Imaginary People
One of my favourite hoaxes is that of the fictional person. Perhaps I find it relatable. In any case, these hoaxes involve convincing the public that someone completely fictional exists. Below, I'll discuss three of my favourite imaginary people:
Ern Malley
An Australian poet born in 1918, Malley never had his poems published until shortly after his demise, when his surviving sister Ethel sent his collection to Max Harris, co-editor of the modernist magazine Angry Penguins. Harris loved Malley's poetry and published it in the next issue.
In reality, Ern Malley was a creation of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two Sydney poets with a particular distaste for modernist works. They wrote Malley's collection of sixteen poems in one afternoon, pulling phrases from books they found lying around and purposefully trying to make nonsensical, pseudo-intellectual garbage.
The hoax was revealed soon after, and Harris mocked for praising poems specifically created to be meaningless. However, and this is the interesting part: Harris and others maintained that, though Ern Malley's works were created to satirize modernist poetry, they contained real poetic value. So did McAuley and Stewart succeed in embarassing the modernists they so despised, or did they create a priceless contribution to modernist poetry of the era?
A (hilariously ironic) sample from one of Malley's poems, Sybilline:
"It is necessary to understand That a poet may not exist, that his writings Are the incomplete circle and straight drop Of a question mark And yet I know I shall be raised up On the vertical banners of praise."
Franz Bibfeldt
Bibfeldt is a well-known theologian who first appeared as a footnote in student Robert Howard Clausen's term paper. Another student, Martin Marty thought the fabrication funny and published a review of Bibfeldt's The Relieved Paradox in the school's newspaper, despite the fact that neither Bibfeldt, nor his book, actually existed.
Some of Bibfeldt's best known works include:
The Problem of Year Zero; which proposes the collapse of the Roman Empire being caused by the fact that they counted years backwards.
Both/And; a response to Søren Kierkegaard's philosophical novel Either/Or and later;
Either/Or and/or Both/And; a revised version of the previous publication
The Boys of Sumer: Akkadian Origins of the National Pastime (a case for the Mesopotamian origins of baseball)
Joachim-Raphaël Boronali
Is a donkey. Roland Dorgelès and friends tied a paintbrush to the tail of a donkey they owned named Lolo and passed the resulting painting off as the work of fictional painter Boronali. The painting (seen above) was quite successful and Dorgelès revealed the prank soon after to a newspaper.
Malley, Bibfeldt, and Boronali may not have ever existed, but does one really need to exist in order to be great? As the saying goes: the best things in life are fake.
- A.M. Ham
