Culture Shock:We attach so much importance to famous names that much of our artistic heritage has become devalued
In John Wyse Jackson and Hector McDonnell's richly enjoyable recent collection of light verse, Ireland's Other Poetry: Anonymous to Zozimus, there is a delightfully scatalogical rhyme on the IRA's attack on an equestrian statue in the Phoenix Park.
The attempt to blow up the poor bronze horse merely succeeded in castrating it. As the poet reflects: "This is the way/ Our heroes today/ Are challenging England's might:/ With a stab in the back/ And a midnight attack/ On a horse that can't even shite!" I remember the verse from the early 1970s, when it was still a popular Dublin recitation. But who wrote it? Wyse Jackson and McDonnell have it down as "Brendan Behan (attrib.)" - a formula that at once attaches it to a well-known name and expresses scepticism about this attribution.
Actually the verse is the work of Vinnie Caprani, a man who is both alive and well-known in Dublin Italian and trade union circles, but who does not bear a famous literary name. This is one of the stranger effects of anonymity - the idea that a verse or a painting or a quip is more important, more valuable, or more worthy of attention if it was created by someone we've heard of. Attribution is not merely an adjunct to a work of art, it defines its market value and even our notion of its intrinsic worth. The National Gallery's breathtaking painting The Taking of Christ is a work of unfathomable genius because we now know it to be the creation of the great Caravaggio. Before that, it was a relatively worthless copy, nice to hang on a bare wall, but barely worth a second glance.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon, but it is certainly one that has become more significant as time has gone on. As John Mullan points out in his new study Anonymity, the use of namelessness (or of pseudonyms) is "most successful when it provokes the search for an author". We saw this in our own times with Joe Klein's Primary Colors, whose initial publication without an author's name allowed it to be read as the work of an insider spilling the beans on the Clintons, when in fact it was merely the work of a well-informed journalistic outsider. But Walter Scott, as Mullan shows, invented this teasing game in the early 19th century, by withholding his name from the title page of the Waverly novels, and provoking the kind of feverish speculation that no amount of straightforward publicity could buy.
But, in a way, Primary Colors is the exception that proves a rule. We can't bear anonymity. Klein was exposed. Internet bloggers who acquire notoriety for intimate revelations tendered under pseudonymous guises are hunted down and identified. In our culture, anonymity has come to be useful only, and paradoxically, as a publicity stunt. Would Banksy, for example, be nearly as famous if we knew who he is? Some of the reasons for this are welcome - there is, in developed societies, much less fear of being locked up or killed for writing a book or drawing a lampoon, and women can, unlike Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot, be taken seriously under their own names. A contemporary Jonathan Swift, for example, would not have to sign himself "Drapier". But Swift is also a good example of what we have largely lost. He used anonymity for literary purposes as well as for survival. Almost all of his best books were published as the work of an invented character whose deadpan expression of shocking ideas (most famously in A Modest Proposal) is much more disturbing because it does not present itself under the protective guise of a literary fiction by a famous author. Likewise Brian O'Nolan's use of multiple literary personae, none of them his own, both stemmed from and fed into his literary ventriloquism and his attack on authorial authority.
Our obsession with artists as celebrities makes such a strategy difficult, if not impossible. You can't put Anonymous on a T-shirt or name a bridge after an unknown author. Writers and artists are now brand-names, and the only reason to release a work under another name is to protect the brand. This is especially so when high artists dabble in low genres - "Benjamin Black", for example, allows John Banville to write thrillers without being forced to return his Booker Prize, just as "Robert Markham" allowed Kingsley Amis to write James Bond stories.
In the Irish context, one of the odd consequences of this state of affairs is a devaluing of a great deal of our artistic heritage. Much of Irish traditional music, song and poetry is anonymous, either in the sense that it was created collectively over a period of time, or that its authorship has been long forgotten. Or, like Vinnie Caprani's work becoming Brendan Behan's, it has been attached to the name of a saint or a hero to give it the required éclat. The absence of presiding geniuses tends to become, in contemporary evaluation, an absence of genius. Like a Caravaggio before it is declared a Caravaggio, traditional work can be treated, for want of a glamorous name, as a lesser species of art. We forget that Anonymous was once, to the people who knew her, a household name.
