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Faking it for Real
Maria Takolander
Deakin University
“[T]he greatest wizard (Novalis memorably wrote) would be he who would
cast a ell over himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias as
autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjeure that
it is. We (the undivided divinity that operates within us) have dreamt the
world. We have dreamt it as solid, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in ace
and stable in time; but in its architeure we have allowed tenuous and
eternal interstices of unreason in order to know that it is false.¹
Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”
J
EAN BAUDRILLARD SUGGESTS THAT THE SUPREMACY OF THE SIMULACRA is a
modern development, reality a construction of the U.S. His argument, given
the U.S. penchant for breaking and remaking the world in its own image (it
is, in the language of Baudrillard, both iconoclast and iconolater), is strong.²
However, writers, artists, and philosophers have been pondering the reign
of illusion for millennia. Plato described the world as a place of simulations
that left us wanting. For Shakespeare, the world was a stage of fools; the
play was that of an idiot. Goya presented the world as a dream of reason
that gave birth to the monsters he painted. Borges (like Shakespeare and
also perhaps Goya and Plato) was obsessed with what he refers to in
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” as the “atrocious or banal”³ idea that reality,
ESC .– (June/September ): –
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as we know it (which is, of course, the only perspective of it that we can
have), is fake. e three books under review here, Ian Miller’s Faking
It, Penny Cousineau-Levine’s Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography
and the Canadian Imagination, and Paul Matthew St Pierre’s A Portrait
of the Artist as Australian: L’Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries, can be
considered additions to the oeuvre fascinated and troubled by what Borges
calls the “phantasmagorias” of our world.
Miller writes that Faking It was inspired “by the intrusive fear that we
may not be what we appear to be, or, worse, that we may be only what we
appear to be and nothing more” (). Miller is interested in the way we feign
states of being and in the existential anxiety that self-consciousness about
this provokes. However, he argues, faking it in a social context, which is
Miller’s focus, is integral to the success of civilization, which is in turn
crucial to the ascendancy of the human race.
Faking it, Miller writes, has found its raison d’etre in social situations
in which he has, for example,
M T
is a Lecturer in Literary
Studies and Professional
and Creative Writing
at Deakin University
in Geelong, Victoria,
Australia. She is the
author of Catching
Butterflies: Bringing
Magical Realism to
Ground (Peter Lang, in
press).
feigned sorrow at the departure of guests, faked joy at their
arrival, simulated delight at a colleague winning a MacArthur
so-called genius award, shammed grief at the passing of the
neighbourhood self-appointed policer of leash laws, assumed
a façade of concern for a student’s bad grade or interest in
stories of other people’s children. ()
With an intimate flippancy typical of Miller’s style, he asks, “[H]aven’t
you nearly choked telling new parents how beautiful their baby is?” ().
Faking it may at times stick in the throat. However, Miller argues that it
is an essential lubricant for social interaction.
 “‘El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis) seria el que se hechizara
hasta el punto de tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas.
¿No sería ése nuestro case?’. Yo conjeturo que así es. Nosotros (la indivisa divinidad que opera en nosotros) hemos soñado el mundo. Lo hemos soñado resistente,
misterioso, visible, ubicuo en el espacio y firme en el tiempo; pero hemos consentido en su arquitectura tenues y eternos intersticios de sinrazón para saber que
es falso” (: ). All translations from Spanish are my own.
 In this review, I shall discuss primarilly the following three books: William Ian
Miller’s Faking It (Cambridge: Cambridge , .  pp. £., --); Penny Cousineau-Levin’s Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and the
Canadian Imagination (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s , . pp. . .,
---); Paul Matthew St Pierre’s A Portrait of the Artist as Australian:
L’Oeuvre bizarre de Barry Humphries (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s , .
 pp. ., ---).
 “atroz o banal” (: ).
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While Miller suggests that everyone fakes it, in social discourse, as he
notes, the phrase “faking it” is popularly used in reference to the female
orgasm (apparently one of life’s profound unverifiables). is reminds me
of Hamlet, who features regularly in Miller’s book, along with various other
literary characters. Miller’s exploration of human nature through apparitions proves richly apposite. Surrounded by plotting men and himself a
fine dissimulator, Hamlet proclaims with the age-old logic of unhappy
men: “Frailty, thy name is woman!” Hamlet was fed up with actors and
acting. However, while dissembling or duplicity in our society is regarded
as “frailty” or vice, frankness or honesty can be intolerably shocking. For
example, as Miller writes, one cannot approach a potential paramour
with the proposition “Hey, wanna fuck?” or even, avoiding the potentially
offensive expletive, “Would you like to fornicate with me?” (). e issue
of success is not primary. To demonstrate this, I’d like to offer an anecdote.
A couple of years ago I attended a dinner party for eight, at which two of
the invitees, Jake and Helen, were single. As is customary at occasions of
prolonged social contact, our hosts offered alcohol to provide an excuse
in the inevitable event of failure to observe social protocols. Of course,
I’m being ironic, if not completely so. Alcohol is commonly consumed to
enable as well as excuse laxness or relaxedness when it comes to social
customs. (Strange: this proverbial desire to play with the primitive fire.)
After dessert, in a lull in the conversation occasioned by preparations to
make socially acceptable excuses to depart, Jake asked Helen, “So, do you
want to fuck?” Helen responded, “Okay.”
e transgression of convention opened up one of what Borges
describes as those “tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason” that
reveal our world to be false. Had all of our polite patter been a lot of play
acting? Had we been caught out like children at a secret game of mothers
and fathers or doctors and nurses? Should we confess all, like actors at
the end of a murder mystery, shamefacedly removing our Jungian masks,
our social personae? Was life really all about the basic instinct, a phrase
indelibly associated, in Western popular culture at least, with the parting
of Sharon Stone’s legs?⁴ (Oh, frailty, thy name is always woman!) While
Jake and Helen may have been inebriated enough to fall happily into the
naked light of the abyss, we weren’t sufficiently drunk to be comfortable
4
In the movie, Basic Instinct, Stone plays a literal femme fatale. She is deadly and
duplicitous. Men die in pursuit of her, in search of the truth. In the scene to
which I refer, she is being interrogated by police.
 | name
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with our fall and exposure. As Miller writes, “[S]omething in us reaches
to pull up the sheet to cover the shame of its nakedness” ().
I’m reminded of those dreams about being naked in public or, in my
more Lutheran—that is, prurient and puritanical—unconscious states of
mind, wearing pyjamas to work. ey’re nightmares of exposure. When,
confronted with my fakery, I instinctively reach to “pull up the sheet,” to
restore the façade, am I covering up the naked self or the abyss that is in
the place where my self should be? Whether the “something” in us that
wants to hide is an entity or merely an effect of social conditioning is a long
debated question in the history of philosophy and psychology. Do I, as the
old school Cartesian theories of self suggest, exist in a rational and absolute
way? Is the “real” me, as Freud believed, a beast of the primal and unconscious, trained to behave by social imperatives? e Buddhists would have
it that I am nothing but flux (but that, paradoxically, “I” should aim to be
nothing rather than flux). Contemporary theories of self, Buddhist-like,
suggest that I am little more than a conglomeration of experiences and
emotions, at once united and disunited by a faulty memory, an imperfect
narrative. ere is a link, as Heidegger put it, between being and time, self
and indeterminacy. Time perpetually makes of me a stranger, for I must
forget. Writing is often seen as a form of self-expression and remembering, as a path to self-realization and immortalization. However, it is often
only a document of one’s strangeness. Patrick White, in his autobiography
Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait, reflects on this phenomenon:
[I] never re-read my books once I have corrected the proof,
but if for some specific reason I have to open one and glance
at a paragraph or two, I am struck by an element which must
have got into them while I was under hypnosis. On one level
certainly, there is a recognisable collage of personal experience,
on another, little of the self I know. ()
e fantastical and unappealing alternative to the disjointed sense of the
self that arises from forgetfulness is Borges’s dysfunctional and depressed
Funes the Memorious, who remembers everything and is no one. Meaningful narratives require selectiveness and tinkering. Is a satisfying sense
of self merely a satisfying story?
Cultural assumptions, perhaps inspired by the solipsistic fallacy of the
body and what has been called the linguistic fallacy of the “I,” tell us that
the normal self is a solid and singular quantity. Jekyll and Hyde tales of
split personalities or stories of amnesia circulate in popular culture as freak
stories. Take, for example, Sybil, e Stepford Wives, Sunset Boulevard, and
 | Takolander
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e Bourne Identity. e lack of a sole and stable identity appears variously
as pathological, monstrous, and central to female identity (oh Hamlet!),
and a downside of the job for professional fakes, such as actors and spies
(those men and women who sacrifice themselves in acting for the good
of America—aka the world).
However, an experience of an internal division, of a Freudian split that
Miller presents as more conscious than unconscious, is commonplace.
Indeed, the above films are arguably responses to widespread if repressed
anxieties about faking it. Miller reflects on the extent of personal fakery at
disturbing length. He suggests that whether or not one is giving a speech,
participating in a ritual of faith, expressing love, delivering an apology, or
demonstrating courage, one often experiences a conflict between an acting
self and what could be called a “meta-self,” whom Miller describes as something of a pesky critic who “is too hard on me most of the time, determined
to unnerve me” (). is “meta-self,” which Freud would probably call the
superego, Miller calls self-consciousness, describing it as that “unpleasant emotion that interrupts our blithe and unself-conscious ‘naturalness.’”
Miller presents his self-consciousness as being similar to a conscience but
notes that it is often concerned less with the fact that he may be acting
than with the persuasiveness of the act: “Unlike the conscience, it seems
to take the performing me less seriously than a truly moral policeman
would. It cares less that I am a moral failure than that I may be a social
failure. It will suffer my being a knave but will not suffer my being a fool.”
Maintaining form in the eyes of the spectator, real and imagined, appears
to be of utmost importance to the “meta-self.” Perhaps another attribute
of the “meta-self ” is that it is never satisfied. Whatever self is performed,
the “meta-self ” always experiences it as performance. e “meta-self,” or
perhaps the “real-self ” for which the “meta-self ” is an autonomous custodian (like a guardian angel), remains unhappy and alone.
In the epigrammatic prose piece “Borges and I,” Borges explores this
rift between the performative self and the “meta-self ” (or its protected
twin, the “real-self ”), as the unhappy coexistence of one self-contented
and one discontented narcissist:
e other, Borges, is whom things happen to. I walk through
Buenos Aires and I pause, perhaps now mechanically, to look
at the arch of an entryway and its folding door; I have news
of Borges by mail and see his name on a list of professors or
in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee and
the prose of Stevenson; the other Borges shares those preferFaking it for Real | 
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Whatever self
is performed,
the “meta-self”
always
experiences it as
performance.
ences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of
an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can
contrive his literature and that literature justifies me. It does
not cost me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages,
but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good
does not belong to anybody, not even to him, but to language
and tradition. Besides, I am destined to be lost, definitively,
and only some instant of me will survive in the other. Little by
little I am ceding everything to him, even though I know his
perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza
understood that all things want to persist in their being; the
stone eternally wants to be stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall
remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is that I am someone),
but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others’
or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to
free myself from him and I moved on from the mythologies of
the suburbs to games with time and infinity, but those games
belong to Borges now and I shall have to think up other things.
us my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything
belongs to oblivion or to him.
I do not know which of us writes this page.⁵
e split between a public and a private self, as Borges’s narrative shows,
has the potential to develop into something neurotic (or creative.) What
happens, as in the case of celebrities, when the performing self overwhelms
the “meta-self ” or the “real-self ”? Are the potential pathological consequences of fame due less to losing touch with the “real-self,” which in all
probability doesn’t exist, and more to do with an unnatural reification, a
kind of death in life? Self-consciousness about fakery can also result in
self-disgust. Miller talks about the exacerbated potential for self-hatred
of minorities forced into “faking gender, ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation, race, and religion” (). At the risk of undermining the tragedy
 “Al otro, a Borges, es a quien le ocurren las cosas. Yo camino por Buenos Aires y
me demoro, acaso ya mecánicamente, para mirar el arco de un zaguán y la puerta cancel; de Borges tengo noticias por el correo y veo su nombre en una terna
de profesores o en un diccionario biográfico. Me gustan los relojes de arena, los
mapas, la tipograf ía del siglo XVIII, las etimologías, el sabor del café y la prosa
de Stevenson; el otro comparte esas preferencias, pero de un modo vanidoso
que las convierte en atributos de un actor. Sería exagerado afirmar que nuestra
relación es hostil; yo vivo, yo me dejo vivir, para que Borges pueda tramar su
literatura y esa literatura me justifica. Nada me cuesta confesar que ha logrado
ciertas páginas válidas, pero esas páginas no me pueden salvar, quizá porque lo
bueno ya no es de nadie, ni siquiera del otro, sino del lenguaje o la tradición. Por
 | Takolander
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of this form of fakery, I’ll quote again from Borges, who on the topic of
self-hatred had this to say:
Any time something is written against me, I not only share the
sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps
I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances
beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every
aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under
a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself. (“Jorge” para.
)
In order to avoid feelings of hypocrisy and unhappiness, as Miller points
out, Jesus advised not to let the left hand know what the right hand is
doing. Jesus’ advice was for those alms-givers of proper conscience, who
felt uncomfortable with the possibility that they were being charitable
for the sake not of kindness but of their own prosperity. As Miller puts
it, Jesus ultimately “counselled self-deception” (). Jesus also suggested a
practice that is impossible (except perhaps for the pathological hypocrite
or the congenitally conjoined). However, generally speaking, while the
experience of what Miller describes as an “internal dialogue” () can
create anxieties about doubleness and hypocrisy, Miller argues that it is
neither pathological nor immoral but the necessary and inevitable result
of the social context in which our identities are formed.
Miller presents the split self-conscious self, similarly to Freud and other
contemporary psychologists, as the evolutionary outcome of a necessary
dependence on society. Socialization (and, thus, survival) depends on
our internalization of social laws, which are learned from parents and
other figures of authority whose opinions we adopt as our own. ese
are transfigured into our “meta-self,” superego, or self-consciousness;
whatever it is you want to call our internally functioning thought-police.
us we are constituted, through social interaction, as profoundly dialogic
lo demás, yo estoy destinado a perderme, definitivamente, y sólo algún instante
de mí podrá sobrevivir en el otro. Poco a poco voy cediéndole todo, aunque
me consta su perversa costumbre de falsear y magnificar. Spinoza entendió que
todas las cosas quieren perserverar en su ser; la piedra eternamente quiere ser
piedra y el tigre un tigre. Yo he de quedar en Borges, no en mí (si es que alguien
soy), pero me reconozco menos en sus libros que en muchos otros o que en el
laborioso rasgueo de una guitarra. Hace años yo traté de librarme de él y pasé
de las mitologías del arrabal a los juegos con el tiempo y con lo infinito, pero
esos juegos son de Borges ahora y tender que idear otras cosas. Así mi vida es
una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es del olvido, o del otro.
‘No sé cuál de los dos escribe esta página’” (: ).
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beings. Jerome Levin, in eories of the Self, offers an explanation of this
process:
At first, the self is a dialogue with others; only later is it an
internal dialogue—a dialogue of the self with the self. at is
how the self becomes … simultaneously subject and object.
e self as object to itself is essentially a social structure …
Self is a dialogue I have with myself in which I take the role
of the generalized other, or of particular others, and speak to
myself as subject as if I were an object of the others’ subjectivity. (–)
However, in a terrific paradox, Miller suggests that a profound narcissism could lie at the root of our inter-subjectivity. He writes: “My self is
intimately tied up with my being embodied in a way that distinguishes
me from others so that I am aware that I see their bodies differently and
more fully than I see my own. at means the only full view I can get of
myself requires others” (). Our need of others lies—to what intrinsic
degree?—in our desire for ourselves.
We would hardly readily admit it (it wouldn’t be socially right), but we
find photographs of ourselves of infinite interest. Presented with a group
photograph, I’ll immediately seek out my own face. In town, happening
to walk past a dark, reflective office window, I’ll try to catch a glimpse
of myself, when I’m not looking, so to speak (and certainly when others
aren’t). We’re in perpetual search of ourselves, and yet we’re in the unhappy
predicament of not being able to see ourselves, leaving us with the necessity of feigning interest in others in order to have that interest returned.
e modern psychological industries, as Miller suggests, have taken
full advantage of our twin foibles of narcissism and blindness. However,
after reading Miller’s book, self-development, the popular movement
to find yourself, to improve yourself, to be true to yourself, becomes
increasingly difficult to swallow. Precisely what self is being developed?
In what constitutes another fine paradox, Miller suggests: “Feeling good
about oneself tends to depend, in fact, on having licked the compulsion
to self-examine very insistently” (). However, succumbing to the spirit
of fashionable feel-good therapy, Miller also tries to alleviate our anxieties
about fakery, suggesting that “To play being a polite person is to be a polite
person. e mask is all that is asked for. ere is a truth there” (). In
any case, as he adds with final pragmatism, faking it “surely makes the
world a better place to live in” ().
e notion of the self as “phantasmagoria” can be disturbing, and it
can also, as Plato showed, leave us aching for the Real. Hamlet, whom
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Miller describes as “the grandest of poster boys for feeling that he is faking it” (), experiences bouts of desperation for the absolute. He finds it
only in the grave. Penny Cousineau-Levine’s Faking Death: Canadian Art
Photography and the Canadian Imagination, if we were to analyze it in
Freudian or Shakespearean terms (Harold Bloom suggests their theories
are synonymous), manifests a similar desire for the transcendent and
interest in the sepulchral, as does the Canadian photography and culture
she analyzes. Cousineau-Levine, focusing on Canadian “art” (as opposed
to “instrumental”) photography but also drawing on Canadian literature,
speaks of a “quintessentially Canadian oeuvre” that reflects a quintessentially Canadian Weltanschauung (). She refers to her “allegiance to
a deeply held Canadian article of faith. is is the belief in a realm of
discourse, free of outside influence, where we will finally locate ourselves
and our ‘true’ identity” (). It is a Hamletesque project, for her hermetic
vision of Canadian identity is a view of the inside of a coffin.
e epigraph to the introductory chapter suggests that CousineauLevine acknowledges the narrative (rather than the ontological) nature of
her project. It is a quotation from Michael Novak’s Ascent of the Mountain,
Flight of the Dove: “Not to have any story to live out is to experience nothingness: the primal formlessness of human life below the threshold of narrative structuring. Why become anything at all? Does anything make any
difference? Why not simply die?” Cousineau-Levine is also quite explicit
in advertising her project as one of postcolonial salvage and oppositional
essentialism. (e other epigraph is from a postcolonial analysis of Canadian photography.) In the past, as Cousineau-Levine writes, Canadians,
suffering from what Australians call the cultural cringe, have defined
themselves and their cultural artefacts “in terms of what they were not”
(). She wants to define Canadians and Canadian art more positively.
A social or political nicety, and very probably another necessary one,
is to turn a blind eye to the old philosophical contradictions inherent in
postcolonial proclamations of cultural identity and to focus any criticism
on imperialism. Postcolonial nations have cause to feel extra anxiety about
their identity (it is the type of exacerbated angst that Miller identifies as
an affliction of the oppressed), and the experience of cultural autonomy
is arguably not only psychologically therapeutic but also politically
important. However, as Borges recognized, formulations of an authentic
postcolonial cultural identity are innately contradictory.
Borges, failing to observe the ideological protocols of a nascent postcolonial Latin America in the early part of the twentieth century, was accused
of treachery for his lampooning of the validity of Argentine parochialism.
Faking it for Real | 
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It is a Hamletesque project,
for her hermetic
vision of
Canadian
identity is a view
of the inside of a
coffin.
Borges had written, in the early part of his career, and continued to write,
throughout his lifetime, literature about Argentine people, history, culture,
and places. However, he also wrote universal and fantastical fictions that
opened up the cracks in the comforting institutions of regionalism and
realism. Borges also explicitly addressed and rejected the nationalist call to
arms. He proclaimed: “[E]ither to be Argentine is fate, and in that case we
are so no matter what, or to be Argentine is a mere affectation, a mask.”⁶
Borges was hardly a crypto-imperialist and cultural saboteur. While
he certainly parodied the artificial character of parochial portraits of Latin
America, his focus was on the artificial nature of what passes for world
reality, which the construction of nations through narrations happens
to foreground so clearly. In an essay on national literature called “e
Argentine Writer and Tradition,” for example, he writes:
[I]n the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if there was
any doubt about the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of
camels would be enough to prove it is Arabic. It was written
by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason
to know that camels were especially Arabian; they were for
him a part of reality, he had no reason to distinguish them; by
contrast, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist
would have done is to lavish camels, caravans of camels on each
page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was relaxed: he knew he
could be an Arab without camels. I believe that we Argentines
can be like Mohammed, we can believe in the possibility of
being Argentine without abounding in local colour.⁷
Another problem with proclamations of cultural identity, which Borges
also recognizes here, is reification, that death in life to which I referred
earlier. In Australia, for example, the reification of Aboriginal identity has
become a significant concern. Aboriginal writers, despite the fact that they
 “o ser argentino es una fatalidad, y en ese caso lo seremos de cualquier modo, o
ser argentino es una mera afectación, una máscara” (: ).
 “en el Alcorán, no hay camellos; yo creo que si hubiera alguna duda sobre la
autenticidad del Alcorán, bastaría está ausencia de camellos para probar que es
árabe. Fue escrito por Mahoma, y Mahoma, como árabe, no tenía por qué saber
que los camellos eran especialmente árabes; eran para él parte de la realidad, no
tenía por qué distinguirlos; en cambio, un falsario, un turista, un nacionalista
árabe, lo primero que hubiera hecho es prodigar camellos, caravanas de camellos
en cada página; pero Mahoma, como árabe, estaba tranquilo: sabía que podía
ser árabe sin camellos. Creo que los argentinos podemos parecernos a Mahoma,
podemos creer en la posibilidad de ser argentinos sin abundar en color local”
(: ).
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are mostly Westernized urban citizens, are obliged to comply with the
popular stereotype of the “authentic Aborigine.” Mudrooroo, an Australian
Aboriginal writer,⁸ has reflected on the pressure to produce images of
Aboriginality that conform to the “naked-and-standing-on-one-leg-withwoomera-and-spear noble savage stereotype,” who exists “in a timeless
cultural Dreamtime” ().⁹ However, cultural identity is, like personal
identity, temporal and dynamic rather than permanent and finite.
e shoring up of political autonomy through representations of cultural difference is also problematized by the exoticism such assertions
provide for the West. Expressions of cultural alterity may be, despite it
all, the only thing to save the world from .. homogenization, although
Baudrillard contrarily suggests that consenting to exist as a sign—albeit
of difference—ultimately only facilitates assimilation into the referent-less
utopia of the capitalist .. us the world, as Baudrillard fears, trapped by
this system of symbols of exchange, moves ever steadily and irrevocably
away from the organic and into orbit.
In a number of ways, Cousineau-Levine’s focus on photography in her
elucidation of Canadian identity is ironic. While her project is an attempt
to read the living soul of Canada in its photographs, as Susan Sontag writes,
 Mudrooroo’s Aboriginality has been the subject of controversy since his skin
colour was revealed to be attributable to Afro-American rather than Aboriginal ancestry. While some Aboriginal groups called for Mudrooroo’s books to
be destroyed and the mainstream white Australian press expressed cynicism
about his perceived duplicity, Mudrooroo, as John Barnes argues, is hardly a
‘“career Aborigine”’ (). Colin Johnson’s adoption of the identity of Mudrooroo,
as Barnes wisely counsels, “should not … be confused with cases of imposture
… or assumed ‘second identity’…. Rather, Mudrooroo’s situation should be read
in the context of the larger tragedy of dispossession and cultural deprivation
experienced by the indigenous people in Australia” (). Mudrooroo was treated
as and genuinely believed he was an Aborigine throughout his life. is was
certainly, as Mary Ann Hughes suggests, a more “logical conclusion, coming
from a small town in the West Australian wheatbelt country,” than that “his
genetic inheritance linked him to African America” (). (Significantly, other
Australian writers who claim Aboriginal ancestry, such as Archie Weller and
Roberta Sykes, have had similar experiences to Mudrooroo.) By contrast, the
white female painter Elizabeth Durack, who assumed the identity of Aboriginal
male artist Eddie Burrup, and the white male writer Leon Carmen, who adopted
the identity of Aboriginal female author Wanda Koolmatrie (and whose novel
was subsequently pulped), consciously faked Aboriginal identities out of apparently little more than commercial motivation.
 However, Mudrooroo also contradictorily contends that, “even today, scratch
many an Indigenous person and beneath his or her contemporary skin, or the
persona he or she shows to the white world, you will still find the old hunter or
gatherer” (). is shows perhaps only the difficulties of negotiating a cultural
identity that balances tradition with modernity or change.
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the photograph is a “death mask” (quoted in Cousineau-Levine ) of the
real; it is a static image of the past. Sontag argues: “To take a photograph is
to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality” (quoted ). Roland
Barthes, in a similar vein, describes the relationship of the referent and
the photographic image as analogous to that of “the condemned man and
the corpse in certain tortures” (quoted ). He argues that “photography
is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the
motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead” (quoted
). us, we experience what he calls “the melancholy of Photography.”
In yet another irony (or perhaps its apposite), given her stated project of
capturing Canadian identity, images of “death, bondage, and entrapment”
() are what Cousineau-Levine identifies as the obsession of Canadian
photography and of Canadian culture in general.
e book contains a number of reproductions of photographs to
support this thesis, which can be wonderfully subtle but also, at times,
incredibly explicit in their manifestation of Cousineau-Levine’s designated
themes. On the subtle side, we have Michel Lambeth’s “St. Lawrence
Market,” which shows a young girl, with a shopping bag at her feet, sitting on the ledge of a shop front window that reads “Funeral Designs.” In
Lambeth’s “Toronto, Ontario,” a young boy hangs Christ-like from a wall
above a woman and her two children; they’re all waiting for a glimpse of
visiting Royalty. e photographs of Charles Gagnon, which focus on uninhabited spaces and structures that feature closed doors or dark apertures,
are similarly understated and effective in conveying a sense of death and
entrapment. Particularly haunting are Vincent Sharp’s “Dog Behind Car
Window,” in which the external photographer’s reflection and the enclosed
snarling dog come together in the photographed car window, and “Girl
Yawning,” another photograph taken of the window of a vehicle, in which
a girl, seated beside a plastic shopping bag, covers her mouth while she
yawns. On the other end of the scale, we have Suzy Lake’s “Contact Sheet,”
a series of photographs of a bound woman; Janieta Eyre’s “Rehearsal ,”
the cover photograph of a woman posed as a murder victim; Jeff Wall’s
“e Flooded Grave,” the title of which explains all; and a photograph from
Paul Litherland’s “Souvenirs,” which shows a man, with his eyes closed,
squashed into an open coffin-like box.
Cousineau-Levine considers a number of explanations for the morbid preoccupations she finds in Canadian photography, which include
Canada’s colonial history of animal slaughter for the fur trade, the overwhelming nature of the Canadian wilderness, and Canada’s postcolonial
or neo-colonial sense of itself as being threatened or extinct as a nation.
CousineauLevine
considers a
number of
explanations for
the morbid
preoccupations
she finds in
Canadian
photography, …
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She also offers an unusual theory, combining her interests in postcolonialism and feminism, which links the psyche of postcolonial Canada with
that of the female anorexic. According to Cousineau-Levine, Canada,
confused about its identity in a postcolonial arena, like the anorexic, who
refuses to become a woman under patriarchy, chooses to dwell in adolescence, caught in “the throes of a profound identity crisis” (). However, Cousineau-Levine ultimately goes for a more optimistic reading of
Canadian photographic images, finding “indications of something other
than a national death-wish” (). Cousineau-Levine finds in the representations of death and entrapment a will to be reborn, a desire to escape
from the dead weight of the photographic referent, which she interprets
as a will to flee from colonial or postcolonial stereotype. She argues: “e
sine qua non of photography, its unique capacity for verisimilitude, is the
very trait that many Canadian photographers seem distinctly ill at ease
with” (). According to Counsineau-Levine, in Canadian photography,
“the photographic image is being severed from the body of the world; an
escape hatch is being fashioned by which the images are able to flee their
attachment to the physical realm” ().
In Canadian portraits, for instance, “What is most evident is not the
personality of the person who is posing but rather their estrangement from
their surroundings” (). Canadian photographs of architecture similarly
show structures that “do not seem to belong where they are, and convey
a sense of profound cultural dislocation and dissociation from the land”
(). Cousineau-Levine sets up a contrast with .. photography, which
she describes, by contrast, as guided by a Transcendentalist philosophy
and concerned with “the revelation of the ‘inner being’ of the sitter” ()
and “the thing itself ” (). Despite agreeing that Canadian photography
is primarily documentary, she suggests that it has a double nature. She
defines its most prominent characteristic as “the consistent delineating
within the photographic image of two zones of reality, one that is ‘here’
and another that is ‘out there’ or ‘elsewhere’” ().
Cousineau-Levine attributes the metaphysical dualism implied by
Canadian photography as well as Canadian literature (Canada being
almost as famous as Latin America for magical realist writing) to a number of factors, including Canadians’ acute awareness of the opposition
between nature and consciousness and their uncomfortable consciousness of Canada’s .. border. Canada’s dual colonial occupancy by the
English and French gets a mention, as do Canada’s migrants. Canada’s
First Nations’ people, in this context, are strangely ignored. e belief
that real life is elsewhere, implied by the interest in the “other side” that
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Cousineau-Levine detects in Canadian photographs, is, of course, a classic
postcolonial condition. Cousineau-Levine recognizes this and, in this context, develops her comparison of Canada and the anorexic to explain the
liminal dual-world space she believes Canadian photography inhabits:
[T]he sense of dislocation from one’s environment expressed so
clearly and so often in Canadian photography may in fact have
more to do with a stalled rite of passage to national maturity
than with the harshness of our climate or to the failure of our
political ideology to fully integrate immigrants into Canadian
life. Could the body of the world and the “feminine,” from
which the subjects of so many Canadian photographs appear
to want to flee, correspond to the mother these ghostly
initiates are attempting to differentiate themselves from…?
Is the photographic referent, that material fact to which the
Canadian photographic image is so hesitant to attach itself,
understood in the collective Canadian unconscious as the
abandoning European “mother/s” from whom we wish to
separate? And with whom, anorexic-like, we remain enmeshed
as we wait like orphans for a maternal recognition that … will
never come? ()
Cousineau-Levine’s theory of Canadian identity is not only decidedly
ambitious but also determinedly optimistic. She focuses on the promising implications of the “window-like opening” () that she identifies as a
predominant motif of Canadian photography. For Cousineau-Levine, the
death Canadian photography obsessively depicts is a ritual or shamanistic
one that comes before a rebirth (here Canada’s First Nations’ people appear
to get a look-in). She argues that the focus on death and duality is the
manifestation of “an unconscious desire … to experience some definitive
rite of passage into maturity” (). She argues, “I believe that the death to
which Canadian photographs refer is in fact the ‘death’ that accompanies
a profound passage from one state of being to another, and in that sense
we may be only ‘Faking Death’” ().
In what amounts to a fascinating contradiction, while CousineauLevine aims to define Canadian identity, what she concludes is that it
definitively escapes definition. She writes that it is the “doubleness that
does not want to ‘come together’ as a monolithic unity that, more than
any other trait, characterizes the Canadian photographic image” ().
Canadian identity, it seems, ultimately slips through those “tenuous and
eternal interstices of unreason” of which Borges speaks.
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Paul Matthew St Pierre’s A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L’Oeuvre
bizarre de Barry Humphries brings together the different focuses of Miller’s and Cousineau-Levine’s books on fakery and postcolonialism. Barry
Humphries, the subject of St Pierre’s book, is a comic actor and writer
who has made a career out of faking it. His most famous incarnation is
as Dame Edna Everage, the super-star housewife from Moonee Ponds
(a suburb of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia), who is renowned for her
outrageous eye-ware, calling her audience members “Possums,” sharing
intimate details of her life, the absurdity of her provincial pretensions
(“Excuse I,” quoted in St Pierre ), and her comically insulting narcissism (“I don’t really look at this as a show—any more than you do. I see it
as a lovely conversation between two people, one of whom is very much
more interesting than the other” [quoted ]). However, Humphries’s
stage personae are multiple and varied, united only by their nationality.
Humphries always plays the Australian; that is, he always caricatures the
Australian. As St Pierre points out, this particular parodic bent, combined with the fact that he chooses to live as an expatriate, has not earned
Humphries many brownie points with fellow Australians, whom the Irish
comedian Dave Allen once described as “the most well-balanced people
in the world: they have a chip on each shoulder” (quoted in St Pierre xi).
However, St Pierre argues that Humphries’s work is in fact a postcolonial
project: it is a celebration of Australianness that “challenges Australians
to like themselves as themselves and not as mere likenesses of Britons,
Americans, and others” (-).
St Pierre’s book is a thoroughly researched academic (as well as
something of a train-spotting fan’s) study of the work of a comic actor
whose chosen vocation, like that of Borges, is to highlight the cracks in
our world that show it up as phantasmagorical. In “Avators of the Tortoise,” Borges proclaims: “Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek
unrealities that confirm that nature.”¹⁰ Humphries, in the spirit of Dada,
for the sake of the absurd, as St Pierre suggests, is involved in precisely
such an undertaking. St Pierre, comparing Humphries to the Dada artist
Marcel Duchamp, writes: “Humphries and Duchamp have a conjoined
contempt for familiarity. ey are dedicated to making the familiar seem
bizarre” ().
 “Admitamos lo que todos los idealistas admiten: el caracter alucinatorio del
mundo. Hagamos lo que ningún idealista ha hecho: busquemos irrealidades
que confirmen ese character” (: ).
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St Pierre’s stated aim is “to foreground Humphreys’s Dadaism, grotesquerie, and music hall artistry as they figure in his writing and configure his oeuvre” (xii). He does this in tortuous detail and with torturous
repetitiveness, but the relationships he identifies between Humphries’s
oeuvre and the traditions of Dada, grotesquerie, and music hall are certainly valid. Duchamp, like Humphries, constructed a comic female alter
ego in Rrose Sélavy, which leads St Pierre to describe Humphries’s Edna
as “Duchampignon” (). (St Pierre has a penchant for neologisms.) e
grotesque act of Edna is also, as St Pierre suggests, about highlighting the
grotesque nature of the performance of the Australian provincial middle
class. Humphries, through Edna, lampoons middle-class social niceties
as an arbitrary and absurd act designed to enable distinction from the
working class or what Edna would call “common people.” In his book, St
Pierre includes a list distinguishing the “nice” from the “common” and
from which Humphries presumably worked in his articulation of the
character of Edna and in his satire of middle Australia. On the “common”
side, Humphries has written “yard,” “pictures,” “smokes,” “lollies,” “pudding”
and “pillow-case.” On the “nice” side, such things are subtly transfigured
into “lawn,” “theatre,” “cigarettes,” “sweets,” “dessert,” and “pillow-slip” ().
e list, with its disturbing attention to detail and fineness of distinctions,
is extraordinarily revealing of the frightening intimacy of Humphries’s
parody. St Pierre is insightful in linking Edna with the tradition of music
hall, as she, like that brand of comedy, “teeters between the binaries of
kindness and cruelty” ().
Dame Edna Everage, as St Pierre writes, is not only Humphries’s most
famous but “also his most chilling creation, a creature whose life and whose
fame sometimes seem to have taken over his own … to the point where
she can even dismiss him, as an inept, even criminal, (mis)manager” ().
However, while St Pierre makes references to Humphries’s three marriages
and his problems with alcoholism (for which he has been institutionalized
on a number of occasions), he refuses to speculate on the repercussions
Humphries’s fakery has had on his sense of the real (whatever that may
be) or on the consequences Humphries’s experience of the real has had on
his fakery. St Pierre, with his focus on matters not biographical, insists on
the importance of seeing Humphries’s characters not as his alter egos but
as “his literary oeuvre” (). In a grand and rather strangely executed line
of argument (“Barry Humphries is a great writer and a great Australian!”
[]), St Pierre strives to establish Humphries’s literary reputation as
comparable to that of Patrick White.
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St Pierre also insists on interpreting Humphries’s work, despite its grotesque personifications of Australian stereotypes, as a postcolonial celebration of Australian identity. e caustic parody inherent in the character of
Dame Edna Everage or, perhaps even more so, in the character of Barry
McKenzie, an ugly recreation of a type known in Australia as the “ocker”—
he is memorable for such phrases as “strain the potatoes” (go to the toilet)
and “chunder” (vomit), both of which reveal his hobby of drinking “tubes”
of beer ( )—makes this a difficult argument to pursue. St Pierre can verge
on the patronizing and tend towards the idealistic, as when he suggests
that Humphries, through the character of Barry McKenzie, encourages
Australians “to recognize the beauty, dynamism, and humour of their own
Australian parole and language” (). (How many people does St Pierre
think actually speak like Barry McKenzie in Australia?) However, even if
he puts his case in a unique way, St Pierre can be more convincing in his
postcolonial characterization of Humphries’s project:
In effect, like Marcel Duchamp … Humphries was painting a
mustache and goatee on the Mona Lisa, or on its antipodean
counterpart, the Mona Everage, as an act of subversion, to free
Australians not from their culture but, rather, from cultural
stereotypes, from any construct of a culture […], whose only
sense of humour is the onset of yet another bilious turn.
()
us, ultimately, St Pierre’s conceptualization of Humphries’s oeuvre
resembles Cousineau-Levine’s description of Canadian photography.
According to St Pierre, Humphries enacts a postcolonial turn by encouraging escape from stereotype through the emptying force of parody: “By playing up and sending up cultural stereotypes, Humphries has encouraged
Australians, and others, to laugh not only at him and his characters but
also at themselves, at the negation of themselves on stage, and to come up
on stage and join in the subversion of their images in the mirror” ().
In the final analysis, Humphries seems to be, perhaps more than
a great patriot, a fine humanist. In exposing social fakery, he enacts a
process of social equalization. Speaking of Humphries’s Sir Les Patterson,
a buck-toothed, lascivious, ungroomed diplomat who notoriously sprays
his audience with spit when he speaks, St Pierre writes, “[E]ven men who
are better groomed and better behaved than Les—is there anyone who
isn’t?—have spittle, semen, mucous, blood, urine, and feces in common
with him, not to mention libidinous predilections” (). e message
is simple: at bottom (excuse the pun), we are all the same. Humour, as
St Pierre suggests, makes the dismantling of social pretensions less
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frightening. Like Dada and music hall artists, “Humphries invites audiences
to find pleasure in subversive things … and to find the act of subverting
pleasurable, even laughable” (). However, while Humphries’s carnival
act makes transgression permissible and fun, in the aftermath, the mask
and the face paint, like that of a clown, prove somehow haunting.
In “Inferno I, ,” Borges narrates a story about Dante in which the
author, before death, is given a dream revealing the “secret purpose of
his life and work”¹¹: “[W]hen he awoke, he sensed that he had received
and lost an infinite thing, something he would never be able to recover,
or even glimpse, because the machine of the world is far too complex for
the simplicity of men.”¹² e books by Miller, Cousineau-Levine, and St
Pierre each promise and inevitably deny the “glimpse” of something dense
and indefinable. Is it truth?
What is truth? ere is, of course, as Cousineau-Levine suggests, death
or, as Humphries’s grotesque parodies celebrate, the shared humanity of
the body. ere’s also fear. Miller, despite exposing almost all human experiences as tainted by feelings of hypocrisy, goes easy on love, although he
ultimately suggests that “whining is one of the more authentic behaviours
we engage in” (). For Miller, “like it or not, we are stuck with faking
it” ().
Truth? Wittgenstein said: “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence” (quoted in Levin ). Truth? Ultimately, we live despite
it.
For Miller, “like
it or not, we are
stuck with
faking it.”
 “el secreto propósito de su vida y de su labor” (: ).
 “al despertar, sintió que había recibido y perdido una cosa infinita, algo que
no podría recuperar, ni vislumbrar siquiera, porque la máquina del mundo es
harto compleja para la simplicidad de los hombres.”
Works Cited
Barnes, John. “Mudrooroo–An Australian view.” European Association
for the Study of Australia  (): –. (http: //austudies.org/europe/
n.html)
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Jorge Luis Borges: e Garden of Forking Paths.” .
www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_quotes.html
———. Obras Completas.  vols. Buenos Aires: Emece, .
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Cousineau-Levine, Penny. Faking Death: Canadian Art Photography and
the Canadian Imagination. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s , .
Hughes, Mary Ann. “e Complexity of Aboriginal Identity: Mudrooroo
and Sally Morgan." Westerly . (): –.
Levin, Jerome. eories of the Self. Washington: Hemisphere, .
Miller, William Ian. Faking It. Cambridge: Cambridge , .
Mudrooroo. Indigenous Literature of Australia: Milli Milli Wangka. South
Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997.
St Pierre, Paul Matthew. A Portrait of the Artist as Australian: L’Oeuvre
bizarre de Barry Humphries. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s , 2004.
White, Patrick. Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait. London: Vintage,
.
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