The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

The appellation fits the smudged images of
the first piece, "Cassie, Cassie." There are
many loose ends and false clues that must
be atavisms and vestiges of other efforts.
"Cassie, Cassie" reads suspiciously like
rejected branches of Murphy's Measure of
Miranda. Cassandra's sister, Pollyanna, is
courted by her parents, much as Miranda
was courted by hers: they send her to good
schools, feed her in fine restaurants, and
keep luxury at home. Polly, like Miranda
before her, finds privilege nauseating, maddening,
and she descends into no-point
suicide — on skis (Miranda went by airplane,
Cassie climbed down a wall). Polly,
Cassie, and Miranda believe in the father's
unexercised power to make the world a better
place, but Cassie and Polly have lived
without seeing or hearing of the world outside
protective walls; the stand (or plunge)
they take has no basis; they have no text.
"Parliamentary Parafiction" is the second
piece in the volume. The title page describes
it as "Seven Elementary Catastrophes: A Set
of Footnotes in search of their text." What
follows are fragmentary transcripts, with
the interviewing doctor's explanatory footnotes,
of interviews with a refugee couple.
The survivors' presence dominates
"Parliamentary Parafiction" as it does earlier
stories set by Murphy among Central
and South American refugees, but here
Murphy writes omissions as poets do. The
refugee wife has learned relevant words of
the doctor's language (torture, corpse, percentage),
but the husband communes only
with spirits now; he cannot be reached in
any human language. The doctor records
the husband's responses as blank pages and
comments that "one can note the laws of
applied linguistics at work ... [as they]
sabotage those changes . .. necessary to satisfactorily
complete acquisition of a new
target language." The doctor's words —
they ring like found objects — are a powerfully
condemning paralipsis.
The volume's title story, "The Deconstruction
of Wesley Smithson," is Murphy
at her horrified, amused, and attentive best.
The story is set in Canada and Mexico
among unnamed or punningly-named
people. Wesley Smithson is "not to be confused
with .. . Smith and Wesson"; his wife
Alice is "née de Wonderland," and his mistress
is "Rosalyn 'the Red' Queen." After
experiencing a crisis of conscience and a
mild earthquake, Wesley Smithson has disappeared
to (or from) somewhere in Mexico,
leaving behind an audio tape diary. In the
wickedly comic introductory segment, editors
argue: one writes that Smithson's diary
is his best work, that he "stood firm to the
last, his fingers on play/record"; another
calls the tapes a hoax and grouses that no
newsman in the world "will think Wesley
capable ... of this ... lazy, pretentious,
emotional crap." Alice believes in the power
of narrative and begs for suppression of the
diary so that her children need not be identified
as the offspring of a "cult figure, a
well-known and admired nut." The tapes
themselves record our decade's worst nightmares;
they are not comic.
As Smithson approaches death, all is circles
and cycles: mechanical gears reflect in
life and time, in medical check-ups,
prayers, memories, customs clearance,
word patterns. Images beget images. The
word around becomes a litany. Smithson
has lived by an instinctive faith in words,
but now letters rotate with the earth, like a
wheel of fortune, a carousel, a torture rack,
a ceiling fan, a passion flower.
The passion flower, folk art, and the
overview are Murphy's signature tropes.
Smithson adds serpents. The body is a
country, words are cancers and guerrillas
and snakes; fate is political. The only hope
for survival, the only road from overview to
understanding, is deconstruction of the
words and tumors. In Smithson's world
there is little choice of identities. His text
wanders among his failures. Newsprint terrors
metastasize; "nothing can ever be only