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After the Author, After Hiroshima
*Bill Freind *
/ Rowan University/
freind@rowan.edu
(c) 2006 Bill Freind.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Araki Yasusada's Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten
Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters In English. Eds. Kent
Johnson and Javier Alvarez. Cumberland, RI: Combo, 2005.
1. While Foucault imagines a time in which questions of the
"authenticity" and "originality" of the author would become
irrelevant (138), and while Barthes famously concludes that
"the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of
the Author," "the author" still plays a great role in our
modes of reading. Until the early twentieth century, writers
routinely published anonymous or pseudonymous works, and the
reading public showed little reluctance in purchasing a text
whose author remained unknown. In contrast, contemporary
writers and readers have demonstrated little inclination to
do away with the author function in the text. The journal
Unnatural Acts, co-edited by Ed Friedman and Bernadette
Mayer in the early 1970s, provides an instructive example.
Work for the first issue was composed in Mayer's first
workshop at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's in New York
City and Friedman offers the following explanation of the
method:
we decided to have everyone in the workshop writing in
the same place for an extended time period. Everyone
anonymously contributed a piece of writing, which
someone else in the group used as the basis for
composing a new work. The "originals" were then
discarded and the afternoon proceeded with everyone
continuing to write works inspired by the reworkings of
reworkings of reworkings. (Kane 199)
Because the work was collaboratively produced, none of the
writers was credited with the authorship of a specific
piece. Yet by the second issue many writers resisted this
lack of attribution. Mayer notes that
it was hard to get people to do it [i.e., publish
without attribution], because they didn't want to lose
their identity. Someone came up to me. . . and said to
me "Is anyone going to know what part I wrote?" I said,
"No, I don't think so." This was a big problem for this
writer. (Kane 200-01)
Even authors whose techniques actively undermine the
authority of the writer, such as William S. Burroughs with
the cut-up method he borrowed from Brion Gysin, and Kathy
Acker with her piracies and appropriations, earned a degree
of fame that was more than a little ironic. For the
foreseeable future, Barthes's and Foucault's meditations on
the irrelevance of the author represent a distant horizon or
perhaps even an unattainable ideal of a mode of reading in
which the text is freed from the potentially limiting
function of the author.
2. The case of Araki Yasusada provides one strategy for getting
beyond the authorial. Yasusada was born in Kyoto in 1907 and
moved with his family to Hiroshima in 1921. After studying
Western Literature at Hiroshima University, he became
involved with Soun, or Layered Clouds, an avant-garde haiku
group. In 1936 he was conscripted into the Japanese army and
served as a clerk in the Military Postal Service during the
Second World War. Yasusada was stationed in Hiroshima and
his wife Nomura and daughter Chieko were both killed in the
atomic bombing; his daughter Akiko succumbed to the effects
of radiation sickness less than four years later. Yasusada
himself died of cancer in 1972 and after his death his son
discovered manuscripts that in the early 1990s were
published in translation in journals in North America and
Europe.
3. Yasusada would almost certainly have earned posthumous
fame--except that he never existed. Shortly after the poems
began to garner widespread praise, some readers began to
notice holes in his putative biography, many of which were
chronicled by Marjorie Perloff. For instance, Hiroshima
University wasn't established until 1949 and "Western
literature" was never a course of study. Yasusada reads
Roland Barthes's Empire of Signs in 1967, five years before
it was published; with the Soun group, he studies the poetry
of Paul Celan in the 1930s although Celan's first book was
published in 1952, and in German, which Yasusada did not
read. So if Yasusada never existed, who wrote the work?
Suspicions fell on Kent Johnson, a poet and translator who
acted as intermediary in the publication of the poems (and
who holds the copyright on them). Johnson denied authorship,
claiming the work's actual creator was Tosa Motokiyu, who
had been listed as one of the translators; however, Johnson
added that Motokiyu was the pseudonym of an unnamed writer
who was now deceased: a kind of literal death of the author,
if Motokiyu had in fact been "real." Many people who had
praised Yasusada's work now denounced it as a hoax. Arthur
Vogelsang, editor of American Poetry Review, claimed that
Yasusada's work was "essentially a criminal act" (qtd. in
Nussbaum 82). Others still supported the work and in 1997
Roof Books published Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks
of Araki Yasusada. Doubled Flowering clearly demonstrates
that Yasusada could not be dismissed as a mere hoax: in
addition to the striking emotional range of the poems, which
move between poignant meditations on the deaths of his wife
and daughter, to fragments that show the influence of
European and North American avant-gardes, to shopping lists
and Zen exercises, the questions the text raises about the
continuing role of the author even after his or her
ostensible death are so pointed that Yasusada is obviously
more than a prank.
4. For his part, Johnson became a tireless promoter of
Yasusada's work, suggesting that Araki Yasusada is a
"heteronym" along the lines of those created by the
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). Pessoa, who
developed at least seventy-two heteronyms, each of which had
a distinctive style, insisted they were not merely aesthetic
masks for aspects of his own personality. Instead, he
claimed they
should be considered as distinct from their author. Each
one forms a drama of sorts; and together they form
another drama . . . . The works of these three poets
constitute a dramatic ensemble, with careful attention
having been paid to their intellectual and personal
interaction . . . . It is a drama in people instead of
in acts. (3)
For a number of reasons, this works as an especially good
description of the ways in which Also, With My Throat, I
Shall Swallow Ten Thousand Swords operates. The text is
supposed to be a collection of letters written by Yasusada
in English to a mysterious correspondent named Richard, but
in part it focuses on Tosa Motokiyu. In Doubled Flowering,
the poems, letters and drafts are so rich that it is almost
possible to "believe" in Yasusada in the way we believe in a
character in a film or play, but the notes in Also, With My
Throat make that more difficult, if not impossible. Almost
every letter features end notes from Motokiyu, in which
Motokiyu enacts (or simulates) his role as editor. However,
most letters include an additional set of notes written by
Kent Johnson and (ostensibly, at least) Javier Alvarez,
Johnson's shadowy and perhaps non-existent co-editor. This
second set of notes frequently comments on Motokiyu's. For
instance, a letter dated 7 May 1926 reads:
Dear Richard,
What was there before your birth?
What was there after your death?
Who or what is it, at this moment, that is reading?
How can we have the apricot blossoms perfuming the whole
world?
I am sincere,
Araki Yasusada (Motokiyu 5)
Motokiyu's note on this letter reads: "in our opinion, as
editors and translators, this is the most mysterious and
beautiful of all the letters" (5). The first person plural
indicates that Motokiyu is speaking with his fictional
co-editors, Ojiu Norinaga and Okura Kyojin, but is he
himself fictive? To Motokiyu's note, Kent Johnson and Javier
Alvarez respond: "as the editors of the 'editors,' we don't
necessarily concur, but that would be, of course, neither
here nor there" (5). Their note amounts to a kind of
passive-aggressive pulling of rank: Johnson and Alvarez
don't explicitly contradict Motokiyu, et al., but as "editor
of the editors" they reserve the right to do so. At the same
time, some of the notes apparently don't have a reference
(e.g., note 1 on page 32 and note 6 on page 33). The notes
both emphasize and denigrate the roles of the various
authors. Far from enacting their deaths, Also, With My
Throat offers a proliferation of heteronymic authors and
editors in a sort of drama that simultaneously highlights
and undermines the different forms of authority that occur
in an edited collection of poetry. Furthermore, the "ten
thousand swords" in the book's title echo the daggers that
sometimes indicate footnotes. These notes become a way of
cutting gaps into the text, slicing spaces within both the
notes and letters through which the readers can become
producers of meaning along with the authors and editors,
even if those authors and editors are fictive.
5. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Also, With My Throat is
its use of a non-standard and halting English that is both
disorienting and often strangely beautiful. The language
doesn't resemble anything a non-native speaker might write;
instead, it seems to intentionally avoid "yellowface" in
favor of a richly fractured syntax in which the infelicities
are strikingly felicitous:
Are you that man in an ocean's center whom is screaming
there is no water? Right or wrong, you must swim, even
if swimming is not. Are you that man whom is holding a
pipe in smokeness so dreamy? Right or wrong, stripped
bare of its pipeness, even, you must smoke, even if
smoking is not. More or less, Dogen Zenji said so. But
my grammar makes the lover's eyes fall out. (12)
In spite of the reference to Dogen Zenji (whom a footnote
identifies as the founder of a sect, Soto Zen) the section
seems less a Buddhist meditation than a tapestry of western
sources. The man "screaming there is no water" seems to
rework the famous line from Coleridge's "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner": "Water, water, every where,/ nor any drop
to drink." The reference to the pipe echoes René Magritte's
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe."[1 <#note1>] While Magritte's
painting emphasizes the essential division between the
painting and what it purports to depict, Yasusada's letter
is more nuanced: Yasusada both is and is not "real," since
Yasusada-as-heteronym remains as actual as any literary
character. The note from Motokiyu states that the last line
is from Dogen's Mountains and Waters Sutra; in fact, as
Johnson and Alvarez indicate in their own note, it is from
the poet Jack Spicer's 1965 lectures in Vancouver.[2
<#note2>] The text first presents an all-too-familiar
stereotype of Japan as a mystical other, then undermines
that stereotype by revealing that the source of this
"Eastern" wisdom is actually American. The pastiche of
sources in Yasusada explicitly works against any n otion of
authenticity; as Yasusada says in Doubled Flowering "I
believe, very frankly, that all writing is quite already
passed through the voices or styles of many others" (77).
6. Also, With My Throat performs a similar move in a letter
that appears to be a /haibun/, a series of haiku with
interspersed prose sections. One section reads:
(One night, in the prefecture of Kanda, I urined [sic]
into some flowers of peony. The wind came and took my
urination in a small spray to my geisha beside me. "I
liked it," said she. Thus I shivered and looked at the
luminous moon.) (14)
This passage borders on parody: the passive geisha who
enjoys being urinated on, the peonies, the moon, and the
prefecture all seem to endorse aesthetic, racial, and
misogynist stereotypes of Japan. Those elements are given
further weight when in a note Motokiyu claims that "This is
truly a beautiful passage," and when in a note to that note
Johnson and Alvarez add, "Indeed it is" (14). However,
Johnson and Alvarez also indicate that the image is in fact
lifted from the American poet Jack Gilbert. The title of the
poem (which they don't specify) is "Textures":
We had walked three miles through the night
When I had to piss. She stopped just beyond.
I aimed at the stone wall of a vineyard,
But the wind took it and she made a sound.
I apologized. "It's all right," she said out
Of the dark, her voice different. "I liked it." (Gilbert
88)
The fact that the image of the geisha comes from an
Anglo-American poet helps to undermine the poem's
orientalisms, although not completely. Yasusada's poem seems
intentionally awkward, as if the stilted language were
supposed to highlight the absurdity of the images. (One can
also see a crude pun in the word "peony," which further
deflates the passage.) Still, the deflation of racist
stereotypes does not negate the fact that they are presented
in the first place. That's one of the reasons that reading
Yasusada's work is fundamentally disturbing: the texts never
offer anything like a moral or ethical position from which
to examine these prominent questions of race, gender, and
history.
7. As the passage cited indicates, a pronounced and complex
sexuality marks many of the letters. For instance, in one
undated letter, Yasusada writes "Are these bodies in some
letters? Are these two tongues touching in some orchard? Who
is it speaking in the dirty-talking?" (10). The first
question is curious: because the text distributes authority
among so many authors and editors, the letters often seem
oddly incorporeal, as if they are voices (or language)
without a body. Even the sexual images in this passage are
disembodied: the poem mentions tongues and a "vagina-organ"
but we don't know whose, nor who is doing the
"dirty-talking." In contrast to this dismembering, a few
important sections in Also, With My Throat go to the
opposite extreme and offers masses of undifferentiated
bodies. In the first letter Yasusada tells Richard about his
girlfriend, or at least a woman he desires: "her sexual hair
is a whole forest, smelling after rain falling. It is very
dark within there. Bodies in piles are burning" (3). While
the metaphor of sexual desire as flame is familiar, in the
work of a poet who is writing in Hiroshima it inevitably
evokes the atomic bomb that was dropped on that city. Lines
that appear to refer to the bombing are much more common in
this volume than in Doubled Flowering, in spite of the fact
that these letters ostensibly date from the mid-1920s. The
text seems to suggest that for Yasusada, and for his
readers, there can be no "before-the-bomb." The reason for
that might be implied in a question Yasusada asks Richard:
"Would you like some Hiroshima?" Because we're reading the
letters, that's a rhetorical question, and it implicitly
highlights the voyeuristic fascination with the suffering of
others available in Yasusada's work. Also, With My Throat
both indulges that fascination and calls it into question:
those sexualized bodies are "burning" in "piles." This is a
kind of self-conscious pornography of violence, and as
readers we often catch ourselves looking.
8. The Yasusada project implicitly acknowledges that the author
function remains central to our modes of reading. Also, With
My Throat offers a proliferation of authors and editors, but
they remain fundamentally unstable. Yasusada is obviously an
invention, but is Tosa Motokiyu or Javier Alvarez? Is the
"Kent Johnson" who serves as editor the same as the
biological entity known as Kent Johnson, or is he a persona,
just as Fernando Pessoa had an orthonym known as "Fernando
Pessoa?" Instead of limiting our readings, the writers in
Also, With My Throat enlarge the range of meaning in the
text: as a cross-national work that evokes and critiques
authority, the stereotype, racism, and misogyny, the
Yasusada project remains both timely and compelling.
/ Department of English
Rowan University
freind@rowan.edu /
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Notes
1 <#ref1>. Yasusada's "What Is the Diffirince [sic]?" which
was published in Doubled Flowering, also alludes to this
painting: "Is a rose is a rose is a rose the same as Ceci
n'est pas une pipe?" (90). Thus a one-line poem manages to
link Magritte, Stein and (in the title), Derrida's notion of
/difference/, a web of allusions that echoes this particular
letter to Richard.
2 <#ref2>. Spicer (1925-1965) is an obvious influence on the
Yasusada project, especially his 1957 book After Lorca which
claimed to be translations of poems written by Federico
Garcia Lorca, as well as letters to the Spanish poet who had
been dead for over twenty years when the volume was
published. Nonetheless, the fact that "Lorca" wrote an
introduction to the volume and that some of the translations
are actually poems written by Spicer, indicates that in that
text "Lorca" is a kind of heteronym to whom and through whom
Spicer is speaking. Spicer is a major presence in Doubled
Flowering: one poem by Yasusada and Akutagawa Fusei is
called "Sentences for Jack Spicer Renga," one of the final
entries in Doubled Flowering is a letter from Yasusada to
Spicer, and at the time of his death Yasusada was working on
a volume entitled After Spicer.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Trans. Richard
Howard. Aspen 5-6 (Fall/Winter 1967): n.p.
Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
Gilbert, Jack. Monolithos. New York: Knopf, 1982.
Kane, Daniel. All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry
Scene in the 1960s. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.
Motokiyu, Tosa. Also, With My Throat, I Shall Swallow Ten
Thousand Swords: Araki Yasusada's Letters in English.
Nussbaum, Emily. "Turning Japanese: The Hiroshima Poetry
Hoax." Lingua Franca 6: 7.
Perloff, Marjorie. "In Search of the Authentic Other: The
Araki Yasusada 'Hoax' and What It Reveals about the Politics
of Poetic Identity." Boston Review 22.2 (1997): 26-33.
Pessoa, Fernando. Selected Poems. Ed. and trans. Richard
Zenith. New York: Grove, 1998.
Yasusada, Araki. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of
Araki Yasusada. New York: Roof, 1997.