Alison,

I am only suggesting that new dimensions and kinds of imagination, empathy,
genre, beauty (sic!) in writing may lay beyond our reified rituals of
authorial ascription, just as new forms of understanding, in say, the
sciences, are made possible by radical revisions of taxonomy.
But I hope I have no idea what concrete expressions future “praxes” might
take!

You are right that most hoaxes carry a negative charge because they are
meant to. But it’s a mistake to apply (I know you aren’t) such intent to all
expressions of fictionalized authorship. Brian McHale, a very fine critic
with a couple books from Routledge, talks about this in an essay on Yasusada
coming out sometime soon. Related to his view, here is what I said in an
interview with John Bradley, available at Gary Sullivan’s Read.me (a great
mag, by the way, four issues now, which people should see and submit to if
they haven’t http://www.jps.net/nada/issueone.htm ):

Kent Johnson: In April of this year I was on a panel devoted to the book at
the "Postmodern Piracy Festival" at Kent State with Chiaki Sekiguchi, a
graduate student from Japan, and Brian McHale, one of the country’s leading
scholars in the field of Postmodern studies.
Sekiguchi had been studying Doubled Flowering in Charles Bernstein’s class
at SUNY/Buffalo, and her paper is quite brilliant: She proposes that the
Yasusada represents a challenging addition to atomic-bomb literature, a term
understood in the sense of all that writing--fictional and
auto-biographical--dealing with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A
subtly suggested idea in her paper is that essentialist projections in the
West of hibakusha identity may be conceived as interlocked, historically,
with hibakusha poetry’s institutionalization in Japan as a specific genre
formation. And this is obviously a proposal of some provocation,
particularly in Japan, where the whole question of atomic-bomb writing has
been the subject of sharp debate.
McHale’s paper, which he later presented in Finland, is an extremely
sophisticated analysis, extending a number of ideas he recently raised in an
essay published in New Literary History. In it, he counters the superficial
ways in which the reductive tag of "hoax" has been applied to Yasusada and
theorizes pseudographic literary expressions into three different
categories, arguing convincingly, I think, that the simple-headed notion of
"hoax" --used as it most often is in the punitive sense-- is thoroughly
inadequate in the understanding of works like Yasusada.

JB: What are those categories?

KJ: "Genuine Hoaxes" are the first level: fabrications carried out with no
intention of ever being exposed. In this category would be such works as
James Macpherson’s 18th century Ossian, the Piltdown Man forgery, all manner
of art forgeries, the Hitler Diaries, and so on. The second level is what
McHale calls "Trap Hoaxes." The point of these "traps" is didactic and
punitive-- to embarrass or expose the foolish credulity of a certain
audience. In this category one would have the famous Ern Malley hoax,
designed to demolish the credibility of the 1940’s Australian avant-garde,
or, more recently, the Sokal hoax, crafted to reveal the ignorance of
"post-structuralist" academic critics of science. The third level is that of
"Mock Hoaxes," which for McHale are fundamentally aesthetic in intent, and
which to greater and lesser degrees are purposely adorned with signs of
self-exposure. 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. It’s a wonderfully insightful paper,
I think.

JB: In McHale’s sense, then, would the spectral author-figure of Tosa
Motokiyu be a part of the aesthetics of Doubled Flowering’s inauthenticity?

KJ: Yes and no, but yes in that the work arose, originally, through a
condition of authorial "hiddenness," so that Yasusada’s art and Motokiyu’s
act of effacement cannot be separated. No in the sense that Motokiyu is not
properly "inauthentic": The author of Yasusada is, indeed, Tosa Motokiyu,
the pseudonym of an author whose express wish, stated in his will, was that
his legal identity never be revealed. And this wish is of a piece with the
spirit and meanings the work calls forth. What on one level seems
"spectral," as you say, on another is perfectly straightforward.

---------

In fact, the good questions you ask, Alison, are the same ones I try to
answer in a long exchange of letters with the Japanese critic and poet
Akitoshi Nagahata, available at Jacket # 2 (with contributions, also by
Russian critic Mikhail Epstein and Eliot Weinberger
http//:www.jacket.zip.com.au ), so I hope it won’t seem if I’m avoiding you
by asking you to see that, where my views are presented as best I can and
then argued with impressively by Nagahata. I think it’s an quite interesting
exchange, and there are links from that to other relevant materials.

Kent

------------------------

Alison Croggon said:

Could well be, Kent: could you elaborate on what those ethical poetic praxes
might be? The hoaxes I can think of seem to operate ethically in a negative
sense, that is, by exposing by their deceptions, wittingly or not, the
corruption or slewedness of certain means of critical or reading practice.
What are the aims of your own concealments/problematisings of authorial
identity? Does it go beyond the aim of "exposure" of another, either as a
fool (for believing the false identity) or shallowly inartistic (for being
angry at being taken in)? And why do so many of these works revolve around
the atrocities of WW2?? These are not needling questions, but straight up:
I'm curious.
Emma Lew has engendered a fair bit of criticism from other poets in
Melbourne because of her practice, which involves working what she calls
"lines" from a variety of sources. I've had a few arguments with people
about this: from what I could work out, they say that at first they feel
deeply stirred by Emma's work, and then, when they discover that she is
"just stealing" other people's work ("plagiarising") they feel angry and
cheated, as if they're being lied to. It goes without saying that I find
this an entirely inappropriate response to Emma's work, though I do not
think her practice is by any means plagiarism; but then I thought that by
now ideas of authorial authenticity were sufficiently sophisticated to
render her practice entirely uncontroversial. So in that way, it seems I'm
wrong: the "originality" of the Authorial Self is still there and up for
grabs, and not merely as a convenient commodity... On the other hand...
One of the reasons I enjoy writing texts for theatre is how the identity of
author is in many ways problematised by the processes of collaboration and
presentation. Are actors "pretending"? The best actors are certainly not
"pretending": but then, what are they doing? Because I think it's possible
to imagine an authenticity which has nothing to do with identity.
Best
Alison


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