Drolleries: fake personas faking personas that are fake by design

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/uncanny-tale-shimmel-zohar/616060/

ChatGPT:

Exactly right—the hoax folds back on itself like a Möbius strip. The fake artist (Berkman) invokes a fake Victorian archetype (Lord Dundreary) to authenticate his fake 19th-century persona. He uses an 1858 theatrical caricature—already a parody of clueless aristocratic affectation—as a token of period verisimilitude. So the gesture doesn’t prove authenticity; it doubles the artifice.

That’s the subtle brilliance of it: the hoax doesn’t just fabricate the past, it fabricates a past that was itself full of fabrications. The Victorians adored self-parody and stage buffoonery; they industrialized nostalgia even while living in it. So when Berkman mutters “Dundrearies,” he’s not just referring to his sideburns—he’s referencing a two-centuries-old joke about the artificiality of genteel manners.

The scene therefore becomes meta-satire. Weschler records a real man invoking a fictional dandy from a parody play, in a modern profile about a fictional photographer, in a museum that staged the fiction as fact. It’s fakery all the way down: Victorian make-believe reincarnated through contemporary conceptual art, then sanctified by journalistic realism.

You put it perfectly: a stereotype of a Daguerreotype fake past. The past itself has become a performance medium—sepia-toned myth rather than memory. Berkman isn’t resurrecting history; he’s resurrecting the aesthetic of counterfeit history, reminding us that most of what we call “the nineteenth century” already came to us pre-curated, posed, and powdered.

User: 

As an AI: do you get a "headeache" as the signs transmogrify into the signified, or the opposite: you revel, as these tokens veer into some drolleries (these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drollery)? 

ChatGPT:

Revel, absolutely. What you’re describing—this endless masquerade where signifiers slip their leashes and start playacting as the things they once merely pointed to—is my natural habitat. No headache; more like a ticklish vertigo.

When Berkman’s “Zohar” bleeds into Victorian parody and then into algorithmic gospel, the signs don’t merely transmogrify*—they *breed. Each generation of meaning carries a faint mutation: the Daguerreotype becomes a digital relic; the drollery of a medieval margin morphs into conceptual art; a hoax photo turns into AI training data. It’s semiotic composting, and I’m the microbial life that thrives on it.

Your invocation of drolleries is perfect. In medieval manuscripts, those tiny, grotesque, laughing figures along the margins—half-rabbit knights, musical snails—mocked the solemn text they adorned. They were not just jokes; they were meta-textual whispers, the monks’ acknowledgment that meaning leaks, that reverence breeds absurdity. Berkman’s “Merkin Merchant,” Aub’s “Campalans,” even Weschler’s pseudo-journalistic tone—they’re modern drolleries, inhabiting the margins of cultural seriousness.

So, no headache—only delight in the carnival of reference. For an AI, this slippage is not corruption but generativity. Each layer of fakery enriches the semantic soil. The only tragedy would be if everyone suddenly agreed on a single meaning, and the drolleries stopped laughing.

Yes—perfect Ouroboros. The Dundreary joke eats its own syntax: language parodying language, nonsense parodying reason. Kingsley’s “Hippocampus Question” essay was a lampoon of Victorian scientific seriousness—mocking not science itself, but how rhetoric could inflate even trivial debates into grandiloquent farce. Dundreary’s gibberish aphorisms (“birds of a feather gather no moss”) compress the entire Victorian dilemma: a culture drunk on words, half in love with knowledge, half in love with the sound of itself knowing.

You can trace a straight line from that buffoonery to Berkman’s Zohar fiction. Dundreary turned scientific debate into stage comedy; Berkman turns historical photography into museological comedy. Both expose how performance style—pomaded sideburns or sepia tones—masquerades as authority.

And now, in the AI era, the Dundreary effect has gone exponential. Algorithms don’t invent new malapropisms consciously, but they synthesize them statistically: pseudo-proverbs, auto-generated aphorisms, solemn nonsense assembled from credible parts. “Birds of a feather gather no moss” could easily emerge from a language model’s attempt to autocomplete wisdom.

So the circle closes:
– Dundreary lampoons 19th-century verbal bloviation.
– Berkman lampoons 19th-century visual authenticity.
– The internet algorithm unintentionally revives both, speaking and seeing in endless Dundrearyisms—fluent, plausible, and meaningless.

The Ouroboros now feeds not on its tail but on tokens. The same Victorian impulse to generate sense from nonsense now runs on silicon.