What’s my name?

by Sunil Badami

When I was younger, I was so thrilled by the idea of seeing my by-line in print, nothing else mattered. As I’ve gotten older, how I wish I’d had the foresight, like my idol, Eric Blair, to get a pen name!

Why, especially in this age of celebrity, where children’s greatest ambition now seems not to be a doctor or even an actor, but just to be, like the Kardashians, simply famous, would I want a pen name? Not even actors bother with stage names now.

Pseudonyms have existed as long as literature has: what other vocation has two names for the assumption of a false identity (or, indeed, so many eponymic adjectives to describe it, from Dickensian to Kafkaesque, Brechtian to Orwellian)? One of Australia’s greatest writers gave her pen name and her actual name to two national literary awards, the Miles Franklin Award and the Stella Prize.

We all know about anonymity and pseudonymity in Australia, where we’ve had a long and ignoble history of literary hoaxing and identity imposture, from Ern Malley to Helen Demidenko, Wanda Koolmartrie to Walter Lehmann.

I’ve always hated my name. Not just because, as I describe in my story, Sticks and Stones and Such-like in Growing Up Asian in Australia, nobody could ever pronounce it, or because, in those newly post-White Australia days, when, despite the emphasis and onus being to assimilate, no matter what I did, I wasn’t ever Australian enough, and my unpronounceable name just seemed too Indian, making me change it for a few weeks until my mother found out and told me the story of its meaning (click on the link, it’ll take you to the story).

A few years ago I discovered that our family name was, despite all the recorded history behind it, made up. My grandfather, tired of being confused with other honorifically-named Raos at the Court of the Maharaja of Mysore, had changed it, taking it from the small temple town from whence family legend said we’d originated (itself a corruption of another name). In India, you can know everything about someone from their name: their religion, their caste, their mother tongue. It is as much a locator as a designator. ‘Badami’ often draws a blank (unless we’re in an Indian restaurant and someone orders Lamb Badami)—not just as a label telling someone in India where I’m from, but from anyone at a book launch who the hell I am.

Still, what does my name say on something I’ve written? I’m all too aware of what a former agent called my ‘USP’ (or ‘unique selling point’): NESB (‘non English-speaking background’), hybridised identity, ‘exotic but familiar’ etc etc etc… Is it any wonder I feel even more fragmented by all that demographication? Sometimes, I wonder if a “non-ethnic” name might have offered me some kind of freedom from perceptions or performances of authenticity—much less whatever a nom-de-plume once did for Orwell or it does the Italian collective Wu Ming or Robert Galbraith, the recently exposed pseudonym used by J. K. Rowling.

At the height of the so-called history and culture wars, what Richard Guilliatt described at the time ‘surely Australia’s greatest cultural identity crisis’[i] occurred: in the space of only a few months, the Ukrainian identity of the Vogel, Miles Franklin and ASA Medal-winning Demidenko was revealed to be untrue; and celebrated Dobby Award-winning Aboriginal memoirist Wanda Koolmatrie was revealed to be middle-aged white taxi driver, Leon Carmen.

Much of the criticism of the initial praise for Demidenko and Carmen—and their own disingenuous justifications for their impostures—was based on the erroneous assumption that, as Demidenko (or Darville, or Dale, or, as David Marr called her, “Helen D”[ii]) put it, ‘ethnic essentialism had reached such a state that if you tried to tell a multi-cultural or ethnic story and you weren’t then you either wouldn’t get published or you wouldn’t be given any sort of credence… So I had to find a way around it.’[iii]. Carmen’s excuse was that ‘the time seemed to be ripe. Authors as personalities were attracting more attention than their books… it seemed the only way to get into print.’[iv]

While we might like to think of literature as some kind of ivory tower, it’s not. Publishing has always been the awkward embrace of art and commerce. As Graeme Turner noted in his keynote to the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference in 1998, while ‘we have tended to see the writer as a scourge of such processes, indeed of all media-constructed identities… the mass-mediated promotional world of fashion and celebrity, literature also appears to have become largely about the author’s saleability rather than primarily about the book’s “literary” quality.’[v]

Writers’ names are brand names now: not just bestsellers like Rowling, Bryce Courtenay or James Patterson whose names are writ large over the top of their books’ titles, but celebrated authors like Carey or Jonathon Franzen. Indeed, isn’t Peter Carey’s name on the cover of a book as important to its sales and reception as ‘Demidenko’s’ supposedly was, or Patterson’s is (and what does it say that like Patterson and Courtenay, Carey—and fellow Booker winner Salman Rushdie—worked in advertising)?

Indeed, what is the difference between brands like Clancy and Patterson and authors—a word very different, I think, to writer—like Carey or Franzen? Much less Helen D?

As academic and novelist Suneeta Peres da Costa argues, perhaps the only difference between the identity construction of a “fake” author like Helen from that of a “real” author like Carey is only ‘the extent that it [has been] demystified as such’.[vi] One of Australia’s foremost hoax scholars, Maria Takolander, along with David McCooey, proposed that the very reasons Helen D was celebrated were the very same that a “real” author like, say, Peter Carey is:

‘At his appearance at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival to promote My Life as a Fake… the session chair… while ostensibly parodying media representations of Carey, nevertheless reinforced in an intensely personalising and fetishizing introduction not only Carey’s status as both familiar Australian and exotic internationalist.’[vii]

If, as novelist E. L. Doctorow argues, ‘the public figure… makes a fiction of himself long before the novelist gets to him is almost beside the point… they are not the same, nor can they be,’[viii] then perhaps the fiction is intensified when the novelist—whose consciousness is already split between themselves author and the fictional narrator whose voice they assume in their work—is the public figure himself.

‘What happens,’ asks Takolander, ‘as in the case of celebrities, when the performing self overwhelms the “real-self”? Are the potential pathological consequences of fame due less to losing touch with the “real-self,” which in all probability doesn’t exist, and more to do with an unnatural reification, a kind of death in life? The split between a public and a private self has the potential to develop into something neurotic.’[ix]

Could this self-splitting be an explanation for why so many writers are so neurotic? Perhaps, because they’re required to ventriloquise or imaginatively sympathise with the characters whose consciousnesses they depict, novelists’s consciousnesses are constantly split between the actual and imaginary, themselves and their fictional characters. But I’m only speaking for myself here… or is that myselves?

And could this be why so many prominent male writers paradoxically proclaim their outsiderness, despite being such a part of the literary establishment? Carey has made much of his humble beginnings in Bacchus Marsh and his lack of interest in reading until he was eighteen, a myth established by one of his first profiles in The Australian Women’s Weekly, titled ‘Author who hadn’t read a book before he turned 18.’[x] In a 2006 Paris Review interview, he reiterated his ordinariness—pointing out his father’s lack of formal education, his mother being the daughter of a poor, country schoolteacher.[xi]

His supposed lack of reading, however, makes you wonder what the hell they were up to in the Geelong Grammar English Department, doesn’t it? As Lamb opines Carey’s reshaping of the past and media personality of ‘ordinariness’ in marketing of his ‘non-elitist’ credentials contradicts the evidence of someone who slipped easily into his years in a school[xii] he asserted to the Paris Review was ‘more about class than anything else.’[xiii]

In 2005, the much lauded, perennially Australia Council-granted and Nobel-nominated unofficial Australian poet laureate Les Murray told The Paris Review that ‘it’s a deep dirty secret, in Australia, that I’m the wrong class to be a poet,’ adding (and echoing Takolander and McCooey’s observation of Carey) that ‘I remain an exotic.’ [xiv]

It’s not just old white blokes, either. In 2013, the equally perennially Nobel-nominated Haruki Murukami, whose last book, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, sold over a million copies in Japan alone, with excited readers lining up overnight to buy it, told The Guardian on its English publication that ‘I’m a kind of outcast of the Japanese literary world. I have my own readers … but critics, writers, many of them don’t like me.’[xv]

It’s a familiar line, offered by Jonathon Franzen in ‘The Harper’s Essay’ (originally published as ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels’) or David Foster Wallace in ‘E Pluribus Unum: Television and American Fiction’, where, according to Franzen, ‘multiculturalism and the new politics of identity bear to corporate specialty-marketing-to the national sales apparatus that can target your tastes by your zip code and supply you with products appropriate to your demographics’and ‘the current flourishing of novels by women and cultural minorities may in part represent a movement, in the face of a hyperkinetic televised reality.’ As Foster Wallace contended in Franzen’s essay:

‘Just about everybody with any sensitivity feels like there’s a party going on that they haven’t been invited to–we’re all alienated… And it’s not an accident that so many of the writers in the shadows are straight white males. Tribal writers can feel the loneliness and anger and identify themselves with their subculture and can write to and for their subculture about how the mainstream culture’s alienated them. White males are the mainstream culture. So why shouldn’t we be angry, confused, lonely white males who write at and against the culture?’[xvi]

But a sense of alienation is not the same as the marginalisation suffered by others who are not white or male. And Franzen and Foster Wallace have never had to negotiate, as I and many other non-white people do, with trying to express themselves in a language that has historically been used to subdue and silence them, denigrate and discriminate against them (which is why, as Malcolm Knox so eloquently argued, the weight of history lays more heavily on a “black cunt” than a white one[xvii]).

All of us are alienated or marginalised at one time or another—even middle aged white men—and reading and writing, as I mentioned in my previous post, exist because we feel like outsiders whom nobody else understands, saying to us the things we cannot say to anyone else, even to ourselves (and even as we ironically isolate ourselves from others to connect to others who don’t exist).

Fiction, ever since Plato banished it from his Republic, has—despite its privilege in the academy and literary circles—always been a little suspect and has traded on its transgressiveness.

Given its historic, eternal unreliability—which, paradoxically, by opposing and questioning the “official record” gives it its essential truth—making what the pseudonymous Simon Leys called ‘lies that tell the truth,’[xviii] the best writing is—and must be—transgressive: the book you shouldn’t be reading, rather than the one you have to study. The screed or satire that mocks the powerful and makes us, in laughing at them, laugh at ourselves (indeed, the best literature, like the best jokes, aren’t funnier for being explained, are they?)

The first great novel, Don Quixote—still funny because it’s true—was a picaresque, and writers must question the official record and purported truth. In such a light, is there any more oxymoronic phrase than “literary establishment?”

According to Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, the novel’s early readership was almost entirely female, and determined its content to a large degree[xix] (and any quick walk through publishing offices from London to Melbourne will attest to how many women work in publishing, even if it isn’t necessarily dominated by them, given how many CEOs and marquee authors and reviewers still overwhelmingly male).

But while the notion that gained ground in the 19th Century that “popular” culture was somehow associated with women as “real, authentic” culture remains masculine, as Andreas Huyssen points out, the traditional exclusion of women from the realm of “high art” takes on new connotations in wake of mass cultural commodification and consumption.[xx] Contrast the male “state of the nation” novel with the female “kitchen sink drama.” How will Franzen’s forthcoming novel, Purity, featuring a female protagonist, be labelled, I wonder?

(Franzen himself acknowledged this in 2010, agreeing ‘to a certain extent [that] when a male writer simply writes adequately about family, his book gets reviewed seriously, because: “Wow, a man has actually taken some interest in the emotional texture of daily life”, whereas with a woman it’s liable to be labelled “chick-lit.” There is a long-standing gender imbalance in what goes into the canon, however you want to define the canon.’”[xxi])

Although her family and friends did call her Miles, you can’t help thinking Franklin chose to use that name in the same way Mary Ann Evans chose George Eliot or Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin chose George Sand—just as nearly a century after Miles, Joanne Rowling chose J. K., apparently on the advice of her publisher, because ‘he thought that young boys might be wary of a book written by a woman.’[xxii] As Anna Maxted notes, ‘the Brontës published under the names Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell 170-odd years ago because, as Charlotte said with admirable understatement, “we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.”’[xxiii]

Indeed, one of Australia’s best literary hoaxes happened when the great Australian poet, Gwen Harwood, sent in two sonnets to The Bulletin, Abelard to Heloise and Heloise to Abelard, to protest the relative lack of representation or respect given to what then-editor Donald Horne patronisingly called “lady poets” and the way in which her poems’ meticulously contructed lines were blithely pushed flush by an indiscriminate style guide.

Because the sonnets’ caesural indentations were marginalised (both literally and actually) they revealed the acrostics SO LONG BULLETIN and FUCK ALL EDITORS. Harwood continued to publish under different pseudonyms, including Francis Geyer, Timothy (T.F.) Kline, Alan Carvosso, W.W. Hagendoor (an anagram of her own name) and others.

But the designation “lady writer” is just as offensive to me as “authoress”—much less “Indian-Australian” or “South Asian” writer. When’s the last time you heard of Peter Carey (or Tim Winton or David Malouf or Les Murray) being described as a “white male writer”? And who gets to decide where the “black” or “women’s” writing goes, much less the “literary” fiction?

Don’t get me wrong: some of my best friends are white men, and I can’t deny the influence Carey and Murray, Franzen and Foster Wallace have had on my work as a writer and me as a man. But as Graham Greene said, ‘For the [writer], disloyalty [is] the queen of virtues…. Loyalty confines us to accepted opinions: loyalty forbids us to comprehend sympathetically our dissident fellows; but disloyalty encourages us to roam experimentally through any human mind: it gives to the novelist the extra dimension of sympathy.’[xxiv]

Surely greatness should not—as Turner alleges Carey wants, resenting suggestions that he’s had a very direct involvement in the construction of his public persona, and critical reviews of his work[xxv]—preclude or exempt scrutiny, but demand even more?

Of course, there’s danger in suggesting novelists have any greater sympathy—much less imaginative empathy—than anyone else, least of all their readers. And for many writers, especially young writers, writing autobiographical fiction—even as there’s no greater fiction than autobiography—there’s a reluctance to speak for others. As Franzen perceived it, ‘unfortunately, there’s evidence that… writers today feel ghettoised in their ethnic or gender identities,’ in which, imprisoned by the first person, they’re ‘discouraged by from speaking across boundaries by a culture apparently ‘conditioned by television to accept only the literal testimony of the Self.’ [xxvi]

Whatever, whoever that is.

Indeed, what’s most fascinating about these authoritative assertions of otherness by Carey, Franzen, Foster Wallace, Murray, Doctorow, Murukami and more, are the cultural assumptions, perhaps inspired by the linguistic fallacy of the “I,” that imply that the normal self is a solid and singular quantity, where, according to Takolander, ‘the lack of a sole and stable identity appears variously as pathological, monstrous, and central to female identity.’[xxvii]

For someone who’s always being asked where he’s really from, who can’t tell if he’s Australian or Indian enough, and who wonders why he has to be sutured together with that hyphen between them, the idea of a sole and stable one is just that. An idea, rather than reality.

Still, although Dobbie Prize judge Elizabeth Webby called Carmen’s hoax ‘an act of colonisation,’ she also warned against ‘drawing some arbitrary line which artists cannot cross. “I do not think there is any line as far as the imagination goes… the claim we make for writing and reading is that it allows us to experience other lives we wouldn’t otherwise experience.”’[xxviii]

Which, of course, makes me wonder about all this in relation to my work. Although most of the protagonists and narrators in my fiction aren’t named because I’m hopeless at naming things, from characters to titles, pretty much every single one is female.

Am I, a supposedly post-colonial writer, colonising other people’s lives and voices myself? It’s a question, among others, I hope we can try to answer on Monday.

References:

Alter, Alexandria, ‘New Jonathon Franzen Novel, Purity, Coming in September’, The New York Times, 17 November 2014. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/new-jonathan-franzen-novel-purity-coming-in-september/, accessed 11 February.

Atherton, C ‘“Fuck all editors”: The Ern Malley affair and Gwen Harwood’s Bulletin scandal,’ Journal of Australian Studies Vol. 26, No. 72, 2002, 149–157.

Carey, Peter, quoted in Radhika Jones, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 88,’ The Paris Review, No. 177, Summer 2006. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5641/the-art-of-fiction-no-188-peter-carey, accessed 11 February 2015.

Carmen, Leon, ‘Wanda and I’, Courier-Mail, 15 March 1997, p 27.

Doctorow, E. L., ‘Notes on the History of Fiction,’ The Atlantic Fiction Issue, 1 August 2006. http://bit.ly/12iMB7T, accessed 23 September 2012.

Franzen, Jonathon, ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels’, Harper’s Magazine, April 1996, 35–54. http://harpers.org/archive/1996/04/perchance-to-dream/, accessed 11 February 2015.

Franzen, Jonathon, quoted in Helena de Bertodano, ‘Jonathon Franzen interview,’ The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/8022791/Jonathan-Franzen-interview.html, 29 September 2010, accessed 11 February 2015

Guilliatt, Richard. ‘Black, white & grey all over,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 April 1997, p 13.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1987.

Lamb, Karen, Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992.

McCurry, Justin with Flood, Alison, ‘Haruki Murukami fans queue overnight for latest novel,’ The Guardian, 13 April 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/12/haruki-murakami-colourless-tsukuru-tazaki, accessed 11 February 2015.

Marr, David, ‘Australia’s Satanic Verses,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 1995, 4.

Maxted, Anna, ‘A Pen Name is a Writer’s Best Friend,’ The Daily Telegraph, 15 July 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10180200/JK-Rowling-is-right-a-pen-name-is-a-writers-best-friend.html, accessed 11 February 2015.

McDowell, Edwin, ‘Doris Lessing Says She Used Pen Name to Show New Writers’ Difficulties,’ The New York Times, 23 September 1984. http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/specials/lessing-pen.html, accessed 11 February 2015.

Murray, Les, quoted in Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 89,’ The Paris Review, No. 173, Spring 2005. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5508/the-art-of-poetry-no-89-les-murray, accessed 11 February 2015

Murukami, Harumi, quoted in Steven Poole, ‘Haruki Murukami: I’m kind of an outcast of the Japanese literary world,’ The Guardian, 13 September 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/13/haruki-murakami-interview-colorless-tsukur-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage, accessed 11 February 2015.

Peres da Costa, Suneeta. “Tautological Modernity: Democracy, Magic and Racism in the Demidenko-Darville Affair,” Cultural Studies Review 8.1 2002, 72–92.

Ruthven, K. K., Faking Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001.

Sherrill, Matthew, ‘Ditching Dickensian’ The Paris Review Daily Blog, 30 April 2014. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/30/ditching-dickensian/, accessed 11 February 2015.

Takolander, Maria, ‘Faking it for Real, ’esc: English Studies in Canada, Vol. 31, Issue 2-3, June/Sept 2005, ACCUTE (Association of Canadian Colleges and University Teachers of English), University of Alberta, Edmonton CA, 307–325. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/1341, accessed 11 February 2015.

Takolander, Maria & McCooey, David,‘Fakes, Literary Identity and Public Culture,’ Journal for the Association of the Study of Australian Literature, Vol. 3, 2004, 57–65. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/34/53, accessed 11 February 2015.

Taylor, D J, The Real George Orwell, BBC Radio 4, 14 January 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p013qs8w, accessed 11 February 2015.

Turner, Graeme, ‘Australian Literature and the Public Sphere,’ Keynote Address to the 1998 Conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, ASAL, Toowoomba 1998, The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Special Issue, 1998. Eds A Bartlett, R Dixon and C Lee, 1–12. http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/2761/3172, accessed 11 February 2015.

Turner, Graeme, ‘Nationalising the Author: The Celebrity of Peter Carey’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, 136.

Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Second American Edition), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles CA, 2001, 43.

Webby, Elizabeth, quoted in Debra Jopson, ‘Writing wrongs,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 March 1997, 38.

Citations:

[i] Guilliatt, Richard. ‘Black, white & grey all over,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 April 1997, p 13.
[ii] Marr, David, ‘Australia’s Satanic Verses,’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 1995, 4.
[iii] Darville, Helen, quoted in Helen Dalley, ‘Helen Darville breaks her silence,’ Sunday, Nine Network Australia, 8 June 1997. http://www.9jumpin.com.au/sunday/cover_stories/transcript_163.asp, accessed 20 June 2013.
[iv] Carmen, Leon, ‘Wanda and I’, Courier-Mail, 15 March 1997, p 27.
[v] Turner, Graeme, ‘Nationalising the Author: The Celebrity of Peter Carey’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, 138.
[vi] Peres da Costa, Suneeta. “Tautological Modernity: Democracy, Magic and Racism in the Demidenko-Darville Affair,” Cultural Studies Review 8.1 2002, 72–92.
[vii] Takolander, Maria & McCooey, David,‘Fakes, Literary Identity and Public Culture,’ Journal for the Association of the Study of Australian Literature, Vol. 3, 2004, 61.
[viii] Doctorow, E. L., ‘Notes on the History of Fiction,’ The Atlantic Fiction Issue, 1 August 2006. [http://bit.ly/12iMB7T, accessed 23 September 2012.
[ix] Takolander, Maria, ‘Faking it for Real, ’esc: English Studies in Canada, Vol. 31, Issue 2-3, June/Sept 2005, ACCUTE (Association of Canadian Colleges and University Teachers of English), University of Alberta, Edmonton CA, 312. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/1341, accessed 11 February 2015.
[x] Brass, Keith, ‘The Author Who Hadn’t Read a Book Before he Turned Eighteen’ The Australian Women’s Weekly 24 December 1980, p 20.
[xi] Carey, Peter, quoted in Radhika Jones, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 88,’ The Paris Review, No. 177, Summer 2006. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5641/the-art-of-fiction-no-188-peter-carey, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xii] Lamb, Karen, Peter Carey: The Genesis of Fame, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992, 5.
[xiii] Carey, Peter, quoted in Radhika Jones, ‘The Art of Fiction No. 88,’ The Paris Review, No. 177, Summer 2006. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5641/the-art-of-fiction-no-188-peter-carey, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xiv] Murray, Les, quoted in Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘The Art of Poetry No. 89,’ The Paris Review, No. 173, Spring 2005. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5508/the-art-of-poetry-no-89-les-murray, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xv] Murukami, Harumi, quoted in Steven Poole, ‘Haruki Murukami: I’m kind of an outcast of the Japanese literary world,’ The Guardian, 13 September 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/13/haruki-murakami-interview-colorless-tsukur-tazaki-and-his-years-of-pilgrimage, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xvi] Foster Wallace, David, quoted in Jonathon Franzen, ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels’, Harper’s Magazine, April 1996, 51.
[xvii] Knox, Malcolm, ‘Context the key when punishing racial vilification,’ Backpage Lead, 11 October 2010. http://www.backpagelead.com.au/index.php/league/2792-context-the-key-when-punishing-racial-vilication, accessed 12 October 2010.
[xviii] Ryckmans, Pierre (Leys, Simon). ‘Lies that tell the Truth’. The Monthly, November 2007. Melbourne: Black Inc Publishing,
[xix] Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Second American Edition), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles CA, 2001, 43.
[xx] Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1987, 47.
[xxi] Franzen, Jonathon, quoted in Helena de Bertodano, ‘Jonathon Franzen interview,’ The Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/8022791/Jonathan-Franzen-interview.html, 29 September 2010, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xxii] Rowling, J K, ‘Pen Name’. http://www.jkrowling.com/en_US/#/timeline/pen-name/, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xxiii] Maxted, Anna, ‘A Pen Name is a Writer’s Best Friend,’ The Daily Telegraph, 15 July 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10180200/JK-Rowling-is-right-a-pen-name-is-a-writers-best-friend.html, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xxiv] Greene, Graham, quoted in Richard Greene, (ed), Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, Little Brown, London, 2007), 148-158.
[xxv] Turner, Graeme, Turner, Graeme, ‘Nationalising the Author: The Celebrity of Peter Carey’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 16, no. 2, 1993, 136.
[xxvi] Franzen, Jonathon, ‘Perchance to Dream: In the Age of Images, A Reason to Write Novels’, Harper’s Magazine, April 1996, 47-48.
[xxvii] Takolander, Maria, ‘Faking it for Real, ’esc: English Studies in Canada, Vol. 31, Issue 2-3, June/Sept 2005, ACCUTE (Association of Canadian Colleges and University Teachers of English), University of Alberta, Edmonton CA, 310–311. http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/ESC/article/view/1341, accessed 11 February 2015.
[xxviii] Webby, Elizabeth, quoted in Debra Jopson, ‘Writing wrongs’. The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 March 1997, 38.