| 词汇 | imaginary biographies |
| 词源 | imaginary biographies. This term is used to describe biogra- phies of people who do not exist. In William Beckford’s Bio- graphical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1824) we find bi- ographies of imaginary artists such as Og of Bason. Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, first published in 1886, for many years contained 84 biographies of nonexistent persons sent in by an unknown correspondent; it wasn’t until 1936 that they were all weeded out. Noel Coward did a bit of the same in his Terribly Intimate Portraits (1922), giving us imaginary biog- raphies of people like Jabey Puffwater and E. Maxwell Snurge. Later, he pulled similar stunts in Spangled Uniform and Chelsea Buns. Many critics have been fooled by phony books and po- ems, but the only instance I’ve come across of a critic writing imaginary book reviews is Gerald Johnson, who, according to Martin Gardner, reviewed “six imaginary books . . . perceptive- ly” in the New York Times on January 2, 1949. Gardner adds that many whimsical authors—Rabelais, Huysmans, and James Branch Cabell (with his “distinguished German scholar” Gott- fried Johannes Biilg)—liked to “refer to the books of non- existent authors.” Jorge Luis Borges has done the same in recent times. |
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