The Critical Purchase of Fraudulence

R E V I E W The Critical Purchase of Fraudulence Lara Langer Cohen. The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture. In Material Texts, ed. Roger Chartier, Joseph Farrell, Anthony Grafton, et al. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 256 pp. $59.95 cloth and ebook. I n this smart, clear, well-written book, Lara Langer Cohen argues that fraudulence is not an occasional transgression in the antebellum print public sphere but an integral part of its constitution. Responding to critics who have followed Habermas in stressing the salutary democratizing aspects of early nineteenth-century U.S. print culture, Cohen demonstrates in a series of chapter-long studies that the search for a genuine U.S. literature discovers, not exactly its opposite, but mixtures of inextricably intertwined truth and falsehood. Nationalist writers at the center of the New York publishing scene, in promoting authenticity in U.S. literature, produce recognizably inferior products that have to be kept aloft with the hot air of puffery. Widespread delight in the obviously fabricated figures of the authentic black and the genuine backwoodsman—Jim Crow and Davy Crockett—firmly locates the actual groups they represent at the margins of national culture while validating literary impersonation as the norm and the prerogative of the white cultural elite. A “pseudo-slave narrative” written by an African American man exposes the romantic formulas underpinning white abolitionist expectations of genuine black experience; at the same time, the Narrative of James Williams stymies white readers who, when they recognize the story’s fraudulence, must acknowledge that African Americans are capable of “original literary creation” [102, 103]. Fanny Fern’s generic shape-shifting pushes marketplace expectations of female artifice to a limit that offers possibilities for creative exposure and manipulation of those expectations. And Melville’s novel The Confidence-Man forcefully expresses the impossibility of literary authenticity in a print marketplace where ubiquitous acts of deceit are accepted as genuine because of paper’s impersonal, authenticating power and the target audience’s chronic naiveté: fraudulence, Melville shows, is a function of literary production , not, or not simply, a subject for it. Cohen focuses on prose writing and its accompanying slippery expectations that fiction offer truth and that nonfiction tell a compelling story—in other words, that it behave like fiction. Building on the work of such critics as Meredith McGill, Trish Loughran, and Lloyd Pratt, scholars of print culture who have emphasized the messiness and C  2012 Washington State University P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 45, 2012 111 R E V I E W unpredictability of early mass print culture, Cohen urges us toward a more “disorderly account of antebellum literature” [5] that takes into consideration the functions of deception, imposture, impersonation, and other forms of fraudulence in the production, not only of U.S. literature, but of the racial, regional, and gender identities that are mobilized to define dominant, genteel, white culture. Poe plays a key role in The Fabrication of American Literature as the writer who, along with Melville, most closely aligns with Cohen’s own critical position; it makes sense, then, that these authors bookend the study, with Poe’s work at the center of the first chapter and Melville’s the subject of the conclusion. In “‘One Vast Perambulating Humbug’: Literary Nationalism and the Rise of the Puffing System,” Poe “guide[s] the reader through” the “profusion of puffery” that attends the literary nationalist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, exposing and condemning the practice wherever he finds it [19–20]. After charting the ways editors and reviewers promoted literary works in which they had vested interests while assuming the pose of disinterested public servants, Cohen turns to some of Poe’s lesser known works, particularly “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” and a cluster of stories that feature balloons, especially “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.” She reads them as critiques of the hot air that propels the circulation of literary nationalism in the period. While Cohen acknowledges that Poe “was guilty of the same practices that he excoriated in others” [49], she focuses on his excoriations rather than his complicity: “‘Must expose the...