Beautiful Untrue Things

How does My Life As A Fake enrich the notion of trickster?

2005-10-05T21:37:00.000-07:00

After a series of readings, rereadings, and creative misreadings, Carey's My Life as a Fake does seem, in many ways, to enrich the notion of trickster through the one thing that sets it apart from traditional trickster tales, the level to which the text itself is in a constant state of becoming. Writing in a multiphrenic world where the concept of truth with a capital T has all but disappeared, Carey adapts legend to fiction, granting his text a level of authenticity while, at the same, leaving it open to continued appropriaton. By creating a cast of characters that are throroughly diaologic, that never limit themselves to one language and one interpretation, Carey leaves each and every character in the text unknowable, and thereby constantly interpretable.

As the main character of the tale, Sarah's language, her level of intimacy with the reader as well as her knowing implications that imply a level of secretiveness, leaves her one of the most interesting personas. While she might not fit the profile of a trickster character in her own right, her life as we know it continues to add more involved levels to the notion of trickster. So, then, the question must be posed. Is Sarah in and of herself a trickster figure, is she "a fake", or is her life a fake?

My Life as a Fake revolves around competing narratives, competing ideas of truth, and competing memories. The art of storytelling leaves its traditional place of confinement within the written word and spreads to memory, to language, and to history. The important question when reading the novel isn't to ask what is true. That can be easily answered--nothing knowable. Rather, the proper question is why are certain things true for certain characters in particular contexts. Such an anlysis, then, would involve a series of questions if we were to come to a conclusion regarding the level to which Sarah is aware of the trickster nature of her narrative, the novel itself.

As for Sarah, then, is the fake the who or the what, in Derrida's terms? Is she intrisically a trickster figure or is her narrative one of a life of decisions based on misinformation, flawed memory? The real issue at stake here, then, is the authority the reader is willing to grant her narratve. Trickster's are much more difficult to pinpoint when they are telling their own story, they are generally identifiable through a narrator whose value system is in conflict with that presented by the figure himself. Coyote doesn't see himself as breaking the rules because he makes his own, but when his tales are told by others they are intrepeted demonstratively because they highlight the clash of value systems. As Sarah's story is being told, then, he perspective is the only one the reader is able to immediately identify with, therefore, while she might be essentially a trickster figure such a reading would necessarily stip her narrative of the kind of authory that is generally granted to a written, first-hand account while problematizing the conscousness level of her manipulations. The first question, then, is unanswerable as far as the text is concerned.

Could the life that she lives be the fake of the title? The answer to that queston, then, is a resounding yes. The problematiation of memory within the text is especially blatant in Sarah's character whose view of the world has historically rested of a misinterpretation (if Slater is to be believed) of her mother's death as well as a reliance on the stories, and therefore memories, of others in her quest for a true interpretation. Such a reliance, then, necessarily implies that she will never arrive at a truth outside of interpretation, one of her greatest fears. Forst, above all, Sarah is a woman of fears. She fears Slater as a sexual predator. She fears the revelation of her lesbian past (and present). She fears the authenticity (or lack thereof) in the stories she is left to rely on (whether that be Chubb's, Slater's, Tina's, or Mrs. Linn's), interprative appropriation of a text outside of authorial intent, and the failure of her journal. More than anything else Sarah wants something to rely on, she wants an open and up front narrative to believe in that is true and that she can, therefore, make informed decisions by trusting. This desire, and her willingness to turn desire into reality in her own mind, doom Sarah to a fake life outside of the realities of a poststructuralistic world in which interpretation and appropraite reside in the language itself that we use to construct the world around us. Without realizing, embracing, and playing with the ambiguity that surrounds her Sarah's life will always be a fake; her reality will be inevitable deconstructed while leaving her with no resources by which to reconconstruct a new notion of reality.

The Art of Lying

2005-09-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

The Picture of Dorian Gray: The Preface
Oscar Wilde

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

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"The Decay of Lying", Oscar Wilde
http://eserver.org/books/intentions/the-decay-of-lying.html

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Along with the character of Oscar Wilde himself, these citiques of the issues surrounding fiction for fiction's sake seem relevent to the art of the trickster. However, not the same. While trickster does appreciate a nicely formed "lie", and while "good" art is a large part of the trickster stories, art if not merely for art's sake. Rather, the message itself remains important to the art of the medium. While trickster stories are not traditionally moralistic, they do moralize, they do recommend a prescribed action or fortell the reaction to particular choices. Trickster stories, however, do have one problem, we read them in a postmodern world. We read them in a period in which the art of interpretation--the interpretive community, how it is constructed and how it functions--is preeminent. Personally, I line up in agreement with this poststructuralistic interpretive community, however it does make it more difficult to hearken back to New Criticism and its discussion on themes and figures. Hence this class and its study of a particular figure make me initially wary of attempting to define the undefinable. Just as deconstruction has, at times, been grossly misrepresented as an interpretive schema that has set rules and methods, defining trickster as a boundary-blurrer, or writing a hermenutic guide, undermines, in some ways, the ability to see the figure in a state of becoming, of taking him for what he is. Trickster, then, acts as an author function to set aside a particular ouevre of works. However, how we define trickster changes the contents of the ouevre, and thus the functioning of the author function and the symbol of the trickster. While this, then, in the postmodern condition and is much more something to accept rather than complain about, the undefinabiity of the trickster should be forefroned as we continue to define and redefine him in the way that makes our analysis the most useful for us.

Hynes--Chapter 3

2005-09-11T20:14:00.000-07:00

Trickster: A Non-Hermeneutical Hermeneutical Guide

Traits:
1. Ambiguous, anomalous, polyvalent
2. Deceiver, trick-player
3. Shape-shifter
4. Situation inverter
5. Messenger, imitator of the gods, psychopomp
6. Sacred/lewd bricoleur

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References:

Saturnalia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturnalia

Feast of Fools
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06132a.htm

Abbeys of Misrule
http://www.lepg.org/liturgy.htm

Herschel Osterpoler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_humor

Hynes--Chapter 2

2005-09-11T20:10:00.000-07:00

Trickster's Typical Identities:
Animal-Person (particularly Blue Jay, Coyote, Crow, Fox, Hare, Mink, Rabbit, Raven, Spider, Tortoise), Anti-Hero, Boundary Figure, Bungling Host, Clever Hero, Clown, Culture Hero, Confidence Person, Demiurge, Lord of the Animals, Numskulll, Old Man, Picaro, Selfish Baffoon, Selfish Deciever, Swindler, Transformer (24)

Key Terms:
Polarities, dualities, multiple manifestations, complexity, ambiguity, border, paradox, marginality, peripherality, liminality, inversion (25)

Trickster as:
Meta-Discourse, “a discourse about itself” (27)

Involved in:
Metaplay
“a sort of inversionary logic that probes and disassembles the most serious rules of “normal” social behavior. The deconstruction is not pursues out of careless spite, but in order to reaffirm for the onlooker a necessary social centrism, a centering not short-circuited or bypassed by the immediate or ethnocentric, but creatively opened up to ‘the other’ and the transrational” (30)

-and-

The Carnivalesque
“The term carnival came to have particular prominence for literary criticism after the publication of Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World (1965; translated by Helene Iswolsky [Indiana University Press, 1984]). In this book, Rabelais’ writing is seen as drawing its energies from the historic practices of carnival which preceded and surrounded it in Renaissance Europe. Bakhtin gives an especially benign account of carnival rituals, in which the time of carnival features as an utopian irruption into the workaday world, a time of feasting when normally dominant constraints and hierarchies are temporarily lifted. The subversive and anti-authoritarian aspects of carnival are here emphasised – authority figures are mocked, the joyless routines of everyday life are abrogated, the lower bodily strata are allowed both to degrade and to regenerate those conceptions of the world which seek to exclude them. Rabelais’ writings, and those of his near contemporaries Cervantes and Shakespeare, are seen as drawing their energies from these carnival practices, and from the epochally established view of the world which they embody. In this specific sense, in which there is a direct connection between historically-existing carnival practices and artistic forms which reproduce them, their writing can be described as “carnivalesque”.

Bakhtin extends the idea very significantly, however, in the notion of “carnivalised” writing which succeeds these Renaissance models and thus long outlives the actual historical location of the practices from which such writing takes it name. Carnivalised writing is that writing which mobilises one form of discourse against another, especially popular against elite forms. In this usage, “carnival” tends to lose its historical specificity and comes to resemble a transhistorical generic principle which can be actualised in widely differing periods; it is present in the Menippean satires of the ancient world and also in the novels of Dostoevsky, written in a society having little contact with historic Renaissance carnivals” (From: http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=160).
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References:

Picaresque Novel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picaresque_novel
http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=862

Jung’s Shadow Figure
http://www.meta-religion.com/Psychiatry/Analytical_psychology/jungs_shadow.htm

Ethnopoetics
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/tedlock/syllabi/ethnopoetics.html

Carnivalesque
http://www.english.uga.edu/~amitchel/4830_carnival.htm
http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~cklestinec/Teaching/LCC3218.Bakhtin.html

Bakhtin
http://www.iep.utm.edu/b/bakhtin.htm#H5

Hynes--Chapter 1

2005-09-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

"Reciprocally, he who through 'methodological prudence, ' 'norms of objectivity,' or 'safe-gaurds of knowledge' woulod refrain from commiting anythong of himself, would not read at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the 'not serious' as in the 'serious'. The reading and writing supplement must be regorously prescribed, but by the necessities of the game, by the logic of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be accorded and attuned" (Dissemination 64).

Those who must play foolishly can not play seriously, those who refuse to play at all are left with nothing. The trickster, then, plays seriously (serio ludere) at all times. While he may be humorous, the humor is in the telling and in the actions of the trickster and not in the message he is trying to get across, or so Hynes points out in this first chapter. This serious play is constructed into a myth-history that various cultures then use to explain the unexplainable questions (those things that everyone is supposed to ask themselves). Does the trickster, then, function as a critic of history by ultilizing a myth-history and therefore making blatant the discoursive formations of master narratives and their deconstructability? (Take a wild guess what my answer to that one is going to be...)

References:
Jung, “On the Psychology of the Trickster”
http://www.southerncrossreview.org/18/trickster.htm

Karl Kerenyi
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Karl_Ker%E9nyi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ker%C3%A9nyi

Plato v Aristotle
http://www.archaeonia.com/philosophy/plato/teachings.htm
http://www.nyu.edu/pages/linguistics/courses/v610051/aristote.html

Aquinas (scholasticism) v William of Occam (nominalism)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism
http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ockham.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism

Wilhelm Dilthey (natural v human sciences)
http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Dilthey.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Dilthey

Hyde--Chapter 3 (References)

2005-09-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

Eco, A Theory of Semiotics
http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/eco.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Gregory Nagy
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f04/nagy.html
http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.nagy.htm

Orpheus and Eurydice
http://www.mythology.com/orpheuseurydice.html
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/eurydicemyth.htm

Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
http://www.mla.org/ade/bulletin/n092/092054.htm
http://www.southerncrossreview.org/4/schwartz.html

Franz Boas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas

Hyde--Chapter 3

2005-09-11T17:56:00.000-07:00

And here comes the link between theft and appropriation. This, I take it, is our way (our postmodern way, which means that there really is no our but I’m still going to use the term anyway) or placing trickster in an amoral realm. Meaning, then, gets made through an interplay between sign and signification, something that is unable to be interpreted is one is not aware of context-bound and situation meaning-making. Meaning-making, appropriation, then, can never be a negative (even though it might not be a positive (even though I have a tendency to think that it is (but there I go again being absolutist (Derrida would not be proud)))). In this world, however, we tend to be constrained by Plato and his (damn) forms (those things never cease to get in the way). Prohibitions, then, are a desire to call back to those “forms”, that reality outside of the cave (to use an overrated example), and (especially when the prohibition is against theft (or so Hyde tells me)) “attempt to constrain meaning, to stop its multiplication, to preserve an ‘essence,’ the ‘natural,’ the ‘real’” (65). If you’re an overprotective parent, then, watch out for that first whopper for it “is a motivated fiction, and a probe into the craft thereof. We may not actually doubt the reality of our parents’ world, but still, a lie is a bit of an experiment with its solidity, and artificial world sent out to see if it can blend in and survive” (64). More than the lie, however, watch out for the first pack of gum they steal, or the first kittens they sneak up to their room (yeah, I wasn’t a very daring thief but the only things I can think of that I pilfered were kittens, books, and a rogue stapler) for, “A child’s first theft and first lie are pivotal in the history of the intellect, then, for with them the child is not just in the world of signification, fantasy, fabulation, and fiction; she is in that world as an independent creator, setting out to make meaning on her own terms, not subject to the prohibitions that preceded her” (65). Now I’ll try not make a big deal out of the fact that he’s using “she” (Hyde must have had a sex-change and became a man during his mid-life crisis…you go girl!), or that he claims that she isn’t subject “to the prohibitions that preceded her” (what about the trace?!?!?!), but I don’t know that I can really buy this making meaning on her own terms thing (collaborative learning, anyone? Language and death? Language as a limit in and of itself?...) but I could be wrong, maybe it does all come back to Plato.

Hyde--Chapter 2 (References)

2005-09-11T17:54:00.000-07:00

Richard Onians, The Origin on European Thought
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~mclennan/BA/JO-TEP.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/040504853X/102-2545042-7824150?v=glance

Aporias
http://www.angelfire.com/de/jwp/aporias.html
http://www.cobussen.com/proefschrift/500_john_zorn/500_shibboleth_aporias_restitutions/shibboleth_aporias_restitutions.html
http://aboutleter.chez.tiscali.fr/pages/etexts%20ml/aporias.html

Alcibiades
http://www.san.beck.org/Alcibiades.html
http://www.italycyberguide.com/History/factspersons/alcibiades.htm

Melville, The Confidence Man
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/atkins/cmmain.html

Hyde--Chapter 2

2005-09-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

How does the chameleon know his true color?

Within this chapter Hyde sets up a series of binaries , opening a space in which they can tricksterishly deconstructed.

1. Blindness v Sight (40)

In Memoirs of the Blind Derrida gives a much better analysis of this binary than I could ever hope to but, to appropriate his reading a series of portraits on blindness to a discussion of the trickster figure, we must keep in mind the figure of Tiresias the blind seer. Firstly, let us recognize that neither one nor the other of these traits could be understood with the other. Blindness would not be a lack if there were no sight and so on. Yet both encompass the other in themselves. The blind are commonly discussed as having a second-sight, a spiritual blindness (ex. Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus) whereas actual sight does not imply that we see clearly. An interesting addition to this binary is Derrida’s idea of tears as ruptures, but that’s a story for another day.

2. Clean (water) v Unclean (defecation) (41)

Honestly, this one is so very obvious that I’m going to leave it you to fill in the blanks here.

3. Imitation v Creativity (42)

As Hyde points out, Trickster has no “way”, no species knowledge. Therefore, he is left to imitate the instinctual knowledge of other species, sometimes with devastating results. Trickster becomes a parasite, but this is the only mode through which his constant adaptation is allowed. Without instincts trickster is able to be creative, is able to critically think (hence his most humanesque quality) and use knowledge collaboratively. If all knowledge is collaborative, if Foucault’s other, the Unthought, is only achievable through an ultimate collaboration and reappropriation, than trickster, thought his constant transgression and his status as an outsider of history, can cross epistemes, I might posit, even without epistemic violence.

4. Poros (fluidity) v Aporos (non-fluidity) (46)

This polytropic attribute of the trickster I have already discussed in my examination of the trickster’s traits in the Introduction section.

5. Sign v Signification (50-51)

Just as Hermes’ fashioning a shoes that did not leave the mark of either heel or toe confused the sign and the signification in the Hymn to Hermes, so trickster stories tend to deconstruct the sign from the signification. A postmodern in a pre-modern world, trickster sends confusing signs that heighten the free play of signification. Just as Derrida’s present trace always carries the trace of the past and the premonition of a future that is unknowable, a Heideggarian present/Being can never exist therefore trickster stories are never in the present, they are always in a space that is neither past nor future while their signification is never fully knowable in that it would always be caught in a never-end web of dominations.

6. Appearance v. Identity (53)

Derrida’s Who and What. How can one do justice to who a person is (their identity) in a world of constant appropriation, reappropriation, and reinterpretation? And yet can one find one’s absolute singularity through the traits that are identifiable? The answer to both questions is no. Therefore the chameleon will never know its true color because it will never have one, nor can we know its true color because it does not really matter to us.

Hyde--Chapter 1 (References)

2005-09-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

Harry Jerison, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence
http://www.thymos.com/mind/jerison.html
http://www.brainmuseum.org/

Carl Jung
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/jung.html
http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Jungian

Vagina Dentata motif
http://www.rotten.com/library/sex/vagina-dentata/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagina_dentata
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss

Frazer, The Golden Bough
http://www.bartleby.com/196/

Hesiod
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Hesiod/

Prometheus
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6969/myth.htm

Pandora
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~loxias/pandora.htm
http://www.loggia.com/myth/pandora.html

Hyde--Chapter 1

2005-09-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

The trickster is both a being of constant, yet constantly unfulfilled, appetites and a mediator between worlds. While these two traits might not be overtly linked, they are necessary to one another. Trickster must never have a home (as discussed previously) and therefore is caught in a blurred space, yet he is left searching for one. Just as Hermes desires to enter the pantheon of the gods, to find a world that he would want to call home, he can never fully reach that status. Hermes remains linked to the earth, to humanity, to those that can die in order to cross borders. His appetites, then, his hunger for the sacrificial meat, can never be fulfilled because he neither has a home nor can ever find one. In order for trickster to find a home, to escape his liminality, he must be helped. Just as the invention of the fish hooks necessitates the fish assisting in its own catch, trickster would have to be accepted into a community in order to join. This, however, is an impossibility. Because trickster is necessarily transgressive (and I mean this an even beyond that described by Foucault) a naturally self-interested society can never accept him because the fulfillment of his appetites will necessarily lead to mortality and pain (38) and, ultimately, descent and destruction.

Hyde--Introduction (References)

2005-09-11T16:57:00.000-07:00

For each chapter I deal with I have collected a list of reference information that has been helpful to me in my reading. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor necessarily the best information, it just happens to be what I have found quickly and that turned out to be either interesting, entertaining, or useful...

Paul Radin
http://www.manataka.org/page657.html
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ra/Radin-Pa.html
http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/histor.htm

Picasso
http://www.picasso.fr/anglais/
http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/mysterypicasso.php
http://national.gallery.ca/english/default_1976.htm

Duchamp
http://www.understandingduchamp.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Duchamp
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Dada_Manifesto

John Cage
http://www.lcdf.org/indeterminacy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Minutes_Thirty_Three_Seconds

Ginsberg
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/ginsberg-fbi.html
http://www.ginzy.com/

Maxine Hong Kingston
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/kingston.htm
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_n1_v22/ai_19654385
http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/7835/books/kingston.htm

Brer Rabbit Stories
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=911&pageno=1

Hyde--Introduction

2005-09-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

Introduction to the Trickster Figure as...
1. Creator of culture (allowing a blurred space in which culture can function)

The creator of culture seems to me to be one of the penultimate and primary roles of trickster as he is presented (this does not necessarily mean that he must always be the creator, rather that a culture, a world, must exist with limits, ethics, and boundaries in play before the trickster can come into existence).

2. Wanderer

Yet the trickster can not have a home, a space, a rest. He must constantly be traversing liminal realms and borders. Where the trickster to ever become a member a culture, a community, he would therefore necessarily follow its rules or be exiled. Trickster figures do not add to the functionality of actual, temporal communities, rather they allow problematizations to exist. He must, therefore, inhabit a border region to become an outsider, allowing him authority as observer and a radically free space in which to act without fear of societal repercussions.

2. Border-dweller and boundary-crosser (the dweller of gates, crossroads, and doorways)

As an outsider, however, he must all be a border-crosser as well as a border-dweller. He must utilize doorways and crossroads, spaces of movement, in which to question the cultural assumptions of the community that he needs to exist. Trickster must deconstruct border, but he must also see that they are reconstituted in order to allow him a new border to problematize. Binaries must seem to exist, must be relied on, in order for human beings in function in the actual, temporal world, but they must also exist in order for trickster to have a deconstructive function. Trickster, then, is necessarily self-interested. He must facilitate change but not destroy civilization just as, for example, the Constitution of the United States must be constantly open to revision but must also exist as an actual document in order to allow the Supreme Court to have something to revise.

3. Sexual (masculine—“non-procreative creativity”)

Hence, just as the male needs the female to create life, trickster tends to be masculine in order that he might be able to effect life without being able to create it. Trickster necessarily needs an other, a community of assumptions and morality, in which to act while not being able to be completely self-sufficient.

4. Amoral, not immoral

Above all else, however, trickster must inhabit an amoral realm outside of ethical strictures. In order to function he must not be thought of as either completely negative nor completely positive, he must be outside of those laws and dictates. Hyde uses the example of capitalism in America to demonstrate this point: “If by ‘America’ we mean the land of rootless wanderers and the free market, the land not of natives but of immigrants, the shameless land where anyone can say anything at any time, the land of opportunity and therefore opportunists, the land where individuals are allowed and even encouraged to act without regard to community, then trickster has not disappeared. ‘America’ is his apotheosis…” (11). The strictly amoral capitalist system functions because it is outside of ethical statements. Capitalism can never be good, nor can it be bad, rather it functions based on a set of rules and regulations that can be easily traversed if the entrepreneurial spirit takes one.

My Life as a Fake

2005-09-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

After completing the novel the key questions for me remain three-fold.

Firstly, who exactly is the fake? I know that Carey doesn't particularly appreciate that question, but he's just another reader, right? To this reader, then, each character (other than Slater) could be considered the title's inspiration:

Sarah, whose life has been lived hating a man who did her no wrong, whose perception of reality and of the past will always be fake because of the pitfalls of memory and because of her reliance on others for stories, for tales, for what she wants to call truth. Yet, also because of her fear of the truth, her desire for Chubb's story to be the chosen past and, most importantly, her constant desire for privacy in order to mask her desires.

Chubb, who has lived his life making recompense for a hoax, not to mention a rather long series of misunderstands, misreadings, and lost opportunities. His neverending desire to appropriate and reinterpret the work that he could never write inevitably leads to his death.

McCorkle, who is traped between seeing himself as appropriated, created, by Chubb and appropriating Chubb's fantastical character as an identity to hold dear. Neither able to be read as a loving father and great artist or as a Frankensteinesque creation, his story is only able to be told by others and therefore told through their eyes, through their interpretations. McCorkle is a character much more than he can ever be a man as he remains trapped between fact and fiction like his blurred newspaper image.

And, finally, Tina and Mrs. Lim, characters in a constant state of flux established through linguistic barriers and pride, they are neither able to nor choose to speak their story, always leading astray the truth-seeker as they seek to present falsehoods to cover a murder which can only be assumed as reality.

Slater remains Carey's only character that is not presented as dissimulating, who presents himself as flawed but does not make excuses. Slater, then, remains the care-taker in his attempts to navigate between Sarah's quest for a story and her desire for truth.
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Secondly, how does Carey's novel fit with a class on the archetype of the trickster? From what I can gather, anyway, it would have to be Bob McCorkle. Tricksters are legendary, they are not definable, they are not predictable. Associated with doorways and crossroads, tricksters are found on journeys with no start and no finish. They appear and disappear, but they are not born and do not die. Thus Bob McCorkle is written. Come to life to haunt and be haunted by Chubb, McCorkle fulfills the role of the unexpected within the text. The remainder of the characters, while "fake" in many ways, do not live up to the stuff of legends like McCorkle.
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So, finally, wherein lies the signifigance of the text? Granted, I can only answer this question for me, but I'm perfectly willing to attempt (and probably fail) to. My Life as a Fake revolves around competing narratives, competing ideas of truth, and competing memories. The art of storytelling leaves its traditional place of confinement within the written word and spreads to memory, to language, and to history. The important question when reading the novel isn't to ask what is true. That can be easily answered--nothing knowable. Rather, the proper question is why are certain things true for certain characters in particular contexts.

Why must Sarah see her mother as drowned and Slater as a sexual predator? Why must she believe Chubb's story or that history which she has made up for herself even she sees a reality, a now, like Chubb's murder? Does Sarah bow down before the cult of the auteur? Is the author's life really so important?

Why does Chubb need so badly to tell his story? To make it true? To invent a past for himself just as he claims to have done for McCorkle? Why must Chubb believe himself a father? Does he need to see himself as the inventor and creator of Bob McCorkle so that he can in some way view himself as the by-proxy creator of a work of genius?

All these and many more questions come to light within a reading of the text, yet that could be the point of the novel itself. The novel could be a trickster, weaving and interweaving truth and fiction, one story, one version, with another until there is no beginning and no end, and there is definitely no middle, the story just is. It will sit there until it is read and reinscribed, reinterpreted, again appropriated to create something new, different, but just as true and just as false.

My Life as a Fake Background

2005-09-06T00:08:00.000-07:00

A selection from a longer interview wherein Carey recounts his struggles with writing and reading My Life As A Fake:
(http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_peter_carey.php)

PC: I guess so. And they don’t even get themselves right, which is also true. We tend not to know each other. The difficulty with My Life as a Fake is that having this title which I really love – I loved it as a title – I never really thought of what powerful shit I am playing with when you have a title like that. What a vector of force it is and how it creates all sorts of understanding about the book that I didn’t intend. And coming back to this question of knowledge and self-knowledge. People will frequently say all of the characters are fakes and it’s hard to know who is the most fake. I don’t think any of them are really fake at all, least of all McCorkle, the poet who comes to life. And then they cite Sarah as someone who is fake. Well, I don’t think she is fake in the tiniest bit. She is somebody who certainly doesn’t understand her life. She doesn’t know who she is. She misunderstands people around her. None of these things suggest a lack of authenticity. She is intensely private about her sexual life. And you could say then that she has a fake persona. I wouldn’t say she was fake at all. I would say she was guarded, an armored vehicle in the world.

RB: It does depend who is paying attention to her. Some people could see her beyond what she presents.

PC: Exactly.
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For more info on Peter Carey take a look below:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/carey.htm
http://wwwehlt.flinders.edu.au/english/PeterCarey/PeterCarey.html
http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/careyp/mlaafake.htm

And then to get a feel for the setting:
"Kuala Lumpur is situated midway along the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia, at the confluence of the Klang and Gombek rivers. It is approximately 35 km from the coast and sits at the centre of the Peninsula's extensive and modern transportation network. Kuala Lumpur is easily the largest city in the nation, possessing a population of over one and a half million people drawn from all of Malaysia's many ethnic groups."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuala_Lumpur
http://www.socialcapitalgateway.org/kualalumpur.htm

Ern Malley

2005-09-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

Overview of Ern Malley Hoax
http://www.ernmalley.com/
The Complete Poems of Ern Malley
http://www.jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-poems.html

This is the one of many of Malley's poems published in Angry Penguins:

Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495
I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters —
Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others.
I am still the black swan of trespass on alien waters.