Weren't You Duped Yesterday?

The smartest characters in movies always give off an apathetic air, or that their emotions are self-contained and controlled. In Ocean's Eleven, Brad Pitt constantly stays in control and the viewer watches him with both awe and an understanding that he is in control. That is how the narrator in "Muckracker," by Cate Mavin feels. She calls out to the reader, appearing insecure, but says as her final statement, "I have no loyalty and I have no pride." How interesting! She tells the tale of her abusive, frail, and spiraling relationship with a man with conviction and multiple analogies.

The message of this poem boils down to the power of words and their voracious nature. Her lover's words entangle her and pull her into his web of manipulation while she herself manipulates the reader. She pulls the reader in, asks for their sympathy, gives airs of insecurity, and then confesses her apathy towards the reader and her lover. The poem almost seems like an experiment in the manipulation of words. This connects with Nabokov's, Lolita. (Sorry! It just keeps connecting to what I read.) The narrator of the novel, H.H., invites the reader's pity by creating a double, a man worse than he. The narrator in Muckraker uses much of the same stratagem, creating a lover worse than herself, one who manipulates and ignores her, enticing the reader to sympathize with her.

The aspect of this poem that draws the reader in is its fascinating nature. The narrator migrates through several extended analogies: comparing the relationship between the her and the reader to a lascivious encounter, her relationship to a trip to the dentist, and his voice to sandpaper. The salacious metaphor hints at her desire for the reader to form a passionate connection with her, read the story voraciously and then move on to the next item in the day's agenda. All the similes magnify her situation: the disparity in her relationship, her desire for a symbiotic relationship between reader and writer.

She closes with a dark and bold statement, "If you can't trust people, you can't trust books, since books are people and people are books." Can books be trusted? If people are flawed, than books must be flawed. What this narrator has yet to accept is that in the weakness of man there is great power. In the acceptance of a fallen soul, one can finally move towards healing. Therefore broken writers are filled with insight, even if they cannot always be trusted.