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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