1st
Look in the puddle, Narcissus!
To kick off a series of posts on the subject of Narcissism, we will begin by pointing to an essay by the poet Gabriel Gudding, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in Mainstream American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing.” Here are two relevant quotations:
To this day the personal experience of the writer has been so foregrounded that the writer William Gass prefers not to teach courses in creative writing because, as he puts it, “I hate dealing with people’s souls.”
The influence of the Mearnsian doctrine that poetry reflect a writer’s experience has so permeated contemporary American poetics that readers will often brook no violation of its tenets. A July 1996 article in the APR tried the limits of these tenets by announcing to the world the arrival of Japanese-born (albeit deceased) poet, Araki Yasusada, an alleged survivor of Hiroshima, whose “fourteen spiral bound notebooks” were found by his son. When the subject of the coverage in the recent APR “special supplement” “Introducing Araki Yasusada” was shown to be a “hoax,” a healthy degree of outrage was levelled at the perpetrator. The accused prankster, some have argued, apparently created this fictional poet while writing his doctoral dissertation at Bowling Green State University. Kent Johnson, the man to whom many point as the author, quite rightly insists the word “hoax” does no justice to the work itself, insofar as the term limits the cultural, aesthetic, and political scope of the Yasusada manuscripts. The interesting thing about the most vituperative of the criticisms levelled against whoever wrote the work isn’t so much that bad poetry had been traded against an exotic biography (a biography which in turn proved to be false) — the poetry, it is generally agreed, is good — nor was it so much that Yasusada’s nonexistence proved to be in bad taste (having been billed as a survivor of Hiroshima). The outrage, I think, arose in large measure because Yasusada’s creator had broken the primary tenet of our mainstream Mearnsian milieu: that a poet’s work portray his experience. In an era of isolation, we cannot afford counterfeiters.
I will be drawing further material from Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism.
—Brown
