Rewriting the psychotic other of author-function in Peter Carey's my life as a fake

Abstract

The chapter reads Peter Carey's novel My Life as a Fake as a series of complex iterations on the psychoticizing nature of author-function. Lacanian psychosis is contextualized as a problematic of language and a failure of naming in the domain of the literary as an act of language that generates the Other. This adds to Carey's narrative context that has to do with Australian literary history as well as its global trappings. The article shows how the potentially psychotic nature of literary alterity is coloured by the changing function of the author in a neo-imperial context of global capitalism. In what way does Carey's psychotic challenge the limits of neo-imperial capitalism and globalized authorship? As we shall see, the novel is a merciless critique of the colonial author's authority. It shows the author's subordination into language and the uncanny emergence of corporeality from language. This language-turned-body has a difficult score to settle with veracity.