Customer Reviews

Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

John Mullan's excellent book is organized around various forms of and motivations for anonymity. As a result, it jumps around in time. Mullan is a specialist in 18th and 19th century English literature, so he is naturally at his best in dealing with those periods. He writes in his Epilogue that he expected to write a much shorter book. However, "There is no possible grand narrative of the changing conventions of anonymous and pseudonymous publication because, at any given time, there are different reasons for it" (p. 286). One historical pattern Mullan discovered was that "Anonymity became much less common in the twentieth century" (p. 286). This recent aberration is of the most profound significance for Shakespeare authorship studies. Blinded by the peculiarities of their own historical era, many Shakespeare scholars fail to approach the authorship question with the knowledge that anonymity was the rule rather than the exception in the early modern era, especially when it came to published plays.

Mullan's book suggests that we are asking the wrong questions if we assume anonymity was an all-or-none thing. Either/or thinking is one of the most common cognitive errors we all make. (One way to minimize this error is to assume that every alleged dichotomy is a false dichotomy until proven otherwise.) Mullan draws attention to "a paradox we will find over and over again: the anonymous writer who does not truly attempt to remain unknown" (p. 29). Until the past century, a convention of authorial reticence dictated anonymity as a common course, even if, paradoxically, the goal was to stir up curiosity about the author's identity and eventually draw more attention to oneself. A first edition might be anonymous to test the waters. If critical and popular reactions were favorable, the author's name might appear on subsequent editions. The anonymity of many books gave way to printed attribution after the author's death. Many writers admitted their authorship freely to their friends, while some pretense of anonymity was maintained publicly.

In our narcissistic era, we project our own wishes for as much attention as possible onto our forebears, blinding ourselves in the process to contrasting cultural practices. Ours is the age of plagiarism, the converse of anonymity. One of our more massive blind spots is for the vast influence of religious belief and practice on earlier generations. Recall that Henry VIII rejected the pope's offer to annul one of his marriages, because he disagreed with the pope's theological grounds. Henry was concerned with the fate of his ever-lasting soul. The reader may perform a thought experiment at this point. Think of your deepest, darkest secret, that you have never shared with anyone. Think of the conditions that might allow you to reveal it. Some of my psychoanalytic patients write in their journals about events they have never revealed to anyone. Could you imagine writing down your secret, if you thought no one would ever know you had written it? As Freud discovered, the unconscious mind is torn between conflicting wishes to keep its secrets and to tell them. One compromise for telling a secret might be to do so anonymously, like the many people who role play anonymously on-line. Mullan recounts several stories that suggest certain books never would have been written unless anonymous publication was the author's goal from the outset.

The psychology of anonymity and pseudonymity is one of my greatest interests in these topics. The reader has to construct his or her own story about this topic out of the rich but scattered material Mullan provides, since he does not address it in a sustained, comprehensive manner. Mullan calls anonymity "this act of creative self-dispossession" (p 28). I would suggest that one important psychological factor in many cases of anonymity is the author's wish to distance herself from unbearably painful inner feelings. It is far more than a matter of keeping one's authorship secret from others. My many years experience in treating patients with dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality) has taught me how vital it is for the psychological survival of some deeply scarred people to deceive themselves into thinking that their worst traumas happened to "someone else," not to them.

Great writers create fictional characters who come to life. It should not surprise us if writers such as Edward de Vere (Earl of Oxford) also create a fictive authorial identity who, in turn, creates these literary characters. Such a pseudonym may facilitate the author's entry into the world of her imagination, the wellspring of her creativity.

For more on this topic, see www dot oxfreudian dot com.