Triad 19 of 32 · 2026-10-12 · Difficulty 4 · Shared form or method, Oblique/structural, Conflict
The thread
Galen’s market theory of forgery (‘when those, who offered the relics of some old writer, were rewarded, many works appeared with false titles’, quoted by Lange, In the Second Degree p. 3) tested across three forgeries: the Seneca–Paul letters (Smolak), Chatterton’s Rowley written into the gaps of Barrett’s Bristol history and Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting (Taylor, pp. 52, 67), and ‘Araki Yasusada’ supplying the Hiroshima-witness voice American journals wanted (Perloff’s afterword). Structural link: each forgery travels with an apparatus that is both alibi and tell — Paul’s bad Latin ‘blamed on the translator’ (Smolak p. 228), Chatterton’s Anglo-Saxon glossed for Walpole from the A entries of one dictionary (p. 67), Yasusada’s editors’ note that he ‘could only have had the original French version’ of Empire of Signs in a 1967 letter (p. 79), though L’Empire des signes appeared in 1970. Conflict: Lange, Taylor and Johnson all resist the word ‘forgery’.
The three books
- In the Second Degree: Paratextual Literature in Ancient Near Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Its Reflections in Medieval Literature, Philip S. Alexander (editor), Armin Lange (editor), Renate J. Pillinger (editor); 2010. Deep-time anchor and theory: Galen’s market, Serapion’s pseudepigrapha, Genette’s second degree; Smolak’s Seneca–Paul chapter as test case
- Thomas Chatterton’s Art: Experiments in Imagined History, Donald S. Taylor; 1978 (Princeton UP; catalogue gives 1979). The eighteenth-century hinge: the market made visible document by document (Barrett, Burgum, Walpole)
- Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, Araki Yasusada, Kent Johnson (contributor), Tosa Motokiyu (translator), Ojiu Norinaga (translator), Okura Kyojin (translator); 1997. The modern case where the buyer is named: Perloff’s afterword on the American appetite for an ‘authentic other’
Notebook
- Galen against Lange: Galen says forgeries follow the money; Lange (p. 9) says ancient attributions ‘root the origins of the cultural heritage in question in the mythical beginnings of culture.’ Place Chatterton’s ‘Ryse of Peyncteynge’ (Taylor p. 67) and the APR supplement (Perloff p. 154) on that scale.
- Write the apparatus first: Chatterton ruled his manuscript so the notes would dominate (Taylor p. 63); Yasusada’s editors take ~23% of the words. Draft three footnotes for a text that doesn’t exist, then write the text they require.
- The translator as alibi: Smolak p. 228 (‘could be blamed on the translator’); Yasusada’s three translators; Chatterton’s self-glossing. What does the translator figure license that an author cannot claim? Test against Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’.
Rabbit holes
Links as checked on the day of the reading.
- Chatterton, The Rowley Poems (Gutenberg) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13037
- Malone, Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/29116/pg29116-images.html
- The Correspondence of Paul and Seneca (Early Christian Writings) https://earlychristianwritings.com/paulseneca.html
- Grafton, Forgers and Critics (Princeton, new ed. 2019) https://history.princeton.edu/about/publications/forgers-and-critics-new-edition-creativity-and-duplicity-western-scholarship
- Ehrman, Forgery and Counterforgery (OUP 2012) https://www.bartehrman.com/forgery-and-counterforgery/
- Kent Johnson, ‘Araki Yasusada: Authorship and Aesthetic Expression,’ PMLA 120.3 (2005) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/araki-yasusada-authorship-and-aesthetic-expression/BC17D1ADA80E310926909D1F9E5D186B
To carry
“But when those, who offered the relics of some old writer, were rewarded, many works appeared with false titles” — Galen, In Hipp. Nat. hom. 1.127, quoted in Armin Lange, In the Second Degree, p. 3
Themes
anachronism · apparatus · authentic other · Barrett · Chatterton · forgery · Galen · Genette · gnesios · heteronym · hyperauthorship · Kent Johnson · literature in the second degree · market for relics · nothos · paratext · patronage · Perloff · pseudepigraphy · Rowley · Seneca–Paul correspondence · Serapion · Skeat · spurious · Tosa Motokiyu · translator as alibi · Walpole · Yasusada
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