Impostures: Subjectivity, Memory, and Untruth in the Contemporary Memoir

Home , Angel at the Fence, Herman Rosenblat, JT LeRoy, Larry King Live, Misha Defonseca, Savannah Knoop

Miriam Hannah Novick

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto

Impostures: Subjectivity, Memory, and Untruth in the Contemporary Memoir

Miriam Hannah Novick

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2015 Abstract The memoir boom of the last two decades has seen record numbers of writers, readers, and critics engaging with forms of life narrative. At the same time, we have witnessed several cases of imposture, which Susanna Egan defines as “a serious disconnect between the author as a person alive in the world, pre-text, before any story emerges, and the written life…[Impostors] claim lives they have not lived, experiences they have not had, and identities that belong to other people” (3). I argue that impostures cannot simply be read as fiction upon their exposure: the referential claim persists in elements of the text itself, particularly in the (invented) name that authorizes the autobiographical truth claim. Thus, I frame imposture both as a genre of life narrative and in relation to the source genres it appropriates. Further, I identify the element of extratextual performance (the assumption of the imposturous persona in public venues such as readings and interviews) as crucial to contemporary imposture, connected to the critical and commercial demands of twenty-first century authorship. My first chapter revisits poststructuralism’s pronunciation of the author’s death and rereads Barthes and Foucault in conjunction with autobiographical theory to locate an author-figure produced by and within the autobiographical text, using Genette’s concept of the paratext as a threshold to position the

author’s name as the hinge between text and world. I examine previous approaches to literary deception and suggest that a lack of attention to questions of power and difference makes them insufficient to account for imposture, particularly an imposturous claim to traumatic or marginalized experience. The next three chapters each address a set of impostures in the context of their source genres, respectively the Holocaust testimony (Wilkomirski, Defonseca,

Rosenblat), the veiled bestseller (Khouri, Amina), and the abused child narrative (LeRoy). Each chapter situates its cases in relation to a contemporary theoretical discourse (traumatic memory, transnational feminisms, queer theory), emphasizing the dynamism of autobiographical discourse

(even its imposturous variants) and the broader implications of my study for claims about the ethical value of life narrative and the ethical turn in literary studies as a discipline.

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Acknowledgments

The process of writing a dissertation is in many ways also a process of accumulating debts, which I can only begin to repay here with expressions of thanks. I am grateful for various forms of financial support received over the course of this dissertation through the Social

Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the

University of Toronto Fellowship, and the English Department’s Doctoral Completion Award.

The Ontario Student Assistance Program bridged the gap between university funding and average time to completion.

My supervisor, Mari Ruti, and committee members Sara Salih and Daniel Heath Justice gave me the much-valued freedom to roam in as many intellectual directions as I chose (and the occasionally requisite nudges to ensure these varied trajectories led to the same destination), as well as the unwavering belief in both the significance of this project and my ability to undertake it. This belief sustained me through the moments when I could not share it, and I am deeply grateful for their confidence in me. I am without a doubt an immeasurably better writer and thinker due to their careful eyes and probing questions; any errors, flaws, or gaps necessarily remain my own. Sidonie Smith provided invaluable feedback in her capacity as external examiner at my defense, and Naomi Morgenstern was a similarly thoughtful and generous internal examiner. Denise Cruz was a source of perpetual encouragement and warmth during my final year of work. The English department administrative superheroes, Sangeeta Panjwani,

Marguerite Perry, and Tanuja Persaud, offered help, humour, and occasionally hugs from start to finish.

I completed a significant portion of the revisions phase of this thesis while on strike with

CUPE 3902 Unit 1 as a graduate course instructor and teaching assistant in the winter of 2015.

This experience (re)solidified for me the profound importance of marginalized voices joining together to speak truth to power and reminded me why I chose to approach this material with an eye to questions of ethics and justice. Whatever the future holds for me, whether in academia or beyond, I hope to always remember these lessons.

From Girls Gone (Oscar) Wilde to the Feminist Killjoys, I have had the incomparable gift of a community of brilliant women throughout my degree. Sarah Henderson and Sundhya

Walther were the first friends I made in the program, which tempts me to a belief in fate; their love and laughter have carried me through so many highs and lows and will, I hope, be with me for years to come. Viga Selak was a beloved source of fun and fat babies, while Dara Greaves’ sunny smile brightened countless days in our shared workspace, as did Laura Clarridge’s cheerful calm. There are so many more friends to name here, but I will have to believe that by now they know the depth of my gratitude to and for them.

My mother, Linda Novick, is and has always been a model of courage and source of strength that words cannot capture. My brother Jason continues to teach me about compassion and entertain me with Star Trek jokes. My (not) in-laws Joan, John, and Talia Storm provided cats, Scrabble games, and a second family that I treasure. Last but never least, Elliot Storm, partner and accomplice, gave me his intellectual comradeship, unflinching integrity, and loving support beyond measure. There is no better place to stand than by his side.

This dissertation is dedicated to Eric Novick, Rose Novick, and Velma Lindop, who read to me before language had meaning, and who will never read this work but have made it possible all the same.

Table of Contents

Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents vi Introduction: The Death of the Author and the Rise of the Memoir 1 1. Theorizing Imposture 27 Defining Deception 27 Locating the Autobiographical Author 34 Can the Autobiographical Author Die? Barthes, Foucault, and Poststructuralist Approaches 47 Historicizing Deception 56 Autobiography, Imposture, Ethics 62 A Levinasian Approach to the Ethics of Imposture 70 2. Truth, Lies, and Holocaust Historiography in the Twenty-First Century: Disproven Memoirs and False Testimony 75 Historicizing Myth, Mythologizing History 75 Witness Testimony and Trauma 82 The Curious Case of Binjamin Wilkomirski 95 Genocide With Wolves 106 Screens, Surrogacy, and Scholarship 113 Romancing the Holocaust 123 3. Speaking As, Speaking For: Transnational Captivity Narratives After 9/11 130 Gender, Authority, and the New (Old) Orientalism 130 The Amina Hoax, or Lesbian Bloggers Gone Wild 140 Captivity Narratives: Power and Politics 147 Bestsellers Unveiled I: Forbidden Love/Honor Lost 154 Bestsellers Unveiled II: Forbidden Lie$ 166 Tragic Misreadings and Discursive Complicity: The Text in the World 176 4. The Autofictional JT LeRoy 187 Text as Imposture 194 Imposture as Text 205 Figuring the Child, Fighting the Future? 212 First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: Authenticity’s Cruel Attachments 221 Conclusion: On Truth and Lies in a Literary-Ethical Sense 230 Works Consulted 243

Introduction

The Death of the Author and the Rise of the Memoir

In the earliest days of 2006, as the seemingly intractable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continued and George W. Bush finished the first year of his second term as president, the image of Oprah Winfrey publicly castigating an author whose bestseller she had championed only months before dominated the airwaves. The subject of Winfrey’s ire was James Frey and his ostensible memoir, A Million Little Pieces, which purported to recount in graphic (and often scatological) detail a true story of drug abuse, violent brushes with the law, incarceration, rehab, and, finally, self-willed redemption. The scandal unfolded quickly and appeared to escalate daily.

Though various media outlets had questioned Frey’s claims as early as 2003, January 8, 2006 saw legal website The Smoking Gun publish a definitive exposé titled “A Million Little Lies” that effectively demolished Frey’s most titillating assertions, notably revealing that the author had spent five hours in jail rather than the 87 days he had described, and that a train accident he claimed to have witnessed took place without him.

Winfrey was, at first, sympathetic to the author whose fortune she had made through the marketing juggernaut of her influential book club. On January 11, three days after The Smoking

Gun exposé, Frey was interviewed on Larry King Live alongside his mother, with King airing a phone call from Winfrey defending the “essential truth” of Frey’s memoir (whatever the factual status of many of its details). Always a savvy pulse-taker of her audience, Winfrey appears to have sensed a turning tide and subsequently invited Frey to reappear on her own television program on January 26 with his publisher, Nan Talese, whose list of authors includes figures no less notable than Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and Antonia Fraser (Talese is also the head of her own eponymous imprint under the Doubleday umbrella). In marked contrast to the adulation

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Winfrey had showered upon Frey during his first appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, this second visit has become almost legendary for the departure it marked from Winfrey’s usual demeanour as she spent the hour effectively nailing Frey to the wall. Positioning herself metonymically as the voice of her deceived audience, Winfrey enacted their apparent sense of betrayal, asserting her own feelings of having been, in her words, “duped,” with the added bonus of displacing her own involvement in the success of A Million Little Pieces following its book club selection (for perspective, Nielsen BookScan’s consumer data aggregation records that the hardcover edition sold 149, 500 copies, while the Winfrey-endorsed and -branded paperback reached sales figures of 2.7 million). The earlier scene of reading with wholehearted belief, which Winfrey and her audience characterized as deeply emotional, describing the tears they had shed over the story’s most poignant moments, was revisited and revised, and the previous markers of Frey’s success in telling an effective story—the feelings engendered by that reading—became the grounds on which he was characterized as a fraud. In other words, the readerly tears that served as proof of the memoir’s authenticity were transformed into evidence of its author’s wrongdoing, and the injury emerges less as the fact of having been deceived than in having invested emotion in the source of the deception. If it is this emotional investment made in ostensibly real but ultimately fictionalized characters and experiences that Winfrey and her readers identified as the stakes of Frey’s betrayal, how do we reconcile this with our propensity as readers (one no doubt shared by Winfrey and many of her book club members) to shed ungrudging tears when reading fiction? What is it, in other words, about the claim to truth made by the memoir as a genre that so ineluctably frames our encounter with a text? What constitutes an emotionally effective story, and how do generic truth claims shape the terms of readerly response? What is the relationship between emotional truth (the grounds on which Frey defended

3 himself and his text) and factual truth, and what does it mean to suggest the former need not rely on the latter or can indeed exist without it?

Without a doubt, there was something satisfying, even thrilling, about Winfrey’s insistence on holding Frey to the standards of factual truth at a historical moment in which Iraqi WMDs turned out to be as invisible as Frey’s prison record and government officials claimed for themselves a degree of creative license typically reserved for fiction. Maureen Dowd opined in the New York Times that “It was a huge relief, after our long national slide into untruth and no consequences, into Swift boating and swift bucks, into W.'s delusion and denial, to see the

Empress of Empathy icily hold someone accountable for lying and conning—and embarrassing her” (“Oprah’s Bunk Club”). And yet, however honourable the origins of Winfrey’s rage might have been, apart from its convenient self-exculpation, her effective (and undoubtedly at least partially sincere) performance of betrayal unsurprisingly failed to engage and indeed further obfuscated the more pressing questions about genre, truth claims, and reading practices raised by

Frey’s literary deception, some of which I introduced above.

For all the attention it garnered, the Frey affair was far from the most dramatically or comprehensively disproven memoir in recent years: though Frey substantially embroidered his experiences with addiction and did go so far as to invent some people and events entirely, there remained a factually truthful kernel to A Million Little Pieces. By contrast, memoirs like

Binjamin Wilkomirksi’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1995) and Misha

Defonseca’s Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997), both purportedly stories by child survivors of the Holocaust, were much more completely fabricated. Close analysis revealed

Wilkomirski and Defonseca had invented every element of their respective stories. Wilkomirski had not witnessed his father’s death or spent his childhood in a concentration camp, while

Defonseca had not spent the war crossing Europe on foot in the company of wolves (truth, in this case, was not stranger than fiction); neither was even Jewish (though Defonseca did convert as an adult). Norma Khouri’s Honor Lost (also published under the title Forbidden Love, 2003), ostensibly presenting an account of an “honour killing” in Jordan, also turned out to be invented.

Khouri, though indeed born in Jordan, had not lived there for decades or assisted in a friend’s illicit and ultimately tragic love affair, being busy at the time (allegedly) defrauding an elderly woman of significant sums of money. In a similar vein, 2011 saw the revelation that the blogger behind “A Gay Girl in Damascus,” ostensibly a Syrian-American lesbian in her thirties named

Amina documenting the increasing violence of the Syrian Civil War, was actually an American graduate student named Tom MacMaster. These examples share a number of features: all engaged in forms of life writing that make truth claims and are predicated upon the shared identity of author and narrator/protagonist that structure autobiographical discourse. This relationship between the life of the author and the life depicted in her text is what constitutes autobiography and differentiates it from fiction in the most basic and essential of ways, forming what Philippe Lejeune has called “the autobiographical pact” (22), or the “referential aesthetic” in Paul John Eakin’s terms (Touching the World 29). The violation of this promised co-incidence between text and life, then, is another crucial shared feature among these examples; moreover, the violation is more complete than Frey’s insofar as they invented their lives and identities, and often their names as well, wholesale. This phenomenon, which I call imposture (after Susanna

Egan, albeit with some differences in usage), is the subject of my project here.

Last but by no means least is the case of JT LeRoy, which began in 1996 but reached its dramatic climax in early 2006 at the same time as the Frey affair filled the headlines. Presented as a preternaturally talented teenage hustler living on the streets of San Francisco, LeRoy began

5 publishing stories at sixteen that blended Southern Gothic-inflected lyricism with depictions of child abuse, poverty, queer desire, gender confusion, and sadomasochism. LeRoy found greater success, at least initially, in avant-garde or alternative literary and cultural circles than the more commercially successful Defonseca and Khouri; however, by 2006, LeRoy had transformed cult fame into relationships with global celebrities like Madonna, Carrie Fisher, Winona Rider, and

Courtney Love. A series of longstanding inconsistencies and curiosities, such as LeRoy’s refusal to appear in public for many years only to emerge in the early 2000s wearing a comically artificial wig and large sunglasses at every appearance, prompted the journalistic investigations that uncovered the truth: JT LeRoy did not exist. The author behind the LeRoy stories was Laura

Albert, decades older than her creation and by no means HIV positive, transgender, or a teenage sex worker (to list but three of the claims made by Albert-as-LeRoy at various points in time).

There is one key difference between Albert/LeRoy and my other cases: the LeRoy stories were published as fiction, albeit marketed as autobiographical fiction. Albert/LeRoy serves as a limit- case for my own interrogation by calling attention to the ways that imposture takes the form of an extratextual performance as well as a textual one. Ultimately, as we will see, the imposturous autobiographical performance was at least as determinative of how LeRoy was read as the fiction label, bringing the LeRoy case into relation with Wilkomirski and the others.

The primary question underpinning my project, then, is what happens to a text that makes autobiographical claims, in generic terms, when it is disproven? Can (and really, should) it be reclassified as a novel? I take the position that if the fundamental or minimal distinction between fiction and non-fiction as genres (whether understood as discourses or modes of classification) is the absence or presence of some kind of truth claim, then the presence of the claim persists within the text (and/or the paratext, on which more later) regardless of its disproval. For that

6 reason, I argue that false memoirs constitute a genre unto themselves, since the claim to truth can neither maintain the text within the realm of “simple” autobiography nor translate it directly into fiction. The presence of the claim and its attendant disproval linger in the form of a trace, particularly in the invented authorial name that underpins imposture’s fabrication of identity.

Another common feature of the cases I treat is particularly crucial here, and that is their implication in depicting various forms of personal and collective trauma, further underscoring the impossibility of separating a disproven text from its initial claim to truth given the stakes of the textual content.

Relatedly, and particularly given my claim about imposture as a genre of its own, how do we distinguish between different forms of truth and untruth in the memoir? Do some forms of truth matter more than others? As the distinction I draw above between the Frey case and the authors I examine in subsequent chapters suggests, my answer to both questions is an overarching if qualified yes: some forms of truth and untruth matter differently (if not more) than others, and the forms in question are those that refer to and shape our understanding of traumatic events that straddle the bounds of personal and collective experience. Lying about the Holocaust matters not because the Holocaust is more important than other events but because these lies reflect and affect our relationship to the very concepts of historical truth. Questions of verifiability and evidence on the one hand, and the insufficiency of facts to fully capture the significance of an event of that magnitude on the other, have been integral to Holocaust studies and Holocaust literature, making the imposter's manipulation of the testimonial genre a pressing concern. What, then, are the ethical stakes of imposture? Are impostures subversive insofar as they call attention to readerly demands for certain kinds of performance of trauma or difference, or perhaps because they highlight a broader and constitutive instability of identity? Or are

7 impostures conservative insofar as they succeed by deploying stereotypes and simplifications without actually interrogating them, either during or after the success or the exposure? My answers to these questions will vary, and will at times depend more on ambiguity than assertion; at base, I am convinced that imposture has much to tell us about how we read and write autobiographical texts, and that the insights emerging from its analysis cannot be reduced to simple condemnation of authorial deception or disdain for readerly belief.

In methodological terms, one of my aims here is to position these literary-theoretical questions alongside related historical questions about the so-called memoir boom: why has the rise of the memoir been one of the major literary news stories of recent years, even meriting its own generic biography (Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda)? The memoir is in some ways both very old and very new: as close kin to autobiography, its roots date back to the earliest religious confessionals, but its commercial and critical explosion has taken place in recent decades. While autobiography and memoir are not identical—the former being generally understood as covering a greater chronological span than the latter, for instance—they are closely connected insofar as both are what Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith call, after Elizabeth Bruss, autobiographical acts

(4). Though critics such as Julie Rak have highlighted the shifting historical and critical trajectories of each term, and especially the memoir’s status as critically denigrated and supplementary to autobiography “proper” (484), it is memoir and autobiography’s shared investment in self-representational modes and discourses that concerns me here. The two may not always make identical claims with regards to the span, form, or significance of the life represented, but both offer an author who speaks through the guise of the first person singular and thus make a compact with the reader fundamentally different than that offered by fiction.

What links can we draw, then, between the emergence of the memoir as a commercially

8 successful genre and our position in an ostensible age of literary crisis (as reflected by, to take but one example, the subject of Paul Jay’s recent book The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies)? Or, to echo Leigh Gilmore, why memoir and why now (2)?

The account of the Frey affair above, though compelling in its juxtaposition of American icon Winfrey with the arguable deterioration of truth-telling in the American public/political sphere, is also in some senses deceptive, for the current popularity of the memoir is decidedly not a national story, or at least not only a national story. This is in part because the earliest iterations of life narrative predate the founding of the United States by several centuries but also because the contemporary circuits traced by the various forms grouped together under the heading of life writing are nothing if not transnational in scope, as Gillian Whitlock emphasizes via her concept of “autobiography in transit” (4). Contemporary autobiography, writes Whitlock, is “on the move in unpredictable passages across cultures, vital to the imaginative work of modern subjectivity and [to] struggles for a place to speak in the public sphere” (4). The increasing concentration of book publishing in the hands of an ever-shrinking number of multinational conglomerates makes it possible to speak of the emergence of a global literary marketplace, as Sarah Brouillette suggests (1); while fewer publishing houses cannot necessarily be said to represent an increased diversity in the sorts of texts produced, it does mean that more of us are reading the same books than ever before, for better or for worse. It seems worth asking, then, how we might understand the memoir boom in the context of broader questions about the globalization of culture.

The omnipresent temptation for the cultural critic to declare that a phenomenon she has identified is both wholly new and symptomatically representative of the unique (and usually uniquely dire) conditions of contemporary social structures, forms, and mores is certainly not absent here. We can see this temptation in Dowd’s response to Frey, as well as in Michiko

Kakutani’s suggestion that “Mr. Frey's embellishments and fabrications in many ways represent the logical if absurd culmination of several trends that have been percolating away for years”

(“Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways”). For Kakutani, Frey and his ilk illustrate a degeneration in the standards of truth and might be linked to what Hannah Arendt called defactualization in her analysis of the workings of the American political machine during the

Vietnam era: a process in which truth is, whether actively or passively, displaced in favour of narrative. Truth is not suppressed but made irrelevant; the believable story becomes not the verifiable one but the one that feels true (20). This sense of truth-as-feeling, not coincidentally for our purposes, leads Arendt to suggest in the same essay that memoirs, particularly political ones, are “in our century the most deceitful genre of literature” (10). Also not coincidentally, it is this phenomenon in our own moment that led popular satirist Stephen Colbert to coin the word truthiness to capture the sense of adherence to truth as a matter of feeling rather than fact, and, particularly, the insistence that what feels true but cannot be proven so remains true in the face of explicitly oppositional and verifiable facts (think again of Iraqi WMDs here, or more recently in the American context, the birther movement). This sense of affective or emotional truth is exactly what the figures I study here, all of whom published ostensibly autobiographical texts (if not, in LeRoy’s case, an autobiography as such), invoke in defense of their performative identities when finally confronted with documentary proof of the non-coincidence between textual and biographical selves. According to this response, a text may not be the true (verifiably factual) story of the author’s life, but it is (emotionally and subjectively) true to the author’s sense of self. While the question of emotional truth as divorced from factual truth is one that will recur in my analysis here, and while I argue that some forms of literary lying do indeed matter differently than others, I am deeply skeptical about any broader presumption that deceptive

10 memoirs represent a degeneration of truth-standards rather than a specifically contemporary manifestation of age-old questions about the nature of subjectivity, memory, and the very possibility of truthful representation in language.

Opting for the all-encompassing, metanarrative claims of the polemic, therefore, would obscure precisely what is most of interest to me here, namely, the very proliferation of explanatory mechanisms that inevitably locate deception and its effects as both exceptional (that is, rare) and elsewhere from the critic, whether in the singular body of the lying author, the amorphous crowd of the gullible reading public, or the degenerate standards of a truth-averse age, from which the critic-as-hero stands somehow apart. Indeed, deception itself is not a static concept, as Michael Pettit argues in The Science of Deception, but rather a contextual one:

“Deception has a history, a history that consists of shifts in the activities, objects, and bodily processes that people associate with deception, the concept’s moral valances, and the sites where it is both performed and exposed” (2). Moreover, what we identify as deceptive is subject to similar historicization, as the meaning of the term itself is unstable; in broad terms, Pettit suggests that even now, “there is little agreement on the contours of what counts as deception, as it elides the certainty, stability, and transparency promised by honesty” (3). The almost tautological definitional uncertainty is clear: deception is dishonesty, while honesty is not being deceptive. Moreover, as Arendt argues elsewhere, though the “opposite of a rationally true statement is either error or ignorance…in the sciences…or illusion and opinion…in philosophy,” it is also the case that “[d]eliberate falsehood, the plain lie, plays its role only in the domain of factual statements,” which for Arendt is the realm of the political (Truth and Politics 549).

Insofar as we are in the realm of the factual, all is clear: we know the difference between true and false, or as Arendt puts it, the success of deception “depends entirely upon a clear notion of the

11 truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods” (31). These difficulties are multiplied in a literary context, however: what does it mean to speak of literary deception when literature is, by most common perceptions and reasonable standards, a creative act, and thus by definition not limited to the realm of fact? Can literature lie, or is any element of deception to be located in the author rather than the text? What does it mean to respond with disdain to feelings of readerly betrayal, particularly in the popular reading context in which many forms of the memoir have found their niche?

My project has emerged in no small part from a desire to take these readers, and their responses to deceptions like Frey’s, seriously in their own right while seeking at the same time to ask deeper questions about what kinds of reading, publishing, and critical practices enable and disable the successful circulation of deceptive memoirs.1 After all, disproven memoirs are not simply a matter of devious author and credulous reader, but are embedded in networks in which literary agents, editors, publishers, publicists, reviewers, and critics all play a part. Moreover, as

Dominick LaCapra suggests in a brief but provocative aside, disproven memoirs have in recent years reached a critical mass, which suggests that they may constitute their own “emerging hybrid genre,” which he names the faux memoire (34), offering a quantitative rationale from my own more qualitative assertion that disproven memoirs constitute a genre of their own. If so many readers take the memoir’s truth claims seriously, and yet some (perhaps many) memoirs appear to treat these claims, at best, with great flexibility, why is the frequent response to the

1 My interest in a number of popular texts here thus shares a basic premise with Anne Rothe’s recent book on similar terrain, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media. Rothe notes, with some reason, that academic analysis often focuses on “representations [scholars] consider to be aesthetically superior” (83), to the exclusion of popular works. However, where Rothe’s argument proceeds from a Frankfurt School-indebted assumption that popular texts produced by mass media are “unethical” and “politically acquiescing” (5), I prefer to leave the question of the ethical value (or violations) of such works to a more textually and contextually specific approach rather than a general position, as will be demonstrated over the course of this study.

12 moral panics emerging from the revelation of literary deception a disdainful dismissal of the gullibility of memoir readers? Such readers have, after all, only taken a given text at face value, and a face value that the most sophisticated critical readers have found difficult to either discard or define.

Memoirs, and especially faked memoirs, speak to what might be counted among our best and worst instinct as readers: the desire to empathize with who and what we read. Memoirs succeed at least in part because of this desire, and deceptive memoirs in particular, given their propensity for emotional resonance over plausibility, as we shall see in subsequent chapters.

Empathetic identification is notoriously slippery terrain: as scholars, how do we chart or measure it? How is it engendered, and to what end? How do texts, and particularly memoirs, invite or discourage empathy? What reading paradigms might we oppose to the notion of empathy, and particularly of empathy as a primary value of literature? A key feature distinguishing false testimonies from their more verifiable cousins, I argue, is precisely their reliance on the ease of empathetic identification, or perhaps the ease of a certain form of empathy. What are the ethical implications of a reader’s feeling that she can identify with an experience she has not lived? Is there a limit to the benefits of closing the distance between the readerly self and the textual other? Is closing this distance through the emotional appeal of the first person singular the best means by which to produce empathetic and ethical engagement, or is there an argument to be advanced for maintaining distance as a means of facilitating critical reflection about the claims made in the name of the autobiographical “I”? In the context of the memoir, when the textual other stands in for a literal (that is, textually external) other, this point takes on a greater urgency, particularly if we take seriously the ethical claims made by theorists of life writing for their genre of study. Whitlock’s already noted emphasis on “autobiography in transit” as a “soft weapon” in

13 the effort to facilitate “cross-cultural engagement and the pursuit of human rights,” one that can

“personalize and humanize categories of people” but is also “easily co-opted into propaganda”

(3), along with Smith and Schaffer’s assertion that “life narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims” (1), are two key examples of this position.

Further, this point bears directly on the question of whether ethics, and perhaps even justice more broadly, require us to think ourselves into the position of others or to acknowledge the impossibility of fully doing so. In a move that will become familiar to my readers, I will suggest a third possibility here: that, perhaps, meaningful ethical engagement is to be found in recognizing the limits of both distance and proximity, of what we both can and cannot know about the lives and experiences of others. Put differently, what happens when the soft weapon in question is as fictionalized as the supposed weapons of mass destruction that drove the invasion of Iraq?

It is on this question of empathy that I hinge my positioning of the memoir in the context of contemporary ethical debates about difference and sameness. The “ethical turn” in philosophical and literary thought has until recently been primarily concerned with difference, evident in the significant interest in and influence of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas.

Difference, and particularly the figure of the other, are crucial touchstones in Levinas’s work, and his insistence on the impossibility of knowing the other and the irreducibility of the other’s difference (or alterity, or otherness) comprise perhaps his most cited, analyzed, and adapted insights. It cannot be stressed enough that in Levinasian ethics, difference is not a neutral or purely descriptive term, but instead places a demand on the self that encounters the other, a demand that is almost violent in its insistence that the self subordinate itself to the demand of the other, a demand that is simultaneously inevitable and impossible to meet. While Levinas’s focus

14 is on the intersubjective dimension, the applicability of his arguments in the context of collective or identity-based forms of difference has been reflected in broader critical and cultural conversations about how, simply speaking, we can live together in increasingly diverse social arrangements and contexts. The globality of the literary marketplace, and particularly the transnational circulation of autobiography, underscores the value of a Levinasian approach to literature. The apparent popularity of truth-claim texts staging an encounter with forms of difference invites questions about how to read and theorize both the texts themselves and the terms by which they circulate amongst readers and critics. How do these texts mobilize difference in service of empathetic identification, and on what terms?

The representational stakes of the memoir are not limited to the relationship between author and reader but involve the complex negotiation between personal and communal memories and identities discussed above. As Gilmore emphasizes, the memoir writer’s injunction to “Represent Yourself!” includes the imperative to be simultaneously unique and representative, or to enact “the compulsory inflation of the self to stand for others” (5). We can see this dynamic at work in many Holocaust testimonies published in memoir form, to take but one (representative) example. For the majority of readers, who will not be survivors, the

Holocaust memoir offers access to an experience profoundly different from their own, but also a narrative that may directly invoke and situate itself in relation to those who have not survived to testify. This is not to say that most works of Holocaust testimony purport explicitly to speak for the dead; such writers are more likely to regret the impossibility or indeed the dubious ethics of such vicarious speech, as Giorgio Agamben notes of Primo Levi in Remnants of Auschwitz (33-

34). And yet, for writer and reader, the Holocaust testimonial memoir can never escape its proximity to the dead, its inevitable but undefinable relation, even if it refuses a logic of

15 substitution. The same is true for the reader: since the only stories we have access to are those told by the living (and further, those stories with the widest circulation, such as popular memoirs, are those to which the largest number of people have the easiest access), these stories become representative for us. No matter how many accounts of the Holocaust are published, they will only ever be a fraction of all possible accounts, thereby becoming the means through which we know the Holocaust. This can also be applied to the process by which any truth-claim text purporting to depict a marginalized experience becomes representative: the more limited the cultural space the marginal group or experience possesses, the greater the representative stakes of the text.

I wish to emphasize that the question of representativeness is not necessarily a matter of claims made by the author or text themselves, nor am I arguing for the imposition of a duty to offer particular types of representation. It is the nature of representation, and thus of representativeness in the context of non-fiction texts, that interests me here, particularly if representativeness can be understood as constituted by the generic claims of the memoir itself, not simply something imposed from outside the text. That is, the memoir as a genre is structured in relation to questions of representation as a function of referentiality—it is not (only) readers who inflate the autobiographical self to stand in for others beyond the text. We can see evidence of this point in the titling conventions of auto/biographical texts across time and (sub)genre, from

A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave to Confessions of an English

Opium Eater. The inclusion of an identity (American slave, English opium eater) links the individual to the group both textually and representationally, framing the reader’s literary encounter from the outset as with an author describing an experience or identity that is both unique (“an”) and shared (representative of a larger group). This is also the case, as we shall see,

16 for each of the writers I examine: all of them explicitly position themselves in dialogue with those who share the experience they claim and simultaneously as message-bearers to the culture at large, emphasizing the ethical and political stakes of their textual truth claims.

And yet, in spite of the importance in generic, ethical, and political terms of autobiography as a truth-claim discourse, theoretical approaches to autobiography have generally avoided in-depth engagement with questions of truth and falsehood, while studies of literary fraud have avoided focusing on the nexus of autobiographical and textual fabrication that interests me here. The oft-cited death of the author pronounced by Roland Barthes in 1968 is surely one reason for the latter omission, which has made it somewhat unfashionable to treat the figure of the author as a locus of meaning and especially to take seriously the author as intentional actor. Moreover, most approaches to literary deception have treated its destabilizing tendencies with postmodern glee, embracing its propensity to throw egg on the face of the credulous and, in some cases, the identity-politics-minded. For K.K. Ruthven, accusations of spuriosity (his preferred term, one that deliberately sidesteps the question of intent and that I use hereafter as an umbrella term for texts whose origin differs from what is claimed) are best understood as boundary-policing measures. Identifying deceptive texts and expurgating them from the canon serves, in a memorable phrase, as a “culturally prophylactic event” that reinforces the legitimacy of the canon with a force at least equal to that with which it dismisses the spurious (3). Ruthven argues that no matter the approach, “the relationship between literarity and spuriosity is framed as a binary opposition, in which literature is valorised as the authentic self and literary forgery disparaged as its bogus other” (3). Insofar as the identification of spurious texts emerges from a desire (stated or otherwise) to preserve the integrity of “authentic” literature, Ruthven’s point is well-taken; however, his invocation of literarity/spuriosity within

17 the terms of self and other is of more limited utility for my purposes. When the spurious text in question promises the reader-self an encounter with the/an other, as do the texts I consider here, what happens to Ruthven’s neat alignment of binaries? The impostures I examine constitute literally (factually) bogus others, not “merely” literary ones insofar as the authors in question all

(falsely) claim marginalized identities and experiences; while Ruthven’s response might well be to assert that this is simply a reformulation of the authentic/spurious binary in somewhat extraliterary terms, I argue that to stop at this binary would be to fail to take the claims critics, readers, and writers alike make for the specific capacities of autobiography with due seriousness.

When the text makes claims about and is structured by the life beyond it, its literary classification is not the only question about its epistemological and ethical status.

In this vein, it will also be one of the key elements of this project to distinguish between forms of literary spuriosity in representational and ethical terms, which is inseparable from distinguishing between forms of literary spuriosity as such. While the difference between a forgery such as the Hitler Diaries and an invented autobiography is relatively clear (one involves the false attribution of a text to a known figure, the other the false attribution of a set of life experiences to its author), the distinction between degrees of deception within and between ostensibly autobiographical texts is more opaque. This will be the subject of a deeper discussion in Chapter One; for now, a more instructive approach will be to offer an example that encapsulates the type of ambiguity or deception that does not concern me here: the case of

Rigoberta Menchú. This case has, on the surface, a number of elements in common with the writers and texts that make up this dissertation: the author published a critically successful memoir called I, Rigoberta Menchú describing her life as a member of Guatemala’s Indigenous population, subject to widespread discrimination and the violence of historical colonial

18 displacement and the more recent violence of military brutality during the decades-long

Guatemalan Civil War. Hailed as a powerful testimonio by general readers, scholars, and activists, and earning its author a Nobel Peace Prize, the political capital that Menchú’s story quickly built up made it a tempting target for ideological adversaries, culminating in a rare

(dis)honour for an autobiographical text: a full-length investigative work devoted to the interrogation of its truth claims.2 Anthropologist David Stoll, by no means sympathetic to

Menchú’s radical liberatory politics, was highly critical of the discrepancies he identified between Menchú’s account of her experiences and his own academic fieldwork in Guatemala.

However, as Gilmore notes, Stoll’s Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans does not conclude that Menchú is an outright fabricator: he “does not dispute whether the events

Menchú reported occurred, but whether they happened to her in the way she represented…and conclude[s] that [she] had often achieved a larger symbolic truth through her condensation of several events into one, her substitution of herself as eyewitness to events at which she was not present, and her depiction of the murder of someone else as her brother’s murder” (4).3 For

Gilmore, Menchú and her text constitute a “limit-case” within the sphere of life writing, a category Gilmore argues is characterized by a “radical engagement with self-representation” (7).

Gilmore’s interest in limit-cases offers her an entry point to “thinking about the way autobiography is partially structured through the proscriptions it places on self-representation,”

2 This is not to suggest that only those opposed to a memoir’s apparent political message (should one exist, though as a general rule this is indeed the case for the texts I examine here) are inclined to investigate its truth claims. As we will see, the opposite is in fact the case for Wilkomirski, Khouri, and LeRoy, where it is members of the community/ies ostensibly represented by the texts that drove the investigations. In Menchú’s case, however, the opposition to depiction of widespread violence and systemic racism appears much more politically transparent. 3 One of Stoll’s most serious accusations—that Menchú misrepresented the events of her father’s death, characterizing a mass suicide in political protest as a government-sponsored massacre—has recently been definitively disproven with the conviction of the National Forces agent responsible for the murder of forty protestors and embassy employees. As Greg Grandin writes in The Nation, “Blaming this massacre on the protesters was meant to undercut accounts that focused on “structural violence,” racism and economic exploitation for the ensuing genocide, when the army slaughtered around 100,000 people, mostly Mayan peasants, over the course of about two years (1981–83). Calling the killing a suicide also had the effect of transforming Menchú’s father from victim to victimizer, from someone invested with the moral stature of Martin Luther King into a crazed suicidal jihadi.”

19 particularly in textual depictions of trauma and the relationship between the self and various others (6).

These limit cases brush up against the respective boundaries of fiction and autobiography, whereas mine, as I will elaborate further in a moment, cross them entirely, but the terms of Gilmore’s engagement are instructive here. She points out that “the relation between trauma and representation, and especially language, is at the center of claims about trauma as a category […] at the same time [that] language about trauma is theorized as an impossibility, language is pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of trauma” which results in

“incompatible assertions that both metaphorize and literalize trauma” (6). The last century has seen the widespread institutionalization of the Freudian “talking cure” as a response to and treatment for traumatic experience, both in psychotherapeutic terms and on a cultural level. The proliferation of trauma narratives, including those impostures I treat here, reflect the notion that language is, if not a cure for trauma, at least a key mechanism by which it is to be approached.

We might draw a parallel between the notion of “telling one’s story” and broader arguments about the importance of political visibility for marginalized groups and subjects: in spite of the visual metaphor, visibility is as much a question of speech as of sight. At the same time as self- articulation through language is posited as a cure for traumatic experience on the personal level and for political marginalization in collective terms, the experience of trauma has, as Gilmore notes and as I will discuss further in Chapter Two, been paradoxically theorized as unspeakable, as that which resists full representation in language and narrative. For Cathy Caruth, this double nature of trauma—the imperative to attest to the traumatic experience and the impossibility of ever fully doing so—is what constitutes trauma as such, while also being a product of its particular temporality. Trauma, for Caruth (following Freud) is always fundamentally

20 experienced as belated and emerges as (partially) knowable only through repetition (4); it is for this reason that trauma, though never fully speakable, also institutes an unceasing attempt to speak it. As Gilmore notes in the passage above, this structural paradox poses particular problems in the context of autobiographical discourse attempting to narrate experiences of trauma.

Returning to the question of language as cure, Gilmore further argues “the joint project of representing the self and representing trauma reveals their structural entanglement with the law as a metaphor for authority and veracity, and as a framework within which testimonial speech is heard” (7). Shoshanna Felman’s assertion in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,

Psychoanalysis and History that to “testify is always, metaphorically, to take the witness stand” illustrates this structural entanglement (204). Indeed, the very adoption of the term “testimony” to refer to (necessarily incomplete) narrativizations of trauma outside of a juridical context enacts this entanglement, transposing the ostensible requirement to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth” from the courtroom to the pages of the memoir. While this may accurately reflect the significance we attach to testimony, it conflates two very different relationships to truth, or at least, two differently structured mandates or discursive conditions. The juridical sphere at least theoretically accounts for the need to weigh testimony against available evidence, to seek a standard of verification, however limited or problematic; the same cannot be said for testimony in literary or otherwise non-legal terms. This is not to say that the standards of the courtroom ought to be applied to the publication of memoirs, but rather to highlight the limits, or indeed, in

Gilmore’s terms, the metaphorical character of testimony’s translation of the legal into the literary. This is nowhere clearer than in the limit cases Gilmore explores and in the cases of imposture I treat here. While the solution is evidently not to further transpose a strictly juridical

21 standard of verifiability to the realm of autobiography, this structural entanglement does suggest a need to consider alternative terms by which to approach the question of truth: what about a memoir needs to be true for it to retain the testimonial and ethical values of its genre’s claims to textual truth?

As I suggested above, the cases I examine here differ from Gilmore’s focus in that they transgress, more or less unequivocally, the limits she explores. Susanna Egan, in the only full- length work to date on the particular form of literary deception I address, defines imposture “as a serious disconnect between the author as a person alive in the world, pre-text, before any story emerges, and the written life…[Imposters] claim lives they have not lived, experiences they have not had, and identities that belong to other people” (3). Imposture thus represents the most radical form of the first of Eakin’s “three primary transgressions…for which self-narrators have been called to account,” namely, the “misrepresentation of biographical and historical truth”

(“Breaking Rules” 112-113). Further, as I elaborate in Chapter One, I emphasize that an element of extratextual performance—in interviews, at readings, and so on—is crucial to both defining and understanding imposture in its contemporary form. The imposters I examine do not simply write memoirs and stand quietly behind them but go to great lengths to establish their textual identities in the space beyond the page. The disconnect, then, is not only between the text and the pretextual author that Egan identifies, but expands alongside and after publication as the author attempts to ensure her text is read according to the terms she establishes.

As Nietzsche points out in “Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense,” deception tends to concern us only when it enacts a form of harm (81). While for him, this is the product of typically moralistic hypocrisy, for my purposes this observation frames a central concern: can we speak of imposture and its claims as causing harm, and if so, to whom or to what? As I will

22 demonstrate, on one level, the answer will be specific to each particular text. What my analyses of various impostures all have in common, however, is an emphasis on the nebulous sense of imposturous harm within the realm of what Ian Hacking calls memoro-politics. “There are perhaps two kinds of politics of memory,” he writes, “the personal and the communal” (210). As the genre’s name suggests, the memoir is intimately bound up in its writer’s memories, which are clearly personal in one sense; they reflect the experiences of a particular individual and shape her understanding of herself and her world. Communal memory, on the other hand, is produced by but also exceeds individual memories. Our understanding of the Holocaust, for instance, is both comprised of individual memories (and their attendant testimonies) but also goes beyond them, not only insofar as, of course, we have historical records and forms of documentary knowledge beyond individual memory, but because the Holocaust has come to signify a form of collective memory intimately linked to group identity.

The falsification of personal memory, then, has implications for its collective form, particularly in relation to events of explicitly political significance such as the Holocaust, underscoring the importance of the impostor’s claims to experiences actually lived by other people. Moreover, Hacking continues, “one obvious link” between “group memory and personal memory…is trauma” (211), further emphasizing the inextricability of the connections between the politics of memory and traumatic experience I focus on here as made manifest in the memoir.

That is, memoro-politics highlight the ways in which memory and subjectivity twine into the political, or more precisely, the ways our memories structure both our own individual experiences and our relationships to broader structures, such as forms of communal identity. For my purposes, it is the tension between the personal and group forms, and particularly the way in which memoro-politics involve “a power struggle built around knowledge, or claims to

23 knowledge [in which it] is taken for granted that a certain sort of knowledge is possible” (211), that is essential to understanding imposture.4 The politics of memory are a matter of the politics of power and identity alongside equally political claims about knowledge. Not only do the texts examined here offer false personal memories, but in doing so they also offer assumptions (and in some cases arguments) about knowledge and subjectivity; moreover, the texts concern personal memories that intersect with public and communal discourses, such as the Holocaust or global feminisms. Mirroring the textual interpenetration of personal and group memory, a key methodological concern in my approach to each text is attention both to its claims with reference to individual, subjective memory on the one hand and its broader assertions about and implications for memory’s ongoing communal effects on the other.

In Chapter One, I develop a theoretical framework through which to address contemporary instances of imposture, reading the poststructuralist reaction against authorial discourse alongside autobiographical theory in order to locate an (autobiographical) authorial figure divorced from the authorial determinism Barthes and Foucault (among others) sought to dismantle. I turn next to the role of the eighteenth century and its two most famous forgers,

Thomas Chatterton and James Macpherson, in critical approaches to literary spuriosity. I question the critique of authenticity that has emerged from those studies, particularly a failure to acknowledge the importance of power in the context of appropriation, empathy, and the relationship between scholarship and its object of study. I end by examining the potential offered by Levinasian philosophy for an ethical analysis of imposture, arguing that impostures are (at least initially) convincing because they offer the seeming possibility of empathetic engagement with alterity without challenging the self’s limits of understanding.

4 Hacking is speaking of personal memory in this passage, but his comments apply equally well to communal memory and I have felt free to use them in reference to both types.

Chapter One, then, approaches imposture as a genre of autobiography rather than taking individual cases as disreputable exceptions to its rule. The chapters that follow take the form of specific case studies, grouped together thematically. That such grouping is possible suggests that if the imposter memoir can be taken as a genre in its own right, there are already identifiable subgenres within it (which is perhaps some of the strongest evidence on offer of the larger generic umbrella in question). Impostures, it seems, take place in clusters, both temporal and spatial. In Chapter Two, the cluster in question consists of three deceptions surrounding the

Holocaust, beginning with the impostures perpetrated by Wilkomirski and Defonseca. I conclude by turning to one curious elaboration of a genuine survivor experience into a Holocaust romance:

Herman Rosenblat’s story, slated to be published in 2009 as Angel at the Fence but ultimately shelved, first circulated as a chain email and then published in an edition of Chicken Soup for the

Couple’s Soul and called “the greatest love story of our time” when the tale reached the ears and stage of Oprah Winfrey. Reading these texts within the field of trauma theory, I centre the problem Gilmore identifies in the paradoxical suggestion that trauma is both unrepresentable in language and yet necessary to (attempt to) represent. Focusing particularly on the influential theorization of traumatic memory as literal, I argue that Holocaust impostures are to some degree a logical culmination of current models of trauma and the ever-expanding role of the Holocaust in public memorial cultures and approaches to collective violence, particularly in the North

American sphere.

Chapter Three takes up a similar flurry of imposturous activity focused around the experiences of women in the Middle East, encompassing Khouri’s memoir and the subsequent documentary exploring it, alongside the Amina blog hoax. These cases offer the clearest example of the way in which imposture translates experiences of otherness into and through the

25 experience of the same: though these writers claim to present stories of difference through the figure of the Middle Eastern woman, the terms by which they do so replicate Western Orientalist assumptions wholesale and therefore present the reader with a familiar mix of exoticization,

Islamophobia, and racism. Further, these texts demonstrate the political implications of imposture’s reliance on the stereotype, underscored by my reading of them into the tradition of the captivity narrative. I do so in order to argue that contemporary attempts to legislate a vision of gender liberation by (for instance) banning the hijab literalize the concept of captivity, while panic over the supposed arrival of the honour killing in Canada with the death of teenager Aqsa

Parvez demonstrates a broad-based discursive construction of Islam itself as a space of captivity for women and, moreover, a portable (that is, conceptual) and migratory site framed as threatening in the context of contemporary Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment.

Chapter Four tests the bounds of my theorization of imposture and mirrors Gilmore’s interest in autobiographical limit-cases by examining the story of JT LeRoy, who engaged in exactly the performative extratextual establishment of authorial identity that characterizes contemporary imposture in my argument, but in the service of texts presented as fictions (albeit explicitly autobiographical fictions). The works Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All

Things (both 1999) may have been clearly labelled as fiction, but the LeRoy case is also the one in which the element of extratextual performance was most dramatic and arguably most influential (as well as the longest lasting at eleven years). Contextualizing Laura Albert, the writer behind the LeRoy stories, within currents in queer theory that critique the mandate to futurity-oriented thinking via the image of the child, I suggest the LeRoy stories offered a vision of kinship outside heteronormative (and homonormative) modes, anchored in the textual and

(supposedly) extratextual identity of a queer child. A closer reading of the texts, however, and

26 particularly Albert-as-LeRoy’s long-term and increasingly celebrity-obsessed performance, reveal a simplistic and cynical mobilization of tropes emptied of their political significance.

While it is not my intention to suggest that literary deception is a new phenomenon, I do take the position that imposture, and especially its performative sense (which I will elaborate further in the next chapter) is a particularly contemporary form of literary fakery. The question of textual legitimacy may be transhistorical, but the answers critics and readers have developed to it differ over and across time; that is, though legitimacy has been a concern throughout the history of textuality, the particular forms that such legitimacy (and the attendant understanding of illegitimacy) will take are necessarily historically specific. Autobiographical imposture emerges from a confluence of discourses, events, and movements: from the Enlightenment conception of the rational subject capable of offering textual self-representation that forms one starting point for both contemporary autobiography and forgery, to the establishment of “a culture of testimony” in Spivak’s terms or testimony’s attainment of a “threshold of legitimacy” per

Whitlock (119), impostures anchor themselves within established discourses about genre, subjectivity, and representation, and therefore have much to tell us about their use and abuse.

Chapter One

Theorizing Imposture

There is no “I” that can fully stand apart from the social conditions of its emergence…

—Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (7)

Defining Deception

The dangers of literary deception are as old as the written word and arguably as old as language itself. It is worth noting that the risk consists not only in the possibility of being deceived but in the nature of the deception itself: Plato’s notorious banishment of the poets in the

Republic is not simply because poets are, as verbal embroiderers, writers of what is not true but rather because they are writers of what is convincingly untrue, because they use language to distort the world rather than elevate it. Ostentatious lies, which draw attention to themselves through their very outlandishness, pose less of a threat than their more believable brethren; it is mimesis’ attempt at recreating the real by means of invention that calls into question the very way in which we suture ourselves to the world through the means of language. As we will see, the most successful acts of literary deception follow a mimetic logic, appropriating texts, identities, or experiences already anchored within the realm of the possible. Inventing a background as a Holocaust survivor, as I discuss in Chapter Two, offers the impostor an established set of conventions—historical, literary, psychological—already culturally and institutionally legitimated (to varying degrees, of course) that provide a predetermined route for textual circulation. Discourses and communities of authentication and legitimation are by no means static, and we will see in Chapter Four’s discussion of JT LeRoy how establishing an identity first within a marginalized community can ultimately lead to institutional legitimation of both life and text, so intimately connected in the realm of autobiography. Imposture is most

27 28 successful when anchored within a community undergoing a process of broader recognition by the culture at large: there must be enough cultural knowledge of identity X to make a narrative from its position of wider interest, but not enough that a majority of readers possess the knowledge required to alert them to deception. It is the gap between readerly interest and knowledge that imposture inhabits and exploits. This is also what distinguishes imposture from other forms of literary deception, and from fictionalization more generally. As Egan has it in a passage cited above, “imposture is distinct from all of these because it is a pretense; impostors are frauds, fakes, plagiarists, and phonies. They claim lives they have not lived, experiences they have not had, and identities that belong to other people” (3), a distinction I will elaborate further below. It is, moreover, due to the particularity of the autobiographical author’s position relative both to her text and to other forms of authorship that the distinction between impostor- texts/authors and the wider body of deceptive literature is so crucial.

In defining the latter, I begin with Ruthven’s “working definition of fake literature,” which “privileges inclusiveness” by encompassing “‘any text whose actual provenance differs from what it is made out to be’” (39). While this operative distinction between spuriosity more generally and imposture in particular is certainly necessary, highlighting the relationship between imposture and literary fakes along with debates over what constitutes the boundaries of

(in)authentic literature is an essential contextualizing gesture. A typology of such deceptions, however, is a more complicated matter; if we only use the term deception textually speaking when we locate something deliberate, generally in the body of a specific person (author, printer, publisher, seller, etc.), a typological approach would have to account for the vagaries of both intention and effect. If our very distinction between fraud and fiction is premised on the presence or absence of the intent to deceive, must we believe an author who denies such an intention while

29 undeniably creating its effect? What, moreover, would we make of an author who claims to believe the story about herself that others call false (as is the case with some of the writers discussed in the coming chapters)? Given the scope of these difficulties, it is not the aim of the present work to offer either a totalizing history or clear-cut typology of literary deceptions throughout the ages, to no small degree because all attempts, as Nick Groom suggests, reveal more difficulties than they resolve. The three key terms around which, for Groom, analysis of literary deception has situated itself, “forgery—counterfeit—plagiarism, are often, in careless talk, treated as synonyms. They are, however, more like competitors” (17). Not only does each seek “supremacy over the other two, each endeavours to colonize the rabble of the other terms that swarm about it, replicating their relationships and ambiguities (copy, fraud, imposture),” but crucially, “each aspires to master the code of representation through other discourses (for forgery it is the legal discourse, for counterfeiting the economic, for plagiarism the pedagogic)” (17).

The double meaning of “forge” as both creative and imitative thus mirrors the proliferation of terms and concepts designed to master, through interpretation, the spurious text’s attempt at its own form of (generic) mastery, and ultimately reveals an interdependence of terminology and concepts that is arguably constitutive of the nature of literary deception rather than a problem to be resolved.

Accepting Ruthven’s minimalist definition as axiomatic (the spurious text as one whose provenance differs from what is claimed), we see immediately that the question of deception is always a question of origins, whether lost, obscured, or invented. Anthony Grafton, in a key passage of Forgers and Critics that Groom also cites, notes that this question of originary legitimacy is coded into our framework at the level of language: in “distinguish[ing] clearly between the genuine and the forged,” the ancient Greeks “classified [works]…as gnesioi

(legitimate), the same term applied to legitimate children” while “spurious [works] were nothoi

(bastards).” Grafton concludes, then, that “[g]enuine writing…had for them an organic relation to the writer who produced it—and that relationship distinguished it from forged writing” (12).

The spurious therefore encompasses both texts with known illegitimate origins and unknown origins whose very indeterminacy renders them illegitimate. Moreover, Grafton’s reading of the use of gnesioi and nothoi as predicated upon the presence or absence of an organic relationship is also an invocation of the body: the intimate connection between textual authenticity and bodily identity is thus diametrically opposed to the vision of writing Roland Barthes puts forth in “The

Death of the Author.” For the author-killing Barthes of 1968 (as opposed to the author-reviving

Barthes of only a few years later, on which more below), writing is or perhaps should be “that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142). This influential vision of authorship, disembodied and de-subjectified, makes appeals to textual verification not only irrelevant but impossible, at least on the grounds of the author. The particular problem this poses in the context of autobiographical life writing, which finds its very reason for being in the subjectivity of the author, is a key site of analysis in this chapter.

The strictest poststructuralist-textualist response would dismiss the referential claims made by life writing out of hand as undermined by the inherently constructed and thus fictional nature of both language and the self, or as Paul de Man would have it in “Autobiography as

Defacement,” “The interest of autobiography, then, is not that it reveals reliable self- knowledge—it does not—but that it demonstrates in a striking way the impossibility of closure and of totalization (that is the impossibility of coming into being) of all textual systems made up of tropological substitution” (922). If the identity of the body writing is an invention, as is the

31 means by which said body writes (that is, via language), there can be no true or untrue depiction of the self; there is only the textual construction of an equally invented life, an infinite play of signifiers that cannot be anchored by recourse to a transcendental signified in the form of the I who writes. And yet, can there not perhaps be some life-depictions that are more or less untrue than others to the particular fiction of a given self? Even if we accept that narrated lives are in some sense always already fictional, what about the external, historical, theoretically verifiable events to which these accounts refer, such as the collective violence of the Holocaust or indeed violence on a more personal scale? Does holding on to some conceptual kernel of referentiality when theorizing the account of a life always amount to a misplaced faith in how and what we can tell in the form of a story, or is this kernel precisely what must be preserved if the act of narrating one’s own experience is to be granted the ethical weight theories of autobiography as testimony grant to it? Moreover, are all forms of life writing testimonial and thus potentially ethical acts?

For Gilmore, the answer to this last question appears to be yes: she argues that from a generic standpoint, “autobiography is characterized less by a set of formal elements than by a rhetorical setting in which a person places herself or himself within testimonial contexts…in order to achieve as proximate a relation as possible to what constitutes truth in that discourse”

(3). Insofar as the autobiographical mode is invested in truth-claims, then, it can be read as testimonial in general terms; further, autobiography-as-testimony is situated within what Spivak calls “the culture of testimony,” which she defines as “the genre of the subaltern giving witness to oppression, to a less oppressed other” (Spivak 7, also quoted in Gilmore 2). While not all autobiography has been or should be understood as testimony specifically to experiences of violence and oppression, some of the most powerful and influential claims made about its contemporary importance are advanced on those grounds, as noted in the introduction. The

32 power dynamic that Spivak emphasizes—this particular form of testimony originating from the site and voice of oppression with the intention of communicating that experience to one outside of it—will be especially crucial to both my understanding of imposture as such and my analysis of the case studies in subsequent chapters. Indeed, my understanding of imposture counts the performance of downward mobility in hierarchical terms as constitutive: it is no accident that in each case I examine, the imposturous identity represents a marginalized position relative to that of the biographical author. To be a Holocaust survivor, an honour killing witness, or a seropositive transgender teenage sex worker may represent a more marketable identity (though this is certainly debatable) than writing as a garden-variety orphan, unhappy immigrant, or middle-aged heterosexual cisgendered punk, but none of the former identities can be said to possess a greater degree of social, economic, or political privilege over the latter in broader terms. Moreover, the absence of an analysis that takes power into account limits the heretofore definitive and otherwise insightful accounts of literary faking proffered by K.K. Ruthven, Nick

Groom, and Margaret Russett. This omission, I argue, undermines the extent to which these authors’ texts can be said to offer insight into the specifically ethical dimension of imposture (as opposed to the ethical implications of spuriosity in general terms). It is due in no small part to this critical omission that I take the ethical as my central focus here.

My argument here is to some degree inevitably premised on a critically unfashionable reliance on truth: calling it veracity, referentiality, and truth-value, as I will at different moments, offers a key degree of specificity in identifying what form(s) of truth I am interested in. At base, though, I want to insist that sometimes, some stories are simply not true in a meaningful way.

More important, however, is which stories are untrue and in what way. In other words, my focus on imposture is premised on a belief that its untruth is different from, and arguably more

33 ethically significant (at least in the Levinasian terms I deploy with regards to the relation between self and other) than the untruth of forgery, while the untruth of a disproven memoir is similarly distinct from the imaginative realm of fiction. The character of the lie is different, and so are the stakes and consequently the implications and effects. As I will elaborate in the chapters that follow, what makes these deceptions important is not only a matter of the nature of the deception but of readers’ belief in it: the question is not only one of belief in the origins of a given text but in the origins of a particular (life) story, the ostensible truth of a particular experience. I want, perhaps even more unfashionably from a critical point of view, to insist on the stakes of claiming an identity that is not one's own when this identity and its attendant experiences are systematically marginalized relative to one’s own. Here again, the term

“identity” seems insufficient to capture the full weight of imposture’s pretences, and perhaps implies mistakenly that the issue is one of essence rather than experience, and of the terms under which that experience is represented and transmitted. Norma Khouri’s case, the subject of my third chapter, is illuminating here: were imposture simply a matter of identity, the fact of her birth in Jordan would suffice to keep her text at a generalized level of spuriosity but would stop short of imposture, performative or otherwise. Her place of birth and racialization would, per an essentialist model, confirm her “authenticity” regardless of her experience (in this case, whether or not she grew up in Jordan and was party to her best friend’s murder, as she claimed, or migrated to the United States as a very young child, as investigations suggest, would be unimportant). I emphasize this distinction to make clear that my insistence on the relevance of identity is not an insistence on identity’s innateness, but rather on the complex way in which imposture tests the boundaries of the relationship between identity and experience.

In sum, then, my aim in this chapter is to outline a theory of imposture that insists on centring questions of political power and ethical engagement while also attending to the valuable poststructuralist critiques of the authorial subject’s presumptive stability. Beginning with the establishment of imposture’s unique constitutive elements introduced above, I turn next to theories of autobiographical authorship more broadly. I use Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext as the space surrounding and shaping the text to suggest that autobiographical authorship, relying as it does on the author’s name, traverses this “threshold of interpretation” in its suturing together of authorial and textual identity. I then read Barthes’ and Foucault’s canonical deconstructions of the author-as-deity and authorial discourse, respectively, suggesting that even within this seeming apex of anti-authorial thought, there is room to locate an autobiographical author as spoken through and by her text rather than imposed from outside it.

Examining prior scholarly approaches to the vagaries of literary fakes and particularly the propensity to reduce critiques of deception to demands for authenticity, I argue that a failure to attend to the power dynamics at play in imposture renders prior analysis insufficient and incapable of apprehending the ethical dimension I insist upon here. I conclude by returning to and expanding upon the importance of Levinasian thought in establishing an ethical approach to imposture. Imposture, in my reading, relies on collapsing the boundary between readerly self and textual other, illustrating the necessity of developing a literary ethics that foregrounds a balance between proximity and distance in empathetic engagement with alterity.

Locating the Autobiographical Author

One of the most influential theorists of autobiography’s constitutive elements is French scholar Philippe Lejeune, whose concept of the autobiographical pact is paradigmatic (whether

35 as an analytical instrument or a site of refutation; for my purposes, it is a useful starting point).

Crucially, Lejeune’s notion of the pact frames it as collaborative, even dialectical: while the pact rests fundamentally upon the author’s promise of the identical nature of the textual author, protagonist, and narrator, Lejeune emphasizes that autobiography is not only a literary genre but a reading practice. He asserts that what “defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name. And this is true also for the one who is writing the text,” a point that highlights the cooperative grounds upon which the pact rests

(19). As the writer promises “a contract of identity” marked by “the proper name,” so too does the reader promise to read the grammatical and biographical subjects in tandem. And yet, though this all-encompassing textual I is a precondition for the existence of both autobiographical author and reader, it is also this element of the genre “which, by its very content, best marks the confusion of author and person, confusion on which is founded the whole practice and problematic of Western literature since the end of the eighteenth century” (20). For literary scholars in fields other than auto/biography studies, this problematic is approached most frequently as a pedagogical question. For many of us, encouraging our students to resist making the instinctive connection between text and author in genres to which the autobiographical pact does not apply (that is, fiction, drama, and poetry) is a foundational step in teaching literature.

Yet there is no single approach to the teaching of authorial biography in relation to fictional genres. That we continue to offer our students biographical sketches of authors of fictional texts they encounter suggests the role of biography in literary education remains complex, or perhaps that in a pedagogical context, as elsewhere, the author’s death has been greatly exaggerated.

This is to some degree the foundation upon which the most influential reconsideration of the author and her ostensible death rests: Seán Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author

36 asserts, “as a logical necessity, the concept of the author is never more alive than when pronounced dead” (xvi). Were the author truly dead in the sense of having attained, by consensus, a widespread irrelevance, the pronunciation would be unnecessary; this is one way in which the death of the author and the Nietzschean death of God can be understood analogically.

For Burke, both “attest to a departure of belief in authority, presence, intention, omniscience and creativity” (21); structurally, author is to text as God is to the world, that is, creator and transcendental signified. However, we can extend the relation in terms of the tension between presence and absence underpinning the ostensible deaths of the creator- and author-versions of the deity: the very necessity of declaring the absence or death underscores the continued relevance or presence of the figure in question, conceptually if nowhere else. The pronunciation of such a death thus emerges as marking a moment of tension rather than of rupture, a measure of fantasy rather than fact.

In any case, it strikes me as a reflection of the tension that remains attendant upon “the confusion of author and person…on which is founded the whole practice and problematic of

Western literature” that we retain a sense of the import of biography as a contextual factor while simultaneously instructing our students to read fiction in direct opposition to the autobiographical pact, that is, on the assumption that the grammatical I is not reflective of a biographical I. The fictional pact, as Lejeune notes, stakes precisely the territory rejected by autobiography: the freedom from all referential requirements, and especially from the containment (or seemingly solid footing) of authorial intent. From this vantage point, reading autobiography emerges as a sort of relief, a release of pressure: no longer must the author be held at arm’s length, the subject of sidelong glances whose interest must be denied to evade the shameful charge of succumbing to the intentional fallacy. And yet this presumption of ease is

37 perhaps equally responsible for the historical marginalization of life writing genres in literary study, which belies both the artistry and complexity of texts that make, however ambiguously, a claim to truth based in the life and person of the author.

It is worth noting at this juncture that, in the cases of imposture considered here, the creation of an authorial persona within and alongside the ostensibly autobiographical text may be read as a literal adherence to the pact’s required simultaneity of author-protagonist-narrator, if one takes “author” as interchangeable with “authorial name” or “authorial signature.” The concept of referentiality is therefore equally necessary in addressing imposture, as evident in

Lejeune’s articulation of “the referential pact.” This includes, implicitly or explicitly, “a definition of the field of the real that is involved [in the writing] and a statement of the modes and the degree of resemblance to which the text lays claim” (22). In other words, while autobiography may bear a greater formal or narrative resemblance to fictional modes such as the novel than to, for instance, a science textbook, the referential pact not only links autobiography to truth-claim genres, but, according to Lejeune, operates “exactly like scientific or historical discourse [in that] they claim to provide information about a ‘reality’ exterior to the text, and so to submit to a test of verification.” Further, their “aim is not simple verisimilitude, but resemblance to the truth. Not ‘the effect of the real,’ but the image of the real” (22), a distinction that will attain its full significance in the context of memoirs that deviate from the autobiographical pact.

Autobiography, then, is a hybrid genre, located in the space usually cleared between fiction’s license to invent and history’s (presumptively) strict adherence to referential norms. We know, of course, that this distinction is in some ways overdetermined: literary critics have long claimed a form of truth value for the fictional, just as post-narrative turn historians have

38 elaborated upon the literary qualities of history. As Derrida observes in “The Law of Genre,” the unspoken command of generic logic may dictate that genres are not to be mixed, but the act of codifying generic boundaries always implicitly structures the possibility or indeed probability of their violation: “As soon as the word genre is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn” (224). To be sure, the consequences for violating the bounds of the supposedly fictional differ markedly from playing fast and loose with the ostensibly factual. We may call a fiction overly reliant on verifiable historical detail dull or pedantic, or one appearing transparently autobiographical uninspired or insufficiently creative; conversely, to be incorrect when writing history, particularly when there is the presumption of a deliberate disregard for truth, is a violation of much broader norms from the scholarly to the discursive to, arguably, the ethical. The question is, then, whether Lejeune’s emphasis on the equal importance of the referential pact to autobiographical and historical (and scientific) writing necessarily implies an equality of consequence for its violation, and in what sphere such consequences might be faced.

While Lejeune’s claim of the exactness of the relation between and among forms of referential discourse evidently presumes a linguistic model in which representation is possible

(that is, that words can meaningfully refer to, invoke, or construct a reality beyond themselves, subject to truth-testing), this assumption of referential possibility does not necessarily imply either a perfectly honest autobiographical author nor a perfectly transparent understanding of language. Lejeune is careful to note, “it is indispensable that the referential pact be drawn up, and that it be kept; but it is not necessary that the result be on the order of strict resemblance”

(22-23). Resemblance is in turn inextricable from the concept of identity: “In biography, it is resemblance that must ground identity; in autobiography, it is identity that grounds resemblance.

Identity is the real starting point of autobiography; resemblance, the impossible horizon of biography” (24). Ultimately, Lejeune emphasizes that the “referential pact can be, according to the criteria of the reader, badly kept, without the referential value of the text disappearing” (22-

23). If resemblance is “the impossible horizon of biography,” unquestionable referentiality is perhaps the impossible fantasy of autobiography, and moreover a fantasy that marks the undefinable boundary linking the textual depiction of self with the material world, the boundary upon which the impostures discussed below inevitably founder.

Lejeune, however, does not elaborate on the relationship between “the criteria of the reader” (which criteria? which reader?) and the criteria he establishes (as [expert] reader?), or perhaps more precisely, the relationship between individual perceptions of referential truth on the one hand and generic categories or empirical verifiability on the other. It is in the particular context of deceptive texts that this relationship concerns us here, but it is no less relevant to the autobiographical genre as such: if the reader can determine the pact is “badly kept” but that the text still retains “referential value,” presumably in part if not necessarily in whole, there must also be the possibility for a degree of bad faith that does eliminate a text’s referential value in the reader’s view. One might be tempted to ask, if a text lies and no one reads it, do its claims to referentiality disappear? Ultimately, given that all autobiography is retrospective, as Lejeune also emphasizes (4) and therefore, equally, reconstructive, the question of referentiality is never and can never be foreclosed. The extent to which a text acknowledges the inevitable gap between a life and its representation therefore becomes a crucial ground upon which autobiographical texts distinguish themselves from each other and, further, make secondary claims about the nature of language in the act of writing. If, as Gilmore adopts Valéry to observe, “every autobiography is the fragment of a theory” (12), I argue here that every autobiography is specifically a fragment of

40 a theory about language; this is another way in which life writing exhibits a greater complexity for writers, readers, and critics than it has often been credited with.

It is helpful to note that imposture as defined here does not appear to have much preoccupied Lejeune’s thinking on autobiography. Paralleling his distinction between autobiography’s reliance on identity and biography’s demand for resemblance, it is “the borderline and the exceptional case…of fraud” that “confirms the rule” of autobiography, while in “the case of resemblance, this will be mythomania” (26). The former term suggests invention and the latter exaggeration, neither of which fully covers the dimensions of imposture most interesting to me here. However, neither case is limited to “the errors, the distortions, the interpretations consubstantial with the elaboration of personal myth in all autobiography”—

Lejeune’s own definition of the genre is, as we have seen, predicated upon its retrospective and therefore creative character—but instead requires “the substitution of an obviously made-up story, and one totally unrelated” to the life in question (26). Whether because or in spite of the creative nature of auto/biographical writing, Lejeune takes the stance that “fraud…is extremely rare, and the referential character attributed to narrative is thus easily called into question by a survey of literary history” (26). The rarity or frequency of the fullest forms of referential unreliability aside, it is curious that Lejeune shifts focus mid-sentence to the character of narrative itself, rather than the specifically fraudulent autobiographical narrative, the claims of which can surely not be verified by an appeal to “literary history” rather than autobiographical history, or history full stop. Whether one takes the generality of auto/biographical narratives as holding a legitimate claim to a referential character, or indeed a referential value, will depend on where one places the emphasis with regard to the terms of the referential pact, but in either case determining when the autobiographical pact (of identical author-narrator-protagonist) is violated

41 versus when referential value is so minimal as to “disappear” strikes me as two distinct questions, neither one of which can be reduced to the other. Moreover, what constitutes referential value will depend upon the nature of the autobiographical text: a Holocaust memoir’s referential frame differs from a family memoir, a point recalling Gilmore’s emphasis on the ways in which autobiography is structured as much by its limits and proscriptions as by its formal or representative claims and capacities.

One of the central questions posed at the start of my analysis was what happens to the disproven autobiographical text: does it become “merely” fiction? While this is a pragmatic question from the point of view of the publisher, the bookseller, or the librarian (provided the text continues to be available after its fall from grace, which is not always the case), the reader and/or critic has the leisure of a more theoretical approach. Lejeune’s brevity on the subject of imposture is equally evident in his assessment of the afterlife of the fraudulent text, but his few words go a long way: the impostor-text, though it may be “disqualified as autobiography…will retain its full interest as phantasm, at the level of its utterance, and the falsehood of the autobiographical pact, as behaviour, will still reveal for us, at the level of enunciation, a subject that is despite everything, intentionally autobiographical” (26). Evoking the work of Genette,

Lejeune here underscores the autobiographical author’s embeddedness in her text as both subject and object of enunciation as made visible by the paratext. This concept, which Genette first articulated in Palimpsests and later fully elaborated in Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, places emphasis on the materiality of the book and offers more explicit attention to the commodity-function of the authorial name than earlier poststructuralist critics like Barthes and

Foucault, whose approach alludes to this commodity-function but does not foreground it. Genette begins by observing that what we call a text, “defined…as a more or less long sequence of verbal

42 statements that are more or less endowed with significance” is, crucially, “rarely presented in an unadorned state, unreinforced and unaccompanied by a certain number of verbal or other productions” which may or may not be “regarded as belonging to the text” (1). Maxims about not judging books by their covers aside, our reading choices rarely take place without recourse to these textual adornments, be they a published book review, a bookstore display, or our recognition of the author’s name. Genette thus develops the term paratext to refer to these elements that “surround…and extend [the text], precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and consumption in the form…of a book” (1). The paratext, then, serves an inherently mediating function: it inserts itself into the reader-text relationship, and arguably constitutes much of that relationship prior to the reader’s encounter with the text itself. The paratext is, per Genette, “a threshold…an ‘undefined zone’ between the inside and outside…a zone not only of transition but also of transaction” (2). The paratext is thus inseparable from the text as text and the book as object, making it both a theoretical space and a physical manifestation of literary material culture.

Beyond noting Genette’s emphasis on the contextual contingencies, or “ways and means” of the paratext through time and space, the most relevant element of his analysis for our purposes is the position of the author’s name in the paratextual space (again meant here as both theoretical and material). One of Genette’s most significant developments in this vein is his distinction between different states of authorial naming and particularly his coinage of the term onymity to underscore the previously unmarked space of the named author. We have long deployed concepts of anonymity and pseudonymity in literary analysis, but “as always, the most ordinary state is the one that, from habit, has never received a name” (39). However robustly the

43 analytical place of the author may be or may have been debated through history, this nominal absence makes clear the normalized assumption of authorial presence: to have a named author is the usual state of things, however we might work to displace that name or to hold it apart from the question of interpretation. For Genette, naming the condition of onymity is the first step towards denaturalizing or making visible the prior invisibility of the named, stably singular author. This in turn enables his assertion that rather than understand anonymity or pseudonymity as exceptional cases, we can more usefully situate them as points along a spectrum of non- onymous authorial naming practices (47-48). Equally relevant here is the distinction he draws between types of pseudonymity: what we might call simple pseudonymity, in which the author attributes her text via the authorial name to an imaginary author (as with a nom de plume), stops at the creation of the false name (and it is necessarily a wholly invented name; the attribution of a given text to an identifiable author other than the actual author of the text would be apocrypha with or without permission, according to Genette’s schema). Mary Anne Evans’ attribution of her work to the non-existent George Eliot is paradigmatic: though the pseudonym was obviously a fiction meant to obscure Evans’ identity as author, it took on no embodied weight of its own but remained an unelaborated screen-name, strictly a camouflage for the legal name rather than an independent identity (as distinct from its discursive circulation or accumulated cultural capital). What concerns me here, rather, is what Genette calls “imagining the author,” in which the author attributes the text to an imagined author with invented characteristics; the difference, in other words, is the creation of a paratextual apparatus (of varying degrees of complexity, as we shall see) to support the pseudonym, to give it life beyond the cover page. Further, given that

Genette characterizes autobiography as the genre requiring the “maximal degree” of paratextual involvement represented by the author’s name, the autobiographical author’s traversal of the

44 paratextual threshold cannot be reversed upon discovery of deception. Imposture, then, represents the further movement of the author’s name from the nexus of text and paratext to a form of performance that exceeds the boundaries of both.

This supplemental identity creation project in conjunction with the establishment of textual identity is what locates the texts I discuss under the heading of imposture, which Egan, in a fuller version of the passage I excerpted above defines as

a serious disconnect between the author as a person alive in the world, pre-text,

before any story emerges, and the written life…Imposture…is not fiction and is

not even the fictionalizing of stories based on truth. Nor is it small lies such as

creep into every personal story because the story sounds better that way. Nor is it

lapses or distortions of memory, with which honest autobiographies are replete.

Imposture is distinct from all of these because it is a pretense; impostors are

frauds, fakes, plagiarists, and phonies. They claim lives they have not lived,

experiences they have not had, and identities that belong to other people. (3)

This final criterion is somewhat misleadingly phrased; “identities that belong to other people” could theoretically refer either to the appropriation of actual historical persons (the false attribution of a text by someone else to, say, William Shakespeare) or to the attribution of a text to a wholly invented imposter-identity. The underlying logic of Egan’s claim, however, is key to my argument here: the impostor’s invented persona appropriates experiences others have actually had (to invent new events and experiences would make one, in the terms I use here, a fabricator or exaggerator like James Frey rather than an impostor). To claim to be a Holocaust survivor without having actually experienced the Holocaust is imposture, because to do so is to appropriate an actual identity or set of experiences, even if one does not claim to be a specific

Holocaust survivor like Primo Levi (for example). This is a distinction based on the differential ethical effect of each claim, as I will discuss further below, but also on the terms required to advance the imposter’s (invented) identity, which involve the appropriation not just of a particular experience but of the discursive and tropological formations surrounding it.

For my purposes, I wish to narrow Egan’s definition further to emphasize not only the textual claim impostors make to “lives they have not lived,” but the para- and extratextual performance of that claim, or rather the presence of both textual claim and para/extratextual performance, as defining specifically contemporary iterations of imposture. This additional criterion allows me to distinguish between, for instance, a Chatterton and a Wilkomirski: while

Chatterton has been called an imposter insofar as he created both the Rowley manuscripts and the identity of the figure behind them, he (and other eighteenth century forgers such as

Macpherson and Henley) created their fakes retroactively, that is, attributed both forged texts and authors to a preceding period. Consequently, the paratextual performance—the act of actual imposture in the present moment—is absent in these cases. On a pragmatic level the discovery narrative (an archetype within the broader counter-archive of literary deceptions from which this project draws, and one I will return to in the fourth chapter) offers the obvious benefit of making the ostensibly newly discovered text automatically valuable as an object of historical interest, as well as offering the forger a self-protecting temporal displacement. The omnipresence of this temporal difference in eighteenth century cases is also representative of the culturally specific nature of literary deceptions that Ruthven emphasizes (59): it is no accident that the spuriosities of the eighteenth century were historically focused, cast as artifactual discoveries, while the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), I argue, has marked the emergence of this

46 performative strain of imposture. Moreover, this performative, contemporary form of literary faking is inseparable from autobiography as both form and discourse.

It is also worth noting that in all the cases I discuss here, the movement from verifiable to claimed identity takes the inverse form of pseudonymous (non-imposturous) practices, as employed by Evans/Eliot or the Brontës, in relation to questions of social power: while nineteenth-century female writers assumed male pen names to avoid widespread sexism and shield themselves from public censure, the impostor seeks to occupy the position of marginalized identities and experiences. It is this appropriative gesture—both the claiming of an alternate identity rather than simply a screening alternate name as well as the marginalized status of the identity claimed relative to the lived identity—that marks the crucial distance between Eliot’s simple pseudonymity and the more broadly performative nature of imposture as examined here.

What this means for the ethical analysis of imposture and the politics of identity more broadly will be a subject of later discussion. For now, let us note on a pragmatic level that the predominance of this downward movement along the lines of social power can be partially understood as reflective of the market conditions auto/biographical texts inhabit, and the question of what constitutes a marketable, or commodifiable, life story. Not all lives are, after all, publishable, and yet it is a condition for the publication of life writing that such lives be both unique or unknown to their readers while offering the truth, or at least what readers agree to accept as such. As we shall see, the autobiographical author’s claim to truth and the reader’s promise to read her text as truth are not mere conventions but fundamental components of autobiography’s generic distinctiveness. From a Barthesian angle, even if it is the language that speaks rather than the author—certainly doubly true in the case of the impostor-text—the author is a symptom of language, in one sense an inversion of Lejeune’s argument but in mine its

47 logical corollary. Imposture, then, offers in one sense a paradigmatic case for testing an ethically inflected poststructuralist model of autobiographical reading (recalling that the autobiographical pact is the function of a reading practice as much as a form of writing), one that counterbalances the necessary foregrounding of generic truth claims with the equally necessary knowledge of the non-transparency of either language or its ostensible speaking subject. How this is also an argument for a particular ethics of reading will be explored further at the end of this chapter and throughout the chapters that follow.

Can the Autobiographical Author Die? Barthes, Foucault, and

Poststructuralist Approaches

Historically, the question of literary fraud is inseparable from contextual and contingent conceptions of authorship. Though we speak frequently of the intentional fallacy (especially to our students), the difference between a deceptive or fraudulent text as opposed to one that is merely inaccurate is in some measure to be found in the person of the author. This is because a text cannot exist as deceptive (rather than ambiguous, or spurious) without an agent of that deception; this is what Arendt suggests when pointing out that deception operates at the level of factual statements, as noted in the introduction. No one, for instance, would speak of texts describing now-disproven scientific theories or historical analyses as deceptive if it can be safely assumed that the author wrote in good faith according to the evidence available to her. In such cases, texts may offer information that is deceptive, but without the crucial figure of the

(deliberately?) acting author, the term “fraud” cannot apply. Given the focus of this project on specifically autobiographical untruths, an emphasis on the role of the author in the construction of the text is to some degree inevitable. The variegated theoretical and historical contexts in

48 which texts and their writers have been characterized as not what or who they claim to be will be one subject of the discussion below; but first, it will be useful to frame the readings in the chapters that follow in relation to the figure of the author and the generic contours of autobiography and memoir.

Two of the most influential treatises on the author are also two of the briefest: Barthes’

“The Death of the Author” has, as Jane Gallop notes, resonated far beyond what could be expected of its handful of pages, and Foucault’s “What is an Author?” is not much longer. The tone that Gallop likens to a manifesto is neither suited nor intended for fine-grained analytical specificity, and it would be unfair to take Barthes to task for failing to address a particular form of authorship when his target is authorial discourse more generally. I will, however, note that

Barthes’ author/Author (more on the significance of Barthes’ shifting capitalization below) is neither specifically an autobiographical author nor specifically not one. Barthes famously asserts that writing “is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142). Such broad argumentative strokes cannot be simply transposed to the autobiographical context, which relies on the identity of the body writing for its legitimacy, but neither can the potential insights generated by Barthes’ anti- authorial manifesto be discarded when approaching the autobiographical author.

Barthes’ later writings, as Gallop points out, offer a less polemically unidimensional conception of the relationship (or non-relationship) between text and author (on which more below). However, the most extreme (and most cited) Barthesian position that takes writing as always necessarily disembodied would evidently require discarding any distinction between spurious and authentic text reliant on an authorial figure. Whether the content of a particular text

49 would be considered true or untrue would depend solely on its generic markers rather than the person of its writer if attributive authenticity is traced by reference to the body of the person writing, since the Barthes of “The Death of the Author” insists on writing as precisely the space where such a body cannot exist. It is at this point that Barthes’ particular vision of the author’s death emerges as to some degree incommensurable with a position that takes seriously the claims autobiographical discourse makes for and about itself: if that generic discourse is constituted by and in the space where the text emerges from and refers back to the body that writes it, how can such writing emerge from the wholly neutral, disembodied space that Barthes describes? Is autobiographical writing uniquely outside the paradigmatic space Barthes carves, or is that space itself cleared only by too-wide strokes of the critical axe? Is it the act of writing itself that severs text from author, and can (or must) the two be sutured back together when the (auto) textual condition for being is the writer herself as subject of the writing, not only the subject who writes?

I wish to argue, then, for a structural parallel between Barthes’ famous pronouncement of the author’s death and his subsequent less-discussed announcement of the author’s return on the one hand and the memoir boom of the last three decades on the other. As Gallop notes in a careful and thorough rereading of the Barthesian corpus, we can see that “the death of the author actually institutes a relation in which the reader desires the author” (5). Gallop reads this desire to some degree biographically, finding in Barthes’ naming of other queer male writers in S/Z such as Genet and Proust “a shade of gay particularity” that in turn suggests an interpretation of the reader’s authorial desire (or desire for these particular authors made manifest in their naming) as perverse and thus, broadly, queer (51-53). Desire, with its typical refusal to remain static and contained, moves in Gallop’s reading of Barthes from the specifically biographical (an implicit community of shared experiences of gay desire) to more generally so (the abstracted reader’s

50 desire for the author as a site of individual meaning and identification). This desire, or perhaps one of its facets, is also for the myth of textual unity behind Foucault’s characterization of the author as “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning” (quoted in Burke 105), a desire that, in conjunction with the desire for alterity in/as text made manifest in the memoir boom, suggests a broader connection between the temporality of the author’s death and the memoir’s maturation. If fiction has been unmoored from the interpretive stability of authorial discourse (if indeed it was ever moored there in the first place), the turn to the memoir (on the part of both popular and literary-critical readers) can be understood as not only a response to the author’s death but, according to Gallop’s reading of Barthes, as emerging from the same logic instituting that death. Desire and death emerge as dialectical rather than causal: it is desire for the author that necessitates that figure’s displacement via (conceptual) murder, while that ostensible death reinstitutes the desire by other means. The desire for the author is thus not a stable force suddenly denied its exercise in fiction and transferentially displaced to the memoir, but is instead always both present and dislocated, rising again from the ashes of (fictional) authorial discourse newly focused if not newly born.

A reading of “The Death of the Author” that privileges only its proclamation of the titular death, enacted in the final lines, therefore loses the full complexity of the author/reader relationship instituted by this death, which is not death in the sense of wholesale disappearance.

Moreover, it is not the author but the Author whose death is proclaimed: Barthes may begin by invoking the former, but it is only the latter that must die to enable “the birth of the reader”

(148). Given that Barthes would announce the author’s “friendly return” only three years later

(Gallop 5), I argue that to collapse author and Author is akin to collapsing the biographical and the discursive functions of authorship. If we take the Author as the imposed limit, the “final

51 signified,” the “commodity,” the “theological principle,” then that Author surely should be, if not marked for death, at least historicized, contextualized, and thus desacralized; left only with the biographical or embodied author, stripped of mythos, we might be better positioned to turn to

Foucault’s question in “What is an Author?” via Beckett: “What matter who’s speaking?” (138).

Before turning to Foucault, however, I will make the paradoxical gesture of attempting to do justice to Barthes the author by noting that I do not offer my reading of the distinction between author and Author in the name of his own intentions, or better, his Authority. That is, I am not suggesting the shift from author to Author marks the latter as Barthes’ sole target. My sense is, in fact, the opposite: if, as above, writing “is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing,” then both biographical author and discursive Author disappear equally under the sign of language in Barthes’ formulation. Instead, I argue that we may locate a third author within the space of autobiographical writing, one who does not lend herself to the neat orthographic distinction represented by the a/A: this is the author as spoken by, through, and in language, that is, the textual author. Even the strictest adherence to Barthes’ polemical position (one that he takes only with such force in this brief essay) requires this third figure in order to account for the particular relationship between autobiographical author and text insofar as that relationship is as much a question of the text itself as the (authorial) discourses in which it is embedded. Further, we need not grant the autobiographical work any truth-value or referential function to encounter this figure, which can, if desired, be treated solely as an expression of language rather than its agent. Barthes emphasizes the origins of the Author as the product of identifiable historical processes and movements, among them “English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation” (142-143). He goes on to problematize a

52 concept of the Author as “the past of his own book [in which] book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after…[positioned in a relation] of antecedence” (145). These are both undoubtedly valuable insights; however, reading his essay through the lens of autobiography points us instead towards a relationship of simultaneity in the act of autobiographical writing (literalized in the imposter’s double creation of life and text) and futurity in its reading (as reading can only take place moving forward in time), underscoring the need for this third figure of authorship I have proposed. The death of the extratextual author/Author may open up a space of near-infinite potential for interpretation, but an attempt to declare the death of the author as and in the text would have the opposite effect: to refuse to read the author-as/in-text is to refuse the act of reading not only autobiography but of the very performativity of language itself, or better, to refuse to read the particular performativity of autobiographical language. All language is, of course, performative, but not all language performances are created equal, or at least not identical. The suturing of author to text, or the emergence of an author-figure within and through the text, in the realm of autobiography performs language differently than the creative license of fiction or the sober claims of scholarly expertise; this is what constitutes autobiography. The freedom from the temporal determinacy of a/Authorial antecedence for which Barthes advocates thus need not kill any and all senses of the author. Even if we question (or altogether disavow) the very possibility of autobiography as the translation of self into text (a relationship of antecedence, as cited above), a Barthesian approach to autobiography would make visible the simultaneous birth of the author as and in text, even as it proclaims the extratextual author’s death. That this birth is, moreover, enacted through the interpretive reader (as Barthes asserts) is a point to which I will return.

The emphasis on the linguistically performative is equally evident in Foucault’s argument for a shift from author to author-function, the latter category capturing but not mirroring the doubled sense of author/Author I traced above in Barthes. Foucault is also concerned with identifying and displacing the author as “a privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, and literature, or in the history of philosophy and science,” a figure who is thought to be the subject of a “singular relationship that holds between an author and a text” and to whom “a text apparently points [as a] figure who is outside and precedes it” (115). For

Foucault, the de-privileging of the author is necessary less on the grounds of interpretive freedom than as a function of a similar de-privileging of the singular, rational, coherent subject.

For Foucault, “the essential basis of…writing is not the exalted emotions related to the act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears” (116). Here again we do not need recourse to a wholly agentic subject who enters, fully formed, into a language she can control, in order to find traces of an author-figure who emerges through language rather than wielding it with subjugating power, particularly in autobiographical discourse. If one of the tasks, or perhaps effects, of writing according to Foucault is “creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears,” her endless disappearance must equally produce an endless reappearance, since an endless exit must be accompanied by a re-entry, or an entry elsewhere.

The absence of a stable subject is not the absence of subjectivity as such, but a reconceptualization and denaturalization of its terms; the same might be said for what is no longer the figure who writes but the figure of writing, the figure created by and through writing, akin to the third version of the author I traced in Barthes above. That this figure is no longer understood as external and prior the text is therefore less a matter of elimination than of opening.

In that vein, the programmatic questions with which Foucault concludes his essay outline a possible approach to authorial and particularly autobiographical discourse that takes into account poststructuralist theorizations of language and subjectivity. Foucault asserts that the “old questions” such as “1) Who is the real author? 2) Have we proof of his authenticity and originality? 3) What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?” characterizing the intentional and biographical approach to authorship must give way to new questions locating the author-function: “1) What are the modes of existence of this discourse? 2) Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it? 3) What placements are determined for possible subjects? 4) Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?” (138). We might also note in passing the appearance of “authenticity” amongst the old questions for which we are now meant to be too theoretically sophisticated; this is a term that will reappear in my discussion below about authorial deception. For now, suffice to say that Foucault’s pairing of “authenticity and originality” (138) points toward the instability of the former term, which is almost never defined explicitly or implicitly and used most often in academic writing as a derogatory shorthand. Here, it seems to substitute in part but not in whole for truthful or perhaps genuine; in either case, it is clearly of little interest to Foucault, and I note its appearance in his text as a prelude to its subsequent recurrence in my own in addressing the ethical stakes of imposture.

Where the old questions offer a stable author (as biographical person and interpretive limit), Foucault’s new questions instead insert discourse, arguably no more clearly quantifiable and qualifiable than the evicted author. The advantage, however, of turning to discourse is the continued emphasis it permits on denaturalizing the stable origins of both author and text, which in turn enables highlighting the productive nature of both. This insight will be especially useful for my purposes, given that autobiographical texts are in a clear sense not only produced by but

55 also productive of an authorial subject. This double effect can only be amplified in the cases I consider, where the deceptive component is precisely the non-coincidence between authorial and textual subject, making the text productive of its author in a literal sense. That is, where autobiography’s reliance on the coincidence between author and narrator (and/or protagonist) ensures that the autobiographical text and author produce each other recursively, cases of imposture literalize the text’s production of the author as a figure who does not in fact exist beyond the confines of the page. It is this non-coincidence between text and author within a textual or discursive field that, structurally, demands such a coincidence that defines the cases I examine here and necessitates an approach to the author that accounts for her particular role in autobiography (false or otherwise). Foucault’s questions, then, intersect with questions of genre, a category he also locates in relation to forms of discourse, and which I address further below.

These questions also have the singular benefit of decentralizing authorial power as productive

(the subject of), emphasizing the way discursive power acts upon the authorial figure (subject to). While Foucault’s repurposing of Beckett’s “What matter who’s speaking?” registers first as dismissively rhetorical, the methodology he offers to bolster this dismissal has the (surely unintended) effect of re-grounding the centrality of the author-figure to autobiography, or more precisely, autobiographical discourse’s simultaneous reliance on and creation of a variety of author-functions.

How can questions posed to shift the author as the creator of discourse to the subject thereof offer renewed insight into the author’s central role in autobiography, as I suggested above? This claim is best illustrated by answering Foucault’s questions in a general way, focusing for now on the second and third. The second question centres on the origin, circulation, and control of the discourse, while the third calls attention to the “placements” made possible for

56 subjects within it. The origins of autobiographical discourse, and the attendant subject- placements it makes possible, can be found (in the Western tradition) in the confessional mode, another discursive formation familiar to Foucault, and one that locates the production of truth and speech in the body of a singular, (auto)biographical subject. For a text to be considered autobiographical, its origins and subject-placement must be identical, that is, connected to the body of the author who is in turn the life behind and within the text. The origins of an autobiographical text and the origins of autobiography as a discursive mode are themselves not identical, of course; both cases, however, assume a subject who speaks, speaks truthfully, and speaks truthfully about herself. All three conditions must be met and all three meet uniquely in autobiography: fiction requires only the first condition be met, and scientific discourse relies most on the second and to a lesser extent on the first (though the history of collaborative or multiple authorship in the scientific academy complicates the model of the author as singular subject). It is thus precisely the uniqueness of the author/text relation in autobiography that both defines the genre and makes its violation in cases of imposture worth close attention. This point will be developed further below; for now, I turn to Ruthven and Russett’s respective approaches to the fake, the fictional, and the spurious in a historical context.

Historicizing Deception

Most histories of literary deception, such as Groom’s or Russett’s, implicitly follow

Foucault’s emphasis on the emergence of a rational subject by treating Thomas Chatterton (nom de plume Thomas Rowley) and/or James Macpherson (author-imposter of the Ossian cycle) as a starting point for historical analysis (if deception is a problem of origins, so too is the origin of deception a problem). While both Groom and Russett do not, of course, suggest that the question

57 of deception was born wholesale in the eighteenth century (and that Grafton’s earlier canonical work also treats older subject matter is undoubtedly a key reason neither rehashes that territory), the urge to link a genealogy of deception to a genealogy of the author as subject appears to some degree irresistible. Egan, by contrast, given her interest in methods and discourses of authentication, emphasizes the biblical origins of concerns about textual legitimacy: the existence of a specialized vocabulary (apocrypha, pseudepigraphia, and so forth) to distinguish the degrees of authority possessed by a particular text echoes later terminological fastidiousness with regards to forgery and fraud. Both systematic approaches, whether beginning from the emergence of the author as rational individual or from debates over the status of religious texts, highlight the source undergirding discourses of textual legitimacy: Barthes’ Author-God, through this lens, emerges as the inheritor (albeit indirectly) of the prior position of God-as-Author.

Russett’s argument offers another insight into the connection between genealogy and terminology through her emphasis on the importance of forgery in the establishment of generic boundaries, particularly with regards to the development of the novel. Defoe, of course, is an essential figure in the history of the novel and its relationship to the boundaries between truth and fiction; he was, as Russett puts it, “surely among the most exuberant concoctors of authorial fictions” (14). Defoe is an emblem of the “notoriously unstable…ontology [of the novel] in the early eighteenth century,” thanks to his deployment of titular and prefatory conventions imitating the truth claims of (relatively) established forms such as the journal, the memoir, the history, the tour narrative (relatively established as truth-claim genres as opposed to the novel’s still- amorphous fictionality, that is). Citing Ruthven’s minimalist “working definition of fake literature” (Ruthven 39, quoted in Russett 14), Russett suggests, “generic innovators [who] constructed paratexts for non-referential prose…produced ‘forgeries’ in the broad sense outlined

58 by…Ruthven.” And yet, it is Walpole (and specifically The Castle of Otranto), not Defoe, who for Russett signifies the full implications of reading the emergence of fictions and fakes in tandem, and of the way in which “many of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ most notorious ‘forgeries’ [can be seen] as generic novelties that helped to define, by transgressing, the ethical limits of framing fictions like Walpole’s” (17). How, precisely, framing fictions function as ethical rather than formal limits remains unarticulated, though perhaps we are meant to draw our own trajectory from fiction to falsity to ethics (a trajectory I will attempt to trace and complicate further).

This reading is suggested by Russett’s subsequent assertion that “fictions of production, one form of ‘referential’ disguise, paradoxically underline the non-referential status of the texts they frame [and thus] define the novel more generally as a text that lies about its own origins,” at which point Ruthven’s spuriosity and Russett’s unstable fictionality appear to collapse into each other (15). However, Katie Trumpener argues that by1760, “the British novel already had a long history of pseudodocumentary fictions framed, in their prefaces, by pseudoeditorial devices, and on one level, Walpole’s novel merely represents an updating of novelistic conventions, to bring it in line with current intellectual trends [and] builds on the conjunction of Ossian’s particular historical vision (at once fixated on historical details and oddly anachronistic in its generalized historical melancholy)” (111). Trumpener’s argument here undercuts the originary role Russett assigns to forgers as generic novelties, and demonstrates the position that I assert for the impostures my project treats: without dismissing the role of fraudulent texts in pushing generic boundaries, I argue that imposture in particular emerges only in contexts where the contours of a particular genre (and a particular identity and/or history) have reached a minimal level of stability. After all, how does one successfully forge (in the sense of falsify) a Holocaust memoir

59 without a relatively established sense of what a Holocaust memoir looks like? This is not to say that imposture texts (or those on the boundaries of forgery, as Russett situates Otranto) are wholly devoid of innovation, of course, but rather that they are innovators within more established paradigms than Russet suggests.

I have dwelt on Russett’s reading of Walpole because it is to no small degree on him and on Otranto that she frames her understanding of the relationship between the literary and the spurious, which is in turn a key distinction between her approach and my own. For Russett,

Walpole “exposes the imposturous nature of all novelistic discourse,” and “contributes to an understanding of literature more generally as an infinitely expansive class” the “elasticity” of which “is purchased by its recursivesness.” Literature thus becomes “the name for texts that produce their own reception, but their ‘auto-production’ is instituted as metaphor and derived belatedly from an original imposture,” that is, the imposture of fiction as such (16). In this view, forgery emerges as exclusively a matter of reception and the author exits the picture entirely.

Further, imposture in the sense I am interested in merges into fictionality to a degree that blurs the differential ethical stakes Trumpener identifies between figures like Walpole and

Macpherson: the former’s fictional preface for Otranto “makes only local claims, without [the] larger historiographical stakes” of Macpherson’s Ossian (111). Like Trumpener, it is precisely the difference (or perhaps relation) between locally specific and broadly historiographic claims that interests me here, and on which my argument hinges; this difference is mirrored in

Hacking’s twinning of personal and communal memory discussed in the introduction. While the two terms in each pair may not be wholly separable (and indeed in the case of the latter pair, I argue that they are not ultimately separable at all), it is the shading of the local into the more broadly historiographic, of the personal into the communal, that both defines imposture as such

60 and its ethical implications. Recalling Gilmore’s characterization of autobiography’s double imperative to be unique and representative and my attendant argument about the dialectical nature of both autobiographical discourse and the approach to its reading, the necessity of accounting for and balancing seemingly opposed elements or tendencies is further underscored when we address the role of reception and intention.

The question of where spuriosity is located—in reception or intention—is also one to which I will suggest a dialectical answer. Russett is not alone in her assertion of the primacy of reception over intention (a binary that should evoke echoes of poststructuralism’s burial of the author and my discussion above): Ruthven, too, insists on absenting the author and therefore the issue of intentionality from a discussion of spurious literature. He opines that “agency should be ascribed to a spurious text rather than to its author, whose inscrutable motives have to be divined before it can be classified as a ‘hoax’ or ‘forgery’ or whatever” (39). He goes on to dismiss concern with intention as speculation that may be “important to biographers but [is] irrelevant to analysts of the cultural life of a spurious text misrecognized by the institutions that process it”

(39-40). Leaving aside the curious disembodiment required for a text to possess agency and for institutions to enact misrecognitions (is it not the people who read the text and comprise the institutions that do this?), this position may suffice for forgery as Groom defines it but does not go very far in clarifying imposture under the terms I am establishing here. If a text is accompanied by both a paratextual apparatus and extratextual performance aiming to establish its claim to referential truth, is it not exactly the biographical disinterest Ruthven proscribes that creates the institutional (mis)recognition of that text according to the terms it dictates? Put differently, if it describes itself as a memoir and follows the conventions of a memoir, attributing the implied agency of misrecognition to the text’s receiving institutions seems counterintuitive,

61 even accepting the mental gymnastics required to omit the clearly intentional figure constructing the text (especially in autobiography), whether knowingly or unknowingly, along institutionally legible generic lines.

Similarly, while Ruthven is certainly justified in arguing that “writers are not obliged to regard their paratexts as statutory declarations about their texts,” neither can the reader be said to be wholly unjustified in reading a work in accordance with the paratextual apparatus it presents

(44). If writers are not obligated to consider the paratext as contractual, surely we cannot disdain readers for taking said paratext into account on the terms provided to them. Doing anything else would require the very investigative (indeed perhaps even biographical) perspective Ruthven objects to as trapping critical approaches to spurious literature in “the banalities of recognition and denunciation” (48). I agree with Ruthven that grappling with literary fakes is “a metacritical problem” requiring the critic to question whether “each literary forgery is so culture-specific as to render cross-cultural comparisons invalid,” particularly given that literary forgery—like literature itself—is not a transhistorically stable essence but a culturally variable construct,” wherein “much depends, therefore, on whether the organising term for such enquiries is

‘similarity’ or ‘difference’” (59-60). However, I find it more productive to endeavour to strike a balance between the terms he opposes (intention versus reception, universal versus local, similarity versus difference) that instead situates the spurious text and its author within a web of social, cultural, historical, and literary forces. My insistence on asserting the relevance of the authorial figure (though not, to be clear, on positioning her as determinative) is predicated not only on a methodological preference for the dialectical rather than the monolithic but, crucially, on the specificity of the authorial role in imposture as inseparable from autobiographical discourse.

Autobiography, Imposture, Ethics

A persistent concern underlining this project is an attempt to find a language with which to identify the nature of imposture’s deceptions without resorting to the clichéd vocabulary of authenticity critiqued at length by most earlier theorists such as Groom, Russett, and Ruthven.

And yet, the term’s spectre cannot be wholly shaken off, nor is there an easily available synonym which will exclude the tendentious connotations while maintaining the kernel of signification beyond “mere” factual truth that I require in order to insist some untruths matter more, or matter differently, than others. Indeed, this kernel cannot often be found in actual uses of the term authenticity, particularly by its detractors, for whom it frequently appears to be an alibi for a pernicious essentialism rather than a relative of an equally vexed notion of truth. Often accompanied in contemporary criticism by an implicitly derisory use of the term identity politics, such conceptual deployments of authenticity frequently display an inverted understanding of the structural dynamics of power. Whereas literary and scholarly approaches seeking to foreground questions of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, disability, and so on emerged at least in part from a recognition of the complex nature of institutionalized marginalization and oppression, critiques of authenticity in relation to identity politics often perform the strange reversal of characterizing forms of economic, political, and social exclusion as forms of critical cultural capital. It is this logic that, for instance, permits Groom, writing in The Forger’s

Shadow, to characterize “authenticity” as a question of “limit” or “lived” experience, under which doubled heading he includes such examples as “social, gendered, and/or ethnic

[identities]; or experimentation with sex, drugs, and/or radical politics (an often lethal cocktail); or merely by professing a profound and unaccommodating eccentricity” (13). In fairness to

Groom, this point is made in support of the larger and more useful argument that we seek to

63 locate authenticity “in the body of the artist”; however, the collapse he proposes between what might from another perspective be called states of being and experiences overlooks both the question of the social and the nature of power. As Sara Ahmed asks, “How is it that bringing up the question of race [gender, class, sexuality, disability, etc.] becomes describable as identity politics? Pointing out structures (how things fall; how the world is organised around some bodies and not others) is treated as relying on identity. Perhaps we are witnessing the effacement of structure under identity not by those who are involved in what is called 'identity politics' but by those who use ‘identity politics’ to describe the scene of an involvement” (Ahmed). The very characterization of structural approaches to embodiment and social power as a matter of

“identity,” Ahmed suggests, is part of the work of minimizing the lived effects of these structures. Poststructuralist and postmodernist critiques of the nature of identity, or what Russett calls “the sense in which identity as such is rooted in fiction” (12), are in this way too apt to presume that deconstructing the fiction makes it less potent in the context of lived experience. I am certainly not the first to point out that asserting all identity is (to some degree) fictional offers peculiarly small comfort or strategic defence for a person denied housing or subject to criminalization on such ostensibly fictional grounds, or to use Ahmed’s terms, to insist upon highlighting the very ways in which the world is organized around and in favour of some bodies and identities at the expense of others. This is by no means to take an implicitly essentialist position; the best version of a constructivist approach, to my mind, is one that goes beyond the mere observation of identity’s constructed nature to acknowledge its ontological weight, the personal and communal affective investments generated by particular (and particularly marginalized) modes of being in the world. To insist on identity’s constructed nature in order to

64 minimize political claims made on its basis runs counter to the ostensibly liberatory logic underlying any anti-essentialist paradigm.

Groom’s characterization of marginalized gendered or ethnic identities as “limit experiences” begs the question: on the limits of what? Such a position surely recenters the white, the male, the heterosexual, and every other similarly dominant category as identities experienced within the limit, or perhaps, within the bounds of the normative. In these terms, whose experiences are understood as too banal to be of interest, and of interest to whom? Groom’s position stems from a sense of underlying fetishism he notes in the obsession with authentic difference, but his analytical concern slides too easily into a seeming disdain for the objects of that fetishism rather than an interrogation of its enabling conditions and broader effects. Taking aim at the academic contexts in which difference is granted the status of a good unto itself may be a worthwhile project, but in so doing one must recall that to be a fetish object is not the same as being a privileged subject or indeed being granted the status of a subject at all. In other words, the critique of oppression fetishism on a conceptual level is most usefully directed at the fetishizer rather than the fetish object.

This distinction between object and subject is nowhere more crucial than in distinguishing between possessing currency as a site of academic inquiry and in the actual obtainment of power in social, political, and economic terms. As noted above, a critical preoccupation with the narratives of Holocaust survivors or young women of colour (two of

Groom’s examples of the authenticity obsession being Binjamin Wilkomirski, discussed here in a later chapter, and Tracey Emin, a conceptual artist noted for such pieces as “My Bed”) may suggest something (perhaps something unpalatable) about the nature of the scholarly gaze, but it does not follow that Holocaust survivors or young women of colour more broadly find

65 themselves in so dubiously fortunate a position as to benefit regularly and substantially from the structures of marginalization underpinning this ostensibly fetishized authenticity. Interest in a particular narrative or set of narratives—even interest at a broader cultural level than the specifically academic—does not by definition attest to the possession of meaningful power. This interest, following the logic of the fetish, is premised on a relation structured by distortion and consumption, in which cultural products are purchased rather than social relations reshaped, an exceptional (often an exceptionably marketable) figure chosen rather than complex questions of the relationship between individual and group interrogated.

That the purportedly authentic, in Groom’s terms, or at least particular iterations of it, is fetishized is thus not a matter of meaningful benefit to anyone but those who consume it/them and those invested in pointing to the problematics of authenticity or using its undeniable limits in service of a broader critique of identity. Such critiques reach their limit, in turn, when we remember that these fictions must still be lived. This is why I insist on maintaining a theoretical space—that is, a space within theoretical analysis and a space that is itself ambiguously bounded—in which to distinguish the basic truth-value of narrative referentiality in the context of imposture. I realize that even this attempt at a highly specified terminological sense I will alternately call referentiality or veracity is subject to the usual deconstructive gesture—what constitutes “basic” truth-value? In what proportion is it required? Does the concept of referentiality not presume a distinction between inside and outside the text that cannot ultimately hold, let alone require a stability of authorial identity that is similarly tendentious?

It is at this point that the specific generic contours of my project are crucial once again, and it is here I reframe Groom’s argument about the location of authenticity in the authorial body for my own purposes: as I proposed above, if the memoir looks for its validation in the body, or

66 more properly person, of the author, then it is reasonable for the status of that person to enter the critical arena. The relationship between person and author is mutually constitutive in the case of the memoir, which cannot exist without an authorizing figure and in turn performs the work of shaping that figure in narrative terms. This is not exactly the same as the bodily authenticity

Groom invokes, or rather not always the same: in the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, for instance, what is important is not his identity as a non-Jew (that is, that an “authentic” Jewish identity cannot be anchored to his bodily person), but rather that he has not had the verifiable experience of surviving the Holocaust. Saying his story of survivorship is not authentic is more akin to suggesting the experience he describes is not “authentic to the Holocaust,” whatever that might mean; saying his story is not true is a simpler but more serious matter. The first sense of authenticity can be understood as synonymous with paradigmatic or stereotypical (his story does not align with other similar stories in form or in content) while the second is concerned with the minimal level of referentiality constituting the memoir (his textual story does not match his non- textual biography). Authenticity can, of course, refer to truth-value, but part of its ambiguity is the sense that it incorporates not only or simply veracity as such but the nature of the story itself, with a symbolic rather than literal sense of truth: recall Frey’s assertion that A Million Little

Pieces represented his subjective or emotional truth, which we might consider authenticity by another name. As we will see in Chapter Two, critics have made similar claims with regards to

Wilkomirski’s Fragments, namely, that it retains some form of value in relation to the history it describes through its capacity to induce an emotional response in its readers. What, then, are we saying when we claim emotional authenticity can be divorced from factuality within the specific context of a truth-claim text?

For Ruthven (and Russett as well, to a lesser degree), this position is equivalent to policing the bounds of the artistic imagination on the grounds of a representational claim that is always already imposturous. In an echo of Groom’s distaste for the valorization of authenticity and Russett’s assertion of the parallel demands made by forgery-as-fiction and fiction as such,

Ruthven attributes a concern with imposture (though without using that term) to “the reign of identity politics” by using the case of Toby Forward, who sent a collection of short stories to

British feminist publisher Virago Press under the name Rahila Khan (Ruthven 23-25). Virago, under an explicit diversity mandate, published Khan's stories either for their literary merit or their ostensible origins from the pen of a South Asian Muslim woman, depending on which

(cynical) version of the story one prefers. In his postmodern disgust for the negative reactions engendered by Forward's actions, Ruthven deplores a political climate “in which ‘empathy’ becomes ideologically suspect. If nobody has the right to speak for anybody else, then to do so is an invasive act: ‘feeling into’ someone else’s mode of existence [becomes] a molestatory practice akin to feeling them up.” Contrary to the historically dominant humanist model of fiction's beneficial development of imaginative sympathies, Ruthven suggests that critics of

Forward and his ilk, operating within “multicultural societies marked by social inequalities between different ethnic groups,” problematically frame “‘empathy’…as a myth of benevolence designed by the powerful to justify their practice of selectively appropriating the cultures of the powerless” (27). Where Ruthven and I differ here goes to the crux of my project: the critique is not that empathy is necessarily an exercise in power but rather, in cases like Forward’s, that appropriating a marginalized identity under the name of empathy is such an exercise. Had

Forward (or any of the impostures covered here) presented the Khan stories under his own name, he would not have been immune from a different sort of criticism surrounding the politics of his

68 representation (and the question of tokenism in efforts to promote diversity is a real one I do not mean to minimize). Writing under his own name in Forward’s case (or under their names in cases of imposture more generally) would engage with the limits and benefits of empathy in the precise way that his appropriative pseudonymity avoids by acknowledging, rather than masking, the writer’s outsider status to their subject.

Moreover, Ruthven’s sardonic use of the “molestatory” metaphor, apart from serving as critique-minimizing hyperbole, overlooks that what is at issue here is a question of knowledge rather than feeling (up): though Forward as Khan was writing fiction, the dynamics parallel autobiographical imposture insofar as the authors in question implicitly frame alterity as both knowable and legible to the (privileged) self. The act of empathizing differs from the act of appropriation because recognizing that empathy is needed requires an implicit acknowledgment that the other in question is not me; this is not to suggest that the other is unlike me in essentialist or deterministic ways (more on this below) but is other as such; all that is not-me is other in this way. Even if one does not accept the subjugating terms in which Levinas (for instance) frames the self/other relationship, as well as his insistence on the other’s unknowability, this does not require understanding critiques of appropriation as a dismissal of empathy full stop, as Ruthven suggests.

The impostures I discuss here, then, engage with questions of otherness and ethics on multiple levels, and in turn there are multiple levels on which (or perhaps lenses through which) to approach the question of ethics in the context of this project; I have mentioned a number in passing already. In the James Frey case, the debacle gained momentum and attention through

Oprah Winfrey’s personification of the betrayed reader, a position that understands the author’s transgressions against literary categories as an offence primarily against the reader’s trust. Ethics

69 first enter the picture, then, to the extent that lying is always an ethical issue, whether in a particular case or as a general principle; it is also at the level of the individual, interpersonal lie that the notion of harm is easiest to quantify (given the widespread dissemination of the impostures I discuss, it is not only readers in the abstract but specific literary agents, editors, colleagues, etc., who were deceived in varying degrees). This is ethics at the level of highly specific intersubjective relationships, however, and of limited interest from a literary and/or critical standpoint. Nevertheless, the responses of betrayed readers extend the question of ethical wrongdoing and harm to the more broadly intersubjective as well as the generic and thus the literary: even if a writer prefers to take the autobiographical pact as a Platonic ideal rather than a practical aspiration, the act of imposture goes beyond merely violating its tenets to thumb its nose at its very premise. That said, can the autobiographical pact be called, in whole or in part, an ethical obligation? Are the readers deceived by imposture victims of unscrupulous but convincing performances or of their own belief in the transparency of the pact and the language in which it is enacted?

The potential implications of the autobiographical pact and its violation do not end with the question of the deceived individual or betrayed community of readers, but can be extended further in the context of ethical claims made for both the writing and reading of autobiography and in turn to the nature of intersubjective encounters through literature and beyond. This is both a matter of the specific self-positioning of particular texts and the ethical position of literature as such; I suggest that the memoir’s dual status as subjectively situated and engaged with public acts of memory (or in Gilmore’s terms, both unique and representative, or invested in both the personal and group levels of memoro-politics in Hacking’s) makes it uniquely suited to an interrogation of the ethical claims made on behalf of literature. Before fully elaborating this

70 assertion, however, it will be useful to consider the texts and contexts that constitute the “ethical turn” in literary studies, and thus the sense of what an ethical approach to literary imposture might constitute.

A Levinasian Approach to the Ethics of Imposture

As I noted in the introduction, the work of Emmanuel Levinas has been central to current theorizations of literary ethics, particularly the primacy of the self/other relationship in

Levinasian thought. Not only is the intersubjective dialectic foundational to Levinasian ethics, but the self’s subservience to the other is equally important in his paradigm. In Levinas’ thought, intersubjectivity is not only asymmetrical but also marked by a crucial limit: “Our relation with

[the other] certainly consists in wanting to understand him [sic], but this relation exceeds the confines of understanding” and marks the first principle of ethics (5). This relationship also cannot take place outside of language, since “[the] impossibility of approaching the other without speaking means that here thought is inseparable from expression…[and further] addressing the other is inseparable from understanding the other” (6-7). Though the self’s relation to the other

“is not reducible to the representation of the other,” (7), we have no access to the expression of this relation without language and thus, in some measure, representation. The appeal of

Levinasian thinking to the literary critic should begin to be evident here; moreover, apart from the location of the intersubjective encounter in language (the “other cannot be approached without language” [4]), it is also language that “awakens in me and in the other what we have in common [and] assumes [both] our alterity and our duality” (25-26). Language opens us to what we share by the very shared nature of language itself, while at the same time underscoring our duality, our separateness, insofar as language will never suffice for me to explain or make known

71 myself to you or vice versa, while being the only tool we have in our perpetually unfolding efforts to know and make known.

Further, it is not only ethics that take place through the encounter between self and other that structures the nature of intersubjectivity, but the concept of justice itself emerges from this dynamic; it is, after all, sociality that is ultimately structured by the one-to-one nature of intersubjectivity. “The totality rests on a relationship between individuals” (27), and in “a certain sense, all the others [autres] are present in the face of the other [autrui]” (106). Levinas’s approach, then, understands subjectivity and relationality in metonymic terms particularly suited not only to literary analysis in general but to the analysis of texts purporting to offer the reader a representation of marginalized histories and experiences through the author’s relationship to those who share, in some measure, the story she offers. The importance of justice in the intersubjective dynamic for Levinas is also particularly suited to the stakes of the autobiographical trauma text, since to “seek the I as a singularity within a totality made of up of relationships between singularities that cannot be subsumed under a concept is to ask whether a living person does not have the power to judge the history in which he is involved” (25). Levinas further suggests that “injustice […] is at once recognition and non-recognition” (30) of the other and her otherness, another insight that is particularly adaptable to my project here, as impostors misrecognize their own histories, the histories of those they appropriate, and arguably the nature of history more generally, even as they invite misrecognition—or perhaps false recognition—on the part of their readers. If we accept Levinas’s emphasis on the priority of intersubjectivity for ethics, and particularly his insistence on both the necessity of recognition and the limits of the other’s knowability to the self, we see once again that the underlying problematic of imposture is not simply a matter of factual deception (though this element is of course constitutive) but also

72 one of misrecognizing, and indeed misrepresenting, the very nature of the relationship between language, knowledge, and intersubjectivity.

As Robert Eaglestone notes, however, a programmatic application of Levinasian thought to literary study poses several problems, not least of which is Levinas’s emphasis on the face-to- face nature of the self/other encounter. For Eaglestone, a Levinasian ethical criticism requires not only the self/other relationship but a related pairing as well: the saying and the said. Language, for Levinas, is comprised of the ‘transcendent’ saying (dire) and the ‘immanent’ said (dit), the interweaving of which enables ontological signification. Eaglestone distinguishes two approaches to literary ethics: epi-reading “’is predicated on the desire to hear. . .the absent person’” and approaches language as “transparent, a window through which the world of people, actions and events can be seen” (3), while graphi-reading “prioritises language, text and reading over a nostalgia for the human and seeks to engage with texts ‘in their virtuality’ […] it represents ‘the eclipse of the voice by text’” (4). Neither approach suffices for Eaglestone: epi- reading sees a world through the text and thus ignores language, while graphi-reading’s engagement with language traps it within the text and unable to find an ethical space beyond that language. In turning to Levinas and the relationship between the saying and the said, Eaglestone aims to forge a dialectical approach (though without specifically invoking dialectics). The saying

(and thus the said) is inseparable from the Levinasian other: “The saying is the impossibility of denying the other; the site of our responsibility for the other” (143). This means that, per

Eaglestone, the “ethical is in language, if at the cost of a betrayal in the said of language” (169), giving literature an essential role in the realm of the ethical, since the “‘saying’ in literature is precisely that uncanny moment when we are made to feel not at home with the text or in ourselves …These moments of fragmentation are a testimony to the irreducible otherness of the

73 other and to our responsibility” (175). The self’s responsibility for the other, taking place both in the face-to-face encounter and within the realm of language, therefore engages the reader in a position of responsibility to the text-as-other and, in the case of autobiography, the author’s alterity.

By this point, the stakes I suggest for imposture should be clear: the falsification of autobiography, as the invention of both text and life, when supplemented by extratextual performance, emerges as the falsification of testimony (understood as an ethical mode). Further, the power dynamics at play in imposture, which entails the appropriation of a marginalized identity by a relatively privileged author, go beyond disrupting the communicative ethics of testimony to invert them entirely. My analysis of imposture, however, does not rest at identifying its ethical inversion but extends to an interrogation of literary-testimonial ethics more generally: if imposture constructs alterity as knowable to the privileged self of the imposturous author, is there a sense in which the very notion of life writing as testimonial presumes to offer its readers a knowable other? For Whitlock, a major consequence of what she calls tainted testimony, and a partial explanation for the sense of betrayal it evinces in its readers, is its undermining of the act of identification across categorical difference. That is, readers feel betrayed by having empathized with an ostensible other who turns out to be, instead, a version of the same.

Discussing Khouri’s Forbidden Love/Honor Lost (the subject of my third chapter), Whitlock characterizes the work of identification as both “pleasurable” for the reader (121) and “likely to be a difficult act” (122). Empathetic identification is pleasurable, per Whitlock, in its “self- affirmation” both of the reader’s relative empowerment and her status as ethical agent (Whitlock

121, Smith and Shaffer 12). For Derek Attridge, “the other is that which is not knowable until by a creative act it is brought into the field of the same” (29), but it remains worth asking what kind

74 of knowledge is in question, as well as what kind of pleasure; is empathetic identification of this kind pleasurable because it is difficult, or does this very pleasure contradict the notion of its difficulty? I want to suggest here, and will reiterate this claim in more detail in my textual analyses, that what imposturous texts offer (not exclusively, but differently) is the pleasure of empathetic identification that does not require putting the very terms of the self’s ability to know the other at issue, that is, it offers the veneer of ethical engagement without the challenge meaningful engagement with difference requires. Indeed, this reliance on simplicity and stereotype emerges as one of the hallmarks of the imposture memoir: simplicity, that is, in the presentation of the nature of ethical engagement rather than simplicity of expression. Simplistic ethical engagement involves an affective sense of the ethical without an intellectual interrogation of its terms, an embrace of empathetic proximity that not only denies but obscures the possibility of the critical distance required to recognize and grapple with the ways that I am not, and cannot be, the other. By offering the guise of (appropriated) difference filtered through the lens of the same—a sameness located not only in our eventual knowledge of the “true” author but on display in the text itself—the issue is not only the ethics of deception but the nature of ethical engagement itself within autobiography and the literary realm more broadly.

Chapter Two

Truth, Lies, and Holocaust Historiography in the Twenty-First

Century: Disproven Memoirs and False Testimony

The aporia of Auschwitz is…the very aporia of historical knowledge: a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (12)

The figure of the autobiographical author, as have seen in the preceding chapter, cannot be read as a wholly agentic, self-contained subject, offering a transparent representation of a stable self in language, but it cannot equally be reduced to a mere function of the text itself without any external existence or referential weight. The autobiographical author serves as the bridge between text and world, as it is her existence in the latter that undergirds, justifies, and motivates the former. In this chapter, I apply the framework developed in the preceding pages to the cases of Holocaust imposters Binjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca, as well as Herman

Rosenblat’s incorporation of a fictional romance into his otherwise true narrative of survival. I suggest that the terms under which Wilkomirski and Defonseca found their initial success highlight the limits of trauma theory’s emphasis on the literality of traumatic memory, and this formulation’s deferral of engagement with the question of verifiability poses both a problem for the theory and a gap through which the imposter can enter.

Historicizing Myth, Mythologizing History

In 2005, only months after nature’s violence and government’s neglect created the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, a friend of New York magazine editor Mark Jacobson named Skip

75 76

Henderson obtained a salvaged lamp at a rummage sale in New Orleans for $35. Tasselled in

Mardi Gras green and purple, the delicate lampshade was, by all accounts, arresting, revealing a striated texture that suggested what mitochondrial DNA testing would later prove: against all odds of time, space, and recent history, this was a lampshade made from human skin. Unnerved by continued proximity to the object he had bought after the seller’s assertion that this was a legendary “Holocaust lampshade,” made from the skin of a Jewish victim, Henderson mailed the lamp northward to his journalist friend, who began an odyssey documented in The Lampshade: A

Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans (Simon and Schuster, 2010).

Combining investigative journalism and the personal reflections of an American-born Jew who learned about the Holocaust from the relative safety of Brooklyn, Jacobson’s mission was twofold: first, investigate the lampshade’s composition and origins, and second, determine what should be done with a relic embodying the collision of the individual and historical via that most intimate of objects, human skin, warped into a form attesting to the experience of collective violence. What, Jacobson wonders, would be the greater disrespect: to deny a human victim the dignity of a burial or to remove such a powerful piece of evidence from public view?

Discovering the lampshade’s origins proved both remarkably simple and frustratingly elusive, as multiple DNA tests in the United States and Germany all agreed the shade was made of human skin but could go no further due to the passage of time as to when or where it may have been created. History, Jacobson writes, tells us that its most likely birthplace would be

Buchenwald, where the commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch (bearer of the famous moniker “the Bitch of Buchenwald” and inspiration for the 1974 cult classic “Nazisploitation” film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, which boasted the tagline “I turned my lovers into LAMPSHADES!”), was known to select prisoners whose tattoos interested her for death, removing their skin in strips and tanning it

77 for alleged use as book covers, furniture upholstery, and the infamous lampshades.1 Jacobson’s research takes him from a New York cantor who does double duty as a forensic analyst to infamous Holocaust denier, white supremacist, and former Louisiana State Representative David

Duke; the most provocative interview for our purposes, however, is with Diane Saltzman, the former head of collections at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, inaugurated in 1993. Inquiring into the possibility that the museum might accept the lampshade,

Jacobson is rebuffed in fascinating terms: in spite of the mitochondrial DNA tests, according to

Saltzman, the lampshade is part of Holocaust mythology: “Even if you could document it one hundred percent,” Saltzman tells Jacobson, “it would still be a myth” (117).

There is much to unpack in such a statement, embodying as it does a mix of seemingly unscholarly perversity and historically founded mistrust of the sensationalism with which these alleged objects have been met by the public, which Saltzman might claim distract and detract from the “real” evidence of the Nazi slaughter. It is indeed true that amongst legitimate scholars, there is consensus that the practice of making lampshades from the skin of Jews was certainly not widespread and may well not have occurred at all; as Jacobson emphasizes, there are no preserved lampshades whose provenance can be clearly and definitively traced to Nazi production. That lampshades continue to be vivid evocations of the Nazi period in the collective imagination has proven useful fodder for deniers, and Saltzman’s evident desire to distance herself and the museum from unprovable assertions is certainly not unreasonable. To take a step further, however, to asserting that even a fully documentable lampshade would be irrelevant to the history of the Holocaust effectively suggests that an object once characterized as a (potential)

1 This is actually a creative mistranslation of the name the prisoners used for Koch, which would be more accurately rendered as the witch (“die Hexe”) of Buchenwald (Jacobson 19). The alliterative epithet has endured in the English- speaking popular imagination nonetheless; for instance, the New York Times review of Jacobson’s book uses the alliterative version without reference to its inaccuracy (Garner).

78 myth is always a myth, and belies the complex back-and-forth that comprises the history of the

Holocaust and indeed the process of historiography itself. Though the term “revisionist” appears to have been more or less successfully appropriated by those whose goals are more accurately described as the denial or minimization of the genocide, it is in a specific sense a legitimate descriptor of how the historical record is established, interrogated, and rewritten as newer, better, or simply different sources of information emerge, particularly after violent conflicts. The exact death tolls of the individual camps, for instance, has undergone scrutiny and debate in legitimate scholarly circles and is now known with greater certainty than in the immediate postwar period; the total number of Nazi victims, both Jewish and non-Jewish, has been subject to a similar process. What is known about the Holocaust, in other words, may not be static, but this is decidedly not the same thing as suggesting that knowledge as such is impossible.

As Omer Bartov argues, it is essential “to distinguish between the wholly objectionable politics of denial and the fully legitimate scholarly revision of previously accepted conventional interpretations of any historical event, including the Holocaust” (11-12). For this reason, I follow writers like Bartov and Lipstadt in referring to those whose arguments explicitly or implicitly attempt to deny, minimize, or distort the genocide as deniers. A key distinction, as Lipstadt observes, is accepting the presence of “a certain body of irrefutable evidence” that genocide occurred (21). Ceding ground, in other words, to the mythologization (attempted or otherwise) of certain components of the Holocaust, as Saltzman appears to do in her interview with Jacobson, begs the question of how the logic her statement displays would affect other testamentary and evidentiary forms whose validity has also been questioned, with varying degrees of success. To take but one example, the diary of Anne Frank was (like many other testimonies) exposed to claims of fabrication upon its initial publication and was in turn subjected to scientific testing of

79 its paper and ink, both of which were proven appropriate to the time period and place in which the diary was written. I am not, to be clear, suggesting that Saltzman means to imply that any piece of evidence that has been questioned should be classed as myth and discarded from the official record (what would remain if this were the case is an open question). Nevertheless, her statement suggests a shift in the discourse of Holocaust history from a concern with factuality to a concern with the appearance thereof; in other words, whether or not sensational claims and objects like the lampshade or, per Jacobson’s other example, soap made from the fat of Jewish victims, can be proven to have existed in small or large quantities is, by this rationale, less relevant than the fact that ostensible examples of these objects have been disproven.

This is peculiar logic, not least because, as mentioned above, it assumes that the fact of inaccurate or exaggerated claims about the exact nature of particular atrocities has a collectively contaminating effect so strong as to render objective analysis impossible. Whether or not the

Kochs (or any other Nazi figures) did make lampshades from the skin of their Jewish or non-

Jewish victims, flayed and tanned human skin was among the artefacts filmed during the liberation of Buchenwald (Jacobson 103-105), and while separating sober fact from hysterical fiction is not an ignoble goal, when the contours of that process cannot be stretched to accommodate not only the discovery that what was previously considered true was false but that what had been dismissed as false might be true, there is a flaw in the logical circuit. The idea that the existence of lampshades made from human skin is so irretrievably damaged by a legacy of uncertainty or outright falsehood that to allow for its possible truth would irremediably taint the legitimate historical record is thus logically and ethically suspect.

In the discussion that follows of two Holocaust memoirs whose factual status has been definitively disproven (in one case by DNA and in the other by the author’s own admission of

80 deception), this is precisely the argument I wish to avoid making, that is, that such fabrications undermine the overall truth-value of Shoah history itself or somehow quantifiably diminish the experience of actual survivors. I would consider it entirely fair to argue that the actions of faux memoirists display a distressing lack of regard for the truth or confusion about its boundaries, as well as what can only be rather understatedly termed disrespect for the suffering of those whose lives and histories they appropriated, but this is not the same as allowing their fabrications the power to call the entirety of the Holocaust or the stories of its victims and survivors into question. The same can be said of Holocaust deniers; while I would not agree with the suggestion that adversarial engagement with deniers such as David Irving dignifies ludicrous and offensive arguments—in particular, denial that spuriously masquerades as legitimate scholarship is worth meticulous demolition—the counter-assertion that an Irving or a Wilkomirski should be taken as a threat to the very fabric of the history and memory of the Holocaust both goes too far and misses the point.

That point, to put it plainly, and to state what should be obvious, is that at this moment in time any fair-minded person cannot deny that the Nazi programme entailed the perpetration of deliberate and atrocious policies of systematic enslavement and murder that resulted in the death of between five and six million Jews and approximately six million members of other groups persecuted on the grounds of politics, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and gender, and disability. We should well know the difference between insisting on clear-eyed and precise historical accounts, such as distinguishing between the six camps whose sole purpose was extermination and the others where slave labour, disease, and starvation were the primary methods of killing, versus claims that attempt to minimize, distort, or deceive, such as the deniers’ insistence that there were no gas chambers or that more Germans died in the carpet bombing of Dresden than did

Jews in the Nazi camps. While those who, like Irving, Ernst Zündel, or others affiliated with organizations like the so-called Institute for Historical Review, may well do damage, to suggest they have the power to call the entirety of the genocidal events of the Nazi period into question does a serious disservice to the careful work of countless scholars, researchers, writers, and survivors who have amassed a collective body of evidence that cannot and should not be devalued (let alone called into question) by the actions and assertions of particular individuals or groups. I argue that to assert otherwise is to enact what Dominick LaCapra would call transference in a scholarly sense, that is, “the tendency to repeat or reenact performatively in one’s own discourse or relations processes active in the object of study” (2001: 36), wherein what is revealed is not the actual effect of Holocaust denial but rather our collective anxieties about it, anxieties that are clearly increasingly potent as we approach the historical moment at which no living survivors of Nazi violence will remain.

That is not to say, evidently, that deceptive accounts of personal Holocaust experience are irrelevant (that I take them as the topic of this chapter should be sufficient to suggest otherwise), but rather to make clear that I wish to examine the conjunction of factors that made both the writing and credulous reading of Wilkomirski and Defonseca’s texts possible. What made the two appropriate the role of Jewish child victim as their own, and what made readers believe them? What formal or structural mechanisms might the two works have in common, and how might these elements relate to the type of contract the works propose to make with their readers? While addressing these questions will necessarily require engagement with the faux memoirs as literary texts, I approach these works more broadly as cultural objects in the form of events, from development to publication, reception and disproval, with implications that go

82 beyond the literary to address and reveal crucial facets of our contemporary relationship to and understanding of the ethical and epistemological significance of the Holocaust.

Witness Testimony and Trauma

The role of the witness in the context of the Holocaust has been essential from the moment the first Allied troops arrived to liberate the concentration camps in the spring of 1945.

In now-famous photographs, most notably those published in newsweeklies like Life and Time that offered a generation their first and perhaps most lasting visual memory of the Nazis’ atrocities, military personnel were greeted by the doubly unimaginable sight of neatly piled corpses and emaciated victims, still alive against all odds and in some cases distinguishable only from the dead by the faintest of signs. Though the Nazi mania for meticulously documenting their own crimes is an essential part of the history of the Holocaust and our subsequent understanding of it, it was first and foremost the living victims who offered immediate and crucial testimony to the crimes they had survived. The categories of witness and victim, then, have had overlapping boundaries in the context of the Holocaust from the moment knowledge of the scope of its horrors began to spread across Europe and the world.2 In this way, the position of the witness is inextricably linked to the question of testimony, itself in turn inseparable from the narrative act; in its most basic definition, we might understand testimony as the act of witnessing in narrative form (the latter term being understood in its broadest rather than narrowest sense, that is, as a process of arranging and telling that is not necessarily or indeed ever complete, let alone structured in deference to strict laws of chronology). Similarly, the fact that what is being

2 Raul Hilberg divides levels of Holocaust involvement into three categories: perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. Though all three are witnesses, and though one of the more pernicious aspects of the extermination process was its implication of victims in operating the genocidal machinery, there is a clear and essential ethical distinction between the last category and the first two.

83 borne witness to in the context of mass violence is necessarily a traumatic event further implicates the intertwined questions of the witness and her testimony in the issue of how such experience is narrated, in turn a question inseparable from the nature of memory generally and traumatic memory in particular.

Theories of testimony are thus necessarily confronted with the complex limits and politics of memory. As a singularly subjective act—as a survivor of violence, one testifies to what one has seen or experienced oneself—testimony occupies an inevitably communal or public role, begging the question of how memory can understand and give shape to traumatic experiences.3 While this is a fraught position for the witness of ongoing violence, whose testimony may aim to induce a response to the conditions from which it emerged, it is differently so for the witness distanced from traumatic experience by time and space, as has long been and becomes ever more the case for witnesses to the violence of the Nazi regime.4 Moreover, theories of trauma and its registration as memory emerging from Freudian psychoanalysis have

3 In a court of law, one can of course also testify as an expert witness, which, while still a subjective act insofar as the knowledge is located within and articulated by a given individual, is different in that one does not necessarily attest to an experience as do survivors of violence. Moreover, witnesses who testify in court to events they have seen or experienced are subject to different forms of questioning than those who take the stand on the grounds of expertise. Holocaust denier David Irving’s 1996 libel suit against scholar Deborah Lipstadt offers an interesting case of overlap between the two types of witness described above. Explaining the decision made by herself and her legal team not to call Holocaust survivors as witnesses in the trial, Lipstadt says that because the trial was about Irving’s beliefs and claims rather than the factuality of the Holocaust (a distinction Lipstadt notes she and her lawyers were committed to preserving in their approach), calling survivors to testify would have meant treating them as expert witnesses and thus subjected them to interrogation as to the minutest details of their memories, not to establish what did or did not happen in their individual cases but as a way for Irving (who acted as his own legal representative) to attempt to undermine the very status of survivor memory and its reliability. 4 As I wrote this, news circulated that the last known survivor of the Nazis’ mass internment and murder of gay men had died (New York Times, “Rudolf Brazda, Who Survived Pink Triangle, Is Dead at 98,” August 5, 2011). Research by the Dallas Holocaust Museum then uncovered another, still living gay Holocaust survivor, named Gad Beck, also the author of a memoir called An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (dallasvoice.com, “Another living gay Holocaust survivor found,” August 9, 2011). Beck, however, was not interned for his homosexuality as Brazda was but was rather arrested on the grounds of his half-Jewish background, begging the question of what exactly it means to be the last gay Holocaust survivor: is it a matter of the coexistence of gay and survivor experience in one life, or the experience of having been interned specifically on the grounds of sexuality? As we advance further into the twenty-first century, the question of the last survivor—who it will be, how we will know, and so forth—will undoubtedly become a greater preoccupation. The question must also be asked what, if anything, will change when “the last survivor” (a term already shading into the mythical) in historical or memorial terms.

84 emphasized trauma’s belated temporality: trauma, in this view, is not fully apprehended as it occurs and only emerges to consciousness as memory after the traumatic event has passed. This gap between the event and its recollection further complicates the belated framework of testimonial speech, which can after all only be given in the aftermath and thus is necessarily retrospective, and doubly so insofar as a gap exists between the event and its recollection on the one hand and its narration as testimony on the other.

It has been suggested that the relatively belated appearance of representations of the

Holocaust in the public sphere, and public interest in the event more broadly, reflects this belated temporality, which in turn makes it of particular note that these three memoir fabrications have only emerged in recent years. Though it would certainly be an overstatement to suggest that no depictions of the Nazi era (and particularly its genocidal apparatus) appeared in the years immediately following the close of the war—Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), generally considered the earliest documentary of the attempted extermination, appeared in

1955—it is safer to observe that the explosion of the Holocaust into the public imagination was indeed relatively belated. The beginning of the public confrontation (perhaps even obsession) with the Holocaust, particularly in North America, is usually traced to 1978 and the airing of the

TV miniseries Holocaust (Novick 209).5 The explosion of the Holocaust into the public sphere in the late 1970s was thus well-positioned to coincide with the institutionalization of Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of the conclusion of American involvement in Vietnam.

Though the psychiatric and psychoanalytic responses to PTSD were indeed largely concerned

5 The narrative is, unsurprisingly, somewhat different in Germany, which saw a number of trials, most notably the 1947 Auschwitz trial, in the postwar period and faced a different context (or rather, two different contexts, following the country’s separation) for its grappling with a past that took place on its own soil. There remains much debate about how — and how well — Germany has grappled with its genocidal legacy; some key dates include the 1968 student movement that swept much of Western Europe, Syberberg’s 1977 film Hitler: ein Film aus Deutschland (in English, Hitler: A Film from Germany), the Historians’ Debate c. 1986-89, the publication of Victor Klemperer’s journals in 1995, and most recently, the inauguration of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin in 2005.

85 with the latter event, critical theories of trauma have, as I suggested above, focused on the former. The emergence of trauma theory, then (and more specifically, the temporality and geography thereof), can itself be read as symptomatic of broader dynamics of collective memory and its repression, in which the Holocaust returns, belatedly, as the exemplar of a condition defined clinically in relation to later events. This question of temporality in the context of trauma generally and the collective relationship to the Holocaust in particular is a point to which I will return in greater depth in the discussion below of Wilkomirski and Defonseca: as I argue that it is not a coincidence that trauma theory has emerged in a particular time and place and manifests a specific relationship to history, so too do I suggest that similar dynamics can be unearthed in the memoirs in question, which have not appeared in this time (and in various places) by accident.

First, a closer examination of trauma theory’s response to Holocaust testimony is warranted, through which I will argue that one essential context for Wilkomirski and Defonseca’s memoirs is the fundamental displacement of the question of veracity in these frameworks.

Felman and Laub’s jointly authored volume entitled Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in

Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1991) contains what may be taken as an archetypal account of the position of the witness (and one that, in turn, performs the double movement of enacting and exemplifying its attendant paradoxes) in Laub’s discussion of the testimony of an unnamed female survivor. At a conference on testimony and the Holocaust, a group comprised of both historians and psychoanalysts encounters the testimony of this woman, who survived internment in Auschwitz and witnessed the (tragically brief and violently concluded) uprising of a number of camp inmates (members of the Sonderkommando, or special squads of Jewish inmates forced to assist the Nazis in the process of mass murder). The survivor in question, in

Laub’s summation, shifts from an otherwise monotone account to inject a measure of passion

86 and even triumph into her recollection of the explosion of the crematoria, describing her vision of four burning chimneys in a memory that is clearly still powerfully evocative for the teller.

According to Laub, her voice loses its colour and returns to an almost dispassionate flatness as she continues to narrate her experience following the uprising and the return to the status quo of manufactured death following the repression and apparent execution of the saboteurs (59-63).

Even if Laub’s account were to have ended there, we would already be faced with an act of testimony offering evidence of Agamben’s paradox of the (in)complete witness, which would suggest that the story of the Auschwitz uprising can never be complete, as its true witnesses would be those who resisted and paid the price, and consequently did not live to tell the tale of their extraordinary actions.6 In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben identifies the absence of this voice of the complete witness as an essential lacuna, predicated upon Primo Levi’s assertion that

“No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner, since it was not materially possible for him to survive” (quoted in Agamben 33).7 According to Agamben, this means the “‘true’ witnesses, the ‘complete witnesses,’ are those would did not bear witness and could not bear witness” (34); or in other words, what can never be told is the full truth of the Nazi genocide’s success, that is, the truth of not surviving. In Felman’s terms, this lacuna represents the impossibility of speaking

6 It is also worth nothing that situating the murdered saboteurs as “true” or complete witnesses is complicated by their status as members of the Sonderkommando, that is, the Jewish prisoners responsible for operating the machinery of the gas chambers. Along with the members of the Jewish Councils and the leaders of various European Jewish communities who knew what was to happen to their fellow Jews and failed to warn them, the Sonderkommando members were among the subjects of Arendt’s harsh and controversial comments in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Levi, by contrast, insists on the moral impossibility of passing judgment on the Sonderkommandos, the primary occupants of his famed “grey zone” wherein distinctions between victim and perpetrator can no longer be maintained. One could argue that the very ethical ambiguity of their position makes the Sonderkommando members the “truest” witnesses to the logic of the Nazi regime, concerned as it was with creating victims who, in the eyes of the Reich, justified their victimization by becoming complicit with it. Those who prefer to emphasize the innocence of the Jewish victims in simple terms (that is, innocence in a moral rather than juridical sense) would more likely disdain this reading of the Sonderkommando and find themselves in a perhaps unlikely alliance with Arendt and her citation of the rabbinical proverb “let them kill you, but don’t cross the line” (119). 7 Since Agamben is quoting from an Italian edition of the posthumously published Conversazioni e interviste (called The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961-1987 in the English edition), I have based the citation on Agamben’s usage rather than attempting to match two differently paginated editions, one in a language I do not read.

87 inside the event, that is, inside death itself (232), and is essential to our understanding (or the impossibility thereof) of the significance of the Holocaust in ethical and epistemological terms.

Testimony, then, has always been haunted by the impossibility of its own completeness, a gap that will be rhetorically exploited by Wilkomirski and Defonseca.

However, the most significant aspect of Laub’s anecdote, for my purposes, is outside the story of the testimony itself. Following the survivor’s account, a debate ensued between the historians and the psychoanalysts (or at least, the initially unnamed analyst who Laub subsequently identifies as himself) as to the accuracy of the witness’s recollection. The historians were aware that according to other testimony and available physical and documentary evidence, only one chimney could possibly have been seen burning, since the uprising had only successfully damaged one crematorium; consequently, according to Laub, the historians felt the rest of the woman’s testimony must necessarily be doubted as a result of a rather grave inaccuracy from their point of view. The historians, in other words, though not necessarily witnesses themselves, took what Laub evidently considers the arrogant position of assuming themselves to possess greater knowledge than the witness herself. Provocatively (and I think correctly, albeit within limits), Laub argues that while the historians sought confirmation of their prior knowledge, the witness was offering instead something new and heretofore unknown, as she testified, again according to Laub, not to the historical particularity of the event of the uprising, but to its quasi-ontological significance from the point of view of the camp inmate. The witness, Laub argues, spoke of “the breaking of the very frame” of Auschwitz itself: “The historians’ testifying to the fact that only one chimney was blown up in Auschwitz…does not break the frame. The woman’s testimony, on the other hand, is breaking the frame of the concentration camp by and through her very testimony: she is breaking out of Auschwitz even by

88 her very talking” (62). Laub suggests that within the existence of the camp, the sight of one chimney burning was as shocking and impossible as the sight of four burning chimneys, thus transforming a factual inaccuracy or misremembering into a deeper attestation to the nature of the camp universe as such, reading what is clearly an error from an evidentiary point of view as a truth in ethical, psychoanalytic, and indeed philosophical terms.

Laub’s argument represents both an extension and a reversal of Diane Saltzman’s logic with regards to the lampshade discussed above: in both cases, the facts themselves become less important than the ends to which they are used (mythologization in the case of the lampshade, attestation to the “breaking of the frame of Auschwitz” and thus a greater emotional truth in the case of the testimony’s factual gaps). We can see a related tendency in Felman’s claim that the

Holocaust’s “literally overwhelming evidence makes it, paradoxically, into an utterly proofless event: the age of testimony is the age of prooflessness, the age of an event whose magnitude of reference is at once below and beyond proof” (211). Though Saltzman and Laub/Felman take their arguments in opposite directions—the former moves to exclude potential proof on the grounds of its contamination by accusations of prooflessness while the latter two wish to underscore the value in a proofless misconstruction of a proven event—both responses are predicated upon the assumption that the factual record has been established and is now, in a certain sense, less relevant than its interpretation and narrativization. Berel Lang takes this emphasis on interpretation as characteristic of the “post-Holocaust” era: “if the essential facts of the Holocaust and that term’s basic referent have spoken, much else has also been said about and around them that is not at all obvious or self-evident, but has had to be inferred or constructed or interpreted.” Consequently, the “search for connections among facts in the effort to trace them to their origins and then to push forward to their consequences unavoidably establishes a distance

89 from history’s surface” (xi). Lang is not, to be clear, calling for a return to a strictly evidentiary mode free of or perhaps prior to interpretation, nor do I cite him here to those ends; rather, the purpose is to highlight the stakes of interpretation. If moving away “from history’s surface” is one of interpretation’s enabling conditions, it is especially crucial to mark the distance travelled from that surface and ensure it remains within view in taking account of the value of testimony, particularly testimony the historical record would prove to be flawed. The question thus becomes one of the balance between evidence and interpretation, or between what is known and how that knowledge (or lack thereof) is understood.

This story of the misremembering witness, which will be repeated in other influential theorizations of trauma and testimony and granted the primacy of an almost inaugural scene of witnessing (for instance, this anecdote opens Kelly Oliver’s Witnessing: Beyond Recognition), is suggestive in many ways not exhausted by Laub’s interpretation of the witness’s resistance to the oppressive frame of discourse in which first the Nazis and then the historians worked to make active resistance an impossibility. In a clear sense, this story can be taken as paradigmatic of the nature of testimony itself if and only if the question of the witness’s status as verifiable (if not, in strictly historical terms, accurate) witness is taken as given. Put differently, her account is only testimony if she actually witnessed something, whether or not what she witnessed was identical to her testimony. To be absolutely clear, my intent here is certainly not to suggest that the woman in Laub’s account was not an Auschwitz survivor, nor that her memory’s divergence from the established record does or should call either the entirety of her memories or her very status as a survivor into question; to do so would be to enact at best a revisionist gesture on the continuum of denial and at worst to repeat the very act of Nazi erasure. Laub is right, I think, to point out that the historians’ dismissal misses what is most powerful in the witness’s story.

However, without his and their assurance of the truth of the woman’s past as inmate and victim, her story would offer an instance of pathological or transferential memory, rather than what Laub wishes us to see: an example of the greater (potential) truth offered by memory in contrast to history (as a discipline making methodologically objectivist claims, at least relative to memory’s subjectivity).8 Laub’s argument relies on the assurance of her survivor status in order to extrapolate a larger truth from her misremembering.

In other words, then, as Agamben argues, we are confronted here not only with the essential lacuna defining the testimonial act but the aporia of Auschwitz, which is in turn the very aporia of history itself: the impossibility of co-incidence between fact and truth, or alternately, the revelation that testimony cannot exhaust history and vice versa. Agamben’s emphasis on the void at the heart of testimonial discourse — the voice of the “true” or

“complete” witness—both enacts and exemplifies the paradoxes of presence and absence, memory and history that are central to the project of philosophical and sociopolitical comprehension of the place of the witness and, especially, the witness who testifies to a personal implication in traumas on the historical scale. Moreover, this paradoxical absence at the heart of both history and testimony (perhaps best understood as the absence testimony makes evident in the core of history’s objectivist or positivist claims) is a problem not only reflected in a number of post-Holocaust discursive structures but perhaps (to a limited extent) created by them.

Agamben, for instance, questions if the postwar trials themselves contributed to the problem of imagining the law could exhaust the dilemmas of working through the genocide (20). We might

8 This is not to suggest that there are no debates amongst historians as to their own discipline, particularly with regards to these issues, which played no small part in inaugurating history’s postmodernist turn as represented in the work of Hayden White; this discussion relies necessarily on rather broad strokes, which I think are not unjustified, particularly in the context of Michael Rothberg’s argument elucidated below.

91 equally ask if the influential formulation of traumatic memory as both literal and unrepresentable has constituted as much as articulated the gaps posited as constitutive of traumatic memory itself.

The survivor of a traumatic event, Caruth argues in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,

Narrative, and History and her edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory (and Felman, writing in Testimony, follows the same lines), will experience the memory of that trauma as both unyieldingly literal and by definition inarticulable. According to Caruth, this paradox of literality and unspeakability is not simply psychical or, more broadly, psychoanalytic, but physiological, as she argues (or adopts the work of Bessel van der Kolk to argue) that traumatic memory is registered differently on the level of cortical functions than ordinary memory, accounting for both the literality of its traces and its non-narrativizable character.9 She writes, “modern analysts…have remarked on the surprising literality and nonsymbolic nature of traumatic dreams and flashbacks…It is this literality and its insistent return which thus constitutes trauma and points toward its enigmatic core,” that is, its belatedness coupled with its “insistent return [that remains] absolutely true to the event” (1995:5). She goes on to reiterate that “the dreams, hallucinations and thoughts are absolutely literal, unassimilable to associative chains of meaning” (5), and, even further, that “the images of traumatic reenactment remain absolutely accurate and precise” (151), making clear the inseparability of her conception of trauma from this notion of its literal registration. That definition, namely, “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearances of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (1996: 11), is, as Leys has observed, notable for its reliance on the case study of a perpetrator (Tasso’s story of Tancred’s accidental stabbing of his beloved, Clorinda). Further, this definition of trauma is

9 An account of this perspective can be found in van der Kolk’s contribution to Caruth’s edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory; a critique is offered in Leys’ Trauma: A Genealogy.

92 identical to the one Caruth later offers of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), begging the question of whether the two are always already identical phenomena, or, in other words, if the traumatic event is indistinguishable from its pathological response.10 In a passing acknowledgement of the heated debates about recovered or suggested false memories, Caruth goes on to point to “the urgency of creating new ways of listening and recognizing the truth of memories that would, under traditional criteria, be considered false,” (1995: viii) but declines to explain what kind of truth such memories might offer or, indeed, how to distinguish the true from the false, particularly if listeners and clinicians are meant to presume literal truth until proven otherwise. What, in other words, is the relationship between literality as subjective truth and referentiality as external verifiability in a Caruthian model? As we will see in the

Wilkomirski case, the literal truth of imagistic memories does not mean the traumatized survivor will possess an equally literal recollection of the context of their emergence.

By contrast, Felman’s focus is influenced less by the biomedical than the deconstructive, as she argues for the impossibility of narrating the Holocaust in the first person as a problem of limits, namely, the limits that mark the survivor’s status as inside or outside the event. From inside, a position analogous to Agamben’s “true” or “complete” witness, narration is structurally impossible first because the speaker lacks the requisite distance to arrange events in sequence and put them into language, and further because of the way in which the Nazis’ genocidal project made those limits collapse in the first instance. From outside, testimony will always be subject to

10 It is interesting to note (as Leys does not) that this aspect of Caruth’s theory to some extent mirrors the psychiatric/psychological institutionalization of trauma in the form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which emerged with specific reference to American veterans of the Vietnamese war. Without denying the undoubtedly traumatic experiences of these veterans, it cannot and I think should not be ignored that their traumas were caused not only by their own victimization at the hands of the Viet Cong but were in many cases the results of actions they witnessed and at times participated in as well. This notion of being traumatized or indeed victimized by one’s own potential acts as a perpetrator remains under-theorized in the case of the Vietnam war and actively disavowed (often for understandable if not always consistent reasons) in the case of the Nazis perpetrators. That many (myself included) would experience a strong instinctive resistance to the latter possibility suggests the importance of subjecting both reaction and case to further scrutiny, especially in comparative terms.

93 a temporal and epistemological gap. In essence, then, not only is testifying to traumatic experience in the most temporally and subjectively immediate sense a structural impossibility, but the problem of verification of traumatic memories and the witness’s experience is both theoretically accounted for in the literality of the memory and endlessly deferred in the unspeakability of traumatic memory as such. While Leys observes in her rather devastating critique of Caruth in Trauma: A Genealogy that Caruth’s twinning of literal memory and narrative impossibility makes her theory unverifiable (253), I would suggest that her theory makes traumatic memory constitutively unverifiable to a degree that renders the testimony- history aporia wholly insuperable. It is one thing to insist, as in Laub’s account of the historians’ conference and the Auschwitz survivor, on the full complexity of testimony’s relationship to the traumatic event, but it is another to theorize traumatic testimony as wholly divorced from veracity. It is this gap between the testimonial and the verifiable that Wilkomirski and Defonseca occupied.

Put differently, granting the importance of Caruth’s complication of notions of historical knowability in relation to traumatic memory, her theory nevertheless oscillates too far away from legitimate concerns of referentiality. Felman’s assertion that an excess of proof can become transmuted into prooflessness similarly exemplifies what Michael Rothberg, in Traumatic

Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, describes as one of two approaches to the study and understanding of genocide, particularly in the context of Holocaust studies. The

“realist” approach relies on “an epistemological claim that the Holocaust is knowable and a representational claim that this knowledge can be translated into a familiar mimetic universe,” and has been the preferred methodological vantage point of historians and social scientists. By contrast, Felman and Caruth represent the “antirealist” tendency. The latter two theorists focus

94 on “a claim that the Holocaust is not knowable or would be knowable only under radically new regimes of knowledge and that it cannot be captured in traditional representational schemata” (3-

4). Further, and crucially for my argument, Rothberg takes the position that the antirealist strand

“removes the Holocaust from standard historical, cultural, or autobiographical narratives and situates it as a sublime, unapproachable object beyond discourse and knowledge” (4). This treatment of the Holocaust as sublime is linked to the supposed literality of traumatic memory with particularly pernicious effects in the context of Holocaust impostures.

Rothberg’s discussion of the need for a balance between the realist and antirealist approaches to the Holocaust in epistemological terms echoes Agamben’s caution against the tendency to define the event in terms of its unspeakability. Though Agamben would agree with the (antirealist) claim that full knowledge, or full articulation, of the Holocaust is impossible, he asserts the necessity of holding open the possibility of speech, even while acknowledging its contingent and impossible completion. For Agamben, “antirealist” scholars as defined by

Rothberg walk a dangerous line: “if, joining uniqueness to unsayability, they transform

Auschwitz into a reality absolutely separated from language [and, I would add, referentiality], if they break the tie between an impossibility and a possibility of speaking that…constitutes testimony, then they unconsciously repeat the Nazis’ gesture” (157). In other words, if the argument that testifying to the event is impossible specifically because of its uniqueness is taken to its logical conclusion, then it represents the absolute triumph of the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate all witnesses to their crimes. Equally, to bow before the survivor of trauma as if before a sacred figure re-enacts that gesture from the opposite direction but with the same effect, that is, that the task at hand is no longer to confront fully the mix of banality and extremity that made the events of the Holocaust possible but merely to proclaim it beyond all understanding and therefore not

95 worth the attempt. I argue instead that the ethical question that confronts the theorist of Nazi genocide and the reader of Holocaust memoirs is how to continually endeavour to confront the desire for knowledge without believing such knowledge can exhaust truth, or, put differently, to maintain respect for the witness’ speech without the uncritical deference that enabled both

Wilkomirski and Defonseca to deceive their readers and themselves on the grounds of the absolute uniqueness of their experience and the literality of their memories.

The Curious Case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, alias Bruno Grosjean-Dossekker

This critique of the formulation of the witness-to-trauma’s memory, as advanced in my discussion of the antirealist school, echoes in some respects historian Stefan Mächler’s analysis of the enabling conditions of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s deceptive memoir, in which the latter portrays himself as a child survivor of the Holocaust, a story that has been disproven as definitively as possible. Beyond the total absence of any documentary evidence in support of

Wilkomirski’s various claims (and the presence of documentary counter-evidence), a DNA test revealed that the man calling himself Wilkomirski could not be the Jewish child survivor of his memoir (Geller 344). The more prosaically tragic story of a single mother deemed unfit to parent by the Swiss state and subsequently forced to surrender her child accounted for his early years, not internment in a camp. Following the explosive public allegations of imposture levelled by

Swiss writer Daniel Ganzfried, Mächler was hired by Wilkomirski’s literary agency to research his autobiographical claims, and his meticulous research revealed a persona constructed on the basis of a psychotherapeutic process that relied on principles in remarkable accord with Caruth’s conception of the operation of traumatic memory. Over a period of years and with the assistance of his partner, friends, and therapist, the man calling himself Wilkomirski took the literality of

96 his imagistic and fragmentary childhood memories increasingly as given, allowing them to form the foundation of historical research that was subservient to verifying his memories (rather than using his memories to supplement a prior given knowledge of his biographical history).

Wilkomirski’s recollection of a particular house and hill, for instance, would lead him and his associates to search for a location that would support his memories; this operation is in marked contrast to, for instance, the visitations performed by Claude Lanzmann in Shoah, in which the director would travel with a given witness to a location meant to evoke memory—Wilkomirski, instead, used memory to evoke historical location.

First published in German in 1995, publicly challenged in 1999 (by Ganzfried), and finally definitively disproven in 2001 (by a DNA test with his documented biological father and half-sister), the ostensible memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood by a man calling himself Binjamin Wilkomirski is among the most notorious (and perhaps the most complex and indeed bizarre) cases of Holocaust-related literary deception. Where Wilkomirski’s most direct antecedent, Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird, both intrigued and exasperated critics and readers alike with its (auto)biographical ambiguity, as the author famously vacillated on the details of his own life and its relationship to his book for years,

Fragments was published, marketed, sold and celebrated as nonfiction from its first appearance to its eventual discontinuation. While this is not to suggest that Kosinski’s attitude towards his text’s truth claims (let alone its truth value) is unproblematic in literary and/or ethical terms, the distinction between equivocation and outright prevarication marks a fine but crucial line, albeit one that Kosinski himself debatably traversed and re-traversed until his suicide in 1991. On the one hand, Kosinski’s private assertion to Eli Wiesel that the young boy in The Painted Bird was the author himself prompted Wiesel to publish a much more laudatory review of the text than he

97 had initially planned (Gourevitch 67); on the other, Kosinski included a defensive preface to the

1976 edition strenuously insisting he had never claimed author and protagonist were identical, placing the blame for the autobiographical reading at the feet of critics alone. No matter how disingenuous his attempt to place the blame for a biographical reading of the text on the book’s reviewers and critics may have been, the book’s indisputable publication as a novel and the very fact of Kosinski’s shifting depiction of its relationship to his life place it in a related but distinct category from Wilkomirski’s memoir, which, as we will see, insists on its veracity at every textual turn.

Moreover, and crucially for my purposes, Kosinski’s autobiographical fictionalization is of a fundamentally different order than Wilkomirski’s: unlike the latter, the former was indeed a

Jew and present in Nazi-occupied Poland (in hiding) for the duration of the war. Though

Kosinski was not separated from his parents, like his child-narrator, nor did he experience the particular forms of isolation and brutality he described, and sometimes claimed, via his text, his

“claim to Jewish and survivor identity [was] authentic” (Egan 139). Accordingly, I view

Kosinski as best placed as a hyperbolizer in the vein of James Frey rather than an imposter given his Jewish status and wartime experience. I cannot, then, agree with Egan that though in spite of

Kosinski’s status as a Jew and a survivor, “his distortion of his history in text and in life created the new identity of the solitary child survivor of appalling atrocities and belongs, accordingly, among the impostors” (138-139). Characterizing Kosinski as an imposter because of the effects of his text on future imposters rather than the relationship between text and author specific to his case reverses the causal logic of imposture; that Kosinski’s textual exaggeration of his wartime experiences would later provide a template for Wilkomirski (and Defonseca, to a lesser extent) does not retroactively nullify his own biography as a Polish Jew. I would argue that to rank

Kosinski among the imposters loses what is most important in ethical terms about imposture as such: the non-coincidence between the facts of an author’s biography and its textual depiction (or construction). Indeed, it is to some degree the very aim of this project to distinguish, in literary and ethical terms, between a Kosinski and a Wilkomirski. It is for these reasons that I do not include Kosinski among the imposters, contrary to Egan’s view. That said, the novel’s unstintingly violent narrative, child narrator, and ahistoric plotting are all features shared by

Fragments (and by Misha Defonseca’s disproven Holocaust memoir, discussed below) and are indeed, as I follow previous critics such as Egan and Lawrence L. Langer in noting, essential both to Wilkomirski’s literary aesthetic and his deception. Indeed, as Heidi L. Pennington and

Sue Vice have both argued, this aesthetic itself provides the initial textual grounds on which to call Wilkomirski’s story into question, as the titular fragments contain the first clues to the gap between Wilkomirski’s ostensibly literal memories and their problematic relationship to verifiable history.

As has been noted by critics such as Mächler (275) and Miller (52), the text of Fragments begins with a disavowal: the author informs the reader that he lacks both a father and a mother tongue, an act that necessarily but ironically takes place within the realm of language. What strikes a tragic chord to the sympathetic reader will more likely seem to the critical reader (in this case, particularly one who reads knowing how Wilkomirski’s broader story ends) disingenuous and perhaps even clichéd; crucially, it both foregrounds and displaces the issue of language simultaneously. Langer, elucidating the grounds for his reading of Fragments as a novel from the first instance, points out that Wilkomirski’s assertion of the “Babel-babble” tongue he inherited from his time in the (here unnamed) camps at Majdanek and Birkenau elides the practical consideration of how the conversations he recounts unfold, given his initial claims about his lack

99 of language. Langer identifies two particular moments in the text in which verbal communication takes place, apparently without difficulty but, equally, without comment on how this might be possible for a languageless child (who, the opening pages also state, after a point lost the power of speech entirely, though that point is, naturally, unspecified). Both incidents Langer identifies take place at Majdanek, and both strain credulity when subjected to detailed interrogation.

Wilkomirski describes what passes in the camp for friendship with an older boy he calls Jankl, who takes the role of protector and teacher in the children’s barracks, showing young Binjamin how to move his feet continuously at night, even in his sleep, to protect himself from what the author describes as a plague of rats.11 While some of the information Jankl provides could theoretically have been exchanged through gestural communication and with a minimal reliance on spoken language, Wilkomirski depicts a longer and more complex verbal exchange between the two without offering any clarification as to its logistics. In a typically gruesome episode, two visibly starving babies are left in the children’s barracks and are found dead after their first night having gnawed their frostbitten fingers to the bone out of hungry desperation. Phenomena like frostbite and its corresponding numbness would seem nearly impossible to explain without a relatively sophisticated shared vocabulary, and yet Wilkomirski presents Jankl’s explanation of the events without an explanation of his own as to how their conversation took place at all.

Later, in the second event Langer highlights as an example of a linguistic confusion that alerted him the dubious truth value of Fragments, a camp guard seeks out little Binjamin to take him to a woman he concludes must be his mother. Notably, this is also the first appearance of the

11 This passage is crucial to Mächler’s investigation of Wilkomirski’s biography; the former’s research, which included a conversation with noted Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, makes clear that there was no significant presence of rats at Majdanek (as opposed to Birkenau). While this might suggest a simple inversion of the presence of rats in Wilkomirski’s memory of the two camps he claimed to survive, the importance of Jankl’s tutelage in the story of the rats firmly locates that anecdote at Majdanek, unless Wilkomirski was also confused as to which camp barracks he shared with the older boy.

100 author’s name in the text, and it passes without comment in spite of his claim later in the memoir to have only learned his name when he was identified as “the little Wilkomirski boy, Binjamin

Wilkomirski” by the woman he claims escorted him to Switzerland, identified as “Frau Grosz,” a name Mächler points out is very similar to the name of Wilkomirski’s (actual) birth mother,

Yvonne Grosjean. Leaving aside the improbability (also noted by Langer) that a camp guard should show such seemingly random consideration for the child and his mother, how does the conversation itself take place? How, if Binjamin doesn’t know his own name or identity, does the guard know who he is or who his mother is? The same questions might apply to the later encounter with Frau Grosz: after the German abandonment of Auschwitz-Birkenau, she apparently recognizes Binjamin and brings him to Switzerland only to disappear, leaving him the only child with a blank name tag in a group of orphans under Red Cross supervision. This is yet another moment where literary symbolism not only pushes the bounds of credulity (the use of a blank name tag to represent the absence of a stable identity would surely be considered almost too on the nose in a fictional context) but appears to disregard them entirely (wouldn’t any name, even an invented one, be less conspicuous?). This problem is compounded and perhaps indeed created by the child’s narrative voice so crucial to the construction of Fragments.

The acceptance of the child’s point of view underpins the affective work Fragments so successfully performed on its early readers, who are told from the outset that in order to tell his story, Wilkomirski (and thus, by extension, his readers) must “give up on the ordering logic of grownups” (378), which in turn creates a contract between reader and author relying on a “you’re either with me or against me” division that essentially equates the disbelieving reader with

Nazism (276). Thus, for all Wilkomirski’s assertions that Fragments should be read as a transparent documentation of his photographic memories (377), his ostensible memoir displays

101 the hallmarks of a text carefully structured to induce empathetic identification along his desired lines and, simultaneously, to preemptively inoculate his work against the same criticisms to which it eventually succumbed. The manipulation of perspective is key here: while it is technically correct that the narrator never wholly abandons the child’s voice, this overlooks that the narrative does occasionally venture into the life of the adult Wilkomirski in content if not in structure. One of the text’s most graphically violent passages, in which Wilkomirski describes seeing rats emerge from a woman’s corpse in a concentration camp, is exemplary here (443). It is unclear whether or not the woman was pregnant, but in the mind of the child narrator the movement within her abdomen merges with a recollection of having been told by an older girl that children move within their mothers’ bellies in a similar fashion (443). “The dead women are giving birth to rats!” the terrified child thinks, which causes him intense anguish and makes him physically ill. After this anecdote, told as if locked within the child’s narrative point of view, comes one of the few moments in which we move forward explicitly to the life of the adult

Wilkomirski, who tells us:

Many years later I went with my wife for the birth of our first son…The first thing

that slowly became visible was the half-round of the baby’s head. As a first-time

father, I didn’t know how much dark hair a newborn baby can have. I wasn’t

ready for this little half-head of hair. All I could do was stand still and stare at it,

and once again, like an echo from before, I heard the ringing and crackling noise

in my chest. (444)

Going on to describe what he calls the nurses’ mocking laughter as he leaves the birthing room, this passage is characteristic of the way in which the narrative perspective does not noticeably change in spite of the shift in chronology, and instead reinforces both Wilkomirski’s total

102 isolation and perpetual victimization. This is not to say that actual survivors of traumatic violence such as the events of the Holocaust do not experience flashbacks or unwanted recollections of past images in the present, both hallmarks of the contemporary understanding of traumatic memory; what is notable here is rather the way in which the narration allows for a seamless continuation of the child’s Holocaust experiences into his adult life without the addition of any post-flashback adult perspective.12 Further, the narrative appears to draw a structural and thus moral equivalence between the nurses’ apparent callousness and all the other adults who played a role in the past victimization of the child and thus by extension those who would continue to do so by failing to believe in the truth of his memories.

Mächler’s suggestion that Wilkomirski’s work “demonstrates many of the hallmarks that—for good reason—apply to the reports of genuine witnesses: the offer of identification with the victim, a division of the world into victims and villains, the rhetoric of facticity” (307) might be said in fact to suggest the generic conventions of the dubious or deceptive Holocaust testimony, give or take a few additional characteristics. This is in sharp contrast to the acclaimed memoirs of writers like Jean Améry, Charlotte Delbo, Saul Friedländer, and Primo Levi, where the ways in which distinctions between victim and villain collapse is frequently crucial in thematic and ethical terms, as is a repeated questioning of the very terms by which ethical judgment and knowledge itself are possible. A desire to avoid prescriptivist claims about the nature of Shoah memoirs makes generalizing from these admittedly exceptional figures a dubious proposition (as Mächler points out, the majority of written testimonies are valuable as witness documents rather than literary accomplishments); and yet, a preference for Levi’s literary approach as opposed to, for instance, Wiesel’s need not be “merely” aesthetic. Without

12 Also notable is the transformation of rats emerging from a woman’s belly into a child’s head emerging from a woman’s cervix, which passes without commentary.

103 reducing the texts in question to simplistically representative status (without ignoring their construction or literariness), memoirs, and particularly those treating an event of historical importance on the scale of the Nazi genocide, will necessarily engage not only with history but with historiography and epistemology more broadly. That is, the choice of how to tell the story of a life is also a choice implicated in the narration of its history, and therefore offers an implicit

(or sometimes explicit) position on the very narrativizability of history as such. Levi, for instance, is a central figure in Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz thanks to his nuanced theorization of “the grey zone,” a concept that proves fruitful for Agamben based on its effective undercutting of exactly the type of binary approach that made Wilkomirski’s and Defonseca’s memoirs so problematically successful and so historically and ethically suspect.

Wilkomirski’s apparent deployment of Caruthian suppositions (knowingly or unknowingly) with regard to the nature of traumatic memory and the testimony emerging from it can be seen as an abuse of that framework, or, both more simply and complexly, as a pathological enactment of transference between the psychobiographical and the historical. I would argue instead that the ease with which Caruth’s paradigm proves appropriable by an individual intent on deception (whether self-directed or otherwise) points to the extent to which the formulation of trauma as structurally aporetic displaces the essential question of how, in the essential instances of intersection between personal memory and historical record, interrogation and verification may take place. To take traumatic memory and testimonial attestations to it as always literal on a psychical and cortical level cannot but create the corollary of pernicious doubt when such memories prove to fail the litmus test of literality, which indicates a critical theoretical failure as well. This deferral of verification or authority (traumatic memory is literal- but-fragmentary) can be seen as in itself symptomatic of what we might identify, following

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LaCapra, as transference between the theorist and the object of study and what Agamben might perceive as ceding ground to a sacralizing mentality.

One of Mächler’s most provocative discoveries over the course of his investigation of

Fragments confronts the limits of the literality paradigm directly. Tracing the (verifiable) childhood experiences of Bruno Grosjean prior to his adoption by the Dossekkers, Mächler encountered the now-adult son of a former foster family with whom Bruno resided in 1944 and

1945. René Aeberhard, 18 at the time of Bruno’s arrival at his family’s farmhouse, identifies a number of parallels between the Aeberhard farm in Switzerland and the Polish farmhouse described by Wilkomirski as a temporary hiding place in Fragments. These parallels are both geographic (the location of hills, the layout of farmhouse and barn) and narrative: Wilkomirski describes flying small glider planes with a boy he claims was his older brother, Mordechai, a memory that René shares albeit with himself in the role of older brother (Mächler 246). The consistency between the fragmentary memories of an idyllic farmhouse coupled with a sense of threat—a Polish farmer’s wife who will later betray the Jewish children in Fragments, the apparently mentally ill and occasionally violent Aeberhard mother described by René—points towards a crucial limit to the notion of traumatic memory as registered literally, namely, that the content of the memory’s images may be literal without any clarity as regards the context of those memories. Once Dossekker decided on his true identity as Wilkomirski, memories that may have been inflated or even created via dubious therapeutic techniques could reasonably merge with prior, literally true memories, with the latter becoming further evidence in service of the truth of the former (Mächler describes Wilkomirski’s approach to therapeutic remembering at length

[246-252]). “In this sense,” Vice suggests, “Fragments represents a fantasised instance of

Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit, in which the backward glance of adult understanding has not

105 accurately recognized those elements that were incomprehensible to the child, but furnished an illusory explanation for them” (Textual Deceptions 158-159). We can see another version of this approach to memory verification in Blake Eskin’s A Life In Pieces, a memoir describing his own encounters with Wilkomirski, briefly thought to be a possible relative through Eskin’s maternal family before the imposture’s unveiling. Upon meeting the Wilburs (an anglicized version of

Wilkomirski), Wilkomirski repeatedly attempts to identify himself or his phantom father and brothers in Wilbur family photographs, switching targets whenever the identity of a particular figure is known to the Wilburs and makes Wilkomirksi’s self-identification impossible. As in his therapeutic process, he attempts to slot potential evidence into pre-existing memories, seeking to reinforce his established narrative interpretation. In other words, the false identity of the child survivor may well have emerged from precisely the literal memories Caruth describes interpreted in conjunction with an inaccurately reconstructed context, and unquestioned on the grounds of both their literality and their ostensible status as Holocaust narrative. What Mächler reads as a potential kernel of (literal) truth within Wilkomirski’s (interpretive) narrative thus becomes, in my reading, another way to approach the critique of traumatic literality and its inability to account for referential context.

The lacuna at the heart of testimony (as conceptualized by Agamben and shared up to a point with Felman) requires a continual oscillation between speakability and unspeakability to be fully apprehended, an oscillation that can itself be understood as the practice of testimony with all its attendant gaps. Agamben and Felman part ways, in the former’s account, as a result of the latter’s privileging of unspeakability conjoined with uniqueness; in a related vein, Caruth’s version of this binary, which emphasizes literality and unrepresentability, does not allow for a productive third term to emerge or, indeed, for a space to grapple with authority and

106 intelligibility to open beyond the foreclosure of her focus on literality. To insist on testimony as aporetic is not the same, Agamben wishes to remind us, as insisting upon its impossibility but rather to demand attention to the unceasing movement it requires in and beyond what the survivor can and cannot know about her own experience and her place in history. The recourse to literality, in its attempt to grant a seemingly inviolable authority to simultaneously fragmentary memory, has the ultimate effect of displacing the question of authority outside the frame of the testimony and indeed the frame of what theorizing traumatic testimony itself can account for.

This, in turn, leaves questions of truth in a historical sense vulnerable to the purview of those who would question testimony with the aim of disproving its veracity rather than interrogating its multiple and always partial sources of authority.

Genocide With Wolves

Following the Wilkomirski scandal was the perhaps even more bizarre literary unmasking of Misha Defonseca, nee Monique de Wael (a name she claims was imposed and changes to Monique Valle in her memoir). Originally published in 1997 as Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years and later republished by a larger house as the painfully titled Surviving With

Wolves, with two French versions in between (Textual Deceptions 166-167), Defonseca’s story took the original approach of combining the faux survivor memoir with the older and odder genre of the feral child narrative, itself rife with histories of deception. As erstwhile Wilkomirski critic Eskin points out, Defonseca’s story strained credulity at the most basic level, from her initial assertion that she did not know her own family name at the age of six to the multiple lupine encounters over the course of her ostensible four-year journey on foot from Belgium to

Russia and back again with only a minuscule compass to guide her. The Defonseca story, from

107 her memoir’s initial publication and commercial (though not critical) success to its subsequent repudiation, offers some instructive parallels to the Wilkomirski case in both literary and structural terms, not least of which are some striking similarities between how the two authors went about constructing their narratives and in the true losses that seem to be transformed and recontextualized as false survivor stories.

As in the Wilkomirski case, Defonseca claims confusion surrounds both her birthdate and birth name, which ostensibly emerges from her informal adoption in circumstances shrouded in secrecy. According to her memoir, her earliest memories consist of a peaceful if restricted existence in Brussels with a Russian Jewish mother and Polish Jewish father, who lived with her in semi-hiding from an unspecified point in time. She states early on in the text that she has no memories before approximately six years of age (20), and even then she recalls only her parents’ given names (Getrusha and Ruven) and her own (Mishke, likely a diminutive form rather than a legal name). The reader’s potential skepticism at her amnesia—tragic if the lost memories of a true survivor, convenient if the evasions of a pretender—is meant to be mitigated by the author’s insistence on the danger that surrounded her family, which presumably forced her parents to keep her in the dark about their identities. However, if her birth took place in 1934 as she states

(rather than 1937, the year of Monique de Wael’s birth), it seems unlikely at best that in the five years prior to the start of the war she should have been kept ignorant of her family name or prevented from encountering other relatives or family friends whose existence could later be invoked in support of her survival story.

Again like the Wilkomirski case, then, the narrative demands the reader’s suspension of logic as its initial premise, linking the emotional reward of empathetic identification with the child-victim to the elimination of critical reading (already a difficult balance, and understandably

108 so, for many readers of Holocaust survival stories); as Mächler so productively observed in

Wilkomirski’s case, the use of the child’s narrative perspective offers the reader two potential positions of identification, either victim or victimizer; a literary binarism that proved, at least initially, remarkably effective in both cases. Also mirroring the narrator of Fragments, Misha’s eponymous narrator claims an excellent memory (with particular emphasis on its visual character) while also omitting nearly all references to dates over the course of the text.

Consequently, it fell to literary and genealogical detectives to reconstruct the timeline of Misha’s parents’ disappearance, which the author tellingly situates in 1941 when, as experts point out, the deportation of Belgian Jews did not begin until 1942. The long journey “to the East” that Misha begins in 1941 directly contradicts official Belgian records that place Monique de Wael in a

Brussels school until 1943, and most damning of all is the baptismal certificate indicating that, again like Wilkomirski, the author of Surviving With Wolves was not born Jewish, however

Jewish she may now claim to have “always felt” and whatever the state of her current religious belief or practice.

From the outset, the child’s perspective is once again used to mirror and justify the incomplete nature of the narrator’s memories, which in turn reflects and is bolstered by the theoretically emphasized fragmentation of traumatic memory itself. If Wilkomirski’s logic, as

Mächler claims and I have extended, can be understood as asserting the truth of his memories on the very grounds of their unverifiable incompletion, Defonseca’s narrative sidesteps the question of verifiability altogether. Where Wilkomirski fails to narrate his post-Holocaust life, Defonseca gives her earliest childhood the dreamlike treatment of an idyll followed by an immersion into the cruelties of her adoptive family, whose banal violence appears nearly equivalent in the narrator’s emotional terms to her later encounters with the Nazi program and its representatives.

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Put differently, while both authors focus their stories on their experiences of the war years,

Wilkomirski appears to be born via his interpellation as a Jewish subject (albeit unnamed as such) by Nazi violence, where Defonseca, whose early years are narrated under the shadow of a threat whose nature is unclear to the child, recalls an early family life marked by love as much as by the danger from which the child is swiftly removed. The facility of these contrasts, and the apparent mobility of the Nazi from literal threat to figural moral equivalence to distant family or skeptical reader, registers as both signs of the texts’ problematic factual status and generic markers of the imposter’s easy manipulation of empathy. Where Wilkomirski-as-child-survivor is born through violence, Defonseca is pulled into it; while the denial of the former’s Jewishness is imposed by an adoptive family that exists largely outside the frame of Fragments, the latter’s non-Jewish guardians are the initial antagonists in the text through their refusal to discuss the truth of Misha’s parents’ disappearance or the nature of the Nazi threat, even going so far as to trick her into eating pork in what appears to be a straightforward display of unprompted cruelty.13 In both cases, the erasure of ostensibly hereditary Jewishness is a key component of the story, but for Defonseca this concern is largely textual (as befits a quest narrative) while it is extratextual for Wilkomirski.

Though neither Wilkomirski nor Defonseca (or, more accurately in this case, Dossekker and de Wael) experienced the genocidal violence of the war as Jews, both did confront losses at a young age, and in de Wael’s case this loss was a clear product of the war. Dossekker’s story is

13 This is another point at which a reader’s critical faculties might come into play. In the anecdote, Misha hungrily eats an unknown form of meat at dinner (meat is a consistent and rather disturbing leitmotif in the memoir, used to emphasize her supposedly instinctive animality) only to be told triumphantly by her caretakers that she is eating pork. She writes that she only discovered later that pork is forbidden to Jews according to the laws of kashrut; though her ignorance of this fact makes a certain amount of sense if one accepts her near-total isolation from other Jews (and indeed the company of anyone other than her parents), it is otherwise questionable that a child should achieve the age of seven without awareness of such dietary restrictions, which are amongst the earliest forms of religious education a child receives (especially one, like Misha, who would attend a mixed school). What would seem like an unnecessary skepticism if Defonseca’s story were more consistent becomes, in the light of her deception, another clue.

110 the prosaic but no less subjectively tragic tale of a child removed by the state from a mother deemed unfit to care for him for reasons that cannot but appear in hindsight to be the product of a sexist and classist state system. Dossekker’s mother Yvonne was an orphan herself, and only discovered she was pregnant after an accident that left her seriously injured and living with permanent physical disabilities at the age of nineteen. Her youth, unmarried status, and supposed

“loose morals” as demonstrated by her reproduction outside the bounds of wedlock (and with the

17-year-old son of the wealthy family with which she boarded), left her in the impossible position of relying on a state that would not offer her sufficient financial support to enable herself and her child to survive and whose representatives displayed a fundamental suspicion of her capacities as a parent. Her own circumstances, as Mächler points out, illustrate the terrible injustices of the former Swiss practice of treating poor, unadopted orphans as essentially indentured child servants called Verdingkinder (Lappin 63-65), as well as the less historically specific discrimination so frequently experienced by single mothers (and particularly those with disabilities) in their interactions with state institutions.

De Wael’s childhood loss is similar in its character—that is, the traumatic removal of a child from its parents—and, crucially, in the role of shame in the construction of her alternate persona. While Dossekker has never conceded the impossibility of his Wilkomirski persona, upon being confronted with the evidence procured by the investigating genealogist (the baptismal certificate and school records mentioned above) de Wael admitted her lie and attributed it, at least in part, to the shame of having been called the daughter of a traitor. Unlike

Dossekker’s experience, the loss of her parents is irrevocably linked to the Nazis: the two were arrested as members of the Belgian resistance, and her mother Josephine passed through a succession of concentration camps before dying of illness in Ravensbruck in 1945. Her father

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Robert, meanwhile, was originally believed executed after his arrest but instead, it seems, named fellow resistance members under torture and ultimately died of exhaustion in German custody.

Though de Wael allegedly did not know the details of either one of her parents’ deaths as a child, rumours of Robert’s disclosures apparently reached Brussels during the war, leaving young

Monique without either parents or heroic myth to comfort her. After the war, according to Le

Soir, Robert’s name was removed from a memorial to victims of Nazi persecution, a literal effacement mirroring his eventual disappearance in his daughter’s narrative. This erasure does not, however, make irrelevant the role of the Nazis in the deaths of the two elder de Waels;

Josephine’s death in Ravensbruck as a consequence of her resistance activities makes her as much a Nazi victim as any other inmate who met her death in a camp, and whatever the truly terrible results may have been for those he named, Robert’s death was equally a consequence of

Nazi violence.

Thus, without suggesting or conceding to her own apparent belief that the younger de

Wael thus somehow becomes Jewish through an amorphous transubstantiation of one kind of suffering into another (which is both ludicrous and unnecessary), or offering an apologia for her deceit, we might take the case of Defonseca/de Wael as illustrative of the broader question of who counts as a victim and what such differentiation does or does not mean. That is, while her family was not, properly speaking, victimized by the Holocaust (understood as the deliberate attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews), they can be considered victims of the Nazi regime, a legacy complicated for the younger de Wael by the surely haunting prospect that her father’s torture may have led him to be party to the victimization of others through the information he apparently disclosed. As with so many of the other conceptual pairings I have elucidated in this discussion, the question is one of holding together two contradictory ideas: that one can be both

112 victim and unwilling victimizer or, in de Wael’s case, inheritor of both positions. To visit the alleged sins of the father upon the daughter is cruel and unnecessary; and yet this is the shadow de Wael describes as hanging over her childhood and her adult life. Given her propensity for mistruth, we cannot know whether this transference of guilt from one generation to the next was largely a product of her own mind or of those around her; in any case, by becoming the Jewish

Defonseca, de Wael becomes a victim whose survival merits celebration rather than shame.

Moreover, Misha’s survival is portrayed as a product of her own exceptionalism at every turn of her constantly credulity-straining text; as Vice observes, “the ease with which the child manages to witness infamous Holocaust atrocities and remain unharmed transforms her into a narrative principle rather than a character” (Textual Deceptions 168). This has the further effect of distancing herself not only from the shame of her father’s revelations but the shame of non- victimization. This is the most marked difference between Surviving With Wolves and

Fragments: where Binjamin moves from violence to violence as if within a dream, Misha’s self- portrayal of a determined transnational journey is always active rather than passive. A constant theme running throughout the text is the exceptional fact of her kinship with animals, a characteristic she repeats to herself in the face of attempts by her post-war caretakers to

“domesticate” her (e.g. 10, 21).14 While this assertion may equally reflect de Wael’s feelings of alienation from the human community following her parents’ disappearance and the later revelation of her father’s concession, it contravenes the historical tendency of survivor memoirs

14 This focus on her apparently intrinsic animal nature shades rather uncomfortably and problematically close to the Nazis’ deliberate animalization of their victims, Jewish and otherwise, first in propaganda and then in their systematic slaughter. One might, alternately, read Defonseca’s valorization of the animal as resistant to the discourse of filth and uncivility that the Nazis’ animalization relied upon; however, the excessively simplistic way in which Defonseca appears to understand the animal would undermine such a reading. Animals, in her view, commit only purposeful violence and defend their young precisely the way she feels she was not protected, both of which images have more to do with a romantic view of the animal world than a realistic one: “The animal world was superior to the world of men and much more powerful. Everything was simple when it came to animals […] The only difference between, for example, a rat and a cat was purely physical” (61).

113 to emphasize the seeming randomness of survival. By transforming herself into not only a Jewish child but an exceptional one who survives by virtue of her own strength of will and instinctive connection to the animal world, de Wael attempts to efface the fact that her survival was not random, not accomplished through virtues of her own, but because she was not Jewish. De

Wael’s transformation into Defonseca, like Dossekker’s assumption of the Wilkomirski persona, reflects a translation of decontextualized feelings and memories into a truth-claiming but ultimately imposturous memoir. What remains to be further examined is why and how these texts were met with acclaim in spite of the clues to their implausibility and ultimate unverifiability.

Screens, Surrogacy, and Scholarship

One way to read the broader significance of these impostures and their popularity would be to understand them as not mere instances of deliberate deception or traumatic pathology but as examples of the Holocaust’s use as a screen memory, that is, as something that is remembered in place of something else. In recent years, scholars such as Peter Novick and Hilene Flanzbaum have undertaken to examine the seeming omnipresence of the Holocaust in the American public imagination, a phenomenon that at first glance may seem counterintuitive given the actual geographical origin of the events in question. The application of these insights here may seem further counterintuitive given that Wilkomirski’s text originated in Europe rather than America, but I think it is justified by the text having found its greatest success in the English-speaking

American market (Mächler 119); in an interesting reversal, Defonseca’s text was first published in the United States and her false story was developed there, though it found more commercial success in its French translation. There are a number of explanations, not least among them the

114 important role played by the Holocaust as the single most significant source of contemporary

American Jewish identity (Novick 7); still, this alone cannot account for the role of the

Holocaust in popular culture, given that American Jews still form a relatively small minority.

Probing further, film theorist Miriam Bratu Hansen has theorized that the overdetermined relationship between the United States and the Jewish genocide may be understood as reflecting a larger failure to engage with that country’s own violent legacies:

[The] popular American fascination with the Holocaust may function as a screen

memory (Deckerinnerung) in the Freudian sense, covering up a traumatic event—

another traumatic event—that cannot be approached directly. More than just an

ideological displacement (which it is no doubt as well), the fascination with the

Holocaust could be read as a kind of screen allegory behind/through which the

nation is struggling to find a proper mode of memorializing traumata closer to

home. The displaced referents of such memorializing may extend to events as

distant as the genocide of Native Americans or as recent as the Vietnam War. It is

[also] no coincidence that African American historians have begun using concepts

developed in an attempt to theorize the Shoah, such the notion of a “breach” or

“rupture,” to talk about the Middle Passage. (311)

Wilkomirski’s self-construction of the child as “pure” victim and especially his embrace by the

American public thus directly reinforces the pre-existing tendency Hansen suggests towards the substitution of the Holocaust in the American historical consciousness for other, more nationally foundational acts of violence, in which American readers might be forced to confront their own legacies of complicity and benefit. In contrast to the European origin and American success of

Fragments is the American origin and European (that is, French-language) success of Misha, a

115 difference that we might link to the relentless exceptionalism of its child protagonist. Where immersion in the complete powerlessness of Wilkomirski displaces historical and ongoing power imbalances in the American present, the child who survives on the merits of her own strength and tenacity displaces not only her family’s potential complicity but the broader truth of the widespread failure to resist and in many cases passive or active support for the Nazi regime in the European context, and, specifically, in Vichy France. To believe in the narrative of survival as a matter of personal achievement or worth effaces the truth that, while survival was exceptional in the numerical sense, it was in other ways as banal as the evil Arendt identified in the unthinking bureaucrats who ran the machinery of genocide. Without downplaying the strength and resourcefulness of many survivors, the fact remains that the difference between victim and survivor was as often as not simply a matter of the tenacity of bare life until the moment of liberation; evading this reality is, as in the American case, another way in which the broader question of complicity and guilt is displaced into a focus on the exceptional as exemplary, in turn another way to avoid grappling with the ethical implications of understanding the often random nature of survival.

These are possible ways in which the Holocaust generally or its particular treatment by these two writers may function as a screen memory in a collective sense, a process in which I locate at least some of the success of these memoirs; I would further argue that the two cases demonstrate a similar dynamic on an individual level that can in turn be traced back to failures of collective confrontations with specific pasts. The socially stigmatized nature of Dossekker’s maternal loss makes his invention of a survivor-self a perversely logical choice from a psychoanalytic perspective; without, of course, suggesting that his deception was in any way justifiable, there is more to be seen here than a simple desire for the status of a more perfect

116 victim. As Mächler puts it, emphasizing the ways in which the fragments of Wilkomirski’s ostensible Holocaust memories originate in Dossekker’s actual childhood traumas, “The need to translate [the memories of his childhood] that [consisted] of fragments and gaps into a meaningful narrative [opened] the way for suggestion and for those images that society offers and accepts for the narration of horrible experiences” (271). Similarly, the denial of de Wael’s parents as Nazi victims exemplified by the removal of her father’s name from the Belgian memorial to the resistance is a partial explanation (though, like Dossekker’s case, in no way a justification) for her self-transformation into the less ambiguous role of Jewish victim. In both cases, then, individual pathology reflects a collective denial: of the institutionalized abuse of orphans in one case and the simplistic (though perhaps psychologically comprehensible) treatment of torture victims who spoke to end their pain as collaborators. Further, De Wael’s creation of an impossibly exceptional alter ego in Defonseca both disavows her father’s ostensible weakness and the possible causes of her own survival of the Nazi years.

In LaCapra’s terms, then, the subjective transferential relationship these two cases demonstrate is triangulated: Dossekker and de Wael’s respective deceptions present two individual cases of transference between the ostensible survivors and their distorted Holocaust memories, or memories variously recontextualized or reconstructed as survivor stories, which in turn reflects the repression of the individual and social significance of the actual traumatic experiences they transmuted into Holocaust stories, and finally, there is the transferential relationship between readers and the author-texts. The latter point in the triangulation of memory, history, and fiction just sketched tells us more about our collective responses to the

Holocaust, I argue, than the explanation of the frauds as the individual actions of two disturbed people would suggest. This point is linked to the question of why we continue to read memoirs

117 of the Holocaust, decades after the event, decades that have moreover been filled with other atrocities and other representations thereof. The notion of the Holocaust as pedagogical moment—that it has taught “us” (or should have done) that “we” must never allow it to happen again—has attained the status of a cultural truism, though one belied by the many events of mass ethnic and genocidal violence that have followed 1945. Indeed, Langer suggests another, more disturbing version of the Holocaust-as-pedagogy:

I can hardly remember a Holocaust conference I’ve attended during the past

decade where someone hasn’t echoed George Santayana’s solemn platitude

that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. The so-called ethnic

cleansing in Yugoslavia is only one of a dozen episodes in recent years to

prove that Santayana’s maxim is nothing more than a piece of rhetorical

excess—yet we continue to use it as if it played a vital role in defining the

meaning of atrocity in our time. Indeed, it could be argued about the

violence in Bosnia that the contending forces not only have not ignored the

past of the Holocaust, but have paid careful attention to it in order to learn

more about how to dehumanize their enemy in the name of some purifying

ideology. (1995: 179)

It may be safely assumed that the continued popularity of Holocaust memoirs is not due solely to an enormous population of dedicated human rights activists engaged in a process of creating meaningful linkages between historical and contemporary forms of genocide, which is not to say some, or even many, readers do not do this, but merely that we cannot presume this is the dominant mode of engagement. Clearly, there is more at play—and at stake—than a model of the

Holocaust memoir as ethical pedagogy.

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At this point, Mächler’s suggestion that the oppressively childlike perspective of

Fragments facilitates an unquestioned identification with the text’s victim seems worth returning to and elaborating further. Though less sophisticated from a literary vantage point, Defonseca’s text attempts a similar structural identification between reader and victim-narrator, albeit one that is less complete thanks to a less consistent (and less well-developed) use of the child’s perspective. This common ground suggests that the identificatory mechanism is key to the reading of both works and to the rewards of doing so, and might be seen as pointing to a broader structural or formal process by which deceptive memoirs seek to short-circuit their readers’ critical capacities, a point I will return to in subsequent chapters. Reliance on the self-righteous pleasure of hatred for victimizers makes these books easy to read in a specific sense, however difficult their violence may be to stomach; it is, in fact, the very graphic nature of this violence that subsumes the reader into alliance with the victim-narrator and allows an evasion of the more complex questions that could be posed not only about the representational choices or truth-value of these memoirs but about the Holocaust itself. The redemptive mode, even if this redemption is a matter of pathos rather than narrative triumph—both Wilkomirski and Defonseca speak through their pain and reclaim Jewish identities that an amorphous legion of shadowy but sinister adult-figures attempt to deny them—should thus be inherently suspect when it is deployed at the expense of grappling with the unredeemable nature of the event.

To read these memoirs following their disproval runs the risk of inducing another problematically simplistic pleasure, in this case by identifying oneself as the victim of the memoirists’ action. Where the payoff, so to speak, of credulous reading is both the denial of complicity in legacies of American (and, of course, European) violence (via screen memory) and the pleasure of feeling oneself a surrogate victim through identification with the child narrator,

119 there is a subsequent pleasure to be found through repudiation of the deceptions perpetrated by

Wilkomirski and Defonseca; the reader is first a victim with and then a victim of. In both cases, if we are to continue to read impostures after their exposure for the many insights I believe they give us, whether into broader questions about autobiographical discourse, authorship, and subjectivity or into the particular issues and contexts they address, a self-reflexive reading practice that interrogates what is enabled and what is displaced through alignment with the position of the victim, whether victim with or victim of, is a necessary corrective. I will develop this idea further throughout what follows, as this form of critical self-reflexivity is, logically, the best defence against deceptive memoirs’ reliance upon the reader’s prioritizing of emotional satisfaction over a deeper engagement with the ethical stakes and significance of not only the event of the Holocaust but the strategies of its representation. This is not to suggest, of course, that all Holocaust memoirs should be read under the shadow of the fraudulent actions of a few (a position I explicitly argued against above), but rather that the best way to demonstrate respect for such stories and those who experienced them is not to foreclose our critical capacities but to exercise them.

There is another sense in which we might examine the question of screens and surrogacy in relation to Holocaust impostures, and this is through the exercise of precisely such critical capacities, in this case the remarkably varied readings scholars have offered of Holocaust imposture’s significance. More so than any other case examined here, critics have read the

Wilkomirski affair at length and at purposes ranging from illuminatingly diverse to wholly incompatible. For Michael Bernard-Donals, the “central question is how a memoir like

Fragments can at once be a false testimony and still produce an effect on readers that induces them to witness” (1303), while Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman argue that this position

120 may allow us “to recuperate Wilkomirski, but at the price…of historical ignorance” and the transformation of the Holocaust into “a metaphor for that which stands outside of history

(experience, memory, trauma)” (37). Rachel Carroll “would suggest that the issues attending the publication and reception of Wilkomirski’s Fragments cannot be resolved simply by expelling the text from the generic category of testimony on the grounds that it is not authentic” (32), while

Gross and Hoffman insist that displacing questions of authenticity allow “false accounts like

Wilkomirski’s [to] become indistinguishable form real testimonies, since we can’t ‘know’ the

Holocaust anyway” (37). Vice has suggested that Fragments can be read as a novel post- exposure (“Fragments and Holocaust Envy” 250), while Susan Rubin Suleiman insists that if we deploy “the criterion of truth claim, therefore, we must call Fragments not a novel but a false— or better, a deluded—memoir” (552; a paradigm that returns us to the realm of intent rather than effect, or resituates the author’s belief as the primary criteria for generic classification rather than his textual claims). These critical bifurcations suggest that Wilkomirski and his text, or perhaps

Wilkomirski-as-text, serve as a screen (in the sense of being projected onto rather than as a covering): without minimizing the value of these readings, it appears that to a degree,

Wilkomirski (and how critics read him) is a reflection and magnification of broader debates surrounding the nature of memory, testimony, and literary representations thereof. To some degree, it is of course a truism that how any scholar reads a text will reflect her position on the discursive frames in which she locates it (this is certainly true of my own readings here); that

Wilkomirski and/as text, however, have induced such varied readings points at least as much to the nature of his text as to the nature of scholarly inquiry as such.

Even the level of literary analysis is similarly fraught: Suleiman sees “a highly stylized work” (547) demonstrating “a masterful artistry” (548), where Amy Hungerford identifies a

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“simple, almost abstract style” (66). Norman Geras, meanwhile, sees the very question of style

(or the ostensible lack thereof) as “naive. Even [if it is] as authentic as can be, what we read is never plain memory. It is a written narrative of it and must consequently have a design of sorts, must be refracted through having had to be set down” (121). On the level of context, Anne

Whitehead emphasizes the text’s emergence during a “period of crisis in Swiss collective memory” (132) in connection with World War II-era Swiss banking practices, while Gross and

Hoffman mobilize the scandal in its entirety as an indictment of “the foreclosure of ‘why’ and the mystification of the Holocaust” in the field of Holocaust studies, as well as the centrality of the Holocaust to American Jewish identity (27). Heidi L. Pennington, meanwhile, argues that

“close reading practices can expose the ruptures that exist in Fragments between what

Wilkomirski wants and believes to be true” (36), and further that “a first reading of any text uninformed by outside sources, contrary to popular opinion and practice, can provide us with our own internally mandated standards of truth-value and indications of referential authenticity in life writing” (39; how these internally mandated standards are to be balanced against the ethical questions ineluctably raised by questioning testimony in a context like the Holocaust goes unremarked).

Above all else, I find it particularly fascinating that one area in which consensus seems to exist is in the insistence that Wilkomirski’s deception is “genuine,” that is, the product of his own misguided belief rather than a programmatic con, as reflected in Suleiman’s distinction between false and deluded memoir (Ganzfried, the journalist who initially exposed the gaps between ostensibly autobiographical text and documented biography, is the one exception).

Timothy D. Neale goes so far as to suggest that though “Wilkomirski’s specific claims are counterfeit, the traumatic childhood revealed by Mächler’s research does provide an experiential

122 warrant for his account” (436), and even the otherwise condemnatory Gross and Hoffman concede that “while Wilkomirski’s trauma has nothing to do with the Holocaust, it is nevertheless real” (35). Pennington goes a step further, suggesting that despite “the nonfactuality of Wilkomirski’s claims, the memories he relates in his memoir complicate the very idea of referentiality in that they obliquely refer to and were produced by his real-life experiences” (39-

40). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given my argument in the previous chapter, I take the view that the referential claims made within the text make the question of referential value a textual question, not an external one. Further, insofar as the text explicitly links its referential claims to the

Holocaust rather than to a broadly undefined trauma, Pennington’s expanded sense of reference may work on an affective level, but not on a historical one (and indeed, if it is the claim to truth through the name of the author that sutures text to world, as I have suggested, the character of a text’s referential value cannot escape the question of its historical and ethical referents). As

Whitehead puts it, “Fragments cannot properly be read as fiction, because of Wilkomirski’s own insistence, and apparent belief, that his text is factual. Neither can Fragments be read as testimony, in spite of its close mimicry of the form, because it does not describe Wilkomirski’s own experiences” (131).

Moreover, as Gross and Hoffman note, to prioritize the ostensible sincerity of

Wilkomirski’s belief in his own story above all else collapses the conventional understanding of memory (as recollections, however subjective, impressionistic, or unverifiable) of events that

(presumably) actually happened to the subject with what Alison Landsberg has called “prosthetic memory.” Landsberg understands prosthetic memory as a process in which “the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live” (2), a subjective internalization that makes

123 possible a radical form of empathy (21). Landsberg’s model emerges from an emphasis on

“experiential site[s] such as a movie theatre or museum,” which differs, of course, from a case of individual confusion (or deception, depending on how one reads Wilkomirski); however, as

Gross and Hoffman argue, “Wilkomirski poses a problem for Landsberg because he illustrates the impossibility of distinguishing prosthetic memory from memory-envy” or, I would add, falsification (35). In other words, while an insistence on Wilkomirski’s sincerity may affect our reading of his particular case, the implications of an argument prioritizing a belief in his belief have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of not just the Holocaust but the nature of memory and its relationship to empathy more broadly.

The double sense of screen I read in both the popular and critical responses to

Wilkomirski finds its inverse in the relative paucity of writing on Defonseca: recalling her commercial success relative to Wilkomirski’s critical praise, the desire to condemn or recuperate

(much like the readerly movement from victim with to victim of I suggested above) tells us as much about the persistence of distinctions between the high and low in our aesthetic judgments as about the texts themselves. That is, Wilkomirski’s literarity (whichever version of it cited above one prefers) invites reparative or expurgatory readings in a way that Defonseca’s popular prose does not. In both cases, the texts exceed themselves first as impostures and subsequently as screens for evasion or projection, rescue or reprehension.

Romancing the Holocaust

In an ironic return that brings us full circle to the introduction, Oprah Winfrey found herself involved in another act of literary deception, this time involving a Holocaust memoir called Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived by Herman Rosenblat, who

124 was interned at Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald and, later, Theresienstadt along with his two brothers.15 Winfrey first hosted Rosenblat on her show in 1996 and invited him to return in

2007 prior to the (later delayed and finally cancelled) publication of his book, which she famously called “the single greatest love story, in twenty-two years of doing this show, we’ve ever told on the air” (Day). The irony of Winfrey’s involvement in publicizing yet another deceptive memoir is compounded by her earlier choice of Elie Wiesel’s Night for her book club immediately following the Frey scandal; the Holocaust, it seems, appealed to her as a solid historical/memorial ground on which to reassert her journalistic (or perhaps merely commercial) credibility.

According to Rosenblat’s relatives, he first began rehearsing his tale among family and friends around 1990, after being shot during a robbery at the television repair store where he was employed. The details appear to have remained largely consistent over the past two decades: as an eleven-year-old concentration camp inmate, Rosenblat met a nine-year-old girl at the camp fence in the winter of 1945. His new friend began providing him with apples and other small portions of food by throwing them over the fence for seven months, until Rosenblat was transferred to Theresienstadt. Twelve years later, in 1957, Rosenblat had migrated to the United

States and was set up on a blind date on Coney Island by a friend. His date, Roma Radzicki, was a Polish fellow immigrant and survivor; as they told each other of their respective wartime experiences, Herman realized Roma was none other than the young girl whose generosity he credited with his survival. He proposed that very night, the story continues, and they were married a year later and had two children, and as the saying goes, lived happily ever after until they decided to share the tale of their romance with the world.

15 Details of the Rosenblat story (both false and actual) are drawn from a series of entries on Deborah Lipstadt’s blog and an interview with Kenneth Waltzer under the auspices of Emory University.

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In the eleven years between Rosenblat’s two appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show, the story of “the angel at the fence” and the miraculous American reunion circulated in various ways, including as an email chain letter and a story in the popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series of inspirational anecdotes (it appeared in a special edition called Chicken Soup for the

Couples’ Soul).16 Inevitably, it came to the attention of Holocaust scholars such as Deborah

Lipstadt and Kenneth Waltzer, both of whom were doubtful of its veracity; alarm bells were triggered for both not simply by the various coincidences upon which the story rests, but on factual knowledge (Day). Waltzer, then at work on a book about Buchenwald, considered it practically impossible for Rosenblat to have approached the fence close enough to see anyone, let alone to receive food thrown over top; Lipstadt was struck by Rosenblat’s assertion that he was told he would be gassed, which she argues would have been impossible at either

Buchenwald or Theresienstadt, since neither camp was equipped with gas chambers. Moreover,

Lipstadt asserts (and is supported by scholarly consensus) that the use of gas was effectively over by May 1945, which contradicts the contents of the original email (and would preclude

Rosenblat’s potential counterclaim that he meant gassing by mobile van, which would have been equally unlikely at that point in any case). The suspicions of both proved accurate, as

Rosenblat’s brothers and, later, the couple’s son came forward to insist that Herman had fabricated both the story of the “angel at the fence” and the coincidental reunion over a decade later.

What is most notable, however, about Rosenblat’s deception is that unlike Wilkomirski or Defonseca, his story was indeed the work of a camp survivor. Neither the brothers with whom

16 In fact, I received the email version of the story myself circa 2003; though I recall it activating my innate tendencies toward skepticism (rather uncomfortably, given the nature of its contents), though its flowery language and too-perfect narrative payoff. I unfortunately did not have the foresight to save it. To the best of my recollection, its particulars were the same as discussed here and documented in the coverage following the revelation of the Rosenblats’ deception. A version of the email from 2008 has been preserved online at Snopes.com (“The Fence”).

126 he was interned nor the scholars or journalists who investigated his story have offered evidence to the contrary; his love story was falsified but his Holocaust experience was not. However, I do not think this makes his actions less problematic; there is a sense in which Rosenblat’s decision to transform a story of trauma and suffering into a romance narrative is more profoundly disturbing than the outright lies of Wilkomirski or Defonseca, because it suggests we have entered an era in which a “simple” story of survival is not enough to capture our imaginations.

According to Rosenblat, his aim was to “give people hope,” a goal made no less trite and significantly more unsettling given the story to which it was applied. Given the correlation I have been arguing for between the deceptive memoirs discussed above and the (especially North

American) contemporary understanding of the Holocaust, what does it say about our existing culture of remembrance that it produced and believed Herman Rosenblat? Put differently, what gave Rosenblat the idea that a story of “mere” survival was somehow not enough?

As we move further into the twenty-first century, the point at which no living survivors will remain is rapidly approaching. I have argued that the appearance of these deceptive

Holocaust stories at this historical juncture is not coincidental, and I would now take a step further and suggest that we are also witnessing the transformation of Holocaust memoirs from occupying a testimonial position to a generic one. That is, as the tellers of Holocaust stories are increasingly distanced from the event itself, the stories written today become reliant on conventions solidified into the imperatives of genre. Where Wilkomirski and Defonseca told their stories in the mode of the heroic victimized child, Rosenblat’s story might be classified as a

Holocaust romance, wherein what is ultimately a typical heteronormative love plot is the true focus of a story that uses the Holocaust as an emotionally loaded backdrop. Vice makes a similar argument, suggesting that although “the Holocaust context is crucial for the significance of

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Herman and Roma’s later meeting, in Angel at the Fence and its reception the Holocaust itself is implicitly subsumed by the romance of the testimony’s title, as implied by the planned subtitle to the withdrawn publication, ‘The True Story of a Love that Survived’.” The emphasis on the love plot in titular and narrative terms suggests “it is not an individual’s survival of genocide but the persistence of a personal relationship in such circumstances that is important” (Textual

Deceptions 151). The Holocaust becomes a floating signifier for radical evil, “the worst of all possible worlds,” applicable to anything and everything; what matters is not its historical specificity but the contrast its generic (that is, unspecified) violence provides to the inevitably uplifting narrative telos, in this case, the conclusion of a love story. We are confronted here with an instance of the banality of evil in a sense diametrically opposed to Arendt’s provocative use of that phrase in her report on the Eichmann trial: where Arendt aimed to invoke the disturbing ordinariness of the perpetrators of the genocide—the fact that, as Gitta Sereny’s biographies of

Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl and architect turned munitions minister Albert Speer demonstrate, men (and to a lesser extent, women) who oversaw or committed murder could return home their families as if nothing had happened—the banality of evil in the Rosenblat case is the banalization of the Holocaust, its reduction to a backdrop. That it is the Holocaust that brings together the Rosenblats is ultimately irrelevant to the story insofar as any horrifying event would in theory be adequate to the task of providing sufficient contrast for their love story; and yet at the same time it can only be the Holocaust that would provide sufficient pathos and resonance for the North American audience that so willingly believed a story that was as highly improbable as it was sentimental.

Rosenblat’s story offers another counterpoint to the argument that all survival stories represent exceptions; improbability and impossibility are not identical, and whatever the extreme

128 antirealist school might assert, the impossibility of fully knowing an event generally or the

Holocaust specifically is not identical to an inability to know anything about it. Like Levi’s grey zone, the collapse of clear and stable boundaries between victim and perpetrator does not make all distinctions impossible; to suspend our judgment of the Sonderkommando members as Levi suggests would not and does not require a similar suspended indictment of the entire genocidal apparatus. To reduce the Holocaust to total ethical indistinguishability, or to pure unspeakability as Agamben so crucially cautions against, is also an enabling condition for its reduction to the status of a mere trope. If we cannot know or say anything meaningfully true, then all that matters is the emotional effectiveness of a Wilkomirski, a Defonseca, or a Rosenblat, not the fact or fiction of their tales. As will be discussed further in the following chapter, the idea that meaningful knowledge can be attained through the false assumption of an identity different than one’s own relies on a logic that assumes an experience and its attendant truth are not merely transferable from person to person but that experience and truth can themselves be separated.

The logic of fiction allows its writers and readers to imagine themselves into another in this way, to imagine the truth of an experience without undergoing it outside the text, but when the boundary between this creative act and the belief that one is or can fully know that other collapses, something is lost. I have argued that deceptive memoirs cannot and should not be understood as diminishing or calling into question the Holocaust itself, but they do undermine the potential for an ethical relationship to that event by collapsing the distance of historical specificity into the proximity of untrammelled transferential affect. Put differently, these deceptions matter not because they make us question other or all survivors’ stories (which is in no way a necessary or inevitable response, let alone a desirable one) but because they cloud our entire relationship to the event and its retelling. It is not necessary, and I would say should not be

129 necessary nor even desirable, to conflate imagining oneself in the place of the other with believing oneself to actually occupy it in order to understand something meaningful about a traumatic event. In other words, the mere fact that a Holocaust imposture is ostensibly capable of evoking feeling or understanding begs the question: if feeling or understanding is prompted by an imposture, in what way are those responses to the Holocaust and not the imposture itself?

Even if the same can be said of any representation of an event—that the understanding we gain is a matter of representation rather than reference—I maintain any value to be found in the reading of imposter texts (and I do think they are worth reading) lies in centering the question of their imposture rather than pushing it beyond the frame of analysis.

If, as Agamben asserts, the law cannot presume to exhaust the question of justice, neither can history make the same presumption with regards to knowledge, nor can testimony.

Moreover, as these cases amply demonstrate, if historical reference alone is insufficient to address the profound epistemological rupture caused by the Holocaust, a purely subjective focus suffers an equal lack. The solution in either case is not to discard the categories of historical (or indeed legal) judgment entirely but to understand both notions as always in process, always a horizon towards which we strive without ever necessarily attaining it. What may never come must still be worked for, and though there may not (I would say is not) a single lesson to be gleaned from the Holocaust, it may at least underscore the crucial need for an unceasing oscillation between proof and prooflessness in Felman’s terms, speakability and unspeakability in Agamben’s, realist and non-realist epistemological modes in Rothberg’s, and, as I have argued here, the factual-referential and the subjective-experiential, the ethical and the affective.

Chapter Three

Speaking As, Speaking For: Transnational Captivity Narratives

After 9/11

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the

preferably unheard.

—Arundhati Roy

Gender, Authority, and the New (Old) Orientalism

Among the many seismic discursive shifts resulting from the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, the rapidity with which the situation of women under the Taliban was mobilized as a justification for the invasion of Afghanistan has had far-reaching effects. Air attacks on Afghanistan began in mid-October, and the ground invasion of Kabul took place from

November 14-16. On November 17, in an historically unprecedented move for an American First

Lady, Laura Bush took over the weekly presidential radio address on November 17 to emphasize the importance of the Taliban’s oppression of women as an underlying motivation for the invasion, and the liberation of women as one of its most important results. On the same day as the radio address, the U.S. State Department also released a Report on the Taliban’s War Against

Women. This confluence of events underscores the compressed timeline with regards to the reorientation of public discussion about the invasion from its initial framing as a direct response to September 11 to a self-proclaimed humanitarian mission designed to end an oppressive regime about which the U.S. government had theretofore not appeared to be particularly concerned.

Beyond the appropriation of feminist rhetoric for military purposes (albeit a particularly liberal- white-saviour variant of said rhetoric), this instrumentalization of women’s rights served to make

130 131 newly visible to the Western gaze the figure of the Middle Eastern woman as victim of oppression in need of rescue from Middle Eastern men by the (white) West.1 This picture, painted with admittedly broad strokes, is not meant to suggest that the double trope of imperilled

Middle Eastern woman and violent Middle Eastern man was born directly from the ashes of

9/11; I would argue instead that this notion Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has so famously and pithily described as the moral injunction for white men to save brown women from brown men was newly crystallized into, crucially, both political imperative and popular trope when the need for a military target and the icon of the burqa collided in late 2001 and early 2002. As Sherene

Razack puts it in Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics, “Three allegorical figures have come to dominate the social landscape of the ‘war on terror’ and its ideological underpinning of a clash of civilizations”; echoing Spivak, they are “the dangerous

Muslim man, the imperilled Muslim woman, and the civilized European, the latter a figure who is seldom explicitly named but who nevertheless anchors the first two figures” (5). Following

Razack, my suggestion here is that we have witnessed, or are in the process of witnessing, a new iteration of an old story.

This process, per Gillian Whitlock in Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit, is reflected in the popularization of the so-called veiled best-seller, that is, memoirs purporting to offer the reader intimate access to the exoticized “true” lives of Muslim and/or Arab women (a

1 My invocation of “the Western gaze” here is not meant to suggest that the “problem of the Third World woman” only emerged as a site of inquiry and management subsequent to 9/11; within the context of feminist scholarship and activism, of course, conversations around and analysis of the importance of race, ethnicity, culture, and religion in interrogating gender norms and politics have a long history in the 20th century. To take but one example, Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s now canonical essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” which addresses many of the same discursive formations I discuss below, first appeared in 1984; Spivak’s maxim quoted later in this paragraph from “Can the Subaltern Speak?” dates to 1988. What I am suggesting, then, is that an issue whose status as a problem had become, in turn, a site of inquiry for feminist thought (that is, the characterization of the ‘Third World woman’ as in need of rescue not only by colonial forces but by the imbrication of colonial discourse and white/European feminist attitudes identified by Mohanty and Spivak) has been re- appropriated in the post-9/11 American context by imperialism masquerading as an investment in human rights and feminist liberation.

132 collapse I will return to), a genre that Whitlock suggests be understood as a contemporary modulation of the captivity narrative (103). Whitlock’s argument therefore requires a double historicization of the generic contours of the captivity narrative and the “veiled best-seller,” which I will treat in turn. Like my own, Whitlock’s focus in this context is on Norma Khouri’s fraudulent memoir Forbidden Love/Honor Lost, which purports to tell story of her best friend’s murder at the hands of her own family in present-day Jordan; unlike Whitlock, who approaches

Khouri as an aberration in a work otherwise concerned with “legitimate” memoir, my focus is on what the exception, so to speak, says about the rule. At base, my interest in Khouri’s deception arises out of a desire to account for its success, or to understand why, as Whitlock puts it,

Khouri’s fraud is “the hoax we had to have” (106). Whitlock’s phrasing offers an ambiguously doubled, or perhaps tripled, sense of inevitability: the first may be read as suggesting that the popularity of “autobiography in transit” and specifically the re-emergence of the “veiled bestseller” not only created the conditions for a hoax but made one necessary (“we had to have a hoax”). Her phrasing can also be read as a suggestion that this hoax would necessarily be of a particular character: that “the hoax we had to have would have to be a text seemingly designed to appeal to a Western audience.” A third, and more provocative, reading of Whitlock’s assertion would be that Khouri’s text had to be a hoax, that it was, to use the common expression, too good to be true; this expression (my own, not Whitlock’s) invites us to ask who and what exactly it was good for, as the answer is surely not that it was good for the women subject to the forms of patriarchal violence Khouri claimed to decry (at least not in the way Khouri ostensibly intended her text to benefit those it purports to represent).

As I have been emphasizing, a crucial common thread uniting the deceptive texts under consideration in this project is their relationship to readerly desire, a slippery terrain to chart but

133 one that is equally impossible to ignore in this context. When asking why certain texts succeed in fooling their readers, especially texts that seem to flaunt their ignorance of the places and events they discuss (on which more later in the context of Khouri), one answer is of course to be found in the textual strategies the writers deploy; and yet the other, perhaps more difficult, answer is that these texts succeeded because readers wanted (or perhaps still want) to believe (in) them.

Successful literary frauds cannot be reduced either to the skill of the con artist or the gullibility of the reader; the deceitful writer tells a story she thinks the reader will believe but will also want to believe, and the reader brings her own set of assumptions as to what constitutes the contours of a believable story into dialogue with text and author. The autobiographical pact is as much a product of both reader and writer when it is upheld as when it is flouted.

When the text in question is concerned with the representation of otherness in cultural, religious, national or linguistic terms, the question of what readers believe overlaps with the terrain of the stereotype and, in the case of Islam and the Middle East, with Orientalist narratives and depictions. What is more believable to the (non-Muslim) Western reader than a recapitulation of familiar images sedimented into tropes by centuries of repetition? Identifying the ways in which Khouri’s text was structured to be well received by such readers is thus also to demarcate its adherence to and implication in Orientalist thought and practice (though not, to be sure, to insist that there is no gendered violence in the Middle East or anywhere else). While

Whitlock is certainly correct to suggest that “now we know Honor Lost as a hoax, we are free to read it as a parody of the veiled best-seller, in which a modest beauty salon in Amman, Jordan becomes the scene for a clash of civilizations” (108), I would suggest that we can, equally, read

Khouri’s work not only as an unintended parody of a genre but as an indictment of the systems of power and desire that make that genre possible. This is emphatically not intended as a covert

134 denunciation of so-called popular literature and those who read it: what makes Khouri’s text and the others discussed in this project worth examining, in my view, is the way in which such deceptions are enabled by a network of readers, publishers, publicists, journalists, booksellers, and critics, not merely the much-maligned memoir reader (or the writer herself).

Following this textual engagement, further developed by an analysis of Anna

Broinowski’s 2007 documentary film examining the Khouri hoax, I will conclude by raising the stakes of my literary argument by extending the linkages I draw between Khouri’s text and context to the recent public response to the murders of Aqsa Parvez and Zainab, Sahar, and Geeti

Shafia along with Rona Amir Mohammed, both events framed in terms of the so-called “arrival of the honour killing” in Canada and the notion of multicultural diversity as something in need of

“management” on the part of governmental authorities. While the question of integrating migrants from varied backgrounds into their new countries of residence is by no means novel, the focus on Muslim migrants from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East who relocate to

North America and western Europe has intensified in the years since 9/11, with specific focus on the question of gender. The now-infamous “Affaire Hérouxville,” in which the municipal government of a small town in Québec published a town charter for the ostensible benefit of newly arrived residents informing them, among other things, that “killing women in public beatings, or burning them alive are not part of our standards of life” and that “[the] only time you may mask or cover your face is during Halloween,” is paradigmatic.2 That the language deployed in the document is both explicitly racist and implicitly directed towards Muslim migrants is ultimately less notable than its emergence in the context of an agricultural community with fewer than 1500 members and no immigrant population to speak of. In other words, though the

2 The English text of the so-called Hérouxville Charter is available on Hérouxville’s town blog. References to “female circumcision” and “stoning women in public” were removed in February 2007 after a group of Muslim women visited the town in an attempt to educate local residents and politicians (CBC News, 13 February 2007).

135 political context of Hérouxville was the broader Québecois debate on “reasonable accommodation,” this particular charter responds to a problem that cannot be said to exist there as such (if, indeed, one accepts the linguistic construction of immigration and cultural difference as a problem to be solved, which I do not). More recently, the Conservative government’s Bill S-

7, titled the Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act (currently past the first two readings in the House of Commons), purports to address already criminalized practices such as polygamy and the marriage of minors with specific reference to immigrants under a title that is, at best, explicitly racist. This language of “barbaric cultural practices” has also found its way into the newest version (2012) of Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s citizenship study guide in a brief section entitled “The Equality of Men and Women” (9). There is a double move at work in this framing of migrants as a threat to the fabric of Canadian life: it relies, first, on what Inderpal

Grewal has called the “outsourcing” of patriarchy “from the USA and Europe [and Canada] to do its messy work elsewhere” (2). Second, this construction of patriarchy as a problem “elsewhere” also positions migrants (and particularly those from the Middle East and North Africa) as those representing the potential of its return, in turn constructing Islam (understood implicitly and sometimes explicitly as the “elsewhere” in which patriarchy resides) as an importable threat borne by migrant bodies.

My goal in what follows is rather to clear a critical path avoiding a number of theoretical and ethical pitfalls. Foremost among these is asserting a position that does not implicitly or explicitly minimize or excuse gendered violence in any context. Dismantling the Islamophobic discourse that essentializes gendered violence as uniquely inseparable from Muslim lives, beliefs, and practices is another key concern; beyond treating misogyny as uniquely constitutive of Islam, Islamophobic essentialism also minimizes patriarchal structures and violence in the

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(similarly monolithically constructed) West. To echo Said, this critique of Orientalism neither requires nor presumes a singular “real” Orient (xviii); the point is indeed that no such monolithic entity exists (as Khouri assumes it does). Equally pernicious though perhaps more subtle are the twin dangers of insufficiently differentiated universalism and paternalist relativism. The former position would totally collapse so-called honour-based violence into the larger category of violence against women, insufficiently attentive to the fact that all forms of violence take place within a complex nexus of factors in which culture and religion may well play a part. This, however, is a matter of suggesting that the specific forms taken by violence against women are contextual, not that the fact of gendered violence itself is particularly fundamental to that context more so than to any other. This balance, then, requires what Sharzad Mojab identifies as “an appreciation of the dialectics of universals and particulars: Each regime of patriarchy is particular…however, patriarchies form a universal regime in so far as they perpetrate, without exception, physical and symbolic violence against women” (34). Mojab’s dialectical position enables a simultaneous critique of gendered violence and the oppression of women within a global framework while also remaining carefully attentive to the particularities of country, region, language, religion, culture, and so forth—without essentializing structural violence as uniquely endemic to any particular group, whether for the purposes of exceptionalist condemnation or relativist minimization.

This approach is especially important in the context of “honour” crimes, which have been constructed in the West as a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, but have in fact been committed by non-Muslims, both in contexts where Islam could arguably serve as an influencing factor (among

Sikhs and Hindus in India) and where such a connection is much less likely or perhaps nonexistent, such as in predominantly Christian communities in Latin American and Southern

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Europe (Hossain and Welchman 4). The question of selection bias is also relevant here: identifying “honour” as the origin of a particular act of misogynist violence will depend on the contextual frame of the observer as well as the nature of the violent act itself. The term “honour killing” is a complex and loaded one; as Welchman and Hossain point out, “the definition of

‘crimes of honour’ is by no means straightforward, and the imprecision and ‘exoticisation’ (in particular in the West) of its use are among the reasons for caution in use of the phrase” (4).

Crucially, the honour crime classification relies on how the intent behind the crime is interpreted:

“the term is commonly used as shorthand, to flag a type of violence against women characterised by (claimed) ‘motivation’ rather than by perpetrator or form of manifestation” (4). For instance, no one has suggested that the recent murder of a young transgender woman by her father was an honour crime, though one might argue the concept of familial shame has a place in the psychological underpinnings of that event as well.3 Evidently, as Lila Abu-Lughod argues, these crimes are typically “explained as the behavior of a specific ethnic or cultural community. The culture itself is taken to be the cause of the criminal violence. Thus the category stigmatizes not a particular act but entire cultures or ethnic communities” (“Seduction of the ‘Honor Crime’” 18).

I use the term here because it is central to Khouri’s text and because it is also used, albeit perhaps with a more developed sense of nuance, by some activists in local contexts (albeit often in quotation marks, which I generally deploy here). Given that the focus of this chapter is on countermanding the alternate universalizing gesture of Islamophobia, particularly as manifested in Khouri’s memoir, I do not have the space both to deconstruct Khouri’s representations and replace them with a detailed depiction of Jordanian life of my own (nor do I have the expertise for the latter); however, I would argue that part of the ground on which I base my critique is

3 22-year-old Bri Gordec was stabbed to death by her father in February 2015, after, according to members of her local trans community in Akron, OH, she began to assert herself as a trans woman. Kevin Gordec blamed a “cult” for his child’s death. Some have speculated that he was referring to the support group she attended (Kellaway).

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Khouri’s evident disinterest in any “real” Orient, presumptive or otherwise. More importantly, I take Khouri’s essentialism as emblematic of broader discursive and political structures.

As for the question of cultural relativism, while it may often be an attempt to avoid

Islamophobic or racist judgments made in the name of an insufficiently theorized notion of universal human rights, any suggestion that honour-based crimes are predicated on culturally specific norms and, crucially, thus beyond critique is to be dismissed outright for a number of reasons, not least among them that this argument, in its simplest form, is essentialism from the other direction. A position that directly or indirectly imputes such degrees of savagery (a term I invoke here deliberately) as to make femicide somehow inevitable is an ethical and political dead end. Moreover, as Mojab forcefully notes, this type of relativism ignores the “extensive and rich literature in all Middle Eastern languages since the late nineteenth century” whose concern is to critique the oppression of women, and which “unreservedly condemns violence against women…Much like Enlightenment thinkers, reformers in the ‘Muslim world’ critiqued the culture, tradition, and religion of oppression including the clergy and their versions of Islam” as, of course, many Muslims in a variety of contexts (and non-Muslims living under various forms of political Islamic rule, as in Iran) continue to do (28). A culturally relativist position that would excuse forms of violence against women on the grounds of their inherent imbrication in Muslim life would therefore not only ignore but actively undermine the efforts of women and men to theorize and change the conditions within their complex communities, yet another reason such a position is to be avoided. As we will see, this argument has been made by activists in Jordan in response to Khouri’s deception, as well as in Syria following the Amina blog imposture.

This last point brings us to two further related questions that require addressing, namely, the issue of agency, and the location of critique. I have suggested, following Razack, that

139 contemporary Islamophobic discourse situates the figure of the Muslim woman as entirely without agency, subject to a closed and totalizing system of religious, political, cultural, and economic oppression. As I will demonstrate, this positioning is a major concern of Khouri’s text, and will consequently be a central focus of my critique. There are certainly elements and variants of Islamic belief and practice that oppress women, but the same can be said of every religious tradition. It is rare, however, to see critiques of gender-segregated prayer space in a Muslim context (to take but one example) that indict similar practices in Orthodox Judaism or Protestant sects; it is rarer still to see such critiques levelled with any interest in the views and opinions of women who participate in these traditions. This is where the question of agency intersects with the position of the critic: another way in which Muslim women’s agency is denied is through a focus on the judgments of those outside the belief system at the expense of listening to those within it. I have already dismissed the notion that those outside a cultural or religious context have no place to judge forms of direct physical violence or broadly-based social, political, and economic exclusion, such as denying women the access to voting rights or to education, and I do not wish to resuscitate relativism by another name. However, it is not relativism but attentiveness to the inadvertent replication of oppressive systems by their critics to suggest that a crucial corrective to the triangulation of Muslim female victim, Muslim male oppressor and white

Western saviour is to resist the deprioritization of Muslim women’s voices and agendas, something we will see in both Khouri’s proposed solution to the violence she condemns and the case of the Amina blog hoax discussed in the next section.

Returning to the moral panic invoked by Hérouxville, then, we see that it is premised on a spectral vision of Islam-as-threat rather than the recognition of a complex system of thought and belief spanning centuries and influencing (and being influenced by) millions of lives. It is

140 spectral in two senses: both in its shadowy dislocation, its apparent mobility, and in its insistent return across time and space. This threat haunts Khouri’s text and the public response to the

Parvez and Shafia cases equally. What begins as geographically rooted (an ostensibly radical anti-American strain of Islam, located first in the mountains of Afghanistan, next in the phantom weapons of Iraq, and now increasingly in ISIS) becomes uncontainable and, crucially, importable in the form of mobile Muslim bodies whose deviance must be managed in order to preserve “our” values of free speech, gender equality, and so on. The response to Hérouxville, however, doubled the moral panic in question, raising the prospect of resurgent forms of xenophobic nationalism that Canada prefers to think equally foreign to its values (and that

Anglophone Canada also prefers to locate in Québecois nationalism as such, but not in its own).

The figure of the Muslim (whether migrant or Canadian-born), then, not only threatens “us” by her very being, but by the threat she poses to “our” sense of unity and common purpose, as she reveals the fissures within and assumptions beneath the ideology of the Canadian mosaic.

The Amina Hoax, or Lesbian Bloggers Gone Wild

Before turning to Khouri’s text and Broinowski’s documentary, I would like to briefly introduce a hoax whose unfolding took place in the compressed time of the digital world rather than the slower-moving pace of print, and whose contours are not identical to the Khouri case but are equally illustrative of the political and ethical stakes of authorial imposture both generally and in the particular context of the West’s relationship with Islam and the Middle East. I am referring to what has come to be called “the Amina Hoax,” which saw the popularization and eventual debunking of a blog called “A Gay Girl in Damascus” purporting to be written by a

Syrian-American women who identified herself as Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, a

141 thirtysomething lesbian living in Damascus under the Assad regime during the tumult of the

Arab Spring and the early days of the Syrian civil war. While the Amina story does not centre on an honour killing, its utility in opening this chapter is twofold. First, it echoes and illustrates the claim made in the Arundhati Roy epigraph above, namely, that voicelessness is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but one produced by the occlusion of certain voices and perspectives.

One of the ways in which this imposed voicelessness takes place is through the self-declared spokesperson, whose singular authority comes at the expense of a multiplicity of voices, no matter the authority or insight the spokesperson might legitimately possess. In this case, the alleged spokesperson is doubly removed from the experiences he (as Amina) claimed to represent. Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the presence of a unique figure: a revealed hoaxer who not only admitted his deception but offered a public defense of it, a defense whose terms offer a mirror image of my argument here.

As the first months of 2011 passed, the world showed no sign of waning interest in the ongoing upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa. In what seemed to the distanced observer like an inexorable domino effect, one by one protests erupted and regimes thought relatively stable (and in some cases near-invincible) lost their grip and crumbled. The story was somewhat different in Syria, under the tight control of second-generation dictator Bashar al-

Assad, where any acts of dissidence (perceived or otherwise) were met with unequivocal violence; the regime’s security forces, with apparent impunity, moved from mass detentions to torture to public executions with ultimately unsurprising but nevertheless deplorable rapidity.

Amidst these events, the internet occupied a prominent place for those inside and outside the countries experiencing turmoil. The role of social media (particularly Twitter) as a means of distributing information and mobilizing resistance was and is a frequent topic of debate; less

142 arguable was (and again, is) the sizeable appetite of readers in North America and elsewhere for first-person accounts of the upheaval via the internet.

As Whitlock notes in a discussion of the earlier US invasion of Iraq as depicted by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax, one of the ways in which war in the digital age has shifted the terrain of representation is through the increased accessibility of voices “on the ground” using the internet to represent lives made invisible under the violence, rhetorical and actual, of the so-called war on terror. This transnationalized flow of self-representation comprises a key component of what she calls “autobiography in transit.” There is a paradox to be noted here: as the face of modern warfare becomes increasingly abstracted, particularly for non-combatants, through the televising of (visually) bloodless drone strikes and targeted aerial bombardments, the viewing audience has simultaneously had unprecedented access to first-person accounts of the wars waged in their names through the proliferation of personal blogs and social media platforms. Though the diffuse events collectively called the Arab Spring represent a different case than Iraq (as internal revolts rather than the arrival of an external force), they share a similar relationship to the Western reading public, that is, one of simultaneous distance and proximity.

This was the political scene onto which Amina’s blog emerged with its first entry on

February 19, 2011. Over the next three and a half months, “A Gay Girl In Damascus” gained in readership and media attention through its unique access to a presumptive “native informant,” until a woman identifying herself as Amina’s cousin posted on June 6 that Amina had been kidnapped by three armed men. Internet readers, and especially the transnational community of queer bloggers in which Amina had established herself, responded swiftly, creating online petitions and Facebook groups in solidarity. The Western media, which had begun to take notice of Amina and her blog a month earlier in an article by Guardian writer Katherine Marsh,

143 publicized the disappearance and international response, while a U.S. State Department representative told Fox News that the government was “looking into” the case. After blogger Liz

Henry and NPR reporter Andy Carvin both expressed doubts about Amina’s identity, Ali

Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of Electronic Intifada published their suspicion that a pair of married graduate students in Edinburgh, Tom MacMaster and Britta Froelicher, were responsible for Amina’s blog and online presence.4

At least initially, MacMaster proved remarkably willing to speak to the media, seemingly convinced he had done something clever by hoodwinking thousands of readers in Syria and beyond (Froelicher, he has consistently claimed, was not directly involved in any writing, though he did draw on her scholarly knowledge of the region). He updated the Amina blog in his own voice and name, proclaiming himself the unmasker of “the often superficial coverage of the

Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism” to which the media outlets who believed in Amina apparently fell prey (how this applies to Syrians themselves is a matter he did not address).5 In his first post-revelation interview, given to BBC Radio’s Good

Morning Scotland, he explains that

I really felt, a number of years ago, that in discussions on Middle East issues

while living in the U.S., it was often—finding that when I presented real facts and

opinions, that the immediate reaction to someone with my name was, you know,

why are you anti-American, why are you anti-Jewish? Which, both are

completely false…Getting that kind of reaction was distracting from the real

4 As a web developer for BlogHer, which had reposted Amina’s most-read blog entry on her father’s encounter with Syrian security officials, Henry researched Amina’s online presence after her disappearance and publicized her findings on June 7 that, among other inconsistencies, Amina’s online identity could only be traced back to 2007 (Henry). The same day, Carvin tweeted his followers to ask if anyone had ever met Amina in person, that is, offline. Abunimah and Doherty’s investigation uncovered an identical address used by Amina and MacMaster, included in their article along with a highly suspicious correspondence with MacMaster (Abunimah and Doherty). 5 Tom MacMaster, blog post, 12 June 2011. At the time of this writing, the content of damascasgaygirl.blogspot.com has been taken down. Quotes from the blog are via screencaps of its contents I saved as the deception unfolded.

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focus. So I invented a name to talk under that would keep the focus on the actual

issues. (Quoted in Davidson)

While there may be a legitimate point somewhere in this undoubtedly self-interested answer about the ways in which accusations of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are used to evade meaningful critical discourse about Middle Eastern politics, it relies on a highly specious conception of the relationship between (geopolitical) position and (sociopolitical) privilege.

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MacMaster underlined and elaborated this point in his final blog entry, again reiterating, “I noticed that when I, a person with a distinctly Anglo name, made comments on the Middle East, the facts I might present were ignored…I wondered idly whether the same ideas presented by someone with a distinctly Arab and female identity would have the same reaction.”6 Shifting from suggesting the need for “a name…that would keep the focus on the actual issues” to “a distinctly Arab and female identity” reveals MacMaster’s implicit argument that his status as a white American male marginalizes him in the context of the political discussions in which he wishes to participate; the equation of a nominal identity that would leave its bearer sufficiently unmarked to speak without confronting criticism to the possession of a specifically Arab female name suggests that MacMaster sought not a neutral voice but an authoritative one. In other words, then, MacMaster is arguing that in the context of these conversations (conveniently omitting where or among whom they take place), the terms of structural privilege are inverted.

What his argument does not account for (and likely cannot) is that the sense of entitlement underpinning his belief in the importance of his own views can be traced to the privileges accorded a white heterosexual American man in the first place.7 Put differently, MacMaster links his own lack of authority to a de-privileging of white American voices, but fails to realize his certainty that his voice deserves to be heard is produced by the very categories of privilege he claims lead to his marginalization. His complaint thus becomes, effectively, that he is not oppressed enough to be taken seriously as a voice for those over whom he wields systemic power.

6 Blog entry, 13 June 2011, my archives. 7 It is also notable that MacMaster does not list his sexuality as one of the factors influencing his authority or lack thereof in speaking on Middle Eastern politics, particularly given that he transforms himself from straight to gay via the Amina persona (and published some truly execrable poetry in Amina’s voice depicting lesbian sexual encounters, no less). The role of the Amina persona as an exercise in sexual fantasy or wish fulfilment for its creator remains ripe for further exploration.

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Rather than interrogating the complexities of representation and acknowledging that, perhaps, it is at times more appropriate to listen than to speak if one wishes to ally oneself with marginalized groups and people, MacMaster instead opted for arguably the least productive and most objectionable choice, namely, the wholesale appropriation of the voice of the other. By doing so, he caused material or practical harm, such as the reported increase in state scrutiny directed at Syrian LGBTQ activists and potentially enabling the Syrian regime to dismiss other claims of homophobic persecution as equally fraudulent (Ramadan 2011). We can conceive of harm in a more abstracted sense as well, as inflicted through enacting and reinforcing the

Orientalist tropes he claimed to be revealing. The Orient remains a mystery to be spoken about, translated from East to West by an ostensible native informant (albeit one able to speak in the

American idiom) promising exclusive access to its secrets, which are no secret at all but mere reiterations of male barbarism and exoticized female sexuality. In this sense, the Amina Hoax is a clear instance of, as Whitlock notes, what happens when “members of privileged groups imaginatively represent to themselves the perspective of the oppressed,” that is, that “their representations can often carry the projections and fantasies through which their own complementary image of themselves is enhanced and reinforced” (67). Steven Salaita (himself no stranger to the fraught politics of speech and marginalization in the context of the Middle

East), writing of the Khouri case, makes a similar point that applies equally well to MacMaster’s blog. The imposture’s “believability, despite its unbelievable contents, can be attributed in part to its appeasement of a long-standing cultural mythos in the United States and its ability to retroactively justify decades of aggressive foreign policy in the Arab world” (88). Though

MacMaster claims to have taken the voice of an Arab woman in order to be granted the power of authoritative speech, he fails to consider the possibility of suspending his own desire for

147 authority and mastery instead of engaging in imposturous pseudo-marginality. This act of appropriation in turn consequently re-marginalizes the voices of actual Arab women and queer people, who remain presumed incapable of speaking for themselves. I referred earlier to the argument this chapter will develop in its discussion of Norma Khouri, namely, that these fraudulent stories of “honour killings” rely on the notion of Middle Eastern and Muslim women as captives of a web of influences variously understood as religious, cultural, national, and geographic, a captivity crucially understood not as applicable to all subjects who inhabit a complex world (as we all do) but as uniquely the product of Islam and Arab culture understood in monolithic terms. MacMaster’s creation of the Amina persona illuminates another dimension of this sense of captivity I am tracing: imposture implicitly accepts the Orientalist construction of the mute Muslim woman and thus reinforces this construction by its logic of substitution and its claims to speak on behalf of the putatively voiceless. This presumption of muteness on the part of those who claim to be exposing Orientalist discourse is thus one of the most powerful mechanisms of its reproduction. I turn now the literary antecedents of one prong of this double bind: the captivity narrative in the English tradition.

Captivity Narratives: Power and Politics

The captivity narrative, an umbrella category of sorts that can include a number of subgenres within its scope, is at the same time a well-established genre from a critical vantage point and one whose genealogy remains, in certain respects, contested. Its most basic undisputed features are its reference to situations (real or imagined) in which an individual or group experiences capture and containment (and the subsequent potential for transformation) at the hands of others. It is, crucially, a genre predominantly depicting the capture and containment of

148 white subjects, though who exactly comprises the others encountered by the white subject is crucial to the variations within the broader genre (as Pauline Turner Strong has argued in Captive

Selves, Captivating Others) and to the texts this chapter analyzes, as I will demonstrate.

Whitlock’s suggestion that the “veiled best-seller” be understood in its contemporary form as an iteration of the captivity narrative is especially productive insofar as that genre centres less on white captives in a variety of scenes than on the (literal) space of the Middle East and the

(figurative) space of Islam. This genre of (predominantly and ostensibly) memoir focuses on the lives of women within countries containing a significant Muslim population and, generally, some degree of overlap between religious and state legal practices (ranging from the near-total collapse of the two to the more complex mix of Sharia and civil courts, such as in Jordan).

Reading the “veiled best-seller” as version of the captivity narrative highlights the ways in which the former relies on framing the image of the veil—understood variously as representative of

Islam and/or the Middle East—as a form of captivity. This construction of Islam as a space of female captivity will inform my discussion of Khouri’s contentious memoir later in this chapter, as well as my larger argument about how this conception of Islam can be identified in attempts to

“manage” or legislate elements of religious or cultural expression in Western Europe and North

America; for now, however, I turn to a brief examination of the historical, rhetorical, and generic boundaries of the captivity narrative.

The captivity narrative as a genre is, broadly, what it sounds like: narratives presented as describing the true experience of being held captive. Formally, the truth claims advanced by these texts make them subject to Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, under which the names of author and narrator are identical and therefore assumed to be one and the same. Crucial to this argument is the double nature of the autobiographical pact: as the contractual evocation of its

149 name suggests, the act of reading autobiography (or reading autobiographically) requires at the same time the author’s assurance of the truthfulness of her text and the reader’s belief in this assurance and, thus, in the events presented in the text itself. In the context of the captivity narrative, the guarantee is of course that the story of captivity being recounted has actually happened to the author, a guarantee reflected in the titling conventions of many historical captivity narratives, which frequently include the author-captive’s name in their title (the first instance of the specifically American generic subset of the Indian captivity narrative, The

Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs.

Mary Rowlandson, initially published in 1682, is a paradigmatic case). It is worth noting that this titling convention does not always translate directly to the veiled bestseller, which instead tends to rely on more generic titling practices (Jean Sasson’s Princess trilogy includes Princess: A

True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia, Princess Sultana’s Daughters, and Princess

Sultana’s Circle, as well as the more recent Mayada, Daughter of Iraq).8 Two possible reasons for this are the frequent anonymity or pseudonymity deployed by the author of the veiled bestseller, or, more interestingly, the use of titling to emphasize a metonymic relationship between the author and the population for which she claims to speak (in this case, fellow oppressed Middle Eastern women).9 Khouri’s two titles, Honor Lost: Love and Death in

Modern-Day Jordan (American edition) and Forbidden Love: A Harrowing True Story of Love

8 While the Sasson texts are not memoirs in that they are not stories written by Sasson about her own life, she does emphasize their collaboratory nature (that is, they are stories told to her by their titular subjects); Sasson has recently begun publishing her own memoirs, the first volume of which, An American Chick in Saudi Arabia, follows the metonymic titling conventions I am discussing). Sasson’s framing of this collaboration is frequently problematic in the Orientalist model of gender I am discussing, as the tagline of her website highlights by proclaiming her “A Voice For Women in the Middle East.” 9 Whitlock also discusses metonymy in the context of the veiled best-seller, though in her analysis the veil serves as the metonym: “These texts are carefully positioned to project the gender apartheid imposed by Islamic fundamentalism toward a receptive market. The veil facilitates the trope of truth and authenticity revealed in life narratives such as these, tapping into a fantasy of the illicit penetration of the hidden and gendered spaces of ‘the Islamic World’” (58).

150 and Revenge in Jordan (in the Commonwealth) both operate according to this principle, as do the Sasson titles mentioned above. All demonstrate a canny sense of their own market position by underscoring the representational nature of their authors’ (ostensible) life experiences, juxtaposing the in-depth detail of a single story promised by the memoir as a genre (“a victim,” that is, a unique, singular victim) with the universalized context in which it takes place

(“modern-day Jordan,” “the laws of man”). The focus thus shifts from the individuation of the historical captivity narrative via its emphasis on the captive to the ethnographic gaze cast upon the captors.

The captivity narrative, understood in its widest sense, is a fundamentally transnational genre: not only does it rely inherently upon instances of cross-cultural contact, but these meetings take place across regional, national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. The genre thus serves, in Mary Louise Pratt’s term, as a contact zone, both in its depiction of the experience of contact and in its textual enactment thereof (though the texts themselves may be more accurately said to function according to the logic of colonial fantasy). Even within the specifically

American context, it has emerged to document, respond to, and frame multiple forms of encounter. Andrea Tinnemayer, for instance, argues that the previously dominant (American) form of the “Indian captivity narrative” was revived and revised post-1848 “not only as residual resurrection of anti-Indian propaganda intended to sway public opinion during Indian Removal but also as real and metaphorical forms for glossing the U.S. Invasion of Mexico and the forced annexation of one third of Mexico’s northern territory as liberating acts” (xii). Captivity narratives, in this view, emerge as sites for the working-through (or, to revisit LaCapra’s terms, perhaps more accurately the acting-out) of political and cultural tensions.

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This focus on acts and spaces of encounter across national boundaries, broadly understood, whether the encounter takes place between captive and captor or reader and text, is essential to the genre’s formal aspects and to its political-ethical stakes. This notion of contact is intimately linked to the truth-claims made by accounts of captivity; that these claims are also connected to the textual representation of a group of persons from a different national, cultural, linguistic, and/or religious context from either captive or reader also, according to Joe Snader, invests the captivity narrative in the epistemological framework of ethnography and its attendant interest in generalizability (34); the terrain shifts to autoethnography in the majority of veiled bestsellers. In other words, the author’s experience of captivity is presented as unique insofar as it is the story of a single individual undergoing something unusual to the majority of readers (a typical literary conceit of the memoir) while, at the same time, her (typically hostile) depiction of her captors is granted representative status; this is particularly important given the renewed import of the veiled best-seller, which speaks to an appetite for stories of women in the Middle

East whose individual lives are often presented and taken as culturally representative. In theoretical terms, then, we are confronted with the multiplicity of rhetorical modes that Snader identifies as another characteristic of the captivity narrative (27). Here, I wish to emphasize a triangulation of the distinct but linked rhetorical categories of life writing, testimony, and ethnography, understood in this context within the larger generic terms of the captivity narrative.

As I turn to Khouri’s text, I wish us to particularly hold in mind the ethical question of this simultaneous claim to singularity and generalizability.

In the context of the veiled-bestseller, the form of the encounter takes on a somewhat different shade. Per Whitlock, the resuscitation of the captivity narrative’s popularity in the late

20th century took place through a paradigmatic veiled bestseller, Betty Mahmoudy’s Not

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Without My Daughter, published in 1991 and continuously in print since, later adapted into a film of the same name starring Sally Field. Whitlock’s argument traces a connection from the

Orientalist fascination with the harem, evident in a range of artistic productions from the literary

(Mary Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters) to painting (Delacroix’s “The Women of Algiers [in

Their Apartment]”), to the twentieth and twenty-first century fascination with memoirs of women’s experiences in so-called Muslim countries, of which Mahmoudy’s memoir is a crucial touchstone. The controversial memoir describes Mahmoudy’s marriage to an Iranian national living in the United States and their subsequent life in post-revolutionary Iran, during which the author depicts herself as a captive victim not only of her husband and his family but of institutionalized Islam and a fanatical strain of Persian nationalism, from which she and her five- year-old daughter finally escaped via Turkey with the assistance of a human smuggler.

The text (in both its literary and cinematic forms) continues to be considered inflammatory for its presentation of Iran, Islam, and the relationship—or perhaps more specifically, the collapse—between the two; further, Iran-as-emblem-of-(oppressive) Islam is framed as a space of female captivity, a place in which not only are women always already unfree but are also the primary agents perpetuating that unfreedom upon themselves and each other. As a white American convert to Islam, Mahmoudy’s doubled position as captive and insider marks the intersection of the captivity narrative and the veiled bestseller; she is, so to speak, held captive behind the veil. This generic intersection is complicated by stories like

Khouri’s, or Jean Sassoon’s famous Princess trilogy treating the lives of women in Saudi Arabia, which mobilize the same tropes surrounding captivity by a supposed insider (whether in the style of the native informant, or a more liminal figure like Mahmoudy). In cases such as these, the encounter is thus between the reader of the veiled bestseller, who, as Whitlock notes, is always

153 constructed as Western and frequently as female (if not as feminist [113]), and the testimony of a

“true” witness to the ways in which geography, religious tradition, and culture intersect in the life of the textual woman and, under the autobiographical pact, the life of the author.

The way in which these encounters and their attendant tensions are represented brings us to the question of power in the captivity narrative as genre, which in turn requires attention to formal conventions of the genre. On the level of form, Snader identifies a number of the key features of the captivity narrative according to which the captive describes her captors. The gaze of the captive (in the context of the British literary tradition), he argues, demonstrates an interest in “early efforts to develop systematic forms of cultural description and evaluation,” leading to

“detailed portraits of alien cultures as tyrannical, barbaric, and superstitious foils for the modernity of Western civilization” (16-17). Accordingly, the captors are situated as a threat not only because of the basic premise of the narrative (they are, after all, holding the author against her will) but as racialized figures, dark Others whose violence is not merely literal but moral and epistemological. While the dynamics of an author-protagonist’s status as captive clearly place her in a subjected position, the systematizing and generalizing gaze relies on a depiction of cultural uniformity that reasserts the captive’s power to represent her captors. That this is a reassertion is crucial to my argument about the nature of power in the captivity narrative as a genre, which is in turn critical to the analytic utility of situating Khouri within that genre’s bounds. In contrast to narratives by formerly enslaved individuals, in which the assertion of (self) representational power is in itself a resistant strategy to institutionalized oppression, the white

European or American captive’s loss of power is both individual and temporary (through fraught with the potential danger of a more permanent loss, or at least the perception thereof on the part of others). Though the structure to which the captive’s successful escape is linked often vary

154 according to national context, the common thread is the shift from temporary powerlessness to systemic power through emphasis on the captive’s adherence to and implication in hegemonic discourses. This moment of re-empowerment is both common and crucial to the narrative structure of these stories: the act of testifying to the experience of captivity by definition requires the captive’s survival and emergence, and the broader structures to which that survival is frequently linked reinscribe the former captive within the hierarchy of social power. While the captive originally speaks in the guise of a marginalized figure, then, narrative closure relies upon a parallel moment of ideological closure in which the superiority of Anglo-American power welcomes her back into its normative embrace, albeit with new knowledge of that power’s necessary conditionality.

That this assertion of individual survival and national-ideological supremacy takes place through the act of representation, specifically the depiction of the culturally other captors, is essential to my extension of Whitlock’s characterization of Khouri’s text as a captivity narrative.

Though I have emphasized the role of contact across lines of culture, nation, language, or religion as a key feature of the genre, and noted that on first glance this feature is absent from

Khouri’s text, it is the way in which her text asserts the superiority of (ostensibly) Western liberal values as compared to a reductive picture of Islam and Arab culture(s) with a specifically

Western readership in mind that makes reading Honor Lost into the captivity tradition so illuminating. Understanding the captivity narrative as a political project engaged in the reification of hegemonic structures emphasizes the importance of the reader-text relationship I have stressed throughout my analysis thus far. Further, it underscores the way in which the veiled bestseller in general and Khouri’s text in particular are structured with a particular audience and political sensibility in mind. In other words, the claim to speak from a position that

155 is both marginalized and culturally representative while simultaneously situating oneself in an ideological allegiance to the hegemonic forces of the Western imperial project is worth interrogating even without the accusations of fraud that will come to indelibly shape the veiled bestseller as a contemporary narrative of captivity.

Bestsellers Unveiled I: Forbidden Love/Honor Lost

Among the most successful examples of the genre Whitlock identifies as the veiled bestseller is Norma Khouri’s 2003 memoir, published (as aforementioned) under the dual titles

Forbidden Love and Honor Lost, referred to in this chapter by the latter title. Purporting to describe the “honour killing” of Khouri’s best friend, Honor Lost recounts a spontaneous and boundary-violating love affair between Dalia, a Muslim (and the aforementioned best friend), and Michael, a Catholic. The pair meet at the salon Norma and Dalia open at an unspecified point in the mid-1990s, supported by parents who were unable to envision any other future but marriage for their daughters. N&D’s Unisex Salon, in Amman, is a crucial setting for the memoir and a key component of the latter’s eventual disproval, discussed further below; in the context of

Khouri’s account, the salon serves as a liminal zone between the restrictions of Jordanian culture

(as envisioned by the text) and the freedoms Norma and Dalia imagine and aspire to.10 Though the pair is under near-constant scrutiny by male family members, including through the frequent presence of Dalia’s brother Mohamed at the salon doing double duty as bodyguard and warden, it is at the salon that Dalia and Michael have their first crucial encounters, and it is through the salon that Norma and Dalia will coordinate the year-long secret relationship between the lovers.

10 For the sake of clarity, I refer to the author of Forbidden Love/Honor Lost by the family name she attaches to the text (Khouri) and the character representing the author in the narrative by her first name (Norma).

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Dalia and Michael’s love—the development of which is never explained beyond the foreign education that has, per Norma, made Michael superior to the typical Arab man—is assisted by Norma and Jehan, Michael’s sister, and reaches its most dramatic point when Norma and Dalia are (inexplicably) allowed to stay in Amman alone while their families make their yearly trip to a beach at Aqaba.11 Norma encourages Dalia to take the opportunity to be alone with Michael, and the pair visits a national forest. After the families return from their vacation,

Dalia becomes increasingly convinced that her brother Mohamed suspects something; it appears that the lovers had returned from their trip with pine needles found only in that particular forest visible on a blanket. Norma refuses to countenance Dalia’s suspicions, in spite of her own insistence on the incredible dangers of this inter-religious courtship, and the three plan to escape

Jordan. Before this plan can be finalized, Dalia is stabbed twelve times by her father and left to die before he calls for an ambulance. Crucial to Khouri’s narrative claims is the blind eye she alleges the Jordanian government habitually turns to crimes of honour, and she consequently asserts that not only did no meaningful investigation into Dalia’s death take place but that officials at all institutional levels, from the paramedics to the hospital staff to the judicial system, colluded to create a climate of impunity that saw Dalia’s father freed entirely after three months on bail.

Following Dalia’s murder, Norma’s heretofore inner rebellion is externalized in a direct confrontation with Dalia’s father and then with her own. She makes clear her belief in both

Dalia’s innocence (that is, in the non-consummation of Dalia and Michael’s relationship) and in the immorality of killing on the grounds of family honour (that her insistence on Dalia’s virginity

11 In a move typical of Khouri’s lack of logical consistency, Norma and Dalia use the computer class they are taking (or rather, that they signed up for as an excuse to be away from their family homes and the salon on Friday nights) as an alibi for Dalia’s visits with Michael. Their parents’ curious willingness to invest money in the salon apparently extends to funding bookkeeping software and the classes the women tell them are necessary to use it.

157 relies on an implicit acceptance of the grounds used to justify such crimes is a point to which I will return). After Norma’s explosive tirade directed at Dalia’s father, her own father attempts to exert his paternal authority by informing his daughter he is now theoretically entitled to kill her on the grounds of her verbal disobedience and demands she apologize to Dalia’s father and admit the rightness of his actions. Norma’s mother counsels her to accede to her father’s wishes, and after secretly reconfirming her plans to depart Jordan during a phone call with Michael, Norma tells her father she will offer the apology he has requested. In what would be the memoir’s most poignant moment if not for its sheer improbability (a feeling heightened, as so many other sensations when reading this text, for the reader who knows how this story will end), Norma visits Dalia’s father and apologies for being unable to resign herself to Dalia’s fate. “I suppose I owe you an apology for…finding [Dalia’s] loss unbearable and your apathy over her loss infuriating,” she says, and somehow this apology is accepted as adequate by both patriarchs and gives her the reprieve she needs to escape. How she has obtained a passport—the difficulties of which had been emphasized for dramatic tension before the murder, and attributed to her gender and single status—is somehow no longer an issue (178).

As a “dissident émigré” first in Greece and then in another country she will not name, she writes her memoir piecemeal in various internet cafés, seeking only to expose the truth of

Jordan’s intransigency and to fight for women’s equality (what exactly this means beyond the elimination of two articles of the Jordanian penal code facilitating minimal punishment for the perpetrators of honour killings remains vague, which is of course not to say this is not a useful goal). The memoir ends with an epilogue summarizing a dozen cases of Jordanian women murdered by their male relatives with apparent impunity, a reassertion of Norma’s belief that she would be murdered by her male relatives if she returned to Jordan, and a brief note thanking

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Dalia for inspiring the author to the heights of courage it has taken to become the crusader she so clearly wishes us to think her. Not least among the facts excluded from this account of self- sacrificial struggle is the six-figure paycheck Khouri received from Random House for the memoir and the relocation to Australia as a refugee arranged by her publishers.

Khouri’s story is riddled with contradictions and outright errors, among them the almost incredible inconsistency with which she represents gendered power dynamics in daily life.

Among Khouri’s most dramatic claims include her assertion that Jordanian women must only wear black or other neutral colours and are not only universally forbidden from eating at the table with men but may only eat after their male relatives have finished, and even then only their leftovers (11). Perhaps even more notable than the all-encompassing sweep of her assertions is the ease with which she contradicts them elsewhere in the text; for instance, after clearly and broadly insisting on the uniform adherence to gender-segregated mealtimes in private homes and women’s enforced consumption of table scraps, she will later almost offhandedly note that her family did not subscribe to this practice, attributing the difference to her Christian background as opposed to Dalia’s Muslim faith. None of this is to claim that women (in Jordan or elsewhere) do not experience forms of gendered distinction, discrimination, and/or oppression, but rather that

Khouri alternates totalizing description and casual exceptions in equal measure at her narrative convenience.

This contradiction reflects both the general sloppiness that characterizes Khouri’s approach to logical consistency and factual accuracy and the particular slippage she repeatedly enacts between “Islam,” “Arabic culture,” and “Jordan” as one-dimensional signifiers of repressive, misogynist practices. Norma, a Christian, and Dalia, a Muslim, are united across religious difference by their subjection to what Khouri calls (without explanation) “the Bedouin

159 code,” which is “always encroaching on the urban streets” (1). The text is relentlessly, almost exaggeratedly, Orientalist from its very first lines:

Jordan is a place where men in sand-coloured business suits hold cell phones to

one ear and, in the other, hear the whispers of harsh and ancient laws blowing in

from the desert. […] It is a place of paradox and double standards for men and

women, for liberated and conservative. Modern on the surface, it is an

unforgiving desert whose oases have blossomed into cities. But the desert

continues to blow in. […] Its fierce and primitive code is always nagging at men’s

instincts, reminding them that under the Westernizing veneer, they are all still

Arabs. For most women, Jordan is a stifling prison tense with the risk of death at

the hands of loved ones. It is my home. I love its stark beauty, its sweep of

history. And yet it may never be safe for me to return. (1-2)

Nothing about this description would be out of place in a Harlequin drugstore novel interested only in the romanticized exoticism of the Orient; equally, nothing about this description suggests its author has any interest in presenting Jordan (or the Middle East) as a real place in which real people live real, complex lives, subject to a variety of freedoms and constraints as affected by personal, familial, and communal engagements with religion, culture, tradition, and politics as by the boundaries of geographical nationhood. Instead, as Salaita notes, Khouri earns “her credibility by legitimizing a long-standing American fantasy that its moral and cultural superiority can be substantiated vis-à-vis the barbaric East” (99).

The relentless conflation Khouri enacts among the terms “Arab,” “Muslim,” “Bedouin,” and “Jordanian” echoes another hallmark of Orientalist thought, namely, the collapse of the geographical and the cultural and, especially, a wilful disregard of the distinctions between and

160 amongst the various cultural formations comprising the geographical region the term ostensibly denotes (Said 5). What I want to suggest is that the initial success of Khouri’s text is not in spite of its overblown prose and frankly offensive investment in a neo-primitivist depiction of life in the Middle East but because of these elements of the text. We might recall here the multiple meanings implicit in Whitlock’s pronouncement that Khouri’s text was “the hoax we had to have,” which I argued suggests not only the inevitability of a deceptive veiled best-seller but the possibility that Khouri’s text itself was inevitably discovered to be deceptive (106). In both cases, it is the genre’s investment (that is, the genre as produced by the triangulation of writers, readers, and publishers) in trading in the currency of Orientalist constructions that creates the conditions for Khouri’s memoir: for its initial publication, its success, and, finally, its disavowal.

Could any story that accords so perfectly with what readers expected of it be anything other than fictional?

The limits of Khouri’s political claim (that is, the claim that she writes as an activist, or more accurately writes as a form of activism) are nowhere clearer than in these moments of perfect accord between truth-claim text and Orientalist fantasy. The relentless othering of Arab and Muslim men is the most visible but not the only example; Khouri’s treatment of Dalia as simultaneously exotically beautiful and sexually (and thus morally) pure is subtler but no less insidious. Offering a physical description of her friend, the reader is told that Dalia “had waist- length, thick, wavy tresses, perfect light olive skin, and full lips. Most of all, she had these mesmerizing dark brown eyes” (12). Like her mother, Dalia “was one of a small cluster of Arabs who still show signs of their ancient Greco-Roman genes, a group of women considered scarce and highly sought-after by Arab men,” a description that packs a great deal of ideological work into its few (clichéd) words (38). Dalia is simultaneously unique and ancient, exoticized and

161 whitewashed; to use Homi Bhabha’s formulation, she serves “as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (122). She is also relentlessly feminine/feminized in terms both animalistic and cartoonish, as Khouri carefully points out that “[for] all her incredible strength, she seemed as vulnerable as Bambi” (17). The binaries at work here also link Khouri’s text to the generic codes of the captivity narrative in formal and rhetorical terms, as outlined above: Dalia’s difference from those around her is depicted as both physical and psychological, which in turn implicitly suggests a connection between her “Greco-Roman genes” and the otherwise decontextualized gender politics that enable her individualized and exceptionalized resistance to imperatives otherwise presented as totalizingly relentless in their social and familial pressures.

Khouri, however, appears less able to resist at least one of those pressures in her textual construction of Dalia as the ultimate victim, namely, the equation of virginity with physical and moral purity. The question of whether or not Dalia and Michael consummated their affair is, according to Norma, a weighted one, as it will determine whether or not Dalia’s family have the legal right to kill Michael for his role in her so-called defilement (152). To that end, a post- mortem examination is performed to verify whether or not the pair engaged in sexual intercourse; though we are not made explicitly privy to the results, it appears Dalia’s family does not pursue violent retribution against Michael. Though the failure to inform the reader whether or not Dalia’s family seeks to exact this vengeance may well be merely another instance of sloppy writing on Khouri’s part, this information is quite decidedly not omitted based on the presumption that the results of the exam are irrelevant to Dalia’s fate: through first-person narration, Norma asserts, “I knew Dalia. I was sure that she was still a virgin” (152). It is worth noting here that Norma’s phrasing—”I knew Dalia”—does not refer to their friendship (she does not say “I knew Dalia would have told me if she and Michael had consummated their

162 relationship”) but instead conflates knowledge of Dalia with knowledge of Dalia’s actions, which must (of course) be consistent with Dalia’s already established status as a romantic heroine embodying physical and moral perfection. This is also another way in which knowledge and embodiment intertwine in the imposture text (recall Wilkomirski’s DNA test), as will surface again in the Broinowski documentary in equally fraught fashion.

The maintenance of sexual purity in heteronormative terms is invoked to make Dalia a more perfect victim; Khouri does not even offer a token gesture towards the idea that Dalia’s murder would be wrong regardless of her sexual history. Arguably, her later description of

Michael as “an innocent man” to her mother, offered as an assertion of the non-sexual nature of his relationship with Dalia, could be read as a strategic use of misogynist logic in order to persuade her mother, positioned as one of its adherents, of the couple’s “innocence” in a broader sense. However, this rationalization cannot apply to Norma’s assertion that she “knew Dalia” and thus was certain of the non-sexual nature of the relationship, an assertion that explicitly equates innocence with abstention and thus cannot avoid implying the opposite (that sexual contact would equal guilt). Ensuring that Dalia is the most innocent of all possible victims is thus privileged over troubling the equation of sexual abstinence and moral purity that underpins the very logic Khouri claims as her enemy.

Arguably, Khouri’s apparently unthinking reification of patriarchal sexual morality might be taken as further support for one of the points she is at pains to make in the text, namely, the ways in which Jordanian women become complicit with and implicated in the very structures that oppress them (in a way that appears to exceed the basic sense in which forms of unfreedom implicate and are upheld by all navigating them). This point is made with Khouri’s typically heavy hand in the book’s later chapters, in which Norma’s mother is made to channel the voice

163 of the system against which Norma rebels. Framing her position as one of concern for her daughter, Norma’s mother insists that Dalia’s death was a result of her own choices and the harm she chose to inflict on her family’s reputation, telling her daughter, “we can’t change anything now [and the] only thing we can do is make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you” (167). In what is presumably meant as a moment of relatively light-hearted comedy, the elder Khouri reacts with greater disapprobation to the revelation that Norma smokes than to Dalia’s death; the latter, she says, represents “only one of the thousands of women this happens to every year. I’m sure the others had mothers, sisters, and friends who were just as upset as you are now, but they realized, as you will in time, that nothing can be done about it. They suffer the loss in silence and then find a way to move on, as you will” (168). Apart from the noticeably American tone of the exchange (the language of “moving on,” as well as Norma’s apology for her outburst on the grounds that she is “an emotional wreck”), Norma’s mother’s position strikes one of the story’s most false notes in its simultaneous fluency and banality.

What might be generously read as the author’s attempt to articulate a generation gap in the context of female expectations falls victim to her apparent need to force her mother to embody multiple possible positions for narrative purposes, and consequently her mother appears designed to serve various metonymic functions rather than to operate as a three-dimensional figure (another retrospective indication of the text’s impostures status). When Norma asks her mother if she had ever had other desires for her own life, she responds, “[we] all go through that confusing period in our lives, but we quickly learn our place and our responsibilities. You will too” (151). The use of “we” is clearly meant to implicate all Jordanian women in Norma’s mother’s description of her own life’s trajectory, suggesting a unified narrative of female socialization that, in accordance with Khouri’s general propensity for simplification, does not

164 include the possibility of different experiences of any sort, let alone of individual or collective resistance. Further, Khouri’s mother blames Dalia for her own death while appearing to recognize, at least to an extent, that the standards dictating that death represent a structural problem. As quoted above, she tells Norma first that Dalia brought her fate upon herself, and then attempts to comfort her daughter by pointing out that Dalia is “only one of…thousands,” a comment that connects Dalia to a history of gendered violence (168). While the credulous reading would suggest this seeming inconsistency is meant to evoke precisely the individual human complexity I criticized earlier as lacking in Khouri’s characterization of her mother (and, certainly, her father and brothers), knowing the scope of Khouri’s deception inclines me to argue that she is here falling prey to the metonymic instinct she seems eager to satisfy in her readers.

This insistence on Dalia as one of thousands underpins the logic of representational substitution at work in Khouri’s text, whereby one woman is meant to stand in for the status of all within the nebulous geographic/cultural/religious bounds Khouri traces and readers are explicitly encouraged to take her as such. If Dalia is the tragic romantic heroine and Norma her rebellious enabler and, later, avenger, then it falls to Norma’s mother to play the voice of the status quo; her subsequent acknowledgment that there are thousands of women like Dalia not only contradicts her own assertion that all Jordanian women undergo “that confusing period” only to emerge from it resigned to their roles as subservient wives and mothers, but highlights that she is a character being made to speak a part in order to represent just another strand in the tendentious and generalized argumentative thread Khouri is weaving. This gap in the coherence of Khouri’s totalized picture of Jordanian life, given that it is the ostensible factuality of that picture that grounds her textual truth claims, is thus also a gap in the truth value of the memoir itself. It is, in

165 this sense, a clue to the fuller picture of women’s lives behind Khouri’s veil, as much as a clue to the falseness of that veil (as constructed by Khouri) itself.

Ironically, though perhaps unsurprisingly, it is the totalizing depiction of gendered oppression—undoubtedly one the book’s most appealing features for its Western audience (see, for instance, Salaita’s account of the early reviews [90-91])—along with Khouri’s own arrogance that brought the book to the attention of two Jordanian women’s rights activists and led to its wholesale debunking. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 2004, Malcolm Knox traces the beginning of the end of the memoir’s success to an anonymous email Khouri apparently sent to the Jordanian National Commission for women, asking for the number of a bank account into which she could potentially deposit funds from her publication (Knox, “The lies stripped bare”).

The director of the commission in Amman, Dr. Amal al-Sabbagh, told Knox she ignored the request and (according to Knox), “Khouri continued to seek cover” by attempting to raise funds for the commission through her public readings. When she first read the book, al-Sabbagh was immediately skeptical: among the most significant triggers were basic errors like the claim on page two that Jordan borders Kuwait (it does not) and that the Jordan River once ran through

Amman (also untrue). Speaking to Knox, she said the very secrecy Khouri claimed surrounded

Dalia’s death rang false: “It sounded fake. If this killing had really happened, we [the commission] would know about it. Jordan is a small place and this is our job—people eventually hear about these things. And we knew nothing about this.” Al-Sabbagh’s suspicions took shape in the summer of 2003, when she and journalist Rana Husseini, a reporter for the English- language daily The Jordan Times who has covered violent crimes against women since the time

Khouri describes in Forbidden Love, devoted their attention to a thorough review of the memoir.

As al-Sabbagh told Knox and both women would later emphasize to Anna Broinowski, director

166 of the Khouri-focused documentary Forbidden Lie$, their research found 73 significant errors and exaggerations (several of which are discussed at length in Broinowski’s film; Rana

Husseini’s own account can also be found in her book [89-100]). The error Knox characterizes as most damning is the impossibility of a unisex salon, which “could not exist by law and was not remembered by any Amman hairdressers or their union.” For a text that is otherwise so relentless in its emphasis on gender segregation, that Khouri’s fatal error should be setting her tale in a mixed-gender business is an irony of almost literary quality (and underscores the complexity of formal and informal gender relations in Jordan, as anywhere else).

Al-Sabbagh and Husseini’s submission of their findings to Khouri’s publishers did not have the immediate effect of inducing the withdrawal of the memoir, but it did have an unintended consequence that would lead to the same ultimate conclusion: though her publishers defended her, Khouri lashed out at the commission, accusing al-Sabbagh and Husseini of being concerned only with defending “the image of Jordan” (Knox). According to al-Sabbagh, this response, which missed the key point that the activists’ goal was “to defend the reputation of

Jordanian women against what she wrote,” only pushed her further, and she began to delve deeper into her hunch that Khouri was not writing with meaningful knowledge of life in Jordan.

The Sydney Morning Herald undertook similar research, and the findings were identical: Khouri had left Jordan for the United States much earlier than she had claimed in her book, and had not lived in Amman since the age of three (circa 1973). Khouri’s brother and mother were found living in the same Chicago neighbourhood in which she had been raised and professed ignorance at what had led her to write her story and, in a new twist, involve her two children in her deception by uprooting them under her refugee claim and taking them with her to Australia

(Knox). As her impossible creation of a unisex salon contradicted her depiction of Jordanian

167 gender relations, her memoir’s claims of a culture of total silence and impunity for honour-based violence fell to pieces on the dedicated efforts of the small but organized community of women’s rights activists more concerned with confronting real lived experience than writing tragic

Orientalized romance.

Bestsellers Unveiled II: Forbidden Lie$

Husseini and al-Sabbagh were instrumental in another endeavour to explore the truth or lack thereof of Khouri’s story, which took place over the course of Australian filmmaker Anna

Broinowski’s filming of Forbidden Lie$, released in 2007. According to Broinowski, the project was initially undertaken with no small degree of sympathy for Khouri’s insistence that much of the apparent inaccuracies of her story could be attributed to a need to protect herself from retaliation; consequently, the film begins by taking Khouri’s claims at face value. For the first 30 minutes, we are given Khouri as a sober witness to a grisly tragedy, reading from her memoir with appropriate gravitas, being interviewed about the pervasiveness of honour crimes, staring purposefully into the middle distance contemplating her life’s mission to avenge Dalia’s death; the high point is a dramatic recreation of scenes from the memoir, culminating in a re-enactment of Dalia’s murder by her father and brothers. With an eye to the dramatic, the theatrical nature of this recreation in particular and the documentary mode in general is foregrounded when the re- enactment is brought to a screeching halt by the strident tones of journalist Rana Husseini, whose calls of “Wait. Wait!” rise above the voice-over narration of the story and the recreated scene. A quick cut to Husseini seated at her desk, holding Khouri’s book with an appropriately (and forbiddingly) censorious expression, proclaiming its falseness, is followed by a return to the scene of the re-enactment, where the actress playing Dalia drops out of character and sits up,

168 smiling and laughing with the men playing her family members as the film crew enters the frame. A shot of Khouri sitting on a set of steps is given a similar treatment, as the backdrop is lifted and the author shifts from serious, mournful witness to a brash-toned request for a cigarette break. Now, the film seems to assert, we will pull back the curtain and show you what has been fabricated, even if we may not entirely figure out the truth behind it.

Husseini’s role in the film is arguably the turning point in the larger story of Khouri and her memoir. Visibly frustrated and at times angry with Khouri’s claims in Honor Lost, Husseini escorts Broinowski and her film crew around the Amman neighbourhood in which the text’s events are set. The camera peers out the windows of a car, taking in the scene of the street, in which young women walk in various styles of clothing, in colours varied beyond the black and grey Norma claimed were the limited purview of women, with hair covered and uncovered. Less than a minute of screen time on the streets of Amman effectively demolishes at the very least the assertion that all Jordanian women are trapped in their houses as virtual prisoners. Husseini stops several of these young women, asking why their hair is not covered or why they are outside without male accompaniment; the mix of confusion and amusement with which these questions are received is another nail in the coffin of Khouri’s repressive scene. In the gym that Norma claims her brother visited during their working days at the salon, Husseini asks a young woman working at the desk who chose her major in college. “I did,” she replies, the “of course” implicit in her tone rather than stated. Husseini then enters a basketball court in the neighbourhood, where she had planned to play a game with a number of other women; they are incorporated into the conversation, a friend talking about her trips to the beach and pointing to her own teenage daughter and describing a life that bears no resemblance to Norma and Dalia’s ostensibly universal experiences. Allowances must, of course, be made for differences in rural and urban

169 communities, religious sects, class background, and other factors; like anywhere else, Jordan is home to a variety of religious, cultural, and familial traditions, including deeply conservative and oppressive elements—universalizing this freedom would be as inaccurate as Khouri’s desire to universalize its opposite.12 Nevertheless, these brief moments of the film and Husseini’s evident scorn are devastating evidence against the static, totalized picture of female captivity Khouri is at pains to paint.

As the film progresses, far too many holes are poked in the memoir to be recapitulated here, as Broinowski accompanies Khouri to Jordan and attempt to elicit conclusive proof of

Dalia’s life and death. Husseini investigates the alleged unisex hair salon on camera, both by questioning long-time residents of the neighbourhood and by a phone call to a body regulating salons. “Man on the street” style interviews are used to great effect, as with the freely walking young women, and as evidence that while residents remember the Bagain family, including

Norma, no one remembers Dalia or an honour killing resembling hers during the time period in question. Khouri’s initially deft handling of the gaps identified in her story becomes more and more laboured as the film continues, and several scenes find her scrambling to evade

Broinowski’s ever more probing questions and demands that, if Dalia is a pseudonym, she be given a real name she can look up in police records or coroner’s reports. It is at this point that

Khouri’s personal charisma and ability to think on her feet and give her interlocutors the answer they want to hear becomes fully apparent, as she keeps Broinowski and the viewer following along, with alternating promises of a name and identifying details and assertions of the impossible danger of doing so. This dance culminates in a damning scene in which Khouri speaks directly to a camera held by the bodyguard she has insisted on hiring for her visit to

12 For instance, while Jordan has a relatively high level of education among its female population—gender parity has been achieved in both primary and secondary education—that same population’s participation in the formal economy remains relatively low (UNICEF Jordan Gender Equality Profile 2011, 4).

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Jordan (who does not, according to Broinowski, have any qualifications for that post and, she heavily implies, is Khouri’s lover). This grainier footage, reminiscent of cinéma vérité, shows

Khouri describing the various machinations she must undergo in order to obtain a name (no longer, it seems, Dalia’s name, but any name that might be traced to an identifiable victim) from her cousin to provide to Broinowski, who will in turn seek to verify that information with the regional morgue. The breathtaking number of balls Khouri is juggling is matched only by the pleasure she appears to take in her successful con up to that point (and it is at this moment that the film most clearly presents her as acting with the intent to deceive).

Khouri’s seeming personal charisma is underscored by another scene, one that sits uneasily within the larger picture of textual investigation, as do many of the points at which the camera turns its eye from Khouri the author to Norma the woman. Describing the development of their relationship, one journalist, an early supporter of Khouri’s, describes an encounter that sounds like a seduction scene (who is seducing whom is an open question) in which he suggests that Khouri claimed she remained a virgin in spite of the years that had passed since Dalia’s death. This scene is played as an indication of the depths of Khouri’s deception, given that while the scrutiny surrounding Forbidden Love was playing out, she was accompanied to Australia by her two children (whose father, John Toliopoulous, alleged member of the Greek mafia in

Chicago, makes his own dubious and self-interested appearances over the course of the documentary). I raise this point here not to imply, as this journalist (and arguably the film) does, that to lie about one’s sexual history is a particularly heinous deception, but rather to note the way that this form of sexualized scrutiny mirrors Norma’s insistence in the memoir that Dalia remained a virgin throughout the course of her relationship with Michael, underpinning the sexualized dynamics at play in the text and its process of disproval. Further, this moment in the

171 film highlights the ways in which an Orientalized view of Jordan and Khouri herself was always part of the response to the memoir, and that her ability to modulate her textual representation in accordance with readerly demands extended to her self-presentation as well: she is, here, both knowing and “innocent,” and above all aware of the gaze cast upon her by this journalist as representative of her broader readerly public (for whom she must be innocent in sexual terms if her description of Jordanian life and Dalia’s death are to be believed, by her own logic).

In the film’s final third, the viewer is offered yet another possible narrative lens through which to read Khouri and her acts. Her trip to Jordan to verify the facts of her story is either her first trip in a decade (according to the journalists who investigated her account) or one of many in recent years (according to Khouri), and offers us a chance to witness her reunion with the father she has so insistently declared would kill her or order her death if she were ever to return to Amman. Majid Bagain, separated from Khouri’s mother, who remains in Chicago, has moved back to the neighbourhood in which Khouri claims Dalia was murdered, where he lives in a small home with a new partner and bears no visible resemblance to the portrait of seething paternal violence painted in Honor Lost (a characterization that is certainly, an impression and not a fact or exculpation). Sitting on a couch, appearing happy to be reunited with his daughter and cautiously eager to please her, he insists that her story is true and that, while he cannot disclose any details (nor does he appear certain as to the details of whichever story his daughter is currently telling), he knows the case in question and will attest to his daughter’s honesty. The vagueness of this statement of support quickly takes a back seat to the dizzying introduction of another accusation, as Khouri tells the viewer that her father sexually abused her as a child.

Broinowski then shows us court documents indicating that Norma went to the police with her story as a teenager and that Majid Bagain pled guilty to charges of sexual assault; ironically, this

172 latest charge, seemingly unrelated to the question of Dalia’s death, appears to be the only accusation Khouri makes for which supporting documentation can be found. On camera, Majid tells Broinowski that he pled guilty to avoid a trial and make the issue disappear, but that he maintains his innocence, while Khouri looks on, strained, and does not respond.

The inclusion of this narrative strand at the eleventh hour of the larger story’s unfolding is unsettling on a number of levels. It offers an uncomfortable echo of the discussion of Norma’s virginity in its reinsertion of her own bodily history into the story, but it also gestures towards two broader possible modes of reading Khouri and her deception, each with their own problems

(and I outline these positions here as problems in themselves). The timing of this revelation has the texture of an ‘aha!’ moment, suggesting that a viewer looking for a comprehensible motive behind Khouri’s seeming inability to tell a single truthful story might take this information as indication of a form of originary trauma. This would be a particularly tidy explanation: Khouri, a child victim, levelling accusations that almost certainly had a devastating effect on her family, transmutes her deeply personal trauma (and the disbelief she may have come up against) into the position of witness to another’s trauma, receiving both the validation of belief and the laurels of her brave testimony. This diagnostic approach to her case is not dissimilar to points I discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Wilkomirski. However, in the story of Fragments, it is the nature of the textual memories themselves that points towards this traumatic displacement, not the simple fact of its author’s status as an orphan and the upheaval of his early life. Broinowski appears tempted by this model, and it would certainly accord neatly with the desire to search for childhood pain behind adult misdeeds. However, the decision to include Majid’s denial, along with the ample body of evidence accumulated up to this point that Khouri has a highly problematic relationship with the truth, complicates this reading. The film seems to beg the

173 question of whether we might not in fact be witnessing the originary moment of Khouri’s pathological falseness rather than her primary trauma. The film invites us to ask whether, if

Norma could lie about being abused by her father when still a child, there are truly any limits to her mendacity. This is a troubling suggestion for a viewer who might (as I do) consider it an ethical principle to believe those who disclose experiences of sexual violence. Though it is perhaps to Broinowski’s credit that she does not offer the viewer a single clear argument either for or against Khouri’s accusations against her father, the film pointedly turns to the secondary journalistic investigator at the Sydney Morning Herald, a woman, rather than the male primary investigator, for the most direct statement of disbelief and the corresponding assertion that

Khouri is lying about this abuse as about all her other claims. This choice tacitly acknowledges the fraught (and I would say dangerous) ground upon which the film is treading at this point, but refuses an explicit acknowledgment of this ethical quagmire. For a viewer whose instincts react against responding to such claims with disbelief, this dilemma is one neither the film nor I know how to fully resolve. There is no evidence to suggest she is lying about this particular claim (and there is her father’s past admission of guilt to support it), but does the ample evidence of her other lies suffice to render her fundamentally unreliable?

The film’s focus on peeling away the layers of deceit arrives, finally, at a core it cannot fully comprehend, and perhaps the viewer’s discomfort at this uncertainty brings us into useful confrontation with a number of ethical dilemmas which lie at the heart of my analysis of literary fraud more broadly. On one level, Broinowski’s decision to include this information in the film without offering a clear position as to its veracity, while at the same time effectively demolishing the story behind Honor Lost, calls attention to the role of the author/director in the construction of textual meaning and emphasizes the ultimate onus on the reader/viewer to critically evaluate

174 the information given and form her own conclusion. At the same time, the ways in which belief or disbelief in the story of Norma’s childhood abuse might make her a more sympathetic figure but one who is, ultimately, responsible for a staggering series of lies, highlights the shifting terrain of victimhood in the context of the deceptive memoir. Does it matter, ultimately, if this kernel is true, and should it? If this kernel is true, does it offer an explanation for her later deceptions, and should it? Is the instinct to look for personal pain behind public wrongdoing a search for logical cause or individual comfort? Is the problem not ultimately our desire to believe that victims are always fully truthful and clearly distinguished from villains, especially in texts whose generic status situates them in the always gray world of actuality rather than art?

Whatever their genesis, Khouri’s deceptions reveal the shadow-side of the communities of transnational sympathy and political activism haunting theorizations of life writing as a mode of engaging with human rights. As Whitlock suggests, what we see here is the danger of testimony becoming commodified (123). This danger can only be amplified when the testimony in question concerns forms of violence and structures of oppression on a global scale, translated into literary terms for market consumption. Further, Khouri’s text highlights the danger that testimony-as-textual commodity implicitly requires the validation of Western eyes in order for the violence and oppression described to be fully “real.” This point is made succinctly by a

Jordanian medical examiner in Broinowski’s documentary: in a meeting with Khouri in which she will theoretically offer him the “real” details of Dalia’s death for verification in his medical records, the doctor, evidently familiar with Khouri’s memoir and the accusations against it, asks her if he may address the book. Trapped, Khouri reluctantly agrees, and after he refers pointedly to the geographical errors that open the story, Khouri defensively reasserts the activist claim of her text, arguing that he and others should focus on creating international pressure to change the

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Jordanian penal code. In a tone mixing frustration and condescension, he informs her that purely legal changes will do nothing to stop actual practices; the key, he says, is to change attitudes, not laws, and this can only be done from within.

This is more than a tactical argument about the relative advantage of legislating from the top down or educating from the bottom up, as it were: at issue here is whether the focus must be on empowering change from within a given (national, cultural, religious) context or imposing it from without, which is a profoundly political question in a broader sense. This point is echoed by the editors of a recent collection on honour-based crimes who consider it “abundantly clear that a narrowly legal approach, particularly one focusing on ‘state law’ and state legal systems as a stand-alone strategy unaccompanied by broader and deeper initiatives and understandings” will be insufficient in inducing meaningful social change (Hossain and Welchman 3). Mojab offers us a more forceful phrasing in her assertion that law “alone cannot disrupt the production and reproduction of patriarchal power” (24). It is notable, however, that a purely legalistic approach is the limit of Khouri’s political engagement, and that it does not seem to occur to her to suggest that her readers educate themselves about how Jordanian women (and men) resist the violence that confronts them or how activists on the ground would prefer to be understood or supported, since those women are (to Khouri) captives deprived of agency. Instead, her appeal is to an international community to “rescue” Jordanian women at the direct expense of acknowledging and amplifying local activism, a Western-ego-flattering fantasy that is undoubtedly a major component of the text’s initial success.

Further, I argue that the relentlessly universalizing tone she uses throughout the text—she and Dalia repeatedly voice their disdain for “Arab men”—is equally crucial to the story’s initial success, relying as it does on a construction of the Middle East and Islam itself as inherent spaces

176 of geographic or religious captivity for women. A reader looking for nuanced treatment of the relationship between religious tradition and changing gender roles will not find it in Khouri’s text, but perhaps of greater concern is the way in which Khouri works to undercut any sense of nuance the reader may already bring to her reading. Her move to foreclose readerly skepticism is also introduced in the earliest pages, as she asserts that “Even for the women who, on the street, look liberated—like me, in my loose skirts and slacks and my hair swinging free of the veil—the risks of rebelling are so high that we boil inside, but obey. We cling to the fading hope that someday we’ll be released from this prison, not really believing that we can be the agents of our own freedom” (4). Khouri’s reliance on first person narration bolsters this explicit dichotomization between external signifiers of freedom (uncovered hair, pants, and so on) and a universalized internal sense of imprisonment that relies on the interchangeability of the space of the Middle East and the non-physically-bound space of Islam or “Arab culture.” Muslim and

Arab women, in other words, are always already captive so long as they retain any allegiance to religious or cultural contexts invariably marked by colonial logics as inherently and stagnantly misogynist.

Tragic Misreadings and Discursive Complicity: The Text in the World

On December 10, 2007, a sixteen-year-old girl from the Toronto suburb of Mississauga was killed by her father and older brother. The former called the police and immediately informed them of his own actions. This was neither the first nor last event of its kind; research has long demonstrated and continues to show that a woman of any age is most likely to face violence at the hands of a man who is known to her, including loved ones or relatives. And yet the media response was quick and dramatic: the murdered teen, Aqsa Parvez, belonged to a

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Muslim family whose elder members had immigrated to Canada from Pakistan, and the headlines trumpeting her as the victim of “Canada’s first honour killing” proved irresistible to respectable and tabloid journalistic elements alike. As Dana Olwan notes, prior to 2001, the phrase “honour killing” appeared in the Canadian media almost exclusively with reference to crimes occurring elsewhere (535). Its discursive migration, then, begs the following question, as posed by Olwan: “What ideas about racialized, gendered, and sexual violence does the honour killing label disseminate and construct in the Canadian context?” (534).

The tragic banality of Aqsa Parvez’s story—a conflict between a conservative father and a daughter testing the boundaries of her new young adulthood—was subsumed in favour of exoticizing its cultural context, and proclamations about the clash of civilizations and the so- called price of Canadian multiculturalism led the way to heated debate about whether or not

“they” (racialized Muslims) could ever fully adopt “our” (white secular-Protestant) values.

School friends cited standards of dress as a major source of conflict in the Parvez household, describing Aqsa’s transition from consistent hijab-wearing to removing the covering when outside the company of her family or not attending services at the mosque, accompanied by her desire to experiment with clothing and makeup deemed inappropriate by her family, as well as her expressed intention of obtaining part-time employment. Unsurprisingly, the murder was not the first instance of physical violence in the Parvez family but the escalation of previous abuse that had led school officials to notify Child and Family Services when Aqsa had displayed the visible signs of physical abuse. In the weeks before her murder, she ran away from home twice and expressed a fear for her life to her closest school friends, who say she had only returned to her family home on the day of her death to collect more belongings to bring back to the neighbour’s home where she was staying. These elements are again consistent with the typical

178 narrative of domestic violence (insofar as such a thing exists), which sees women at the greatest risk of fatality after leaving the violent home and then returning to it.

Beyond the clearly absurd assumption that so-called Canadian (for which, again, read white secular/Protestant) values play no disciplinary role with regards to women’s lives and bodies, recourse to the clash of civilizations/cost of multiculturalism discourse that paints such violence as uniquely endemic to Islam is obfuscatory at best and outright racist and Islamophobic at worst. The problem is not simply with identifying the ways in which religious belief may underpin a particular violent act but rather with the construction of Islam itself, in essentialist and exceptional terms, as a site of captivity for women. It is here that the logic underpinning the success of Khouri’s deception, reflected in the discursive structure of her text, reverberates broadly, echoing in the dominant tone of the response to Aqsa Parvez’s murder. In particular, the disingenuous question posed (and later defended) by Toronto Life, asking if the circumstances leading to Parvez’s death could be understood as “the price of multiculturalism,” offers a more subtle but equally insidious view of Islam as inherently dangerous for women (Rogan 2008).

Moreover, this question and the manner of its posing, with the implication that, first, multiculturalism will have a price, and, second, that this price will be paid by “Canada,” or rather by “ordinary Canadians” (understood as white or non-racialized) shifts the coordinates of the violence in question from an act perpetrated again the victimized women to violence enacted against Canada itself.

I suggested earlier that my conclusion would aim to raise the stakes of my own argument by connecting it to current conversations around multiculturalism as something that must be

“managed,” whether in the case of France’s ban on wearing a niqab in public, Quebec’s previously proposed ban on all (non-Catholic) religious iconography for public servants (on

179 which basis the Parti Québecois was roundly defeated in the 2014 general election), or the

Hérouxville declaration. Most recently, we have seen the Conservative federal government attempt to ban the niqab at citizenship ceremonies and introduce the so-called Barbaric Cultural

Practices Act, which legislates issues such as polygamy and underage marriage with specific reference to migrants and marginalized communities (as though implementing a minimum legal age for marriage requires a racialized argument!). Like media responses to the tragic murder of

Aqsa Parvez (and more recently, Zainab, Sarha, and Geeti Shafia and Rona Amir Mohammed) painting her death as “the arrival of the honour killing in Canada,” these legislative and discursive gestures all simultaneously construct the notion of tradition (coded often explicitly as

Islam but sometimes, as with Khouri, more vaguely as Arab or Middle Eastern) as a space of female captivity that not only can be but is being imported abroad. This is the sense in which

Toronto Life’s question about the price of multiculturalism frames the real crime of Aqsa

Parvez’s death as one committed against “us” instead: what is tragic is not the death of a teenage girl but that it happened here, that (to quote again from Rogan’s article) “it raised the spectre of religious zealotry in the suburbs.” It need hardly be said that the religious zealotry behind, to take but one example, the resurgence of anti-abortion discourse in Canada (some of which almost certainly can be found in the suburbs) does not appear to provoke the same concern, though were it to attain its political goal of criminalizing reproductive freedom it would prove at least as deadly. The threat posed by the actions of Muhammad and Waqas Parvez, Aqsa’s father and older brother, is thus reconstructed as the threat that “recent waves of Muslim immigrants aren’t integrating, or embracing our liberal values” and, perhaps, “Toronto has become too tolerant of cultural differences” (Rogan).13 In both cases, there is a presumed set of collective values to

13 In fairness to Rogan, with whose position I clearly find a great deal to disagree, this latter point is framed as a question rather than a statement of opinion. As should be clear, however, I take the very formulation of a number of

180 which Muslim migrants pose a threat, made all the more ominous by the unarticulated nature of this supposed consensus, vaguely understood to refer to the “varying degrees of success [with which Canada] condemns institutionalized patriarchy” (Rogan). The token gesture towards acknowledging the imperfect nature of gender equality in Canada, brief as it is, fails to recognize that framing the Parvez and Shafia murders as an importation of foreign violence obscures precisely the way in which institutionalized patriarchal structures pre-existing these crimes places women of colour at a greater risk than any other group in Canada, and, moreover, that all women in Canada (and again women of colour and Indigenous women especially) face the greatest risk of violence from men known to them.14 It would have been more shocking, from a statistical point of view, though certainly neither more or less tragic, for Aqsa Parvez to be murdered by a stranger than by men close to her. This does not mean her death was not a tragedy: it was a truly horrific one. But to frame it as an exceptional tragedy—as without precedent or context, unlike all other forms of violence—is not borne out by what we know about the broader dynamics of gendered violence.

In other words, insisting that Muslim migrants to Canada bring with them radically new forms of misogynist ideology and violence re-enacts the erasure of structural inequality along lines of race and gender (to name but two categories) performed by uncritically celebratory proclamations of Canadian liberalism. That Rogan can refer to the “varying degrees of success” with which Canada has supposedly eradicated institutionalized patriarchy without explicitly naming one of the most damaging failures of this condemnation, which occupied newspaper her questions as illustrative of a conception of Canadian liberalism that appears remarkably unwilling to engage in self-critique. 14 According to Statistics Canada, only 5% of adult (18+) female homicide victims between 2004-2008 (the most recent longitudinal data set available) were killed by a stranger (Gender Differences in Police-reported Violent Crime in Canada, Table 7). Family members are responsible for fully one third of solved homicides in Canada, and for children and youth (ages 0-17), “homicides against children and youth were committed more often by family members than non-family members [and] parents commit the majority of family-related homicides against children and youth” (Family Violence In Canada: A Statistical Profile, 35).

181 pages at the same time as Aqsa Parvez faced escalating violence and finally death in her family home, is instructive. During the autumn leading up to her murder, the trial of Robert Pickton, a pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, dominated the headlines. Pickton’s confession that he murdered 49 women over a span of two decades (the majority of them

Aboriginal women living in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side neighbourhood) made him

Canada’s most prolific and notorious serial killer. Beyond the shocking scope of his crimes lies another story of violence, one in which hundreds of Aboriginal women are estimated to have gone missing or been murdered over the last 30 years with the majority of crimes unsolved.15

One of the unique elements of the Pickton case, then, was that it represented one of the astoundingly few convictions in an epidemic of sexual and gendered violence that has drawn the attention of Amnesty International to the deep-seated failures of the Canadian legal system. The space shared by Parvez’s murder and Pickton’s crimes is not only ideological but literal, as the former case displaced the announcement of the latter’s conviction on six counts of first-degree murder, which came down December 9, 2007, two days before Parvez’s father and brother killed her and confessed.

I emphasize the connection between these two events not simply because their temporal proximity makes their juxtaposition rhetorically convenient (and I certainly do not mean to suggest one is more or less important than the other), but because the systematic disregard of violence committed against Aboriginal women in Canada gives the lie to the attempt to understand gendered crimes characterized as honour-based as radically distinct not only from other instances of violence against women but from the very fabric of Canadian life and the

15 Estimates of the total number of murdered and missing Indigenous women vary, as is often the case with politically charged data. Michelle Mann, in a report entitled Aboriginal Women: An Issues Backgrounder, produced for Status of Women Canada, refers to “over 500” missing and murdered girls and women (4). Aboriginal activists place the estimate closer to (and sometimes over) 1000 murdered and missing girls and women (“It Starts With Us”).

182 nature of colonial statehood itself. In what sense can the Parvez case be understood as “the price of multiculturalism” when that price is already paid daily by women whose lives and deaths go equally unremarked? This vision of Canada, in which Parvez’s murder is understood as wholly unique, already exists because of a double displacement; the literal territorial occupation of land under colonization becomes mirrored in the erasure, in discursive terms, of the continued reverberations of physical displacement. This reverberation extends to all spheres, including the legal one: “the legacies of genocide and colonialism have shaped the operations of the law against victims of gender and sexual violence [and] the law and the courts are complicit in concealing and enabling violence against indigenous women” (Olwan 543). At the same time,

“the assumptions of their susceptibility to certain forms of cultural and gendered violence [means that] Muslim women's bodies not only mark the ideological and political boundaries of the nation state but also enable its governing functions” (545). If multiculturalism—or rather its self- congratulatory celebration on the one hand or construction as a problem in need of management on the other—can be understood to come at a price, the cost is an acknowledgment of the founding violence of Canadian statehood and the continued suppression of its violent legacies, among them mutually reinforcing and differential distributions of risk along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality for Indigenous peoples and migrants.

As I alluded to above, this understanding of Islam as particularly and uniquely dangerous for women (and, by extension, uniquely threatening to a static notion of Western culture) has seen among its contemporary manifestations a focus on legislating religious expression in terms that invert the supposedly inherent misogyny of Islamic traditions. If veiling practices, such as the hijab or niqab, are taken as methods of controlling women’s bodies (as some policy makers have argued, an external position to be distinguished from the complex debates within religious

183 communities about belief and practice), enforcing their removal simply enacts identical control from the opposite direction. As with Khouri’s insistence that no Jordanian woman can be truly liberated, attempts to “manage” diversity that seek to regulate signifiers of adherence to religious or cultural traditions treated as non-Western assumes no agency for women whatsoever (which is not to say that women, or anyone else, are wholly agentic subjects entirely divorced from the structures of power, but rather that the oscillation between agency and hegemony is always complex and in motion). Further, I argue that this position is analogous to treating honour-based violence as both singular—uniquely the product of a particular religio-cultural formation, never connected to domestic violence more broadly—and generalizable to the entirety of the formation in question. In other words, the way Khouri’s text conceptualizes the gendered violence it describes constructs that violence as both specifically and universally Islamic; it is both only

Islam and all Muslims that adhere to the gendered norms and deadly consequences in question.

The dialectic tension between singularity and generalizability I introduced earlier in the context of the captivity narrative’s ethnographic gaze and in Mojab’s injunction to attend to “the dialectics of universals and particulars” (34) in understanding patriarchal regimes thus re- emerges as a central concern in whether or not crimes linked to sexual purity or honour are understood as isolated from other structures of gendered and racialized violence in Canada and beyond.

While all forms of structural violence emerge from their own specific set of contextual factors, the pernicious refusal to understand honour-based violence within a larger global narrative about the status of women is less invested in the importance of the particular from (for instance) the standpoint of prevention than in isolating such crimes from their ideological cousins in service of painting Islam (and a number of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North

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African countries) as uniquely retrograde or barbaric. There remains legitimate room for debate about the precise balance to be struck between understanding any epidemic of violence in its highly individual context versus as merely one instance of a universal problem (and such debates about how to understand and even name honour crimes are being waged amongst activists and academics concerned with women’s rights and status in multiple contexts). However, refusing to link the worldview that allowed Aqsa Parvez’s father and brother to consider her life expendable to the national culture that allowed Robert Pickton to murder Indigenous women with impunity for decades relies on understanding violence against women in Western countries as somehow less culturally engrained or, indeed, less objectionable than violence elsewhere.

I have argued that over the past decade we have seen the emergence of a construction of

Islam as a mobile site of captivity for women, an argument implied by the Orientalist tenor of

Khouri’s text (though not, to be sure, unique to it); what has remained unarticulated, however, is who precisely enforces the prison sentence. To answer this query we must (surely unsurprisingly) return to Spivak’s famous words with which this chapter began, in which we will find that brown men (understood variously and broadly as Muslim, Arab, or Middle Eastern in the religious-cultural-national triangulated collapse to which I have already referred) are the ultimate threat to brown women. This is a claim echoed in the recent RCMP report insisting the majority of missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls are victims of Aboriginal men; while this may be consistent with the broader dynamics of gendered violence I have been discussing, it also conveniently omits both the overarching history of colonialism and the specific role of law enforcement as perpetrators and camouflagers of that violence (Missing and

Murdered Aboriginal Women: A National Operational Overview 2014). This threat represents a doubling of the violence that the men in question are already, in the wake of 9/11, presumed to

185 pose to “us,” that is, to the white West, reflected in the countless forms of criminalization of which racial profiling, rendition, Canada’s profoundly anti-immigrant Bill C-31, and

Guantanamo Bay are only some of the most notable examples. Like the moral panic implicit in the deployment of the epithet “homegrown terrorist,” in which the threat posed by Muslim men is not “out there” but “at home,” the assumption, explicit in Khouri’s writing and reflected in much of the media treatment of the Parvez and Shafia murders, that there is a congruence between the two senses of the domestic (national and personal) also constructs the Muslim man as uniquely threatening to his female relatives.

The presence of potential violence is also, in the cases under consideration here, a matter of the presumed absence of affective bonds, an especially chilling gesture of dehumanization. It is not only in writing of Dalia’s male relatives (whom she is after all accusing of murder at worst or homicidal complicity at best) that Khouri relies heavily on this trope of the violently unloving man, but in her depiction of her own father and brothers as well (who, we will recall, are

Catholic and indicted under Khouri’s sweeping use of the term “Arab,” once again underscoring the fluidity of the discourse of racialization at work). While she writes with breathtaking generality that “the thought of being married to an Arab man turned [her] stomach, as it did

Dalia’s,” Norma’s brothers are singled out for condemnation as hiding a particularly violent essence beneath a modernized exterior (30). If she dared to break their gendered code, Norma claims, she “could picture my brothers battling with my father over who would cast the first stone” (30). Though to the outsider they appear to be “well-educated, professional, refined young gentlemen [and] modern young Arab men,” but they have inevitably, like “all Arab men,” been

“taught that it is their responsibility to discipline the women in their lives, and that the best way

186 to do so is through corporal punishment. My brothers were no exception” (30-31).16 Norma’s father is not exempted from this description: while he “would probably be the least physically explosive of all my family members” and “might not lift the fist or knife” if confronted with a filial transgression, he would nonetheless be “the driving force behind my brothers’ violent acts”

(32). Khouri is insistent in painting this patriarchal violence as the province of all men who share her family’s ethnicity and geography, envisioning “all Arab men” as committed to upholding rigid sexual values beyond any possible sense of love for their female relatives, an insistence that doubles the threat attributed to Muslim men as potential terrorists abroad and at home. The threat to the latter upholds the fantastic and paranoiac belief in the threat to the latter, or as Salaita puts it, Khouri’s book “could be believed because its readers had already accepted its contents as true before it had even been written; had they not, it would have been impossible to write” (88).

None of this, of course, is to say that Khouri herself (or her book) is directly or indirectly responsible for the policy choices in question, nor did she create out of thin air any of the discourses her text deploys; though she undoubtedly bears personal responsibility for individuals she deceived in direct interactions, and, in my view, for writing a profoundly racist and

Islamophobic book, the net of culpability must be cast beyond one person. Khouri’s fraud was produced by literary agents, editors, and publishers apparently eager to believe her simplistic and simplifying view of gender relations in the Middle East, and received by readers happy to take its error-riddled story at its word. The text thus relied upon, reinforced, and extended the pre- existing conditions for credulity that saw the public prepared to accept a vision of Islam as a site of female captivity, and one at risk of being brought by Muslim migrants to their new homes in

16 In one of Khouri’s many self-contradictions, she writes that “her brothers’ friends might have difficulty picturing them reacting with violence if they found out [she] was romantically interested in a man,” apparently forgetting that the friends in question would also be subject to the code that she has so relentlessly informed her reader governs all Arab men (31).

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Western countries. These are the ethical stakes, then, of unquestioned belief in the memoir as a testimonial genre; this is particularly the case with memoirs that, like Khouri’s, allow so untroubled and distancing a reading of truth-claim texts, a reading according to terms that refuse to stay “merely” on the page but instead become the basis for modes of legislative and discursive regulation.

Chapter Four

The Autofictional JT LeRoy

The revelation in late 2005 that avant-garde golden boy JT LeRoy, a prodigy who began publishing as a teenager, did not in fact exist sent a number of ripples through the cross-sections of the literary world, celebrity culture, and various marginalized communities to which LeRoy had laid claim. Following hard on the heels of the Frey vs. Oprah battle royal, the LeRoy affair entered a media landscape already primed to enjoy a scandal, and this time, the scandal was infinitely stranger than Frey’s comparatively pedestrian (albeit hyperbolic) self-involved fictions.

Beginning in the mid to late ‘90s, a handful of San Francisco-based writers, publishers, and agents began to receive phone calls from a voice claiming to belong to a 15-year-old living and working on the street called, variously, Jeremy, Jeremiah, Terminator, or JT. The voice described, and would later send (via fax) stories of a childhood spent bouncing between a teenage mother and repressive fundamentalist grandparents in West Virginia, subjected to violence on all sides and (most dramatically) often joining his mother in truck stop sex work while passing as a girl. Depending on who the voice addressed, different elements of his biography, “tailor-made for their interests,” were emphasized: “Like [Sharon] Olds, he had a strict family background; like [Dennis] Cooper’s characters, he was a boy who had fantasies of being beaten up; like [Bruce] Benderson’s characters, he was a hustler; like [Mary] Gaitskill’s characters, he was involved in S&M and prostitution” (Beachy 2). Over the course of about a decade, JT would publish three books (interwoven short story collection The Heart is Deceitful

Above All Things and novel Sarah in 1999, followed by Harold’s End in 2005, with a fourth manuscript, Labour, withdrawn following the imposture revelation); he would write for venues such as Nerve, Spin, and Shout NY, and trade one group of avant-garde artist friends for another

187 189 as he showed an uncanny ability to make his way up the rungs of the celebrity ladder from underground figures to Hollywood circles.

That this improbable story of success, perfectly calibrated to hit the double note of quintessentially American self-made boot-strapping on the one hand and investment in artistic and queer communities on the other—getting by with a little help from (networked and famous) friends—should prove entirely fictional will not surprise any readers who have followed me thus far. Behind the mask of a brilliantly self-promoting street-hardened teen paradoxically presented as too shy to perform at his own readings was a woman named Laura Albert, JT’s continual public escort, perpetually in the background at his events, frequently inserting herself into his interviews and photo shoots, occasionally performing an exaggerated British accent. This shyness, at first attributed to LeRoy’s self-consciousness about HIV-related facial Kaposi’s sarcomas, miraculously disappeared around 2001, at which point LeRoy began appearing in public wearing a blonde wig and large sunglasses. The body in question belonged to Albert’s young sister-in-law Savannah Knoop, an aspiring model and actress (Beachy 4). Albert, also known to some as Speedie or Emily Frasier, was not only fifteen years older than her authorial alter-ego but had not in fact lived the life of a cross-dressing child sex worker that she created for

LeRoy and portrayed in her books (though Albert, in another move that should be familiar by now, claims a form of emotional authenticity behind the content of the stories). The LeRoy case is the longest-lasting, and arguably the most complex, of the impostures covered here: from introduction to exposure, Laura Albert preserved the existence of JT LeRoy for eleven years, the last seven with a growing amount of public attention. JT LeRoy is also the author who achieved the widest and highest level of undeniable celebrity among those I examine here: Wilkomirski may have made crowds of women cry, and Khouri may have sold out readings on her book tour,

190 but only LeRoy had a Vanity Fair photo shoot to his credit and could claim personal interaction and even friendship with Madonna, Carrie Fisher, and Courtney Love, not to mention an associate producer credit for Gus Van Sant’s cult classic Elephant and public praise from Sharon

Olds, Mary Karr, and Mary Gaitskill.

The LeRoy imposture is also unique among my cases for another key reason: the three

LeRoy books were published as fiction, not memoir, which may account for the surprising paucity of scholarship on Albert/LeRoy’s work and the exposure of Albert’s persona. In one sense, this fictional status should disqualify the LeRoy texts from the parameters of this study, given my focus on self-declared autobiography and memoir. I have argued that we can understand the identity of the author in life writing as exceeding or traversing the paratext through the autobiographical pact, as mobilized by and through the name (which necessarily sutures together text and identity, albeit complexly and imperfectly); if this is the case, does the non-contractual nature of the fictional author’s name emerge as a necessary consequence? Put differently, if I take the nonfiction as the determining factor in life writing understood as creative nonfiction, is it not equally necessary to my argument that the fiction in “autobiographical fiction” is given the same weight? That LeRoy is the subject of this chapter will be the first clue to my answer: though the LeRoy texts were labelled as fiction, they were also emphatically framed as autobiographical and were “always…marketed as thinly concealed memoir” (Beachy

3). This marketing, as noted above, eventually extended to the use of Albert’s sister-in-law as the public face of LeRoy in interviews, readings, and photo shoots, a form of extratextual performance that I discussed as constitutive of autobiographical imposture in Chapter One. I have argued for the primacy of this extratextual authorial performance in my understanding of imposture as a subgenre of life writing, making the juxtaposition of this performance with a set

191 of texts presented as fiction (albeit in a clearly autobiographical mode) a useful limit case for this project. If, per Burke’s suggestion (quoted in Chapter One), “authorship is the principle of specificity in the world of texts” (202), then Laura Albert’s process of persona construction—of inventing the principle of specificity underpinning and authorizing the LeRoy texts—becomes its own site for analysis. Proceeding from the question, “what does it mean to claim a work is autobiographical, especially a work of fiction?” I argue that Albert’s evident effort to anchor the

LeRoy texts to the specificity of a (false) biography while simultaneously disclaiming this biography’s grounding role in the texts through their labelling as fiction is a fundamental contradiction in terms, as the extratextual performance of the LeRoy character served to shape the reading of ostensible fictions with reference to a (literally) legitimating body. By presenting these fictional texts as autobiographical and producing a body to uphold that claim, Albert-as-

LeRoy made a determined effort to ensure an autobiographical mode of reading (which, recalling

Lejeune, is as essential to the autobiographical pact as the initial authorial claim itself).

This example is, consequently, where the elasticity of imposture as a conceptual frame and cultural phenomenon is tested, and where the performativity I have insisted on emphasizing comes into its fullest relief. Given this outlier status, it is perhaps ironic that the LeRoy case is the one that spurred the initial development of this project, and remains the case in which I find it most difficult to disentangle the literary and ethical threads; its analysis thus requires an argumentative elasticity as much as a conceptual one. For if it is true that the assertion of fictional status is crucial in the generic terms I have sketched here, it is equally true that the deliberate performance of authorial identity in the LeRoy story exceeds all the other cases discussed here, in duration if not in kind (Wilkomirski’s readings staged to a High Holy Day prayer-infused soundtrack and Khouri’s relocation to Australia as an ostensible refugee have

192 their own cynical appeal, but are in the end only distant seconds in both scope and duration). It is the very inextricability of text and performance in the LeRoy imposture that brings it in line with the explicitly autobiographical texts I have discussed thus far and justifies its inclusion here while also illustrating the pivotal role of the performative in my theory of imposture. In this vein, it is telling that, like Wilkomirski and Khouri but notably unlike many pseudonymous authors of fiction, the biographical author behind JT LeRoy, Laura Albert, has not published any subsequent fictional work under her own name (or, to the best of my knowledge, under any other).1 Whether this is a matter of choice or informal publisher blacklist is less relevant than the way it illustrates the primacy of performativity in the LeRoy story (and given that she continues to claim significant support for her works in her various social media personae, these explanations seem insufficient). What follows thus shifts the analytical balance even further, relative to the previous chapters, towards reading the imposture itself as text rather than focusing exclusively or even primarily on the text(s) as imposture.

Indeed, in the LeRoy case, the public performance element emerges much earlier (prior even to the publication of the first story) and to some extent continues later relative to my other cases, highlighting the complex temporality of autobiographical deception. While Khouri’s public status as author-victim appears to have emerged with the publication of her text, and while

Wilkomirski’s previously tentative and conflicting claims of his survivor identity were at the very least strengthened and at most only fully realized with publication, Laura Albert’s development of the LeRoy persona appears in some form to have preceded the act of writing

1 Albert was credited as writer on the television series Deadwood under her own name, but this was a job she had obtained while still using the LeRoy persona. This was, then, a reversion to the legal name rather than the attainment of a new contract or publication of new work under Albert’s own (legal) identity. Her website suggests she works in an editorial capacity for one or two small magazines and she published a memorial to Lou Reed in The Forward (unsurprisingly, the memorial is as much about Reed’s appreciation for LeRoy as it is a tribute to Reed’s work), but this is the fairly limited extent of her post-exposure writing career.

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(and certainly the act of publishing). The mechanics of time here are recursive rather than linear, underscoring the interpenetration of text and identity for both reader and writer: more than in any other case I examine, Albert’s textual and extratextual performances emerged in mutually developing tandem. Some critics have understood the impostor’s fictionalization of identity as a form of play, as I discussed in Chapter One; the story behind Albert’s creation of LeRoy also, or perhaps instead, suggests identity as work. It is one of the greater ironies of this project that my analysis here relies inevitably on accounts from Albert (and later, Savannah Knoop, the body-in- public, who published Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy in 2008) whose investment in truth-telling is as uncertain when she speaks under her own name as when she uses another. She has given two significant public accounts of the LeRoy imposture: first, an interview in The

Paris Review with Nathaniel Rich in the Fall 2006 issue and, in November 2010, a 13-minute monologue as part of New York storytelling series The Moth. In both contexts, Albert reveals herself as a skilled performer, one who appears, in the video recording of her Moth appearance in particular, as mesmerized by her own tales as is her audience; more importantly, she reiterates a claim of emotional authenticity as the basis for her persona creation in her assertion that JT was not an imposture but an “avatar” that allowed her to transmute her own otherwise unspeakable experiences into an artistic form. In this way, my insistence on the importance of autobiographical truth claims is matched here by a recollection that my argument relies, in a sense, on constructing a story about the varied stories others have told; Albert’s version of her creation of LeRoy thus may be seen (as it is here) as another such story, open to interpretation, not the full or final truth.

One of the many points of interest in this particular instance of imposture, however, is the preponderance of stories by and about others concerned in the LeRoy affair to which we have

194 access: just as Eskin’s memoir about Wilkomirski and Broinowski’s documentary on Khouri emerged as necessary supplemental (para)texts to both the text-as-imposture and the imposture- as-text, LeRoy’s penchant for accumulating an ever-widening scope of celebrity contacts has also given us access to a variety of public narratives about the development of the LeRoy imposture through the writers, photographers, directors, and so on who have been willing to discuss their part. I incorporate some of these views here, then, not in the service of a judicial or diagnostic approach but a textual one, which is consistent with the broader methodology at work here and the specific dimension of myth-making that I read as crucial to the initial establishment of the LeRoy persona as well as Albert’s post-revelation justification for her invention. It is vital to Albert’s account that she claims not to have exerted precisely the sort of control over her creation that would suggest premeditation and intent to deceive. The legalistic language here is deliberate insofar as Albert’s earliest public statements emerged as she was also confronted with a lawsuit on the basis that she had signed a contract for the film rights to Sarah under the nonexistent LeRoy’s name rather than her own legal name (the name, that is, of a person who does not legally exist, which led to a ruling against her).2 Of course, the immediate self-interest of disclaiming intent if not control is evident. However, there is more happening here: JT LeRoy was always a mythical figure, even when ostensibly real, and Sarah, for which Albert still expresses public pride (in contrast to The Heart is Deceitful, which she says she can no longer read) owes a literary debt to a gothic-inflected magic realism that makes Albert’s post-facto insistence on a mythic narrative illuminating (even as these generic elements distance the texts

2 In July 2007, Albert was ordered to pay Antidote Films almost half a million dollars in damages and legal fees in a trial that included comparisons to Shakespeare. The amount was later reduced, at least in part because there was no way Albert could afford to pay it. The Authors Guild subsequently released a statement condemning the implications of the verdict for “free speech” and the right to write under a pen name, which strikes me as missing the crucial point that signing a contract under said pen name is a somewhat different matter (all of the above per Alan Feuer’s coverage of the trial in the New York Times).

195 themselves from the autobiographical mode, as Vice argues [Textual Deceptions 52]). Before turning to the post-exposure version of the LeRoy myth, however, its origins—as a myth, indeed, about origins both personal and artistic—merit further discussion.

Text as Imposture

In my first chapter, the question of origins emerged as doubly significant to both poststructuralist theories of authorship and historical accounts of literary spuriosity. From

Barthes’ assertion in “The Death of the Author” that writing “is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (142) to Grafton’s observation that the ancient Greeks “classified

[works]…as [either] gnesioi (legitimate)” or “nothoi (bastards)” (12), the rupture or continuity between author and text is a problem of genealogy as much as one of critical approach.

Arguments about what constitutes the legitimate versus the spurious are (of course) a matter of how we define those respective terms, but they are also about how we understand origins as such in the context of art. There is another historical dimension here beyond the linguistic or the classificatory: the history of literary spuriosity is not only a history of invented origins but the history of a particular narrative of origins, that is, a history of discovery that parallels Albert’s claims to have “discovered” LeRoy quite literally in her ostensible capacity as a street outreach worker. The literary text as discovered or found object is the single most common point of initial entry for spurious texts into legitimate (or legitimating) literary discourse: from desert excavations to the family attic, the buried (literary) treasure is as much a trope of literary history as of fiction. As Russett notes, both Chatterton and MacPherson deployed this trope, further suggesting it had already attained a mythical status: “By the mid-eighteenth century, any claim to have found an unknown masterpiece lying around gathering dust should have elicited suspicion

196 rather than belief—this was a story so overdetermined that it automatically looked like a story, like fiction” (24). The discovery narrative is inextricably linked to a fantasy of origins, and whether the discovery is understood as affirming prior historical knowledge or upending it, in either case the fantasy is one of knowability. Whether what we know changes or stays the same, what is key is the belief that there is a narrative that can be known, a truth that can be uncovered: discovery relies on a fundamentally progressive conception of epistemology.

The LeRoy story offers a variant of the discovery narrative that blends imposture’s

Romantic roots, as traced by Russett, with a particularly contemporary twist: what is discovered is not a history-revising text, long gathering dust and awaiting its moment to dazzle the public and reshape scholarship, but a person. Though there are probably as many variations of LeRoy’s origins as there are people who heard the story, the thread of discovery recurs throughout in forms worth elaborating here. There is, first, the framing of LeRoy himself as a discovery by

Albert, who then encouraged his entry into the literary world, at first through smaller, underground circles. As Beachy documents, LeRoy’s first step toward publication was to contact authors he claimed as inspiration, such as Dennis Cooper, one of his early champions (he would work his way up the literary ladder, so to speak, using successive contacts to put him in touch with agents, publishers, and more famous writers [1]). The discovery narrative is doubled here: first, these literary figures understood themselves as discovering a new and exciting talent to whom they could offer mentorship and experience. Further, they received the flattery of literary worship and were inscribed into a mythologized narrative of JT’s discovery of their writings. For example, LeRoy claimed to have discovered Sharon Olds’ poetry through one of his sex work clients (Beachy 1), constructing a gritty, saved-by-literature narrative to which Cooper attributes much of the protective instinct older writers developed toward LeRoy (discussed further below).

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LeRoy presented himself, then, as both worshipful discoverer and talent to be discovered, framing the writers to whom he told his story as saviours because of their (personally uplifting) writing and their (materially useful) friendship. The LeRoy story then becomes a story of origins in the context of both reading and writing; the “primal scene” (as Russett describes Chatterton’s narrative of “discovering” the Rowley manuscripts, 24) of this discovery is embedded in the form of “outsider” narrative in which LeRoy claimed to identify the figures who inspired him as writers and in which he located his biographical origins. The fantasy being enacted here is a complex and multivalent one. The discovery of LeRoy (on the part of the already published authors he courted) is akin to discovering a figure like one’s own fictional character, a sense that one’s authorial invention has not only stepped off the page but been constituted in some measure by your writing itself, a figure who has in turn framed their discovery of you as a form of authorship by its inauguration of their own authorial creativity in turn. The discovery narrative, then, hinges on LeRoy’s double status as fan and fan-turned-author.

The LeRoy-as-discovery narrative is further literalized in the story Laura Albert developed to account for her own omnipresence as LeRoy’s fame increased, as did his public appearances. Also according to Beachy, and echoed in Savannah Knoop’s memoir, Albert’s perpetual presence at LeRoy’s interviews, photo shoots, and celebrity events was tolerated only grudgingly by writers, publishers, and famous fans alike. The language used toward Albert is instructive: she is characterized as pushy and aggressive, self-important and desperate; for Kira

Cochrane in the New Statesmen, she is “voluble and dominating,” while for Bruce Handy in

Vanity Fair she was both “pitiable” and “Svengali-like.” There is a clearly gendered sense of excess underpinning the palpable disgust barely masked by those who tolerated her gatekeeping presence in order to be nearer to LeRoy, at times linked to her physical size in the earlier days of

198 the LeRoy (Knoop herself emphasizes Albert’s size repeatedly; one of the more uncomfortable themes of Knoop’s account of her time as LeRoy is what appears to be competitive disordered eating between herself and Albert). Albert’s presence was justified based on her own claim to discovery of both JT the person (in his capacity as a street-involved youth) and JT the author- figure. LeRoy and his writing appear as a packaged commodity in this narrative, making their discovery one and the same.

From the beginning, then, public and critical interest centred above all on the boy behind the books. Albert appears to have actively courted this attention for a number of purposes, including a considerable interest in celebrity beyond the world of letters; the inner cover of

Sarah features lavish praise from no less than ten notable names, not limited to authors but including a director and a singer as well. Though Albert denies the quest for fame as a motivating factor in the construction of the LeRoy persona, Jannah Loontjens observes in

“Resisting the Author: JT LeRoy’s Fictional Authorship” that JT as character quickly eclipsed JT as writer (2008, no pagination); for that reason, I understand Albert’s creation of LeRoy and her subsequent self-defense as the discursive enactment of a set of assumptions (whether intended or implicit) about the relationship between reality and representation. While the creation of an authorial persona would seem at first to suggest a separation of author and text, closer analysis of

Albert’s deployment of the LeRoy persona instead demonstrates a perpetual tightening of the yoke between (ostensibly) autobiographical fiction and the author behind it. As I noted above, both Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (a title that provided a number of commentators with the potential for predictable, if nonetheless enjoyable, puns), were consistently framed by both LeRoy and readers as “true to life” in theme and in particulars, as was the less popular final work, Harold’s End, completed before the revelation but published as

199 the curtain was being drawn back, so to speak (and which notably features a young, blonde, ambiguously gendered teen on the cover meant to invoke LeRoy). For these reasons, I read

Albert’s creation of LeRoy and the terms in which she has since justified the deception as attempts to foreclose the space for readerly criticism by defining the lens through which the stories are to be read, that is, the lens of (auto)biography.

As I discussed at length earlier, critical scholarship on forms of literary spuriosity reveals a gap between the diverse forms deception has taken and the paucity of typological approaches to those forms. One of the difficulties in analyzing the LeRoy fraud is that it does not fall neatly into any one particular category of literary deception: the works published under that name are not, by any basic definition, plagiarized, though there are notable similarities in theme and content to other works (such as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Armistead

Maupin’s The Night Listener, the latter of which is, as Beachy observes, based on an eerily similar fraud in which a social worker wrote a false memoir as an HIV-positive young man with a background much like the one Albert created for LeRoy [3-4]). Further examination may well reveal a greater degree of “borrowing” from these clear source texts for the construction of JT- as-imposter (rather than textual character), but at present the most Albert can be accused of is transforming the life stories, both fictional and otherwise, of other writers in creating her own work, not direct textual theft. Nor can Albert’s assumption of the LeRoy persona be fully and adequately described with reference to pseudonymity, since her intent was quite clearly not only to camouflage her own identity but to induce belief in another identity alongside her own; the more general label of spuriosity undoubtedly applies but stops short of fully capturing what is particularly fascinating about the complex process by which LeRoy was created, maintained, and finally exposed.

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To some extent, the difficulty in classifying the LeRoy case hinges on what kind of assumptions a given critic is prepared to make about Albert’s motivations in her creation of

LeRoy. As Beachy points out:

A good hoax is like a good con. Though a con liberates the mark from some of his

material things, it also teaches him how easily he was tricked, how ready he was

to believe certain stories. To ‘wizen the mark’ is to send him back into the world a

little less wide-eyed, a little more jaded, his vision now penetrating beyond the

surface of things. But to enlighten us, a good hoax or a good con must eventually

be revealed. (2)

That literary deceptions are informative is, to be sure, one of the basic tenets of my project.

However, the question of whether or not a given deception is meant to be informative depends to an extent on whether its author has designed it to be revealed, which is also a problem of typology. While “hoax” works to a degree as an umbrella term in the same way that I have used

“spuriosity” (with reference to any text whose origins differ from what is claimed), hoaxes designed to be revealed by the hoaxer fall under the heading of the mystification littéraire, or literary mystification, as elucidated by Jean-Francois Jeandillou (Superchéries 470-472). The origins of mystification are traced in Jeandillou’s work, via the word mystifié, to a form of trickery that is unique for its perpetration by a member of a given class against his or her social and/or economic equals (Esthétique 9-10; Abramson 12). Unlike, for instance, a forged document or counterfeit currency, which is designed to “pass” as of greater value (cultural or monetary) in order for the forger/counterfeiter to improve his or her status, mystification’s particular history locates its occurrence between those of equivalent position or power. Also key to Jeandillou’s typology is the intentional aspect of the mystification, which is designed to serve

201 a didactic purpose through the necessary and intended logical endpoint of the scheme, which is the act of demystification (Esthéthique 8). Mystification, then, must be revealed in order to fully achieve its purpose, the archetypal example of Beachy’s “good hoax.”

The so-called Sokal Affair is a typical example, in which one academic set out to mystify his scholarly peers, who presumably had access to the equivalent critical resources and knowledge needed to decode the hoax. In 1996, mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative

Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the journal Social Text. Once the article was accepted and published, Sokal revealed that he had purposefully written a nonsensical piece designed to appeal to the biases he perceived in Social Text specifically and in deconstructionist approaches more generally. Sokal’s goal—firing a cheap shot in the heady days of the “culture wars” or illustrating a preference for style over substance, depending on one’s outlook—required that he reveal his own deception in order for it to attain its fullest purpose, its narrative closure.

The difficulties in directly transposing this framework to the LeRoy case should be immediately apparent, since Jeandillou posits that in a true case of mystification, the demystification occurs at the hands of the mystifier rather than a third party (in LeRoy/Albert’s case, the journalistic exposé rather than Albert herself was responsible for the revelations). That demystification is the corollary to mystification is what makes the act didactic: in order for the mystifié (the mystified individual or party) to learn from his or her folly, the perpetrator of the deception must not only be the one to reveal the truth but must have planned that revelation all along as the denouement to the lesson at hand. Unless Albert had intended to be revealed as a hoaxer and merely had not gotten around to exposing herself yet (perhaps the only excuse for her

202 actions she has not yet offered), there is an evident gap between intention and effect that prevents us from reading LeRoy as a straightforward and deliberate instance of mystification.

I have dwelt at length on the question of intention in relation to classifying the LeRoy case in no small part because some published commentary does seem to read Albert’s project as more deliberate than she herself is necessarily willing to claim (such as Cochrane in the New

Statesman, 21-22, or Gaitskill as quoted by Beachy, 2). This retroactive attribution of didactic intent relies (in what strikes me as an unnecessarily tautological argumentative move) on the potentially educational results of her fraud as proof of its subversive value rather than its intentions. That is, the suggestion that because we might learn certain lessons from the LeRoy case Albert’s actions must have been consciously subversive strikes me as a position that is both needlessly complex (why must Albert have desired our edification for it to be experienced?) as well as premised on an on obvious logical fallacy (that outcome must be a result of intent). The logical equivalent would be to suggest that Wilkomirski, whose Fragments certainly had the effect of inducing a good deal of self-reflection amongst publishers, critics, and readers on the vagaries of the Holocaust memoir industry, set out to reveal our readerly desires to us; given that he appears to be either genuinely mistaken in his biographical beliefs or pathologically false, this conclusion seems unwarranted in his case and, I believe, in Albert’s as well.

Jeandillou’s insistence on the egalitarian character of mystification (that its victims are peers of its perpetrators by definition) provides another useful vantage point from which to analyze Albert’s creation of the LeRoy persona (and another reason I am arguing for understanding Albert as an impostor rather than a mystifier). While Cochrane views Albert’s primary victims as members of the publishing industry—who might stand to benefit from a little humility, she implies—there are other sets of victims worth considering. As Beachy documented

203 thoroughly in his definitive exposé, the primary mechanism by which Albert made her way into the literary world was through contacting authors supposedly idolized by her teenage author- figure, individuals whose real lives and literary subject matter had a great deal in common with the biography constructed for the young JT. One of the necessary conditions for the endurance of

Albert’s success – as well as one of the more ethically questionable deceptions among many – was her ability to convince writers, specifically those who shared aspects of LeRoy’s fictional history, of the truth of his story. One of LeRoy’s earliest supporters (and thus an early victim) was author Dennis Cooper, whose status as a writer of “outsider fiction” that deals with themes from homosexuality to sadomasochism made him a particularly important ally from the inception of LeRoy’s literary career. LeRoy offered readers an introductory biography cannily designed to appeal to a writer who may well have invented a character just like LeRoy.3 Writer and activist

Susie Bright, also among the first wave of LeRoy victims (and one of the speculated candidates for true author of the works in the months between the initial article in October 2005 that revealed the fraud and the later piece in January 2006 that definitively named Laura Albert) alludes to this aspect of the relationship between LeRoy and his supporters in a blog post written after the unveiling of the fraud:

[B]y portraying herself as the Little Cripple Boy, who’d choke back the tears as

he asked me for a match, [Albert] set up the dynamic that determined the rest of

our relationship: Don’t expect anything from JT— he’s too fragile. Don’t tell him

to not be an asshole— he can barely get up in the morning. Never refuse a

request, no matter how crazy— he’s never had anyone he could count on in his

3 Indeed, a friend of Cooper’s youth who has figured prominently in his work shared a great deal in common with the story Albert built for LeRoy; LeRoy even borrowed the young man’s photograph from Cooper for use as the author photo on one of his own book jackets; the preceding account is all found in Beachy’s 2005 article, while Albert’s alternate version of the author photograph story is found in Rich (160).

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life. Just to let you know how far gone I was, when I first read Beachy’s expose,

my first thought was, “If this is true, JT might kill himself.” My suicide alert

bells went off. Truth be told, a lot of us who got conned by JT have been trained

since childhood to respond to these [kinds] of distress calls.

[…] There was a tremendous camaraderie and pride in JT’s success. If his story of

the extreme dispossessed could make such a dent, it said something about all our

efforts, about the lives we knew firsthand. (Bright 2006)

Dennis Cooper (also speculated about as another possible author) shared Bright’s feelings of betrayal and offered an incisive reading of Albert’s particular skill as a manipulator in a blog entry of his own:

JT Leroy's work has always been completely attached to the presentation of the

author as a teenaged boy whose difficult life occasioned the subjects of his work.

The work was fiction, but its legitimacy came through the understanding that his

stories' subject matter resembled the content of his real life, and JT Leroy forced

this reading from the very moment 'he' appeared. 'He' originally seduced me and a

number of other writers with his misery and horror[-]filled autobiography and his

seemingly remarkable ability to not only have survived that life but to have such a

bright future ahead of 'him' due to 'his' inexplicable talent as a writer and the

courage 'he' showed in using art as a weapon to face down all that abuse. All

writers who believe writing is important want a reason to believe, because there

aren't many reasons out there these days, and JT Leroy was a reason, a real flesh

and blood, authentic reason to believe writing remained a very important medium.

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[…]'He' asked us to save him with this wonderful thing we did called writing, and

so we did. (Cooper 2005, my italics)

Ironically, Albert, whose rise to fame relied heavily upon manipulating the sentiments of her fellow artists, now claims justification for her actions on the grounds of artistic authenticity. In her Moth performance, she presents her storytelling as akin to a sacred mission:

In the group home [I lived in as a teen], everyone’s telling the stories,

and I don’t even know how to tell mine, I don’t even have the tools to

tell mine. And I would go to buy a little relief, at the street corner there

was a phone booth…and I’d be a boy, I’d call hotlines and I’d tell them

all the stories. My stories, my pain, everyone’s stories, the house

parent, who had survived the Biafran war, would say to me, “Laura,

your job is to tell our stories.” (The Moth, New York City, November 2010)

The cynical reader might note Albert’s continued propensity for grafting herself to the experiences of others (if you can’t describe your own pain, why not legitimize yourself by instrumentalizing a war survivor’s?). I would also point out the way that “pain” and “story” emerge as increasingly fluid terms. Experiences are not individual but part of a collective unconscious of suffering, and Albert’s “avatar” is a mere translation of this collective suffering, not a set of specific experiences mobilized in relation to others with the same ostensible backgrounds. Whether or not LeRoy’s ostensible biography superseded his literary output as the main source of his interest to his wide circle of supporters (and Albert makes a thinly veiled claim in her Paris Review interview that a certain gay author, who is quite clearly meant to be

Cooper, was more interested in pursuing sex with the teenage writer than in the writing itself),

Cooper and Bright both make clear the inextricability of author and text in the persona Albert

206 presented to them in marked contrast to Albert’s focus on the supposed purity of her own relation to LeRoy’s art. While there is no suggestion, then, that Albert intended her creation of LeRoy to serve as a form of mystification with its attendant demystifying gesture in the specific sense developed by Jeandillou, it is clear that she engaged in a process of mystification in the broader sense of the term insofar as she sought not merely to blur the boundaries of author and text as well as author and persona but to collapse them entirely. Given that this collapse functions at the same time to (over)determine the act of reading—to ensure that fictional texts maintain both the license of invention and the weight of claims to truth—it seems both reasonable and necessary to take Albert/LeRoy at their word and class the LeRoy texts among the impostors in accordance with the author’s own emphasis on their autobiographical status.

Imposture as Text

In a similar key, Albert’s participation as LeRoy in literary venues contingent on elements of the LeRoy persona that do not apply to Albert herself further disproves her claim to an exculpatory “purity of intent” in the development and deployment of her imposture (Beachy

8) and underlines the difficult position of the writer of fiction claiming autobiographical status.

In an interview given well after LeRoy had surpassed cult status to become something of a cause célèbre for inclusion in an anthology titled GenderQueer:Voices From Beyond the Sexual

Binary, Albert-as-LeRoy refers to aspects of the novels as factual (that is, autobiographical) in the context of discussing LeRoy’s “real” biography. It is worth emphasizing that while other pieces in the collection are told in personal narrative form, generally without distinguishing between the wholly factual and the creative rendering of the author’s life, the interview format is relatively unambiguous in its direct attribution of speech to the subject. Nowhere is it made

207 clearer that the LeRoy persona was of benefit to Albert beyond serving as an aspect of some sort of psychological/artistic process: what reason other than strengthening the credibility of the

LeRoy persona could Albert possibly give for agreeing to the inclusion of this interview in a venue predicated upon experiences she has never had (or subsequently claimed to have had)?

While the fact of giving the interview “in character” is arguably revealing in and of itself, the actual content of the conversation offers further insight. After complaining of not receiving sufficient attention from what LeRoy terms “the transgender community” (101), LeRoy goes on to offer the following interpretation of his own work:

I looked at prostitutes in Sarah like they were artists…While the straight ones [in

the novel] are trailer trash [, the] trans characters are very noble; they are

respected and revered in a way that in real life they’re not…In Sarah I totally

reversed that. They are the most valued…I didn’t write Sarah to be political. I

wrote it from my experience. (102-103)

The self-laudatory tone is echoed in Albert’s first post-exposure interview, given to Nathaniel

Rich at The Paris Review, in which she also claims a positive effect for her writings as JT, relying on the old chestnut of fraud perpetrators everywhere when claiming that hers was a victimless crime (162). In the same interview, she asserts in her defense that she refused a publisher’s wish to present the LeRoy books as memoir, claiming that she “ didn’t want to publish the stories if they couldn’t stand on their own as fiction” (158). However, the books were never permitted to “stand on their own” so long as LeRoy himself remained a character beyond the text as well as the figure who authorized its content, and the subsequent revelation of

Albert’s authorship and deliberate long-term deception ensures that, rightly or wrongly, the works will not and indeed cannot be read on their own terms. However unerringly the LeRoy

208 persona tapped into a particular cultural moment (and to the undoubted glee of Albert’s publishers), I have yet to find an interview in which she claims pressures on the production side as having motivated her to assert the autobiographical nature of the stories through the LeRoy persona. James Frey, for instance, was quick to point out that he originally wanted to publish his memoir as a novel; while Albert insists she was responsible for the classification of her works as fiction, she has not offered an explanation for the performative dimension of the imposture, which the ostensible fictionality of the works would seem to render unnecessary (that is, it is is unnecessary that the authorial performance should align with the content of purportedly fictional texts). Considering that she has not been at all reticent in discussing other areas of the imposture, it seems unlikely that she would hesitate to point the finger in the direction of her publishers or literary agent if it seemed to hold the potential to deflect attention from her own role. In the absence of such claims, it seems logical to attribute the enmeshment of author and text to

Albert’s own agency, however far beyond her control the LeRoy fire may have spread.

The excerpt from the GenderQueer interview quoted above underlines the simplicity that apparently characterizes Albert’s view of fiction, however paradoxically complex the consequences of that view (as made manifest in her imposture and its aftermath). LeRoy expresses surprise at not being more definitively taken up by transgender readers given the nobility with which he claims Sarah portrays sex work across gendered boundaries. While I have deliberately deferred the question of such representations within the text itself in favour of a discursive approach, that LeRoy’s comments are made in the ostensibly non-fictional space embeds them in the self-constructed paratextual authorial narrative. To no small extent, this relatively minor excerpt typifies my own fundamental objection to Albert’s actions and the ideological baggage behind them, namely, that at every turn the LeRoy figure, in word, deed, and

209 significance, served to simultaneously obscure and oversimplify the complexity of the relationship between the writer of fiction and her textual projects. If Albert has indeed committed, in Susan Stewart’s phrase, a “crime of writing” (2), it is not ultimately the deception of individual publishers, fellow writers, or readers that that is most objectionable, but rather the deliberate attempt to restrict the bounds of critical interpretation by insisting upon the coterminous nature of the writer’s life and its fictionalization while claiming immunity from charges of imposture on the very grounds of fictions she otherwise claimed as truth.

This is nowhere more evident than in Albert’s insistent claim, alongside her self-defense as an author of fiction, not autobiography, that the LeRoy books emerged out of her own history of abuse and violence (that these claims are more than a little contradictory insofar as LeRoy is at times representative of the full scope of an artist’s license to invent and at others a version of

Albert’s own experience is in keeping with Albert’s expansive approach to self-justification).

Proving herself an astute reader of contemporary pop psychology if nothing else, she repeatedly refers in her Paris Review interview to a long series of childhood abuses and traumas that led to what she claims is the development of an alternate personality as a psychological protective mechanism. It must be said that as of yet, no tangible evidence of Albert’s claims, such as reports from Child Protective Services, supporting commentary from friends, family (her mother and sister were both involved with the financial side of the LeRoy imposture), or other witnesses has been made public, and it is anyone’s guess whether or not her narrative of trauma is just another ploy by an experienced grifter with an eye towards regaining any possible crumb of sympathy

(this is not to say she should be obligated to produce such evidence, but merely that she has not).

As I noted in my discussion of Khouri’s claims of childhood sexual abuse in Broinowski’s documentary and the uncomfortably limited range of spectator-positions made available to the

210 viewer in response to her assertions, many of LeRoy/Albert’s readers, myself included, may generally hold political or ethical positions granting the benefit of the doubt to anyone making claims to an abuse survivor’s past until definitively proven otherwise. Nevertheless, the fact that

Albert’s incarnation as LeRoy depended on taking advantage of exactly this tendency, particularly prevalent amongst the feminist, queer, and survivor communities that comprised

LeRoy’s earliest readers and Albert’s earliest victims, is difficult to ignore. Whether or not

Albert can also legitimately or verifiably claim to be a survivor of abuse, the salient point here is that she feels that this claimed status grants her a privileged position not only in terms of her subject matter as an author but in her invention of a wholly distinct authorial persona (whose experiences, even of childhood violence, are not identical to her own). For instance, in her Paris

Review interview, Albert offers pages from her teenage diaries as evidence of her own psychological trauma (149-151) in an evident attempt to justify her assumption of the identity of a traumatized teen; this may explain her choice of artistic subject matter but not the extratextual performance, which goes unremarked. Throughout the interview, her primary objection to the criticisms levelled against her seems to be that in her eyes she is not an outsider to the subject matter she writes about, which manages to sidestep the crucial distinction between writing about something emotionally resonant for yourself as an author and creating a persona that you claim is both a real person and identical to the subject of your fictions.

None of this is to suggest, naively, that Albert would not have faced critique had she published the same stories under her own name and identity – she may well have had to confront the same accusations of outsider status, albeit with less venom, that she now faces (or rather, does her level best to avoid facing). Nevertheless, Albert’s deception allowed her to neatly sidestep an honest confrontation with what Linda Martin Alcoff calls “the problem of speaking

211 for others” in her essay of the same name. As Alcoff writes, the question “is it ever valid to speak for others who are unlike me or who are less privileged than me” (7) is increasingly posed by and directed towards critics and writers (though the question itself is not new, its pervasiveness, Alcoff suggests, may be). Had Albert written in the textual voice of JT LeRoy without masking herself with the character in public, whether merely as a character or more akin to what I have called simple pseudonymity, her work would have provided another point of entry into this debate, particularly given her claims to share biographical traits with her fictional creation. Instead of inviting meaningful engagement with the nature of representation, however,

Albert as LeRoy and now as herself has, as Mächler says of Wilkomirski, produced literary and meta-literary texts that

proceed from a simple division of the world into victims and villains, and the

reader has no choice but to identity with the victim. The alternative is to be one of

the villains, one of those who have never listened to the victims. By identifying

himself or herself with the victim, the reader also wins, for as a victim he or she

can also find consolation. (210)

By continuing to insist on her own non-fictional victimhood as the authorizing factor behind her imposture, Albert reveals her continued enmeshment in a binary worldview peopled by writers she presented as jealous of her success (Dennis Cooper, Stephen Beachy) who, by questioning her motivations in creating LeRoy implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) question her status as victim. As Wilkomirski accused his critics of employing “fascist technique[s] of argumentation” against him by questioning his story (150), so Albert’s reliance on an undifferentiated and translational rhetoric of victimhood allies her critics with the logic of villainy.

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It is instructive to observe another formal similarity between the biographies of the two apparently fictional authorial personas, Binjamin and JT. LeRoy famously credited his birth as a writer to a psychotherapist, Dr. Terrence Owens, who is given prominent billing in the acknowledgements of all LeRoy’s full-length works (Owens does in fact exist and appears to have treated Albert, or at least Albert-as-LeRoy). In the LeRoy legend, according to various accounts, it was Dr. Owens who suggested that the young JT (then a street-hustling teenager) write down his remembered stories as a means of maintaining narrative continuity between therapy sessions (all of which, it now appears, took place over the phone, ostensibly due to

LeRoy’s intransigence and intense anxiety at engaging in face-to-face interactions but clearly one of Albert’s chief means of perpetrating her imposture). Similarly, as I noted earlier,

Wilkomirski says he began writing only after undergoing therapy (at his partner’s insistence) to begin to recover long-repressed memories. As I and other critics have emphasized, his ostensible memoir’s title, Fragments is reflective of its formal characteristics: the narrative pieces are arranged in rough chronology but are non-linear and often missing large chunks of time between biographical sections, which Wilkomirski claimed was directly representative of the piecemeal nature of his childhood recollections. In both cases, then, the two authorial personas incorporated a particular perspective on the fragmentary nature of memory and the reconstructive possibilities of writing into their imposturous projects, which has the double effect of making their stories more believable (through their self-conscious mimicry of the vagaries of the cognitive process of remembering) as well as providing a built-in alibi for the more easily defensible divergences from historical truth. Paradoxically, the very characteristic of their writings that gives them their particular emotional resonance is that which is also most cunningly deceptive, and highlights the truth of Jeandillou’s statement (echoed in translation by Abramson [12] and argued elsewhere by

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Whitlock [119]) that literary deception is only possible when the conventions of a particular genre have been established and formalized. Understanding the LeRoy case as a form of autobiographical imposture (rather than a hoax more broadly) thus draws into relief the particular vision of the relationship between fiction and autobiography employed specifically in the creation of JT LeRoy and in wider generic terms.

Figuring the Child, Fighting the Future?

While my argument for taking Albert/LeRoy as an example of imposture has emphasized the role of deception and appropriation in her case, I want to complicate this critical reading by turning now to an element of potential opened up in the space between text and imposture. There is another echo of Wilkomirski here, this time within the bounds of the LeRoy persona rather than in Albert’s account of its creation: as Vice notes, like Wilkomirski, the LeRoy books are narrated through the first-person perspective of a child (Textual Deceptions 51). The limitations of this position are instrumental in establishing the victim/villain interpretive mode Mächler describes, as the child’s inability to comprehend the world of violence he inhabits raises the stakes of that violence and positions the reader as equally, if vicariously, victimized. The textual infliction of trauma on the child’s mind and body attains further symbolic significance through the discursive capital with which images of the child circulate on a cultural scale: as we know from Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the image of the child mobilizes meanings, and particularly vulnerabilities, in excess of the literal forms of the latter.

To threaten the child is to threaten not only a member of a class understood as protected, but to threaten the very fabric of sociality and its reproduction. Discussing the mobilization of the child in political discourse, Edelman asks, “What…would it signify not to be ‘fighting for the

214 children’? How could one take the other ‘side,’ when taking any side at all necessarily constrains one to take the side of, by virtue of taking a side within, a political order that returns to the Child as the image of the future it intends?” (3). Put differently, that our location in a child’s point of view produces the effects Mächler describes in the first place is, Edelman tells us, already an instance of the privileged position occupied by, first, the Child understood as emblem of vulnerability, and second, the Child as enmeshed within or indeed constituting the discourse of futurity as such (or more specifically, what Edelman names reproductive futurism).

Edelman makes clear that his interest lies in the figural Child, not “historical children” of any stripe and that, moreover, the figural and the historical should not be confused (11). His argument stakes its critical territory firmly in the realm of Lacanian theory, and he relegates his dismissal of predictable anticipated critiques to a footnote. “There are many types of resistance for which, in writing a book like this, it is best to be prepared,” Edelman notes, such as “the defiantly ‘political’ rejection of…an insufficiently ‘historicized’ intervention in the materiality of politics as we know it,” as well as a “variant [that] will assail the bourgeois privilege (variously described, in identitarian terms, as ‘white,’ ‘middle-class,’ ‘academic,’ or, most tellingly, ‘gay male’)” (157n19). This note identifies the most likely counterarguments to his approach without the dignifying gesture of a response, suggesting instead that these anticipated critical evocations of class or racial privilege are symptomatic of the failures of futurism’s propulsive aggression.

Edelman argues that “such versions of politics and history represent the compulsory norm this book is challenging,” while implicitly proposing at the same time that the invocation of privilege is framed by homophobia. It is surely the theorist’s prerogative, and the established one doubly so, to mark her terrain’s inclusions and exclusions; I am aware that my own stance here is predicated to no small degree on the “defiantly ‘political’ rejection” Edelman dismisses in the

215 same note. Nevertheless, I believe the gap between the figural Child of Edelman’s analysis and the historical children he dismisses can usefully bear further theorization though the

Albert/LeRoy case. I want to suggest here that this gap between Child and children, made manifest through denying the status of (figural) Child to some (historical) children, is what enables the very injunction to “think of the children” at the heart of the discourse of reproductive futurism.

As Cynthia Degnan argues in “The Queer and the Innocent: Rethinking Queer Theory’s

Child through the JT LeRoy Literary Hoax,”

To actively queer the child in fictional representation directly challenges

essentialist understandings of childhood. The apparent truth that

autobiography lent to the stories, however, permitted readers' indulgence in

representations of child abuse, sex work and drug use. Narrating the queer

child from a position of truthful representation and tying that queerness to

abuse puts the burden of queering the child on the abuser…By locating this

responsibility in the abuser rather than drawing attention to the reader's

desires to consume such stories, the autobiographical claim positions this

queerness as exceptional and lamentable, thus leaving the normative

framework of childhood innocence intact. Prominently focusing on LeRoy's

life allows his creators to represent and market a queer child precisely

because the texts in this archive reinforce the essential innocence of

children in general. (762)

The Albert/LeRoy case offers, first, a potential example of the way in which the symbolic status of the Child as emblem of vulnerability and futurity is mobilized to engender empathic

216 identification: the LeRoy stories largely hinge on the presumptive emotional effect of depicting violence against a child, and specifically on violence undergone by the ostensibly real child in and behind the texts. Second, by depicting that violence as inflicted upon a real child and a queer one at that, the LeRoy texts can simultaneously offer a critique of Edelman’s figural Child and the material/historical children his theory makes absent. Even if we take his characterization of the Child’s symbolic circulation as gospel, how do we reconcile the privileged place of the Child in political and psychic cultures with the material children who are neither as pure nor as innocent as their figural counterpart, nor as protected and shielded? How, in other words, do we reconcile the injunction to “think of the children”—which Edelman’s analysis rightly criticizes— with the demonstrable material vulnerabilities that suggest a world of difference between Child and (most) children? As José Muñoz notes in Cruising Utopia, though “Edelman does indicate that the future of the child as futurity is different from the future of actual children, his framing nonetheless accepts and reproduces this monolithic figure of the child that is indeed always already white” (95). In perhaps his most-quoted passage, Edelman writes, “Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les

Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop” (29). At the risk of putting too fine a point on the question, what about the ways that “the whole network of

Symbolic relations” ensures that children other than the white, the straight, the gender- normative, the able-bodied and neurotypical, the class and geopolitically privileged, are not understood as vulnerable and are instead subjects of oppression as children and indeed grow up to be equally vulnerable or oppressed adults?

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Put differently, my critique here can be framed in relation to Edelman’s argument about

“the queer” as a structural position. Writing of and against the homonormative embrace of futurity, Edelman asserts, “those of us inhabiting the place of the queer may be able to cast off that queerness…but only by shifting the figural burden of queerness to someone else. The structural position of queerness [as negativity], after all, and the need to fill it remain” (27). I argue that the figural Child performs a similar displacement: that Child exists because other children are excluded from its figural logic, not in spite of this. The figural Child, in its purity, innocence, and vulnerability, requires the structural position of the child-as-threat, the unchildlike child, in order to attain its full significance. The Child of Edelman’s argument can emerge as in need of protection only via its discursive opposition to (historical) children denied said protection (children killed by drone strikes, or constructed as active threats, as in the case of

Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and the criminalization of Black and other youth of colour in the

United States and in Canada). In this vein, it is instructive that the “Fuck the Child” passage occurs directly after Edelman indicts former cardinal Bernard Law’s public denunciation of legislation proposing to grant health care benefits to the same-sex partners of Boston municipal employees on the grounds of “a futurism so blindly committed to the figure of the Child that it will justify refusing health care benefits to the adults that some children become,” a critique

Edelman juxtaposes against Law’s later resignation as a result of his role in facilitating impunity for sexually abusive priests. This juxtaposition highlights more than the institutionalized hypocrisy of the Catholic church (though it certainly does that as well). This moment—both

Law’s rhetoric and Edelman’s single-minded use of it—brings into sharp relief the structural contradiction, the Symbolic and material violence, that Edelman’s theory not only cannot account for but renders invisible: the child as subject of violence in systemic rather than

218 individual terms, against which the figural Child is defined. Edelman does acknowledge and highlight the multilayered hypocrisy and material violence at work in Law’s invocation of the figural Child against “the adults that some children become,” an invocation that took place while

Law was at the very same time screening adults who had committed violence against children from the consequences of their actions. However, this is not the same as acknowledging structural violence against children as (racialized, classed, gendered) children, as subjects themselves, rather than (only) as the adults they become.

Albert makes a similar point about the gap between figural Child and material children in her Moth story, one of the only moments in which she offers what could be taken as a political critique in justification of the LeRoy imposture. She describes how “when they [the public] were just starting to talk about abuse, sexual abuse, [the image used was] always a blonde-haired blue- eyed cute little [sic] that you would forgive and love no matter what they did, no matter how transgressive and what they did, you’d just love them. I never saw myself represented in any of that.” While I am disinclined to accept this as a motivation for Albert’s actions, she does touch on something important here: we “think of the children” by not thinking of others as children insofar as “child” is understood as constituting a class in need of protection or a metonym for vulnerability. Muñoz underlines that the “future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (95). Not all children have a future, just as not all children can be considered markers of figural futurity in the same way, if at all: some are already understood as threatening the very social order that the figural Child represents.

JT LeRoy, as Degnan notes above, simultaneously inhabits, bridges, exaggerates, and exploits that gap between figural Child and material children. Subject to forms and degrees of abuse from nearly every adult he encounters both as imposturous author and fictionalized

219 character that exceed the boundaries of even the height of so-called “misery lit’s” obsession with victimized children, JT becomes closer to a Child martyr than a historical child. And yet

LeRoy’s ostensible innocence is complicated by queerness, both on the literal level of his claims to non-normative gender and sexuality and the figurative sense in which Kathryn Bond Stockton speaks of the child’s queerness in the twentieth century. “If you scratch a child, you will find a queer, in the sense of someone ‘gay’ or just plain strange,” writes Stockton (1), and both claims are equally true of LeRoy. This is another way in which the performative dimension of the

LeRoy imposture relies on the author-persona underpinning ostensibly fictional texts whose depictions of graphic sexual violence (against Jeremiah in The Heart and the unnamed narrator of Sarah) might otherwise be read as fetishistic at worst and excessive at best. It is the ostensible existence of this child, both strange and queer in Bond Stockton’s terms, that circumvents (at least to some extent) potential accusations of exploitation and fetishism, or more accurately provides a predetermined response: the story is graphic because it is true. Indeed, the unflinching attitude towards this violence, as well as the ways both child protagonists emulate mother

Sarah’s (essentially the same character in both books as reflected by the presence of the same name) use of sex as an object of exchange for physical and psychological comforts, occasionally lapses into an almost gleeful grotesque. One scene features Jeremiah, no more than twelve, dressing up as his mother to seduce her boyfriend, while another features Sarah punishing

Jeremiah by tying a string to his penis, and a third offers an aestheticized depiction of blood resulting from a violent assault. At times, reading LeRoy’s work feels like entering a world intent on outdoing its own prior depictions of brutality on the ostensible grounds of autobiographical authenticity. What might look like a courageous confrontation with a difficult past read through the lens of fiction “inspired by a true story” may just as easily be read as a

220 cynical attempt to up the shock value ante when the persona is known to be as fictional as the story, and a story that constructs the depiction of a queer child through the lens of innocence lost and thus may reinforce as much as deconstruct the sanctity of that figural innocence through the image of its violation.

And yet, there is more to the reader’s potential disquiet than the question of representing violence (and this reader, at least, finds the LeRoy book experience profoundly, even viscerally, discomfiting and at times repulsive). My own inescapable feeling remains that the writer is glorying in textual brutality, but this is impossible either to confirm objectively or to shed completely and is likely a readerly rather than critical feeling. There is a different truth at work here than that proffered by the notion of emotional or autobiographical authenticity, a truth we can find from one angle in Stockton’s queer child. Jeremiah and his unnamed counterpart know things they should not according to the symbolic economy of Edelman’s figural Child, things about violence, sexuality, and the relationship between the two that should by rights be the purview of the adult world and unknown to the Child. The latter figure can exist as requiring protection on the condition that children like Jeremiah do not require such protection and are indeed actively denied it. By this I do not simply mean to reiterate my earlier point about the occlusion of queer children or to speak of children’s strangeness as Stockton does in a general sense; rather, this uncanny knowledge itself is a form of strangeness, of broad queerness, of disquieting awareness relying on and exceeding the trope of innocence, that is submerged throughout my various cases.

This is the sense in which children, and particularly children with traumatic pasts

(whether or not the traumas are the ones publicly claimed), know things they should not, but it is also a question of what that knowledge leads to: we may be tempted to read impostures such as

221 those discussed here as the transmutation of one form of trauma into another, and I have suggested this reading at certain points. Is it not equally possible that the knowledge Albert represents (and thus offers us, by effect if not necessarily intent) is that victims, like children, know more than we think? Further, is it not also possible that this strange knowledge is not mere knowledge of trauma but the knowledge of how easily we are manipulated by the victims-and- villains mentality, by how willingly we will believe (some) child victims are locked into the innocence of the figural Child, even as we fail to believe in the innocence of others? If some of us are willing to understand Albert’s imposture as a translation of her own pain into another form, might we not also consider that her very explanation of her actions in those terms represents the knowledge that emerges from what she claims to have survived? In other words, if

Albert insists on her invention of LeRoy as a method of survival, perhaps that very insistence marks the forms of manipulation that (some) victims learn to survive. The lie, rather than revealing Albert’s unspeakable truth, might equally reveal the truth of our own desire to understand victims one dimensionally, as always only victims, and to read stories that reflect this unidimensional role. This is not to suggest that children who experience trauma are to blame for their own victimization, or that we do not already engage in vicious constructions of children as manipulators (the recent response to accusations of sexual assault made against Woody Allen by one of his daughters is a case study in victim-blaming) but that when we understand children as manipulators we do so to disclaim their victimhood, not to acknowledge its more disturbing effects or to acknowledge children as complex beings. Children, like victims of violence, must be either wholly innocent or wholly knowing; perhaps what Albert offers us, if we read against her attempts at proscribing our interpretive freedom, is the uncomfortable knowledge that these

222 terms are not mutually exclusive and that “authentic” victimhood, like literary truth, is not a one- dimensional category if it exists at all.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce: Authenticity’s Cruel Attachments

There is an extensive and varied scholarly vocabulary that might be employed against

Albert; for example, we might call her textual work monologic, closed, or totalizing, but these theoretical apparatuses all converge in the accusation of authorial usurpation of the right to interpret. The politics of representation of a given text may be more or less transparent or opaque without meriting such a criticism; the problem lies, as I suggested earlier, in the deliberate evasion of an honest confrontation with the act of writing (without, that is, an appeal to a nebulous authenticity), as well as in claiming one’s text as a representational mechanism within the frame of a truth-claim generic mode bolstered by an extratextual performance. LeRoy’s insistence in the GenderQueer interview on the positive nature of Sarah’s gesture towards representing marginalized individuals and groups reveals a markedly simplistic conception of such portrayals as either “good” or “bad,” with the author apparently ignorant of the fact that depicting cultural outsiders as possessing some kind of innate nobility of the oppressed is itself a shopworn cliché (the “hooker with a heart of gold” is neither new nor radically oppositional).

The simple inversion of stereotype to which LeRoy refers partakes of clear assumptions about how fiction is read and written, namely, that individuals look for “positive” representations of their group identities and, further, that whether portrayals are positive or negative is mathematically qualifiable and interpretively significant. In essence, then, my argument hinges on reading Albert’s participation in the guise of LeRoy in the “real” (extratextual) space of the interview as a move that is part and parcel of a broader project of interpretive circumscription.

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Given that a work of fiction is, by definition, a work that claims for itself a license to invent, the attempt to anchor a fictional text within the autobiographical realm is to inscribe a number of assumptions upon the text prior to its reading (assumption that do not apply in the case of fiction’s imaginative freedom). While it would be simple enough to dismiss the importance of such a declaration with reference to the undoubted truth that all fiction, emerging from a particular authorial consciousness, partakes to some degree in depicting aspects of the author herself simply by virtue of singular authorship, I think it fair to say that Albert went much further in assuming an authorial persona essentially identical with the primary character of her fiction and producing a body to reinforce the overlap between text and life. Further, she has since attempted to defend herself with recourse to an authorial reality outside the text through her insistence on the commonalities between her own life and the fake she created. This is another means by which Albert and her imposture work to reify the autobiographical reading and once again evade forthright engagement with the complexity of transforming reality into fiction.

As I discussed at length in Chapter One, Ruthven argues that the unveiling of literary fakes and the attendant public condemnation serves a culturally prophylactic function akin to a moral panic, whereby the frenzy of accusations allows for a collective process of purging an undesired element and resolidifying the boundaries of authorial and textual legitimacy (3).

Taking this assertion as a methodological caution rather than a critical inevitability, I hope to have guarded as well as possible against the tendency to moralize for moralizing’s sake on the subject of literary falsification. It seems to me, however, quite reasonable to insist upon the deeply conservative nature of Albert’s project, which rather than seeking to expand our conception of the complex interplay between (auto)biography and textuality instead at every turn envelops that relationship, and the very process of writing, in a cloud of mystery. Albert

224 describes LeRoy as “a mutation, a shared lung” (Rich 166) that inexplicably (and inconsistently) was both beyond her control and subject to her whims, while also able to inhabit the body of

Savannah Knoop. The vagaries of individual creative processes aside, this strikes me as yet another means by which the author seeks to displace the role of her own consciousness in the formulation of the fictional and figurative manifestations of the LeRoy text.4 Where a mystifier might seek to deceive in order to illuminate, I hope to have shown that Albert instead sought to muddy the waters at every turn; while this obfuscation may prove critically productive following

Albert’s exposure, this effect would be in spite of Albert’s actions and not because of them.

Whether or not Ruthven’s characterization of the feeling of readerly betrayal in response to literary deceptions described earlier as an exercise in boundary-drawing is entirely apt, the question remains as to the circumstances that make these fakes possible in the first instance.

What commonalities can we find amongst impostures such Wilkomirski, Khouri, and Albert?

Taken together, the subjects of these authors’ fakes—the Holocaust, the social position of

Muslim women, child abuse, non-normative experiences of sexuality and gender—display a clear pattern: all are subjects of a good deal of (often prurient) public interest but without a corresponding breadth of public knowledge. Put differently, the degree of appeal these subjects hold for mass readership is in contrast to the level of collective knowledge about them; impostures, as I argued in relation to Norma Khouri and Amina, occupy and exploit an epistemological gap marked by a lack of critical engagement with the topics they address and thus the texts that address them. These topics are also, not coincidentally, subject to social taboos around what sorts of personal experiences can and cannot be subjected to outside scrutiny, as we

4 Albert claims that Knoop underwent spontaneous physical transformations, such as the cessation of menstruation, after a certain period portraying JT in public (Rich 166). Knoop’s account suggests disordered eating as a more likely cause.

225 saw in Wilkomirski’s declaration that to question a Shoah survivor’s story is to employ the logic of fascism.

On the other side, the most significant commonality among these writers, and the impostors studied here more broadly, is their doubled mobilization of authenticity as a principle of textual legitimacy both before and after their exposures. What begins as a term of praise becomes a term of exculpation in light of deception revealed: where first authenticity is invoked as a feature of the textual content—”this is worth reading because it is an authentic story of the

Holocaust, of an honour killing, of child abuse”—it is then, more amorphously, a defense against accusations of deliberate malfeasance. Albert is a perfect example of this insistence: “For the people who feel betrayed or whatever, I say: For me, JT was very real…We didn’t make anyone do anything they didn’t want to do. We were there, really, being of service. We were really there, spreading joy and love. Maybe it allowed you to have compassion by proxy” (Rommelman 7).

The first sense of authenticity substitutes, arguably, for truth understood as factuality or verifiability; but what are we to make of the second, a recurrent claim made by the impostures throughout this study that authenticity is something that can be solely the product of feeling, or that to feel something is authentic is determinative in some way? If Albert claims that JT was real to her, what kind of realness is she claiming, and what model for critical literary evaluation does it propose? That Albert understands this claim to be fundamental to her project is evident in its repetition as recently as January 2014. In a Twitter conversation with a Toronto artist

(expressed in characteristic style), Albert exclaimed, “SO many dumfux NEVER bothered 2 ask me WHY - Yeah HOAX…LOL! As fuckin IF! JT was my TRUTH! Stand by it!” She goes on to claim that the critical response to her deception attempted to, but could not ultimately, deny the

“felt authenticity of the work” (@lauraalbert, 10 January 2014). It would be easy enough to take

226 this as pure calculation on Albert’s part, but would it not be easier to stake her right to invention, as she does elsewhere, on the works’ status as fiction rather than as authentic in a “felt” sense?

What is it about the claim to authenticity in these terms that makes it more appealing than a simple refutation of a pact with her readers based on truth? One answer would be that this is a tacit acknowledgment on Albert’s part that her texts were never received as “mere” fictions and that the paratextual performance I have emphasized was indeed as crucial to the reception of the texts as were the books themselves. There is another answer I would like propose, however, that understands the claim to felt authenticity made for otherwise untrue (in the first sense of authenticity as factuality) texts as illustrative of something more, of a set of desires for something not only impossible but obfuscating. These desires emerge in a triangulated formation: first, there is the authorial insistence on authenticity as an evaluative ground and justification for the work, a desire for a certain kind of reading; second, there is the reader’s role in experiencing authenticity as a mode of feeling, a desire for a certain kind of story; third, we find a critical persistence of the term, particularly in the context of auto/biography studies, a desire for a form of conceptual stability. What is remarkable about this endurance is the lack of consensus as to what this sense of authenticity means and, moreover, what purpose it serves.

In this vein, then, I want to conclude by suggesting here that we consider authenticity in light of Lauren Berlant’s theorization of “cruel optimism,” or rather, that we understand both

Albert’s claims and the critical relationship to authenticity as a concept through Berlant’s lens.

For Berlant, cruel optimism is fundamentally relational (rather than a condition or state of being) as well as necessarily ambivalent; “a relation of cruel optimism exists,” Berlant writes, “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing…[Such relations] become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it

227 initially” (1). Cruelty is not a characteristic of optimism (or belief) itself, Berlant specifies, but it inheres instead in the persistent relationship to something that not only harms us individually but actively counteracts the end ostensibly served by the attachment. For Berlant, the paradigmatic example is our collective belief in the “good life” promised by neoliberal capitalism, which underpins our belief in and aspiration to lives made theoretically possible by a system that renders such lives functionally unattainable and the fantasy itself actively detrimental (3). I want to suggest a structural parallel to Berlant’s framing of “the good life” in the compulsive repetition of a double invocation and disavowal of authenticity in auto/biography studies; that is,

I understand this repetition as marking a relation to authenticity as an object-concept that masks the manifold forms of and relations to truth, however messy and indeterminate, at work in life writing.

Authenticity as a conceptual matrix bridging (or effacing) multiple senses of truth in life writing—referential truth or subjective truth, as I have emphasized here—performs a structurally similar function to Berlant’s cruel optimism, whether it is framed as unattainable standard or object of critique. In either case, its ephemerality is equalled only by its centrality, its exertion of a centrifugal discursive force understood as underpinning all references to identity or dismissals thereof. Can we envision a theory of life writing—or indeed, a politics of identity—that does not require mobilizing authenticity as either linchpin or antinomy? Alternately, if we understand life writing’s critical relation to authenticity as one of cruel optimism, that is, as an object-category whose invocation in tacit support or in dismissal leaves us in the same position, can we avoid rehearsing an analytical immobility now decades old? Smith and Watson include authenticity with authority in the strategic tool kit appended to their undeniably and deservedly definitive

Reading Autobiography, sidestepping the apparent impossibility of defining the former by an

228 appeal to the relative concreteness of the latter; and yet, why not omit the term entirely? What value motivates its relatively undifferentiated inclusion? What logic makes its appearance inevitable, and what would happen if we refused the telos signalled by its presence?

This inclusion without explanation marks the relation Berlant describes, and highlights the need to interrogate not the meaning of authenticity but the meaning of our seeming inability to escape from it. If Wilkomirski, Khouri, LeRoy/Albert and their various defenders can first produce their texts to acclaim (whether popular, critical, or both) on the grounds of authenticity and subsequently justify their fabrications in the same terms, authenticity is not merely a moving target but an endlessly polysemous alibi. I have suggested through this project that speaking in terms of verifiability when this is in fact what we mean gets us further, analytically, toward our actual concern; after all, what does “authenticity” become in the less quantifiable terms at play in the suggestion that Wilkomirski has written an “authentic” Holocaust story without being a verifiable Holocaust survivor? In the latter case, authenticity appears closer to a structure of feeling, a (cruelly optimistic) relation to an idea of a feeling as affect, that is, as embodied and experienced: authenticity as a desire to insist that what feels true must have some value as truth.

The second version of authenticity, on the surface a claim to a feeling of truth, emerges in this view as the name for our desire that truth can be a feeling, that feeling is enough, that what we feel to be true is not produced by a blend of subjective and discursive assumptions about lives and experiences unlike our own but is, in itself, authentic. We believe, in other words, that our sense of what constitutes the authentic is its own proof that authenticity exists and can be recognized: we know it when we see it.

The point, then, is not that the LeRoy stories are not “authentic” (as opposed to untrue or nonfactual); rather, I am interested in Albert’s belief that claiming they are authentic (in

229 whatever non-factual form) should matter. As I suggested in the third chapter, that Norma

Khouri reveals herself as an outsider insofar as she lacks meaningful knowledge about Jordan does not interest me as an indictment of her personal status as “authentic” in ethnic or national terms. By that logic, the debate about her text becomes a question of identity as an abstraction rather than a position, of ontological essence rather than structural power; that her story already reflected a one-dimensional Orientalism does not require a countervailing picture of the “real”

Jordan populated by equally one-dimensional “authentic” Jordanians to be effectively critiqued.

Similarly, whether Albert was or was not abused as a child or can be understood as an authentic victim is less significant than her insistence on maintaining authenticity as the principle behind her fictionalization of both story and identity. Unless we are to continue to chase our tails, critically speaking, in arguments about what is or is not authentic, we need a more sophisticated vocabulary to account for the vagaries of factual untruth experienced or presented as felt truth, of why what feels true so often replicates assumptions about difference rather than challenging them.

What emerges as a determinative principle for Albert’s writing, and (though perhaps less consciously) for all the cases elaborated here, is the idea that forms of victimization translate across stories and storytellers, that one teller can speak for others, as Albert claims in her Moth performance. That this claim is made in the context of experiences about which, as I noted above, there is a gap between public interest and public knowledge is no accident: if stories and traumas can be translated with such fluidity, what onus is there on readers to do the difficult work of stepping beyond the individualizing limits of empathy, beyond authenticity as subjectively felt truth, to acknowledge that doing justice to others requires knowledge as well as feeling? It is this discrepancy between interest and knowledge and the appetite for publicly

230 consumable stories of autobiographical drama so good it could be fiction as well as the attendant lack of critical readership strategies that Albert exploited with her stories. Her very success is indicative of the extent to which the LeRoy character was tailor-made to feed the public desire for a conveniently self-exoticizing cultural other. It remains to be seen whether Albert will be able to forge a literary career under her own name, or whether the spectre of her creation will finally prove, as by all appearances it has thus far, too real to disappear completely.

Conclusion

On Truth and Lies in a Literary-Ethical Sense

What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no consequences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even hostilely inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”

Given the emphasis this project has placed on the dialectical tension between the roles of reader and author in life writing, it seems only fair to reflect here on the responses of various interlocutors over the course of this project and the ways such interactions have shaped my thinking and this text. Without wishing to characterize these conversations as unstintingly hostile or oppositional, the spectrum of responses to my choice to write about imposture, and to write about it from a critical-ethical vantage point and not to laud its destabilizing or playful effects, has been instructive and thought-provoking. “Haven’t you ever,” asked someone early on, “told a lie about your life?” Though I will confess myself rather pleased with the rhetorical effectiveness of my response (“Of course, but not about being a Holocaust survivor”), this question has remained with me over the countless hours of reflection to which the dissertation writer subjects her work. Do we not all, ultimately, lie, dissemble, or perhaps most charitably, embroider, in the

230 232 telling of our lives? I have tried to make Ruthven’s compelling insistence that what we identify as fraudulent reflects our conception of the authentic a structural problematic or thematic touchstone, but one could still ask whether my argument ultimately re-enacts the expurgatory gesture he decries. Conversely, have I merely identified lies so egregious that to analyze them at the length I have done here is to give them far more importance than they merit? Is my argument,

I have often wondered, fundamentally anti-aesthetic or, worse, anti-art? Is a retrograde literary prescriptivism the unspoken assumption undergirding my thinking?

Though I have envisioned responses to each of these questions, I will not rehearse them here one by one. Nevertheless, it strikes me as imperative to revisit one of the crucial claims that has shaped this project and, indeed, my very investment in the study of literature: that texts are inevitably in and of the world and that this is not an afterthought or a symptom but a condition for textual being. To emphasize this materiality, which extends to or perhaps implicates author, reader, publisher, and critic in its scope, is not to reduce the text to “mere” referential document or consumer object but to say something about it that I can only call fundamental. If texts do not exist in this meaningful sense, do not work on us in ways both perceptible and invisible, why do we read? That this project, and its author, proceeds from the belief that texts matter, and consequently that language matters, must be the ultimate defense against charges of ethical prescriptivism or subjugating art to politics. Language may not—more accurately, cannot—be the adequate expression of all realities, but it is also all we have within these realities, and how we use it must matter.

I have emphasized the complex rhetorical, ethical, and representational nexus at which autobiographical truth claims operate rather than the simple fact of textual untruth, though the two cannot be separated so neatly. The untruths I have focused on have been discovered in no

233 small part because of the tellers’ insistence on the transparency of their truthfulness: as we have seen, Binjamin Wilkomirski’s acknowledgment of his fragmentary memories was followed by an even more forceful assertion of their literal truth, while JT LeRoy’s fictions were accompanied by an elaborate apparatus designed to amplify their autobiographical status. It is this desire to have it both ways that characterizes the ethical violation in these cases: the desire to demand the belief of autobiography with the license of fiction, accompanied by the insistence on being read as transparent rather than complex or partial truth

Another example, this time not a case of imposture, is illustrative here: Lauren Slater’s

Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2000) announces its recursive ambiguity immediately in the titular one-two punch. The outright provocation of “lying” in a truth-claim genre is elevated to constitutive indeterminacy by the promise of metaphor’s deliberate juxtaposition of what is not with what is. In the most strictly contractual reading of the pact, a metaphorical memoir is a contradiction in terms we might typically call fiction (if all writing is autobiography, would not all fiction be metaphorical memoir?). Acknowledging both a long history of experience with mental illness (her first book was Prozac Diary, also a memoir) and a conflicted relationship with truth, Slater recounts a story in which kinship, creativity, and epilepsy form a tangled web.

Her narrative moves from a childhood tense with her parents’ disappointments, particularly her mother’s thwarted artistic ambitions, to an early adolescence dominated by illness and a young adulthood marking her birth as a writer. She begins to experience seizures at the age of ten, which have a significant impact on every aspect of her life (though she suggests more than once that she may have exaggerated their severity or even worked to induce them, and at times faked them entirely), particularly her relationship with her mother and her relationship with the concept of truth (she tells her classmates that she has cancer caused by her epilepsy, for example). “I

234 have epilepsy,” she writes early on, “Or I feel I have epilepsy. Or I wish I had epilepsy, so I could find a way of explaining the dirty, spastic, glittering place I had in my mother’s heart” (5-

6). It is from her mother that she learns both her creativity and her mendacity: “She was a woman of grand gestures and high standards and she rarely spoke the truth. She told me she was a Holocaust survivor, a hot-air balloonist, a personal friend of Golda Meir. From my mother I learned that truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are” (5). At age fifteen, a surgical procedure called a corpus callosotomy severs the two halves of Slater’s brain and puts an end to her seizures, though not her tendency to blur the boundaries between truth and untruth (including a stint with an Alcoholics Anonymous group despite not being an alcoholic).

Over the course of the text, it becomes clear that at least some of this medical information is fictional or fictionalized. At age thirteen, Slater tells us, she “developed Munchausen’s, on top of my epilepsy, or—and you must consider this, I ask you please to consider this—perhaps

Munchausen’s is all I ever had” (88). She goes on to cite a series of journals defining

Munchausen’s, a “factitious illness,” and noting, “epilepsy is one of the illnesses frequently chosen by Munchausen’s patients” (90). Most damningly, as a freshman in college, Slater visits a school psychologist, bringing a copy of an academic article written about her by her former surgeon and reproduced within the text itself (98-106). Within moments, the psychologist informs Slater, “This…this paper…is not real,” telling her “there is no way this paper was written by a doctor, or anyone even remotely connected to the medical profession” (175). He points out that the paper references a portion of the brain that does not exist and that the paper diagnoses Slater with a nonexistent form of epilepsy (she calls her epilepsy “eliopathic” rather than “idiopathic” when only the latter form is real). He goes on to note that a corpus callosotomy is not performed on patients with temporal lobe (rather than generalized) epilepsy, finally

235 demanding to see her surgical scar. This demand takes on the quality of a sexualized threat, and she flees his office and reports him to the school authorities to no avail. However, the reader has been given sufficient information from this brief scene to question Slater’s representation of her condition in specific terms, and it is easy to confirm by a simple internet search that the psychologist’s most damning claims are all accurate. It is clear that Slater cannot have the illness she claims to have in the form she claims to have it (if she has epilepsy at all); nevertheless, in a chapter called “How to Market this Book,” addressed to her (possibly fictional) editor and

Random House’s marketing department, she insists that Lying be presented as memoir, not fiction, regardless of the uncertainty she herself has cultivated. “For marketing purposes, we have to decide,” she writes, continuing, “We have to call it fiction or we have to call it fact, because there’s no bookstore term for something in between, gray matter” (159). Her argument is not purely pragmatic, however, but deeply felt: “After all, if I were making the whole thing up— and I’m not saying I’m making the whole thing up—but if I were, I would be doing it not to create a character as a novelist does, but, instead, to create a metaphor that conveys the real person I am” (162). “My memoir, please. Sell it as nonfiction, please,” she concludes (165), insisting that, however elliptically, her text engages in the memoir’s fundamental act of self- representation.

Whether epilepsy ultimately serves as a metaphor for her relationship with her mother, her years of clinical depression, or the development of her creativity is never made explicit

(though she raises all three possibilities in the same chapter); further, according to Slater, this information is ultimately less important than the metaphorical truth Lying tells about its author, whatever that may be. The contours of that metaphorical truth—what in the text is a metaphor, and what it expresses—are thus implicitly irrelevant, in Slater’s mind, for the reader. For Slater,

236 the autobiographical pact is performative rather than constative, and the statement “this is a memoir” is the sole utterance on which it hinges. In place of Lejeune’s emphasis on the reader’s evaluation of a text’s referential value we find the author as not only the ultimate but the only arbiter. And yet Slater’s repeated insistences that the text be understood not just as a memoir but as her memoir—as a representation of her particular, individual self—suggests an inability to escape the role of the reader through its repeated imperative. Even as Slater maintains that it is her assurance of the text’s representativeness that should determine its generic classification, the very necessity of these recurring appeals makes visible the reader’s power as believer or skeptic.

The strongest assertion of authorial power cannot wholly foreclose the space for readerly interpretation, though it can shape or even determine it (whether in whole or in part). Slater can and does insist that her text be sold as memoir, but cannot ensure it is read as such.

Slater fails to address what ultimately most interests me here: what is it about the translated, metaphorized, or fictionalized depiction of truth that is (subjectively) truer than the

(verifiable) truth? If Slater is not in fact epileptic, if she has never even had a seizure, what do we make of her claim that it is only through the invention of an epileptic history that she can communicate crucial truths about herself (or at least her self-understanding)? In other words, if she is not epileptic, how does she know that epilepsy offers a (subjective, metaphorical) truthful representation of her psychic life? As Thomas G. Couser suggests, this is a pragmatic question as well as a literary one: “the ethical crux of Lying is not that Slater may be lying about having epilepsy, but that in exercising prose license she commits herself to an essentializing and mystifying characterization of a still stigmatic disability” (142). Is it not in fact her imagined sense of what epilepsy might be like that resonates with her as truthful—in which case, how and why is her text meaningfully different from fiction? In both literary and ethical terms, Lying

237 clearly occupies a different space than Fragments: Slater does not insist beyond the text on the

(factual) truth of her self-representation and indeed offers the reader sufficient evidence within it to gain at least a vague sense of the fictional and the autobiographical. The two authors’ respective understanding of literary mimesis is remarkably similar, however, as Slater does insist, like some defenders have of Wilkomirski, that a wholly imaginative experience is an authentic (self-) representation. This may be true on a purely individual level, but where does it leave actual epileptics or Holocaust survivors? What happens to an experience when it becomes a metaphor for someone else’s life? None of this is to say Slater should not have written her book or should somehow be prevented from using the terms she chooses; rather, my point is that the logic underpinning those choices reflects a presumptive ability to know (to represent, perhaps to consume) the other at least as much as it does a constitutive instability of language and identity.

The particular realm a given artist declares, in effect, free for the taking, may be subject to change, but the assumptions undergirding that declaration appear remarkably similar.

And yet I have not insisted on suspicion (or its less threatening sibling, skepticism) as a recuperative reading model, nor have I addressed it at length. What would it mean to suggest that stories of trauma in general be read with an eye towards framing their necessary gaps as possible moments of authorial guilt (in the sense of wrongdoing)? This is an ethical question as much as a conceptual one; I have argued that trauma’s fragmentary nature (or at least, the fragmentary nature of its memorial and literary representations) cannot be the evidence of its truthfulness, but neither can the same fragments and gaps be taken automatically for signs of deception. This is also why a solely textual approach to truth value in autobiography strikes me as insufficient: for texts that stake referential territory, what can be considered inside and outside the text breaks down at the merest critical glance, and to suggest that a text’s truth value can be ascertained

238 solely with recourse to internal markers is to miss or at least undervalue this crucial element. The suggestion that the textually internal alone (even if one grants that texts can be hermetically sealed in this way) can suffice to gauge the criteria of truth also risks imposing too-neat limits on trauma’s representational modes. Wilkomirski’s internal inconsistencies, his insistence on both the fragmentation and the accuracy of his memories, may trigger the first electric shock of suspicion, but to stop there leaves the door open to confusing aesthetic and referential critiques.

If the presentation of a narrative is read as the (or even a) primary determinant of its truth content, the effect is an implicit circumscription of what constitutes authentic depictions of traumatic experience when authenticity is understood as a structure of feeling rather than fact.

The question of suspicion is one I feel most keenly (and with the greatest sense of conflict) in the moment Forbidden Lie$ asks its viewers to evaluate Norma Khouri’s claims of childhood sexual abuse as merely another rung on her ladder of dishonest self-creation, indeed as the originary point culminating in the textual deception of her ostensible memoir. I alluded to this discomfort in my suggestion that for many people, myself included, operating from a premise of belief in the sincerity of such claims is an ethical principle. Though I did not dwell at length on this discomfort, it has returned spectrally, almost remorselessly, both in the LeRoy chapter and more forcefully in recent months as broad conversations about rape culture and claims to survivor experience have unfolded at length in the Canadian media (the Jian Ghomeshi accusations and impending trial) and in the United States (Rolling Stone’s article about sexual assault on campus through the lens of one set of allegations at the University of Virginia).

Though these claims, counterclaims, and nearly endless thinkpieces have not played out in the realm of memoir, their connection to my material here is inevitable: what are the stakes of believing what someone tells you about their life, and what are the stakes of disbelieving the

239 same? If suspicion is so often a form of epistemic violence that underpins rape culture(s)—and I believe this to be true—then I cannot advocate for suspicion as a universal methodological approach to life narratives with any ethical or intellectual consistency (which is not the same as acknowledging suspicions as they arise in particular contexts, though this is also fraught terrain).

In a related vein, if the majority of life narratives (like the majority of allegations of sexual assault) are not demonstrably false (though they may equally not be verifiably true in their entirety), to mandate suspicion runs the risk I rejected in Chapter Two’s discussion of the

Holocaust: to give too much credence to those whose denials of forms of violence serve their own interests (the interests of power) under the guise of truth. Moreover, as Gilmore argues persuasively, it “might be that the fake that delivers what a readership wants and expects is less likely to trigger sceptisim than the nonnormative life narrative that challenges” readerly assumptions (28). Thus, the ethical solution cannot be “to hold persons to an impossible standard of fullness and transparency in accounts of the self” (29). Some texts may offer clues to their untruthfulness or their ambiguity, but to read all truth claim texts with that eye would do both texts and reader a disservice and potentially enact a form of ethical violence advanced ironically under the name of ethics itself.

The ethical dimension of the project has been its most enduring concern, from its inception to its final words; by contrast, it seems entirely fitting that its more personal resonances came to my awareness only belatedly, well into the writing process. Also fittingly, this personal connection is a problem of origins, both known and unknown, and of the ways that identity is shaped by what we do not know as much as by what we do, by absence as much as presence, by the stories we do and do not tell about ourselves and those who came before us.

240

I have long known in a general sense that my paternal grandfather, who died before my parents met, was a con artist; the vagaries of familial silences (my grandmother’s reluctance to speak about her ex-husband, in such marked contrast to her love of all other family stories), deaths (particularly the death of my father, when I was still too young to understand or inquire about his own father in depth), and estrangements (numerous and generational) have kept me from accessing stories of my grandfather's life and activities. My own research instincts, the gift of the internet age, and a fortuitous but vague memory from my father’s oldest friend of my grandfather’s face on a magazine cover finally granted me a partial picture.

Among my grandfather’s many distinctions—my favourite being that he was the first person in Canada forbidden to receive mail under any name, legal or pseudonymous—are two feature-length accounts of his activities, one in The New Yorker and one in the now-defunct

Canadian magazine Weekend. From these articles, I have learned that his primary modus operandi was almost literary in its execution: he relied on homonyms to create fake companies

(“Hudson’s Bay,” for instance, became the aurally indistinguishable “Hudson’s Bey” over the telephone, presumably passed off as a typo on letterhead sent to unsuspecting Americans) in order to defraud small business people of sums of money and goods. At a certain point in his history, mail carriers in Montréal kept his photograph with them to ensure they were not delivering the post to another as-yet-undiscovered false name, a recourse to the presumably indisputable facts of bodily identity offering echoes of the conclusion to the Wilkomirski and

LeRoy cases.

The vagaries of familial dynamics alluded to above came to a catalytic moment over a year ago when two of my younger cousins asked over dinner what I knew about our grandfather.

At first, I gave a non-committal answer, kept uncharacteristically reticent by my instinctual

241 awareness that their own father’s silence reflected a shame that would have preferred the story remain untold. My mother, who was aware of my discoveries, watched with evident curiosity as to what I would or would not say and, taking my cue, changed the subject. The moment, and its attendant dangers, passed, but I felt unsettled. Why did I consider myself obligated to maintain a silence I understood emotionally but had found personally painful, a silence that implied a generational transfer of guilt, a silence that replicated the dysfunctional dynamics underlying the previous generation’s estrangements that my cousins and I were in that very moment trying to overcome? Who was I to decide they did not deserve knowledge that had made so many things about those dynamics clearer to me and given me empathy for figures towards whom I had previously only felt disappointment or anger? Hadn’t I spent much of my adolescence and early adulthood regretting the loss of narrative knowledge engendered by death along with the deaths themselves? Wasn’t this story, on one level about a relative none of us had met or would ever meet, also in a crucial way a story about ourselves? Weren’t my cousins old enough to hear the answer if they were interested enough to ask the question? I made up my mind and put down my fork. “Actually,” I said, “I do know some of the story.”

Their reactions were characteristic: while H. (then 19) followed a brief, shocked speechlessness with endless questions, D. (17) absorbed most of the story in silence, finally interjecting to ask, with slightly more animation than his typical teenage near-monotone, “So, he was like a gangster, kind of. Did he…kill anyone?” “No!” I said quickly. “I wouldn’t have told you this if he had! Or at least, not this casually.” He accepted this with a mix of relief tinged with disappointment, ostensibly underwhelmed but ultimately, I knew, relieved. This revelation was the main topic for the rest of our weekend visit, as we went over what I knew and did not know.

The image of my cousins, brother, and mother sprawled throughout my living room trading

242 computer-printed pages of The New Yorker article, alternately engrossed in their reading and pausing to share portions aloud while my partner brought us snacks, has stayed with me as a cherished memory of collective discovery. I think it is no exaggeration to say we all felt, at the end of that weekend, that we understood our fathers, each other, and ourselves differently, perhaps even more deeply.

Long after this conversation, and my conclusion that I made the right decision, I have continued to think about D’s question about the scope of our grandfather’s crimes. It is my response that has stuck with me, embodying as it does an implicit sense of a hierarchy of harm.

The harm of murder or physical violence is clear, and clearly worse than fraud, my answer suggests; my desire to reassure my cousin and exculpate my grandfather at once, however, glosses over the seriousness of the harm my grandfather undoubtedly inflicted on vulnerable people, for whom small-scale swindles may have been as devastating as more dramatic offenses

(that he also appears to have sexually harassed at least one potential employee should not go unremarked here either). It is the concept of harm, of identifying it, quantifying it, and qualifying it, that I have struggled with most in this project. Does imposture cause harm? To whom, and how? It would be easy to reply that my grandfather’s deceptions were of a different order than these texts, explicitly aimed as they were at parting people from money. It strikes me as somehow perverse (and deeply capitalist) to frame harm only in the context of material losses, to demand that damage be seen to be real, just as it seems impossible to advocate for the importance of first-person narrative as windows into experience on the one hand but to dismiss the appropriation of the autobiographical mode as insignificant on the other.

243

Is an untruth—or more plainly, a lie—so different spoken aloud than written down? If language can cause injury, can’t literature do so as well? How can harm be quantified? If a lie is told and no one detects it, does it matter?

“You should write a book about your family,” said the aforementioned family friend, the one who recalls the day my father and his brothers were confronted with their father’s face on the newsstands (incidentally also the woman who introduced my parents to each other; origins again, inescapably). In a sense, I now realize, I already have; any attempt at a direct account would contain too much conjecture for memoir and too much uncomfortable truth for fiction.

Instead, this investigation into the accounts we give of ourselves, with its forays into the varied fields of subjectivity and ethics, its queries into the emergence of both the self and its modes of representation, this text at least as full of questions as answers, is perhaps in the end the most justice I can offer not only to the idea of story itself but, ultimately, to my own.

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