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Monday, August 02, 2004
 KHOURI -- LIKELY STORY There's always another hoax about, and UD likes to keep you updated. This latest one's a sad and common type, a la Rigoberto Menchu -- an unscrupulous or naive person who has some connection to a culture of injustice fakes (in whole or in part) an account of an outrage. The motives are part narcissism, part greed, and part desire to draw attention to a horrible situation (the oppression of peasants; the enslavement of women). This is a sad sort of hoax because when the work is revealed to be a cynical lie, the cause, which is all too real and needs all the attention it can get, suffers serious damage. UD has already written about the hate crime hoax staged by Professor Kerri Dunn (see UD, 3/19/04), and the anti-semitism hoax more recently choreographed in the Paris metro (UD, 7/14/04); now she invites you to consider the best-selling book shown here, which details an honor killing in Jordan (rather than endure the shame of his Muslim daughter marrying a Christian, her father stabs her to death). The author, who turns out to have many aliases and a criminal history, did not live in Jordan during the events she claims to have taken part in. She is also, it seems, one of those charismatic, borderline psychotic types (Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, etc.) so bafflingly attractive to hard-bitten realists like publishers and editors, who are always getting taken in by them and then publishing memoirs about how they were taken in... Anyway. One of the advantages of being educated is that you've got a bit of preparation for things like literary hoaxes, because you're aware of their long history, their perennial attractiveness to certain sorts of people, and their routine characteristics. You might even get to the point where you can begin to spot hoaxes before other people do, merely through the style of someone's prose and the general presentation of their book. Being educated doesn't mean you're a paranoid cynical sort - a "master of suspicion" - but it should mean having sufficient dispassion, sufficient familiarity with a certain rhetorical tradition (in this case, the hoax), and sufficient sensitivity to prose style to sniff some of this stuff out on your own. |