Is Anonymity Still a Thing?

The literary world is atwitter this week with the revelation of the real identity of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonym used by the author of the acclaimed Neopolitan Quartet. Italian journalist Claudio Gatti reported on his months-long investigation in the New York Review. Gatti’s conclusion, based on real estate sales and financial records that came from an anonymous source, is that Ferrante is really Anita Raja, translator based in Rome and married to a Neopolitan writer, Domenico Starnone.

The Economist entered the fray by putting Gatti alongside advocates of “transparency” like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Stig Abell, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, quickly condemned Gatti and claimed that the TLS would never have published the piece. He would have honored the author’s wishes, expressed in a Guardian interview: “The wish to remove oneself from all forms of social pressure or obligation. Not to feel tied down to what could become one’s public image. To concentrate exclusively and with complete freedom on writing and its strategies.”

The mere fact of the exposee is a problem but the smarmy voyeurism of Gatti’s piece makes you want to wash up afterwards: “Public real estate records show that in 2000, after Ferrante’s first book was turned into a successful movie in Italy, Raja acquired in her own name a seven-room apartment near Villa Torlonia, an expensive area of Rome; the following year she bought a country home in Tuscany. . . . Records show that in June 2016 Raja’s husband, Domenico Starnone, bought an apartment in Rome, less than a mile away from the one registered under his wife’s name. It is a 2,500 square foot, eleven-room apartment on the top floor of an elegant pre-war building in one of the most beautiful streets of Rome, also near Villa Torlonia, with a value estimated between $1.5 and $2 million.” The public needs to know: Not only her identity, but the size and cost of her apartments. Why exactly do we need this kind of transparency? If someone doesn’t want to be a Kardashian, can’t we allow her the privilege?

Abell’s is a noble sentiment, but he’s surely aware he’s fighting a rear-guard action. In an age of selfie-exposure, anonymity is hardly a thing anymore.