Trick or Treat?

My Life as a Fake - Trickster motif

The function of the trickster is singular - to slip the surly bonds of earth (culture, time, propriety) and in doing so, open doors of possibility and unanswered answers. To follow after the trickster requires intrepidness for one must venture out into the thin air of broken rules without the comforting restraints of societal norms or conventions. The trickster is the creator of memory as his tricks frequently inform notions of origin and destination. The guardian of the cross roads, trickster watches over all that passes form present to memory and back again. This enter-play of the trickster and memory is integral in Carey’s “My Life as a Fake.” Led down the convoluted paths of memory, each character encounters the tricksters who appear time and again in differing guises. Each time boundaries are crossed, redrawn, or destroyed altogether in the process of rewriting memory.
Sarah Wode-Douglass is in search of herself as a composite of the memories she both harbors and seeks. Much of this revolves around the writer John Slater and the complex intertwining of his loud, distracting, and what she perceives as destructive nature with that of her parents, specifically her mother. Sarah’s job is not one of creation (life), but one of judgment (death) that rarely attains, at its pinnacle, a vicarious sort of living through the authors she allows to live in the public realm. In a striking parallel, her memory is also dominated by death. Her memories of her mother’s death are scant but for most of the novel, unquestionably concrete. Her construction of memory is rooted in faint impressions from the past and her forceful hatred of Slater in the present.
It is this construct that the work of the trickster is most suited to destroy and rebuild. By accompanying Slater to Malaysia and thereby leaving the familiarity of her native land and culture, Sarah acknowledges her search for identity, her attempt, “to understand my own unhappy family a little better” (7). If she can understand her family, grasp a solid memory of the past she will also be able to construct her present, her identity. Despite her desire, Slater persistently evades her presence and her questions until the middle of the novel when the answers are, perhaps, the least important. Evasion, the refusal to follow conventions or fulfill an expectation for definition is the stock and trade of the trickster.
In further keeping with the trickster demolition and restructuring, Slater does eventually walk Sarah back down the path of memory, accompanies her along the edge of past and present until even the future has been reworked. After Sarah is forced to re-member a dissected past she says, “I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptized in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously, made me who I was” (133). The misconstructions of Sarah’s past are nothing more than the cultural constructions enforced by a society. A homosexual father and a mother who commits a violent suicide are not things one speaks of in “proper” circles of society. Slater violates this taboo, which allows Sarah to see the entire construction of her past, her own construction of her identity.
Freed by the barrier-reducing act of Slater’s action, Sarah is loosed to reconstruct her identity. She comes to terms with her own homosexuality and records the simple, yet monumental, task in one sentence: “Finally I dealt with myself, and then I slept” (137). The peace that descends when Sarah finally shakes off the constructions of her past allow her to embrace the present and even face the future with a new identity. Her identity is not one of certainty and the story does not end with peaceful resolution. She continues a desperate search for the truth of McCorkle, “the body of truth…dismembered and scattered” (265). The trickster’s work begun in her remembrances continues into the memory being continually constructed in the present. It would seem that the trickster never truly completes…

posted by Charity @ 9:49 PM