The author's booty

a reflection on the dynamics of the author function based on texts falsely attributed to Luis Fernando Verissimo

Abstract

Quite often we find on the internet texts that bear the signature of acclaimed writers, but that were not written by them. The Brazilian writer Luis Fernando Verissimo is one of the contemporary national writers whose signature people frequently put in apocryphal texts. This phenomenon raises two questions that this article attempts to answer. Firstly, how can we explain the existence and productivity of a fake signature that associates a text with Verissimo? Secondly, what would be the motivation behind someone putting the name Luis Fernando Verissimo as the mark of their own or someone else’s text? The hypotheses we present as answers stem from Michel Foucault’s concept of author function and Antoine Compagnon’s elaboration on performance and mimesis. Based on these concepts, the fake signatures phenomenon would be an act of self-valuation regarding a text that demands others recognize the same amount of value in this text.