Carmela Ciuraru Nom de Plume A (Secret) Histor

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.“It really felt like he was another human being,” she told the Paris Review in a 2006 interview.“He’d tell the story and I was the secretary who would take it down and say, OK, thank you, now I’m going to try to turn it into craft.But while I wouldn’t sit there and think of myself as JT, as long as I was writing I didn’t have to be Laura either.”What’s in a name? Everything.Nothing.Some writers find that crafting prose under the name they were born with is too restrictive.It can seem oddly false, or perhaps not grand enough to accompany their literary peregrinations.A name carries so much baggage; it can seem tired and dull.Too ethnic.Too stultifying.Too old.Too young.In such instances, an author may be unable to proceed if he is, say, Samuel Clemens, but feels capable of achieving impressive feats if he is Mark Twain.Imagination blooms.Assume an alias, and the depths of the mind can be plumbed at last, without fear of retribution, mockery, or—worst of all—irrelevance.The erasure of a primary name can reveal what appears to be a truer, better, more authentic self.Or it can attain the opposite, by allowing a writer to take flight from a self that is “true” yet shameful or despised.A nom de plume can also provide a divine sense of control.No writer can determine the fate of a book—how the poems or novels are interpreted, whether they are loved or grossly misunderstood.By assuming a pen name, though, an author can claim territory, seize possession of a work before the reader or critic inevitably distorts it.In this way, the author gets the last laugh: despise my book as much as you like; you don’t even know who wrote it.However petty, such trickery yields infinite pleasure.Obfuscation is fun!“Every writer—after a certain point, when one’s labors have resulted in a body of work—experiences himself or herself as both Dr.Frankenstein and the monster,” Susan Sontag once lamented.Authorial identity can become a trap that causes creative fatigue or even halts literary output altogether.As many writers know firsthand, the literary world is tough: one minute you’re the toast of the town; the next minute you’re just toast.The desire to emancipate oneself from the shackles of familiarity and start anew, under an altogether different name, makes perfect sense.In fact, why not more pseudonyms?In the nineteenth century, the curious phenomenon of pseudonymity reached its height, and as early as the mid-sixteenth century, it was customary for a work to be published without any author’s name.It is interesting that the decline of pseudonyms in the twentieth century coincided with the rise of television and film.As people gained more access to the lives of others, it became harder to maintain privacy—and perhaps less desirable.In today’s culture, no information seems too personal to be shared (or appropriated).Reality television has increased our hunger to “know” celebrities, and even authors are not immune to the pressures of self-promotion and self-revelation; we are in an era in which, as the biographer Nigel Hamilton has written, “individual human identity has become the focus of so much discussion.” This is not entirely new, but with the explosion of digital technology, things seem to have spiraled out of control.Fans clamor to interact, online and in person, with their favorite writers, who in turn are expected to blog, sign autographs, and happily pose for photographs at publicity events.Along with their books, authors themselves are sold as products.Even though the practice of pseudonymity is still going strong, it has lost the allure it once had, and for the most part it is applied perfunctorily in genres such as crime fiction or erotica.Today, using a pen name is less often a creative or playful endeavor than a commercial one.Reticence is not what it used to be.For each of the authors in this book, hiding behind a nom de plume was essential [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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