Author of My Brilliant Friend explains her anonymity in Paris Review
Paul Mackin
mackin.paul at gmail.com
Thu Jan 14 10:06:43 CST 2016
"Elena Ferrante" is more Pynchonian than Pynchon. Now considered leading
Italian novelist of her era.
INTERVIEWER
Many American reviews seem to make a direct connection between the work you
do writing—its sincerity, its honesty—and your keeping out of the public
eye. As if to say, the less one appears, the better one writes.
FERRANTE
Two decades are a long time, and the reasons for the decisions I made in
1990, when we first considered my need to avoid the rituals of publication,
have changed. Back then, I was frightened at the thought of having to come
out of my shell. Timidity prevailed. Later, I came to feel hostility toward
the media, which doesn’t pay attention to books themselves and values a
work according to the author’s reputation. It’s surprising, for example,
how the most widely admired Italian writers and poets are also known as
scholars or are employed in high-level editorial jobs or in other
prestigious fields. It’s as if literature were not capable of demonstrating
its seriousness simply through texts, but required “external” credentials.
In a similar category—if we leave the university or the publisher’s
office—are the literary contributions of politicians, journalists, singers,
actors, directors, television producers, et cetera. Here, too, the works
do not find in themselves authorization for their existence but need a pass
that comes from work done in other fields. “I’m a success in this or that
field, I’ve acquired an audience, and *therefore* I wrote and published a
novel.” It’s not the book that counts, but the aura of its author. If the
aura is already there, and the media reinforces it, the publishing world is
happy to open its doors and the market is very happy to welcome you. If
it’s not there but the book miraculously sells, the media *invents* the
author, so the writer ends up selling not only his work but also himself,
his image.
INTERVIEWER
You were saying that the reasons for staying in the shadows have changed a
bit.
FERRANTE
I’m still very interested in testifying against the self-promotion
obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion
diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has
become universal. The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature
without pointing to some writer-hero. And yet there is no work of
literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of
collective intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this collective
intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind
every work of art. The individual person is, of course, necessary, but I’m
not talking about the individual—I’m talking about a manufactured image.
What has never lost importance for me, over these two and a half decades,
is the creative space that absence opened up for me. 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.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6370/art-of-fiction-no-228-elena-ferrante
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