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ID
theft and fraud in literature
This page considers identity theft and identity fraud
in literature.
It covers -
introduction
As we have suggested in discussing authenticity
in a separate profile on this site, imposture, appropriation
and identity have been both a rich literary theme and
something used by authors to paint their way out of corners.
depictions
In Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley
(1955) the charming psychopath Tom Ripley character murders
and then takes over the identity of his friend Dickie
Greenleaf, commenting that surely it is better to be a
fake somebody than a real nobody.
That assessment - and the exhilaration of shape changing
- is a preoccupation in major works such as Thomas Mann's
The Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man
(1954), Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade (1857) and William Gaddis' The
Recognitions (1955).
Mark Twain's The Prince & the Pauper: A Tale for
Young People of All Ages (1881), Rafael Sabatini's
The Lost King (1937), Wilkie Collins' Armadale
(1866), Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, Ian Fleming's
Moonraker (1955), Peter Carey's My Life as
a Fake (2003), Armistead Maupin's The Night Listener
(2000), Alexandre Dumas' The Man in the Iron Mask,
Daphne Du Maurier's Scapegoat or Anthony
Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) offer more
romantic accounts.
There is a mordant view in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved
One (1947), Peter Lovesey's The False Inspector
Dew (2001) and Simon Leys' superb The Death of
Napoleon (1986).
'Reinvention' and appropriation appears in works such
as Dana Spiotta's Eat The Document (New York:
Scribner 2006) and Frederick Forsyth's The Day of
the Jackal (1971)
For academic perspectives see Gary Lindberg's The
Confidence-Man in American Literature (New York:
Oxford Uni Press 1982) and Susan Kuhlmann's Knave,
Fool, Genius: The Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century
American Fiction (Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina
Press 1973).
authors and imposters
Recent authorial shape-shifting is evident in controversies
over Helen Darville/Demidenko's
unlovely The Hand That Signed the Paper (1994)
and Bruno Doessekker's supposed Holocaust memoir, highlighted
earlier in this profile and the discussion of literary
forgery.
'Demidenko' is discussed in Andrew Reimer's The Demidenko
Affair (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1996), Corey
China's
2004 Under the Influence of Prize Culture: Helen Demidenko
& the Vogel, Miles Franklin, and ALS Gold Medal Awards
and Robert Manne's The Culture of Forgetting: Helen
Demidenko & the Holocaust (Melbourne: Text 1996).
For Wilkomirski see in A Life in Pieces: the Making
and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski (New York: Norton
2002) by Blake Eskin and The Wilkomirski Affair: A
Study in Biographical Truth (New York: Schocken 2001)
by Stefan Maechler.
They are an unpleasant echo of impostures by George Psalmanazar,
Norma Khouri, Rahila Khan, Leon Carmen and Carlos Castaneda.
There has been similar controversy over JT LeRoy
and 'Navajo' author Nasdijj, hyped as author of an autobiography
"so achingly honest it takes your breath away".
In 2005 the NY Times sniffed that
Leroy's
brief career has generated the kind of magazine-feature
publicity usually reserved for movie stars. Sarah,
his first novel, published when he was 20, elicited
comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and Nathanael West,
as well as numerous profiles, all of which dutifully
recounted LeRoy's teenage career as a prostitute, his
androgyny and his friendships with celebrities.
A
year later the same newspaper and the NY Metro
published allegations that Mr Leroy was in fact Ms Laura
Albert and was not, as claimed, HIV+. The Guardian
gushed
JT
LeRoy is one of literature's most elusive and most compelling
figures. Depending on who you talk to, he is either
an endangered species, the last of the innocents, or
a spectacular example of media manipulation, the greatest
literary hoax since the Australian "modernist"
poet Ern Malley was exposed as a caustic invention in
the 1940s - and thus a dazzling satire on modern media
gullibility. He is feted as an authentic underground
voice by the hippest of the US hip, but very few substantiated
truths about him exist. If he is a him.
Memoirist Nasdijj, author of The Blood Runs Like A
River Through My Dreams (New York: Houghton Mifflin
2000), The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping (New
York: Ballantine 2003) and Geronimo's Bones: A Memoir
of My Brother and Me (New York: Ballantine 2004),
has been attacked over claims that he is a Navajo Indian
and for inventing key elements of his autobiography. That
is unsurprising if he is, as alleged, white porn author
Timothy Patrick Barrus.
James Frey's 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces,
which garnered sales of over three million copies by 2006,
has been criticised
as heavily "embellished". Frey initially responded
with threats
of defamation action against those critics. Some observers
questioned expectations about 'truth' in memoirs. One
reader more succinctly commented "He should have
written 'I'm an Alcoholic, I'm an Addict, I'm a Criminal,
and I'm a Liar'". The LA Times thundered
A Million Little Pieces became a bestseller
because it seemed to employ a brutal honesty in telling
a personal odyssey from the lower depths of alcohol
and drug addiction to a painful recovery. Frey's harrowing
tale, and utterly reckless attitude toward the law,
attracted Oprah Winfrey, whose teary-eyed endorsement
sent sales into the stratosphere.
Now it turns out that Frey's tough-guy antics were largely
made up. The three-month stint in jail that he describes
- for instance, reading War and Peace aloud
to a fellow inmate - actually lasted a few hours. Dozens
of other violent events in the book were unmasked as
gross exaggerations or outright fabrications on the
website thesmokinggun.com. The details of Frey's addiction
appear to be more accurate than his claims of criminal
notoriety. But they are harder to verify, so who knows?
... After these disclosures, however, no one can honestly
call A Million Little Pieces a work of nonfiction,
or even a memoir.
In
2001 Tom Carew, author of bestselling memoir Jihad!
(London: Mainstream) about his supposed exploits
with the SAS and training Afghan guerrillas, was similarly
revealed to have been creative. Fine if you are a novelist,
less so if you claim to be presenting the unvarnished
truth.
US playwright Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), whose defamation
action is discussed elsewhere
on this site, lifted other people's lives for her "frank"
memoir Pentimento, one reason for Mary McCarthy's
famous comment that
every
word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'.
Daniel
Defoe gained more renown for successive fictional autobiographies:
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), A
Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and The Fortunate
Mistress, or Roxana (1724). More recently Geoffrey
Wolff gained attention for his wry memoir The Duke
of Deception (New York: Vintage 1990).
whodunit
Literary conspiracists have of course detected identity
theft where there was none, perhaps most famously in denying
Shakespeare's authorship. Ignatius Donnelly's zany 1888
The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon’s cipher
in the so-called Shakespeare plays argued that the
earl of Oxford was the author of Montaigne's Essays,
Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Marlowe's
plays. Contemporary Edward Durning-Lawrence's 1910 Bacon
is Shakespeare went even further, crediting Francis
Bacon with the Authorized Version of the Bible.
Brian Vickers, in reviewing Scott McCrea's The Case
For Shakespeare: The end of the authorship question
(Westport: Praeger 2005), gently comments that
None
of the Baconians was a literary scholar, none of them
felt the need to acquire any knowledge of English literature,
or the English language in the sixteenth century, and
none bothered to read Bacon, although the magnificent
fourteen-volume edition of James Spedding was completed
in 1874. All they needed was the preconceived notion
that Shakespeare could not have written the plays, while
Bacon could.
One
of the more deliciously wacky exposes sighted recently
explains that both Bacon and the Earl of Essex were the
unacknowledged children of Queen Elizabeth I, an individual
who has also been credited with writing Shakespeare's
plays.
Critics of less distinguished writing have had fun with
the mysterious B Traven, author of The Treasure of
the Sierra Madre and Death Ship. His ouevre
has been variously identified as coming from Hal Croves,
Ret Marut/Otto Feige or Traven Torsvan. Accounts are provided
in Karl Guthke's B.Traven: The Life Behind the Legends
(London: Lawrence Hill 1991) and Tapio Helen's 2000 article
B. Traven's Identity Revisited
ghosting and plagiarism
This site features a more detailed discussion of ghosting,
essay mills and plagiarism
(with a supplementary note on plagiarism incidents).
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