Ventriloquizing the Real: Textual Forgery in a Postcolonial World

Summary:

The project investigated a number of fake autobiographies and memoirs as well as plagiarized novels that claim to tell stories of minority and postcolonial subjectivities in, primarily, a US context. I aimed to evaluate the effects of these texts using trauma as a starting point to narrate their experiences as marginalized. Having been, in the end, empirically proven to have engaged in impersonation, these texts are shown to appropriate suffering. It should be added that readers’ desires often collude in and motivate the authors’ projects, something the project also addressed.

One central question I have been forced to attend to during the course of my study has been to problematize the rigid binary of the fake/authentic binary. I have detailed my conclusions below. For the sake of simplicity in this report, I will nevertheless make use of terms like “fake” to refer to my chosen problematic, excessively performative texts.

I have also been forced to pay attention to the specifics of each case to trace the authors’ desires to impersonate through memoirs and other performances. It is through the specific cases that we can understand what has become a central insight of this project: the ways the texts “testify to testifying.” Through their secondary witnessing, they are not able to work through the traumas they attempt to narrate. They are stuck in a melancholic loop; their attempts to throw into relief their complicity in the upholding of white privilege in the US.

Finally, I have also studied a striking case where a minority author appropriated the work of white mainstream authors, which would have helped her, if undetected, attain status and commercial success in mainstream America. This was Asian American Kaayva Viswanathan plagiarizing, in her novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” (2006), white chick lit novelist Megan McCafferty. The cases in my study have been chosen for being exemplary of forging memoirs bearing witness to the suffering of minority subjects. A further investigation would foreground the implications of plagiarism in relation to the falsification of memoirs. In the selection of my case studies, I found myself concentrating on examples from the USA. When extending my study, I will further theorize the national context within which my chosen cases work, and also place them in a global context.

Further explanation:

In the case of fake memoirs and autobiographies, depictions of trauma are central. The memoirists bring their narrators into being by having them narrate traumas endured, to the point of the memoirs working as testimonials. They thereby create, I argue, a reality effect: they can inhabit the subjectivities of minority and postcolonial subjects, in fact, seemingly gain immediate access to such subject positions. They can thus inhabit what we refer to as the margins of society.

Notably, the authors also tend to also channel their impersonations into real-life performances, denying their own ethnicity. One very famous case is Swiss Bruno Dösseker, who wrote, as Binjamin Wilkomirski, a memoir about being a Jewish child coming to Switzerland from Auschwitz, “Fragments” (1996). Dösseker’s performance has been so “authentic” that critics sometimes have assumed that he is perhaps convinced that he himself indeed his narrator. A case included in this study concerns white social worker Timothy Barrus appearing as a Native American “Nasdijj.” The fake memoir authors perhaps allay a variation of what Geoffrey Hartman has coined “memory envy.” Hartman refers to children of Holocaust survivors trying to make sense of being shut out of the traumatic events that defined the previous generation. Significantly, though, in the case of the fake memoir authors, their envy can be deemed illegitimate as they seek to appropriate the defining pain of the other.

There are some basic factors problematizing the assessment of “truth” in relation to testimonial texts. First of all, all testimonial writers trying to narrate trauma confront the inherent problem of the unreliability of memory. Cathy Caruth presents one very influential way of viewing this difficulty. She posits that narrating trauma, clinically and otherwise, will always be marked by a sense of belatedness. The moment of trauma itself, she argues, cannot be remembered directly. The actual moment when trauma occurs, such as in a car accident or in military combat, cannot be accessed in an unmediated way. This could throw into doubt the authenticity of trauma narratives on the whole.

In addition, all genres are conventional, and inherently unstable, something pointed out by, for instance, Jacques Derrida in his essay “The Law of Genre,” as products of language. My project relies on such insights from poststructuralist theory, and takes into consideration Barthes’ ideas about the “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author,” which undermine the authority of the Author. The author, I agree, is indeed a provisional construct, and we need to bear this in mind also when understanding the work of memoirists.

However, this does not entail a relativization of all generical boundaries that would undermine representations of the suffering and trauma by survivors whose experiences cannot be doubted. My project of examining fake memoirs has not been aimed at redeeming the memoirs investigated, but to examine how the idea of the author-as-provisional can function as a concept that enables us to understand what occurs when memoirs are reveled to be fake or novels to be plagiarized. The author-as-provisional compromises the author as guarantor of authenticity. In a deconstructive vein we can say that the awareness of the author being provisional enables us to differentiate in more discriminating ways between various modes of authorship. We do not have to, in fact, rely on the rigid binary of false/authentic, but see gradations of these concepts. The author, I presume, is present empirically and, at the same time, as an imaginary construct. We are forced to pay close attention to the language and poetics of the “fake” memoirs: how do they, for example, employ stereotypes? How are the narrators’ personae created? In what way(s) is the “author” actually present? It is also imperative that we pay attention to the commercial context in which memoirs of all kinds are disseminated.

Ultimately, I propose that studying fake memoirs is useful when we see them as texts that testify to testifying. The works are secondary testimonials, can only bear witness to a historical situation through echoing traumatic events of others. Importantly, the forged works need to reproduce the glitches of the historical moment in which they appear. As Gary Weissman points out, writing relying on memory will have to be read for its possible inconsistencies and hesitancies. Faking such hedging means having to contend with these moments, and to use them, just like the texts they approximate, to create a sense of fragmented or periled subjectivities. But the writers slip; when found out, inconsistencies of, for example, style, time-line, and, indeed, regarding appearance and situation of privilege, are emphasized. This can be a dangerous exercise, and intense debates can arise, such as over indigenous Guatemalan writer Rigoberta Menchú’s celebrated memoir of oppression “I, Rigoberta Menchú” (1983), where the collaborative nature of Indian story-telling has been foregrounded in defense of accusations of inconsistencies in truth regarding her time-line of events. Nevertheless, some authors are more easily found out than others, as they tell apparent and hyperbolic whoppers about themselves as witnesses.

In the end, my project proposes that the fact that an overwhelming number of forgers in a US context are white can be an indication of them being trapped by their white melancholia, a cultural melancholia that perseveres. Whiteness is, in a US context, historically privileged—and whiteness has trumped economic and other kinds of oppression. The authors claiming a minority position is a symptom of the difficulty of working through and escaping the melancholia of a nation where white privilege has not been adequately addressed by those owning it. This would be similar to the process that Paul Gilroy demands in his book “Postcolonial Melancholia” (2005), calling for former colonial powers like Britain to recognize and address their brutal colonial histories to avoid demonizing immigrants from former postcolonial countries, racism becoming an effect of the denial.

Works referenced:

Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author.” “A Barthes Reader.” New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982.
Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.” Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016.
Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” “Acts of Literature.” Transl. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. “A Foucault Reader.” Ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin, 1991.
Gilroy, Paul. “Postcolonial Melancholia.” New York: Columbia UP, 2006.
Hartman, Geoffrey. “The Geoffrey Hartman Reader.” New York: Fordham UP, 2004.
Menchú, Rigoberta. “I, Rigoberta Menchú.” New York: Verso, 1984.
Weissman, Gary. “Fantasies of Witnessing.” Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.
Wilkomirski, Binjamin [Bruno Dösseker]. “Fragments.” Transl. Jane Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1996.
Viswanathan, Kaavya. “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.” New York: Brown, Little, 2006.

Conference Papers:

The project has generated three conference presentations:

“The Broken Lines as Form: Mira Jacobs’s The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing,” MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), USA, 2015.

“Author Hoaxes and Collective Responsibility: The Case of Nasdijj,” Memory Frictions: Conflict-Negotiation-Politics, Spain, 2013.

“Lost in the Fiction Factory: Kaavya Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” Representations of Family, Sweden, 2010.