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Whenever a text published as a memoir has been found to be spurious, it has elicited public outrage. Thirty-six years ago, at the center of a heated debate of this nature was Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird (1976), but, more recently, similar controversies sparked Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1995), Misha Defonseca/Monique de Wael's Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (1997), and Herman Rosenblat's Angel at the Fence (scheduled for publication in 2009, but canceled in December 2008). Along with many others, they became instances of a trend that established the faux memoir as a distinct genre. These infamous texts in particular, however, troubled the public not only because their authors assumed a false identity, but also because the texts laid claim on atrocities of massive proportions—primarily on the Holocaust—and, thus, on the personal and collective history of readers. They were charged with violating the public, causing readers to feel betrayed to the point of associating the hoax "with the ultimate affront to truth telling, Holocaust denial" (71), as Wendy Steiner points out.¹ But in subverting ready-made reader responses and dominant narratives, faux memoirs also rekindled anxieties pertaining to the constructedness of truth and reality and fueled a long-standing polemic regarding the nature of fiction and fact.

Notably, by literally embodying the "fact or fiction" question, both false memoirs and a kindred genre, historical fiction, bespeak a pervasive cultural phenomenon. "Fact or fiction?" reverberates in various forms across contemporary western cultures (particularly as TV shows) and, arguably, corresponds to the gradual rise of public interest in documentaries, in memoirs, [End Page 227] and in autobiographies from the last decade of the twentieth century until today. Perhaps this growing interest is due to a need for reassurance that the external reality of the past, solid and immutable, is still "out there," in spite of or maybe because of its terrifyingly brutality; or, on the contrary, this interest is incited by a desire to question the need for such a reality, and is symptomatic of a contemporary confusion about what is real and what is not. Historical fictions in particular—identified by various names and in different media (mockumentary, psychotic realism, autofiction and its offshoots roman faux and autofabulation, reality TV, and actualism or quantum fiction²)—craft and tangle definitions of reality, questioning the very premises that undergird notions of existence, facticity, and the self. They engage in performance rather than mimesis, seek out new techniques of relating to reality and to themselves, and violate by rendering violence visible (particularly aspects commonly deemed elusive or impossible to express). This kind of creative work with extremity enables historical fictions that pertain to massive atrocities to reveal that the visually violent or extreme is not unspeakable, or sacred, or the essence of a catastrophe.

Several theorists have identified a correspondence between the current historical moment and the allure of "the extreme" as a pervasive international phenomenon. While Dave Boothroyd points to "a widespread fascination bordering on obsession" with everything extreme, noting that "the extreme" functions not only as a rhetorical technique but also as a kind of philosophical figure, fascinating due to its elusiveness (2006, 277), Naomi Mandel and Alain-Philippe Durand offer a similar observation with regard to the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in terms of literature. In their collection Novels of the Contemporary Extreme, Mandel and Durand articulate "the contemporary extreme" (2006, 1) as a distinct textual element of violence and transgression, which erases the distinctions between reality and fiction. Conceptualized thus, the violence of "the extreme" bears particular significance for false memoirs and historical fictions. It responds to Michael Bernard-Donals's concern that "we can never confront the abyss of the event because it is filled with a knowledge—with what we already know" (2001, 1313) in that, while "the extreme" reveals the constructedness of the boundary between known and unknown, its violence seeks to sabotage a circuit system of perception and knowledge already in place. This article examines precisely this operation and argues that the "violent...