* * *
To explain what her own mother bequeathed to her, Ferrante offers the word frantumaglia – in fact, the term, all hints and murmurs and overheard sounds, explains nothing. The word gives the title to the collection of essays and interviews, all conducted by correspondence, from which many of the statements by Ferrante cited so far in this chapter have been taken. It is a book that, among other things, serves as a sustained rejoinder to the resentments provoked by her refusal to release her true name and take proper charge of her writing: she has everything to say about her writing, and about what her characters and novels mean to her, but not one thing about how anyone should read her books. But it also seems to me as if Ferrante, in interview after interview, as energised as she often appears reluctant, is ‘dream-reading’ her own work – the term she uses to describe how a true literary work takes off from its author to engender something new and unanticipated in the reader (which makes the unconscious the slipstream of all new birth).58
This is where a mother’s disintegration, loss of self, falling into pieces, so central to Ferrante’s writing, begins. Frantumaglia is a word of dialect that her mother used when she was ‘racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart’, which depressed her, made her dizzy and her mouth taste like iron.59 The word for an unfathomable disquiet, it referred to ‘a miscellaneous crowd of things in her head, debris in a muddy water of the brain’, the source of all suffering ‘not traceable to a single obvious cause’.60 The strongest memory it evokes is of her mother weeping ‘frantumaglia tears’.61 Frantumaglia arrived as a warning that her mother was losing herself – it would drive her suddenly out of the house, leaving a pot burning on the stove. This memory of her mother in pain is the seedbed of Ferrante’s writing: Olga, distracted, walking out of the house; the copper pot that explodes in My Brilliant Friend, the first warning shot that Lila is cursed with a gift that shatters the world’s contours.62
But vivid and poignant as this memory appears, it is also a complete mystery: to the mother herself, and then to Ferrante, the daughter who cannot now ask her mother what on earth the word meant, and who for that reason – obedient to a legacy as generative as it is scary – has no choice but to make the word her own. What mothers pass to daughters, Ferrante is also telling us, is language, not as a tool but in the form of words that endlessly slide from our grasp. It is this fundamental recalcitrance of language, its inner resistance to the meanings it is meant to promote – like the sexuality no mother can herself fully know or own – that led Jean Laplanche to argue that all mothers are an eternal enigma to their child, presenting the child with an insoluble sexual riddle that will spur their curiosity for life.
When Ferrante picks up the term frantumaglia, its meanings quiver and darken, and this in turn will be the legacy she passes to Lila – her best-loved character, as she acknowledges, because she forced her to work so hard.63 ‘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.’64 She is on her own home ground: ‘I who sometimes suffer the illness of Olga,’ she comments, ‘represent it [frantumaglia] mainly to myself 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.’65 As we have already seen, this thrum of being that Ferrante sources in the body of the mother, however agonised, is the precondition of creativity. Frantumaglia evokes a moment of childhood, before language instilled speech, a ‘bright-coloured explosion of sounds, thousands and thousands of butterflies with sonorous wings’.66 For the mother, frantumaglia was the bad spirit of the household, its spilled remnants gently bruising the fragile discipline of the home. As a daughter and as a writer, Ferrante has added colour and sound, rendering her mother’s anguish cosmic.
That rare moment of identification with her character Olga and her illness – ‘I who sometimes suffer the illness of Olga’ – should give us pause, since if there is one easy way out of all this mess, it would be to label Ferrante’s own suffering mother, together with Lila and all the rest of these mothers, as sick. This is a charge I have heard levelled at mothers merely for falling in love with a man other than their husband, or at the first hint of discontent – another common ploy being to attribute all maternal unhappiness to the onset of the menopause (one mother who had tried to leave the father of her children told me that, in the course of her marriage, he had diagnosed her at least four times as suffering from the menopause, which defies the laws of biology, if nothing else).
Lila’s moments of ‘dissolving margins’, as she describes them, reach the limits of what is bearable, for herself and for Lenù, who, it would be fair to say, is the person who loves her most. They turn the world dark, as if an intense black mass of a storm were scudding across the night sky, reducing the moon to insensate matter; or, in the midst of an earthquake, dissolving the boundaries of the driver of the car and the car itself, in which she is sitting: ‘the thing and the person gushing out of themselves, mixing liquid metal and flesh’.67 Lenù struggles against this vision but she also, on occasion, imbibes it: ‘I thought: yes, Lila is right, the beauty of things is a trick, the sky is a throne of fear … I am part of the universal terror; at this moment I’m the infinitesimal particle through which the fear of everything becomes conscious.’68 As she sits on the beach, she finds herself hoping that mad dogs, vipers, scorpions, enormous sea serpents and assassins will emerge from the sea to torture her.69 This is frightening, but unlike forms of mental disturbance that lock the sufferer inside her own head, it is shared, passing back and forth between the two friends. And, as we will shortly see, Lila’s unique insight, which she is calling up on behalf of everyone, can be understood as drawing out the dark substance of the earth, together with its political terrors.
There is, therefore, a way of reading the Neapolitan Novels that would see Lenù not just as Lila’s best friend (the two being parts of each other’s innermost being) but also as a mother who feels her only task in life is to contain – to ward off – the nightmares of her child: ‘I who have written for months and months,’ she writes at the end of the final volume, sweeping the entire work up in such a protective impulse, ‘to give her a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself.’70 They are the last lines of the Quartet (followed only by the epilogue).This would make the entire Quartet an act of mothering, albeit with a difference, since in this version the only way of soothing the world is first to call up its worst demons. I remember one of the people dearest to me in the world asking me about my baby daughter: ‘How will you help her with her fear?’ (which at least has the virtue of seeing that there can be no allaying a child’s fear – nor indeed anybody else’s – unless you acknowledge the fear in the first place). Lenù also knows that without that fear she would surely not be able to write: ‘Would I know how to imagine those things without her? Would I know how to give life to every object, let it bend in unison with mine?’71 This, finally, is the genius of Lila – my brilliant friend.
Ferrante is by no means the only writer, nor indeed the first, to make this link between mothering and the contours of the universe. To take just one striking instance, in this case rendered from the point of view of a son: William Maxwell’s 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows is a vivid portrait of a mother, Elizabeth, who will leave two young boys when she dies of Spanish flu in the pandemic of 1918. In the mind of her eight-year-old Bunny, all lines converge on her body. She must be present to secure his domestic space: ‘all the lines and surfaces of the room bend toward his mother, so that when he looked at the pattern of the rug, he saw it necessarily in relation to the toe of her shoe.’72 Only then can he allow his possessions to be at times ‘what they actually were’ and at others to become ‘knights and crusaders, or airplanes or elephants in a procession’.73 Unless the world is kept in its shape by the mother, there can be no ima
ginative freedom. Unless there is a mother, there can be no world. But the same mother also threatens the very contours she holds in place. When she kisses Bunny, ‘everything blurred’; when he lies in bed not quite awake listening to her conversation with his aunt Irene, ‘the white woodwork was unattached to the walls, the shape of chairs was ambiguous … while he squinted his eyes, the walls relaxed and became shapeless.’74 Ferrante gives a modern-day version of this inherent instability of all forms, which Lila raises to the nth dimension.
* * *
As we saw earlier, one of the plaints and limitations of the modern mother in the West today is that she so often finds herself adrift from the wider world, from public, political life. To that extent, the idea of the ‘working mother’ is to my mind one of the misnomers of all time, since the one thing such a mother must never think of doing is taking her baby or children to work. If Medea and Dido are heroines for Ferrante, it is at least partly because of the way their anger spreads outwards from their personal despair, bringing down whole dynasties and cities in its wake – whereas today, as Ferrante puts it, women can enter the city provided they do not try to reinvent it.75 Such women are connected and powerful, however tragically things turn out in the end. In their eyes, their most intimate rejection is an injustice, one that the whole world needs to hear about.
If Ferrante is so resonant for the argument of this book, it is not only because of the way she ploughs the darkest depths of the maternal psyche, excavating, as terror and vision, the aspects of being human that are hardest for anyone to contemplate. Nor is it just that, in her literary hands, pregnancy becomes the original dissolution of all form, in which the world, if it would only shed its most oppressive, self-centred delusions, would do well to recognise itself. It is also because of the way – in one last, perhaps unexpected, twist – she folds this vision into the political reality out of which it at least partly grows, and on which it so violently propagates and feeds itself.
In Ferrante’s vision, a mother’s body and the public world all around her are indissolubly linked – her rejoinder to the idea we have repeatedly come across that these two opposite realms of being a mother, at their most intense, are best sidelined or not spoken about. The community of Naples in which Lila and Lenù live is drenched in a violence that stems from a resurgent post-war Italian fascism. This violence pervades the meat factory where Lila works under inhuman conditions, a war zone between communists and fascists where her boss is finally murdered; the proud and struggling business enterprises of the community steeped in dirty money, bribery and corruption; the assaults, mental and physical, on women; the safety, or rather non-safety, of the streets from where children are seized without warning or redress. It is not just mothers who grow, unwelcome, inside their daughters’ pregnant bodies. It is a whole vicious political dispensation that is threatening to be reborn. The fear lived out by Lenù on the beach is, therefore, also a political fear that passes indiscriminately from body to body, hand to mouth. These women, these mothers, are alert to it like nobody else. The agonies of the mothering body – to give the term ‘labour pains’ an added gloss – are at one with the drag and flow of the community in which they take place. ‘Lila and Elena [Lenù] are made of the neighbourhood’s matter,’ Ferrante comments, ‘but a fluid matter that drags everything along in its wake.’76
In this context, to be a mother is to struggle to save – while also knowing that you will fail to save – your child. To be faced with the prospect that the world is not getting better, that there will not be a better life for the lives you have made (a feeling that for so many in the world as I write is becoming more intense by the day). Violence breeds violence. In order to save herself and her son, Lila thinks, she ‘had to intimidate those who wished to intimidate her, she had to inspire fear in those who wished to make her fear’.77 At times, writing is contaminated by the same vision. ‘One writes not so much to write,’ Lenù muses in the midst of the struggle against the Solara brothers, ‘one writes to inflict pain on those who wish to inflict pain.’78 Get in there first (another, deadly, type of cross-border exchange). Children are not spared. In one of the grimmest moments in the Quartet, Silvia, a political activist, arrives at Lila’s home having been beaten and raped by fascists, and tells her story ‘as if she were recounting a horrendous nursery rhyme’.79 Lenù’s daughter Elsa is in the room. When Lenù goes to find her other daughter, Dede, she finds her playing with Silvia’s son Mirko (another child of Nino’s). She is instructing him: ‘You have to hit me, understand?’80 ‘The new living flesh was replicating the old in a game.’81
What is a mother meant to do in such a world? Might it be kinder to mothers to lift from their minds and bodies the impossible expectation that they can repair the world and make it safe? And if the world took on its own responsibilities for the mess that it makes? ‘We are,’ Ferrante states, ‘the destabilising conditions we suffer or cause.’82 Naples is ‘a male city ungovernable in both its public and private behaviour’,83 but it took time for her to realise that her flight from Naples, which was above all a flight from its mothers, was futile, that what she needed to recognise was the ‘torture of women, to feel the weight of the male city on their existence’.84 This makes the flight from the mother a form of political blindness. Or rather, it makes the mother answerable, the scapegoat for a political distress of which no mother could possibly be the single source, but for which she inevitably will be blamed. At moments in the Quartet, it is as if every dissolution of form flows indiscriminately from the violent politics of the city streets. In vocabulary strikingly evocative of the miasma that bears down on Lila, Ferrante describes the city as ‘a dark force of the world that weighs on its subjects, the sum total of what we call the threatening reality of today, engulfing, through violence, every space of mediation and civil relationship around and within the characters’.85 Lila can see into the violent heart of things, but none of it, not as wife or mother or daughter, is her fault.
‘What do you think of the governing political class today?’ one interviewer asks. ‘I am repulsed by it,’ Ferrante replies.86 Later she elaborates: ‘narratives that can state more directly, even through literature, the reasons for our repugnance as citizens are necessary.’87 Note that she speaks as a citizen, which all mothers of course are, even if in modern times it does not always feel that way. But to be a citizen fully, you have to know you belong to the widest sweep of historical events. Ferrante’s vision is expansive. The horror, the repugnance, cannot be restricted to – hived off onto – Naples, a metropolis that ‘has anticipated and anticipates the troubles of Italy, perhaps of Europe’.88 Slowly Lenù understands that Naples was part of a chain: ‘with larger and larger links: the neighbourhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet’.89 In which case, Lila’s moments of breakdown cannot be hers alone. Rather, it is the rotting future of Europe and the whole universe that she is registering on behalf of everyone. In this, she is reminiscent of Freud’s hysterics, whose symptoms allow the rest of the family to carry on behaving as if they, unlike the hysteric, are just fine. This makes Lila, not sick, but – to return once more to the Greeks – a prophetess. Or perhaps both: sick at heart and freighted with the cares of the world (the second being a common enough definition of motherhood).
* * *
In the course of working on this book, I have come to think that it is because this is the reality lying in wait once you scrape the surface of being a mother, a reality captured by Ferrante with such unforgiving intensity, that much public discourse on motherhood, tacking at top speed in the opposite direction, tends to be so glib, falsely knowing, cruel or anodyne. On the basis of conversations with my women friends who are mothers and devoted Ferrante fans, it would seem that her lack of inhibition on the subject of mothers plays a decisive part in her extraordinary success, making her readership – among which women do seem to predominate – something like a club or secret society, whose members have taken
a vow never to explain exactly why they have joined or what, behind closed doors, they really talk about. When the boundaries of her characters dissolve, Ferrante observes of her own writing, ‘the language with which they are attempting to say something about themselves also is loosened, unbounded.’90 She has loosened the tongue and lifted a burden of guilt (we are far from Bettelheim). After all, what matters in the end is what can, and cannot, be said – an issue with added political urgency in our newly censored times. ‘The most effective stories,’ she states, ‘are those that resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded.’91 Her simile – ramparts – is telling. Like de Beauvoir on the radical disorientation of mothering, she could be talking about the aliens on our shores.
Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that Ferrante’s experience of writing should sail so close to her subject matter: ‘In the Neapolitan Quartet, I wanted everything to take shape and then lose its shape.’92 At first she needs tense, clear formulas that are ‘demonstrations of beautiful form’, but only as a pathway to writing that is ‘disjointed, agitated, increasing the risk of absolute collapse’ (when the borders collapse, ‘the story begins’).93 She dreads the moment ‘when the narrative has to compose itself again’.94 She writes hundreds of pages without stopping, sometimes never needing to alter a single word, but she still prefers the rough draft to the finished product, ‘writing that is dissatisfied with itself’.95 Letting go of ‘wriggling material’ is, she states, ‘the worst sin the writer can commit’.96 Like the pregnant body, like Lila’s mind, like the city – in harmony, or rather disharmony, with each other – writing expands, secretes, spills, dissolves, disintegrates. It is, remember, the boundaries that are fake: ‘When we tell a story, the only thing that should matter is to find a cascade of our words that will flood all the marked-out territory with the persistence – even if devastating – of mucilage.’97 This is writing as raw, viscous matter, like the worm that Leda found stuffed deep inside Elena’s doll to make her pregnant. Remember Olga in The Days of Abandonment: ‘To write truly is to speak from the depths of the maternal womb.’98
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