Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of the Literary Mystification (review)

Fraudulence is now very much in the public eye. Since all that talk of simulacra (Jean Baudrillard), frauds (Umberto Eco), and mystifications (Jean-François Jeandillou), fakes have found themselves on a variety of pedestals. And with good cause: falseness of all kinds has always been part of fiction (the terms are, in fact, nearly synonymous), and there are those who have turned lying into art—or who reveal that art is always already a lie.

In this respect, Julia Abramson's Learning from Lying is in good company, and she undertakes close examination of a handful of prime cases of literary mystification. In general, Abramson's thesis is that such endeavors are always works of rebellion, standing in conflict with authority: she aims to show "how the sleights of mystification constitute an unusually elegant, constructive means to explore ideas perceived as going against the grain. Mystification works through irreverent mummery, yet at bottom it is a serious endeavor" (17). Traditionally, scholarship has tended to deprecate mystifications: Prosper Mérimée's "false translations" are not included in his collected works, for example, and many "inauthentic" texts have been overlooked by critics as light-weight practical jokes, unworthy of serious consideration. Abramson participates in the reversal of this trend, focusing on a handful of key literary texts—primarily those by Denis Diderot, Mérimée, and Wolfgang Hildesheimer.

One of the problems with this subject area is the proliferation of terms without rigorous definitions. What are, after all, the fine differences between fraud, fraudulence, forgery, fake, plagiarism, apocrypha, hoax, trick, lie, mystification, sleight-of-hand, deception, and all the other words occasionally conjured up in such a context? Unfortunately, the technical descriptions in the field are thin, and Abramson appears to settle most comfortably into the most broadly used term, mystification, which we might understand here as an author's deliberate misleading of his reader, culminating in a revelation of the trick that has been played (a.k.a. demystification).

The first full chapter, "Inventing Mystification," looks at the rise of the term "mystifier" (and its nominal and adjectival siblings) during the eighteenth century, along with another word of the same register: persiflage. No one asserts, of course, that trickery was born in the eighteenth-century (Jeandillou, after all, points to the first literary instances of mystification in The Odyssey), but clearly at this time the French public gained a new appreciation for it as a literary practice. Although often referred to pejoratively, mystification begins to manifest itself explicitly in literature (especially in the libertine novel), and Abramson relates it particularly to the (somewhat) counter-cultural group of the encyclopédistes. In particular, Diderot figures prominently in this group, and in 1769 he published a tale bearing the intriguing title, Mystification.

In a sampling of Diderot's texts, with special emphasis on Le Paradoxe sur le comédien, Abramson shows how Diderot challenges conventional wisdom, hinting at the possible superiority of appearance over essence. Her analysis of Mystification, although bogged down by a great deal of plot summary, shows how the story might be considered a metaphorical reflection on "the rules and conditions of art" (75).

Another chapter is dedicated to Prosper Mérimée, viewed as the "apotheosis" of literary mystifications. Focusing primarily on Mérimée's well-known pseudonymous works (Le Théâtre de Clara Gazul and La Guzla), Abramson walks us through the history of the production and reception of these texts and the manner of their demystification. Looking at selected passages, she helps to illustrate the ways in which the author maintained the illusion of authenticity; her study implicitly initiates an analysis of the rhetoric of mystification. One suspects that if Abramson were to take this line of inquiry to greater depth, there would be much to say; alas, that study will await some future volume.

The final analytical chapter ("Authoritative Mystifications") represents a dramatic shift: leaping from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth, and...