After the Author, After Hiroshima

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.

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.

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...