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Date:         Fri, 13 Nov 1992 16:45:05 +0100
From:         Johan Schimanski <johansc@ULRIK.UIO.NO>
Subject:      Counterfeit nations revealed!

FIRSTLY, one might cite the case of George Psalmanazar, who arrived in
London in 1703 claiming to be a native of the island of Formosa. He
convinced The Society for the Propogation of the Gospel that he could speak
Formosan, whereas he in fact was speaking a language he himself had
invented. In 1704 his _An Historical and Geographical Description of
Formosa_ was published, containing much completely spurious information. In
1728 he repented, and became a Grub Street hack. This reversal was much
admired by, among others, Dr. Johnson. But as late as 1808 his imaginary
Formosa appeared in G. Bouchard de la Richarderie's _Bibliotheque universal
de voyages_.

SECONDLY, Psalmanazaar's Formosan experiment can be taken as a precursor of
the many similar activities undertaken by pre-romantic and romantic
antiquarians under the rise of nationalism as a functional ideology.
Examples might be James Macpherson (1738-1769) in Scotland, Iolo Morganwg
(1747-1826) in Wales, Theodore  Hersart de la Villemarque (1815-1895) in
Bretagne, and Vaclav Hanka (1791-1861) in Bohemia. To a certain extent, all
nations are forgeries - a thesis which underlies many of the articles in
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's book _The Invention of Tradition_,
Cambridge University Press, 1983. See also James Clifford's _The
Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and
Art_, Harvard University Press, 1988, p.15 for a small bibliography of
other references to the same problematic. In one sense, nation-states did
not exist as such before the 1700s, and it is the introduction of the
concept and its incorporation into political realities which has led to the
need for an invention of national origin, national borders, and national
culture in many different cases. The nation-state imposes upon us the
difference between belonging and not-belonging, between outside and inside
- and it should be obvious from the development of post-colonial African
states how this sets into play an opposition of natural and artificial, of
true and false.

MY PERSONAL involvement with this problem has to do with with my
Magistergrad thesis (Oslo 1990), which focused on the literary forgeries of
the Welsh stonemason, antiquarian, political and moral activist, poet and
forger Iolo Morganwg (or Edward Williams). Not only did he provide the
Welsh with a fictitious history and literature sellable to English romantic
taste (it was he who instigated the druidic Gorsedd-ceremonies at the
National Eisteddfod), but he also tranformed the past history of his own
region, Glamorgan/Morgannwg, into a golden age of poetry and legend,
central to his vision of the formation of the Welsh nation.

HOWEVER, I still have problems imaging/imagining exactly how the forgery of
nations and of literature exactly got started, seeing as it was seldom a
relevant part of affairs before about 1700. Did the first forgers know they
were forgers? Fiona J. Stafford's book _The Sublime Savage. A Study of
James Macpherson and The Poems of Ossian_, Edinburgh University Press,
Edinburgh 1988, seems to imply that Macpherson actually thought that he was
"translating", and not "forging".

FURTHER READING: The British Museum catalogue _Fake? The Art of Deception_,
ed. Mark Jones, BM Publications, London, 1990 is a good place to start,
with descriptions with most of the forgers mentioned in this posting.

Looking forward to further postings on this matter,

        J.


Johan Schimanski  (johansc@hedda.uio.no)
----------------------------------------------
Research grant holder working on Ph.D. thesis ("An Intercourse of
Nationality and Genre in Welsh Literature after 1700").
- Observatoriegaten 16, N-0254 OSLO, Norway (+47 2 853945) ("Allern/Ribe"
bell)
- Section for General and Comparative Literature, University of Oslo, p.b.
1013 Blindern, N-0315 OSLO, Norway (+47 2 854037, fax +47 2 857100)
- sometimes I look after the family cats, and can be reached on +47 2
541460.
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