Forgery

I've been immersed in work-related reading and writing as of late (ergo, less blogging), but too much time with Mary Grace Susan Crumpe finally drove me to pick up a modern novel.   I crossed paths with Sabina Murray's A Carnivore's Inquiry some time ago, and never did manage to figure out whether or not I actually liked it; ergo, time to give Murray another go with Forgery, which follows the path of an antiques appraiser in Greece and  the USA during the early 1960s. 

Forgery seems to be an endlessly tempting subject for novelists, raising as it does all sorts of questions about authenticity, history, identity, and fiction.  Murray's first-person narrator, Rupert Briggs, notes early on that his job requires him to "provide a past" for the antiques he examines, both "provenience" and "provenance": "Provenience spoke to origin; provenance to history" (41).   Only objects surrounded by a halo of history have any value for the collector; to obtain the desired price, the dealer must supply the right story.  The antique is, in a sense, solidified history.  As "provide a past" suggests, however, the appraiser may well be coming up with just a plausible fiction--and in the art market, that fiction can serve as nicely as fact.  Rupert's case complicates matters even further, because although he specializes in furniture, his "Uncle William" (in reality, his father) has sent him off to Greece to buy antiquities.  An acquaintance, journalist Steve Kelly, tells Rupert that he can detect "a faint line around your rim" (44)--indicating a fake coin--and although Rupert denies the charge, it's true that his qualifications for developing historical narratives about antiquities are limited.  In fact, just a short while later, Rupert provides a confident date for a lamp that he admits he "had absolutely no way of dating" (78), and then authenticates a lovely plate, despite the flashing neon foreshadowing of its "modern" qualities (79).  Rupert's authority as an expert, even a faux expert, transforms the valueless (because without history) modern forgery into a valuable antiquity, whether accidentally (as here) or deliberately (as with a head of Antinous later on).  We might find in Murray's title the same pun on "to forge" as Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837: Rupert's acts of authentication are fakery, but they are also creative in their own right. 

With a title like Forgery, it's hardly surprising that the novel is loaded with fakes and deceptions of all kinds.  Besides "Uncle" William, we have Steve Kelly, whose news reports may be politically-motivated fictions; the artist and forger Jack Weldon, who sneers at Byron's attempted Greek exploits, but is himself funding an army; and Jack's wife Amanda, whose devotion to her husband is a matter of money.  Susan Stewart argues that "[a]lthough a forger, unlike a plagiarist, makes a claim for the authenticity of a document rather than for the authenticity of himself or herself as a site of production, a forger is in fact often caught because of the 'unnatural' relations between himself or herself and the document."¹  But in this novel, all of the forgeries remain unexposed, right down to the provenience and provenance of Jack's Antinous.     ("Uncle" William was never a secret, as Rupert admits, although his mother's identity was.)   In this novel, fiction makes reality--most literally in Steve's case.  As Rupert's friend Nikos dryly inquires after seeing Steve's report on a probably non-existent bombing, "[h]ow can there be peace-keeping if there is peace already?" (76)  By novel's end, it's clear that the characters exist in a world where the distinction between the forged and the authentic neither exists nor, perhaps, even matters.  Jack's forged Antinous is in the Met, sanctified by its fraudulent antiquity; one of Jack's originals is also there, sanctified by the artist's posthumous celebrity. 

Rupert's first sentence is "I will never be the sort of person to make a major contribution to mankind" (1), even though his forged narratives eventually bring something "major"  into being.  Still, the cheerfully self-deprecatory nature of this opening, relegating the speaker to permanent second-class status, also covers up his depression.  Not quite an alcoholic, but definitely an excessive drinker--he spends much of the novel looking for the next bottle--Rupert is mourning the death of his young son, Michael, who drowned.  But this is mourning without tears or even overt grief, although Rupert's gaze often fixes on young children in his vicinity.   Without quite entering into I Am A Camera territory, Rupert's voice rarely registers extremes of happiness or sadness, peace or rage; even his affair and ultimate marriage to cancer-stricken Olivia, supposedly a love match, is narrated with detachment.  Although a number of other characters note what Rupert's strange restraint might imply about his actual state of mind, he too remains "unexposed," like the novel's other forgeries.  His coping mechanisms, which other novelists might expose as a mere mask, are here allowed to remain in place.  Again, authenticity and forgery collapse into each other.

In a sense, this novel reads as a "forgery" in a different respect: the total irrelevance of its historical setting.  Although there are allusions to 1960s Greek politics and US racism, courtesy of Steve Kelly and Uncle William, there's really no reason for the novel to be set at this particular moment in time; in fact, the characters' sexual attitudes are all remarkably contemporary.  The story might just as well take place in the twenty-first century (and, given its postmodern theme, probably could).  Like the plate and the head, the characters inhabit an invented past, suitable for the novelist's purposes. 

¹ Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 24.