NY TIMES, JONATHAN LETHEM
BUNK
The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
By Kevin Young
Illustrated. 560 pp. Graywolf Press. $30.
In Mr. Schiff’s social studies classroom, at LaGuardia High School in 1978, certain striking terms seemed quarantined firmly in a benighted American past. “Yellow journalism,” for instance, was the story of how William Randolph Hearst tricked us into the Spanish-American War. “Trusts” were something Teddy Roosevelt heroically Trust-Busted, from that time before the need for regulation of monopolies had been recognized. We pitied those earlier Americans unworldly enough to be at the mercy of unscrupulous barons of print and commerce; by the time we’d come along those quaint evils had been decanted into nothing more harmful than boring multiple-choice quizzes on sublimely scented mimeograph paper.
Thank goodness we got all that cleared up.
Kevin Young, the author of the National Book Award finalist “Jelly Roll: A Blues,” among many other works, is a poet of extraordinary dynamism and erudition, whose flair for intricate cultural reference is tempered by his distrust of postmodernism’s risk of blurring provenances and voiding ethical obligations. He also works as the director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and his scrupulous feel for archival traces — for the urgent materiality of memory — is one of the superpowers he brings to both his poems and nonfiction. The newest example is “Bunk,” Young’s enthralling and essential new study of our collective American love affair with pernicious and intractable moonshine.
----
 |
Though, it may raise an eyebrow or two. In the age of global warming and election-hacking, do we really need a deep-dive rehash of hoaxes as thin and appalling as JT Leroy, the faked Hitler diaries and Stephen Glass? In a looping, free-associative style, Young revisits these rubbernecking scandals, as well as others as forgotten or unknown to many younger readers as Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird,” Frederic Prokosch’s “butterfly books” and Clifford Irving’s bogus Howard Hughes as-told-to autobiography.
In Young’s thesis,...“The hoax is almost always a trick disguised as a wish. … The real revelation may be just whose wish it is.”
It was Young’s deployment of the old-fashioned terms “bunk,” “humbug,” “charlatan,” “malarkey” and “balderdash” that drew me back to the complacencies of Mr. Schiff’s social studies classroom. Yet Young’s project is the opposite of an attempt to flatter the contemporary reader on her comfortable superiority. It represents instead a deliberate and even violent confrontation with our determination to locate a susceptibility to bunk elsewhere, whether in the deplorable past or merely in the deplorable other. “Bunk” is a brief against what Young calls “cultural Alzheimer’s”: “We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can’t quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place. The resulting de-hoaxing leads to outrage. For the hoax reminds us, uncomfortably, that the stories we tell don’t just express the society of the self, they construct it.”
In other words, our eye-rolling ... at James Frey and Pizzagate is itself a blind to our need to understand what they have to do not only with each other, but with ourselves: “Hoaxes are both overexposed and underexplored.” What Young finds unsatisfying isn’t that we fall for bunk, but that we’re so ready to congratulate ourselves for seeing through it afterward, leaving the deeper implications on the table, like the unbearable continuities between P.T. Barnum’s “racial grotesques” and the phony black inmate conjured up in James Frey’s imaginary jail experience: “He calls himself Porterhouse because he says he’s big and juicy like a fine ass steak.”
Young takes his lead from James Baldwin (“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”). Though Young’s argument is winding, his tone at times eccentric or amused, by the time Young brings in Susan Smith (the South Carolina woman who in 1994 blamed the disappearance of her children, whom she’d murdered, on an imaginary black carjacker), Rachel Dolezal and our own Age of Euphemism (Young’s term for our dog-whistling disjunctions from the facts), his indictment is overwhelming. Again and again, Young plumbs the undercurrents of a hoax to discover lurking inside the figure of a mischaracterized racial other. Sympathy stolen on behalf of imaginary sufferers is stolen from real ones; phony monsters divert us from real ones. The hoax is like an art that dulls our sense of reality, rather than sharpening it. For Young, these aren’t victimless crimes: “There is of course no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.”
Young also writes as an appalled citizen-witness to the November 2016 election, in which 63 million pulled the lever for a con man. A less jubilant Barnum, Donald Trump is also himself a fictional character: a television billionaire and tabloid playboy, a tissue-thin confabulation of theatricalized cultural resentments, like “All in the Family”’s so-wrong-you-can’t-deny-I’m-right Archie Bunker.
The delight with which Archie Bunker was sentimentally enshrined in our culture made it clear the bigotry he parroted still thrived, in a twilight realm where untruths not only live on past exposure, but develop an uncanny power stronger than mere facts. If Bunker was a Frankenstein creature, who arose from his liberal creator’s writing desk to engulf his context, so Trump is a nightmare uprising of an unstable and potent vein of American unreality, called forth by more than a century’s indulgence of dreams of exceptionalism, privilege and demonizing nativism. These delusions are buoyed up not only by cultivated fear (paging Fox News) but also by yearning for revenge against implicit calls for social justice and historical reparations. Like the greatest of hoaxes, so-called fake news does better than resist shaming by logic and moral reasoning. It engulfs and devours the very expertise it rejects, partly through a mocking air....In Kevin Young’s implacable formulation, then, “the Trump era” is a hoax, the ultimate howler, one we’re fated to live (or die) inside.