ABSTRACT
For all its high seriousness and insistence on authenticity, modernism was full of mischief: in 1910 Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and her cohorts dressed up in turbans and dark makeup and passed themselves off as the court of the Emperor of Abyssynia, duping British naval officers into giving them a tour of the flagship HMS Dreadnought; in 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted an inverted urinal to the Armory Show, signed R. Mutt; Arthur Cravan vanished in 1918, no one sure whether his disappearance was a murder, an accidental drowning, a suicide, or the ultimate Dada performance art; the brief but brilliant career of Ern Malley, Australia’s “national poet,” was fabricated by two obscure poets in 1944.1 The prevalence of such high jinks suggests that, far from sharing Marlowe’s ethical sympathies in Heart of Darkness (“You know I hate, detest, can’t bear a lie”), modernism loves a lie, reveling, like Felix Volkbein in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, in “splendid and reeking falsification.”2
