![]() The anonymous literature of Ancient Rome is a species with its own special genius, its own idiomatic capabilities. Still now, the value of a piece of literature seems pegged to the currency of the name it bears. There was little space in the culture of authorship for works whose author was properly unknown and many modern readers have inherited these exclusionary tastes. Even when there was no clear single point of origin for a work – eg, when the authorship was genuinely shared – Ancient readers invented one: it could never just be the Iliad or the Odyssey it had to be the Iliad or Odyssey of Homer. This was reflected in the very way that libraries stored their goods: a ticket would hang off the end of the scroll marking the two most salient hashtags of identification: title of work and name of author. ![]() When a Roman reader pictured the origins of a canonical work of literature, it was typically as the fruit of a real, flesh-and-blood, historical individual. In fact, a whole part-industry of scholarship sprouted up around securing attribution, making sure, that is, that the right texts had their proper authors, and that readers could know the worth of what they read. A literary text without authorship was often thought of as something dark, mysterious, lacking and disabled. Literature for the Romans was primarily the product of a singular intelligence, a coherent creative force, known by shorthand as an author. ![]() If they all left, would we miss authors after all? Or would their departure make their work stronger?Īncient Rome is a prime setting for grasping the power of anonymity, for Romans of the Classical world often acknowledged its power negatively, adversely. The question, then, is whether a work of literature’s oomph is actually jeopardised or atrophied by the presence of the author. The potential of the anonymous work is in its ability to throw the reader into the realm of apparent universality. Ferrante, for example, has won glowing praise for representing the world of women, or female friendship, in general. Not knowing the author of a literary work does something powerful to the reader: it makes her experience the words as an exemplary, representative, far-reaching burst of culture, a spark of art that seems to transcend the limits of the singular intelligence. They can also give rise to other electric acts of creativity, responses stretching from conspiracy theories, to informed speculation, to new ways of understanding authorship, to new works of art and criticism.Īnonymity achieves much more than this spur to creative response, or this spurt of audience engagement. The same goes for the elusive, self-created pseudonym of an Italian novelist, Elena Ferrante: is the ‘real’ Ferrante’s absence making an important feminist point about anonymous authorship, flipping a genuine middle finger to the publishing industry and the capitalist culture of self-promotion, or is it a glorified money-spinner, a bare strategy of generating interest and sales, a joke, as it were, on us? Because anonymous works leave a crucial gap as a placeholder for the author’s ‘rightful’ position, they open themselves to the wild and contradictory gamut of responses. Debate still simmers over whether the UK street artist Banksy’s fugitive identity is a compelling act of cultural critique, or an annoying and cynical publicity stunt. Anonymous works of art and literature tend to rend and vex their audience.
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