Literary Hoaxes: Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater

Literary Hoaxes:Throwing Out the Baby

with the Bathwater

IA Brief Survey

Psalmanaazaar

• Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704)

• Swift, ‘A Modest Proposal’, etc

James Macpherson (1736-1796)

• Ossian (1760-73)• Goethe, Walt Whitman

• Spread of Romanticism throughout Europe

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70)

"This is the most extraordinary young man that has come to my knowledge ... it is wonderful how the whelp has written such things" – Samuel Johnson

Insert: Painting of Chatterton by Wallis

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/romanticstudies/chatterton/

Thomas Chatterton (1752-70)

• ‘Thomas Rowley’ (1769)• Wordsworth, "Resolution and Independence": I

thought of Chatterton, that marvelous Boy;• Coleridge, "Monody on the Death of Chatterton"

(1796): O Chatterton! That thou were yet alive!• Charles Harpur (Aust.)

‘Ern Malley’ (1944)

Insert image of Angry Penguins:http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=9203

• The Darkening Ecliptic• (James McAuley, Harold Stewart)• Vs Angry Penguins, ed. Max Harris

• ‘Adoré Floupette’ (1885)• (Henri Beauclair, Gabriel Vicaire)• Les Déliquescences d’Adoré Floupette

Frank O’HaraJohn Ashbery

John Tranter, John Forbes, etc.

‘B. Wongar’ (1972- )

(Sreten Božič)

Mudrooroo (1995)

(Mudrooroo Narogin, Mudrooroo Nyungar, Colin Johnston)

‘Helen Demidenko’ (1995)

(Helen Darville, Helen Dale, etc)

IIConcepts and Applications

Unexamined territory:

• The poetics of the hoax• The pathology of the hoax

Poetics

Two concepts

• The Peritext

• Ultra-fiction? Hyper-literature?

‘writing without borders’?

We also need to consider:

Broad range

Pseudonymy/’masking’ to parody to satire/deflation to pathological enactment

e.g. in Australia:

• ‘Tom Collins’ (Joseph Furphy)• ‘Miles Franklin’ (Stella Maria Miles Franklin)• ‘Henry Handel Richardson’ (• ‘Mort Brandish’• ‘Ern Malley’• ‘B. Wongar’• Paul Radley• Mudrooroo• ‘Helen Demidenko’• ‘Wanda Koomatrie’ (Leon Carmen)• Marlo Morgan• Norma Khouri• Etc.

‘Hoax Nation’ ??

A national pathology ?

i.e. an ontological anxietylegacy of Immigration / cultural displacement

Sidney Nolan, ‘Ned Kelly’(no face: the poet who does not exist)

• Insert image of Sydney Nolan paintinghttp://nga.gov.au/nolan/index.cfm

Tim Storier, ‘The Histrionic Wayfarer’(no face: the poet who does not exist)

• Insert image: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2012/29250/

The question of ‘identity’

• As national obsession• As international/universal obsession

Fernando Pessoa (Portugal, 1888-1935)Heteronyms

The pressure to cohere is one of the madnesses of our times

Deleuze and Guattari

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The pressure to be one

Hoax as domain of the multiple

Why teach literary hoaxes?

• Corrective to literary history – filling out the real story

• Better understanding of national character and identity

• (most important?) better understanding of individual identity formation, the battle of the Multiple and the One (and so better understanding of immense contemporary psychological pressure [depression, etc.])