Abstract
Writing under a pen name has been a feature of literary history, ranging from the Brontë sisters to Søren Kierkegaard, says
Unfortunately, there are still many writers around the world who adopt pseudonyms for negative rather than positive reasons, the most obvious of these being self-preservation. Historically, the biggest threat has been religious persecution, which is why even as late as 1770, the atheist Franco-German thinker Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, published his The System of Nature under the name of Jean-Baptiste de Mirabaud, a man who had been dead for 10 years.
Nowadays, political heresy is a more common motivation for preserving an author’s anonymity, but we should remember that when the church wielded great power, theocratic dissent was political dissent, as it remains in several Islamic countries today. Less has changed than we might hope.
The other major historical motivation to adopt a pseudonym is to give voice to those who could not publish under their real identities, most notably women. That is why in the 19th century the Brontë sisters wrote under the names of Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. Although women’s rights have come a long way since then, it is worth noting that women can still not be sure of being taken as seriously as men, which is why the author of Harry Potter adopted the semi-pseudonym of JK Rowling, after being advised boys would not want to read a book written by a Joanne.
It should be a minimum aspiration that we live in a world where no one is forced to adopt a pseudonym for the sake of self-preservation or to get a hearing. If we achieved this, however, that would not render the pseudonym redundant or harmless.
In a free society, anonymity ceases to be a way to protect authors and instead becomes a way of making it easier to harm their enemies. The internet has opened up a whole new set of problems for those who naively believe that the only deep problem of free speech is its suppression. We have seen many people use the opportunities to hide their identities online to intimidate, abuse and defame. It is difficult to know how to deal with this without introducing dangerous curbs on freedom of expression, but it is an issue we cannot just ignore.
There are therefore two types of “dark pseudonymity”: that which protects against harm and that which enables the infliction of harm. But even in an open society, there are uses of the defensive variety. Writers who have no fear of persecution may still dread the prospect of public exposure and scrutiny. Privacy is hard to defend when almost everyone has a smartphone and there are no end of websites, newspapers and magazines all too eager to report almost any detail of a celebrity’s life.
This is not entirely new of course. For Charles Dodgson, the name Lewis Carroll enabled him to continue as an Oxford scholar without the distraction of his literary fame and also to preserve some privacy. Today, however, freedom from intrusion is even harder to protect. So although the real person who writes under the name of Elena Ferrante can be thankful that her sex is no longer a barrier to publication, it is understandable that she (or he) still prefers to keep her identity a secret to enable her to live a private life. Such cases illustrate how enabling freedom of speech can inhibit the freedom of people to live private lives, another dilemma that naive defenders of free speech without qualification are wrong to dismiss.
There are, however, some uses of pseudonyms that are entirely positive. Rowling adopted the nom de plume Robert Galbraith for her adult crime novels “to work without hype or expectation and to receive totally unvarnished feedback.” Her pen name enabled her to remove the weight of expectation and prejudice and to offer her work as though she were a literary debutante.
Eric Blair’s reasons for writing as George Orwell are less clear. In part it seemed it enabled him to avoid the baggage his birth name had acquired as that of a mediocre, jobbing hack. It has also been suggested that he simply didn’t want to embarrass his respectable parents with the stories of his slumming it in Down and Out in London and Paris.
But perhaps the greatest use of the pseudonym is not to enable you to write freely as yourself, but to become another. That was the motivation behind Søren Kierkegaard’s prodigious pseudonymous output. Anonymity was not the issue here: everyone in Copenhagen knew who was behind the work of the likes of Johannes de Silentio, Constantine Constantius, Hilarius Bookbinder and Anti-Climacus, hardly names designed to disguise their artifice.
For Kierkegaard, adopting a pseudonym was borrowing an identity, a world view. It was a way to write about a way of seeing the world from the inside, from a perspective that he himself did not endorse. It might be called an exercise in intellectual empathy, getting a sense not only of how others feel but how they think. This enterprise is even more relevant today, when identities have become freer and more fluid. Playing with different perspectives is no longer just a way of getting out of ourselves but having the freedom to explore the diversities contained within ourselves.
JK Rowling at an event to discuss her books written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith
CREDIT: Fenris Oswin / Alamy Stock Photo
Kierkegaard thus represents the opposite end of a spectrum. At its worst, a pseudonym is a desperate necessity, the only means of writing as yourself. At its best, it is a freely chosen way of writing as another or extending oneself. The world views that determine which form of pseudonym prevails are fundamentally opposed in values. In one, the minds of others are to be controlled and suppressed, while in the other they are seen as places to be explored with openness and interest.