What is an author? The response to that question was never simple, and it became a lot more complicated after Barthes, Foucault, and post-structuralism. Now, here comes an investigative journalist who thinks he knows the answer. Claudio Gatti presumes to tell the world the "true identity" of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous writer of the
Naples Quartet and other fictions. In two columns for the
New York Review of Books, published online about a week ago, he ostensibly outs the author of the Ferrante books.
Gatti's conception of authorship is heavy-handed and literalist. He thinks that learning the identity of the person behind the pseudonym is essential to understanding the fiction - and that readers are better placed to interpret the novels, thanks to his journalism. Biographical readings have an important place in the history of literary criticism, but Gatti's method is rather simplistic. He thinks that Ferrante has lied about her past and invented a personal account that is deceptive. But whoever writes under the name Ferrante has always made clear that it is a
nom de plume and obfuscated the connection between the writer and the pseudonym; in fact, this obfuscation is central to Ferrante's writings. The charge that the writer has faked her biography in supposedly personal works such as Frantumaglia, which is forthcoming in English next month, seems rather silly, given everything that Ferrante has said about identity and authorship.
There are many reasons why people around the world are outraged by Gatti's columns, and I think a couple are worth emphasizing. The first reason has to do with gender and the second with his methods. Consider the first: feminist critics have pointed to the fact that yet again a man has presumed to tell the world what to make of a woman's work and even to suggest who she "really" is. Gatti leaves open the possibility that Ferrante's novels might be a collaboration between the outed writer and her husband, Domenico Starnone, as if to suggest that a woman were somehow incapable of composing prose of such precision and intensity. Women are not the only writers to have used pseudonyms, and George Eliot and George Sand, for instance, are far outnumbered by the many more men who have deployed alibis on book covers.
But that's not the point. Ferrante asked to be left alone; she explained repeatedly why she found such a state to be helpful to her creative process and wrote eloquently about her reasons. Anonymity is what made Ferrante's books possible. "To relinquish it would be very painful," she
said last year. As Katherine Angel
writes, "Ferrante's books are, it's worth remembering, significantly about women's negotiation of the public and private realm, and about the violence and surveillance women routinely experience." The creation of an anonymous space where Ferrante might explore difficult questions about violence within family life is central to her writing. Virginia Woolf referred to this kind of space as "a room of one's own". Gatti forces open the doors and windows of Ferrante's room; his exposé; is itself a kind of violence.
The second reason why Gatti's work is so dismaying is the heavy-handedness of the method. He does not seem to realize that one does not bludgeon literature with tax records and real-estate transactions. His work, we are told, is the result of "months of investigation" he undertook for
Il Sole 24 Ore, a business daily in Italy. In truth, the column on Ferrante reads as if it would be more at home in a financial newspaper than in the
New York Review of Books (versions of it were published in
Il Sole 24 Ore, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and on the website Mediapart). He writes about real estate records, purchases of apartments, tax lawyers, payments, revenues, and sales figures. These "financial clues...speak by themselves," Gatti says. It's unclear what the financial clues tell us about Ferrante's writings, but thanks to his journalism, we know that the writer is a successful member of the bourgeoisie in Rome, though that is scarcely a reason to intrude into her privacy. What we also know is that Gatti's analysis is lacking in the qualities we find in the finest literature and that there is nothing here of poetry, imagination, subtlety, or tact.
In an interview published in the
Paris Review of spring 2015, Ferrante says, "Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it's not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court." For her, literary truth is connected to language, style, and rhythm, and it should be investigated, if at all, by a philologist, not an accountant. Even if Ferrante had used her "real" name in the Naples books, the novels would not be autobiographical in any simple sense. Writers have the right to frame the characters in their fictions in any way they please: in this case, the details of her apartments tell us very little about the questions Ferrante is trying explore in her work.
Perhaps it was naive of Ferrante to think that she would never be investigated in an age that has forgotten the meaning of privacy. It almost seems quaint to talk about privacy in the age of Facebook and Google. Ferrante used her pen-name for the first time just before the birth of the internet era in the early 1990s, but the Neapolitan novels were published in English only in the last few years. Gatti says that the "books' sensational success made the search for her identity virtually inevitable". Search by whom? Some observers have said that by repeatedly referring to the importance of anonymity in written interviews, Ferrante was more or less inviting the scrutiny of journalists-but that sounds like a variation on "she was asking for it". Ferrante committed no crime, broke no laws, and had asked for anonymity. She says, "Indeed, I have my private life and as far as my public life goes I am fully represented by my books." Her readers are happy for her to remain anonymous, and, for many of them, the guessing-game is even part of the pleasure of reading Ferrante. Why not leave her and her readers alone?
In case you're wondering who wrote the quartet of Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, the answer is this: the author of the novels is Elena Ferrante.
Phiroze Vasunia is Professor of Greek at University College London and the author, most recently, of 'The Classics and Colonial India' (Oxford, 2013)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.