La Pseudonymie dans la littérature française: de François Rabelais à Éric Chevillard ed. by David Martens (review)

Pseudonymity, which has never been more widely practised than it is today — for what is a username if not a pseudonym? — may be the most basic of literary acts: as Gérard Genette observed, ‘si vous savez changer de nom, vous savez écrire’ (quoted p. 8). The twenty essays that make up this collection, skilfully co-ordinated by the editor and arranged in six thematic sections, explore the history of the phenomenon from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first: its forms, its motivations, and its effects. The first section is ‘cartographic’ and gives pride of place to a single essay, by Jean-Pierre Cavaillé, devoted to the first work on pseudonymity (in which the term appears in italics as if to signal it as a neologism), namely Adrien Baillet’s (anonymously published) Les Auteurs déguisés (1690). That work offers a comprehensive account of what motivates authors to change their names, and of the manifold ways in which they go about inventing their authorial names (anagrams, translations, toponyms). By placing a study of Baillet’s work first, David Martens makes it clear from the outset that the commonly held assumption that pseudonymous publication is simply the sign that a work was morally and politically suspect is extremely limited; as Cavaillé’s account of Les Auteurs déguisés shows, there have always been many perfectly legitimate reasons for authorial disguise, including, for instance, a wish to disguise a social status, to avoid an ill-sounding word in a name or an infelicitous meaning, to test a work incognito on the public, and ‘un pur mouvement de gaieté de cœur’ (p. 24). The case studies that follow, which include Alcofribas Nasier, Nerval, Céline, Saint-John Perse, and Duras (by Ariane Bayle, Michel Brix, Jérôme Meizoz, Sylvain Dournel, and Christophe Meurée, respectively), fit remarkably well into one or more of Baillet’s fourteen categories. Other essays in the collection focus on questions of naming and identity in specific historical moments, notably during the civil war of the sixteenth century in which a name suggested a Protestant or Catholic identity and with it a political position (essay by Martial Martin); the eighteenth century, when ‘anonymous’ was still the most common authorial name and Rousseau ostentatiously signed all his works with his own name (Jan Hermann); and the second half of the twentieth century, when the white authors, Boris Vian and Jack-Alain Léger, adopted the pseudonyms Vernon Sullivan and Paul Smaïl, which suggested they were writers of colour, black American and beur respectively, thereby provoking fierce debate (David Martens and Aleide Vanmol). The wish to change gender is perhaps the only motivation not explicitly discussed by Baillet (although he could be said to cover it in the desire to conceal a social status, and he does discuss the fact that women’s names are subject to change). Four essays (by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, Mélinda Caron, Patricia Izquierdo, and Sophie Vanden Abeele-Marchal) discuss gender-bending pseudonyms, and Vanden Abeele-Marchal invents the terms ‘pseudandrie’ and ‘pseudogynie’ to do so. The phenomenon is, then, a decidedly creative one.