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 _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com