Gotcha!

LAST SPRING, the writer Paul Maliszewski published a lengthy inquiry into what he called a ''Holocaust hoax" perpetrated by the novelist Michael Chabon. In his essay, published in the journal Bookforum, Maliszewski recounted a series of lectures given by the author of ''Wonder Boys" and ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" at the invitation of Nextbook, a Jewish arts organization. The drama of these talks hinged on a man who lived down the street from the 10-year-old Chabon, a Nazi journalist who had married a Jewish woman and then reinvented himself as a survivor of the Holocaust. ''They recognize the story; they've heard it before, they think," Maliszewski wrote, noting how audience members nodded along when Chabon mentioned the man's memoir, ''The Book of Hell."

Not only had the elderly neighbor fabricated his own history. As it turned out, the existence of the man himself, Maliszewski charged, had been fabricated out of whole cloth by Chabon with the intention of ''fashion[ing] a Jewish identity for himself that incorporates--through an utter fiction--the Holocaust."

Nobody seemed to care, however. Those who attended the talks had been duly entertained, and Chabon had ''signalled to the audience at every turn that the narrator isn't to be completely trusted," Nextbook's program director wrote in a letter to Bookforum. In the minor brouhaha that followed, Maliszewski was accused of being the only person in the lecture hall who hadn't caught the author's wink--and even of ignoring it, in hopes of stirring up a scandal.

Whatever Chabon's intentions, the long and distinguished history of literary hoaxes shows that the average reader is often willing to put up with a lot as long as it is in the service of a good piece of writing. But hoaxes, with their vanishing authors, broken faiths, and disingenuous territories, can also be deeply disturbing, going beyond the mere ''gotcha!" to trouble our more basic ideas about truth, lies, and literature.

In recent years, scholars have begun pursuing a more nuanced approach to discussing literary hoaxes than the knee-jerk disgruntlement of a reader scorned. Instead, literary scholars like Ohio State University professor Brian McHale and the Australian critic K.K. Ruthven are concentrating on the productive and beautifully unpredictable effects of hoaxing. Are all hoaxes the same? Should they all be judged by the same ethical standards? Do some hoaxes rise above being trifling pranks or bogus facsimiles to become serious acts of cultural criticism? What of an author's intentions?

And finally what separates an artful hoax from an authentic piece of literature? As Ruthven wrote in his 2001 study ''Faking Literature," ''Literary forgery is a sort of spurious literature, and so is literature. Consequently, when we imagine the relationship between literature and literary forgeries, we should not be thinking of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde but rather of Tweedledum and Tweedledee."

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The most fascinating aspect of hoaxes is the extent to which they tend to escape the control of their creators, absorbing new accomplices along the way. As McHale observed in a recent interview, literary hoaxes are ''cut loose from their source, or outright lie about it, and so float free, in a certain sense, so that they can be reclaimed further down the line and used for all sorts of unintended purposes."

But not all hoaxes are created equal, and McHale cautions against seeing them all through the same moral lens. He identifies three types, each with their own ethical consequences: ''genuine hoaxes," ''entrapment hoaxes," and ''mock-hoaxes."

Genuine hoaxes are those that are unleashed with no hope of ever being exposed: These are the literary equivalents of forged paintings. In 1764, Horace Walpole published ''The Castle of Otranto" under the pretense that it was a recently discovered 16th-century manuscript recounting a story that dated back to the Crusades. Walpole was exposed as its author and forced to apologize, though ''Otranto" endures as a seminal moment of Gothic literature.

Around the same time, the Scottish poet James Macpherson produced ''translations" of a third-century epic by the bard Ossian. These heroic verses attracted admirers like Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, and Napoleon and weren't definitively unmasked as Macpherson's own work until a century later. Thomas Chatterton, who in 1769 began passing his own quasi-medieval poetry off as that of a 15th-century monk, committed suicide at age 17 after questions were raised about his work's authenticity. More recently, ''My Own Sweet Time," an award-winning 1994 memoir by an aboriginal woman named Wanda Koolmatrie, was revealed to be the work of an Australian named Leon Carmen, who responded to his unmasking by lashing out at the publishing industry for excluding white male authors like himself.

Entrapment hoaxes, on the other hand, rely upon exposure to prove their point. McHale describes these as ''didactic and punitive" acts that culminate in some epiphanic gotcha! Perhaps the most famous recent example is the 1996 hoax by New York University physicist Alan Sokal, who suppressed his contempt for postmodern philosophy long enough to construct a bogus article about the political possibilities of quantum mechanics. He submitted it to the theory-happy humanities journal Social Text, where it was printed without alteration, despite the fact that it made no sense whatsoever and contained some elementary scientific errors. Sokal exposed the hoax--as well as his intention to save the academic left from its worst instincts--in the magazine Lingua Franca.

Another entrapment hoax, involving the Australian poet Ern Malley, was particularly fascinating for the way it backfired. In 1944, the influential journal Angry Penguins published a special edition dedicated to Malley, who was said to be a lonely insurance salesman who had died the previous year at age 25, leaving a bundle of writings. But as it turned out, his poems were really the invention of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two young artists who detested the modernist fashions of their time and had written the poems over the course of an afternoon of free association.

A Sydney tabloid broke the story in June 1944 and the two authors confessed. But it turned out that McAuley and Stewart's bad poems weren't so bad after all. Max Harris, the editor of Angry Penguins, would eventually praise the poems as examples of accidental greatness. And in 1976, when John Ashbery presented his MFA students at Brooklyn College with a Malley fake and one of Geoffrey Hill's very real ''Mercian Hymns," only half were able to guess which was which.

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But perhaps the most vexing and complex kind of hoax is McHale's last category, the mock-hoax, in which, he writes, ''issues of authenticity and inauthenticity are elevated to the level of poetic raw materials" through a deliberate blurring of true and false.

A case in point was the poetry of Araki Yasusada, a Hiroshima survivor whose striking voice and fine, sensual imagery caught the attention of editors at Grand Street and The American Poetry Review in the early 1990s. His verses about seasons passing and bodies crisped by the A-bomb captivated readers; even more amazing was the fact that none of it had ever been published. Sketches and workbooks seemed to confirm Yasusada's identity as an A-bomb survivor who had worked as a postal worker in Hiroshima until his death in 1972. But on closer inspection, his life was rife with impossible claims: For example, he had attended Hiroshima University 20 years before its founding and communicated with poets (Paul Celan, for example) who had not yet published in their own countries, let alone in Japan.

After the inconsistencies in Yasusada's patchy, impossible story were exposed on Internet message boards by academics and poets in 1996, some of the same people who had praised the unnerving beauty of his poems now lined up to strike them down as dangerous and possibly racist. American Poetry Review editor Arthur Vogelsang, who had published a number of Yasusada's poems, denounced the hoax as ''essentially a criminal act."

Today, the true author of the verse gathered together in the 1997 volume ''Doubled Flowering" is commonly believed to be a Midwestern poet named Kent Johnson. But Johnson--who is currently preparing a new book of Yasusada's letters and prose titled ''Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords" (Combo Books)--claims the hoax was in fact the doing of his friend, the late (and possibly fictional) Japanese-American poet Tosa Motokiyu. Some observers speculated that the promoter of this unknown Japanese poet was in fact expressing some kind of long-suppressed, white male rage. If Johnson couldn't find acclaim with his own words, why not borrow the voice of another, more fashionable kind of victim?

Today, Johnson maintains that thanks to chronological impossibilities and other textual clues the Yasusada poems were ''clearly marked as a fiction" from the beginning, and that the fiction has attained a life of its own thanks to the reception of the work. ''I happen to know that the work's creation was not driven in any way by a desire to embarrass anybody," he said in a recent interview. ''Whatever...resentment surrounds the writing exists as an after-effect."

The Yasusada hoax poses a very important question: Can one craft beautiful art out of intentionally misleading parts? But controversy has obscured it. The poems had touched the third rail of identity politics--they were too empathetic. Rather than identifying with the victim's plight, the poems appropriated it. John Solt, a professor of Japanese culture at Amherst College, dismissed the poems' scenery as ''Japanized crap" (even though Japanese readers praised the work). But supporters pointed out that the presumed exoticism of Yasusada had simply fulfilled the editors' desires.

In the end, when it comes to understanding hoaxes, it may be more useful just to fix on their effects rather than the intentions of their creators. As Ruthven argues, literary fakes often function as creative forms of critique. At the very least, they offer interesting reflections of their respective times. Walpole, Macpherson, and Chatterton took advantage of the 18th-century fascination with antiquity, while the Malley authors and Sokal exposed the faddishness they despised. Yasusada and Koolmatrie each capitalized on our polite adherence to multiculturalism, reminding us of the faith we invest in the names of witnesses emblazoned on dust jackets.

We are conditioned to believe that there is something encoded deep inside literature, obscure layers of meanings and intentions that we can only access through careful study. But what happens when close scrutiny only leads us further away from the truth? Hoaxes confound this most basic tenet of reading, toying with our expectations and reminding us that sometimes the lies can be beautiful, too.

Hua Hsu is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is a frequent contributor to Slate and the Village Voice.