Impostors

Literary Hoaxes and Cultural Authenticity

Christopher L. Miller

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226591001, 9780226590950
• eBook ISBN: 9780226591148
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Writing a new page in the surprisingly long history of literary deceit, Impostors examines a series of literary hoaxes, deceptions that involved flagrant acts of cultural appropriation. This book looks at authors who posed as people they were not, in order to claim a different ethnic, class, or other identity. These writers were, in other words, literary usurpers and appropriators who trafficked in what Christopher L. Miller terms the "intercultural hoax."

In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy's Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller's contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm.  

PART 1

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Hoax

Slave Narratives and White Lies

Standing behind all American ethnic and racial impostures, the slave narrative establishes both a massive precedent and a series of questions. Narratives by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and countless others insisted in their titles that they were “written by himself,” showing the importance of both literacy and authenticity. American nineteenth-century slave narratives insisted on their own truth for a very good reason: it could not be taken for granted. Because slaves were largely, but not completely, barred from literacy, demand for their writing was strong among abolitionists, but the status of any writing attributed to them was suspect. White hands often held the pen. And because those hands belonged to abolitionists, pressing for a political and moral imperative, the narratives needed to tell a certain kind of story. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explains: “Two forms of imitators soon arose: white writers, adopting a first-person black narrative persona, gave birth to the pseudoslave narrative; and black authors, some of whom had never even seen the South, a plantation or a whipping post, became literary lions virtually overnight.” Gates cites the examples of one Archy Moore (The Slave, 1836), actually a white historian named Richard Hildreth (the “white slave”), and the Autobiography of a Female Slave, written by a white woman named Mattie Griffith (who owned slaves at the time of her imposture).1 These pseudo-ex-slaves, Gates says, “had to be authentic” in order for their stories to have any weight or influence; once unveiled as hoaxes, they surely undermined the credibility of the cause. Because it was known that some slave narratives were faked, it was common practice to include authenticating documents from trusted white people.2 All of this was taking place in a United States that was deep into its “age of imposture,” the nineteenth century: as Kevin Young describes it, “filled not just with tall tales and sideshows but also with con men and fake Indians, pretend blacks and impostor prophets, with masks and money.”3

Laura Browder writes, “The only way [the abolitionists] could ensure the production of the slave narratives they preferred was to write them themselves.”4 A sort of “white lie” was thus key to certain fake slave narratives: the fakery served a high moral purpose, that of the abolition of slavery. Impostors of the twentieth century, including some in France, will sometimes stake an ethical rationale for their ethnic transgression. In the case of slave narratives, the high moral stakes might well justify the imposture.

The Forrest and the Tree

I now wish to leap forward to a golden age of ethnic hoaxing in America: our own times. The last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginnings of the twenty-first have produced a great new wave of impostures, a few of which I will review now.

The Education of Little Tree is an exemplary case of ethnic fakery framed by virulent American racism. The novel, a folksy Cherokee Bildungsroman, “tricked a generation of readers” with its soft-focus nostalgia for a lost world.5 The cover bore the name Forrest Carter, who was supposedly half Cherokee, when in fact the book was written by Asa Earl Carter, a white man raised in Alabama who went on to a full career in racial hatred. The KKK was not radical or violent enough for him in the 1950s, so he formed a paramilitary splinter group; he authored the speech in which George Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In the 1970s, Asa Earl Carter moved away from Alabama and reinvented himself as Forrest Carter, Cherokee.6

The Education of Little Tree “by Forrest Carter” was first published in 1976 and sold modestly.7 Early editions bore the subtitle A True Story by Forrest Carter. Carter died in 1979, never having revealed the hoax. In 1985, the University of New Mexico Press reissued the book (minus the rubric “true story”) with a dithyrambic introduction—“Little Tree is one of those rare books like Huck Finn that each new generation needs to discover and which needs to be read and reread regularly”—by a Cherokee legal scholar, Rennard Strickland. He describes the book as the “wonderfully funny and deeply poignant . . . autobiographical remembrances of [Carter’s] life with his Eastern Cherokee Hill country grandparents.” It is “a human document of universal meaning.”8 The commercial success began. Little Tree spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in 1991, and won the first American Booksellers Book of the Year Award that same year.9 It was sold in souvenir shops on Indian reservations and was used “to rehabilitate youthful offenders” in Washington State.10 The Education of Little Tree was widely taught, at both the secondary and college levels.11 The hoax was definitively revealed in 1991, in the New York Times, by Dan T. Carter, a historian (and perhaps a distant cousin). “Readers have warmed to the uplifting story,” he wrote, but “unfortunately, The Education of Little Tree is a hoax.” Forrest Carter, a “new-age wise man for the greening of America” was nothing but a mask concealing Asa Earl Carter, a “home-grown American fascist and anti-Semite.”12 He was, a critic wrote later, a “redneck Paul de Man.”13

But in fact, the true information about the author had been available for ten years. In 1976, the impostor “Forrest” Carter appeared on the Today Show with Barbara Walters to discuss his book; NBC received many phone calls from Alabama identifying him as Asa Earl Carter; and later that year, a piece in the New York Times by Wayne Greenhaw asked “Is Forrest Carter Really Asa Carter?,” whom he identified as “a speech writer for George Wallace.”14 The hoax should have ended then, but amazingly—in a pattern we will see again and again—, it did not; it survived this initial exposure. Carter merely doubled down on his deceptions and cover stories, and the hoax went on even after his death.15 (The republishing of the novel by the University of New Mexico Press may be compared, as we will see, to the new lease on life given to a novel signed by Camara Laye, The Radiance of the King.) As is often the case with literary hoaxes, the truth was hiding in plain sight; but something about the book and the “warm” story it told compelled readers to keep buying it and the publishing industry to ignore or suppress the facts. Forrest Carter was good, in the sense that he fooled a lot of people: Larry McMurtry endorsed one of his books as “the Iliad of the Southwest,” nearly “the great American novel of the Indian.”16

Critics and historians have asked, What did Carter have to gain as a racist by writing passages like these in The Education of Little Tree:

“It is The Way,” [Granpa] said softly, “Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. . . .” (p. 9).

How the government soldiers came. How the Cherokee had farmed the rich valleys and held their mating dances in the spring when life was planted in the ground; when the buck and doe, the cock and peahen exulted in the creation parts they played. (p. 40)

How the government soldiers came, and ringed a big valley with their guns . . . The Cherokees had nothing left. . . . The wagons could not steal the souls of the Cherokee. The land was stolen from him, his home; but the Cherokee would not let the wagons steal his soul. (p. 41)

How did “thinking Indian” (p. 123) advance the cause of white racism? As historian Gina Caison puts it, “It is difficult to reconcile” Carter’s history of extreme and violent racism with “the imagined motives of the author of a book touted as a multicultural masterpiece of tolerance and respect.”17 Her typology of different answers to this riddle is useful. Why would a Southern racist write such a novel? To paraphrase Caison, readers have suggested three basic possibilities:

1. 1. it reflects a genuine self-reinvention and atonement for previous racism;
2. 2. the book actually conceals or smuggles in what Caison calls “a sinister narrative of white supremacy” (i.e., the Trojan Horse explanation);
3. 3. the book is so salutary that its dubious origins are of little importance.18

Browder takes the first approach, seeing in Little Tree an attempt by Carter to find “a way out of the black/white binary.”19 The second theory is the most common among literary critics, as we will see below. The third case is succinctly stated by a reader’s comment on the Goodreads website: “There is a lot of controversy and here say [sic] about the author of this book. Forget about it and enjoy this book with an innocent mind!”20

If Carter was the racist that he gave every appearance of being, and Carter wrote Little Tree, what does the book have to do with the author’s ideology? Was his ideology in fact detectable—readable—in the book? A literary agent who had worked with Forrest Carter, struggling to deny the hoax in 1991, stated that “anyone who wrote Little Tree could not have worked for George Wallace. . . . I just don’t believe it. I know it’s not true.”21 The case of Little Tree flies in the face of the identity between self and work that we take for granted. Unless, of course, one subscribes to the second approach above, that of the Trojan Horse, in which case self and work are reunited: simply look at the text from a different angle, and its “true” meaning is revealed. One high-school teacher who had hailed the novel as “the hottest new text since To Kill a Mockingbird” and ordered one hundred copies for his students suddenly realized it was in fact a “manifesto for the message of states’ rights.”22 Since the reveal, with 20/20 hindsight (which is, as Kevin Young calls it, “the hoax’s best light”),23 critics have found Carter’s revival of the Lost Cause and his states’-rights agenda “obvious.” Laura Browder points out that Little Tree had another very seductive agenda, which now seems painfully evident: an “inner child Indian” and “a way out of history” that appealed to post-1970s sensibilities.24 Cherokee linguists have found that the “Cherokee” words in the novel are more like Klingon.25 Dan T. Carter and Mark McGurl both point out that the convergence between Cherokee and Confederate had strong historical precedents.26

What does this case say about the possibility and power of forensic reading—the attempt to discern an author’s true identity or true intentions simply by reading? Nothing good. There are very few Charles Dickenses out there, able to detect identity and imposture by reading alone. Little Tree would not and did not lend itself to that type of forensic reading: the reader “can’t tell” and, more importantly, didn’t tell, until the reveal. There were enough failures of reading to let the hoax fester for years, eventually producing “significant embarrassment for many Native Studies scholars who [had] extolled the book as ‘authentic.’”27 There is no hiding from the fact that authenticity suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of Asa Earl “Forrest” Carter. Even the initial revelation of Carter’s true identity came up simply because people recognized the author on television.

In a deliberate or incidental attack on authenticity, an intercultural hoax violates what I will call the ethics of ethnicity: the unwritten code that says each group should represent itself, perhaps exclusively, perhaps only with permission.

This type of question comes up with striking force in the controversy surrounding a beloved if now dubious Francophone African novel, L’Enfant noir: Why would French colonialists write that book (if indeed they did)? Why would they, as opposed to an African, create a colonial Africa in which almost all signs of a French presence are invisible? If the text has certain traits, can we surmise who the author “must be”? There are some striking similarities between Little Tree and L’Enfant noir: the child’s point of view, the depiction of a wise, timeless, “native” culture that is under threat fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• part 1  The Land of the Free and the Home of the Hoax
• part 2  French and Francophone, Fraud and Fake
• part 3  I Can’t Believe It’s Not Beur: Jack-Alain Léger, Paul Smaïl, and Vivre me tue
• Notes
• Index