Abstract :
[en] Peter Carey’s recent novel shares the concern with ‘unoriginality’ which has become a hallmark of his later fiction. It can actually be argued that, through this new variation on a known theme, he purports to move beyond the clichéd postmodern paradox that authenticities – whether psychological or aesthetic – are always essentially made up, in order to consider the matter from another angle, pondering the perilous moment when an overtly fabricated object somehow mysteriously springs to life. If, as the title suggests, even our most personal emotions can be rationalized in terms of chemical reactions, why then could we not pursue a reverse path of investigation and envisage material reality as the source providing the components for the creation of spirit? This is the subjective context in which the protagonist Catherine, who works as a horologist (clockwork expert) in a London museum, must reconstruct a nineteenth-century mechanical swan suspected by some to be harbouring the soul of its original maker.
Interestingly Catherine, herself a die-hard rationalist, finds herself shaken by a devastating bereavement which makes her unusually open to any form of consolation – including the self-indulgence of nostalgia, but also of cocaine and alcohol – which is why she will whole-heartedly embrace the welcome distraction offered by her work of mechanical reconstruction. As part of her attempt to understand the structure of the automaton, she feels that she must immerse herself in the diaries left behind by the commissioner of the work, an Englishman named Henry Brandling animated by his faith that the elaborate toy may release enough energy in his consumptive son, Percy, to save him from his otherwise lethal condition. Thus Carey creates an opening into the rationalist fabric of his protagonist’s present, allowing her to entertain anachronistic fantasies about the life-saving (let alone life-giving) properties of true art.
Inasmuch as Catherine’s perusal of the diaries eventually facilitates a circuitous confrontation of her own grief, so that her excursions into the past serve to shore up her fragile sense of a future, the text appears to vindicate its own fantastic claims about the demiurgic, or at least redemptive, powers of art. Perhaps predictably, some reviewers balked in the face of this species of self-promotion, repeating the oft-expressed view that Carey’s fiction, in view of its deliberate straining of the laws of credibility, finally fails to emerge from an enmeshment in its own favoured themes of forgery and imitative inadequacy. The ultimate question asked by the work is then whether it must be seen to be equal to its own promise of transcendence. The present paper, by way of its own descent into the past (and particularly through a comparison with My Life as a Fake which rehearses similar themes), will try to provide an answer, notably by circumscribing the intention of a text in which metafiction assumes a metaphysical dimension possibly unique in Carey’s corpus.
