A scholar of the Italian language explores the ‘dissolving margins’ between Ferrante’s novels and Lahiri’s Italian work.
In the six years that he spent in Mumbai as a teacher of the Italian language at Mumbai University, Roberto Bertilaccio acquainted himself with Hindi as well as bookstores around the city. But when he moved to Delhi in 2015, to concurrently teach Italian at Delhi University and Jamia Milia Islamia, Bertilaccio was surprised to find Italian novelist Elena Ferrante’s books in the bestseller sections of bookstores in the capital. His linguistic worlds were melding into each other as he watched the global appreciation for Ferrante, the Neapolitan quartet and the “exotic” appeal of Naples for the Anglophone world, as well as the buzz around Pulitzer-winning American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri writing in Italian.
That’s what got Bertilaccio to look into the works of both these acclaimed authors – who have a huge following in the Anglophone world – with a view to exploring common elements. To begin with, there is Ann Goldstein, the editor at the American magazine New Yorker, who has translated Ferrante’s books from Italian to English, as well as Lahiri’s Italian book In Altre Parole into the English In Other Words. Having immersed herself in the Italian language for much of the last decade, Lahiri moved to Rome, and has, at several literary fora, explained her reasons for not translating her own work in Italian into her prima lingua English.
However, Bertilaccio says he felt no uneasiness while reading In Altre Parole. “I was aware that the writer is not Italian and it isn’t her language. It is also not a novel and so the expectations were different. I did not feel any gap or distortion between whatever she is talking about and the style. I did not find her choice of word strange or unnatural or naive.”
‘Smarginatura’
Drawing on the critique of Ferrante by Tiziana De Rogatis, a professor at Università per Stranieri di Siena, Bertilaccio notes the common elements between Ferrante’s characters and Lahiri’s evolution with the Italian language as nothing short of “smarginatura”.
Ferrante has created new literary models of female identity, explains Bertilaccio. But while her characters are secure in themselves, even in their struggles, sometimes they are on the verge of crises, constantly struggling between choices.
“Smarginatura” – a word that Ferrante employs in her novels – cannot be easily translated into English. Goldstein has worded it as “dissolving margins” across Ferrante’s now-famous Neapolitan quartet. Said Bertilaccio, “Smarginatura is the experience of Lila, Ferrante’s character, right from the first book of the quartet My Brilliant Friend. Across all four books, Lila is in and out of margins. Compared to her friend Elena, she is the one who is constantly exposing herself (to situations) and is thus seen as less defensive.”
This exposing of oneself is extremely painful and yet vital for metamorphosis, and Lahiri, says Dr Bertilaccio, has expressed this kind of metamorphosis as important to her too, especially as she grasped the Italian language.
But Lahiri’s admiration of Ferrante, and of her own “smarginatura”, goes beyond mere fandom. Lahiri has previously spoken about how, having read Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment in English, she felt the desperate need to read it in Italian, and she did so as she developed her own skill as a reader of the language. She said:
“It was one of those reading experiences that changed my life, pushed me over the edge as a reader of the Italian language. I decided to write two letters to Ferrante, because I felt this was the only way I could express what effect she had had on me as a reader. I wrote to her about her choice as an author to be present solely in terms of her writing, at least for our consumption and accessibility, and my admiration for this radical step to not participate in the publication of her books…”
Giving her a vision beyond the surface, “smarginatura” happens unwillingly to Lila. For Lahiri to put herself in the uncomfortable situation of not just learning but also writing in a new language is also about seeing beyond the surface, even it that might cost her her self image.
Bertilaccio feels that Ferrante has influenced Lahiri’s writing style in the Italian. In Altre Parole was born out of a collection of essays that Lahiri wrote during the one-and-a-half years she lived in Rome, and was invited to write for the politics and literary magazine Internazionale about her experiences in Italy and with the language. “The complete book as it is today is much more complex and is a mix of genre.” Said Bertilaccio. “On the one hand, it is like a journal as she follows her experience in a chronological way, while on the other hand, it is a coming-of-age book: a child (in language) becomes an adult, through different experiences, becomes more aware. The book is also a theory on literature and writing.”
He elaborated on this inspiration: “Apart from ‘smarginatura’, the idea of ‘sorveglianza’ or ‘watchfulness’ is typical of Lila, whereby the woman is acutely aware of whatever is happening to her and her children. The word can denote the act of policing, but in this context it is the psychological state typical of women. Lahiri’s writing has that kind of ‘sorveglianza’, about her own literary steps into Italian, with a continuous questioning of her own explorations, to reach some clarity, in each chapter.”
Play
‘Innesto’
Lahiri’s journey also mirrors the “innesto” as experienced by another Ferrante character Leda. In The Lost Daughter (not part of the quartet) Leda abandons her two daughters for three years to escape from her unhappiness over the failure of “innesto” or “graft” – bonding – with her children. “Lahiri says her approach to the Italian language was also ‘innesto’, a graft, because inserting grafts are risky,” said Bertilaccio. “For Lahiri, the possibly ‘wrong graft’ with its imperfections is the premise of her book. For her, the frustration and the imperfection of a new linguistic process puts her closer to a new way of creativity.”
In Altre Parole is divided into different chapters, each with a title that is a metaphor, which is about Lahiri’s process of learning the different linguistic and cultural nuances of the language during her journey. Lahiri, Bertilaccio asserts, chooses to write from such a context of displacement.
Ferrante is absconding from her real identity by creating a new one, but is also speaking openly about her childhood experiences, her vision of global politics, through her publisher. In her new collection of essays and interviews, titled Frantumaglia – another word that is difficult to translate and could be best understood as debris – she recounts her childhood, adolescence, and her life as a teacher. “Ferrante is thus described as a character: not just as an author whose story isn’t known, but one with an identity and a story of the past,” said Bertilaccio.
But Lahiri has been erasing her English literary background and starting from scratch as a writer in Italian, throwing herself into the mouth of a new language, by ignoring her own existence as an award-winning writer in English.
“Here in Italy where I am very comfortable, I feel more imperfect than ever…every day when i speak and write in Italian, I meet with imperfection…this reveals that I am not rooted in this language…Why, as an adult, as a writer, am I interested in this new imperfection? What does this offer to me? I would say, a stunning clarity, a more profound imperfection…Imperfection inspires invention, imagination, creativity…It stimulates…the more I feel imperfect, the more I feel alive. I have been writing since a child to forget my imperfections, in order to hide in the background of life. In a certain sense, writing is an extended homage to imperfection…I consider a book alive only during the writing. Afterwards, at least for me, it dies.”
I enjoyed this novel much more than its predecessor, My Brilliant Friend. After finishing MBF, I was unsure if I wanted to continue to read the series (there are four). After finishing SNN, however, I cannot wait to continue reading.
The Story of a New Name picks up right where My Brilliant Friend leaves off: at Elena’s best friend, Lila’s wedding. Lila, at sixteen, has decided that the only way for her to escape the poverty of her neighborhood and family is to marry the local grocer, who has pulled himself out of poverty via hard work and determination. Elena and Lila have grown up together, constantly competing to be the brightest in their class.
With her marriage to Stefano, Lila quits school and completely devotes herself to Stefano’s business enterprises, as well as Lila’s brother, Rino’s, shoe factory. Elena is thus left alone to navigate high school and eventually college.
While grounded in everyday concerns such as clingy boyfriends, nagging mothers, and homework, the real action in The Story of a New Name takes place in Elena’s mind. The most poignant passages describe Elena’s feelings about growing up, the importance of education, and her relationship with Lila.
The Story of a New Name’s author, Elena Ferrante, made headlines recently when a scholar claimed that he had discovered her true identity (Elena Ferrante is a pen name). The author has always expressed her wish to remain anonymous, and Claudio Gatti’s apparent disregard for her wishes caused quite an uproar.
This debacle is even more interesting when one considers how Elena’s heroine, also named Elena, publishes a novel in The Story of a New Name, and describes at length the pride she feels in seeing her name in print. If Elena Ferrante feels this way, one wonders why she chose to publish under a pen name.
*SPOILER AHEAD* I cannot wait to see where the rest of these novels go (there are two more in the series). I will say, if Elena ends up with Nino, which I am starting to believe may happen, I will be very disappointed because of Nino’s previous relationship with Lila. If, however, Elena ends up with someone else, I will continue to enjoy these novels. I highly recommend them to anyone, in particular any women with close female friends that they have spent their life growing up with.
In this episode Autumn and Kendra discuss The Elegance of the Hedgehog and My Brilliant Friend. Do protagonists have to be likable? What role does education play in the lives of Elena and Lina in My Brilliant Friend? Listen and join the conversation on Goodreads or other social media!
In 1991 publishers Sandra Ozzola and Sandro Ferri faced a dilemma: their author, who chose to call herself Elena Ferrante, declined their invitation to promote her first book. My job is done, she explained: I wrote it. “Besides, isn’t it true that promotion is expensive? I will be the publishing house’s least expensive author. I’ll spare you even my presence.” Luckily, the owners of Rome’s independent Edizioni E/O accepted Ferrante’s terms: she has made them a fortune (1.6 million sales of the Neapolitan Quartet in the U.S. alone)—all without revealing her identity.
This volume of the Italian novelist’s letters, essays, reflections, and interviews over 24 years (1991-2015) begins with her refusal letter, her acceptance of the prize that her debut novel Troubling Love received, and her reactions to Mario Martone’s film script. Ten years pass before commercial buzz from her second novel, The Days of Abandonment, creates a demand for interviews. Another 10 years pass before Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, the tale of a 60-year friendship that was written as a single book and divided into four parts, ignites “Ferrante fever” in America.
Elena Ferrante may be “faceless,” but she has much to say about why she chooses her themes—mothers and daughters for her first three novels, sisterhood for the quartet—and how she uses writing to clarify and repossess her experiences, much like Elena Greco, who narrates the Neapolitan novels. Many incidents are rooted in childhood, some, like “The Beast in the Storeroom,” terrifying; others explain her ambivalence towards her birth city, Naples. Neapolitan mothers she has known, for example, are “silent victims, desperately in love with males and male children, ready to defend and serve them even though the men crush and torture them . . . . To be female children of these mothers wasn’t and isn’t easy.” Those children are the characters we meet in her pages, and their friendships are fragile, “without rules.” The “brilliant friends” Lila and Lenù fight and make up for decades, but they are devoted to each other in a way neither are with their men. Ferrante’s comments are revelatory, especially her need as a fiction writer to be “sincere to the point where it’s unbearable.”
The Ferrantean novel starts with an emergency that immediately hooks us—the hero’s mother has died suddenly, her husband wants a divorce, her best friend has vanished—then we get the backstory. About this technique, the novelist says, “I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold tone but at the same time exposes a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they are dealing with.” A Vesuvian eruption creates the tension and suspense that keep us turning pages and gives us female narrators who battle for their sanity. “I very much enjoy,” writes their creator, “breaking through my character’s armor of good education and good manners, upsetting the image she has of herself, undermining her determination, and revealing another, rougher soul; I make her raucous, perhaps crude.” Ferrante’s women speak proper Italian, but they always curse in dialect.
Olga, who falls into domestic hell only to rise more sovereign in The Days of Abandonment, was intended as the antithesis of de Beauvoir’s “broken woman” Monique. Ferrante says she began this story with the image of a woman locked inside her home, but only when she herself experienced “the humiliation of abandonment” did the plot begin to gel. Similarly, a childhood friend of the novelist gave birth to My Brilliant Friend and its sisters. Female friendship being rife with envy and distrust, it’s a bumpy ride, but this is the psychic landscape of women blossoming post-World War II, juggling the demands of family and career, and sometimes wanting to disappear.
Women disappear at alarming rates in these novels, sometimes with a sudden death, sometimes as a way to resist sexism. The first to disappear in the Neapolitan Quartet are Lila’s and Lenù’s dolls; at the end they reappear in a “happy” ending that is oddly discomforting. Why? Because Ferrante is more comfortable with questions than answers. Mystery as a narrative strategy has served her well since Troubling Love (1992). Frantumaglia is the record of the novelist’s fight to preserve another mystery—her identity—and, more vital to us as readers, her right to remain anonymous.
Initially coy, Ferrante has in recent interviews clarified her debt to the theorists of sexual difference, which turned her thinking “upside down” and allowed her to focus on relationships between women. She names Carla Lonzi, Luce Irigaray, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Rosi Braidotti as feminists who “fired her imagination,” and points out how rarely a critic studies a female writer’s influence on a male. As if in answer to those Italian journalists who insisted for years she was male, Ferrante writes: “What if, instead, we’re dealing with a new tradition of women writers who are becoming more competent, more effective, are growing tired of the literary gynaeceum and are on furlough from gender stereotypes. We know how to think, we know how to tell stories, we know how to write them as well as, if not better than, men.”
The word (and title) frantumaglia is borrowed from the author’s mother, and it’s a female condition best demonstrated by Olga as she falls apart and—with brandy in one hand, pills in the other—isn’t sure she really wants to live. But Ferrante also describes it as an affliction she herself has suffered and witnessed in other women. What Ann Goldstein translates as “a jumble of fragments” might more accurately be called a “breakdown,” from the Italian frantumare to break or shatter. Lila’s episodes of smarginatura (dissolving margins) in the Neapolitan novels will become full-blown frantumaglia, the need to disappear without leaving a trace.
Europa’s claim on the book’s dust jacket that Ferrante’s interviews give us “a self-portrait of a writer at work” is disingenuous, especially in light of the pseudonymous author’s recent “unmasking” by Claudio Gatti. Frantumaglia is a portrait of a persona the author has created for public consumption, the better to keep attention on her work. And for many of us that subterfuge is acceptable, even admirable. Remove the mask and you remove my powers, the author warns repeatedly. Her decision 24 years ago “to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety” has, of course, made her notorious, her attempt to renounce the media circus raising important questions about privacy but also about our assumptions as readers. Do we have a right to her history?
Aware that for many years “women’s writing” was dismissed as too autobiographical, this woman writer chose to disappear behind her words. Elena Ferrante = Elena Greco. Italo Calvino once asked, “How much of the I who shapes the characters is in fact an I who has been shaped by the characters?” In the case of Elena Ferrante, the answer is “all of it.”
—————
Lisa Mullenneaux teaches Advanced Writing for the University of Maryland UC and has written about Elena Ferrante since 2007. She studied Italian Literature at the University of Florence and earned an MA from the Pennsylvania State University. Her critical study of Ferrante’s seven novels, Naples’ Little Women, is available as an e-book.
– See more at: http://www.nwreview.com/reviews/frantumaglia.html#sthash.tvqLjrnS.dpuf
The acclaimed series of novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet traces the long, complex friendship between two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, as they come of age against the backdrop of Naples, Italy. Elena Ferrante, their pseudonymous — though controversially unmasked — creator, studied Classics and admits to the presence of its “traces” in her work.
One ancient text that has left a deep imprint in these novels is the Aeneid, especially Dido, the Carthaginian queen who has an affair with the titular hero, Aeneas. Elena, the narrator, recalls how the teenage Lila quickly devoured the epic:
She talked in great detail about Dido, a figure I knew nothing about, I heard that name for the first time not at school but from her. And one afternoon she made an observation that impressed me deeply. She said, “When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.”
When Elena then states that “people will fall in love” with Lila and “suffer like that Dido,” Lila counters, “No, they’ll go and find someone else, just like Aeneas, who eventually settled down with the daughter of a king.”
This conversation so affects Elena that she later writes a high school paper and university thesis on the Dido episode. But it also speaks volumes about how Ferrante has written Vergil’s epic into her feminist tale and suggests valuable ways of reading the Aeneid.
Female-Centric Epic
Ferrante upends the long tradition of male-focused epic by populating the center of her magnum opus with women and courting them as readers. Even the book covers of the U.S. editions present unapologetic images of femininity that recall books marketed to women. Some have regarded these covers as incompatible with Ferrante’s literary (i.e. “masculine”) aspirations, but her fiction defiantly refuses to dress itself up for the reading male eye. Lila’s reading of the Aeneid illuminates and affirms Ferrante’s marked orientation toward women, and in this Lila differs strikingly from Elena, who readily transforms herself to appeal to men.
A repeated proposition in the Aeneid is that amor (“love”), both feminine and feminizing, impairs the male sphere of labor (“work”). As Dido succumbs to erotic desire her urban project halts: “the towers, begun, cease to rise (non coeptae adsurgunt turres, 4.86).” Lila inverts this idea, making amor the enlivening force without which the masculine space of the city is sterile.
It is unsurprising that an impoverished girl would read the Aeneid differently from Vergil’s original elite male audience. Lila, like Dido, inhabits a world designed to exclude her, but to her it is women’s domain where men occupy the periphery. For her, Dido is not an obstacle blocking the male hero but the epic’s vibrant center, and Aeneas matters only insofar as he affects her. Assessing one of many love triangles between a man and two women (which Aeneas, Dido, and Lavinia foreshadow), Elena rightly observes, “The boy had had scant importance in that story.”
Despite the masculine violence of its streets, the Neapolitan neighborhood Lila and Elena inhabit, seen through their eyes, is a markedly feminine, apolitical space focused on the domestic upheavals of private life. Its women, from the heartbroken widow Melina to the trans woman Alfonso, teem with dynamic energy. Lila in particular becomes the neighborhood’s vital, female center and blooms within its borders.
Elena, who becomes a successful author, finds the neighborhood and her gender confining. She instead studies subjects that unlock male spaces, mimics the masculine language of politics, and imitates the dress of women who marry elite men. She thus manufactures herself using “tools perfected by men” to elicit their admiring gaze: “No one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men.” The result is a contrived identity devoid of the innate creativity that Lila locates in women.
Elena only gradually repudiates her privileging of the masculine. The character that initially elicits Elena’s strongest disgust is her mother, whose marked limp suggests fixity within her private, female domain. Pregnancy-induced sciatica leaves Elena herself with a telling limp, which she first loathes but later describes as a “pleasingly distinctive gait.” In the end, social distinction comes only through reincorporating the feminine into herself, and it will be granted to her not by men, but by the women who constitute the majority of her readers.
Like Elena, Vergil’s Aeneas rejects the feminine as he remakes himself as a hero of pietas (“duty”) toward the public interests of Rome. As he proceeds from Troy to Italy, he divests himself of his personal desires, especially when they elicit in him the “feminine” qualities of love and rage. These are forces instead to be kept in check through masculine imperium, “command” or “power.”
Elena too conceives of rage, which is fundamentally a response to powerlessness, as feminine. Angrily confronting a lover’s infidelity, she ponders, “Am I always this furious other … I, who if I could would kill this man, plunge a knife into his heart with all my strength? Should I restrain this shadow — my mother, all our female ancestors?”
Neither Elena nor Aeneas ultimately restrains the shadow of the feminine. Aeneas submits to fury as war embroils him in the epic’s second half, and he perpetrates death with gruesome impiety. Lila’s reading in fact prioritizes this furious Aeneas, whose moral ambiguity disquiets readers and undermines the easy simplicity of a pious hero. “Dutiful Aeneas,” barren of feminine energy, is to Lila something of a sterile figure, easily overlooked in favor of the enraged Dido, the victim of Aeneas’s pietas.
Ascent
Class is another theme of the novels articulated in Lila and Elena’s exchange about the Aeneid. Here Aeneas replaces Dido with the more marriageable Lavinia, a king’s daughter. Elena undertakes a project of self-fashioning to become an elite Lavinia-figure suitable for the ambitious Nino, for whose love Lila is her chief rival. But Elena is also Aeneas, who forges new social identity through marriage. The Aeneid is thus recast as a journey up the social ladder.
An education centered on Classical languages, historically the province of the elite, provides the first step up. Though initially Lila also studies Latin and goes on to teach herself some Greek, her formal education is abruptly halted at the end of the fifth grade. Elena, however, achieves a university education, graduating with a degree in Classics and marrying a Classics professor, Pietro, whom she likens to a “boundary stone” into elite society.
Elena’s ascent out of the social underworld of the neighborhood parallels Aeneas’s trip back from the land of the dead, which likewise occurred in the Neapolitan outskirts. The neighborhood is accessed through a tunnel on the stradone that runs through it, which evokes the tunnels around the Bay of Naples thought to be entrances to hell.
It is not until fifth grade — after which their paths fork most decisively — that Lila and Elena first sneak through the tunnel. Whereas Elena longs to walk all the way to the sea, fear strikes Lila, turning them back. She later confesses to Elena, “The better and truer you feel, the farther away you go. If I merely pass through the tunnel of the stradone, I’m scared.” Lila, unlike Elena, is at home among the shades of the neighborhood, within the confines of her class.
For Elena the neighborhood is increasingly inhabited by the phantoms of her youth, “the ghosts of [her] girlhood,” with the tunnel opening a door into a past world. To proceed, Elena must reckon with this past. In the final novel, she returns to live in the neighborhood in order to draw on it for inspiration, making it subject matter for her writing: “What before was dragging me down was now the material for climbing higher.” Elena imagines that by claiming authorial control over her past she can surpass it and use it as a springboard into greater success.
For Aeneas too the underworld presents an opportunity to transcend his history: Troy, his father, and Dido. The Aeneas that emerges is in some ways a man reborn, shed in particular of the Greek epic past, his Odyssean wanderings and Achillean wrath. To quote R.D. Williams, “Here in Book 6 …he takes his final leave of the Trojan and Homeric past and turns towards the Roman future.” This Aeneas is ready to found an empire.
The epic’s second half, however, reveals a more complex story. The final image is of Aeneas in full Achillean rage, reclaiming the fury he reluctantly gave up as Troy fell. His story ends with him embodying the Greek literary past, which itself may be lurking behind Elena’s surname of “Greco.” The past will never stop exerting itself on the stories of Elena and Aeneas. It haunts them, especially the ghosts of Lila and Dido, whom they can never fully abandon.
Abandonment
The strongest thematic contact between the Aeneid and the Neapolitan Novels is abandonment. Aeneas’s most significant act to Lila and Elena is his desertion of Dido for another. Mutual romantic devotion is likewise excluded from Ferrante’s novels: Elena leaves Antonio; Lila leaves Stefano; Nino leaves Lila; Elena leaves Pietro; Elena leaves Nino.
These are not ultimately the desertions that give Ferrante’s story emotional weight. The more poignant moments come when women — mothers, daughters, friends — abandon each other, and these grow ever more grueling as we proceed. The permanent estrangement between Lila and Elena unfolds slowly as a long series of fissures places increasingly greater distance between them. As the years pass, Elena simply knows less and less about Lila.
Lila’s reading of the Aeneid explicitly invites comparison of herself and Dido. She, like Dido, holds enormous promise, and Elena assigns her an almost mythical presence. Like Dido’s Carthage, the neighborhood prospers under Lila’s care — every enterprise in which she involves herself flourishes, from Stefano’s grocery to her computer business with Enzo. But Lila’s promise, also like Dido’s, is stifled until she becomes a figure of tragic loss. Whereas Dido’s tragedy springs from erotic abandonment, Lila’s comes when Tina, her beloved four-year-old daughter, simply disappears.
This loss produces indescribable grief in Lila. Her mind becomes an “inferno,” and she transforms into a wraith haunting the streets of the neighborhood. Lila’s grief turns the neighborhood into Fields of Mourning, the realm of the underworld Dido inhabits in Aeneid 6. When Elena unforgivably uses Tina’s disappearance as literary subject matter, Lila herself vanishes.
Elena’s only recourse after Lila’s disappearance is to write the story of her friend in an attempt to un-silence her. When one reaches the final page, it is clear that Elena will never stop narrating Lila, fleshing out someone she likens to a disembodied voice or an empty sleeve. Lila’s silence, which parallels Ferrante’s own desire to be unknown, constitutes a refusal to be living material subject to another’s authorial control. It is her way of taking over her own narration.
Dido similarly refuses to be subjected to the narrative control of others. After being used so terribly by fate, the gods, even Vergil, Dido chooses suicide in order to regain agency over herself — her death is nec fato (“unfated,” 4.696) and ante diem (“premature,” 4.697). The silent disregard she directs towards Aeneas in the underworld makes her inscrutable, not subject to clear narration. Her silence puts her beyond even Vergil’s reckoning.
Imitation
Whose imitation of the Aeneid is this? Most obviously it is Ferrante’s, who has disclosed her prodigious reworking of earlier literature. But within the novels Lila first makes this contact with the Aeneid, whereupon Elena as narrator expands it and maps it onto their lives. After being praised for her high school paper on Dido, Elena asks herself, “That idea of the city without love … hadn’t it come to me from Lila, even if I had developed it, with my own ability?”
Elena similarly takes up Lila’s narrative cue when she reworks as her first novel Lila’s own childhood story, The Blue Fairy. Its plot is not described, but the title alludes to the magical fairy of Pinocchio, a classic Pygmalion-themed story about art’s power to invent identity. This is a formative story for Elena, who incorporates this theme into her writing and makes self-fashioning a central feature of her life. Elena in fact finds it so impossible to create without Lila’s influence that she sees herself as Lila’s invention. Elena’s panic over Lila’s disappearance is that of an artist deprived of inspiration.
What would this story look like as told by Lila? Certainly nothing like the Aeneid with its forward momentum toward a defined goal. To Lila life is incompatible with narratives that move along a linear path. For her, the boundaries of people, time, and place are subject to unpredictable dissolution, a phenomenon she calls “dissolving boundaries.” “Everything moves,” she says. Whereas Elena constructs a narrative of progress for herself, Lila’s recreations are Protean: “Lila the shoemaker, Lila who imitated Kennedy’s wife, Lila the artist and designer, Lila the worker, Lila the programmer, Lila always in the same place and always out of place.”
After Tina’s disappearance Lila becomes obsessed with the origins of Naples:
In the Neapolitan facts as she recounted them there was always something terrible, disorderly, at the origin, which later took the form of a beautiful building, a street, a monument, only to be forgotten, to lose meaning, to decline, improve, decline, according to an ebb and flow that was by its nature unpredictable.
In her focus on origins, change, and dissolution, Lila is Ovidian. Lila’s narrative tendencies are so different from Elena’s that, when she rereads her long narrative to see if Lila has tampered with it, she confesses that “these pages are mine alone” and “Lila is not in these words.”
Elena’s stated purpose in writing is to give Lila “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve,” i.e. to impose authorial control on her friend. But Lila keeps a final narrative trick up her sleeve that affixes an unresolved, open ending to Elena’s grand text. She sends her a package containing their childhood dolls, the story of whose loss opened the first book. The end of Elena’s story thus merges with the beginning, and the tale of their friendship now plays on a repeating loop that undermines its linear structure. Lila effectively dissolves the boundaries of Elena’s text.
Dido too upends the forward momentum of the Aeneid by reverberating across its second half. Allecto infuriates Turnus and Amata, replaying Cupid’s shooting of Dido; Camilla is dressed as a new Dido; Turnus is like a wounded Carthaginian lion, recalling Dido’s erotic wound; Pallas’s corpse is wrapped in a tunic woven by Dido. Vergil cannot desert her, and the narrative loops us constantly back to her. Turnus’s death reiterates, like Camilla’s before him, Dido’s demise, and we follow him in the last line sub umbras, “to the shades below,” where Dido resides. This famously ambiguous ending refuses the closure Vergil’s linear narrative invites us to expect.
The Aeneid and the Neapolitan novels question whether anyone can forge a new identity that transcends one’s birth, origins, or past. Art instead captures the process of becoming, how we fold our past selves into our present moment, and how this repeats across a lifetime. Both works have an open ending because life affords no moments of illuminating closure, no promise of authorial control. Having come so far, Elena and Aeneas end up largely where they began, though no less transformed because of this.
Stephanie McCarter is an Associate Professor of Classics at Sewanee: The University of the South. She is the author of Horace between Freedom and Slavery: The First Book of Epistles (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) and has an article forthcoming in Classical Philology on humor in Vergil’s Georgics.
Bibliotherapist Ella Berthoud recommended the Neapolitan Quartet as post-election reading for Hillary Clinton on the BB4 radio show The World Tonight (starts at 40:45).
“I felt betrayed. Not because she was no longer anonymous; I had never cared about that. But because she is not Elena.”
The day before an earthquake I spent five delirious hours in the Naples airport. I spent ten minutes outside smoking a cigarette. I thought: This place is pale yellow and has unusual palm trees. It had tropicality with European gravity. There was a blue-lavender volcano that I could not see.
TheNew York Times
Harlan County, U.S.A.
TheNew York Review of Books,
Saturday Night Fever
Young God
The Story of a New Name.
My Brilliant Friend
The Blue Fairy
The Story of the Lost Child,
News From Home
Those Who Leave and Those Who StayTheNew York Times
Katherine Faw is from North Carolina. Her debut novel, Young God, was long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and named a best book of the year by The Times Literary Supplement, The Houston Chronicle, BuzzFeed, and more. Ultraluminous, a novel, is forthcoming in 2017. She lives in Brooklyn.
Originally published by Edizioni E/O in Italian in 2003 and then progressively augmented with new material in subsequent editions, Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia features short notes and meditations by Ferrante, carefully selected correspondence between Ferrante and her publishers, as well as a variety of interviews with both Italian journalists and members of the international press. As Sandra Ozzola––one of the publishers of the edition––informs readers, this carefully culled selection of documents was made available in order to illuminate “the internal history” of Ferrante’s “motivations, of the struggle to give them shape, and how they changed over time.” The book is aptly titled. Together, the brief meditations, interviews, and letters make up a jumble of frantumaglia: scattered “bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint,” a “vortex of debris, a whirlwind of thoughts-words,” “splinters” of the mind that offer tantalizing insights into Ferrante’s imagination, interests, and views.
This fragmentary collection was originally envisioned as a companion book that would give readers some sense of Ferrante’s thoughts about the nature of her work, drawing together documents that could “without too many veils, and by making use of various fragments, notes, explanations, even contradictions, accompany the works of fiction” in some useful way. What is now Part I of the collection––letters, notes, and interviews relating to Ferrante’s work up to and including The Days of Abandonment (Edizioni E/O, 2002)––was later supplemented by a second edition, which included the material which “update[d] the book through The Lost Daughter” [Edizioni E/O, 2006]. Subsequently, Ozzolla and her partner Sandro Ferri released a third edition occasioned by the “reprint [of] Frantumaglia in Italy [. . .] enhanced with a collection of the interviews that Elena has done since the publication of the four installments [2011-2014] of My Brilliant Friend or the Neapolitan Quartet, as it’s called in English.” Ann Goldstein’s English translation is based on this third edition.
Presumably in Italy, collections of interviews, and/or letters and meditations like Ferrante’s Frantumaglia, are not only commonplace but the norm, as they are in France, Spain, Germany, and indeed in most of Europe. The published cahier, the book of conversazioni, the collection of pubblicistica—these are well known forms in which writers collect their meditations and the documents that they have allowed to gather dust in desk drawers. Writers often also use such encompassing genres in order to gather together interviews that otherwise would be lost or inaccessible, to meditate on their craft with its other practitioners, or to engage in polemics. However, Ferrante is not most writers, and this family of related genres that seem to enhance––or at least to enlarge––most writers’ lists of publications does her a disservice and seems to diminish her own. This is not because Ferrante does not understand the formal characteristics of this related group of genres, but because such genres, in their most basic form, depend on the concept of the author as a figure of auctoritas, as a figure who as auctor, as “producer / progenitor” of the work, has authority over it. Such collections are intended for readers already familiar with the writer’s oeuvre, who at the same time wish to know more about the writer herself. They turn to such collections with the implicit belief that the writer’s comments or pronouncements on her works are relevant to one’s understanding of them. These genres are the stuff of which biographies and literary criticism often are made because they are so thoroughly grounded in the idea that knowledge of the author’s life and his or her views matter: that the author can illuminate the work.
Ferrante and her publishers are keenly aware of this fact. After all, the work is titled Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey. The volume advertises itself as detailing Ferrante’s inner journey from Troubling Love to the Neapolitan Quartet. It, too, seems grounded in the idea of the author as auctoritas. The title and table of contents imply that this author’s life and thoughts are important to an understanding of the works she has produced. And yet, despite having agreed to the proposed form of the collection, Ferrante gives readers very little concrete information about that journey. She maintains, as she has all along, that “I don’t think one can know more about a work by having information about the reading habits and the tastes of the one who wrote it.” She insists that “I don’t think that the author ever has anything decisive to add to his work” and affirms that the author is “present” in her work, and that is all the presence one can and should expect. She denounces the “media attention” that has “accustomed readers to the idea that the producer of the work counts more than the work [,] as if to say: I will read you because I like you, I have faith in you, you are my small god.”
Unfortunately, this denunciation clashes with the very premise of the book in which it is found. One publishes the cahier, the conversazioni, the pubblicistica precisely because one has faith in the writer who has also published the book of poems that one loves, the novel one admires, or the play one saw performed. One buys such works for the same reason. Indeed, one is interested in the frantumaglia, “the jumble of fragments inside” or “the aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self,” because one is curious about the author of the novels, the plays, the poems. The implication here is that the author can and should be known outside of her works. Ferrante does not agree, but her belief that the author is superfluous to the text and can only be known in and through that text is at odds with the form of the book.
This is not to say that the volume is completely lacking in biographical detail, and as much as Ferrante seems to disagree with the generic form, she acts as though she agrees with its premises. It is these fractured fragments of life, as few and far between as they are, that make up the best material in the collection. Ferrante dazzles when she narrates the world in which she grew up and in which she now lives. She is brilliant on her experience of the tensions between social classes in contemporary Italy, on Elisa Morante’s novels, which she loves, on Caravaggio, on books as miraculous entities that we receive unexpectedly, like the gifts of the Befana, the crone of Italian folklore who delivers presents to children on the eve of the Epiphany. She is brilliant in her discussion of the relationship between the city and the writer, her city and her writing, which she uses to breathe new life into the old metaphor of writing as weaving. She meditates on Walter Benjamin’s “city-labyrinth” and his mysterious Ariadne, who “preserves the art of getting lost” by controlling the thread that unwinds through the vast and threatening urban landscape, on her mother’s sewing machine and the swirls of colored thread with which her mother “weaves her spell,” transforming cloth into garments that will “become one with the body” of a Neapolitan woman, and on Dido, Virgil’s doomed Carthaginian queen, who in losing Aeneas’s love loses the “thread”––or the “art”––that would allow her to find her way through the “urban labyrinth” that her polis of “love” has become. She is brilliant on the question of why she is a feminist, on cultural stereotypes, on how important it is for her to write alone in a little corner. In other words, Ferrante is brilliant when she writes as if for a cahier. We learn about who she is as a writer, as an intellectual, and as a woman living in Italy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, by watching her mind at work, by reading her thoughts on culture, on literature, on Italy and its political and social ills. We learn about who she is by hearing about the winter afternoons she spent with the Aeneid as a young girl, or by thinking about Stanislaw Lem’s Solarisalongside her, or by reliving with her the memory of a first reading of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
Unfortunately, one must search for these snippets as though diving for pearls, both because Ferrante seems constantly at odds with her publisher’s expectations for the volume and because a substantial portion of the book is made up of interviews. When the interviewer is an engaging interlocutor, like Nicola Lagioia—who is himself a writer and who was Ferrante’s co-competitor for Italy’s highest literary honor, the Strega Prize—the questions are both engaging and broad enough to allow Ferrante the space to meditate on the topics that fascinate her. When Ferrante is engaged, she engages us. However, the acuity and perspicacity of the interviewers varies. A number of the interviews are disappointing not because Ferrante is not a thoughtful interlocutor or because the translator Ann Goldstein does not manage to convey Ferrante’s answers into supple English prose, but because the questions are repetitive and tired. More often than not, they center on Ferrante’s identity, even though Ferrante has made it clear that she has nothing more to say on the subject.
Frantumaglia is a difficult book to judge because its form and its publishers’ intentions seem at odds with Ferrante’s own intentions. The volume raises more questions than it answers: How is one meant to judge the publisher’s decision to print this work if in it Ferrante adamantly condemns “the editorial marketplace [that] is [. . .] preoccupied with finding out if the author can be used as an engaging character and thus assist the journey of his work through the marketplace?” Is this not what this “journey” collection does? Has the irony escaped Ferrante? Has it not? Does Ferrante provide such limited (and possibly false) biographical information, which simply reinforces the cultural and literary heritage in which her novels are steeped, in order to underscore the point that all one needs to know about an author can be found in her works? Might it be the case that every single one of those compelling autobiographical moments has its origins in––even derives from––a moment she describes in one of her novels? Is she constructing an auctor simply to teach her readers a lesson? Is this what Ferrante means by calling the book an “afterword?” We may never know, and the recent controversy caused by Claudio Gatti’s supposed revelation of the author’s identity only makes such questions more difficult to answer. Perhaps we should simply take pleasure in reading Goldstein’s elegant English prose and acknowledge the one idea that seems both indisputably true and central to everything that Ferrante writes: deep down we are all made up of “heterogeneous fragments that, thanks to impressions of unity––elegant figures, beautiful form––stay together despite their arbitrary and contradictory nature.”
The Mean Beach Attendant stares at me with his cruel eyes. He strokes the lizard tails of his mustache. Then he extends his gnarled, dirty hands, picks me up, tries to open my mouth, shakes me.
“She still has words in her,” he says to the Big Rake.
Then he asks me: “How many did your mamma put inside you, eh?”
This sadistic scene is from Elena Ferrante’s children’s book, The Beach at Night (La spiaggia di notte, 2007). The mamma is a child who has abandoned her doll on the beach. At nightfall a man and a rake come to clear the sands, looking for saleable treasure amid the detritus. Words are especially valuable: “At the doll market they pay a lot for words that come from games”. The most precious of all the words hidden inside the child’s doll is “mamma”. This is the word that saves the doll, consoles the child and secures the story’s happy ending.
Frantumaglia: A writer’s journey (La frantumaglia, 2003) – an expanded version of the Italian original – takes its title from a word Ferrante says her mother gave her:
My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments . . . . It was a word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain.
Ferrante has taken this word and given it new meaning: “The frantumaglia is an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self. The frantumaglia is the storehouse of time without the orderliness of a history, a story”. To understand fully the extraordinary text Ferrante has constructed, emphasis must fall on her subtitle. The interviews, letters, discarded passages of prose assembled here are companion pieces, cumulative appendices, to the novels she has published. “I have written four novels, the last in four volumes”, she explains. Frantumagliaelucidates and comments on the creative process through which Ferrante has drawn all these novels from her disorderly imaginative storehouse. It is an intimate history of her progress between one book and the next; an invitation to sit at her desk and to see as she sees the work she does with words.
The child or adult reader of The Beach at Night might well ask how the words are put into the doll. How are they pulled back out by the mean man and sold in the marketplace? The same could be asked of the author’s books. In Frantumaglia Ferrante reflects on her decades of struggle with words: “For a lifetime I’ve been trying to learn to tell a story with written words”. Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Journal is a partial precedent. In 1953, Leonard Woolf published extracts from his deceased wife’s diaries to show her in the act of writing, when “she reveals, more nakedly perhaps than any other writer has done, the exquisite pleasure and pains . . . of artistic creation”. Ferrante has more control than Woolf did in exposing her creativity. But her choice is to renounce that control: to offer not a retrospective account – “the story of my success so far” – but instead an assemblage of contingent reflections in real time that fit alongside the books as they were written. In doing so she provides an elaborate answer to the puzzle of the connection between her slim and somewhat surreal first three novels – Troubling Love(L’amore molesto, 1992); The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell’abbandono, 2002); The Lost Daughter (La figlia oscura, 2006) – and the expansive, seemingly realist, Neapolitan Quartet (2011–14), embedded in the post-war history of Naples.
The first two novels, published ten years apart, emerged from the author sifting through her frantumaglia, moving fragments of disquieting memory around until they eventually cohered into stories she deemed worth publishing. “How I moved from the frantumaglia that I’d had in my mind for years to a sudden selection of fragments, combining to make a story that seemed convincing – that escapes me, I can’t give an honest account. I’m afraid that it’s the same as with dreams. Even as you’re recounting them, you know that you’re betraying them.” The third novel began in the same way as its predecessors. The Lost Daughter is a story about a woman who steals a doll from the child of another woman on the beach: a story about the complicated relationships between women. But as she was writing, Ferrante found “the writing dragged in unspeakable things, so that I erased them myself, the next day, because they seemed important and yet had ended up in a verbal net that couldn’t sustain them”.
All of those important and unspeakable things that had been pushed back were still there when she began the first novel in the Neapolitan series, My Brilliant Friend (L’amica geniale, 2011): “It’s no coincidence that when I came to the Neapolitan Quartet I started off again with two dolls and an intense female friendship captured at its beginning”. The experience of writing the quartet was completely different from the painstaking reworking of the earlier books. Ferrante reveals that she wrote as many as a hundred pages at a time without re-reading or revising them. “From the start I had the sensation, completely new for me, that everything was already in place.” She positions the quartet against the backdrop of her small private gallery of “fortunately unpublished” stories of uncontrollable girls and women who are in vain repressed by their men and environment, yet always wary of disappearing or dissolving into their mental frantumaglia.
In 2006, the year before Ferrante published The Beach at Night, she agreed to take part in an Italian radio programme called Fahrenheit, in which listeners sent in their questions and Ferrante’s answers were read out by an actress. One woman wrote in to describe a series of photographs she had taken of little girls and Barbie dolls on the beach. She compared her dolls, buried in the sand, to Ferrante’s female protagonists. This was the response:
I understand this and I feel close to you. I’m curious about your manipulation of dolls and sand. If you want, you can send me a few photos. I know little about the symbolism of dolls, but I’m convinced that they are not merely a miniaturization of the daughter. Dolls can be stand-ins for women, in all the roles that patriarchy has assigned us.
Of all the challenges to patriarchy that Ferrante has issued, the most dramatic is her decision to sever the connection between her private life and her work. She is not anonymous – her books have a named author who is vividly present in the text and who engages indirectly with interviewers, reviewers, critics and readers – but she is absent, physically separated from her writing. She does not appear in photographs, at prize-givings or literary festivals alongside her books; she refuses to answer questions about her personal appearance, love or family life. Her reasons may have shifted subtly over time as her fame and sales have grown, but they remain essentially the same: “knowing that nothing of the concrete, definite individual I am will ever appear beside the volume, printed as if it were a little dog whose master I am, showed me sides of the writing that were obvious, of course, but which I had never thought of. I had the impression of having released the words from myself”. Ferrante’s absence liberates her, her words and her readers from patriarchal patterns of possession and ownership. “I would like to think that, while my book enters the marketplace, nothing can oblige me to make the same journey.”
Almost everyone wins – Ferrante is free to sit at her desk and get on with writing, her book is free to make its way in the world, and readers are free to take or leave the text on its own terms and theirs. The only people who lose are the hapless employees of publicity and newspaper editorial departments who, it sometimes seems, gave up reading actual books long ago. For them some tittle-tattle about where a successful and good-looking author eats, shops, or sleeps is always welcome, but everyone knows those column inches and photo shoots have nothing whatever to do with literature. Ferrante connects her stance to a long literary tradition dating back to Homer and Virgil, through Tolstoy, Keats and Shakespeare:
I think that in art, the life that counts is the life that remains miraculously alive in the works. So I am very much in agreement with Proust’s stand against positivist biography and against anecdotalism in the style of Sainte-Beuve. Neither the color of Leopardi’s socks nor even his conflict with the father figure helps us understand the power of his poems.
This is not a blanket rejection of biographical writing or journalism, but an insistence that the truths they pursue are different from the truth with which literature is concerned. Ferrante hopes that her readers search not for “the brittle face of the author in flesh and blood, who makes herself beautiful for the occasion, but for the naked physiognomy that remains in every effective word”. Literary truth, she insists, is not founded on any autobiographical, journalistic or legal agreement, “it is not the truth of a police report or a sentence handed down by a court; it’s not even the plausibility of a narrative constructed with professional skill. Literary truth is the truth released exclusively by words used well, and it is realized entirely in the words that formulate it”. The lover of literature knows there is nothing for him or her at “the bureau of vital statistics” where the keepers of the positivist flame, like bean counters, fastidiously divide fact from falsehood. The whole of world literature is technically a lie.
“I don’t at all hate lies”, Ferrante declares in Frantumaglia, “in life I find them useful and I resort to them when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures. But lying about books makes me suffer, literary fiction seems to me made purposely to always tell the truth”. A few weeks ago the Italian investigative journalist Claudio Gatti claimed to have unmasked Ferrante by dislodging her pseudonym and connecting her work to the tax and payment records of the Rome-based translator Anita Raja. “I don’t like lies”, Gatti declared, winning some hollow applause, perhaps, in the empty halls of the bureau of vital statistics, but none in the vital literary world. Of all the shabby things he could think of to justify his journalism, the worst was his suggestion that the quasi-“biographical” Frantumaglia is a cat-and-mouse game through which Ferrante aims to mislead her readers. Evidence for this rests on two main points of contention: Ferrante’s relationship to Naples and her mother’s occupation.
If Ferrante is Raja – and let us assume she is – she probably left Naples earlier than Frantumaglia suggests. Does the length of time Ferrante has lived in Naples, continuously or intermittently, affect the veracity of her claim that “Naples is my city”? If what is at stake here is her local tax liability, of course it does. But that is not what is at stake. In Frantumaglia Ferrante aligns Naples with Dido’s Carthage, the ruined female polis – dux femina facti – that was destroyed by erotic love. “Often when Naples comes to my mind, it’s a cold city in a storm.” She quotes Dido’s devastating last curse, nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto – “let there be no love or accords between our peoples”. She describes her childhood love of the classics, her dislike of Dido, until she re-read the Aeneid to help her write The Days of Abandonment, and was struck by Virgil’s use of the city:
Carthage isn’t a background, isn’t an urban landscape for people and events. Carthage is what it has not yet become but is about to be, material that is being worked, stone exploded at times by the internal movements of the two characters. Not coincidentally, even before Aeneas admires the beautiful Dido, he admires the bustling activity of the work of building.
In the Neapolitan Quartet, Naples is material exploded between the movements of the lifelong friends Elena and Lila in exactly this way. More than background, the city is almost molten, like the lava that flows from Vesuvius, preserving ancient stories and inserting them into the present. We don’t need to track down the exact building in which Ferrante was born and put a plaque on the wall to appreciate her relationship with the city.
In Frantumaglia Ferrante claims that her mother was a dressmaker from Naples. Raja’s mother was German and probably not a professional dressmaker. It is hard to imagine circumstances in which this discrepancy would be significant. Ferrante knows exactly what she is doing. The figure of the dressmaker isn’t just a superficial joke, or a way of putting literalists such as Gatti off the scent. For a start, it is another link to Dido, who was mockingly granted by the King of the Gaetuli only as much land to found her city as the hide of a bull would go round. She cut the hide into near-invisible strips and stayed up all night stitching them together into what became Carthage’s perimeter. The dressmaker is also a link to Elsa Morante, the Italian writer of the previous generation who has most influenced Ferrante. In Frantumaglia Ferrante quotes Morante: “No one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, thinks that a mother has a woman’s body”. She goes on to position her own creative purpose alongside this claim: “I’ve tried to describe the painful, more or less unhappy journey of the fabric – let’s say – with which even we ourselves, the daughter-dressmakers, make the mother’s body shapeless”. Finally, she includes a dream-like childhood memory of going into her mother’s bedroom, where finished dresses waiting to be worn were laid out on the bed. As she entered the room, a draught brought one of the dresses fleetingly alive, but when she lifted the fabric, she saw a disfigured female torso beneath: “I’ve always felt that dresses aren’t empty, that they are human beings who at times stand empty in a corner, desolately lost. When I was a child I tried on my mother’s dresses”.
An “intense game of clothes” runs throughout Ferrante’s fiction. Sometimes the roles of wife and mother are self-annihilating, sack-like dresses; sometimes they are flamboyant, tightly fitting carapaces. In Frantumaglia the author includes an adolescent nightmare cut from Troubling Love in which a young girl is expected to undress in front of a man. She cannot do so, because her clothes seem to be drawn on her skin. He starts to laugh and in an effort to please him she grabs her chest with both hands and opens it: “I opened up my own body as if it were a bathrobe. I didn’t feel any pain, I saw only that inside me there was a live woman, and I suddenly understood that I was only someone else’s dress, a stranger’s”. If women’s bodies are dresses, in this anguished metaphorical sense, all of our mothers are dressmakers.
Ferrante, like Alice Munro – another writer whose influence she explicitly acknowledges – draws on the achievements of Sigmund Freud without allowing psychoanalysis to reduce literary fiction to a series of case studies or archetypes: “I love Freud and I’ve read a fair amount of him: it seems to me that he knew better than his followers that psychoanalysis is the lexicon of the precipice”. By the precipice she means what stands between all characters, real or imagined, and their “dissolving margins” – a state that recurs in the Neapolitan Quartet – beyond which there is only incoherence. In Frantumaglia Ferrante refers to Freud’s Totem and Taboo, which tells of a woman who gave up writing her own name:
She was afraid that someone would use it to take possession of her personality. The woman began by refusing to write her own name and then, by extension, she stopped writing completely. I am not at that point: I write and intend to continue to write. But I have to confess that when I read that story of [neurotic] illness it right away seemed wholly meaningful. What I choose to put outside myself can’t and shouldn’t become a magnet that sucks me up entirely.
The doll in The Beach at Night does not choose to put her words outside herself. She tries to hide them at the back of her throat, then deeper in her chest, but the beach attendant drops a hook on a line of saliva down into her mouth and wrenches out her name:
I see Celina – my Name, the Name that my Mati [mamma] gave me – fly through the air attached to the Mean Beach Attendant’s saliva and then disappear beneath the lizard tails, into his big mouth.
Whatever it was that motivated Claudio Gatti to try to steal Ferrante’s name from her – money, perhaps, or fame, or professional allegiance to the bureau of vital statistics where literature is not understood – he has ended up indistinguishable from a mean man in a children’s book with a thread of drool hanging from his big mouth. His words are already nothing. “How much will they give us for a doll’s name? Two bucks? Three?”, the beach attendant asks. Elena Ferrante’s words, however, will last as long as there are readers who love them. It has been her lifetime’s work to separate her words from herself so that they will endure without her. As an ardent classicist she surely knows Ausonius’s epigram: mors etiam saxis nominibusque venit – death comes even to stones and to names. In great literature alone death is almost infinitely postponed. Carthage lives long after the stones have crumbled, and the names of Dido and Aeneas have not disappeared among the ruins.
Ann Goldstein on the art of translating for mysterious Elena Ferrante
00:0023:38
AMT: Hello. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti and you’re listening to The Current.
[Music: Theme]
AMT: Still to come, the fight for safe private toilets is underway in South Africa where a woman was murdered on her way to use a public bathroom. We’ll talk about the link between sanitation and sexual assault in South Africa. But first, this is perhaps the closest you will come to hearing from Italy’s great mysterious storyteller, Elena Ferrante.
SOUNDCLIP
I did it because I believed that she was very much a public figure. And when millions of books are bought by readers, in a way I think readers acquire the right to know something about the person who created the work. I personally think that. But most importantly, I believe that Ferrante and her publishers agreed with this point of view. Her self-declared autobiographical Writer’s Journey, Frantumaglia, which is being published right now next month in the US, was presented to the public as her answer to the legitimate request of detailed information about her.
AMT: Italian journalist Claudio Gatti drew the wrath of literary fans when he sought to unmask the true identity of the best-selling Italian author who goes by the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. His findings pointed to Anita Raja, a Rome-based translator. Her editors deny it. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet of novels is wildly popular worldwide with what borders on a cult following. But Elena Ferrante has wanted no part of the limelight. She insists on remaining anonymous. Her true identity has mattered little to her readers, who say they’ve become addicted to her tales of the rich decades-long friendship of Lenu and Lila that begins in Naples of the 1950s. If you have read any of Ms. Ferrante’s work in translation, then you will be acquainted with the words of my next guest. Ann Goldstein is the English translator of all of Ms. Ferrante’s books. She is an editor at the New Yorker magazine. She is often the public face of the Neapolitan series. Elena Ferrante’s most recent work is Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, a collection of letters by and interviews with the reclusive writer to give us a window into her thoughts on her characters and her writing process. And Ann Goldstein joins me in our Toronto studio. Welcome.
ANN GOLDSTEIN: Thank you.
AMT: Are you as—you must be as in love with these books as the rest of us are.
ANN GOLDSTEIN: I am. Yes, I love these books. All of her books, in fact.
AMT: I have to tell you by the time I came to the fourth of the Neapolitan quartet, I started to read it very slowly and even put it down for a while because I didn’t want to let those girls go. They were just—you become entwined in their story.
ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, I was very worried when I was reading the fourth novel because I couldn’t—well, working on the fourth novel because I was—I couldn’t, I didn’t, couldn’t figure out how she was going to end it. I knew it was the last of the novels of the—originally actually she had planned it to be three and then she realized she couldn’t do what she wanted to do and so it became four. But I just kept thinking how is she going to end this in a satisfying way? And I can’t say that I slowed down because I was under pressure of time to get the translation done. But I thought it was beautifully and satisfyingly ended.
AMT: When did you first get introduced to the works of Elena Ferrante?
ANN GOLDSTEIN: In 2004, I think the Italian publisher, Sandro and Sandra Ferri who had this publishing company, E/O, Edizioni E/O in Rome, they were her Italian publishers and they had decided that they wanted to publish books in English and to open up essentially an American branch of their publishing company called Europa Additions. And The Days of Abandonment, which was actually Ferrante’s second novel, was the first book that they decided to publish and they looked for a translator and somehow they found me.
AMT: And how did they find you? You have a day job. [chuckles]
ANN GOLDSTEIN: [chuckles] Well, I had been translating for about 10 years and I think they got my name off the PEN website. They had asked about three or four translators to do samples and they chose me for which I was very grateful because as soon as I started reading The Days of Abandonment, I thought I have to translate this book.
AMT: And so when you got to the quartet—so you were translating it as she went along. You didn’t like—
ANN GOLDSTEIN: The quartet. Yeah. More or less, yes, Well, she had—yes, that’s true because she hadn’t finished even when she—I think she says in probably in Frantumaglia, that she had this idea for the quartet. She originally thought it was just going to be a very short novel. Then she realized it was going to be a somewhat longer novel and she still thought it would be a single book, but her publishers dissuaded her. They said you can’t. It was clearly going to be big. I mean long, that is to say. She said I think that she had ideas about certain points, certain plot points or certain things that she wanted to develop but she didn’t really know the details. And so as she was writing, the details came to her or she made them up, whatever. But anyway, I forget where I was going with this.
AMT: When it comes to translating the novels, what kind of pressure do you feel?
ANN GOLDSTEIN: Well, there’s time pressure of course. I mean there was with the Neapolitan novels because she wanted to—the publisher wanted to bring them out one a year and they weren’t really finished until they practically they were published in Italian. So there was time pressure. But yeah, I mean as readers became more in love with the books, there was pressure to do it well, to do it—I mean there’s always pressure to do it well, to do the translation well. I’m not sure what else you mean by pressure.
AMT: Well, yeah, and you know there’s so much talk of the masterful prose, of just the way the words just exist in our minds. I don’t even want to say on the page because when I read things like that, they come into my mind. I mean maybe just help us understand your process because you see that in Italian and you must then move that into another language.
ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. I mean it’s a interesting process. I mean it’s—I usually—well, usually I’ve read the book first. In the case of the second, the last three of those novels, I actually was translating as I was reading. And so I felt that I was experiencing them sort of in real time. But usually I read things pretty quickly. I mean I translate the first draft very quickly and then I go back and I revise and I revise. And often I try to stay close to the text basically and sometimes I move away from it and then I—with these novels, I very often went back to the original translation because somehow I had captured something there, I thought, that was closer to the Italian. I mean the Italian, it’s very dense. It’s kind of a run-on language and actually English readers, many English readers have commented on that, on the sort of run-on sentences. I mean Italian sort of, it accommodates the run-on sentence more easily than English does. The prose is a little bit more—the syntax is a little bit more flexible. So capturing that, the intensity and the density of her sentences in English was sometimes a challenge.
AMT: So and you said you sometimes went back to the original, your original translation, almost like your visceral feeling as you translated first time around.
ANN GOLDSTEIN: Yes. And actually, Ferrante in the Frantumaglia, in some of these interviews, she talks about how she doesn’t like beautiful writing. She likes ugly writing because the ugly writing is what conveys the intensity of what she wants to convey. And I think that sometimes that was the case with the translation too, that you know it didn’t want it to be too smooth.
AMT: Well, I have more questions about the translation. But do you know her? Have you met her?
ANN GOLDSTEIN: No, no. As far as I know, the only people who know who she is are her publishers. And I would say that, just to go back to the Gatti that you played before, I mean she did not present Frantumaglia as an autobiography. I mean it wasn’t meant to be an autobiography. It was meant to be sort of a collection of well, her letters, of sort of a window on to the writer’s process, not into anything personal.
AMT: It’s interesting because he’s again trying to put motive and personality into the book and that’s exactly what she’s trying to keep away.
In Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo, he writes of the potential for names to invoke a taboo, particularly for ‘compulsion neurotics’. One patient suffering from this ‘taboo disease’, he writes:
adopted the avoidance of writing down her name for fear that it might get into somebody’s hands who would thus come into possession of a piece of her personality. In her frenzied faithfulness, which she needed to protect herself against the temptations of her phantasy, she had created for herself the commandment, ‘not to give away anything of her personality’. To this belonged first of all her name, then by further application her hand-writing, so that she finally gave up writing.
Referring to this passage of Freud’s in Frantumaglia, Elena Ferrante says:
when I read that story of illness it right away seemed wholly meaningful. What I choose to put outside myself can’t and shouldn’t become a magnet that sucks me up entirely.
Implicit in this neurotic condition, and Ferrante’s relation to it, is an untenable faith in a boundary distinguishing the self and the other. To avoid being possessed by another, conscious and deliberate acts of stratification are required: What I choose to put outside myself; shefinally gave up writing.
But of course the outside and the inside are faces of the same coin. And this coin, to push a metaphor further than it needs to go, is made material in culture. A coin gains value only in its relation to currency; its function precedes the individual but is imposed on the human; the cold object’s provenance bears traces of countless others’ fingers. To attempt to secure a clear line of self-determination from this frantumaglia is a tall order. Yet there it is. The sincere wish for a boundary.
Frantumaglia is the name of Elena Ferrante’s latest book, which has been translated into English by Anne Goldstein. It is not a work of fiction, though it contains a great deal of fiction. Nor is it—considering the recent revelations about Ferrante’s creator’s ‘true identity’—nonfiction precisely, though letters, being documents that exist in the historical sense, are usually understood under the aegis of nonfiction. It is a 374-page collection of the author Elena Ferrante’s letters, interviews, speeches, and reflections; it is a ‘companion text’ for Ferrante readers.
The term frantumaglia, she explains, is a Neapolitan word meaning “a jumble of fragments”. It is more than this, though. To explain the term, and with it the dimensions of this book, I will quote from the text:
The frantumaglia is to perceive with excruciating anguish the heterogeneous crowd from which we, living, raise our voice, and the heterogeneous crowd into which it is fated to vanish. I … represent it to myself mainly as a hum growing louder and a vortex-like fracturing of material living and dead: a swarm of bees approaching above the motionless treetops; the sudden eddy in a slow body of water. But it’s also the right word for what I’m convinced I saw as a child—or, anyway, during that time invented by adults that we call childhood—shortly before language entered me and instilled speech: a bright-colored explosion of sounds, thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings.
Reading this, I let out a painful sigh. It is clear to me that this passage expresses the core of female consciousness. I say consciousness which is ‘female’ only because it retaliates against the reductions of patriarchal thinking. It may well be human consciousness, but I am not in a position to describe what is human or not. Other terms that might capture it are queer consciousness, intersubjectivity, intertextuality, the primordial, the prenatal. The gooey. The frightening. I say female consciousness and I mean: the sense I hold in my body that every atom of my being is governed by the chaos of matter, a sense which, once acquired, makes it impossible to accept an ordered, reasonable view of things. And still, the wish for a boundary is sincere. Thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings quickly becomes a nightmare without language.
As this compendium makes very clear, however, Ferrante is not without language, nor is she interested in breaking with it. While she has a priestess-like connection to the other side of reason, Ferrante does not write from a prenatal morass. To the contrary, she is ferociously meticulous, exacting, and direct. Her letters to the director Mario Martone, who in 1994 began adapting the 1992 novel Troubling Love, exhibit an incredible level of care and connection to the subtleties of her text. This care becomes clear, too, in several of the more caustic interviews republished in the volume, where Ferrante makes no secret of her distaste for lazy journalism and a shallow media culture. When one Italian journalist, whose questions are all focussed on the author’s identity asks her whether she finds this phenomenon disturbing, Ferrante responds:
Yes, it disturbs me. But it also seems to me the proof that the media care little or nothing about literature in itself. Let’s take these questions of yours: I’ve published a book, but, despite knowing that I would answer in very general terms, you have focused the whole interview on the theme of my identity.
Readers of her novels will recognise this edge; indeed, it is precisely her capacity for cruelty, for helping us locate the violence inert in everyday life (particularly within the bourgeois social strata) that qualifies Ferrante for her readers’ devotion. Through her violence we, her readers, become vital and vigilant creatures.
In a seventy-page response to questions asked by the editors of a journal called Indice, Ferrante tells the story of how she came to understand her capacity for violence in language. Little Elena is seven, and she wants to kill her irritating younger sister. When the girl interrupts her older sisters’ game for the umpteenth time, Elena says: “We need a rope, there’s one in the storeroom.” The little sister makes a dash for the storeroom. “I was the child,” writes Ferrante, “who had been able to find the sentence that would send the little girl to her death without taking her there in person.”
The identification I feel with Ferrante’s texts, and which I share with many hundreds of thousands of women globally, is the cultural phenomenon that enables a book such as Frantumaglia to be published. Without the keynotes, the live-to-air radio interviews, the photographs of the author in her youth, the marital status updates, the path-to-fame narrative, the reader is left with only, and significantly, the pages she has written. But a volume like Frantumaglia insists that there is much, much more to books than their flesh and blood.
Freud’s patient, who cannot write her name for fear her identity will be taken up and consumed by another, forces us to confront that a self exists beyond our fleshy boundaries, over which we have no control. The facts of our material biographies are largely irrelevant when it comes to how others understand and consume us. When we exist in public, we are shadows on the walls of other people’s caves. Similarly, the author’s absence, the absence of the body writing, from the publishing industrial complex allows us to recognise the life that books have beyond being written and read. Ferrante names this life the “third book”: “I didn’t actually write it, my readers haven’t actually read it, but it’s there. It’s the book that is created in the relationship between life, writing, and reading.” This third book’s form, I suspect, is something akin to frantumaglia.
Ellena Savage is a writer from Melbourne. Her essays, stories and poems have been published widely.
It is with some trepidation that I approach this review of Elena Ferrante’s unabridged and updated collection of papers, Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey. Many readers will alight on it, not just because of Ferrante’s ferocious brilliance as a novelist, but also because they long to glean some rare insights into the personal world, motivations and craft of the elusive writer herself. Elena Ferrante is, of course, a ‘nom de plume’: the Italian author has always insisted on her anonymity, and has even said it is essential to her continuing writing. The Italian publishers of Edizioni E/O and Europa Editions, however, have encouraged her to ‘dissolve’ this boundary between herself and the reader to some extent. As they explain in their introduction, they have published this collection – some letters from the author to themselves, some interviews she’s given and some correspondence with particular readers – in order to satisfy the curiosity of [her] exacting yet generous audience and to clarify we hope conclusively, the writer’s motives for remaining outside the media circus and its demands.
I am a devoted, but not uncritical reader of Ferrante. Along with legions of others, I have hungrily devoured each of Ferrante’s novels to date (in English), but I have also, very often, found myself perturbed by her ‘voice’, whether it be expressed through the persona of Elena Greco in Ferrante’s hugely acclaimed Neapolitan Quartet, or that of Delia in her first published novel Troubling Love, the novel I admit I had most trouble with. I have found myself trying to pinpoint why I have never warmed to her female characters, and why – although their raw and visceral emotions intrigue and involve me – I have never been able, as a woman, to identify with them (although I know many women who do). At the same time, the uncompromising nature of the writing and its exquisite craftsmanship excites me. Ferrante is an absolute mistress (or master) of the great beginning and ending, of charting our descent into the abyss. In the novel Days of Abandonment, I was enthralled by her ability to nose-dive from the heights of a fictional norm to within an inch of the unbearable and unreadable, and then pull out – and upwards – just in time, just before the bond between reader and author was severed.
But, even in the delineation of her most torrid scenes and imaginings, there is a dispassionate coolness that disturbs: I am not sure whether this is because of Ferrante’s fastidiousness or whether it stems from the literal rather stilted precision of Ann Goldstein’s English translation (Goldstein is Ferrante’s trusted translator). I am advised by many who have read Ferrante in the original Italian, that this is more a characteristic of the translation, and that Ferrante writes, in fact, with fluidity and intimacy.
To add to all these complex reactions comes the recent ‘unveiling’ of ‘Ferrante’ by the Italian investigative journalist Carlo Gatti, first in the Italian media then in the ‘New York Times’. This has caused such outrage in the UK and US media, and provoked such vitriol against Gatti, that it is hard not to be swept up in the outpouring of sympathy for Ferrante. However, after reading Frantamuglia – published shortly after the ‘unveiling’ – I was surprised by my own reaction. The book has left me angry. Not at Gatti for exposing a writer who – in many of these pages – so eloquently and insistently articulates her reasons for wanting to remain anonymous. Not with the evident telling of untruths that Gatti has exposed, including Ferrante’s Neapolitan background and seamstress mother. I am angry, instead, with the intellectual cat-and-mouse game that ‘Ferrante’ herself has decided to play with her interviewers and readers, which – for all the author’s feigned reticence – smacks of arrogance. Reading a couple of these interviews previously in isolation – I had enjoyed Ferrante’s interviews in the ‘Paris Review’ and ‘Frieze’ Magazine – did not have this same effect. But now I feel that, despite their best intentions, her publishers have done Ferrante a disservice: by gathering these interviews and responses together into a collection, they have exposed several of Ferrante’s self-consciously rhetorical devices and conceits. Because, of course, Ferrante does not meet her interviewees and correspondents in person or speak to them over the phone, her responses here have the deliberate and considered artifice of her writing.
The Elena Ferrante of these interviews and letters emerges, then, as a precisely crafted fiction – not just a simple pseudonym. But then why should we expect an author who writes such compelling fiction, who finds truths in lies and lies in truth, not to continue to play with her chosen form? Her voice (which again is filtered through Goldstein’s translation) is as articulate and unflinching as ever. But there is also something disingenuous in the way Ferrante repeatedly seeks to explain her decisions, frame her conditions of engagement, and dissect her reasons for being drawn into this exercise. As a result, her generosity in ‘giving so much more of herself’ to these various correspondents somehow becomes ungenerous, because it is always only on her terms.
But then, as ever with Ferrante’s writings, there are passages that are so frank and electrifying in their insights that you want to read and read them again. The interviews in which she has chosen to focus on her writing, instead of her own responses to her situation – particularly those, in which she explains why she has chosen specific words – are sometimes miraculous in their ability to capture an indescribable or unspeakable sensation. Take her explanation of the word ‘frantumuglia’ – which gives this book its title:
My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments. The frantumaglia … depressed her. Sometimes it made her dizzy, sometimes it made her mouth taste like iron. It was the word for a disquiet not otherwise definable, it referred to a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain… When she was no longer young, the frantumaglia woke her in the middle of the night, led her to talk to herself and then feel ashamed, suggested some indecipherable tune to sing under her breath that soon faded into a sigh, drove her suddenly out of the house, leaving the stove on, the sauce burning in the pot. Often it made her weep, and since childhood the word has stayed in my mind to describe, in particular, a sudden fit of weeping for no evident reason: frantumaglia tears.
Other fascinating segments include quotations, sometimes at great length, from discarded passages from her books – which, like many of her novels, are a wonderfully disquieting read.
So what to make of Frantumaglia? Personally, I would rather return to the time when I used to stumble across the occasional odd gem of an interview with ‘Elena Ferrante’, while eagerly waiting for her next fiction to appear.
“A Strangeness in My Mind”: The 2016 Man Booker International Prize Finalists
(…) Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, is the only one of the finalists for the Man Booker International Prize that has been widely reviewed in the United States and broadly marketed. The fourth book in her Neapolitan tetralogy, it concludes the story of the friendship between two women who grew up together in a poor neighborhood in Naples, Elena and Lila, whose lives take very different courses as adults. Unlike the other novels in this review, Ferrante’s tetralogy is a grand realistic project, which reviewers have compared to Balzac, to Tolstoy, to Mann’s Buddenbrooks. It follows the lives of a closely connected set of Neapolitan families from a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood in Naples over a span of about six decades, from the post-World War II period to the present day. (Each novel contains an index of characters in front, with all their relationships described.) The center of the novels is the relationship between Elena and Lila, who meet in first grade and quickly become best friends. The first volume in the tetralogy is called My Brilliant Friend; since Elena is the narrator and fictional author of the books, the title seems to refer to Lila but indeed describes them both in their relationship to each other. Both women of extraordinary intelligence and imagination with a drive to escape the confines of their traditional world and the ways in which it defines women’s lives take different paths. Elena, always a dutiful student, goes to university, escapes Naples, becomes a writer and feminist; Lila, more brilliant and temperamental, leaves school, marries an abusive husband, creates a number of local businesses by using the entrée her male friends and relatives afford, but never realizes her creative gifts. The title of the third volume of the tetralogy, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, identifies this dynamic; the novels ask us to contemplate what leaving and staying mean for the two heroines, whether Elena can ever really leave, and how crippling Lila’s staying becomes. The two women seem almost halves of a single self, alternate lives in a complexly gender-stratified world. The friends love each other, and they are intensely jealous of one another, Elena creating her fiction out of the life she has abandoned but cannot leave.
All four of the volumes of the tetralogy are deeply satisfying, but the last is perhaps the best in bringing together all the strands of the complex world Ferrante creates. My Brilliant Friend begins with a prologue that motivates the telling of the story; Lila disappears, and Elena seeks to bring her back by telling their story. The Story of the Lost Child brings us to that disappearance and the rupture in the friendship it represents. There is indeed a terrible loss of a child at the heart of the novel, but the lost child refers to much else—the lost dolls that Elena and Lila believe the local Mafia chief has stolen from them as children, the biological children from whom they feel estranged, and, most intensely, the childhood selves from which they’ve both departed. The tetralogy vividly depicts the texture of women’s lives: the dailiness of taking care—of children, houses, men—the physicality of menstrua- tion, sex, and pregnancy, the drive of aspiration and inspiration, the weight and web of social constraints. Earlier I quoted Eliot’s Middlemarch; in some sense, Ferrante is redoing Eliot’s project. Eliot begins her novel by comparing her heroine, Dorothea Brooke, to Saint Theresa: “Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.” Lila, in some sense, is a modern day Theresa who fails to find an epic life, just as Elena, in some sense, is Mary Ann Evans; not the least brilliant of these novels’ many achievement is Ferrante’s exploration of the writer’s implication in her fictional project.
This is the first year that the Man Booker International Prize has been given not to a writer in recognition of his or her entire career but to an individual novel. The benefit of such a change is the attention it brings to extraordinary novels not familiar to many English-speaking readers.
Speaking with the author of the Neapolitan Quartet novels and Frantumaglia about why readers have trouble with challenging portrayals of women, the supposed sin of narcissism, and smoking cigarettes.
I interviewed Elena Ferrante by email over the summer of 2016. This was about a month before the New York Review of Books published a long article by an Italian journalist alleging her “true” identity. She read my questions (which were written in English) and wrote her responses in Italian. Her replies were translated by Ann Goldstein, the English translator of Ferrante’s many books. I had been hesitant about conducting this interview when I was offered the opportunity, for I admire Ferrante’s reticence. Yet, debating it with myself, it seemed it would be a mistake not to ask this great writer questions, if I had the chance.
For those who are unaware, Ferrante is one of the most celebrated contemporary writers in the world, and rightly so. In 2011, she released the first of a series of four books (each around 350 pages in length) called The Neapolitan Quartet, which follow two female friends from the time of their childhood in Naples in the 1950s to the present day. The books thrillingly unmask the consciousness and social situation of these women, tracing the complex bonds and political struggles of several generations of families in twentieth-century Naples. Reading these books, I felt a keen loss over the many great books that had not been written by women down through time; Ferrante made me long for even more first-rate writers to map (and to have mapped) the many underwritten aspects of the female experience. To me, the books have a distinctly female point of view: the point of view not of the natural victor but of one who has to fight for the right to observe.
Her three earlier and shorter novels (Troubling Love,The Days of Abandonment, and The Lost Daughter, published in Italian between 1992 and 2006) are like tinctures of the quartet: exquisitely precise and intensely felt, they magnify moments in a life and are written in a style and language that calls to mind few others—perhaps Clarice Lispector, for being just as brutal, penetrating, and heartbreaking. Ferrante’s books are profoundly contemporary while giving the same satisfaction as many nineteenth-century novels, as if Ferrante were not living in a landscape of busily competing media, but rather writing in a world where the quiet of readers can be taken for granted. She is formally risk-taking yet is a masterful storyteller. Her books rush you along in a swell of complicity, curiosity, feeling, and suspense. I cannot think of a single person I know who has not read Ferrante only to fall helplessly into her world. She has collapsed the gap between the sort of books that writers feel awe for and that the reading public can’t get enough of—the rarest thing.
Speaking personally, as a writer who has engaged in the various publicity and marketing strategies that many of us allow, I was interested to talk to Ferrante about how she knew from the beginning that she wanted to avoid the performance of self. I wanted to ask about how she—as a great illustrator of the human condition—has navigated such experiences as motherhood, discipleship, and rebellion. Naturally, I was curious to know how she wrote her books, but I didn’t ask too many craft questions because I know that for any writer, composition is ultimately a mystery.
Ferrante has managed, for decades, that difficult and enviable thing: the maintenance of total privacy as a human being, along with total openness as a creator through her art. I, and many of her devoted readers, hope there is even more of that art still to come. We are so grateful she took the time to do this interview, although as you will see, she doesn’t consider this an interview at all.
***
Sheila Heti: You’ve remarked that you forget the books you read. Do you think there’s some connection between being a reader who forgets (I am too), and being able to create and write? Maybe forgetting is a subconscious kind of remembering that allows writers to recombine what they’ve taken from literature, in ways that are particular to them.
Elena Ferrante: Yes, that’s probably the case. I do forget, I forget especially the books I’ve loved very much. I have an impression of them, I have a feeling for them, but to discuss them I would have to reread them. If I had a clear memory that allowed me to cite passages, point out crucial moments, any attempt at writing of my own would seem to me lost at the start. Imagination is said to be a function of memory. I prefer to think that it’s a function of nostalgia. We compose stories knowing very well that we are the last to arrive. And yet every time it seems to us that we are returning to the moment when the first human being, with nothing but the truth of his experience and the urge to reinvent it at every step, began to tell a story.
You once said, “I tend to edit and then inevitably revert to the original draft, when I see what I’ve lost by editing.” I agree: there is always some power in the way a person first catches the words on the page. Can you talk about your instinct to keep the rawness with your instinct to clean up? If you often prefer the first draft to the edited draft, what does your editing process consist of?
I detest vapid, sugary, sentimental tones and I try to get rid of them. I detest refinement when it cancels out naturalness, and so I look for precision without going too far. I could continue like that, with a fine list of intentions, but it’s just talk. In fact I move by instinct, a spontaneous movement that, if I put it in order, becomes merely a banal guidebook. So let’s say that, pulled this way and that by countless readings, by varied layers of taste, by inclinations and idiosyncrasies, I generally aim at what seems to me perfection. Then, however, perfection suddenly seems an insane excess of refinement and I return to versions that seem effective precisely because they are imperfect.
Picasso said the newwork of art always looks ugly at first, especially to its creator. Did you find your books ugly in the way Picasso meant?
Yes, certainly yes, but not because I feel the book as new; rather, because I feel it as mine, tarnished by contact with my experience.
So much contemporary female writing is accused of narcissism. Have you escaped the charge of narcissism, or have you received it? I’d like to bind this question to your comments about women who “practice a conscious surveillance on themselves” who before were “watched over by parents, by brothers, by husbands, by the community.” You have written that women who practise surveillance on themselves are the “heroines of our time,” but it’s precisely these women—real and fictional—who are accused of the sin of narcissism, as if a woman looking at herself (rather than being looked at by a man) was insulting to everyone. How do you understand this charge?
I’ve never felt narcissism to be a sin. It seems, rather, a cognitive tool that, like all cognitive tools, can be used in a distorted way. No, I think it’s necessary to be absolutely in love with ourselves. It’s only by reflecting on myself with attention and care that I can reflect on the world. It’s only by turning my gaze on myself that I can understand others, feel them as my kin. On the other hand it’s only by assiduously watching myself that I can take control and train myself to give the best of myself. The woman who practises surveillance on herself without letting herself be the object of surveillance is the great innovation of our times.
Your books resist the pressure to be “correct” in a feminist sense. For me, I have noticed that often it’s women who react most negatively to portrayals of women that are “un-feminist.” Why do you think such readers have a hard time with portrayals of women that conflict with their ideals? Do they feel the female author is somehow betraying them?
“Correctness” has never been a concern of mine when I write. Nor have I ever felt, in telling a story, that I had to adapt the story or the character to the demands of a cultural alignment, to the urgent needs of political battles even if I share them a hundred percent. Literature is not the sounding board of ideologies. I write always and only about what it seems to me I know thoroughly, and I would not bend the truth of a story to any higher necessity, not even to some ethical imperative or some prudent consistency with myself.
You’ve said, “Even if we’re constantly tempted to lower our guard—out of love, or weariness, or sympathy or kindness—we women shouldn’t do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved.” This is very striking to me. What does it mean to you to lower your guard? Women are taught to give ourselves fully, with great trust, in love… but you think we shouldn’t?
It seems to me risky to forget that no one gave us the freedoms we have today—we took them. For that very reason they can at any moment be taken away again. So just that, we mustn’t ever lower our guard. It’s wonderful to give oneself fully to another, we women know how to do it. And we should continue. It’s a serious mistake to retreat, giving up the marvelous feelings we’re capable of. Yet it’s indispensable to keep alive the sense of self. In Naples, certain girls who showed the marks of beatings would say, even with pleased half smiles, He hits me because he loves me. No one can dare to hurt us because he loves us, not a lover, not a friend, not even children.
You’ve said, “I feel such a sense of unease and distrust these days that I can no longer write even half a word without fearing that, once published, it might be distorted or purposely taken out of context and used in a malicious way.” I think this is something many writers feel. Have you found a solution for it?
Yes. Be silent, recover my strength, start again.
Do you smoke cigarettes?
Until a few years ago I smoked a lot, then I stopped abruptly. I tell you this because what is written while smoking seems better than that which fears for its health. But we have to learn to do well without necessarily doing harm to others and ourselves.
Do you keep copies of the books you have written and published in the room where you write?
No.
You’ve written, “A novel about today that is engaging and full of characters and events should be a novel about and against the suspension of disbelief.” How does your work avoid the necessity of the suspension of disbelief, and do you find too many novels are written today that require the suspension of disbelief? If readers are trained to suspend their disbelief, are they less effective political actors on their own behalf?
Those words of mine were a political metaphor. I was referring to what seems to me to have happened in recent decades: the transformation of citizens into a public involved in representations of the world that are skillfully constructed in order to suspend incredulity. The citizen risks acting like a fan, an enthusiastic consumer of media narratives that are plausible but deceptive, because those narratives are not the truth but have the appearance of truth. In other words, we have to return to not believing what they tell us. We have to relearn to distinguish between truth and verisimilitude.
Why do you do interviews? How do you decide which interviews to participate in? Are there rules you follow? Why not let the books exist without the interviews? Are you ever going to stop doing interviews altogether? Why not now?
I no longer follow any rule. The main thing is that it doesn’t seem to me that I’m giving interviews. You think that we’re doing an interview? I don’t. In an interview the person being interviewed entrusts his body, his facial expressions, his eyes, his gestures, the way he speaks—an often-improvised speech, inconsistent, poorly connected—to the writing of the interviewer. Something that I can’t accept. What we are doing resembles, rather, a pleasant correspondence. You think about it and write me your questions; I think about it and write my answers. It’s writing, in other words, and I like/am fond of all occasions for writing. In the past it seemed to me that I was unable to come up with answers suitable for publication. Either they were too succinct, a yes or a no, or a short question became an occasion for reflection, and I wrote pages and pages. Now I think I’ve learned something but not necessarily. So no, I don’t give interviews, to anyone, but I find these exchanges in writing increasingly useful—for myself, naturally. It’s writing that should be placed beside that of the books like a fiction not very different from literary fiction. I’m telling you about myself, but you too—a writer, I read one of your books in Italian, which I loved—with your questions are telling me about yourself. I talk about myself, as do you, as a producer of writing. I do it truthfully, addressing not only you and our possible readers but also myself, or at least that substantial part of myself that considers it completely senseless to waste so much time writing and needs reasons that justify the waste. In short, your questions help me to invent myself as an author, to give form, that is, to this unstable, elusive part that I myself know little or nothing about. Something that I imagine has happened to you too, as an author, when you have formulated the questions.
In Magda Szabó’s The Door, Emerence—the intelligent cleaning-woman with a strong inner code of behaviour, who keeps house for the intellectual woman-writer protagonist—reminds me a bit of Lila, and Szabó’s protagonist is reminiscent of your Elena. Yet Emerence is somehow the superior of the pair, as is Lila. Is there something in the figure of the intellectual woman writer that pales in comparison (from the perspective of the woman writing) to the (comparatively) uneducated woman who yet knows and understands the world? Why do so many female writers demean the “intellectual” female figures we create? Do we still not truly value female literary work, women who work with their minds? Is it a kind of self-loathing? Why do we often portray intellectual women as having lost more than they have gained?
You pose a very interesting question; I have to think about it. Why do we invent cultivated, intelligent women and then lower their level or even their pleasure in life? Who knows. Maybe because we’re still incapable of a convincing portrayal of female intelligence. We haven’t completely set aside the literary model that represented us at the side of a superior man who would take care of us and our children. Thus, though we have now acquired the sense of our inner richness and our intellectual autonomy, we portray them in a minor key, as if our capacity to produce ideas and culture were a presumptuous exaggeration, as if, even having something extra, we ourselves didn’t really believe in it. From here, probably, comes the literary invention of secondary female figures who possess that something extra in themselves, remind us of it, assure us that it’s there and should be appreciated. We are still in the middle of the crossing, and literature makes do however it can.
You write in Frantumaglia that you were the sort of child who “apologized for everything.” But as an adult, you realize that goodness “derives not from the absence of guilt but from the capacity to feel true loathing for our daily, recurring, private guilt.” Yet how can a woman ever truly know what she should be guilty for, when women live in a world of codes that have been created by men; when we live in “male cities” (as you have termed it) and when the route to understanding who one is necessarily involves exploring one’s instincts to “disobey”? How can you tell the difference between what you should feel guilty for and what you are made to feel guilty for but shouldn’t feel guilty for?
Our future depends on this connection. There is no true liberation without a strong sense of self. The systematic practice of disobedience is in fact an integral part of male values, and so doesn’t really free us; rather, at times, it crushes us, makes us even more acutely the victims of men’s needs, especially in the realm of sex. We need an ethics of our own to oppose that which the male world has imposed on and claimed from us. We need a hierarchy of our own of merits and faults, and we need to reckon with truth. But that’s possible only if we consider ourselves to be exposed to good and evil like any human being. When literature represents us as the positive pole of life or as having been exposed to evil only as victims—an evil that in the end will turn out to be a good, if looked at with spectacles different from those imposed by males—it is not doing its duty. The duty of literature is to dig to the bottom. We are a subject not only unpredictable but unknown even to ourselves. We have an urgent need for representation and for an ethics of our own. We have the right and the duty to explore ourselves thoroughly, to slip away, to cross the borders that make us suffer. I insist on self-surveillance, which means choice, assumption of responsibility, and the necessity of losing restraint in order to know ourselves, not lose ourselves.
Did you ever fear what you would lose by not participating in the media, festivals, etc.? How did you set about so confidently not pleasing your publisher? And do you think it’s possible for a writer who has sent herself around in the world as a writer to stop? Or does the fact of ever having been seen mean that something is forever lost and any retreat is useless? Finally, have you ever signed a book?
Yes, I made the mistake of signing a hundred copies, some years ago. It was naïve. It seemed to me that since I was doing it at home, in private, it wouldn’t cost me much. Today I think that I could have spared myself even that. I remain of the opinion that a book has to absolutely make it on its own; it shouldn’t even use advertising. Of course, my position is extreme. And among other things the market has by now absorbed it and made the most of it, while the media have readily changed it to gossip and a puzzle to be solved. But for me the small cultural polemic underlying the choices I made twenty-five years ago remains important. I will never consider it finished, and I trust that no one who feels that writing is fundamental will completely set it aside. Good books are stunning charges of vital energy. They have no need of fathers, mothers, godfathers and godmothers. They are a happy event within the tradition and the community that guards the tradition. They express a force capable of expanding autonomously in space and time.
The complete conversation between Elena Ferrante and Sheila Heti can be found in Brick magazine’s Winter 2017 issue, due out at the end of this month.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
