Poe in Cyberspace: “Fake it till you make it”

Abstract

Poe came of age in what Frank Luther Mott described as a “Golden Age of Periodicals” in A History of American Magazines ([New York: D. Appleton, 1930], 337). Although “essentially a magazinist” (PL 476), Poe managed to become a major American author by working in the fruitful midground between books and newspapers. “The whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” he wrote in 1846. “We now demand the light artillery of the intellect: we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand,” he warned, “the lightness of the artillery must not degenerate into the pop-gunnery . . . of the newspaper press” (Graham’s, December 1846, eapoe.org).What Poe called “pop-gunnery” in newspapers, anticipating the stream of social network items on the Internet today, had their place for him when he needed their special ambiance. Significantly, he announced his return to New York in 1844 by publishing his famous “Balloon-Hoax” as an extra of a penny paper, The Sun. It was issued on a single sheet surrounded by a mixture of announcements, events, and fiction reprints. Poe saw that the effects of the penny papers on “the whole newspaper business of the country . . . are probably beyond all calculation” (Edgar Allan Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson [New York: Library of America, 1984], 1214; hereafter ER). The impact of The Sun was memorable: “Its success firmly established ‘the penny system’ throughout the country” . . . [becoming] one of the most important steps ever yet taken in the pathway of human progress” (ER 1221). On the other hand, the penny press also contributed “an increasingly spicy diet of horror, gore, and perversity” (David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 171), suggesting at times a content approaching that of Poe’s most extreme tales.When “The Balloon-Hoax” was published, Richard Adams Locke edited The Sun, where his quite famous “Moon Hoax” had appeared eleven years before. Reviewing Locke afterward, Poe listed the main ingredients of a good hoax: “the novelty of the idea,” its “reason-repressing character,” the tact of the deception, and the “exquisite vraisemblance of the narration” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). Suggesting a possible similarity between the hoax and the detective tale, Poe reminded us that the former challenged the reader with constant intellectual “correctness, and the consequent difficulty of detecting a flaw” (“Doings of Gotham,” 4, eapoe.org).Readers of a detective tale might enjoy the possibility, however difficult, of solving the crime, but readers of a hoax had to deal with the utter impossibility of the situation. In total, Poe wrote six hoaxes, each exhibiting a different kind of wit than that found in his detective tales. They further burnished his image as a very clever writer in what was, lest we forget, the age of P. T. Barnum. To a degree his hoaxes were the humorous literary equivalent of diddling, sharing its qualities of “minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin” (M 3:869–70; repr. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales and Sketches, ed. Mabbott [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000], 2: 869–70; hereafter M [2000] 2).Poe’s first hoax, “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall” (Southern Literary Messenger, June 1835), as he later admitted, failed to achieve a consistency of approach, because he “fell back upon a style half plausible, half bantering” (Godey’s, October 1846, eapoe.org). The banter included the use of the date April 1, the description of the balloon as “entirely made of dirty newspapers,” and his use of Dutch-Irvingesque ambiance. In this and subsequent hoaxes, Poe always built on something that readers already knew. Recent press reports of balloon flights provided the starting point for “Hans Pfaall.” Early exploration attempts in the Antarctic provided information on which to base The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837). The famous Lewis and Clark expedition paved the way for its imaginary predecessor, “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840). Poe used the apparently inexhaustible subject of aerial travel again in “The Balloon-Hoax” (1844), where he incorporated as many supporting factual details as possible. The contemporary interest in hypnotism and mesmerism—forerunners of the modern concept of the unconscious—providedgrounds for his next hoax, “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845). Finally, the contemporary gold craze and the myth of the transmutation of lead provided contexts for his last hoax, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery” (1849).Poe claimed that the public widely believed his hoaxes. One reader, the historian Robert Greenhow, went so far as to mention “Julius Rodman” in his Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North America, and the Adjacent Territories (PL 289). Poe insisted that most readers believed his “Balloon-Hoax”: “Not one person in ten discredited it . . . chiefly the ignorant, because the thing was so novel, so entirely ‘out of the usual way’” (PL 161). For “Van Kempelen,” Poe made the similar claim that “nine persons out of ten (even among the best informed) will believe the quiz,” adding that as a “check to the gold fever, it will create a stir to some purpose” (PL 796). In private, however, Poe told a different story, responding to a query from Arch Ramsay, a Scottish druggist: “Hoax is precisely the word suited to M. Valdemar’s case. . . . Some few persons believe it—but I do not—and don’t you” (PL 677).The press generally greeted Poe’s hoaxes with skepticism. However, reviewers at first were charmed by the novelty of “Hans Pfaall”: the Baltimore Republican saw it as “a capital burlesque upon balloonings” (PL 160), and the Charleston Messenger appreciated it as “one of the most exquisite specimens of blended humor and science” (PL 160–61). But reviewers who recalled that Arthur Gordon Pym had been party serialized “under the garb of fiction” could not accept it as a work of fact supposedly created by an actual Pym, then conveniently deceased. Although the New-Yorker praised Pym as a work of “extraordinary, freezing interest” (PL 250), the New York Mirror called Poe a “liar of the first magnitude” (PL 252) and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine declared it to be “a mass of ignorance and effrontery” (PL 254). The Naval and Military Gazette remarked that Poe’s Pym contained “not only the improbable but the impossible” (PL 257). Disdaining “The Balloon-Hoax” as “ridiculous,” James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald used the occasion to refer to the current Sun publisher, Moses Y. Beach, as “that manufacturer of hoaxes of all kinds” (PL 460).Taking advantage of the loose editorial standards of the day, Poe sometimes pursued the opportunity to exaggerate the extent of his accomplishments and even to fabricate details in his biography. For example, he reported that as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger he had increased the number of subscribers eightfold, from 700 to 5,500, in only fifteen months (Poe to Anthon, October 1844, eapoe.org), and later had boosted circulation at Graham’s tenfold (from 5,000 to 52,000) in only two years (ER 742). Poe’s estimates were repeated in some form in biographies and general reference works until Terrence Whalen, examining the surviving circulation records of the Southern Literary Messenger, found that subscriptions increased only modestly during Poe’s editorship, undermining his claims: “The oft-repeated Messenger story must therefore be seen as a deliberate act of deception” (Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999], 75).Perhaps in imitation of Byron, Poe added some details to his biography that made him seem more adventurous and more brilliant, and he also shaved two years off his official age. Poe gathered these claims for a biographical sketch intended for the Philadelphia Saturday Museum in 1843, hoping they would serve to promote his proposed magazine, The Stylus. The claims consisted entirely of “myths concerning the elopement of Poe’s parents, their death ‘on a visit to Richmond,’ Poe’s journey to Greece and St. Peterburg, [and] his return from Europe on the night after Mrs. Allan’s burial” (A. H. Quinn Edgar Allan Poe [1941; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998], 373). Although Poe expected his friend Frederick William Thomas to complete the article, Thomas, insisting he “knew more of his history,” demurred, and the sketch was completed by Henry W. Hirst, who claimed he had been helped by Thomas, which Poe dismissed as “a slight extension of the truth for which I pray you to forgive him” (Quinn 371). Thus, when Thomas confronted Poe regarding the inaccuracies and fictions in the sketch, he took the matter very lightly: “He was amused, and laughed the matter off by confessing that the story was intended to help the magazine project” (qtd. in Whalen 64).On another occasion, Poe insisted that the use of exaggeration was an essential element in the composition of “Berenice.” He famously enumerated the sources of the tale’s effectiveness: “In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical” (PL 150). Poe continued by applying the process to editing: “The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.”Today, many species of exaggeration flourish in Silicon Valley, where careers are believed to thrive by following the maxim: “Fake it till you make it.” A recent severe example of the maxim was Elizabeth Holmes’s unicorn, her highly promising automated blood testing company Theranos. With her charming presence and appealing backstory, Holmes presented herself as a youthful, female version of the brilliantly successful Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. At its height Theranos raised an estimated $1 billion in investments, enjoyed a marketing agreement with Walgreen’s, and had an estimated stock value reaching as high as $10 billion. But Theranos proved to be something other than a legitimate invention seeking to turn a profit. On October 15, 2015, the Wall Street Journal began running a series of exposés revealing that the company’s signature device was a sham that had never worked; in order to perpetuate the lie, its supporting tests had been staged. In 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Holmes with a “years-long fraud” of deceiving both investors and patients. In January 2022 a jury found her guilty of four counts of fraud. Although Facebook has literally billions of users, very few of them stop to think about how the service works. Indeed, even outside Facebook very few understand its inner operations. There was great interest therefore when Frances Haugen, a former data engineer at Facebook, turned whistleblower in September 2021, sharing with the Securities Exchange Commission, the Wall Street Journal, the British Parliament, EU authorities, and even 60 Minutes thousands of internal company documents. Her evidence suggested that Facebook prioritized its profits over the public interest in its handling of a long list of sensitive subjects, including “political misinformation, hate speech, teenage mental health, human trafficking, the promotion of ethnic violence, preferential treatment for certain users, and its communications with investors” (Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2021). Although Facebook employees spent 3.2 million hours tackling global issues of misinformation in 2020, Haugen’s documents disclosed that a disappointingly low 13 percent worked on content from outside the United States.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to Haugen, “Many of the claims don’t make any sense. I think most of us just don’t recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted” (Facebook, October 6, 2021). Facebook spokesperson Mitch Henderson said it had spent $13 billion and hired forty thousand people to work on safety-related issues, further claiming its artificial intelligence software was catching 90 percent of hate speech. In rebuttal, Haugen said the figure was less than 5 percent (New York Times, October 25, 2021).After the Haugen papers appeared, Facebook changed its identity, preferring to be known as Meta. Zuckerberg expressed the hope on October 26, 2021, that over the coming five years people would move from seeing Facebook as “a social media company to being a metaverse company.” Since “metaverse” had become a widely adopted buzzword with a variety of meanings and associations, for many observers this immediately clarified little. But Facebook did have a concrete plan to invest at least $10 billion in its VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and AI (artificial intelligence) activities. Zuckerman remarked, “I believe the metaverse is the next chapter for the internet” (Facebook, October 28, 2021). Nevertheless, whether known as Facebook or Meta, the stock of the company collapsed, falling from its high in September 2011 by 45 percent in February 2022 (Bloomberg, February 18, 2022).After the era of Web1, the text-based early web, and Web2, the era of the interactive commercial web, Web3 promised to bring AR, VR, and AI into the home. However, some observers remain skeptical about the promises of machine or artificial intelligence: “For instance, many companies who claim to have developed algorithms that can recognize complicated images or derive meaning from text with machine learning don’t always mention that humans are often doing much of that work behind the scenes” (Washington Post, January 4, 2022; hereafter WP).Outside Silicon Valley in the United States today, in an era of ultra-partisan politics, unbridled exaggeration in the form of misinformation, disinformation, fake news, doctored media, conspiracy theories, and outright lies has become dangerously prevalent. Recently the word “hoax” is more likely to be applied to discussions of partisan politics than to literary antics in magazines and newspapers. In the United States nearly everyone seems to believe in some national political hoax. To Trump supporters, the hoax is the theft of the 2020 election by Biden and his supporters. To Trump critics, the hoax is Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen, despite the denials of Trump’s vice president and attorney general. In addition, there are also a parallel pair of irreconcilable views of what happened at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. While president, Trump was ceaselessly active on the social networks, especially Twitter. According to critical statistics gathered by the Washington Post Fact Checker newsletter, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first three years as president, with the number increasing each year: “Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third claims a day in his January hoaxes have been to contemporary fake news, even they never to political G. “Fake Poe’s and the that in their of penny press as The Sun readers to their 2020, At the the penny press to some extent the of a that has been as the of and (qtd. in people a among media for that their the be among in Poe A in point is Poe’s story of the outside the Sun for the his of the balloon in the has because his to believe this great Poe had described a of for a so that the the Sun was literally for most of the The and Thomas a different starting from his that Poe’s after a or two of him “not but Poe his to a newspaper for he the but by a of on the the and told the that the extra was a hoax, as he for he had it The the and the . . . saw his author what he to be the of American repr., New York: a and who had Poe times in In “The Poe described her as “a a a a and a of of more I not to (ER one of her to Poe he had ever praised a in for Poe replied that to an act would be an he that he had so when to a way of “not his to In Poe he was guilty of a the of (qtd. in Quinn with Poe that he and even with of Edgar Allan Poe repr., New York: hereafter However, in a subsequent he to the that he all “I on would to the very the I would have in from and from and on this are and in “The of apparently for Poe, the of newspapers, us in in it is the of to create a make a to further the of (qtd. in this how to create a among readers by content with the of some “The mass of the people as only him who of the general (M in a of far beyond the of success in the maxim “Fake it till you make it.” For Poe, was never a of a successful but a to a variety of and pursued this by two which have been described as and in an Poe never in partisan fake people his of exaggeration and him to his work to literary as he in his that a (ER For Poe, even after or public much he continued his for and in “I . . . from a mental and of in are at