When I realized the length of Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts and Fake News, I decided I’d listen to it on audiobook. I’d read a positive review of it in the LA Times and wanted to know more about P. T. Barnum and his ilk. I’d often heard that Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but I never learned what exactly he did to sucker people. Yet, I came away from Bunk with something much more useful than a list of the ways people have been hoaxed. It felt like a series of lessons for the writer on cultural appropriation. Not that the book was meant specifically for writers—it’s a good read for anyone.
Several professional reviewers note that some of the arguments in Bunk use poetic elements (Young is a poet), such as alliteration and word play, in place of meaning. (For a look at this criticism, a good read is NPR’s Annalisa Quinn.) They all note, however, that the work contains much meaning. The audiobook resolved this issue for me—it made Bunk fun to listen to between the more intense digs into American culture of the last two hundred years. I did need to check out a print copy after listening because I wanted to go back over a few of the ideas. This also gave me the opportunity to see several photos that accompany the text.
Hoaxes, Fakery and the Ridiculous
One of the most interesting things about the hoaxes Young discusses is that many are absolutely ridiculous—the reader feels certain that no one could honestly believe any of them. One of Barnum’s earliest hoaxes was displaying the 161-year-old African American nanny of George Washington. Another was a ‘Feegee’ mermaid (a dry shrunken monkey head and corpse attached to the tail of a fish). Every Barnum hoax was about this ridiculous.
Bunk as an Encyclopedic Work
Bunk covers fakes so numerous, the reader could use it for research as a hoax encyclopedia. People were led to believe there was a family living on the moon in 1835; they fell for photos that included fairies who came out to play with a pair of sisters; they poured over love letters from Abraham Lincoln to his first sweetheart. The list goes on right into the present, where it includes many books, supposedly nonfiction, that are entirely the products of the authors’ imaginations or stretch real events so far out of shape as to be unrecognizable.
Familiar Bunk and Hoaxes
The interesting thing to me about the books is that several are recent enough that I can remember people falling for them. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Kevin and Alex Malarkey’s The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, both debunked, are two examples. One thing becomes very clear quickly: we are duped and hoaxed, humbugged (as Barnum would say) because we want to be.
Bunk: It Feels Good
Others agree with me on this. Slate’s Laura Miller states: “Young sees Donald Trump as the heir to P.T. Barnum not because he lies, but because he bullshits. Trump doesn’t deceive his fans so much as he creates an environment in which whether something is true or not becomes irrelevant; all that matters is if it feels good.”
Humbug: Why We Love to be Hoaxed
The question then becomes, ‘Why does it feel good?’ Young makes a good case that many hoaxes are centered in racial anxiety, in the creation of the ‘other’ as somehow a freak. (See Jonathan Lethem’s review in the New York Times for a nice overview.) Numerous hoaxes consist of freaks from far off lands. (African Americans were portrayed as from Fiji and displayed as cannibals when they were ordinary people hailing from, say, Chicago.) White people perpetrate other humbugs by pretending to be People of Color. (A well-known and recent example is Rachel Dolezal, who had a position in the NAACP, self-identifying as Black.)
When we fall for bunk, we want to create easy caricatures of the ‘other.’ What is the lesson for the writer who is not attempting to perpetrate a fake upon the reader?
Bunk: Lessons for Writers
Young examines James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Outed as a liar, Frey re-marketed the book as fiction. So—everything is right with the world? Not exactly. Frey’s portrayal of an African American prisoner he comes up against during a (completely fictional) stay in jail is a caricature.
“‘He calls himself Porterhouse because he says he’s big and juicy like a fine ass steak’—asks Frey to read to him for three hours a day. ‘In the past twelve weeks we have worked our way through Don Quixote, Leaves of Grass, and East of Eden. We are currently reading War and Peace, which is Portehouse’s favorite.’ Even in captivity, Frey is a social worker, an ex-alcoholic abolitionist teaching the poor brute about words and peace. . . . Powerhouse now plays Boy Friday to a heroic Crusoe, rescued by Friday’s very presence. Poterhouse’s mythic blackness comes complete with illiteracy.”
Be Proactive Against Bunk
Most writers aren’t trying to fool their readers. But equally important for writers is not to create people of other backgrounds and cultures based on stereotypes. Of course, no one wants to write a novel with all the characters looking just like themselves. So—writing requires a lot of cultural interaction, sometimes research, sometimes sensitivity readers. It’s hard work. A lot of hard work. Bunk makes this very clear to the fiction writer.
Other Lessons for Writers
The following are some recent articles that you might find helpful in working to create characters. Some are only available in print or by subscription, but are worth the small price.
Lessons from Writers’ Magazines
The Writer Magazine had an article in the October 2019 issue, “Writing Across Margins,” that addresses telling the stories of marginalized communities of which the writer is not a part. “You’re going to make mistakes. It’s inevitable when you aren’t directly connected to your subject matter. What is most important is that you do everything you can to mitigate those mistakes.”
In the September/October 2019 issue of Poets & Writers, the regular feature article “The Literary Life” is a discussion between historical fiction writers Christina Baker Kline and Lisa Gornick. (The article is an adaption of a conversation at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library and is available only in print.) While discussing her novel Tin Ticket–a work about mid-nineteenth century convict women sent from Great Britain to Australia–Kline brought home the importance of research for the novelist seeking to represent societies unknown to them: “The convict women endured terrible hardship, but their experience paled in comparison to that of the Native people. Writing about cultures other than your own is fraught and complicated. I am consulting, and sharing my work, with a number of people who know far more than I do, including a historian at the University of Melbourne who traces his ancestry back to the Trawulwuy people of northeast Tasmania.”
Gornick quotes law professor Ken Manaster: “‘To deceive people about what was [is not only] disrespectful, but also undermines our collective conversation about our path, hindering our thinking about what could be.’”
Lessons from Books and Reviews
Adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is It? Rebecca Solnit writes in Literary Hub: “This is a time in which the power of words to introduce and justify and explain ideas matters, and that power is tangible in the changes at work. Forgetting is a problem; words matter, partly as a means to help us remember. When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, made, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions. They are the fruit of labor. Forgetting means a failure to recognize the power of the process and the fluidity of meanings and values. . . . It’s easy now to assume that one’s perspectives on race, gender, orientation, and the rest are signs of inherent virtue, but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently, through the labors of others.”
And finally, I leave you with this, from Rebecca Solnit in The Mother of All Questions: “The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It’s how we make the world.”
Branching Out
Note: If you enjoyed the Rebecca Solnit quotes above and want to see a few more to use as writing prompts or to get an idea of books you’d like to buy, see my post here.