Literary Hoax is an Underappreciated Genre | Hacker News Reader

Literary Hoax is an Underappreciated Genre

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There was a book written awhile ago [would love to have the title/author pointed out if anyone knows] with the theory that most of the books we have from Latin authors were actually forgeries from the Renaissance, based on analysis of the Latin used and circumstances in which they were "found" at a time when Latin books were all the vogue and in demand. If it is true, then whoever did it was generating quality literature on a regular basis to satisfy the demand, which is impressive in itself. In a way, they would have been creating enjoyable, quality historical-based fiction and imitation philosophy as a serious genre.

This theory sounds highly implausible.

Among other things, it would have to explain the cross-referencing among ancient authors, where author X alludes to or directly mentions a work by author Y, which has also survived. Unless there was a single central factory manufacturing these frauds, that would be almost impossible to achieve.

Renaissance scholars were in fact very good at sniffing out actual frauds from textual analysis, e.g. the debunking of the donation of Constantine.

Not necessarily - author X writes a forgery which, both to make it seem more authentic and to pad out the verbage, quotes extensively from authentic sources A, B and C.

Unrelated author Y does the same thing, but quoting B, C and X (why wouldn't he? He doesn't know it's fake).

Repeat repeatedly.

Then the whole cloth would unravel as soon as one careless author made a historical error or used anachronistic language. All the other works that cite this work, and any that cite those, etc., would all be proved frauds. Yet this has not happened.

Moreover, new ancient works and new physical evdience (coins, letters, inscriptions in stone) have continued to be found, yet somehow they have all remained consistent with the tremendous fraud that was perpetrated 500-600 years ago. To explain this requires a vast, multi-century conspiracy.

Oh, I’m not saying this is LIKELY. I’m just spitballing how it could happen.

Honestly, this sort of organic conspiracy could be robust.

Suppose a particular work A - which is referenced by other works X, Y, Z - is shown to be counterfeit. Does that mean works X, Y, Z are counterfeit? Not necessarily - A could be a counterfeit version of a work that was lost! That would, indeed, be the most valuable work to counterfeit. Take a work that is referenced by other works, find all the references in other works you can, and use that as the skeleton of your counterfeit work. People will eat it up, because they’ve been waiting for it.

New physical evidence, yeah, you’re screwed on that. Especially if you recover an original version of a work that was later counterfeited.

There are quite a large number of forgeries we have that date to the classical or early medieval era, that are recognized as important works of their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Dionysius_the_Areopagit...

for example.

That book might be History: Fact or Fiction by Anatoly Fomenko, originally published in Russian [1]. It sounds pretty wacky.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)

The title is History: Fiction or Science

"the idea of a book being “fake” greatly misunderstands the vagaries of imaginative thought, whose tendency is to trawl the idiosyncratic detritus inherent to its mimesis regardless of the spuriousness or relative candor of its constitutive parts. "

An interesting idea overall (the article) but I stopped reading there.

“Back away from the thesaurus!”

Strike a blow for polysyllabic sesquipedalianism!

I know HN dislikes lazy dismissals, but I think the downvotes here are a bit harsh. This is unreadably turgid prose, and quoting it here saved me from a frustrating experience.

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