Wary of His Cunning: About My Life as a Fake

As I undertook this assignment, I felt the onus of discernment weighing on me heavily. How was I to adequately assess the meaning of how My Life as a Fake gave us more insight into the trickster than what was to be found elsewhere? I had no doubt that Hyde, Hynes, and Doty gave us an abundance of tricksterish lore to draw upon. The numerous websites my classmates have shared have given me a multiplicity of insights into the topic. So what set Carey’s work apart? I wondered and wondered, and then it finally came to me: the horror, the… er, no, I mean the absurdity.
When I say absurdity, I don’t mean to say merely that the storyline itself is absurd, although there are certainly elements which require us to willingly suspend our disbelief: for example, when “a creature with heavy dark wings and a huge head and a pair of horns flew around the room moaning horribly” in the home of the Kaya Kaya the day that Chubb arrives for Tina (201). This would merely be magical thinking in any other tale.
Nor am I referring just to the fact that, according to the review by Blair Mahoney on David’s site, Carey published his work just shortly after Michael Heyward’s The Ern Malley Affair came out, which basically told the same story, only in a more straightforward way, and without the Frankensteinian element. We must question, however, what conceit led Carey to imagine his work would sell when, as Mahoney states, “The early parts of the novel – in which Carey puts his fictional spin on the real events – struck me as somewhat superfluous” (http://www.themodernword.com/ reviews/carey_fake.html). I’m suddenly struck by the breakdown of the word “superfluous.”
No, the absurdity runs much deeper than any one definable element, whether it is trying to imagine someone like Chubb who speaks with an Austalian accent and also Malaysian inflection, or Cary taking on the persona of a gay British woman to write, or even the very absurd fact of the totality of obfuscation involved in the Ern Malley hoax itself. The most startlingly absurd aspect of the work is that it takes so many, many facets of the trickster from both legitimate (e.g. Frankenstein) and less-legitimate (e.g. Ern Malley "himelf") sources and combines them into a comprehensible whole. That there could be so many characters which, in their duplicity - or rather multiplicity - manifest themselves in the role of trickster in the telling of one tale is, in itself, a marvel.
The coalescing of sense from the non-sense, although fluid (see superfluous) is a trick of the art of the language in turn. For even the sense is illusive, elusive, a seeming of sorts. Out of the Derridian fog come occasional glimpses of some deeper meaning. Again, in the words of Mahoney, “the irony is that Bob McCorkle, who is portrayed as a wild but unaffected person, turns out to be more genuine than any of the other characters“ (ibid). Could this possibly mean that humans, in their natural state, are inherently tricksterish, and only in creating fictional people do we achieve that which defies deceit, or is that idea a further deception, in that by creating we are deceiving, and therein… well, this is getting really absurd.