Retelling the Vernon Sullivan Hoax, Or What has been Neglected in the Telling: Why People Do Not Care About Elles se rendent pas compte (1950)

There is a way in which a literary hoax functions as a metonym. It speaks of the broader climate in which it is produced. For scholars like David Brooks a literary hoax cultivated in Paris in the years following the Second World War is necessarily steeped in the collective guilt that would not find any official catharsis until as late as the 1970s. For Brooks the hoax provides a means of self-invention and, importantly, an invention of self at one remove. As we shall see below, the development of post-war French noir is bound up in the same tensions and is predicated on the same allegorized, and thus objectively distanced, reinvention of self, via the translated works of American authors. The problem with generalisations, of course, is that they work against individual stories. In this article we shall try to tread a line between the background of a hoax and the specific mechanics of its genesis. In this way, we hope also to tease out the nihilistic, writerly meanin gs hidden within the broader framework, of meaning-making, while at the same time creating a new critical space for re-examining a whole hoax.