Faking Literature.(Book Review)

by K.K. Ruthven. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Paperback, $49.95

`Pleasure in the spurious helps perpetuate it' (89), writes K.K. Ruthven, author of Faking Literature. And he is right. Indeed, the argument that Ruthven makes about literary hoaxes applies to his own book: in the process of demonstrating that literary forgery is a `critique of the twin institutions of literature and literary criticism' (195), Ruthven offers some very engaging accounts of literary hoaxes, plagiarism, imposture, and forgery. The problem is that by yoking together perpetrators of so many kinds of authorial misrepresentation under the rubric of literary forgery, Ruthven undermines his central argument that literary forgeries constitute an important mode of cultural critique. By way of example, readers familiar with Ern Malley and Helen Demidenko will know that one name signals a hoax designed to `destabilise the fragile economy of literary accreditation' (4), but the other recalls a very different kind of authorial misnaming, one which inadvertently revealed something about the reception of ethnic writing in Australia in the mid 1990s. Put differently, the news that Helen Demidenko, the author of an ostensibly semi-autobiographical account of the Ukrainian collaboration with Nazis during World War Il, was really Helen Darville, an Australian of British descent, provided scores of journalists, scholars, and media pundits with the opportunity to mount `a powerful indictment of such cultural practices as literary reviewing and the awarding of literary prizes' (4), but Darville/Demidenko should not be credited with engineering this critique. And by contending that `literary forgery is criticism by other means' (171) Ruthven disregards the important cultural work that is being done by scholars--like him!--who produce the criticism he indiscriminately attributes to literary forgeries.

Ruthven argues that the scholarly `scapegoating of fake literature' has, in the twentieth century, become a means of `shoring up the correspondingly real thing while also displaying one's own probity by occupying the moral high-ground' (45). He locates the seeds of this `scapegoating' in a `Romantic ideology of literary authorship which conceives of the text as an autonomous object produced by an individual genius' (41). The argument turns out to be convincing, but it is not made in any detail until later chapters, and the many intervening references to `a Romantic conception of authorship' are frustratingly vague. Chapter three argues against a perceived tendency to treat literature and literary forgery as logically dichotomous. Here Ruthven neatly summarizes the ways in which poststructuralist critical theory has challenged the notions of authorship and literary originality that were explored in the previous chapter, but his central contention that `the received wisdom of literary ...