40
Popular Culture Review
Treating De Quille’s hoaxes as serious business also helps raise the
profile of this prolific early Western author.
Although reports from
contemporaries indicated that De Quille’s literary star was projected to dwarf
Twain’s (Dwyer 3-4), the intervening 100+ years have reversed that prophecy.
Richard Dwyer and Richard Lingenfelter have attempted to remedy the inequity
by producing an extensive biography of De Quille (1990), which amplifies
Lawrence Berkove’s excellent preface to his 1988 edition of De Quille’s novella,
Dives and Lazarus. In both of these portraits, De Quille appears as a cluster of
contradictions: a devoted and supportive father and husband who nonetheless left
his family for nearly forty years to prospect and to write in the West; a reputedly
genial and non-confrontational friend who was also known to pick fights in bars
for practically no reason; a dedicated journalist, by all contemporary reports the
workhorse of the Territorial Enterprise, who was fired at least twice from that
paper for being too drunk to work for weeks at a stretch; and, a tolerant and wellread socio-political theorist who turned out shockingly virile anti-Semitic and
anti-Chinese statements in his later life. De Quille’s hoaxes provide another
conundrum, introducing us to a media prankster who was also one of the most
respected authorities on all things Western. Berkove solves this dilemma by
suggesting that De Quille’s hoaxes had “no ulterior purpose beyond
entertainment” (20), thus readers were easily able to separate his hoaxes from his
serious journalism. However, it was not always that easy for readers to make the
distinction, as attested by the survival of many credulous responses to De Quille’s
hoaxes. After all, hoaxes are not parodies or satires. By imposing on readers’
good faith, they create alternate realities that readers inhabit until disillusioned.
De Quille consciously refined this capacity of hoaxes for creating textual reality
into a technology capable of altering the balance of power between governmentsponsored scientists and Eastern businessmen on the one hand, and Western
prospectors on the other.
In my dissertation The Rhetoric o f the Scientific Media Hoax, I argued
that scientific media hoaxes are effective social technologies for constructing
resistance to dominant scientific institutions and ideologies. Framed as stories of
“real” scientific discoveries or technological innovations, these news articles are
actually ingenious rhetorical machines patterned after contemporarily popular
technologies. During the heyday of scientific media hoaxing in the nineteenth
century, the hoaxes mimicked energy-transforming machines of the day like the
steam engine. Instead of taking in coal and producing steam power, the hoaxes
took as their fuel reader’s assumptions about ethnoscience—or, pervasive lay
attitudes about science. Then, the rhetorical mechanics of the hoax transformed
these assumptions into an embarrassed awareness of their instability. More recent
media hoaxes like the Sokal affair, in which a physicist hoaxed cultural studies
scholars, still mess with readers’ assumptions about rhetorical genres and reality,
but according to a different paradigm. Sokal’s hoax, and other current hoaxes like