Truth, whose mother is history

April 18, 2018 12:04 PM

A handsome youth with shoulder-length golden hair sits in a London garret, pondering. He is composing his first book—a work he believes will transform him from a penniless foreigner into a literary cause celebré. But first he must answer a self-imposed question: what do Taiwanese aristocrats eat for breakfast? "George Psalmanazar," laudanum, constructed languages, human sacrifice, and an 18th-century hoax

An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa (1704)
The Memoirs of * * * *, Commonly known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native of Formosa (1764)

posted by theodolite (9 comments total)

I thoroughly enjoyed this article: many thanks, theodolite, for posting it. I'd read a a little bit about Psalmanazar before, and even got hold of a copy of a 1920s reprint edition of An Historical and Geographical Description... (which I regret I've still yet to finish), but there was plenty in this piece that was new to me.
posted by misteraitch at 1:37 PM on April 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I can't remember where I first came across the idea, but I've sometimes thought about the notion that some people have very specific gifts that suit certain art forms, and if their form or instrument doesn't exist, they turn to something else that doesn't quite work. George Psalmanazar might have made for a good and important novelist if he'd been started writing a couple of decades later. In England the idea of fiction as a distinct category from truth and falsehood is still in its early stages in the first decade of the 18th Century. Not that fake memoirs and travel books weren't published later in the 1700s. Indeed they still are in modern times. But in Psalmanazar's youth being a novelist wasn't something young writers could aspire too, but being a celebrated traveler was. The first edition of Robinson Crusoe, published fifteen years after An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, famously pretended to be a true account. It's interesting to wonder what might have been if Psalmanazar had written a novel set in his Formosa.
posted by Kattullus at 2:11 PM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

So on the one hand I definitely had the "ah, a speculative fiction writer out of his proper time" reaction, and on the other hand that is definitely some racist-ass proto-spec-fic, not that the supergenre is exactly unfamiliar with such.
posted by inconstant at 4:13 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've sometimes thought about the notion that some people have very specific gifts that suit certain art forms, and if their form or instrument doesn't exist, they turn to something else that doesn't quite work

I think thats part of it, but per the article, Psalmanazaro later copped to “vanity and senseless affectation of singularity” so at least part of it was also just about wanting to be special, unique. Which, as numerous “that never happened” social media posts prove, is a pretty common desire that a lot of people manage the same way today.

The other thing about the divide between travel fiction and nonfiction, pre-globalization, is that there was just no way to verify things. Marco Polo had the opposite problem 400 years earlier where he really did go to China (seems to be the consensus of modern historias) wrote about it in a fairly straightforward way, and was broadly take to be a liar anyway.

Regardless, it’s an interesting piece of history, and since I’m about to visit a couple of countries Ive never been to, I liked this question from the article: “Is the act of travel also an act of authorship, of inventing a reality that we each filter through our individual preconceptions?” The places I visit wont be the places themselves, they’ll be an amalgamation of what I see and how I interpret that, without enough knowledge or background or understanding to get it right.
posted by mrmurbles at 4:18 PM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

Some of the names (but not the shapes) of the letters in his alphabet are clearly derived from a West Semitic language like Hebrew: Mem, Nen, Taph, Lamdu, Samdu = Mem, Nun, Tav, Lamed, Samekh. There's also a letter (Xatara) that has a guttural "kh", which further increases the similarity. Maybe it reflects French or another Romance language rather than a Semitic one, but the fact that he specified it as "kh" implies that he didn't think of it as being equivalent to a Latin letter.

Pdalmsnazar's use of "Taph" rather than "Tav" or "Taw" may offer another clue: that pronunciation is common among Ashkenazi Jews who grew up hearing the name of the letter but didn't see it written down. Also, I think a well-educated European learning Hebrew as an adult would have automatically associated Tav with the Greek letter Tau, and therefore would have avoided the mistake. I therefore suspect that Psalmanazar either grew up speaking Yiddish, or heard the names of the letters from someone who had.
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:06 PM on April 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

In Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner named the supercomputer that no one knew was emergently sentient (and solipsistic), and which processed all the world's information 'Shalmaneezer', and had it say to itself at one point something to the effect of 'Whee, what an imagination I have!'

I always wondered where that name came from.
posted by jamjam at 6:08 PM on April 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

John Brunner pedantry:

Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser.

Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.“

posted by Chrysostom at 6:43 PM on April 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

More John Brunner pedantry. Shalmaneser the AI is named after the Assyrian king, Shalmaneser V, who is mentioned in the Bible. If I remember correctly there's another AI in the novel which is also named after an Assyrian king from the Bible.
posted by Kattullus at 12:57 AM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I was aware of the King, though I would have said he was Babylonian, and who also has the next to largest size champagne bottle named for him, by the way (the 9L Salmanasar; the largest being the Nebuchadnezzar), but I couldn't see why a sentient computer who thinks the entire world is a figment of his imagination would be named after him, but a "Psalmanazar" who created an entire and very detailed imaginary culture out of whole cloth seemed to clear that right up.
posted by jamjam at 4:50 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]