
The “Unmasking” of Elena Ferrante - lermontov
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante
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sytelus
This is quite sad. I know nothing about this author so I looked up Wikipedia
and this is a quote from her:

 _Once I knew that the completed book would make its way in the world without
me, once I knew that nothing of the concrete, physical me would ever appear
beside the volume—as if the book were a little dog and I were its master—it
made me see something new about writing. I felt as though I had released the
words from myself._

I feel whoever investigated this knowingly taken away her art from her. It
isn't super hard to identify someone who has written so much and the fact is
that she never made it like a sport or challenged anyone. It's like someone
with a gun has this need to hunt deer who was just minding her business just
to assert their skills.

------
JadeNB
> I hate to do it, but in the interest of clarity, here, briefly, is what
> Gatti claims.

All these articles weigh in, ponderously, on the ethics of this, _but continue
to spread the information_. Presumably, and hopefully, a report on doxxing
would not include the personal information that was released, but that's
essentially what's being done here. Why? (The author herself seems to be
acknowledging in the quoted sentence that this is undesirable.)

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egypturnash
This makes me sad. Mystery and anonymity is an increasingly rare thing in
today's highly-connected world, especially when so many parts of the Internet
strongly encourage the use of real names in an effort to stem the tide of
shitty anonymous flames.

\--------

There is an experimental music act that calls themselves the Residents. For
years, they performed in costumes; mostly with three members wearing giant
eyeballs over their head, and one wearing a stylized skull. They have been
deliberately cagey about their names ever since they first appeared in the
mid-seventies.

It used to be that if you _really_ wanted to know their names you could, but
you'd have to dig. And anyone who cared enough to dig had a good chance of
caring about their schtick enough that they'd respect their desire to be
anonymous.

Now, though? Type "The Residents" into Google and you get a big sidebar that
helpfully lists various information parsed from their Wikipedia page and
elsewhere. Including their real names. And that, too, makes me sad.

------
postgutenberg
Not too many people venture behind the pay wall of The Financial Times -- even
though it is easy to sign up for a trial subscription. So, hardly anyone seems
to have made the point in this post:

'Much ado, not by accident: Elena Ferrante has spoken frankly about exploiting
the gossip mill to drive book sales — to The Financial Times 06/10/2016'

[https://post-gutenberg.com/2016/10/06/9645/](https://post-
gutenberg.com/2016/10/06/9645/)

Does that seem a fair point to ardent Ferrante fans?

------
sevensor
Ferrante was the name of the (probably imaginary) evil brother in Eco's _The
Island of the Day Before_.

------
6stringmerc
Do I like that the journalist is using the author's success as justification
for trying to cross into the personal life of a person performing a
professional task? Not really.

Do I think using a real name or pen name or any kind of pseudonym is a fool-
proof, legally protected avenue to avoid being the responsible person for
one's art? Not really.

> _Ferrante’s steadfast artistic choice to be anonymous can only be that: an
> artistic choice, made at the beginning of her writing career for private
> reasons that she deemed essential. The cost of anonymity is high; she told
> her publisher that she would do nothing to promote her books, and, indeed,
> they could well have sunk to the bottom of the literary river without a
> trace. That they succeeded, and reached the kind of audience they have, has
> happened, if anything, in spite of Ferrante’s anonymity, not because of it._

Mostly I feel that because the novels were presented as fiction then
researching the "fictitious" author using a pen name is against the spirit of
art. Sharing art is very risky, emotionally speaking, and I feel the tradition
of using pen names is worthwhile. It's not quite like journalism where there
are mechanisms to protect sources who would be personally / professionally
endangered by speaking out, but I think they're closer then we may believe.

The article brings in quite a bit of gender-related discussion that could be
appropriate, but kind of rubs me the wrong way. It somewhat - and not too
forcefully - asserts that women have not had access to writing and publishing
historically. As a studied male, I can surely assert that writing has
traditionally been seen as a feminine and not masculine enterprise, much like
teaching or nursing are seen in modern times. Women flat out effing dominate
literature historically, so I don't really like inferences to the contrary.
Well, maybe I'm exaggerating here but women in literature are plentiful and
highly respected.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
> Women flat out effing dominate literature historically > women in literature
> are ... highly respected

Let's suppose for a moment that this is true. What would be a useful way of
testing this? One thing that comes to mind is the Nobel Literature prize. I
found a list of female winners:
[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/women.html](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/women.html)
and it appears that prior to Gordimer's winning in 1991 which opened some
floodgates, women won in 1966, 1945, 1938, 1928, 1926, and 1909. That's six in
90 years.

~~~
6stringmerc
You're not going back far enough. I'm referencing back to the 1700s or so when
there was education in the English language that was outside of the Church,
because it did take a while after the Black Plague killed off many of the
literate Latin scholars to allow the use of written language to trickle down
to Royalty and others, but I've seen enough over the years to know women have
earned much respect in literature. Naming a couple names seems futile because
distilling "influence" or "respect" into a spreadsheet is fucking bullshit,
but being able to say Jane Austen or Mary Shelley or Harper Lee in educated
company reflects that there are giants in the field that are reflected upon
for the merit of their works.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Is that the same Jane Austen who, quoting wiki, "Like many women writers, she
chose to publish anonymously" and the same Mary Shelley who published the
first edition of Frankenstein anonymously. (You also left out the Brontës, all
of whom used male pen names, and, as mentioned elsewhere, Amantine-Lucile-
Aurore Dupin, aka George Sand).

(Also which "Black Plague" are you referring to here? Your mention of "the
1700s" makes me think you mean the one of 1665, but that strikes me as
extremely late in the 'there are lots of works written in English' game).

