Hiya kent and list
I didn't really mean to dismiss Derrida in considering hoax and _Of
Grammatology_ is one book I do like to carry around with me in my currently
nomadic life. It was just there are other lines that can also be followed. I
could even mention Baudrillard and third order simularcra.... now again that
suggests the hoax could be a hinge which reverses the Platonic notion of
representation. Hoax's can be fascinating but what are the limits imposed is
another question, again. I have also been playing with performance which is
a theme in _The talented Mister Ripley_ novel and film. I found the film a
let down as I felt Mat D's performance implied there was a real authenic self
underneath the performative self which morally questioned performance as an
aesthetics and mode of life, whereas the performance is real in the novel.
Another poet (son of genet) also sent me something which said that Genet
promoted the fake... a very fine comment which I think about often. We seem
to live iin an era of reversals. Gilles Deleuze reversing Epicurean
philosophy in _Logic of sense_ not that this is something very new. Deleuze
got the impetus from Marx who may have been the first to make such a reversal
and so forth. This creates a sort of uncertaintly and fear. A horror that the
dam will burst and things will flow all over the place, perhaps. Things are
not what they seem or what we believed things to be. Our faith in the world
of things is shattered.... we are left only with a flood of process and
events and the event of the clinamen in Epicurean thinking presupposes the
atom... what a turn around.
Anyway, thanks for your added comments. They were most helpful.
best wishes, Chris Jones
On Sun, 24 Feb 2002 06:16, you wrote:
> Cris,
>
> If the below was written when you were brain dead, what happens
> when everything is working normally? Very interesting questions
> and ideas, and with your permission (b/c me, if you would), I would
> like to forward this on to Mikhail Epstein and Brian McHale, two
> fine critics who have written and are writing on Yasusada and who
> have thought rather seriously about these issues. Would that be
> OK? I think they would have some productive things to say.
>
> MacHale, for example, in a book of various essays on the topic
> coming out in coming months from Palgrave/St. Martin's, argues
> that Yasusada can't really be considered under the generic and
> cliched rubric of "hoax," since the work's aesthetic is inseparable
> from its numerous and flagrant gestures at self-exposure, and his
> essay does a nice job of "deconstructing" the Hoax concept into
> various genera, including that of "Mock-Hoax"-- works whose
> artistic/critical "arguments" in fact "appeal," as you term it, as
> much to reified notions of forgery as to logocentric notions of
> authenticity. In this sense, a work like Doubled Flowering might be
> seen as slipping free, effortlessly, from the bind to which more
> conventional hoaxes fall prey; the "search for some beginning and
> end, some form of closure which is eternally denied," is not an
> issue, inasmuch as the work is openly acknowledged as a work of
> fiction (albeit a most unusual one), whose empirical authors or
> authors will never, as per his/her/their request, be officially
> revealed.
>
> The "beginning and end," therefore, is simultaneously revealed and
> denied, and the work's "authorship" simply requests that this
> doubleness be taken as intrinsic to its very conceptual and critical
> *closure*. To quote St. Augustine, as quoted by Motokiyu in an
> _After Lorca_-like letter to the dead Jack Spicer: "...if the fact that
> they are false in one respect helps certain things to be true in
> another respect, why do we fear falseness so much and seek truth
> as such a great good? Will we not admit that these things make up
> truth itself, that truth is so to speak put together from them?" In its
> gesture of mock-falsity, perhaps Yasusada attaches itself to the
> real in ways that conventional poetry, mediated and shielded as it
> is by a false carapace of Authenticity, cannot. That's a thought,
> anyway, which just occurs to me.
>
> Kent
>
>
>
> Hi Kent and list
>
> You'll have to excuse me as I am exhausted and brain dead and
> haven't
> followed the disscussion enough but interested enough to ask a
> question.
>
> The problem I have with authenicity of authorship is that it buys
> into a sort
> of deconstructive reading which understands authorship as a play
> of
> signifiers and becomes the flipside of the Romantic notion of the
> author
> which it claims to be critical off. That is, it is still just as complicit
> in
> the authenic as the authenic it claims to critique. I will hasten to
> add I am
> not saying Kent is doing this. Anyway, as a result of this endless
> line, this
> interminable dialectic which has no end to the discussion
> something
> interesting gets passed by and ignored. I am thinking of a literary
> biography, Edmund White's bography of Genet, where I felt that I
> was reading
> not a scholarly work with a claim to truth but another White novel
> like _The
> beautiful room is empty_. White raises the question of biography
> and
> autobiography to a certain pitch which has so far as I have read
> not been
> understood (I am not even sure Edmund knows....) In the Genet
> biography I am
> reading about a real person placed in a fictional situation, of sorts.
> It
> made me think of another novel, _Cloud splitter_ by Russell
> Banks, a
> historical genre novel where genre denotes imagination as
> opposed to Truth.
> Autobiography, biography and genre fiction become real. The
> imagination is
> real. The authenic and claims to truth distance itself from this real
> even
> while operating under a critical poetics and prescriptive formalism
> calling
> itself Realism.
>
> Anyway, hope this is not too garbled... I would be interested in
> comments,
> whatever they may be. Afterall, a hoax must appeal to the
> authenic in order
> to operate as a hoax. That is the bind it catches and traps itself
> in... a
> deconstructive reading appears as an escape only to again bind
> itself up in
> it's own claim to be an authenic hoax with an endless chain of
> signifiers
> which block any beginning even when a beginning is always in the
> middle. You
> are left to search for some beginning and end, some form of
> closure which is
> eternally denied. You find yourself again tracing the steps towards
> the
> Absolute and the face of God to again face judgement... back to
> Hegel, again,
> at least in criticism. As Derrida says: Hegel is the end of the book
> and the
> beginning of writing. Poetry becomes critically captured in the
> hoax of
> critique.
>
> Anyway, sorry, as I said I am exhausted so hope you can
> understand my
> question...
>
> many joyous times
>
> Chris Jones
>
> On Fri, 22 Feb 2002 02:29, you wrote:
> > Argh on the below, David. In our "wrangling" I've said more than
> > once that a work like Yasusada has nothing to do with folkloric
> > anonymity. It represents the creation of an author, with a
>
> biography
>
> > and a poetic and epistolary corpus, that includes letters and
> > musings left by his translators.
> >
> > In such creations (Yasusada is only a limited, perhaps in ways
> > awkward, expression of possibilities), the "biological author(s)"
> > may relate to the heteronym(s) in any number of public forms.
>
> But
>
> > to engage in the production of authorships in no way precludes
> > writing and presenting in more conventional ways. We all have
>
> our
>
> > driver's licenses and ID cards, after all...
> >
> > By the way, I certainly recall us wrangling, as you say, but not
>
> over
>
> > the current issue. My memory is that we have been civil and
>
> proper
>
> > to each other when discussing this?
> >
> > Kent
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