Did you get it? Literary hoax from the fiction of Don DeLillo
JA
August 26
The world loves a good literary hoax – the Sokal affair, Helen Demidenko/Darville, Norma Khouri and Forbidden Love and Ern Malley to name but a few. The latest ruse is perhaps a little more light-hearted than its predecessors and more modest in scope, but it’s certainly good for a chuckle.
Back in 2004, a review essay on the writing of David Foster Wallace called ‘An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent’ was published in the prestigious US journal Modernism/Modernity (John Hopkins University Press). The author was listed as Jay Murray Siskind of Blacksmith College. I haven’t yet read any Don DeLillo, but those of you who have will recognise Siskind as one of the characters in his novel White Noise, and Blacksmith College one of the book’s fictional towns. Readers of the essay may have assumed that there existed a real academic of the same name, however the hoaxers provide further clues about the prank. For example, there are fake footnotes referring to other characters from White Noise, such as the narrator Jack Gladney and Alfonse Stompanato, and a paragraph which reads more like the voice of a fictional character than it does a scholarly reviewer:
It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I’ve always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women.
Mark Sample, a professor of Contemporary American Literature and New Media Studies at George Mason University, revealed the joke on his blog last month. He first noticed the fake review in 2005 when one of his students cited it in an essay, but forgot about until recently. He’s since found out that the review has been cited in several graduate theses as a legitimate source and is regarded as a serious piece of academic dialogue. Sample was not above seeing the funny side of the hoax, but he also pointed out that the fact that it has gone largely unnoticed indicates a troubling and telling blindness in contemporary American academia. ‘How could any 20th century Americanist, whether modernist or postmodernist, fail to see the references to perhaps one of the most important novels of the past fifty years?’ he asks.
The editors (both former and present) of Modernism/Modernity have since written an open letter in reply, which seems to suggest that they themselves were at the bottom of the hoax.
Who were we to reject the offer of a review from a respected and even popular colleague? Who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review . . . well, new fiction? Isn’t that the very essence of peer reviewing? It should also have come as no surprise to anyone that Jay Murray Siskind’s writing should have sounded like Jay Murray Siskind’s writing, in much the same way we might expect that the writing of Pierre Menard, author of the Quijote, to sound much like Don Quijote
The full letter is available on Sample’s blog.
For more on literary hoaxes, come along to 'From Ern to Quadrant' at the MWF this Friday (it's free), where Sophie Cunningham, Michael Heyward and Simon Caterson will discuss literary hoaxes from Ern Malley to present day. For full details see our Noticeboard.
You can also read Katherine Wilson’s essay on her hoaxing of Quadrant’s Keith Windschuttle from the June edition of Meanjin online here.
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Comments
26 Aug 09 at 7:17
The most interesting thing about these literary hoaxes is when they work to produce something of value in it’s own right. Ern Malley would have meant nothing if ‘his’ poetry wasn’t actually brilliant at times. “Who but a fictional character could be better qualified to review… well, new fiction?” Either we can dismiss this as nonsense, or look at the way we invest in a book like White Noise, not only in its characters, but in the persona of its author. A book like Infinite Jest is arguable unreadable without the ‘genius’ persona created by David Foster Wallace. The way he pre-empted his own suicide with speeches about suicide, makes you feel like he was foreshadowing a character’s demise. My point being that fiction begins at the roots of who we are, from family histories to personal mythologies. Eruptions of fiction into reality are ceaseless, but the fabric is only torn when those threads are revealed. There’s also the dialogue between two post-modern writer’s here that is interesting, because Wallace’s first book was about a character who wonders whether she is real or not and a constant theme in Delilo’s work is the simulation of life through media and literature. I think that there’s a possibility that these hoaxers actually understood their subjects in a very authentic way.
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