Tricksters and Hyperauthorship

In prepa­ra­tion for my short paper on My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey, I researched lit­er­ary hoaxes. While Ern Malley and Bob McCorkle may have been set in Australia, there was a famous hoax in the United States as well, though it didn’t receive as much pub­lic­ity at the others.

In an arti­cle from Linguafranca: The Review of Academic Life, Emily Nussbaum out­lines a hoax involv­ing Araki Yasusada, a Hiroshima sur­vivor who never was.
In the early 1990s, sev­eral jour­nals pub­lished the work of Yasusada, only to dis­cover that the author was not real. He was con­structed, it seems, by pro­fes­sor Kent Johnson and Tosa Motokiyu, a pop­u­lar author. The story goes that Motokiyu wrote the major­ity of the poetry while he and Johnson were room­mates in the 1970s. He included some of Johnson’s work because it fit the theme.

As with the Malley inci­dent and the fic­tional McCorkle, the lit­er­ary reac­tions around the United States were mixed. The edi­tors duped into pub­lish­ing Yasusada’s poems seethed with anger. Others, espe­cially post­mod­ernists, saw the hoax as “a fit­ting rebuke to those strag­glers who keep try­ing to roll back the rock from the tomb of the author.” Still oth­ers, like John Solt, a pro­fes­sor of Japanese Culture at Amherst, thought the hoax played right into the assump­tions Americans held about Japanese cul­ture, bely­ing the igno­rance of true Japanese literature.

Lee Chapman, edi­tor of First Intensity who pub­lished parts of the poems in 1995, said, “It struck me as par­tic­u­larly con­ceited and cyn­i­cal [for some­one] to be push­ing made-up mate­r­ial relat­ing to the hor­ror of Hiroshima when real sur­vivors and their fam­i­lies are still around to remem­ber what hap­pened to them.” The Hiroshima attack, appar­ently, was too fresh in the minds of many peo­ple like Chapman. It was not yet ready to be par­o­died or made light of. Trickster, rear your head.

The kind of mock­ing and unabashed use of atroc­i­ties to make a joke is exactly what trick­ster does. He works on those things that aren’t sup­posed to be vul­ner­a­ble. He pokes you where it will hurt your morals most and puts stress on the bor­ders of decency. At least one critic under­stood this about the Yasusada hoax. Marjorie Perloff wrote that “there isn’t any sacred sub­ject you can’t make a hoax about! Why would this be more okay if it were about the vic­tim of a car accident?”

The answer to Perloff’s ques­tion seems obvi­ous in the con­text of trick­sters. If the hoax dealt with the sur­vivor of a car wreck instead of an atomic blast, there would be less scan­dal, less chance for con­tro­versy. Car acci­dents are a com­mon occur­rence; they are cul­tur­ally accepted. Hiroshima, on the other hand, was still fresh in the minds of liv­ing vic­tims. It is a source of emo­tions. More than that, the Hiroshima attack is a ques­tion­able episode in our cul­tural his­tory. It is some­thing that we feel guilty about, some­thing we are ashamed of. Our pro­cliv­ity for shame makes Hiroshima a vul­ner­a­ble tar­get for trickster.

Yet Hiroshima is not the largest issue brought to light by trick­ster in the Yasusada, Malley, or McCorkle hoaxes. A far older cul­tural assump­tion is under attack from lit­er­ary hoaxes: the notion of author­ship itself.

It is often taken for granted that a cor­po­real author wrote a book. We do not ques­tion, for instance, that there is a real man, Umberto Eco or Stephen King, who sits down with a pad or at a key­board and writes books. Those books are their pro­duc­tions and are their men­tal prop­er­ties. Almost since the intro­duc­tion of the print­ing press, this has been a widely held cul­tural assump­tion. By “cul­tural,” in this case, I mean the cul­ture of literacy.

But lit­er­ary hoaxes cast doubt on that estab­lish­ment. They are seen as exam­ples of the bur­geon­ing con­cept of “hyper­author­ship,” the author­ing of texts by more than one per­son work­ing under a sin­gle author per­sona. The cre­ated author in any of these hoaxes will “for­ever remain in flux,” wrote Nussbaum, “a ‘hyper­author­ship’ which wrig­gles and splits like mercury.”

Mikhail Epstein’s arti­cle “On Hyperauthorship” deals with the emerg­ing con­cept. Epstein defines the term as opposed to “hypertext”—text spread out over a num­ber of spaces that can be vis­ited in any order, thereby remov­ing any lin­ear­ity from the read­ing. Hyperauthorship, he says, denotes an author that is “not a dis­crete per­son­al­ity but a wave, going across times, places, and per­son­al­i­ties.” To Epstein, Yasusada is an exam­ple of a kind of “vir­tual author­ship” in which “real per­son­al­i­ties become almost illu­sion­ary, while fic­tional per­son­al­i­ties become almost real.” In other words, hyper­author­ship removes the “author” from a text. Like with hyper­text, the read­ing is self-guided and non-linear. The text loses its asso­ci­a­tion with the author, who is no longer nec­es­sary as a per­son­al­ity who gives mean­ing to the text.

Hyperauthorship is not with­out its prob­lems, though. An old prob­lem, one of credit between mul­ti­ple authors, still arises. If we are to acknowl­edge that a text was hyper­authored by mul­ti­ple per­sons, how do we account for those authors with­out sub­or­di­nat­ing one or another? For instance, in Carey’s novel, we could ask who is more rightly called the author of the McCorkle poems, McCorkle or Chubb? Since McCorkle was the cre­ation of Chubb, do we list Chubb first? Or since McCorkle is given the byline, do we list him first?

In the case of the novel, it is even harder to solve this dilemma, con­sider that McCorkle, like a Frankenstein mon­ster, takes on phys­i­cal form. In the Ern Malley hoax, it is harder. It is easy to con­sider Harold Stewart and James McAuley the authors of Malley’s poetry since they con­structed it, but what of Malley? Since he was widely attrib­uted as the author in jour­nals and in the press, he gained a mea­sure of fame, despite his non-corporeality. An open-minded com­pro­mise is in order: all three men are the authors of a “hyper­authored” text.

Epstein calls this “inter­fer­ence.” The idea is com­pa­ra­ble to physics’ con­cept of inter­fer­ence. When two waves enter the same space, the waves both negate and rein­force each other. The result is some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent from the ini­tial waves. The idea works with author­ship as well. A pat­tern of rein­force­ment and nega­tion between mul­ti­ple authors pro­duces new read­ings not pre­vi­ously imagined.

There is yet another way to look at the issue. In the book Faking Literature, K.K. Ruthven argues that forgery or faked lit­er­a­ture is really a clever means of cul­tural and lit­er­ary crit­i­cism. By ques­tion­ing “orig­i­nal­ity” and “authen­tic­ity,” Ruthven seems to say that forged lit­er­a­ture is both lit­er­a­ture and not lit­er­a­ture at the same time. Critic Patrick Herron called this “Ruthven’s paradox.”

Herron dis­agrees with Ruthven, point­ing out that the notion of forgery as “wrong” sticks with soci­ety despite Ruthven’s attempt to decon­struct it. This is because, as Herron says, “forgery is reg­u­larly treated only on polit­i­cal and cul­tural terms.” Since the audi­ence read­ing a text ulti­mately decides its worth, its valid­ity is in the hands of the pub­lic, not crit­ics like Ruthven. In the end, Herron wished to “develop ways to eval­u­ate or appre­ci­ate forg­eries on a lit­er­ary dimension.”

This seems to me a lack of imag­i­na­tion. We already live in a soci­ety in which cer­tain “forged” or “hoax” or “hyper­authored” are accepted with­out much ques­tion. These texts are trans­la­tions, which are authored by both the native lan­guage author and the trans­la­tor. If there is any doubt to this, then think of the num­ber of words Eskimo tribes have to describe the word “snow” ver­sus English. There is no such thing as a one-to-one trans­la­tion between lan­guages, so the trans­la­tor becomes part-author of a text, gen­tly chang­ing words here or there to cap­ture what he imag­ines to be the spirit of the orig­i­nal text.

If these sort of hyper­authored texts can be accepted with lit­tle ques­tion, how far can we be from the com­plete loss of the author? The impli­ca­tions are unclear. Now, an author adds a cer­tain author­ity to a text. We read Harold Bloom’s books because we trust in “Harold Bloom.” Stephen King’s nov­els are best­sellers because they were writ­ten by “Stephen King.” Yet, would it make that much dif­fer­ence to learn there never was a Bloom or a King? “A rose by any other name…”

The entire argu­ment leads back to uncer­tainty. Hyperauthorship leads to uncer­tainty as to the real­ity of our authors and our trust in them. To tie it clum­sily back in, this is exactly what trick­ster wanted all along, to make us doubt our estab­lish­ments and keep us on our toes, always aware lest we be fooled again.

http://jacketmagazine.com/17/index.html
http://jacketmagazine.com/17/herron.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araki_Yasusada
http://www.emory.edu/INTELNET/ar_hyperauthorship1.html

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