Definition: Apocrypha is also the name given to any text of questionable
authority,
authorship, or
attribution, be this
intentional or not.
Explication: From the Greek word "Apokrupha", meaning "secret" or "hidden", from
apo- -kruptein, kruph meaning "to hide"; also a conceptual link to the Greek
kryptos meaning
crypt or
cave, connected to concepts of
invisibility or
hidden as in
Plato's
Allegory of the Cave.
The origin of our modern conception of "apocrypha" comes, as rightly suggested above, from a group of 14 books which were rejected for inclusion in
The Holy Bible, though they were included in
St. Jerome's translation into the
Vulgate. Today its
connotation is far wider and it generally is used in reference to a text written by a
fake author, or about a
fake subject. Perhaps the most famous of all modern apocryphal works are those written by
Jorge Luis Borges, who is, of course, famous for his
reviews of
imaginary books.
Italo Calvino,
Milorad Pavic,
Jacques Derrida and
Umberto Eco are other contemporary authors who have worked, in one way or another, on the subject of apocrypha. Historically, apocrypha was also important to the works of such writers as the
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19c. Japanese
linguist Seiji Koga, the English
playwright William Shakespeare, and the great Russian
theorist and early
structuralist Prokofy Borohav. Apocrypha was perhaps, first of all, perfected by early
Jewish Kabbalists.
The line between
apocrypha,
history, and
fiction is of course a thin and changing one. At least one of the themes that all these writers have attempted to foreground is the changing relationships between the
true and the
false: two entities that are, according to a traditional notion of
philosophy (such as that expressed by
Plato in his
Meno), names for
static metaphysical categories. For example, that Borges' works are
apocryphal does not exclude their being
fictional, obviously. Yet it does not also exclude their being
historical in some senses of the word and according to some
historiographical conceptions of that
discipline. That it is considered
apocrypha at all is probably due only to his
writing style which generally attempts to pass of his reviews as if they were of
real books. Borges' works, and that of other
apocryphists, presents an interesting challenge to traditional
epistemological and
metaphysical theories that construct and organize our
poetics and resulting
texts. In the least, they call into questions are
old-fashioned answers to questions like: "What is real?", "Who is an author?", "What is history?", "What is a valid historical archive?". The
web,
hypertext as a technology, and even
e2 are further breeding grounds for apocryphal texts, with the possibility of
misattributed texts,
nonexistent authors (in at least one sense of the term 'existent'), texts on false subjects that nonetheless pass themselves off as genuinely historical. One can imagine entire
websites devoted to the explication of
texts or
lives or
revolutions that never occured.
Hypertext and
apocrypha certainly do call into question our notions of 'value' as they relate to
writing and a
poetics that may situate this writing. Why are
historical texts put to certain tasks that
fictional ones aren't? Why must
fiction be well-written, but not
history? And, why can not
history be itself the subject of a
fiction, in a sense far more interesting than those
historical fictions one might have read in
high school?
(Note between the parentheses: (these parentheses are becoming a tradition for me, read some of my other w/us for examples). I have embarked on a long project here on e2, which has only begun, that seeks to break apart those lines between apocrypha, history, fiction, and literature. Of course there is a distinction to be made, but I don't think it should be made in terms of metaphysical categories such as real or fake. Rather, the differences can be better spelled out in practical terms, in the terms of the archive. The real question in reading Borges is not, "Did that book exist?"; rather, it is "Did you read that book or did you read about it in another book?". Of course, most of the interesting questions are going to be about the text itself, as well as its subject. The metaphysical status of the subject is an inquiry of a different sort. If I have written anything here, it is only so that I may dig deep into that line that supposedly divides history from literature--it is a line that is situated in a three-dimensional space, not two-dimensional, and so it must have some depth into which I can direct my painful gaze.)