The Ethics of Literary Hoaxes

EVERY TIME a literary hoax is exposed—it is a frequent occurrence in publishing nowadays— there will be those who say there is nothing really wrong with faking it in a literary sense. They might argue that it is some sort of a victimless aesthetic crime that reveals shortcomings in our cultural institutions. That view has a certain appeal, but I will argue that it is wrong.

Ethically, if not morally, there is much that is objectionable about telling literary lies and no shortage of examples that show that, like any breach of trust, it is injurious to culture and bad for business. There is also at least one historical example arising out of the Holocaust which demonstrates that literary faking can be and indeed has been used as a tool of genocide.

Typically in Western culture, when a hoax or imposture is revealed it has entertainment value for consumers of news. In the minds of some, the exposure of a fake calls into question the judgment of the publishers, critics and prize givers that seemed to nurture and support it. There are those who applaud the gesture as confirmation that the culture industry is corrupt and thrives on mediocrity and that hoaxes merely highlight this abysmal state of affairs.

There is no law against lies, and it would be absurd to try to make one. Hoaxes can be entertaining and are not criminal acts in themselves unless they encompass things like bomb threats or fraud. It isn’t just illegal acts that have serious and lasting consequences that are negative, however. Culture, like the wider society it seeks to approximate, requires self-regulation to a very large extent, and transgressors who cause damage to the fabric of trust and responsibility should expect to pay a price for doing so.

Modern communications technology makes hoaxes easier to perpetrate but also easier to uncover. Any short-term commercial gain that may flow from the immense publicity that the major literary fakes can and do attract is surely outweighed by the negative consequences for the people, companies and cultural institutions directly involved.

History shows that fakes have a way of hurting everyone found to have actual involvement with them, however unwittingly, and indeed anyone who rushes to defend literary fakers publicly does so at their own risk. If it ever comes to a choice, I think there is far more to be gained as a hoax buster than a faker or an apologist for fakes.

There have been so many high-profile literary fakes in recent years that a new word—faketion—has been invented for what some commentators see as increasingly a mainstream publishing phenomenon. Faketion, it is said, is taking over from fiction.

The advent of this new mutant genre has been blamed on the supposedly deleterious effect of reality television, which, it is asserted, helps to redefine modern fame in terms of the lowest common denominator.

Morality may not determine celebrity status, but I think ethics and taste still count for something. The way celebrities conduct themselves can have consequences in public just as it does in private, even if it is a case of being a bit odd. Just ask Tom Cruise and the CEO of Paramount Pictures, who parted ways in the wake of the bizarre couch-vaulting incident on Oprah and other slightly scary public statements.

It is a sign of the times when a chastened author by the name of James Frey appears on the Oprah Winfrey show, as he did a couple of years ago, to face the charge that he fabricated A Million Little Pieces, the bestselling “memoir” of life as an abused street kid and petty criminal. Winfrey, who is reputed to be America’s most influential media personality, had previously spruiked Frey and his redemption story with zeal through her lucrative book club.

Not long ago one of Australia’s most popular authors, Norma Khouri, underwent a somewhat less theatrical but equally compelling primetime television interrogation by Ray Martin after Forbidden Love, her memoir of a female friend murdered in Jordan in a socalled honour killing, was exposed as pure invention.

Frey and Khouri and all the others lied about things that they and their credulous publishers claimed were true and which readers therefore felt they could accept as fact. But why should it matter that the book turned out to be a lie? What harm could a book ever do? It is just words printed on a page, after all.

Fake paintings have sold for millions but books are cheap. So it is not even as if the lies told by the likes of Frey and Khouri caused any substantial financial loss to any individual who bought their book, and they were successful in getting people to read books.

These authors received lavish praise and they sold books by the truckload until the fabrication was exposed. For a while they were good news for an industry where margins are tight and the commercial risk high.

Freedom of artistic expression is not a licence to lie. In everyday life, it is normal to feel hurt and angry when someone we trust tells us a lie. An act of betrayal by someone close to us is perhaps the hardest thing of all to forgive.

The relationship between author and reader is ordinarily remote physically but in the reading of a book may feel intimate. Words by themselves can move us to tears or to anger and they have frequently been known to incite people to kill. This is why it is important that authors tell the truth about the things that readers can reasonably expect to be true.

If A Million Little Pieces and Forbidden Love and other similar books had been sold as fiction rather than nonfiction then no great offence would have been caused. By faking it in the way they did, the Freys and Khouris of this world moreover added insult to the injury suffered by genuine victims of the appalling real-life situations that they appropriated for their personal gain.

Most readers would expect that what they are told in what is known as the paratext—that is, those parts of a book that surround the main text such as blurb, author biography and media release—is true. If the author’s stated identity, for instance, has a bearing on the content of the text, not matter what the text contains, then there is a clear need for it to be true.

Authors, like anyone else who participates in the national conversation, ought to have the courage of their convictions. Even if the author’s identity is judged immaterial to the reception of the book, the fact that there has been a deception of this kind may help to explain reservations about the content.

No book is read in an ethical, emotional or cultural vacuum any more than it is written in one. If reputations don’t matter and trust in authorship is a concept that has no meaning, then Khouri’s publisher would not have recalled Forbidden Love almost immediately after she was exposed, and offered apologies and indeed a refund to anyone who bought the book.

Khouri herself lost all credibility as an author. Other contemporary fakers have similarly found their careers to have been curtailed, albeit in a rather spectacular fashion. Some fakers have had an afterlife as a kind of cultural curiosity, but none of them to my knowledge has ever regained anything like the literary stature their undiscovered faking gained for them.

NOVELISTS ARE OF COURSE free to make things up in their work, and no one minds if writers invent pseudonyms or even make up wild stories about themselves, as long as this is done ethically. Who cares if Eric Blair wrote as George Orwell? It seems he had to in order to create what he did and for that we should of course be grateful. If Ruth Rendell writes as Barbara Vine (or is that the other way round?), or Thomas Keneally as William Coyle (hardly an earth-shattering imposture, that one), what does it matter?

Pseudonyms and anonyms were the norm in fact until very recently in the history of publishing. Even now, it doesn’t matter in a legal sense what name, if any, an author chooses to adopt. None of that affects an author’s ownership of the work he or she creates.

Authorial anonymity, we are told, was necessary for female writers before the twentieth century who wanted to get their work into print in the first place. Something similar is true for writers who risked being persecuted by the state for drawing attention to tyranny and injustice. Voltaire, Swift and Camus provide just a few examples of writers who assumed false identities for what I think are unquestionably the highest of motives.

At the other ethical extreme, however, it is known that literary fakes can prove deadly. The most diabolical literary hoax of all time is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda that was extolled as true by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and was adopted by the Nazis as part of their racial ideology. The Protocols, which first appeared in 1905, purport to expose a Jewish cabal that allegedly controls the world.

The Protocols hoax was exposed by the London Times in 1921 as the work of the Tsarist secret police in Russia. Though patently false and absurd, the Protocols were issued as a school textbook during the Third Reich and thus became, in the words of historian Norman Cohn, a warrant for genocide.

The pernicious influence of the Protocols did not end with the Holocaust. The book remains popular in certain parts of the Middle East, and an American edition is sold by amazon.com with a suitable warning. A television adaptation screened recently in Egypt. There have also been Australian editions, such as the one edited by late League of Rights leader Eric Butler.

Just when you might have thought the message of the Protocols had faded away in the liberal West, along comes Mel Gibson, whose notorious drunken outburst to police in California while in their custody reportedly included the claim that all wars are started by Jews, a sentiment that echoes the Protocols. Deservedly Gibson was condemned for this outburst.

So the next time some cynic or cultural relativist claims blithely that there’s nothing wrong with faking it in literature, it is worth remembering the damage that literary fakes cause to reputations and to public trust in publishing in addition to, and most serious of all, the evil political ends to which literary hoaxes have been put.