Alias Arts

­­“You seem very
clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning
of the poem…?”


“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can 
explain
all the poems that ever were invented—and 
a good many that haven’t been invented
just yet.”

­—Lewis Carroll, Through the
Looking-Glass


In 1945, John Ashbery discovered ­th­e work
of an obscure Au­stralian poet named Ern Malley. “I liked the poems very much,”
Ashbery recalls. “They reminded me a little of my own early tortured experiments in
surrealism, but they wer­e much better.”¹ Later, in 1961, he included two
of Malley’s poems, “Boult to Marina” and “Sybilline,” in an issue of Locus
Solus edited with Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler. Though
neither Koch nor Ashbery believed Malley had any influence on his own work, both
thought of him as a “secret, exotic, precious, outlandish figure” whom they would
teach in their poetry classes at Columbia and Brooklyn College, introducing his work
to the next generation of American writers, and, through them, back to their
Australian peers John Forbes and John Tranter.^2­­­­

Anxiety about deception runs deep in the philosophical and religious traditions of Europe, and new techniques for mastering this fear mark episodes in the history of the modern world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both the playfulness and the peril of deceit came to be distanced from the sphere of rational inquiry: the sciences ceased to have much use for legerdemain; metaphysicians lost interest in the theater. But it was not always so, as the conversation below with Anthony Grafton suggests. Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor
of History at Princeton University and the author of a shelf of major
works on the­ Renaissance, classical scholarship, ­and the history of
science, including Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton University Press, 1990).­ ­D. Graham Burnett, editor at Cabinet and also professor of history at Princeton, sat down with Grafton to discuss his work on deception and forgery­.

Tony, let’s play name that tune. “We have also houses of deceits
of the senses, where we represent all manner of feats of juggling,
false apparitions, impostures, and illusions…” I have a feeling you’ll
recognize this wonderfully strange passage from one of the
hallucinogenic masterworks of the early modern period.

I do indeed.

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­­­For more than a century, any promenade do­wn a seaside boardwalk has required a stop at an apparently nam­eless apparatus: a painted wooden façade featuring a colorful character in an outlandish situation with a hole where its head should be. A tourist playfully inserting his or her head into the cartoonish scene is then recorded for posterity by a professional photographer. The genre has its favored iterations, from the weightlifting hulk to the bathing beauty, the swimmer perilously clenched in the mouth of a shark to the novice aviator nervously clutching the controls of an airplane. As one of the omnipresent features of visual mass culture in American life since the end of the nineteenth century, these façades offer the possibility of radical transformation in the guise of carefree recreation, a chance for the working-class beachgoer to become, safely and fleetingly, someone very different. As with any element of quotidian experience that see­ms always to have existed, the photo-caricature or comic foreground (two names given to the innovation by its inventor) does in fact have a genealogy—a complex one that winds its way through the rise of modern culture.­­