Sunday, September 25, 2005
Peter Carey
I had wanted to read My Life as a Fake for a while, and then it turned up as a discount audiobook at Daedalus Books (I heartily recommend the Daedalus catalogue; I've even been to their store in Maryland, as part of the preparatory work on my wedding. No, really, we made a point of getting to the store and inviting one of the people there to the wedding. We also bought a lot of books, of course.).
The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.
Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.
I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.
Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"
dmh
The idea is fascinating: a grumpy poet writes a pseudonymous parody of modern styles, which is acclaimed as genius, and then the poet shows up. It's based on a real literary hoax, well known in Australia (you can Google "Ern Malley," and Carey uses the Malley poems as those of his hoax poet, Bob McCorkle), and the story is framed by the narration of an editor, Sarah Wode-Douglass, who is also after the poems and has a few levels of fakery of her own.
Almost everyone here is lying about something. Wode-Douglass has managed to delude herself about her mother's death; John Slater (old family friend and the man she has blamed for said death) has kidded the world along about his own talents, and he insists on a couple of false truths about Christopher Chubb and Chubb's daughter; Chubb is the mediocre poet who created McCorkle and the original McCorkle poems, who has given up claims to the truth but still wants it to be told; Chubb's daughter, if she is his daughter, denies his parentage and claims she is pure McCorkle; and McCorkle, who is dead as the story is told and may never have existed at all, claims to have come into being without a childhood, at the moment of the creation of the original poems. Underneath all this is a new trove of McCorkle poems, always held just out of view but attested as brilliant by the two people who claim to have seen it.
I'll admit that the obvious Frankenstein connection didn't come to me at first, but it is obvious once it's pointed out. McCorkle is preternaturally tall, elementally strong, always out of his element, seeking a place -- and family -- that cannot be purely his own. He and his creator try to destroy each other and, arguably, both succeed. But while that is an interesting and perhaps important perception, it isn't, in my opinion, Carey's fundamental concern.
Creating a work of art is, at its bottom, lying. Art makes sense of the world, yet the world really doesn't make any sense. Christopher Chubb lies about his poetry, attributing it to someone else, and no one believes he wrote it because it's so much better than anything he's written. The truth doesn't matter, in one sense, as long as the art is good. Did Chubb write it? Did McCorkle? Has Wode-Douglass fabricated the whole episode? The answer to all questions is no, of course: Ern Malley (or his creators) wrote the poems, and Carey fabricated the rest. As an early critic asked, "What is truth?"
dmh
