If you've ever wanted to make a name for yourself, you're bound to take some inspiration from the stories of people who took things one step further and manufactured entire selves.
Fictional characters have been known to walk the earth, either when allegedly real folks like you and me have taken on assumed identities, or when whole people have been invented for one use or another. Of course, there's a long tradition of using pseudonyms or noms de plume, so it will take something exceptional to be worth a mention here.
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Emperor Norton |
When Psalmanazar died in 1763, his memoirs, in which he confessed to the decades-old hoax, were published. His life was revealed to have been one long work of amazing improvisational dramatic fiction.
In 1817, a poor British lass named Mary Baker managed to pass herself off as a shipwrecked "Princess Caraboo" of "Javasu," with the help of a Portuguese sailor who claimed to understand her invented language. The media attention her act captured caused many jewelers and such to shower their wares on her in hopes of impressing the Javasu royals. Even though the hoax was eventually exposed, she managed to haul away about £10,000 in booty.
Wilhelm Voight gets bonus points for putting on the uniform of a Prussian military officer in 1906 and using this ruse to gain the allegiance of a pack of soldiers, then raiding the treasury of Köpenick on the pretense of investigating tax irregularities. Well done, Wilhelm! The Kaiser was so embarassed at the ineptitude of his military that he pardoned Voight (who'd been caught trying to flee with the cash), who later made a career out of reënacting the adventure on the American stage.
One of my favorite examples (although it perhaps deserves its own category) is of a San Franciscan named Joshua A. Norton who, in 1859, declared himself to be Emperor of the United States (and Protector of Mexico). It appears to have been a creative solution to being dead broke after some financial speculation had soured. Astonishingly, and as a credit to his character, it worked like a charm.
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Players who are inspired by Norton's story might want to look into Lord Buckley, the swingingist cat that ever did deliver the scratch to the itch. He encouraged people to storm the aristocracy by taking on titles that reflected their actual nobility rather than their inheritance or ancestry.
Literary types, already well-versed in the arts of creativity and fiction, can be excused for wanting to take that extra step and fictionalize a whole author. If you believe in your art, it seems a logical step to take advantage of the fact that your reader has probably already suspended disbelief about your identity even before the reading begins!
In 1944, a literary magazine called Angry Penguins published a series of poems by Ern Malley, a poet whose early death would have made his amazing work forever obscure had it not been unearthed by the magazine. The works were then published elsewhere, and are today included in anthologies such as the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. The poor editor of Angry Penguins was prosecuted and convicted by an Australian court when the poems were found to be obscene. Ah, but alas, Ern Malley was just a convincing invention of a couple of poets who wanted to play a prank.
These sort of literary inventions are becoming more and more popular, it seems. The world of Australian letters was more recently rocked by Ukranian author Helen Demidenko, who won literary awards for The Hand that Signed the Paper, but who was later found to be Australian writer Helen Darville, and by Wanda Koolmatie, the eloquent aboriginal writer whose autobiography, My Own Sweet Time, turned out to be a fictional work by Leon Carmen.
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Literary commentators and critics are naturally quite offended at this sort of thing, mostly since their pretensions are often the butt of the joke. A related concept is that of literary forgeries, which gets its own page.
Moving away from the literary world and into the domain of celebrities, Esquire magazine recently played off of the supermodel hypesteria by inventing one from scratch, slapping her on the cover, and writing a feature article about her as if everyone important already agreed she were the most amazing up-and-coming new thing. Allegra Coleman (or the model who was photographed in her place for the hoax) apparantly got quite a career boost from being invented (no surprise there). Suck magazine commented on the hoax in their typically witty way.
And with that, we enter the world of Impostors and News Hoaxes. For those of you into fake quasipeople like Bigfoot or the Piltdown Man, check out the Cryptozoology or Archeological Forgery pages. And learn about imaginary painter Pavel Jerdanovitch in our Art Forgery page.