Cat Lambert, Cornell University
Critics have long noted that forgery and philology are curiously entangled (Grafton 1990). Such entanglement has led to a rich reassessment of the ‘pseudepigraphic’ in classical literature as a corpus worthy of our critical faculties (e.g., Peirano 2012, Kearey 2019). And yet, the category of ‘forgery’ per se continues to have a dubious, if not abject, status. In her study of Roman pseudepigrapha, for example, Peirano opts for the term ‘fake’ over ‘forgery’ as ‘fake’ conveys ‘the element of pretense and fiction in authorial impersonations and chronological fictions’ whilst ‘forgery’ suggests ‘an intent on the part of the author to deceive’ (2012: 28-29). This paper assesses the broader ethical, affective, and epistemological ramifications of our critical approaches around forgery, drawing on Jordy Rosenberg’s 2018 novel, Confessions of the Fox, to imagine a queer(er) way forward.
First, it argues that the rubric of deceptive intent puts us in a paranoid position, a position that is evident in a pattern of critical discourse that ‘puts its faith in exposure’ (to use Sedgwick’s phrase), unveiling the wayward text as a deceptive, even contaminating body, and reinforcing the critic’s pose of epistemological rigor. We might understand this approach to textuality as akin to what Scott Larson has called the “laying open” of the gender-variant subject: “those individuals whose gender has come under scrutiny have never lacked curious audiences, particularly audiences prepared to adjudicate identity, diagnose difference, determine taxonomical belonging, or simply witness a marvelous sight” (351). Whether or not “about” gender-deviant subjects, forgeries are often understood in ancient criticism through a framework of sexual deviance: illegitimate, adulterated, bastard fabrications (Grafton 1990; Fisher 1999). In addition to reproducing dynamics of this ancient hermeneutic, our paranoid position reinforces anti-trans
and anti-queer practices of over-examination and exposure.
The remainder of the paper imagines an alternative, reparative approach to forgery through Confessions of the Fox. In Confessions, contemporary scholar Dr. Voth creates an edition of what appears to be the lost memoir of Jack Sheppard, a real-life 18th century thief and jailbreaker. At first, Voth is interested in questions of the manuscript’s authenticity, for it represents Sheppard as a transgender, intersex man. The University’s “Dean of Surveillance” discovers Voth’s project and compels him to market the manuscript as ‘the earliest authentic confessional transgender memoirs in Western history.” Voth soon realizes the document embodies something other than a single, authorial voice and is rather the collective product of intervening hands that have made reparative alterations and additions to the body of/in the text. He absconds with the manuscript to an otherworldly library “dedicated to archiving the stories of those whose bodies and lives have transcended sexual categories” (Newby 2023: 191). Voth, himself intersex and trans like Sheppard, mobilizes forgery to strike back against the institutional regime of academia that demands empirical evidence, bodily legibility, “laying open”, and archival management of circumscribed subjects. Confessions invites Classicists to consider how we might develop archival practices that are hospitable to “queer,” anomalous, and seemingly “counterfeit” features of texts and/as bodies.