David, you raise important points. Your concerns are very similar to some of
those expressed by Akitoshi Nagahata in my extended exchange with him at
Jacket #2. So close, in fact, that I will point to my comments there in
response, as they are easily accessible. Maybe you'd like to take a look.
Also, this forthcoming essay in Angelaki touches on issues of the ethics of
poetic identity, in particular, Bill Freind's defense of Forrest Gander's
Nation essay on Yasusada, where Gander argues, contra various critics, that
Yasusada constitutes an ethical gesture of unusual empathic order. I have a
long interview soon coming out (with Freind, in fact), wherein I try to
discuss the crucial issues you raise. All in all, I think the "problem" you
pose has to be looked at in light of concrete examples-- there is no
abstract, over-arching good or bad to the matter. It's a complicated issue
which cannot be wrapped up with simplistic terms like "hoax" or "forgery",
for example.
Now in response to Michael's comments.
Michael said: "Actually, he didn't "saddle new ... poets with selves" ~ as
you have read, he
allowed the multiple personalities to emerge: he was releasing the
potentiality in himself for high-grade hysteria coupled with dissociation on
a very specialised verbal but not psycho-socially interactive level (i.e. he
kept it to poetry writing), creating something like the personae of Pound's
early poems or the different roles played by Peter Sellers in one film
(didn't you mention one a few e-mails back?"
I respond:
Well, yes and no here, Michael. I wouldn't use the word "saddle" again-- I
was picking up on David's use of it-- an ill-advised rhetorical tit for tat
on my part. However, it is the case that Pessoa (he talks aobut this
himself)
wrote an initial body of writing for each of his heteronyms and *then*
created the detailed biographies to go with the writing. In a certain
"practical" sense, such biographies did create a "saddling" constraint for
Pessoa as the heteronyms continued to expand their ouvres. A kind of
psychological, stylistic, theoretical exoskeleton (albeit, yes, very soft
and pliant) was in place, and Pessoa had
them write within it (with Caeiro this is less the case, as most of his work
was produced in one fell swoop; for major heteronyms like de Campos or
Soares, however, who produce their work and *lives* over an extended period
of time, the "psychological body" of the poet is something important to keep
in mind). And I would say that Pessoa's heteronyms are *very* different, on
a
wholly different aesthetic and psychic plane than Pound's personae. Pound
wrote poems by Ezra Pound as "others", and these were almost always discrete
and "didactic-aesthetic" occasions. Pessoa's heteronyms (for Pessoa) are
wholly different poets, in the process of presenting their separate
realities, and as real (from the standpoint of their poetic existence) as
Pessoa himself.
One more dissent: It is not correct to say that Pessoa "kept" his
"disassociative intercations" to "poetry writing". The heteronyms wrote
prose, as well-- letters and criticism, often commenting on each other's
work. The "semi-heteronym," Bernardo Soares, wrote exclusively in prose--
his notational work collected in The Book of Disquietude. So heteronymity
for Pessoa, you see, if not an isolate poetic moment, as the "persona" is
for Pound, again...
And as to those necessary differences between self, persona, mask: Well, for
some poets maintaining such distinctions is important, obviously. For
others,
like Pessoa, it's a more
complicated negotiation. The hive of "personae" can be soemthing much more
than just
another "device"-- it can be the very "self" (if such a thing exists, with
nod to
Erminia)-- a reality that can't be avoided
and through which one arrives at other realities.
Kent
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