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ESC: English Studies in Canada 31.2-3 (2005) 307-325

Faking it for Real
Maria Takolander
Deakin University

"[T]he greatest wizard (Novalis memorably wrote) would be he who would cast a spell over himself to the point of taking his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?" I conjecture 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 space and stable in time; but in its architecture 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"

Jean 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, [End Page 307] as we know it (which is, of course, the only perspective of it that we can have), is fake. The 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" (4). 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,

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.

(3)

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?" (103). Faking it may at times stick in the throat. However, Miller argues that it is an essential lubricant for social interaction. [End Page 308]

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). This 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...

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