I’ve read two interesting articles on the New Yorker magazine website recently.
1) “What’s in a Pen Name“
I think I’ve always found this fascinating, too, probably also partly because of a adolescence shaped by comic books. In my case, I reflect this in my fiction, since many of my characters are using names they weren’t born with. They have different reasons, and they handle the question differently (and one even does have a comic-book-style secret identity), but they’re all probably expressing that fascination (and also it shows that the place where they live invites people to recreate themselves).
2) “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind“
This one was about trigger warnings (which we’ve also been discussing over at Maggie’s blog), but the thing I want to comment on here is at the beginning.
The writer talks about his enjoyment of the novel Lolita, which ended when a professor in graduate school said, “When you read Lolita, keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl.” The writer said that he was never able to read the book again because of “the weight of [the professor’s] judgment.”
This astounded me. For one thing, that’s not a “judgment” — it’s a fact. That is what the book is about (and I’ve read and enjoyed it several times).
But here’s what’s astounding to me: Yes, Humbert does monstrous things. Do we avoid literature that depicts monstrous actions, or even literature which depicts monstrous actions by the main character? Macbeth and Othello do monstrous things — do we stop seeing and reading Shakespeare’s tragedies? That seems a weird way to approach literature.
Take that to its logical conclusion and you’d rule out a lot of great writing. As I commented over at the New Yorker website, I don’t demand that fictional protagonists be admirable people.
My feelings about this are probably reflected in the fact that the two characters I’ve been writing about for the longest time (several decades) are an internationally renowned amateur detective and a notorious mass murderer.
(By the way, to follow up on my last post, Humbert Humbert is a classic illustration of the difference between a protagonist and a hero, since he is definitely the former and obviously the opposite of the latter.)
The article on pen names is fascinating. I’d never considered it that way before. Whenever I think of them in the modern world, one aspect I think of is privacy. When I read a biography of JRR Tolkien, I came across the times that he had people show up at his door because they found him using the phone book. (Flattering but totally creepy.) Thanks to the Internet, it’s even easier to be tracked down. Or have people gather way more information on you than you ever intended for them to find. (Perhaps more of a problem for my generation since social media started becoming popular while I was in high school.) Pen name or not, though, it’s good reason to be careful what you put out there.
I think in general the idea that celebrities always have to have tons of security around them came pretty recently. I knew somebody who sailed right up to Katharine Hepburn’s front door once, and she invited him in for a visit. That wouldn’t happen with a star of her magnitude today. I started writing under a pen name before the Web existed, but I’ve been glad I did. It wasn’t really for privacy though — mostly just because it felt egotistical to want to see my name on a book. Nothing against those who do — it just felt wrong for me.