Elena Ferrante

The New York Times: “Elena Ferrante: A Power of Our Own”

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Power is a story told by women. For centuries, men have colonized storytelling. That era is over.

By Elena Ferrante

Ms. Ferrante is a novelist.

May 17, 2019

Power, although hard to handle, is greatly desired. There is no person or group or sect or party or mob that doesn’t want power, convinced that it would know how to use it as no one ever has before.

I’m no different. And yet I’ve always been afraid of having authority assigned to me. Whether it was at school or at work, men were in the majority in any governing body and the women adopted male ways. I never felt at ease, so I stayed on the sidelines. I was sure that I didn’t have the strength to sustain conflicts with men, and that I would betray myself by adapting my views to theirs. For millenniums, every expression of power has been conditioned by male attitudes toward the world. To women, then, it seems that power can be used only in the ways that men have traditionally used it.

There is one form of power that has fascinated me ever since I was a girl, even though it has been widely colonized by men: the power of storytelling. Telling stories really is a kind of power, and not an insignificant one. Stories give shape to experience, sometimes by accommodating traditional literary forms, sometimes by turning them upside down, sometimes by reorganizing them. Stories draw readers into their web, and engage them by putting them to work, body and soul, so that they can transform the black thread of writing into people, ideas, feelings, actions, cities, worlds, humanity, life. Storytelling, in other words, gives us the power to bring order to the chaos of the realunder our own sign, and in this it isn’t very far from political power.

In the beginning I didn’t know that storytelling was a kind of power. I became aware of this only slowly, and felt an often paralyzing responsibility. I still do. Power is neither good nor bad — it depends on what we intend to do with it. The older I get, the more afraid I am of using the power of storytelling badly. My intentions in general are good, but sometimes telling a story succeeds in the right way and sometimes in the wrong way. The only consolation I have is that however badly conceived and badly written — and therefore harmful — a story may be, the harm will always be less than that caused by terrible political and economic mismanagement, with its accouterments of wars, guillotines, mass exterminations, ghettos, concentration camps and gulags.

What to say, then? I suppose that I chose to write out of a fear of handling more concrete and dangerous forms of power. And also perhaps out of a strong feeling of alienation from the techniques of domination, so that at times writing seemed to be the most congenial way for me to react to abuses of power.

( . . . )

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Bitchmedia: In “My brilliant friend,” companionship and survival are forever linked

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On Bitchmedia

Feb 1, 2019 – Rachel Vorona Cote

The summer before my senior year of high school, I spent three weeks at a French immersion sleepaway camp. While enrolled, we were contractually bound to speak and read only French, and we consumed exclusively French media. Only one leniency forestalled total cultural isolation: We were permitted to write and receive letters in English. I had forgotten to make note of my best friend’s home address, but assumed the issue would be resolved when she sent her first letter to me. In the meantime, I dutifully wrote to her each day, my first letter swelling into a lengthy diaristic account of my Francophile experiences. Yet she never wrote to me once over those three weeks, and so I never sent her that roving, tome-like epistle. I suspect that I reread it later in the summer and, in a fit of embarrassment, threw it away.

Love her though I did, my best friend oftentimes baffled and vexed me, and I’m certain that she felt similarly about me. I tracked evidence that pointed to her reciprocated affection—the number of weekends spent together, the fond remarks, the articulated assurance that I was her best friend. I was her confidant, but I often worried that my disposition condemned me to need her more than she would ever need me. And like My Brilliant Friend’s Elena—who, in despair, awaits letters from her own best friend, Lila—I grew increasingly agitated that my friend’s silence confirmed my fear.

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ActuaLitté

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Frantumaglia : Elena Ferrante pulvérise l’expérience autobiographique

ESSAI ROMANCÉ – Elena Ferrante avait débuté sa carrière sous couvert d’anonymat, par timidité, finit-elle par avouer. Ce masque l’a abritée dans un temps, puis protégée, malgré les tentatives de journalistes pour percer le mystère. Qui parle quand Elena écrit ? Quel personnage-auteur se profile donc ?

Voyager à travers l’écriture, quoi de plus dangereux, et de plus mensonger quand un pseudonyme nous promet de parler de sa vie et de l’écriture ? Le rapport de l’un à l’autre est complexe, mais la vérité n’est pas une fin en soi : ici, l’essai importe autant que la trame romanesque qui, somme toute, aboutit à une autre histoire, dans l’histoire. Elena Ferrante, quelle qu’elle soit, est une amoureuse de la littérature : dans les multiples exemples que contient Frantumaglia — lettres, courriers aux lecteurs, à l’éditeur, interviews, etc. — elle affirme une réflexion sur ce métier. Revenons sur un point : voilà plus de vingt ans que Ferrante publie des livres et écrit. Et à ce jour, elle incarne le plus grand secret, entretenu et jalousement préservé, quant à l’identité derrière le nom. Sauf que les lecteurs, eux, s’en moquent éperdument. C’est ainsi que l’ouvrage divise les questionnements en deux catégories : ceux qui interrogent sur sa vie personnelle, et sont éconduits, et ceux qui tentent de trouver les signes.

Car, en fin de course, Ferrante nous entraîne d’abord sur une authentique piste de réflexion : qu’est-ce donc qu’être auteure ? La première édition de La Frantumaglia fut publiée en Italie fin 2003, bien avant que le succès ne l’inonde : elle ne comptait alors que deux livres publiés, dont l’un, prix Elsa Morante, fut adapté au cinéma par Mario Martone, conférant une certaine aura à l’auteure. Cette édition enrichie, comme l’explique son éditeur, se double de multiples ajouts. En Italie, sa parution manqua d’être compromise par l’article de Claudio Gatti, qui fit paraître une enquête le 2 octobre 2016, où il affirmait avoir découvert la vérité autour d’Elena Ferrante. Un travail de fourmi et de patience, mais qui ne fit que lui attirer les foudres des lecteurs. Depuis toujours, Ferrante pointe le texte, seule chose qui importe. Et les rares éléments biographiques connus dans Frantumaglia servent avant tout à humaniser l’auteure. À l’incarner. Car elle est romancière d’un bout à l’autre, et si elle livre des données biographiques, ces dernières sont encore romancées, et l’on cherchera en vain les clefs — et plus encore, les serrures. Alors personnage ou auteure ? Les deux, en réalité : quand elle cite Freud et Totem et Tabou , c’est pour souligner le cas de cette patiente qui refusait de se servir de son nom, redoutant qu’on s’en empare pour lui dérober ensuite sa personnalité. De l’auteure au texte, en passant par la figure de l’auteur, les questions agitent la critique — quand bien même c’est le texte qui demeure. Et demeurera toujours.

The Dartmouth:“Neapolitan Quartet” is an immersive look at a female friendship

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On The Dartmouth

Jan 1, 2018 – Isabelle Blank

Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s operatic Neapolitan Quartet, a series that spans four volumes and six decades of friendship, traces the intertwined lives of characters Lila and Lenù. The series begins with Lenù and Lila’s childhood as they grow up in a poor Neapolitan neighborhood and traces their subsequent lives as wives, mothers and ultimately lonely old women. The quartet is a series of cyclical events encapsulated in a larger cyclical narrative structure. The first book of the series, entitled “My Brilliant Friend,” opens at the fourth book’s close. Rino, Lila’s son, telephones Lenù to tell her that his mother has gone missing. At the end of the final book, entitled “The Story of a Lost Child,” there is no answer as to where Lila has disappeared. However, Ferrante writes such a thorough description of Lila’s character and psyche throughout the series that, in the final book, it makes sense as to why she erased herself. It seems not to matter where she’s gone. Lila is mean, whip-smart and down-trodden — how could she not want to disappear, how could she not want to melt into what she calls the “dissolving boundaries” of her complicated world?

Ferrante weaves an intricate cloth depicting detailed scenes and characters that repeat themselves over and over to construct a patterned, sprawling tapestry. These intimate, very often domestic, scenes that Ferrante writes involve only the characters introduced in a list at the beginning of each volume. Though the scenes are private and the characters insular, the story conveys broad-reaching meditations on class, femininity and politics.

Lenù and Lila are foils for one another. Lenù is blonde, studious, eager to please, self-doubting and ambitious, whereas Lila is dark, naturally brilliant, mercurial, mean and irresistible to those around her. The story is told from Lenù’s point of view, but the two friends understand one another on such a deep and complex level that the reader is often privy to Lila’s perceived inner thoughts. The two are paradoxically bound to, yet at odds with, one another. Lenù cannot resist Lila’s magnetism, her cutting intellect and her unbounded passion even when Lila is at her most cruel. Ferrante’s prose is cerebral. The reader is immersed not only in Ferrante’s cinematic scenes, but also in Lenù’s body and her psyche. Ferrante lays bare Lila and Lenù’s most unlikable traits: their respective failures as mothers, their self-absorption, their gnawing anxiety, their seeming inability to experience joy and their mutual jealousy.

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