Historically, it has not been uncommon for writers to publish under
noms de plume. At times, pseudonyms have offered protection from political persecution and--in the cases of women like
Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell,
George Sand, and
George Eliot--have lent legitimacy to to those whose work would otherwise have been dismissed on account of gender, et cetera.
The use of pseudonyms has not been, as one reading
Margaret Cannon's review of
Inger Ash Wolfe's The Calling might begin to think, pure gimmickry. (Related: I'll be delving into my advance-reading copy of
The Calling as soon as I finish
Stet--even though by that time the bookstore-employee perk of the "advance" will be a little superfluous.)
The Star's Vit Wagner gets this and, I think, ultimately
strikes closer to the truth of pseudonymity:
Sometimes, as in the case of Charles Dodgson writing as Lewis Carroll, the desire to evade publicity was genuine. And then there were the many cases rooted in satire and mischief. When Henry Fielding wrote Shamela, his parody of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, it amounted to one anonymous writer sending up another.
Today, genuine and lasting pseudonymity is rare. Most know that Ruth Rendell is also Barbara Vine, that Anne Rice is sometimes Anne Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure or that Booker Prize winner John Banville has written crime novels as Benjamin Black.
Wolfe, by contrast, professes the purest, most guileless motivations, at least based on an email interview with the author (see sidebar). Who can say? Anonymity author Mullan offers some insights based on the available evidence and his own expertise.
"It sounds like a combination of two fairly traditional things," Mullan says. "When a literary author writes crime fiction, they often use a nom de plume as a mark that they are in a different role. But this is usually advertised, not disguised. [My emphasis.]
"To advertise the disguise is a publicity thing, surely. There are a lot of crime novels published. But this crime novel will, at least initially, get a degree of attention that others won't. If it's actually successful, critically or popularly, then the speculation about its authorship might begin to snowball."
"Actually trying to remain permanently concealed is very rarely the motive. In the majority of cases, writers either expect or hope that people will try to guess because that, in a way, is a sign of their success or éclat."
Pseudonymity is freeing. Well-established authors are, to a certain degree, released from the expectations of their usual audience. Back in January,
Maclean's speculated that Inger Ash Wolfe was actually Jane Urquhart (Urquhart, according to Wagner's article, has since denied this.) From Urquhart, readers have come to expect a certain style, a particular interweaving of past and present, time and space (see
Away,
Changing Heaven,
The Stonecutters, and--arguably her best--
The Underpainter.) How would those who fell in love with this kind of writing receive an attempt at genre fiction? (Funnily enough, and maybe
Michael would agree with me on this, the Urquhart leitmotivs could arguably constitute a a sub-genre of their own!) How could Urquhart ensure that a new, radically different text be judged on its own merits? By separating the text from the Urquhart brand, of course. Pseudonymity can re-invest first-time author status in the established author and can give him or her the latitude to explore outside the comfort zone.
Pseudonymity--and anonymity, for that matter--also allows one the latitude to speak or write without the fear of reprisal, and so in that way, too, pseudonymity is a good thing.
Yet that same freedom,
as I recently discovered, can also be a violent, dangerous thing, if people use it to evade consequences. (Think of this in the context of anonymous hate-speech and Holocaust denial.) Trite as it may sound, freedom really does come with responsibility.
When it comes right down to it, though, I think that while pseudonymity and anonymity are appealing artistically, it ultimately takes more
cojones to let
your own name stand by what you write. That's what I've tried to do here for the past five-and-a-half years.
So, yes, while I do still feel strangely, a-little-guiltily authoritarian for implementing comment moderation here, I feel I'm at least being fair. I attach my name to what I write here; it's only right that would-be commenters should have to do so, too--even if that name be a pseudonym.
