“The Pochsy Plays” by Karen Hines and “A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning” by Catherine Mavrikakis

We’ve all known people who are narcissistic, blissfully unaware of the depths of their own self-absorption, of the inadvertent parody they play. Narcissism could, in fact, be the poster personality type—or disease—of the 21st century, a century in which we in the West are heedlessly contaminating the earth, ravaging its resources and starving the poor while obsessing simultaneously about appearances, our children’s college educations and deck furniture. Were the consequences less dire, it would be fodder for drawing room theatre. Enter Karen Hines’s character Pochsy (pronounced Poxy, as in the pox).

A regular on Ken Finkleman’s biting hit The Newsroom, Hines has performed Pochsy on the Fringe circuit worldwide through three solo-woman shows—collected here in The Pochsy Plays—and with, apparently, some compassion and humour remaining for us prototypical, privileged Westerners. In Pochsy, Hines has created our perfect representative. She’s toxic (mercury poisoning from her job at Mercury Packers) and sick. She’s befuddled, frivolous, vain and very funny. She wants, desperately, to be loved. Shes sweet and canny, contradictory and seductive and cruel, the kind of character we can’t stop watching; the kind of character to whom we can’t help but respond. Along with Hines’s illuminating, intelligent introduction to the character and her style, photos and performance stills provide readers a fair sense of Pochsy’s stage effect. It doesn’t hurt that she looks like a silent movie star and carries a hint of Betty Boop’s saccharine charm.

When you think the honey can’t be any thicker, Hines spreads on more. Love, sighs Pochsy, has made her “the happiest girl in the world.” Shes “a little bit in love” … with her doctor. And why not? After all, there’s “something about him. Like the way he looks at me. (dreamy) When he’s examining me.

“It’s like I’m the only one in the room.”

Pochsy remembers their first encounter: “As I lay on his table, the thin cotton of my floral print dress draped damply over my youthful form, I stared into his eyes, and I knew that I wanted to be with him. (rapturous) Bound together with him in a madness of our own making. I wanted to take the disillusionment out of his eyes and fly away with him. Set up a practice in the slums of Calcutta.”

And on, over the top, it goes. Whether shes sending up loneliness and love or shallow ambition and greed, Hines’s satire is dead-on. “I’m at a fork in the road,” Pochsy suddenly recognizes. “And I realize that I don’t want fifteen minutes of fame; I want a career. I need a family that’s a team! So I take the road less travelled. There are thousands of people on the road less travelled. People who create their own reality. People who play hard. And I can tell, from the looks in their eyes, that they all have something important in their minds, and so I know I’m going the right way.”

If The Pochsy Plays turns on the cosmic and comic ironies of narcissism, a second Coach House publication, Catherine Mavrikakis’s novel A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning, recreates narcissism’s tragic ironies—the black and obstinate preoccupations incited by mourning.

An unusual book, A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning is a “fictionalized memoir” in which the narrator goes by the same name as the author and is entirely obsessed with death. AIDS is claiming the narrator’s friends and acquaintances, all of them named Hervé. She is furious. “When it comes to death I know only what I have learned from my friends, dead or ill,” Catherine claims, “and they’ve never told me how to understand the incoherence of our lives and of our deaths. With them, I learn to understand nothing, and most of all I learn not to understand their deaths. I refuse to understand. I refuse to abide by the law of some such knowledge, of a possible reason.”

Though the book is in part a monograph on death and a treatise against the despotism of AIDS, the intellectual honesty and fierceness of the narrative extricate it from abstract philosophical discourse. The narrator won’t abide by meek or dutiful explanations of death entreated by social convention and tradition. Her anguished, sullen posture, like that of a modern-day Hamlet, is kindled equally by “the anger of dying” and by disgust for “the cult of survivors in the game of death.”

Catherine’s blunt refusal to understand the deaths of the Hervés in her life attenuates her communication with the dead. “‘This is where it ends, and you can see, it does end,’ is what,” the narrator believes, “these derisory monuments seemed to say, buildings built against death, right up against death, in an attempt to suffocate it. Tonnes of stone erected less to keep memory than to forget, to reassure. But is it really possible to be done with those we have known? Is there an end for our dead?”

Troubled and fraught, her relationship with one of the Hervés continues in death where it left off in life. The two have a powerful connection that persisted through a separation they’d fallen into, a separation that does not deter them in their subtle communication. “A telepathy of the dead we were to one another,” Catherine explains ironically.

Before Hervé’s death, they meet again at a screening of Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant. The film is a testament to the complicated nature of human relations. In it, Frau von Kant summarizes a relationship that has come to an impasse: “You’re in a car or a room with someone and you would like to say something, would like to show affection, but you’re afraid to concede a single point that would mean being the weaker. It’s a terrible moment when you can no longer turn back.”

Death, it would seem, is just another such moment.

Mavrikakis’s deftness in delineating the apprehension and awkwardness around the impasse of death is breathtaking. With wit and great integrity, she examines the truth of the complex relationships we have with our dead. At the heart of the relations, she argues, lie desire, longing, possessiveness, faith and more; all of life’s remnants are salvaged. Yet the connection is also freighted with the paradoxical knowledge death brings: that earthly bonds, at least, have been forever severed. The moment we learn of someone’s death, something between us changes. We stand on distinct sides of a great divide—and the division is shocking, maddening, monstrous; the distance, incomprehensible. Death, as Catherine Mavrikakis puts it, is scandalous. ■

The Pochsy Plays by Karen Hines, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004, softcover; 174 pp, $18.95. A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning by Catherine Mavrikakis, translated by Nathalie Stephens, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004, softcover, 153 pp, $18.95.

Mariianne Mays writes and edits from Winnipeg.