>Rather than serving some ulterior agenda, as is the case with
>the first two categories, he argues that in mock-hoaxes "issues of
>authenticity and inauthenticity are elevated to the level of poetic raw
>materials...Mock-hoax poems make art out of inauthenticity." He places the
>work of Fernando Pessoa, Thomas Chatterton, and Yasusada in this category.
>But for McHale these categories are also made porous by contingencies of
>time and place, and works that through intention fit in one category can
>slide, through reception, into another.
Thanks Kent - I'll look up that interview later. But this is
interesting. It makes me wonder, given Pessoa's heroicisation of
Shakespeare, whether Shakespeare might also be thought of as a "mock
hoax". Pessoa's heteronyms strike me as most certainly not "hoaxes",
mock or not, whatever else they are: the products perhaps of a radical
loneliness? Pessoa reverenced Shakespeare because he was so many,
something Pinter also says in that essay The Peopled Wound: so many and
so invisible, so the identity Shakespeare (whom I think Keats was also
thinking of when he said that a poet is the "most unpoetical thing you
can think of") is in fact a label used to cover or reveal a troubling and
ambiguous absence.
Which is only to say, that many of these questions originate from the
practice of theatre, and for that reason among others I think it does
poetry good to get out of the conference room and into the pragmatic and
unromantic and somewhat brutal (but also - at its most interesting -
idealistic and selfless and joyous) place that is real theatre, not a
metaphor of it - that is, not an imaginary stage of an Author's identity
or ego, but a stage of splintering/splintered selves where the Author and
the Text remain uncertain and unstable and strangely intractable,
existing only through the mediation of others.
In even the most conventional presentation of a play, these questions are
(or should be) unremarkable: who authors a performance? The one who
writes the text? the one who performs? the one who directs and shapes the
performance? the one who designs the stage and the lights, and therefore
the performance's relationship to its audience? The audience? (It's not
a trick question: the answer is: all of the above, and more - you can
tell unsatisfactory theatre by its easy solution of these ambiguities, by
its placing say of the Author or an Actor or Director as the legitimising
source, rather than the "glowing genius of the ensemble").
Which is not to say that there are not theatre writers with as much stake
in the romantic notion of self as any poet: but it's much more difficult
to sustain, requiring a certain violence towards the aesthetics of
theatre itself; and Shakespeare was most definitely not one of them. As
for the "legal self" - that's another question altogether - it's also the
self that gets _paid_, which mattered as much to S as any others of us
without jobs in the academy to shelter us from the wolf -
Best
Alison
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