From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A false document is a form of verisimilitude
that attempts to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal
and expected suspension of disbelief for a
work of art. The
goal of a false document is to fool an audience into thinking that what is being
presented is actually a fact.
In practice, false document effects can be achieved in many
ways, including use of faked police reports, newspaper articles,
bibliographical references, documentary footage or using the legal
names of performers or writers in a fictional context. The effect
can be extended outside of the confines of a text by supplementary
material such as badges, I.D. cards, diaries, letters or other
artifacts.
By intentionally blurring boundaries between fiction and fact,
false documents present complex and perhaps insoluble ethical
questions. In some cases, the difference between a great artistic
achievement and a stunning forgery is slim. Sometimes the false
document technique can be the subject of a work instead of its
technique, though these two approaches are not mutually exclusive
as many texts which engage falseness do so both on the literal and
the thematic level.
A false document is usually created simply as an artistic
exercise, but occasionally is promoted in conjunction with a
criminal enterprise like fraud,
forgery, or a confidence game. A false document should
not be confused with a mockumentary, an admittedly fictional film
presented in the manner of a documentary.
Origin of the false
document technique
One of the earliest examples of the technique is the 16th
century chivalric romance Amadis of
Gaul (1508, Garci Rodríguez de
Montalvo).
False
documents in film
The Semidocumentary film making technique
popularized in the 1950s used documentary techniques.
The 1973 film The Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (And the 2003 Remake) claims to be based on true
events, but this is not the case. It is, in reality, only loosely
inspired by crimes committed by Ed Gein.
The 1974 film Macon County Line claims to be
true but it is fiction.
Peter
Jackson's 1995 film Forgotten Silver was billed and
introduced as a serious documentary, purporting to tell the story
of 'forgotten' New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie. A large
portion of the viewing audience were fooled until the directors
revealed they were "only joking".
A disclaimer before the 1996 film Fargo makes the claim that it is
based on a true story, but this was repudiated by its creators, the
Coen brothers,
saying that people would more readily believe something outlandish
if told that it actually happened, per the "truth is stranger than
fiction" idiom.
When the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project
was released, the extensive marketing campaign claimed it to be a
real documentary, compiled from footage discovered abandoned in a
forest.
The 2008 film Cloverfield purports to be video
footage shot by witnesses of a monster attacking New York City and
recovered by the Army as evidence. It begins with a title
screen claiming the footage was found in "US Site 447, formerly
known as Central
Park." However, the enormous scale of the disaster shown in the
movie makes it impossible that viewers would consider the movie to
be true.
False
documents in art
Orson Welles'
F for Fake is
a prime example of a film which is both about falsification (art forgery and the
journalism surrounding art forgery) as well as having falsified
moments within the film. The movie follows the exploits of a famous
art forger, his biographer Clifford Irving, and the subsequent
fake autobiography of Howard Hughes that Irving tries to
publish. The issues of veracity and forgery are explored in the
film while at the same time, Welles tricks the audience by
incorporating fake bits of narrative alongside the documentary
footage.
Another artist who has run afoul of the technique is the artist
JSG
Boggs, whose life and work have been extensively explored by
author and journalist Lawrence Weschler. Boggs draws
currency with exceptional care and accuracy, but he only ever draws
one side. He then attempts to buy things with the piece of paper
upon which he has drawn the currency. His goal is to pass each bill
for its face value in common transactions. He buys lunch, clothes,
and lodging in this manner, and after the transactions are complete
his bills fetch many times their face value on the art market along
with accompanying evidence (receipts, photos, and the like) which
prove the veracity of the actual transaction. Boggs does not make
any money from the much larger art market value of his work. He
only exists on the profit of the actual transaction. He has been
arrested in many countries, and there is much controversy
surrounding his work.
Mostly, however, the technique is employed in more mundane ways
that hark back to its nineteenth century origins. Whether a
particular piece of art is a false document, or is using false
documentary techniques in a central way, is of course arguable.
Usually, the character and extent of the use is examined.
False documents, fakery
and forgery
Documentary filmmaking, and other attempts at actual
documentation, can wittingly and unwittingly participate in the
form as its goals of authenticity are so closely aligned with
direct false documentation (that is, in both cases there is an
element of authenticity and an element of narrative fudging). In Schwarzenegger's Pumping Iron,
for example, Arnold talks about how his father died in the months
preceding a major body building competition. He uses this anecdote to illustrate how
important the final months before a competition are to a truly
dedicated bodybuilder. He says that, though his father's funeral
was set during the penultimate month, he did not attend because he
could not be distracted from training. However, in the companion
book it is revealed that at the time of printing, Arnold's father
had not died. It does not say the story was a lie, it merely
provides contrary evidence. Schwarzenegger was executive producer
of both the film and the companion book. It has been theorized by
Professor Sally Robinson that Schwarzenegger was intentionally
undermining his own narrative, effectively creating a mildly
self-deprecating re-examination of his own obsessions for
perfection at any cost. In the end, whether Arnold intentionally
fabricated the story for a desired effect is left to the audience
(in interviews associated with the re-release of the film, he says
he did).
The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion
In the case of the text Protocols of the Elders of Zion there
is a very interesting complexity. It is an alleged record which was
published and printed for the first time in 1903. The alleged
original manuscript has long since disappeared, and conflicting,
and inconsistent, testimony and witness reports about it have been
presented at the Berne
Trial in 1934 and 1935. Nevertheless, it has been established
that it was a fabrication created by the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana. Furthermore, it has been established
that a substantial portion of it was taken, without citation, from
a 1864 satire on Napoleon III by one Maurice Joly (his French language work
titled, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu) - so that it also
constitutes plagiarism. Nevertheless, it has been
repeatedly reproduced, in typescript and printed form, by its often
anonymous editors as an alleged authentic document taken or stolen
from some vaguely identified Jewish and Masonic organization. As
such, it was presented to Russian Empire censors (1903, 1905,
1906, 1911) who passed it along for publication. Similarly, it was
presented to various government officials, military and diplomatic,
in the United States and in Europe (1919-1920), in opposition to
the Russian Revolution, and to
influence the terms of the peace settlement which resulted in the
Treaty
of Versailles. Accordingly, this work, which now only exists in
the world as a reproduction, has all the elements of a false
document. Since it is difficult to imagine a typesetter working
without a manuscript, we must assume that one existed. But since
this original forged item has long since disappeared, the crimes of
fraudulently and repeatedly submitting such a false document as
authentic not only cannot be prosecuted, but cannot be studied by
historians or subjected to the rigorous requirements of forensics.
False
documents in theory
False
documents in fiction
Several fiction writers use the technique of inventing a piece
of literature or non-fiction and referring to this work as if it
actually existed, typically by quoting from the work.
Blurring the line of reality and fiction is an important
component of horror, mystery, detective, science fiction and
fantasy narratives due to their unusual demands on verisimilitude; a
typically descriptive narrative form may not engender in the reader
the necessary sense of wonder and danger. For this reason, false
documentary techniques have been in use for at least as long as
these literary genres have existed. Frankenstein draws heavily on a
forged document feel, as do Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde and many of the works of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Vladimir
Nabokov's Pale
Fire is a particularly elaborate variation.
The following is a partial list of false supporting documents in
fiction:
- Miguel de Cervantes claims that all
the chapters but the first in Don Quixote are translated from an Arabic
manuscript by Cide Hamete
Benengeli. He is parodying a plot device of chivalry books. For instance, Joanot
Martorell in the introductory letter to Tirant lo Blanc claims to be not the
creator of a fiction, but the translator of an English historical
manuscript.
- Robert
Graves' novel I,
Claudius is written as a recently-discovered autobiography
penned by the late Emperor.
- Daniel Defoe's
Robinson
Crusoe was supposedly the autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spent 28 years
on a remote island. The
account was presented as a factual event, in a genre called histories. It was based on the real
castaway Alexander Selkirk.
- Jonathan
Swift's Gulliver's Travels was
originally attributed to "Lemuel Gulliver", a ship's surgeon, and
purported to be a factual account of four of his sea voyages. It
even includes a rather irate bogus note from Gulliver to his
publisher. It may be debatable whether the book is an example of a
False Document, but is included because it initially bore little or
no indication that it was a work of fiction.
- The Ossian cycle of
ancient Celtic poetry supposedly rediscovered and published in 1760
was actually written in the eighteenth century, possibly based on
some fragments of earlier verses.
- Voltaire's novel
Candide purports to
be assembled from the notes of a deceased "Monsieur le docteur
Ralph", likely due to the fact that the novel pokes fun at most of
the powers of Europe at the time.
- Bram Stoker's
novel Dracula is told in the form of numerous documents,
including journals and newspaper articles. A brief introduction
claims that they are all real.
- Italo
Calvino's novel If
On a Winter's Night a Traveller deals extensively with the
concepts surrounding false documents, including serially
representing the contents of the novel itself as a false
document.
- The Anno Dracula stories and novels of
Kim Newman use many of
these same false sources.
- The Necronomicon appearing in the works
of H. P.
Lovecraft.
- The King in Yellow appearing in
the book of the same name by Robert W. Chambers purports to be an
actual play that is capable of driving the reader insane.
- Both the books Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find
Them and Quidditch Through the
Ages, which were written by Harry Potter author J.K.
Rowling as a way to raise funds for Comic Relief, are written as reference
books for the wizarding world. The books, which are referenced many
times in the Harry
Potter books, even have footnotes about other books, which do
not exist, for future reading, and a foreword by Albus
Dumbledore, which explains why they are releasing the book to a
muggle audience. Fantastic
Beasts also has "written-in" commentary by both Harry and
Ron.
- Neil Gaiman, in
the first issue of his comic Sandman, introduced the grimoire titled
Grimorium Magdelene.
- In the The
Club Dumas, author Arturo Pérez-Reverte introduced
the grimoire The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows
(also called The Ninth Gate) as well as the
Delomalanicon.
- Author William Goldman claims in his book
The
Princess Bride that the story he tells is an abridged
version of the Florinese literary masterpiece by the great (and
fictional) S. Morgenstern.
- Fritz Leiber's
novella Our Lady of Darkness revolves around the secret
occult studies of fictional author/occultist Thibaut de Castries
and his book Megapolisomancy: A New Science of
Cities.
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco pretends to
be a recovered manuscript.
- First Encyclopaedia of Tlön appearing in the short
story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"
by Jorge
Luis Borges, plus several other fictional books invented by the
same author, including an entire bibliography for the fictional author Pierre Menard. Borges' analysis of
metafiction in the essay When Fiction Lives in
Fiction deals extensively with the teleological nature of
false documents.
- Several works of the fictional author Fanshawe
appearing in Paul
Auster's The Locked Room in The New
York Trilogy.
- The Red Book of Westmarch and a
surviving copy of it called The Thain's Book, portions of
which were "translated" by J. R. R. Tolkien into his books The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien also physically fabricated several pages of another
fictional book, the Book of
Mazarbul.
- Never Whistle While You're Pissing is the work of the
fictional character Hagbard Celine in The Illuminatus!
Trilogy by Robert
Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
- Michael
Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is a
fabricated recreation of the Old English epic Beowulf in the form of a
scholastic translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's tenth century
manuscript. Many of his other novels, such as The
Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, also incorporated
large quantities of fabricated scientific documents in the form of
diagrams, DNA sequences, footnotes
and bibliography.
- Business historian Robert Sobel wrote For Want of a Nail, a
fictional history of an alternate North America which
included hundreds of fictional footnotes and a bibliography listing
over a hundred fictional histories and biographies.
- Dozens of fictional footnotes referencing events, books of
magical scholarship, and biographies in Jonathan Strange & Mr
Norrell, the debut novel by Susanna Clarke.
- Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the
Khazars is a work of fiction in the form of three
fictional encyclopedias, which incorporate
viewpoints that provide inconsistent descriptions of the events
they describe.
- A
Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs claims to be
the manuscript of John Carter relating his
adventures on Mars, except
for the first chapter explaining how the manuscript was received.
Burroughs has also used this technique extensively in his other
novels, particularly the tales of Pellucidar.
- House of
Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a work of
fiction revolving around the discovery of a manuscript critiquing a
documentary called The Navidson Record and its effects on both its
author and editor.
- The Third Policeman and The Dalkey
Archive by Flann O'Brien
contains not only quotes from the works of a fictitious Irish
philosopher named de
Selby, but also has numerous footnotes and references to other
fictitious authors writing about de Selby and his books.
- The Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser are
supposedly edited versions of the title character's memoirs.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is named for a fictional
galactic encyclopedia that one of the main characters works for.
The book also frequently quotes the fictional Guide.
- The roleplaying game Spaceship
Zero presents itself as being based on a non-existent
television show, which is based on a non-existent radio play, all
of which are to be adapted into a non-existent film. The hoax has
been generally accepted in a number of reviews of the title.
- Philip K.
Dick's novel The Man in the High
Castle features a (banned) fictional work called The
Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which purports to describe how things
might have transpired after World War II if the Allied side had won
(in the reality of the book, the Axis powers triumphed).
- The
Historian by Elizabeth Kostova purports to be a
book by the main character, and further contains a number of other
letters,
books, and
maps relating
to Dracula and the main character's friends and family.
- The twelve-volume opus Life by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey is
an oft-quoted imaginary work referred to in various novels by Jack Vance.
- Isaac Asimov's
Encyclopedia Galactica as
presented in The Foundation
Series is an attempt to compile all human knowledge in order to
preserve it following the collapse of the Galactic Empire in the
far future. An "excerpt" from it introduces each chapter of each
book in the series.
- Isaac Asimov's story "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated
Thiotimoline" is a fictional research paper about a compound
that dissolves before being added to water that cites only
and entirely false sources.
- Stephen King's
novel Carrie includes many excerpts from
a fictional committee's findings on the events in the novel, as
well as excerpts from a book on the events in the novel titled
The Shadow Exploded.
- Dean Koontz'
novels included quotations from The Book of Counted
Sorrows, which did not exist until, at the urging of his
fans, he created it.
- Jack Higgins
based his book The Eagle Has Landed on
alleged research into a German abduction plot in the Second World
War. Higgins writes in the first person of finding the graves of 13
German paratroopers in an English churchyard, an event known not to
have actually occurred, and claims that the book stems from his
research into actual events.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne's book The Scarlet
Letter opens with an account of the author himself finding
the letter and records which tell the story of Hester Prynne, which
is narrated in the rest of the book. The existence of the records
has never been proven; the opening is generally considered to be a
literary device.
- Margaret
Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale closes
with a chapter set at a conference taking place some time after the
events of the rest of the book, in which scholars question the
authenticity of the earlier manuscript.
- The comic book limited series
Watchmen makes
extensive use of the technique, including one character's
autobiography, magazine interviews with several characters,
psychiatric reports and even a fictional comic book within the
comic book.
- James Gurney's Dinotopia: Land Apart from Time is based
on the premise that it is the diary of Arthur Dennison, who gets
shipwrecked on the island of Dinotopia.
- Nick Bantock's
series of Griffin and Sabine works
consist of a series of letters and postcards between the two main
characters.
- The Tattooed Map, a novel by Barbara Hodgson also
published by Raincoast Books, reads as a journal being kept by the
protagonists as they travel to Morocco, complete with hardwritten
notes, photos and magazine cutouts from the journey.
- The books in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate
Events conclude with supposed letters from Snicket himself
to his editor, containing a summary of his submitted manuscript for
the following book in the series. Since Lemony Snicket is both the
fictional narrator of the stories as well as the author's pseudonym, it creates a
false sense that the stories are written from truth.
- The Screwtape Letters,
written by C. S.
Lewis, is purported to be a series of missives from a demonic
teacher at a college to his protégé.
- The Zombie Survival
Guide, by Max
Brooks, presents itself as a survival manual in the event of a
zombie outbreak. It includes
citations of scientific studies performed on zombies, details on
the sort of preparation one can make to guard against attacks, and
historical examples of zombie outbreaks. It concludes with blank
pages which the owner is meant to use as a journal, should they
endure a zombie outbreak, lending the book a stronger, if satiric,
kind of realism. Brooks' later work, World War Z, uses false interviews to
create a mockumentary account of a worldwide zombie
outbreak.
- "The Facts in the Case
of M. Valdemar," by Edgar Allan Poe, about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended
hypnotic state at the moment of death. It was published without
claiming to be fictional, and many at the time of publication
(1845), took it to be a factual account.
- Each chapter in Frank Herbert's science fiction novels Whipping Star, The
Dosadi Experiment, and Dune
variously begin with an aphorism, an excerpt from an official
report (or even a manual), a quotation from a book about the events
of the novel, etc.
A special case is represented by two examples fashioned to
represent traditional academic scientific publications:
False
documents in games
In video games, the
adventure
genre has most frequently given rise to the use of false documents
to create a sense of immersion. The feelies pioneered by text
adventure company Infocom include many examples, such as
blueprints, maps, documents, and publications designed within the
context of each game's fictional setting. A more recent
development, the alternate reality game, is
intrinsically tied to the concept; an ARG may exist solely as a
collection of false documents that build a fictional storyline and
puzzles connected to it.
A prominent example of false document in the videogame genre is
the Resident
Evil series, which, from the first installment, uses newspaper
clippings and television news reports that report the alleged
cannibalistic murder of the victims found in the Arklay Mountain
region. While the rest of the series does not do this as much as
the first, there are still a few cases that it happens, such as the
opening sequence of Resident Evil 4.
A viral
marketing campaign ran prior to the release of Shadow of the Colossus, stating
the Colossi were actual real statues found by explorers and
tourists.
False documents in
cross-marketing
There is a long history of producers creating tie-in material to
promote and merchandise movies and television shows. Tie-in
materials as far-ranging as toys, games, lunch boxes, clothing and
so on have all been created and in some cases generate as much or
more revenue as the original programming. One big merchandising
arena is publishing. In most cases such material is not considered
canon within
the show's mythology; however, in some instances the books,
magazines, etc. are specifically designed by the creators to be
canonical. With the rise of the Internet, in-canon online material
has become more prominent.
The following is a list of "false document" in-canon
supplemental material:
- Twin
Peaks spawned three canon books:
- The Autobiography of F.B.I. Special Agent Dale Cooper: My
Life, My Tapes ISBN 0-671-74400-3
- The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer ISBN
0-671-73590-X
- Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town ISBN
0-671-74399-6
Additionally, a set of trading cards was
produced which are also canon.
- Bad Twin ISBN 1-4013-0276-9 is a canon
tie-in novel for the TV series Lost
False documents in
politics
A forged document, the Zinoviev Letter
brought about the downfall of the first Labour
Government in Britain. It was likely forged by SIS, the secret service now
known as MI6.
Conspiracies within secret intelligence services have occurred more
recently, and led Harold Wilson in the 1960s to put in
place rules to prevent phone tapping of members of parliament for example.
Hoaxes
A number of hoaxes have
involved false documents:
False documents as a field
of study
False documents were recently the topic of a graduate level
seminar in the humanities at the University of Michigan. The
seminar was taught by Professor Eileen Pollack. While the form has
existed for at least two hundred years, focused study is fairly
recent.
See also
References
Curtis
Peebles (1994). Watch the Skies: A Chronicle of the Flying
Saucer Myth, Smithsonian Institution, ISBN
1-56098-343-4
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
