The Birth of the Author

The impulse to separate the literary critic from the mere consumer, the serious reader from the lightweight, is abiding. Several means of demarcation have been used; one is how much interest, and what kind, a reader shows in the person behind the work. The Guardian recently drew a line against the persistent interest in Elena Ferrante’s identity: Ferrante’s “true” fans, which is to say, the serious readers who grasp her work in all its depth, do not care about her identity. In the 1960s, a different literary trend insisted that the author was irrelevant. Ferrante refreshed that orientation, insisting that any attempt to learn about the author responsible for her novels was motivated by a kind of literary malfeasance, hardly higher than tabloid gossip. An author’s biography, Ferrante maintains, opens no window onto her work.