The Truth Behind K. Ungeheuer

So the truth is that K. Ungeheuer never existed, and this entire website is a work of fiction. The photos are of my amazing grandfather Thornton V. Sigler and other family members.

Back in the 1990s, this website started as a place for my short fiction, but I wanted to pull all the stories together in some fashion. I've always been fascinated with the concepts of linguistic context and metafiction, and K. Ungeheuer became the glue I needed.

The Importance of Context

Back in high school, my English teacher asked our class to write an essay on a story by Hemingway. After we had handed in our papers, the teacher revealed that Hemingway had never written the story. A friend of hers had written it in the style of Hemingway.

Learning this, we were asked to write a second paper now that we knew the truth about the story's authorship. Most of us found that our opinion and analysis of the story had changed to at least some degree. Many were mad that they had been "tricked" by the professor (more on "tricking" readers in a couple of paragraphs), but what the lesson taught me was that what you know about the author affects the fiction itself. After learning the actual authorship of the "Hemingway" story, the work was now being read under an entirely different light, a different time, a different context. Why shouldn't that affect the story itself?

This shouldn't be a surprise. Meaning is the daughter of context. Words take on a deeper meaning when put in context with other words. Words help define each other. As an elementary example, what does the word 'bear' mean? Well, it depends. Take these two sentences:

I hope this tree will bear fruit.
We saw a bear while camping.

Here 'bear' is a homonym. The meaning changes from one sentence to the other. What about in these two sentences?

The bear blocked the only route of escape.
The bear was led into the ring dressed in a clown suit.

'Bear' has the same literal meaning in each, but the connotation certainly changes with the context of the sentence. I'd much rather meet the second bear over the first.

Context and its effect on meaning isn't just a game that words play amongst themselves. When we talk about a piece of writing, we also talk about its historical context. The world around the book constantly changes, building a history as the text ages. The author, their life, and the times they lived in are part of this historical context. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse. As my father once said, "There is a story about this story."

Knowing what was going on in the world at the time that a "A Modest Proposal" was written helps the reader appreciate the work. The author, his life and times are part of this historical context. Knowing a little bit about Johnathan Swift will undoubtedly deepen the meaning further. Learning more about H.P. Lovecraft's personal history and racist beliefs deeply affects reading of his work for many.

The Hoax

What I learned from all of this was that it's possible to change the reader's experience with fiction by playing with their assumptions. There's an uglier term for this; a hoax.

Hoaxes have a long and rich history. Psalmanazar was able to convince hundreds of thousands that he was a cannibal prince from Formosa through a book translated into English, French, Latin and German and an "educational" roadshow. Han van Meegeren convinced the world that he had discovered previously unseen paintings by Vermeer. Literary hoaxes like The English Mercurie seem even more likely than any other type.

Fiction writers, already versed in the art of storytelling, might be excused for playing in hoaxes. It seems a logical step to take when your reader has probably (hopefully) already suspended disbelief. They want to believe. After all, every author is telling a lie in the strictest sense, and the line between a story and a hoax is very gray.

Books which are a part of our literary canon walk that line very closely. In the preface to Robinson Crusoe, Defoe says "The editor believes the history to be a just history of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it." Jack Lynch covers this history in his paper I Believe Hardly a Word of It: Fact, Fiction, and Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Narratives.

“...what, in short, constitutes a fake. So let's see: each faker is a liar, who disseminates extended falsehoods, who represents his work as something it is not, and who tries to deceive his audience about the nature of his text. So far, so good. But here a problem arises: notice that I've described not only Psalmanazar and Macpherson, but also Defoe and Richardson. According to these criteria, our beloved novelists are guilty of the same crimes as the mendacious finks: their works are filled with lies, they represent them as something they're not, and they try to deceive their audience about the nature of their texts. The conclusion is inescapable: the eighteenth-century novelists are just as bad as the forgers.”

We could throw the baby out with the bath water and take the same position as Plato (and many after him) when he said of poets in The Republic, "I condemn them because they tell lies." Or perhaps we should agree with Picasso who said, "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand."

The Vulnerable Internet

We should all know that the internet is ripe for hoaxes in this age of "Fake News" and rampant conspiracy theories. The internet has very specific features that lends itself directly to the hoax. The main one is that information presented on the internet has very little connection with the physical world. In other words, it lacks context.

When Han van Meegeren faked a previously "undiscovered" Vermeer he went through an arduous process of recreating the pigments and canvas that experts would expect a Vermeer to be made of. How many people would be fooled by a website claiming to have found a new Vermeer, with nothing more than a picture of the painting and some testimonials of "experts" as to its authenticity?

The internet is a context free forest of 0's and 1's that can be made to look like anything you might want. The fallout of this is already being felt worldwide. Mailboxes are filled daily with false promises of millions of dollars, cries for help for children that never existed and terrible "truths" about celebrities and politicians.

Hackers have inserted fake stories into well respected news sites and taken advantage of confirmation bias on social networks. Information Security expert Bruce Schneier contended over two decades ago that semantic attacks on the internet are the next wave of information warfare and history has proven him correct. Back in 2000 he described the difference in the ease of propagating a hoax via the internet versus traditional methods:

“In the book "How to Play With Your Food," Penn and Teller included a fake recipe for "Swedish Lemon Angels," with ingredients such as five teaspoons of baking soda and a cup of fresh lemon juice, designed to erupt all over the kitchen. They spent considerable time explaining how you should leave their book open to the one fake page, or photocopy it and sneak it into friends' kitchens. It's much easier to put it up on a recipe website and wait for search engines to index it.”

The Birth of an Author

So, back to the 1990s. The seeds for Ungeheuer were rattling around my brain, the ground that is the internet was fertile for this sort of hoax, and Ungeheuer was born. The stories took on a new color as I fleshed out his history.

Over the years I found discussions of his work online. Occasionally, author lists would nestle my dear Ungeheuer somewhere between the likes of Mark Twain and Jules Verne, and I was once honored to have a podcaster record their narration of one of Ungeheuer’s stories.

I wrote this post expressly to explain the truth about Ungeheuer because, at some point, I think the real difference between a hoax and fiction is the motivation behind it. It's about how you treat your readers. I hope the proper context helps you enjoy the fiction of Ungeheuer even more.