There is to be an odd little celebration this month, in Folkestone of all places, to commemorate its visitation by, and subsequent nuptials therein of, Samuel Beckett.
Beckett married his long-term partner, as we now know due to a series of excellent biographies, in curious circumstances. He was embroiled in a serious relationship with a BBC producer at the time.
Beckett with Mme Beckett
Ostensibly, marrying Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in March 1961 was intended to achieve the aim of ensuring her inheritance of his copyrights. As it happened, she ended up dying about six months before him, in 1989.
The curiosity pertains to Beckett’s decision to marry after nearly three decades of relationship, at the very moment when he was most involved in a separate relationship with an entirely different woman.
The organisers of the festival in Folkestone aim to give voice to those surrounding the events of the marriage, including the perspective of a journalist thrown off the scent, and a witness to the wedding itself.
It’s fun, original and embedded theatre, doing what theatre can do best, which is dramatise our stories back to ourselves. Samuel Beckett’s mysterious marriage took place in Folkestone, and it is great that they can now include this odd intrusion from the world of absurdist theatre and continenal intellectuals as one of their own stories, for it is that too.
It’s especially gratifying to see oneself mentioned, not only in Chiara Crosignani’s conference report about “Fantastic Religions and Where to Find Them”, from Genzano a couple of years ago, but also in Derek Thiess’s imaginative and very current article about preppers and the apocalypse.
As always, there’s a bumper smorgasbord of non-realist writing to be enjoyed, from the Gothic to SF, from Britain’s haunted forests to Stanislaw Lem. Over 280 pages in fact!
I’m personally saving up, like a child hoarding his easter egg, their review of the Korean SF anthology Readymade Bodhisattva for after I finish reading the collection.
Fantastika is always an excellent read, and in these days of outrageous access charges for academic research, it’s delightfully free to read.
Elena Ferrante has probably been the biggest literary fiction phenomenon of the 21st century to date. Translated into multiple languages, prize-winning and universally lauded, Ferrante’s work, especially the Neapolitan quartet of novels, have generated intense curiosity about the notoriously reclusive and pseudonymous author.
Attempts to ‘out’ Ferrante have been made almost from the beginning, but the push in recent years to examine Ferrante’s work stylometrically and algorithmically has apparently closed in on a single suspect. And he’s a man.
The Neapolitan Quartet, in Italian paperback editions.
Lithub has a decent precis of how this came about, which I won’t reprise too much here. Suffice to say that enterprising and persistent scholars used a series of methods to compare the style of Ferrante’s writing throughout her career, and then sought to find close similarities with any other writers, including some, such as the prime suspect Anita Raja, a literary translator.
What these various scholars with their various stylometric methods discovered was curious – Ferrante’s style had a number of different eras or phases, and the changes between them mapped almost exactly onto similar stylistic developments in the work of another Italian author – Domenico Starnone, who happened to also be Raja’s husband.
It now appears that Starnone may have adopted the persona of Ferrante while writing in a female voice for a lesser known publishing house, while retaining his own male name for novels with a more prestigious publisher. Furthermore, Starnone’s fiction, which apparently like Ferrante’s also deals with issues of class and identity while growing up in Campania, is unknown outside of Italy, whereas the Ferrante novels have proven a global success, especially in the ever more female readerships of the Anglophone world.
There are questions of authenticity here, in terms of the validity of men writing from female perspectives, but there is also surely some remit for literary creativity, as well as the extremely lengthy tradition, extended to almost all historical authors in the Western tradition (with the possible exception of Jane Austen), of authors writing from the perspective of characters irrespective of gender.
If we are to deem gender relevant here, perhaps the more intriguing issue is the relative successes of Starnone and Ferrante nationally and internationally, against the backdrop of an ever more female reading public. If Ferrante does transpire to be Starnone, as seems likely now, he would not be the first white male author in recent times who sought to pass himself off as something he was not.
There was, for example, a lot of controversy in particular over the case of Michael Derrick Hudson, a poet who in 2015 won an award for writing one of the best poems in America that year. Having had the same poem rejected over 40 times, he submitted it under a female Chinese name – Yi-Fen Chou, and subsequently it was accepted.
Adopting such personae and noms-de-plume seems a rather high-stakes gamble for white male authors, who are not exactly unprivileged in the international publishing world even if the tide has begun to turn away towards amplifying the voices of a wider and more diverse range of writers. After all, the ramifications of being found out in ‘subterfuge’ of this nature are potentially career-ending.
Nevertheless, the editor who included Hudson’s poem in that anthology, even after discovering the truth, acknowledged that the poem itself retained its quality even when the provenance had shifted. It did not, after all, trade heavily upon Chinese cultural attributes for its strength. Returning to Ferrante, this is a more fraught concern, as the Ferrante novels are written from female perspectives, feature female lives as their central thematic concern, and focus heavily on how female friendships and relationships are constructed and deconstructed.
I offer the following suggestion, therefore: if millions of people have enjoyed Ferrante’s novels, does it matter who wrote them? The figure of Ferrante has been throughout a somewhat shadowy one anyhow. As with notorious recluse Thomas Pynchon, Ferrante has largely let the novels speak for the author.
The more concerning thing arising from this artful piece of academic detective work is the eradication of pseudonymity, which could have significant ramifications online as well as elsewhere. When we did a conference on invented languages for Ponying the Slovos in 2016, we heard a paper by Professor Patrick Juola, a forensic linguist who had developed an algorithmic methodology for identifying authorship in any language. His paper for our conference demonstrated how he could detect whether Tolkien or a fan had written any particular poem in Tolkien’s invented Elvish language.
And here we are a few years on and similar technology has outed Starnone as Elena Ferrante. Perhaps in another year or two, it will be exposing the identities of offensive posters and tweeters online. A lot of people may welcome such a world, a world in which the current tendency towards extreme opinions is fuelled by a sense of security offered by pseudonymity. But it would have other ramifications too, in terms of whistleblowing for one.
It may not matter whether Elena Ferrante is a man or not. But it may well matter a lot that we now live in a world where it is impossible for him to keep that hidden any longer.
A friend was complaining about struggling with writing a section of work. I upchucked my maudlin all over their social media and now feel shame, so instead I’m relocating it to my own space for self-indulgence. You’re welcome.
Me, most days.
Writing is truly Sysiphean. You spend literal aeons of your life doing it, and when it’s done all you can see are the errors, lit up like neon.
There’s always something. It doesn’t flow. You missed part of the argument. You didn’t know about that one guy who wrote the thing. There’s always something for Reviewer Number Two (accursed be thy name) to crank on about.
Right now, I’m two weeks late with a draft that is already 3,000 words over, and still half a chapter to go. I’m writing at lightspeed and it still feels like swimming through treacle with all limbs bound.
And when it IS done, I will hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, because of the pain of writing it, and the acute awareness of its flaws. But yet I’ll still be upset when Reviewer Number Two gets going.
And I’ll still want people to read it, though I’ll never want to see it ever again (yet will be destined to, repeatedly, when the rounds of editing commence.)
Sometimes I think I should take up something easier on the soul.
Into the Seventies and at the midway point of the series on Burgess’s invented languages over at Ponying the Slovos.
What did people speak before Indo-European languages developed?
How many invented languages can you fit into a small novella that’s mostly poems?
I’ve attempted to answer those questions there.
Bonus: if you ever wondered what 19th century Romanescu dialect sonnets sound like when translated into Mid-Ulster Hiberno-English, I got your back there too.
Into what, I hear you ask? Into the actual dialect of the North of Ireland. You may have heard tell of Ulster-Scots. It too is an invented language, created (and not the first either nor the last) for political reasons. One day I’ll tell that tale too.
The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction has produced a fascinating special edition volume focused on what they term Middle Eastern SF (though the inclusion of an article on Iranian ‘theory fiction’ writer Reza Negarestani suggests a somewhat expansive understanding of Middle East).
It’s not especially focused on religious futurism, despite the inclusion of a review of Jorg Determann’s book (my own review of which is pending publication in the next edition of Foundation.)
Nevertheless, there is much of interest here for those curious to know more about Arab futurism, Gulf futurism and the interactions between Israeli and Palestinian SF especially. Highly recommended.
The third part of the series on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages is now live over at Ponying the Slovos, featuring what just might be Burgess’s most significant novel, the weird, wonderful and intensely Structuralist riddle that is M/F.
In my book on Anthony Burgess, I pay M/F a lot of attention, because I think it’s a very misunderstood novel and also one that is extremely important in Burgess’s own development as a writer. It’s a novel about riddles, based largely on Claude Levi-Strauss’s Structuralist thinking, especially as applied to early myth such as Oedipus.
It’s also a novel about what meaning actually means, and how we look for it in vain and what it is that generates it for us.
And, as this article on PtS details, it’s a novel which, like A Clockwork Orange, features its own invented language.
Why the title M/F? Apparently an actor said to Burgess that someone should update Sophocles’s Oedipos Tyrannos with the title “Motherfucker.” Alas, that title wasn’t possible at the time of publication, but the truncated version actually facilitates other interesting dynamics from the novel, such as male/female and the protagonist’s own name, Miles Faber, the soldier-maker.
The last post was on options for people seeking review outlets for their publications on SF, or alternatively, looking for outlets for whom they might write such reviews. What it didn’t address was what those reviews actually do.
When you’re slogging through the writing of a book, it can be difficult to remain motivated sometimes, especially if that book is an academic text. Once upon a time, I was a journalist, and I would spend a few hours writing an article I knew literally millions of people would read. Now? I spend years writing something that perhaps measures its readership in the hundreds.
So, you find motivation where you can. Imagining a positive response from that small but focused readership is one way. You may dream, perhaps foolishly, that the book once finished will be truly understood by the few who encounter it. That it might persuade, change their thinking, provoke thoughts of their own.
Sometimes, if you are really very fortunate, your book will find such a reader. If fortune compounds itself positively, they may even be motivated to review it. And then you might have that extraordinary experience of seeing someone engage positively and constructively with your work.
I am thankful therefore to Rhodri Davies for being such a reviewer: critically astute, carefully analytical, and positively engaged in his encounter with my book on Science Fiction and Catholicism. I’m also thankful toFoundation, the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation, for publishing his review.
Unlike reviews of, say popular fiction, which are aimed at either enhancing or eroding sales, reviews of academic studies aren’t going to tilt the dial of books sold, and in any case, no academic ever made their fortune out of book sales. Few make anything at all. Rather, when you see your book reviewed, what you’re hoping for is that someone got what you were saying, whether they agreed or not.
Rhodri got it. I hope you will too, if you choose to read it.
