Who came out of the Ern Malley hoax looking worse?

Two Australian poets invented a dead modernist called Ern Malley. By their own account they wrote his work in a single afternoon, cutting lines from dictionaries and from a report on mosquito breeding, to prove that an avant-garde magazine would print anything. The editor published it as a discovery.

That much is the hoax working as designed. The part nobody could have scripted came next: the editor was prosecuted for obscenity over the fake poems. The state took the nonsense seriously enough to charge someone over it.

Look at the incentive each party had. The hoaxers needed the editor to fail a test of taste. The editor needed a lost genius, because discoveries are what an avant-garde magazine trades on. The prosecution needed to find something indecent in verse that, by design, meant nothing in particular. Each acted rationally inside its own institution, and the result was three institutions reading meaning into a dictionary.

I would argue the hoax proved less about modernism than its authors wanted. It proved that every reader, hostile or devoted, brings the meaning with them.

So who failed the test here: the editor who believed in the poems, or the prosecution that believed in them a different way?

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