Possum Pouch

Believer Beware

Wow. Here it is the last day of '03 and I'm looking at Michael Atkinson's article, "Hyperauthor! Hyperauthor!," published in the December issue of the San Francisco-based monthly, The Believer. Therein Atkinson re-hashes the whole Araki Yasusada affair of publication and exposure, making nostalgic claims for a lost relationship between reader and writer.

His article looks at literary hoaxes, focusing specifically on a book attributed to a survivor of the US nuking of Hiroshima in 1945, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada.

"Kent Johnson & Co.'s purposes, for example, could range from simple opportunism to metaliterary experimentation, and we may never know them for certain," Atkinson writes. "I for one, would like not to care a lick about the the Yasusada scandal, savoring the spin of the dustdevil the culprits have kicked up but feeling mildly disgusted at the meaningless satisfaction I imagine they're enjoying as a result. But, if you're going to bother to read the Yasusada poems, you simply have to care: despite some critics' old college tries at evaluating them as authorial-context-free works of art—as 'just poems'—the Yasusada verses are not literature anymore. Rather, they're the residue of a cultural trump, the MacGuffin in an intellectual cocktail-party story, the gun but not the crime. Their actual substance resides not in the writing itself but beyond it, in both the deceiving purposes of the writer and the subsequent reaction of the outside world. They are Narcissus works, self-relevant only in their reflection, and irrelevant to all others."

I don't know who could really think "Kent Johnson has pulled off a fabulous coup, a litmag Tom Sawyer-ism," for the amplification of the work is much greater than mere market instability it caused. Clearly, though, Atkinson is right to a point. The work is not merely literary, and it is a residue of something that reaches beyond the bounds of literature. The Yasusada poems were written and published within the context of American military and cultural hegemony. Kent's theorization behind the Yasuada debates of hyperauthorship in essence values the imagination over cultural formalities such as appropriate models of writing and dissemination.

Hyperauthorship is exploratory and expansive rather than static and determined by a number of set forces. The relationship between writer and reader is not as significant as that between the individual and the imagination. The power of language runs according to images that strike us, demanding our complete attention. To be absorbed by strange and unknown forces is to inhabit hyperauthorial space. It doesn't matter if Yasusada is "real;" his existence in language is vitally active within the imagination of many people. There's a thin line between existence and nonexistence anyway, and both stream through us and language is the thread in it all. Yasuada is image, and is a fact as such. You may not find his corpse, but you'll find 65,000-200,000 others from Hiroshima who were minding their business that August. Yasuda doesn't speak for them. He doesn't represent their "interests" or "claims" or their "voices." Yasusada is an American image created to navigate the consequences of its actions. Yasusada is sympathetic to lives evaporated in Japan but he's playful and contradictory to American literati queasy with their own insincerity. More than anything, actually, Yasusada is a sincere reaction to our world now. Again, there's precious little between existence and nonexistence. Yasusada is a medium, an angel, of these distances.