Michael Heyward
Auteur van The Ern Malley Affair
Werken van Michael Heyward
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- 2
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- 108
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- #179,297
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- 4.0
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- 8
Heyward does a great job telling the story, though the legal wranglings at the end of the book (takeaway: forties Australia was a horrible time and place) are much less fun than the development of the hoax and his description of the personalities involved. Cliche alert: it reads like a thriller. Or so I imagine, since I haven't read a thriller for some time. Anyway, I couldn't put it down.
The book lacks one thing: a real engagement with the intellectual and artistic problems a successful hoax creates. The editor who accepted the Malley poems argued that the hoaxers, freed from the constraints under which they usually wrote, wrote better than they could have done otherwise: in other words, standard mid-century surrealist/psychoanalytic nonsense. Heyward suggests that the strange quality of the Malley poems is caused by the fact that there was no single Malley; that there are so many different Malleys, in other words, standard late-century postmodern nonsense.
I think the real issue we have to face is: what sort of a literary movement would *not* be subject to hoaxes like this? The neo-classicists were fooled by 'Ossian,' the Romantics fooled by almost everything, and so on. There was never a literature that could not be parodied with great success. But modernism was and is more easily open to it, simply because there are no 'rules' for success in modernist art. This is a problem we're still dealing with. Some people try to impose rigid rules (James Wood), some people revel thoughtlessly in their absence, and the best authors, I suspect, are the ones who can really work through the incredibly strange situation of a high art form that lacks established criteria. I certainly haven't done so.… (meer)