Date: Fri, 05 Sep 1997 14:15:15 -0600
From: George Trail <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: PLC: Hoaxes (forward)


>
>>http://www.poetrysoc.com/place/review/hoax.htm
>>
>> The Hoax Engine
>>
>> Peter Forbes
>>
>> Suddenly hoaxing has become a crucial sign and    [Image]
>> symptom of our society. Or rather, I should say,
>> principally of the cultural laboratory of the        Illustration by BIFF
>> Western world that is America. A recent issue of
>> the Boston Review (1) refers in its editorial to
>> "the emerging field of hoaxology: the study of
>> deception, both deceivers, and dupes,
>> particularly in contemporary cultural
>> production". The issue contains a masterly
>> analysis by Marjorie Perloff of the latest
>> example from the poetry unit of contemporary
>> cultural production: the spoof Hiroshima poet,
>> Araki Yasusada, who took in the editors of
>> American Poetry Review, Grand Street, and our
>> very own Stand last year, only to be revealed as
>> a hoax perpetrated by a white American academic,
>> Kent Johnson, from Highland Community College,
>> Freeport, Illinois.
>> Araki Yasusada was supposed to have been born in 1907 in Kyoto, moved to
>> Hiroshima in 1921, and died in 1972 after a long struggle with cancer. "He
>> has been a postman since 1927, and delivers the mail", says his
>> biographical note. His notebooks were "discovered" in 1980 and formed the
>> basis of a major feature in American Poetry Review (3).
>> Hoaxing, the use of alter egos and multiple personas have been an aspect
>> of poetry for centuries but there are obvious reasons why it should be
>> becoming an epidemic now. The modern world is driven by expectation, and
>> if there is no natural occupant for a niche the pressure to invent becomes
>> intense. And the temptation to subvert even stronger.
>> The classic hoax of recent years occurred in cultural studies of physics:
>> Sokal's Hoax was so obviously the prototype of the Hiroshima hoax, it is
>> worth looking at first. In contemporary American academic culture, physics
>> and poetry are equally items of "cultural production" and subject to the
>> same pressures and critical climate.
>> Alan Sokal is a New York based physicist who had become irritated by the
>> decline in standards of academic rigour in the USA, especially in
>> postmodernist appropriations of science. He published in the journal
>> Social Text (3) a hoax paper called 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward
>> a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', which pressed as many
>> fashionable buttons as possible and was salted with scientific howlers and
>> non-sequiturs.
>> Sokal gave the editors what they wanted to hear and they fell for it. He
>> used many buzz words but the keynote repeated endlessly was "non-linear",
>> a word that non-scientists don't understand but which, in postmodernist
>> circles, has come to have an enormous plus value. Both Sokal and the
>> Hiroshima Hoaxer told their audience what they wanted to hear in such an
>> over-amplified manner the dissonance of error and absurdity was simply
>> swamped.
>> What has all these got to do with the cultural product we still call
>> poetry? Poetry has its plus words too, and the Yasusada Hoax mimicked
>> Sokal's Hoax quite closely:
>>
>>      The pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant
>>      and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity.
>>      (Sokal)
>>      It does appear to us that these pieces [undated haiku] unmistakably
>>      bear the stamp of the famous poet, and Holocaust survivor, Paul
>>      Celan... It is known, from Ogiwara Seisensui's writing, that his work
>>      was read by the Layered Clouds group [pre-WWII] and critically
>>      discussed by them.
>>      (Yasusada's translators)
>>
>> "Unmistakably", "ineluctable"  this is argument by hectoring, the reader
>> being reminded by them that to dissent from party line concepts of added
>> value is inconceivable, though in fact both statements are demonstrably
>> false  pi cannot have a history; it is not a constant of the physical
>> world but a property of mathematical relations; Yasuda couldn't have been
>> influenced by Celan in the 'thirties because Celan wasn't published until
>> 1952 and then only in German.
>> Both Sokal and the Hiroshima Hoaxer peppered their work with such
>> give-aways, deliberately inviting discovery. Sokal refers to complex
>> number theory as a "new and still quite speculative branch of mathematical
>> physics" when it's actually something you do in 6th form maths. Yasusada
>> is described as translating "with accuracy from six languages: French,
>> English, Canadian, Australian, Zelandish, and Korean". A Yasusada poem of
>> 1925 included the word "scubadivers" (invented in the 'forties). There was
>> even a clue to the hoaxer's identity: the name of a friend of Johnson's 
>> Howard McCord  was dropped into a list of American poets Yasusada was
>> supposed to have been reading in 1967 (Snyder, Creeley, Ferlinghetti,
>> etc).
>> The poems were received enthusiastically by many. The best reaction quoted
>> by Perloff is Language poet Ron Silliman's. Here is the authentic voice of
>> wrong-headed poetry appreciation, a man in thrall to what Perloff calls "a
>> blinding pre-occupation with writers' socio-cultural positions":
>>
>>      There's an elevation of tone in these poems that reminds me more of
>>      Michael Palmer than Spicer [Jack Spicer, Yasusada's supposed great
>>      American influence], perhaps because the translators are all
>>      Hiroshima poets... These works kept me up last night and probably
>>      will again for another night or three. I recommend them highly.
>>
>> The cluster of ideas which made the hoax possible include the following
>> tenets:
>>
>>      1) The writer does not construct his poem  the culture writes the
>>      author (Foucault).
>>      2) Where a poem comes from in the matrix of class, gender, economic
>>      power is more
>>      important than the textual meaning  positioning and empowerment are
>>      all.
>>      3) Word like open, Eastern, decentred have added value; closed,
>>      Western, hegemonic negative value.
>>
>> These criteria are highly congruent with the criteria for a postmodernist
>> science: 1) science is culturally and historically conditioned, eg the
>> indeterministic physics of the 'twenties followed the collapse of European
>> hegemony in WWI; 2) science is a linguistic construct and language is
>> self-referential, reflexive, unreliable, hence there is no reliable
>> knowledge of the external world; 3) science is sexed, ie male-dominated,
>> and politically oppressive; 4) vaguely metaphoric connections between such
>> disciplines as psychoanalysis, topology, quantum mechanics, morphology,
>> etc, can, if repeated often enough, constitute a synthetic framework of
>> revealed truth. Indeed the criteria for science and poetry alike are
>> variants of the master set of rules for postmodernist cultural production
>>  old-style production: patriarchal, authoritarian, deterministic, and as
>> charismatic as John Major's underpants; new style postmodernist
>> production: radically decentred, non-linear, changes the baby's nappies.
>> The fact that hoaxes which exploit these rules are so successful suggests
>> that there is a strong element of willing into being behind the
>> phenomenon. In fact, not only did the duped editors read into the work
>> what they wanted to see, the rules themselves have been willed into being
>> in the teeth of all the evidence against them.
>>
>>                                 * * * * *
>>
>> The prevalence of hoaxing in America has a curious wry inverted image in
>> Britain: the collapse of the traditional ritual of hoaxing on April 1st.
>> Mark Lawson has pointed out in the Guardian (4) that this year's newspaper
>> hoaxes were so feeble and few as to suggest that April 1st is another
>> moribund institution alongside the monarchy and the Tory Party. The April
>> Fool requires that most of the time what the newspapers print is serious,
>> however inaccurate or biased. This, together with the notorious assumption
>> of the automatic authority of print, enables obvious nonsense to
>> masquerade as truth for a paragraph or two at least. Lawson says: "The
>> complication now is that stories which are ridiculous or exaggerated or
>> untrue are now a staple of the media". In the land where, according to
>> Will Self, Chris Morris is God (and Cake was the hoax of the year) what
>> chance does an ordinary April Fool have? (Ah, take me back to San
>> Seriffe!). Lawson goes on: "The cruel truth is that we have lost the right
>> to choose when we want to be disbelieved".
>> There is another related reason that the April Fool's time is up  it is
>> traditional, ie it has no logo, no red noses, no bucket shop promoting it
>>  it is just there, like kid's street games and nursery rhymes, something
>> we pass on unofficially. This isn't good enough for the age of cultural
>> production. No logo and you're dead. The Police aren't just Police any
>> more, they're Crimestoppers with a hotline. Even the Queen has a website,
>> for God's sake. April 1st could still make it if it acquired those
>> accoutrements. Write a mission statement. Put in a lottery bid. Line up
>> some star endorsements. Start planning for 2000 NOW!
>> But lest we get too gloomy, this issue was conceived because hoaxes are
>> both fun and instructive. Fake poets may sometimes be needed because real
>> ones have left a gap. Britain today has two of the finest: E. J. Thribb
>> and Jason Strugnell.
>> Private Eye's long-standing Poet in Residence, Eric Jarvis Thribb
>> (perpetually 17 years old), has been the characteristic elegist of our
>> era. All of the dead great and good have been commemorated by him in the
>> only verse form truly appropriate to our times, a floundering free verse
>> that gasps to find anything appropriate to say. The poems ironize the
>> achievements of the famous by pointing out the contradictions inherent in
>> their role.
>> Thribb also invented the great Everywoman persona, Keith's Mum, to add her
>> vox pop commentary  a sobering counterpoint to Thribb's insouciantly
>> youthful irreverence. By combining an old and a young voice in this way,
>> Thribb effortlessly predated the rise of anti-ageism, anti-sexism and
>> anti-classism.
>> Thribb's name is in itself a poem of course: E. J. being reminiscent of
>> Auden's W. H. but also invoking in its consonantal music the E. L. of
>> Wisty, Peter Cook's phenomenally boring character who was clearly one of
>> Thribb's formative influences. Then of course the name Thribb is the
>> Pooter de nos jours, a name of "diminished expectations", a Larkinian
>> bicycle-clip of a name.
>> Jason Strugnell is a typical product of the provincial and suburban poetry
>> workshops that flourished from the 'seventies on. Judging by the internal
>> evidence of 'Sonnet v' Strugnell was born around 1938. His stamping ground
>> is the South London of Tulse Hill and Norwood. By temperament Strugnell is
>> somewhat sluggish, his verse, in the words of his lovingly imitated
>> Shakespeare, "far from variation or quick change". But it is this very
>> dullness that enabled him to bring the art of bathos to a new peak.
>> Strugnell's heroically unheroic stance made him the only poet able to take
>> on the challenge of Shakespeare's Sonnets and make something effortlessly
>> late 20th century of them. Not even Eliot could bring bathos to the point
>> of "I need a woman, honest and sincere, / Who'll come across on half a
>> pint of beer". And the characteristic pleasures of the age have never been
>> more truly sung than in 'Sonnet v': "And yet I still have my guitar to
>> strum / And books to read and some fantastic grass / that Tony got me"
>> (Tony of course is a good friend of E. J. Thribb's Keith).
>> And sometimes a hoax hoaxes the hoaxer. The poetry of Ern Malley was
>> summoned into being to protest at certain tendencies in Modernist poetry
>> (see p10). But its satire was too good and was hence taken as the real
>> thing. For if Ern Malley was a fraud ("In the twenty fifth year of my
>> age") so were Dylan Thomas, George Barker ("You have hawked in your throat
>> and spat / Outrage at velocipedes of thriftless / Mechanical men..."),
>> Auden ("Rise from the wrist, o kestrel / Mind, to a clear expanse"), and
>> the rest of the Modernist pantheon plundered by Malley. Malley's work is
>> pastiche, full of grotesque lurches in register, bathetic absurdities and
>> mock profundities. But what Modernist poem isn't? That litany constitutes
>> a definition of Modernism. Because they're fakes we should perhaps not
>> regard the Ern Malley poems as Modernist, but in their subversion of the
>> compact between between writer, words and the world they now seem
>> quintessentially postmodern. Whatever, the poems are alive to this day and
>> included in anthologies because in sitting down to write rubbish McAuley
>> and Stewart effectively evaded the internal verse policeman who would have
>> made them write dull conventional poems of the time. Let hoaxing thrive.
>>
>> 1. Marjorie Perloff, 'In Search of the Authentic Other', Boston Review,
>> Vol 22 No 2, April-May 1997. This can be accessed on the web at
>> http://www.polisci.mit.edu/ BostonReview/
>> 2. 'Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada', translated
>> by Tosa Motokiyu, Okura Kyojin, and Ojiu Norinaga, American Poetry Review,
>> July/August 1996, pp2326.
>> 3. Alan Sokal, 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
>> Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', Social Text, Summer 1996, pp217252.
>> 4. Mark Lawson, 'April Fool? It's a joke', The Guardian, 3 April 1997.
>>
>> With thanks to Stephen Burt for alerting me to the Hiroshima Hoax.
>>
>