The Final Verdict
The ‘Ern Malley affair’ confirms Plato’s fears about imitation. Through imitating modernist poetry, McAuley and Stewart unwittingly actualised it. The fact that the Malley poems are taken seriously as an example of modernist literature in the trial, and in their legacy, shows that the imitative poet has no knowledge of the things he imitates. McAuley and Stewart took themselves for the ones who ‘used’ poetry, when they were only the ones who ‘made’ it.
What’s more, the Ern Malley poems magnify the obscurity of identity in Plato’s definition of imitative poetry. Not only is the voice of the poet imperceptible in the poems, but McAuley and Stewart are obscured by a further fiction, that of Ern Malley, which continues to operate as a signifier despite its ‘deactivation’ through the revelation of the hoax. In the context of the trial, the punch line doesn’t land, and the imitative nature of the poems isn’t registered at all by the law.
If hoax poetry has proved a point of discursive slippage in both these instances – in Plato’s efforts to excommunicate imitative poetry from the city, and in the attempted legal analysis of the Ern Malley poems, what is markedly different about the latter? That is, how does hoax poetry play out differently in the modernist period? And what ‘truth’ of modernist poetry does the modernist hoax poem imitate at the level of the Forms? Seemingly, despite modernisms tendency toward objectivity and impersonality, we still want our poets to ‘say it like they mean it.’
In the Ern Malley trial, the hoax doesn’t matter, but the non-intentions of the fictional poet do. More broadly, from the perspective of 1940s antipodean legal thought, there isn’t even the minimal registration of the inherent instability of poetry as a discourse. For Plato on the other hand, hoax poetry is of some importance. He lays out an argument clearly differentiating it from other kinds of poetry and considers its potentially negative effects at length. What’s more, he has a theory of how poetry should relate to the law, at least regarding citizenship. However, because of this, he is duped all the more into believing that imitative poetry isn’t still operating at the heart of his system. Plato’s banishment of the poets inscribes imitative poetry in the foundation of his thought-city.
All this points to a persistent relationship between poetry and law. What is most disturbing is not that poetry and law are incommensurable, but rather that these two discourses are absolutely intertwined, each to the mutual constitution and erosion of the other.
An earler version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Antipodean Modernism Today’ at The Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, in 2023. I’d like to thank the organisers William Holbrook and Jeremy George for inspiring this contribution.
