False Document - in Fiction

In Fiction

Several fiction writers use the technique of inventing a piece of literature or non-fiction and referring to this work as if it actually existed, typically by quoting from the work.

Blurring the line of reality and fiction is an important component of horror, mystery, detective, science fiction and fantasy narratives due to their unusual demands on verisimilitude; a typically descriptive narrative form may not engender in the reader the necessary sense of wonder and danger. For this reason, false documentary techniques have been in use for at least as long as these literary genres have existed. Frankenstein draws heavily on a forged document feel, as do Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and many of the works of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and H.G. Wells. Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a particularly elaborate variation.

The following is a partial list of false supporting documents in fiction:

• Miguel de Cervantes claims that all chapters but the first in Don Quixote are translated from an Arabic manuscript by Cide Hamete Benengeli, parodying a plot device of chivalry books. For instance, Joanot Martorell in the introductory letter to Tirant lo Blanc claims to be not the creator of a fiction, but the translator of an English historical manuscript.
• Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius is written as a recently-discovered autobiography penned by the late Emperor.
• Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was supposedly the autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spent 28 years on a remote island. The account was presented as a factual event, in a genre called histories. It was based on the real castaway Alexander Selkirk.
• Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was originally attributed to "Lemuel Gulliver", a ship's surgeon, and purported to be a factual account of four of his sea voyages. It even includes a rather irate bogus note from Gulliver to his publisher. It may be debatable whether the book is an example of a False Document, but is included because it initially bore little or no indication that it was a work of fiction.
• The Ossian cycle of ancient Celtic poetry supposedly rediscovered and published in 1760 by Scottish poet James Macpherson was actually written in the eighteenth century, possibly based on some fragments of earlier verses.
• Voltaire's novel Candide purports to be assembled from the notes of a deceased "Monsieur le docteur Ralph", likely because the novel pokes fun at most of the powers of Europe at the time.
• Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is told in the form of numerous documents, including journals and newspaper articles. A brief introduction claims that they are all real.
• Italo Calvino's novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller deals extensively with the concepts surrounding false documents, including serially representing the contents of the novel itself as a false document.
• The Anno Dracula stories and novels of Kim Newman use many of these same false sources.
• The Necronomicon appearing in the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
• The King in Yellow appearing in the book of the same name by Robert W. Chambers purports to be an actual play that is capable of driving the reader insane.
• Both the books Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages, which were written by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as a way to raise funds for Comic Relief, are written as reference books for the wizarding world. The books, which are referenced many times in the Harry Potter books, even have footnotes about other books, which do not exist, for future reading, and a foreword by Albus Dumbledore, which explains why they are releasing the book to a muggle audience. Fantastic Beasts also has "written-in" commentary by both Harry and Ron. The Harry Potter books themselves also contain fictional documents and books beyond these, such as The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which was later put into print in a similar fashion to Fantastic Beasts and Quidditch Through the Ages. Other false documents that appear in the books include articles from The Daily Prophet, a wizarding world-only newspaper which usually referenced events that were pertinent to the plots of the books, and The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, a "tell-all" book which became pertinent to the plot of the final book in the Harry Potter series.
• Neil Gaiman, in the first issue of his comic Sandman, introduced the grimoire titled Grimorium Magdelene.
• In The Club Dumas, author Arturo Pérez-Reverte introduced the grimoire The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows (also called The Ninth Gate) as well as the Delomalanicon.
• Author William Goldman claims in his book The Princess Bride that the story he tells is an abridged version of the Florinese literary masterpiece by the great (and fictional) S. Morgenstern.
• The 1977 book Gnomes by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet was written as a nature study of gnomes and their way of life presented as fact.
• Fritz Leiber's novella Our Lady of Darkness revolves around the secret occult studies of fictional author/occultist Thibaut de Castries and his book Megapolisomancy: A New Science of Cities.
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco pretends to be a recovered manuscript. In addition, the story partly concerns the discovery of Aristotle's book on Comedy, which is in fact a lost book.
• First Encyclopaedia of Tlön appears in the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" by Jorge Luis Borges. Several other fictional books were invented by the same author, including an entire bibliography for the fictional author Pierre Menard, as well as an imaginary novel, purportedly written by a Bombay lawyer named Mir Bahadur Ali, entitled "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," which was "reviewed" by Borges in his story of the same name. Borges' analysis of metafiction in the essay When Fiction Lives in Fiction deals extensively with the teleological nature of false documents.
• Several works of the fictional author Fanshawe appearing in Paul Auster's The Locked Room in The New York Trilogy.
• George Orwell's dystopian novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" includes selections from a banned fictional book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, which citizens of Oceania are forbidden to read. Orwell also uses the technique of false document in an appendix to the same novel, titled "The Principles of Newspeak," where Orwell offers a linguistic guide to Oceania's official language, Newspeak from the perspective of the country's ruling party, along with policy prescriptions for how the language may develop in the future.
• The Red Book of Westmarch and a surviving copy of it called The Thain's Book, portions of which were "translated" by J. R. R. Tolkien into his books The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien also physically fabricated several pages of another fictional book, the Book of Mazarbul.
• Never Whistle While You're Pissing is the work of the fictional character Hagbard Celine in The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
• Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is a fabricated recreation of the Old English epic Beowulf in the form of a scholastic translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's tenth century manuscript. Many of his other novels, such as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, also incorporated large quantities of fabricated scientific documents in the form of diagrams, DNA sequences, footnotes and bibliography.
• Business historian Robert Sobel wrote For Want of a Nail, a fictional history of an alternate North America which included hundreds of fictional footnotes and a bibliography listing over a hundred fictional histories and biographies.
• Dozens of fictional footnotes referencing events, books of magical scholarship, and biographies in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the debut novel by Susanna Clarke.
• Milorad Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars is a work of fiction in the form of three fictional encyclopedias, which incorporate viewpoints that provide inconsistent descriptions of the events they describe.
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs claims to be the manuscript of John Carter relating his adventures on Mars, except for the first chapter explaining how the manuscript was received. Burroughs has also used this technique extensively in his other novels, particularly the tales of Pellucidar.
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is a work of fiction revolving around the discovery of a manuscript critiquing a documentary called The Navidson Record and its effects on both its author and editor.
• The Third Policeman and The Dalkey Archive by Flann O'Brien contains not only quotes from the works of a fictitious Irish philosopher named de Selby, but also has numerous footnotes and references to other fictitious authors writing about de Selby and his books.
• The Flashman books by George MacDonald Fraser are supposedly edited versions of the title character's memoirs.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is named for a fictional galactic encyclopedia that one of the main characters works for. The book also frequently quotes the fictional Guide.
• The roleplaying game Spaceship Zero presents itself as being based on a non-existent television show, which is based on a non-existent radio play, all of which are to be adapted into a non-existent film. The hoax has been generally accepted in a number of reviews of the title.
• Philip K. Dick's novel The Man in the High Castle features a (banned) fictional work called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which purports to describe how things might have transpired after World War II if the Allied side had won (in the reality of the book, the Axis powers triumphed).
• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova purports to be a book by the main character, and further contains a number of other letters, books, and maps relating to Dracula and the main character's friends and family.
• The twelve-volume opus Life by Unspiek, Baron Bodissey is an oft-quoted imaginary work referred to in various novels by Jack Vance.
• Isaac Asimov's Encyclopedia Galactica as presented in The Foundation Series is an attempt to compile all human knowledge in order to preserve it following the collapse of the Galactic Empire in the far future. An "excerpt" from it introduces each chapter of each book in the series.
• Isaac Asimov's story "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" is a fictional research paper about a compound that dissolves before being added to water that cites only and entirely false sources.
• Stephen King's novel Carrie includes many excerpts from a fictional committee's findings on the events in the novel, as well as excerpts from a book on the events in the novel titled The Shadow Exploded.
• Dean Koontz's novels included quotations from The Book of Counted Sorrows, which did not exist until, at the urging of his fans, he created it.
• Jack Higgins based his book The Eagle Has Landed on alleged research into a German abduction plot in the Second World War. Higgins writes in the first person of finding the graves of 13 German paratroopers in an English churchyard, an event known not to have actually occurred, and claims that the book stems from his research into actual events.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne's book The Scarlet Letter opens with an account of the author himself finding the letter and records which tell the story of Hester Prynne, which is narrated in the rest of the book. The existence of the records has never been proven; the opening is generally considered to be a literary device.
• Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale closes with a chapter set at a conference taking place some time after the events of the rest of the book, in which scholars question the authenticity of the earlier manuscript.
• The comic book limited series Watchmen makes extensive use of the technique, including one character's autobiography, magazine interviews with several characters, psychiatric reports and even a fictional comic book within the comic book.
• James Gurney's Dinotopia: Land Apart from Time is based on the premise that it is the diary of Arthur Dennison, who gets shipwrecked on the island of Dinotopia.
• Nick Bantock's series of Griffin and Sabine works consist of a series of letters and postcards between the two main characters.
• The Tattooed Map, a novel by Barbara Hodgson also published by Raincoast Books, reads as a journal being kept by the protagonists as they travel to Morocco, complete with hardwritten notes, photos and magazine cutouts from the journey.
• How Is This Going to Continue?, a novel by James Chapman, presents itself as the libretto to a musical work by a composer whose (fictional) entry in The Grove Dictionary of Music is quoted at length. The apparatus is supported by extensive source notes, some of which refer to non-existent sources. Moreover, much of the book consists of false quotations by famous musicians, intermingled with actual quotations and with quotes by fictional characters.
• The books in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events conclude with supposed letters from Snicket himself to his editor, containing a summary of his submitted manuscript for the following book in the series. Since Lemony Snicket is both the fictional narrator of the stories as well as the author's pseudonym, it creates a false sense that the stories are written from truth.
• The Screwtape Letters, written by C. S. Lewis, is purported to be a series of missives from a demonic teacher at a college to his protégé.
• The Zombie Survival Guide, by Max Brooks, presents itself as a survival manual in the event of a zombie outbreak. It includes citations of scientific studies performed on zombies, details on the sort of preparation one can make to guard against attacks, and historical examples of zombie outbreaks. It concludes with blank pages which the owner is meant to use as a journal, should they endure a zombie outbreak, lending the book a stronger, if satiric, kind of realism. Brooks' later work, World War Z, uses false interviews to create a mockumentary account of a worldwide zombie outbreak.
• "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar", by Edgar Allan Poe, about a mesmerist who puts a man in a suspended hypnotic state at the moment of death. It was published without claiming to be fictional, and many at the time of publication (1845), took it to be a factual account.
• Each chapter in Frank Herbert's science fiction novels Whipping Star, The Dosadi Experiment, and Dune variously begin with an aphorism, an excerpt from an official report (or even a manual), a quotation from a book about the events of the novel, etc.
• Either/Or, an influential philosophical text by Søren Kierkegaard, purports to be a collection of texts discovered and edited by Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author Victor Eremita. In it are contained the writings of an "Aesthete" (called A), as well as the letters of a Judge Vilhelm (called B), both found accidentally by Eremita in an antique writing desk. An additional layer to the book includes the famous Seducer's Diary, itself supposedly discovered by the Aesthete.

A special case is represented by two examples fashioned to represent traditional academic scientific publications:

• The Snouters: Form and Life of the Rhinogrades, by Zoologist Gerolf Steiner, purports to be a non-fictional natural history study, and was written, published, and presented as if it were an actual scientific treatise documenting the recently-extinct indigenous wildlife ("Rhinogradentia") of the equally fictitious Hi-yi-yi archipelago. There is nothing in the work itself that indicates it is a work of fiction.
• In a remarkably similar vein, science fiction artist and author Wayne Douglas Barlowe wrote Expedition: Being an Account in Words and Artwork of the 2358 A.D. Voyage to Darwin IV, which was a natural history study of an alien planet and its indigenous wildlife, written as though published in the year 2366.

• Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed is based on a fictional manuscript.