Sometimes it's curious to be fooled. Especially when it's not about money. Mainly because after that you can recreate your favorite moment from The Who's "Won't Be Fooled Again" - which is Roger Daltrey's seminal title check and piercing "Yeah!"-scream. You get a little bit wiser, little bit better because of it. You gain experience. And after that you can go on with your life like nothing happened. It may or may not bring a smile on your face much later on a certain occasion. You can also put your sunglasses on in the same time, but you're definitely better than that.
***
Our life is seemingly shaped around the so-called "men of wealth and taste" - the great men. We live inside a culture transfixed on the cult of the personality. In literature it is even more apparent. Author, the man behind it all - is one of the victims of this attitude, the one whose personality is completely separated, sometimes severed from his work. His body of work in this case is almost an afterthought. That's a tragic situation that suppresses the real workers of the word in favor of those who fit the big picture.
The whole attitude towards the writers amongst the masses can be described like that: "Why don't you just give up? Do yourself a favor! See, your life is uninspiring, glaring void! We will never pay you any kind of attention! You don't matter! Just admit it! Stop! Please stop!" and so on and so forth. That in turn causes common writer to think "Why don't I just give up and submit to the Great God of Bland, because all my exotic gestures are no longer in demand..." and then goes the defeated down the road of ghostwriting and other pitiful acts of self-loathe succumbing to fear, cowardice and shame.
It is fascinating how much attention is given to the writer's persona and such supplementary things as his views on various subjects instead of his primary output - his writings. Authors are overexposed and it makes them no good. Everybody knows who they are, less than a half knows what are they writing about and even less read it properly. Measurement of importance of a certain writer had shifted from judging his body of work as it is and in the cultural context to his marketability, zeitgeist appeal, media exposure and so on. Fancy writers with cool backgrounds and flashy subjects are more likely to gain prominence than some word hackers who write sprawling narratives grounded in multi-levelled realities intertwined with one another.
In such blatantly bland reality literary hoax is some kind of a cure, a protest against state of things. Which is really mind numbing if you really think about it.
***
Literary hoaxes often get a bad rap because it's an act of fraud and thus it must be discouraging to perform such hideous acts. It goes in the same vein as "lying is bad" - completely devote of any context and thus a bit more didactic then it should be. And it's right. Making the things up in certain situations is not only bad but harmful to the others, such fake accounts of Holocaust survivors. But in other, less sensitive, cases - literary hoaxes are always fun.
It's an ultimate literary cannon fodder for thought. It's like an ink drop in the water - significant for a moment until it dissolves. It is so many things rolled in one. It's an investigation in a whodunit manner, it's uncovering the details surrounding its creations, it's analyzing the initial reactions and subsequent consequences, it's a comparison of forged texts with the official output of the executor. It's also the fun to be fooled by one if you ever be lucky to experience that.
The fact is - literary hoax is such a rich, layered narrative that you can be involved in the story on so many levels, focusing on themes you're interested in the current moment and discovering so many different shades of one thing simply from changing the point of view almost on an infinite loop. And that's only the spectators part.
From a writer's point of view - things are a bit different. There are many reasons to do the hoax. Most of them involve having an ego of the Jupiter's size and unrelenting, defiant contempt towards contemporaries (what a marvelous word choice!). Longing to make fools out of those "poseurs" is a strong motivation. Such was Ern Malley affair. It was designed so that its victims would taste their own medicine. Sometimes it can be just a practical joke - surely meant to discourage and downright embarrass the victim and to make fun of initial reactions, but essentially harmless. Such things were made by the great Prosper Merimee, La Guzla in particular. Sometimes it's just for writing's sake - because writer can write so differently from his usual style that no one will make the connection. Like Thomas Chatterton and his Thomas Rowley. Even "Robinson Crusoe" was conceived as a hoax. However, "screw you" and "because I can"-attitudes are not the only reasoning to do the hoax.
There are also other reasons. Literary hoaxes may have grander ambitions than a friendly or not so poking, such as changing the course of history, enriching and widening national aesthetic narrative - Book of Veles or James MacPherson's Ossian is what comes to mind. Edward Williams and persona Iolo Morganwg had a significant influence on a neo-druid movement even if he was just masterfully imitating and forging medieval scripts. Also Yuriy Vynnychuck made a big splash with his Ryanghabar's report of The Great Kyiv Plunder of 1240 even he was just poking fun at self-serious scholars.
It also can be just making thing up to fill the required space. Like Victor Yerofeyev and his overview of Canadian literature in the Soviet Literary Encyclopedia. Sometimes hoax is the necessity, because there is no other way to express your thoughts and get your works published without harming yourself (mostly) - like Andrey Sinyavskiy and his Abram Tertz. Because of growing absurdity of political correctness and its unholy alliance with spiteful bigotry - it may soon become a thing.
***
Part of the appeal of literary hoaxes lies in its completely ridiculous ludicrousness. Any way you look at it - it makes sense and it the same time makes no sense. You're on the Moebius strip.
You read it, possibly few times. Some parts of it settle in your memory. You take time to know every detail of it, you dig deep to taste the thick of it - hours and hours pass and by the time you're done with it - you're so involved you don't know what to think. You carry it around like it's a candy cover in your pocket and it grows on you like some kind of a mold. You try not think about it but then it goes again and again and again. The fact is - the more you think about it - the more you like it. No matter how closely you study, no matter how you take it part, no matter how you break it down - it remains a consistent enigma. "Why?"-part is never fully satisfied. Because it not part of its design.
In the world of tell-all ghostwriting extravaganza literary hoaxes are things-in-itself free of the surrounding world. They exist inside of their own bubble. Hoax offers full experience, complete with biography, background, texts and even meta-rides to the real world in the form of reactions.
You get the experience. You get a little bit wiser, little bit better. You may or may not smile because of it later on a certain occasion.
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