Author of My Brilliant Friend explains her anonymity in Paris Review

[Mark Kohut]

I like all this and think TRP might agree. look what publicity has
done for-to-Franzen, just for one example.

On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 11:06 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at gmail.com> wrote:
> "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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