Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T11:28:07.020Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Strange Case of Araki Yasusada: Author, Object

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abstract

The essay reads the authorial hoax surrounding Araki Yasusada, said to be the author of poems relating experiences in post-Hiroshima Japan. The case—Yasusada's poems seem to have been written by a white American man—recalls (not for the first time) the difficulty the literary imagination has in dealing with biographical authorship. After examining the polemics the case generated around poetries of witness, the essay connects Yasusada's imagination to three other ideas: first, the collectively pathological memory associated with historical trauma (exemplified by Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments); second, subject-object relations in modern poetry (the essay closely reads two Yasusada poems in terms of their phenomenological concerns); and, third, a debate around the question of “woman's writing” carried on by Nancy K. Miller and Peggy Kamuf and inspired by another authorial hoax. The essay concludes by thinking about authors as historical objects—objects of readers’ subjective perception of them.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Yasusada, Araki. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. New York: Roof, 1997.Google Scholar
Bradley, John. “Works and Days: The Poetry of the Next Millennium.” Green Mountains Review 9.2-10.1 (1996-97): 140–43.Google Scholar
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Chambers, Ross. “Orphaned Memories, Foster-Writing, Phantom Pain: The Fragments Affair.” Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Community. Ed. Nancy, K. Miller and Jason Tougaw. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. 92111.Google Scholar
Chang, Juliana, Lew, Walter K., Lin, Tan, Tabios, Eileen, and Yau, John. “Displacements.” Cohen.Google Scholar
Cohen, Joshua, ed. “Lessons from a Hoax: Responses to the Araki Yasusada Affair.” Boston Review 22.3 (1997). 1 July 2004 <http://bostonreview.net/BR22.3/BR22.3.html>.Google Scholar
Erickson, Jon. The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eskin, Blake. A Life in Pieces: The Making and Unmaking of Binjamin Wilkomirski. New York: Norton, 2003.Google Scholar
Estrin, Barbara L. The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. New York: Palgrave, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forche, Carolyn, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York: Norton, 1993.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Trans. James Venit. Partisan Review 42 (1975): 603–14.Google Scholar
Freind, Bill. “The Deferral of the Author: Authenticity and Originality in the Yasusada Poems.” Ms. Rev. as “Deferral of the Author: Impossible Witness and the Yasusada Poems.” Poetics Today 25 (2004): 137–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallop, Jane. “The Translation of Deconstruction.” Qui Parle 8.1 (1994): 4562.Google Scholar
Ganzfried, Daniel. Alias Wilkomirski: Die Holocaust-Travestie: Enthullung und Dokumentation eines literarischen Skandals. Berlin: Judische, 2002.Google Scholar
Glazner, Greg, and Davis, Jon. “Bring Back Excellence.” Cohen.Google Scholar
Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kent. “Hoaxes and Heteronymity: Interview with Kent Johnson.” With Bill Freind. The North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics. York U. 5 Apr. 2003 <http://www.poetics.yorku.ca/article.php?sid=46>..>Google Scholar
Johnson, Kent. Interview. Denver Quarterly 31.4 (1997): 106–25.Google Scholar
Johnson, Kent, Snyder, Gary, and Paulenich, Gary, eds. Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry. Boston: Shambhala, 1991.Google Scholar
Kamuf, Peggy. “Writing like a Woman.” Women and Language in Literature and Society. Ed. McConnell-Ginet, Sally, Borker, Ruth, and Furman, Nelly. New York: Praeger, 1980. 284–99.Google Scholar
Kamuf, Peggy, and Miller, Nancy K.Parisian Letters: Between Feminism and Deconstruction.” Conflicts in Feminism. Ed. Hirsch, Marianne and Keller, Evelyn Fox. New York: Routledge, 1990. 121–33.Google Scholar
Kern, Robert. Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Logan, Marie-Rose. “Graphesis …Graphesis: Perspectives in Literature and Philosophy. Spec. issue of Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 415.Google Scholar
Mao, Douglas. Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mclntyre, Ronald. “Husserl and Frege.” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 528–35.Google Scholar
Miller, Nancy K.The Text's Heroine: A Feminist Critic and Her Fictions.” Conflicts in Feminism. Ed. Hirsch, Marianne and Keller, Evelyn Fox. New York: Routledge, 1990. 112–20.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Emily. “Turning Japanese: The Hiroshima Poetry Hoax.” Lingua Franca Nov. 1996: 8284.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “In Search of the Authentic Other: The Poetry of Araki Yasusada.” Araki 148–68.Google Scholar
Perloff, Marjorie. “Marjorie Perloff Responds.” Cohen.Google Scholar
Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro.” Selected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1957. 35.Google Scholar
Qian, Zhaoming. Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sadlier, Darlene J. An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998.Google Scholar
Shaner, David E.The Bodymind Experience in Dogen's Shobogenzo: A Phenomenological Perspective.” Philosophy East and West 35 (1985): 1735.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Gertrude Stein on Picasso. Ed. Burns, Edward. New York: Liveright, 1970. 8391.Google Scholar
Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.Google Scholar
Weinberger, Eliot. “Can I Get a Witness?Jacket 5 (1998). 3 May 2003 <http://jacketmagazine.com/05/yasu-wein.html>.Google Scholar
Weinberger, Eliot. “Three Footnotes.” Cohen.Google Scholar
Weissman, Gary. Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments. Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken, 1996.Google Scholar
Williams, William Carlos. “A Sort of a Song.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Ed. MacGowan, Christopher. Vol. 2 (1939-62). New York: New Directions, 1988. 55.Google Scholar