La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  Donadio: Where do you see yourself in the Italian literary tradition?

  Ferrante: I’m a storyteller. I’ve always been more interested in storytelling than in writing. Even today, Italy has a weak narrative tradition. Beautiful, magnificent, very carefully crafted pages abound, but not the flow of storytelling that despite its density manages to sweep you away. A bewitching example is Elsa Morante. I try to learn from her books, but I find them unsurpassable.

  Donadio: The opening scene of the fourth and final installment in your Naples series, The Story of the Lost Child, echoes some scenes in The Lost Daughter, a book in which the protagonist, Leda, also writes that she likes the echoes of names: Nani, Nina, Nennella, Elena, Lenù, etc. Why these echoes? Do you see your protagonists as some variation on the same woman or women?

  Ferrante: The women in my stories are all echoes of real women who, because of their suffering or their combativeness, have very much influenced my imagination: my mother, a childhood girlfriend, acquaintances whose stories I know. In general I combine their experiences with my own and Delia, Amalia, Olga, Leda, Nina, Elena, Lenù are born out of that mix. But the echo that you noticed maybe derives from an oscillation inside the characters that I’ve always worked on. My women are strong, educated, self-aware and aware of their rights, just, but at the same time subject to unexpected breakdowns, to subservience of every kind, to mean feelings. I’ve also experienced this oscillation. I know it well, and that also affects the way I write.

  Donadio: It seems fair to surmise from your books that you are a mother. Even if that’s not the case, how has the experience of motherhood—lived or observed—affected your writing?

  Ferrante: The roles of daughters and mothers are central to my books; sometimes I think I haven’t written about anything else. Every single one of my anxieties has ended up there. To conceive, to change shape, to feel inhabited by something increasingly alive that makes you feel ill and gives you a sense of well-being is both thrilling and threatening. It’s an experience akin to awe, that ancient feeling that mortals had when they found themselves facing a god, the same feeling that Mary must have felt, immersed in her reading, when the angel appeared. As for my writing, it began before the children came along, it was already a very strong passion, and it often came into conflict with my love for them, especially with the obligations and pleasures of taking care of them. Writing is also a kind of reproduction of life, one marked by contradictory and overwhelming emotions. But the continuum of writing—even with the anguish that you might not always know how to revive it and that no life might ever pass through it again—can be severed, if you need to, out of necessity or other pressing matters. In the end, you have to separate yourself from your books. But you never really cut the umbilical cord. Children always remain an inescapable knot of love, of terrors, of satisfactions and anxieties.

  Donadio: There are many, many classical references in your work, not least the names Elena, or Helen, and Leda. Why the interest in the classical world? What about it speaks to you?

  Ferrante: I studied classics. You’ve recognized the traces of it in my works and I’m pleased by that, but I hardly notice it myself. I recognize my education more in stories that I wrote as exercises and that fortunately have never seen the light of day. I have to say that I’ve never seen the classical world as an ancient world. Instead I feel its closeness, and I think I’ve learned many things from the Greek and Latin classics about how to put words together. As a girl I wanted to make that world my own, and I practiced with translations that tried to remove the lofty tones that I had been taught to use in school. But at the same time I imagined the Bay of Naples filled with Sirens who spoke in Greek, as in a lovely story by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Naples is a city in which many worlds coexist. The Greek, Latin, and Eastern worlds; medieval, modern, and contemporary Europe; even the United States, are all side by side, neighbors, especially in the dialect and also in the historical stratification of the city.

  Donadio: How did the Naples tetralogy come into being? Did you envision the books as four distinct novels from the start or did you start writing My Brilliant Friend without knowing where the story would end?

  Ferrante: Almost six years ago I started writing a story of a difficult female friendship that came directly from inside a book that I’m very attached to, The Lost Daughter. I thought I could manage it in a hundred, a hundred and fifty pages. Instead, the writing, I would say extremely naturally, unearthed memories of people and places from my childhood—stories, experiences, fantasies—so much so that the story went on for many years. The story was conceived and written as a single narrative. Its division into four hefty volumes was decided when I realized that the story of Lila and Lenù couldn’t easily be contained in one book. I always knew the end of the story, and I knew some central episodes very well—Lila’s wedding, the adultery on Ischia, the work in the factory, the lost daughter—but the rest was a surprising and demanding gift that came from the pure storytelling pleasure.

  Donadio: The third installment in the Naples books is more cinematic. Have you also worked in cinema?

  Ferrante: Absolutely not. But I adore the cinema and have since I was a child.

  Donadio: How did you start writing novels? What book of yours do you consider a breakthrough in your own writing and why?

  Ferrante: I discovered as a girl that I liked telling stories. I did it orally and with some success. Around age thirteen I started to write stories, but writing didn’t become a permanent habit until I was in my twenties. Troubling Love was important. I felt that I’d found the right tone. The Days of Abandonment confirmed that for me, after much struggle, and gave me confidence. Today I think My Brilliant Friend was my most arduous yet most successful book. Writing it was like having the chance to live my life over again. But I still think that the most daring, the most risk-taking book is The Lost Daughter. If I hadn’t gone through that, with great anxiety, I wouldn’t have written My Brilliant Friend.

  Donadio: In which order did you write your seven novels compared with their publication dates?

  Ferrante: As I said, I consider the four installments of My Brilliant Friend to be a single story, so I’ve published four novels, the last one in four volumes, and all of them pubblished in the order in which they were written. But they ripened during the years when I wrote privately. It’s as if I found them by painstakingly organizing countless narrative fragments.

  Donadio: Can you describe your writing process? You told the Financial Times that you made a living doing what you’ve always done, “which is not writing.” How much of your time are you able to devote to your writing compared with your other job? Can you tell us what that other job is?

  Ferrante: I don’t consider writing a job. A job has fixed hours—you start, you finish. I write continuously and everywhere and at every hour of the day and night. What I call my job is orderly and quiet, and when necessary it retreats and leaves me time. Writing has always been a great struggle for me. I would polish it line by line and I wouldn’t move forward if I didn’t think that what I had already written was perfect, and since the work never seemed perfect I didn’t even try to find a publisher. The books that I ultimately published all came with surprising ease, even My Brilliant Friend, although it took me years.

  Donadio: What about the editing process? You send your work to Edizioni E/O and do they do much editing?

  Ferrante: The editing is extremely attentive, but delicate and done with great courtesy. I’m the one who welcomes doubts. I add them to my own questions and write, rewrite, erase, add until the day before the book goes to press.

  Donadio: I fully respect your choice, and I’m sure you are tired of this question, but I have to ask it: At what stage in your writing life, and in what spirit, did you choose anonymity? Was it meant, as in the ancient epics, to give the story precedence over the storyteller? To protect your family and loved ones? Or simply to avoid the med
ia, as you’ve said in the past?

  Ferrante: If I may, I didn’t choose anonymity; the books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than twenty years ago I felt the burden of exposing myself in public. I wanted to detach myself from the finished story. I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage. This choice created a small polemic in the media, whose logic is aimed at inventing protagonists while ignoring the quality of the work, so that it seems natural that bad or mediocre books by someone who has a reputation in the media deserve more attention than books that might be of higher quality but were written by someone who is no one. But today what counts most for me is to preserve a creative space that seems full of possibilities, including technical ones. The structural absence of the author affects the writing in a way that I’d like to continue to explore.

  Donadio: At this point, now that you’ve had a certain success, would you ever reconsider the anonymity and reveal who you are? For Hollywood stars, they say that fame can be lonely. But anonymous literary success must also be a bit lonely, no?

  Ferrante: I don’t feel at all lonely. I’m happy that my stories have migrated and found readers in Italy and in other parts of the world. I follow their journeys with affection, but from afar. They are books that I have written to put my writing on display, not me. I have my life, which for now is quite full.

  Donadio: In Italy in particular, people often say that your anonymity must mean that you’re a man. What do you make of that assumption? The Neapolitan novelist Domenico Starnone has given interviews saying that he is very tired of everyone asking if he’s you. What would you say to him?

  Ferrante: That he’s right and I feel guilty. But I hold him in great esteem and I’m certain that he understands my motivations. My identity, my sex can be found in my writing. Everything that has sprouted up around that is yet more evidence of the character of Italians in the first years of the twenty-first century.

  Donadio: Any comments you’d like to make about the current state of Italy?

  Ferrante: Italy is an extraordinary country, but it has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest. This confusion, concealed behind verbose self-promotion of all kinds, runs through criminal organizations as well as political parties, government bureaucracies, and all social classes. That makes it very difficult to be a truly good Italian, different from the models constructed by newspapers and television. And yet good, excellent Italians exist in every corner of civic life, even if you don’t see them on television. They are evidence of the fact that Italy, if it still manages, in spite of everything, to have excellent citizens, is truly an extraordinary country.

  Donadio: Besides wonderful material, what else has Naples given you? What for you sets that city apart?

  Ferrante: Naples is my city, the city where I learned quickly, before I was twenty, the best and worst of Italy and the world. I advise everyone to come and live here even just for a few weeks. It’s an apprenticeship, in all the most stupefying ways.

  Donadio: Flaubert famously said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” Which of your books—and which of your protagonists—would you say is closest to your own experience or your own heart, and why?

  Ferrante: All my books derive their truth from my own experience. But together Lenù and Lila are the ones that best capture me. Not in the specific events of their lives, or in their concreteness as people with a destiny, but in the movement that characterizes their relationship, in the self-discipline of the one that continuously and brusquely shatters when it runs up against the unruly imagination of the other.

  Donadio: What is the best thing that you hope readers could take away from your work?

  Ferrante: That 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.

  Donadio: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

  Ferrante: No.

  NOTE

  The interview with Rachel Donadio, translated by Donadio, appeared online in The New York Times (U.S.A.) December 9, 2014, under the title “Writing Has Always Been a Great Struggle for Me: Q. & A.: Elena Ferrante.”

  6.

  WOMEN WHO WRITE

  Answers to questions from Sandra, Sandro, and Eva

  Sandra: What happens to reality as it enters a novel? How do you begin a new work?

  Ferrante: I can’t say precisely. I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every effort, at least as far as I’m concerned, is insufficient. In my experience there is a before, made up of fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins. But before and after, I have to admit, are useful only for answering your question in a sensible way.

  Sandro: What do you mean by fragments of memory?

  Ferrante: A heterogeneous mass of material that’s hard to define. You know how when you have in your head a few notes of a tune but you don’t know what it is, and if you hum it, it ends up becoming a different song from the one that’s nagging at you? Or when you remember a street corner but you can’t remember where it is? To give a label to those fragments I use a word that my mother used: frantumaglia. Bits and pieces whose origin is difficult to pinpoint, and which make a noise in your head, sometimes causing discomfort.

  Eva: And any one of them could be the origin of a story?

  Ferrante: Yes and no. They might be separate and identifiable: childhood places, family members, schoolmates, insulting or tender voices, moments of great tension. And once you’ve found some sort of order you start to narrate. But there’s almost always something that doesn’t work. It’s as if from those splinters of a possible narrative come equal and opposite forces: the need to emerge clearly, on the one hand, and to sink farther into the depths on the other. Take Troubling Love: for years I had in my mind many stories about the outlying neighborhood of Naples where I was born and grew up; I had in my mind cries, crude family acts of violence I had witnessed as a child, domestic objects, streets. I nourished Delia, the protagonist, on those memories. The figure of the mother, Amalia, on the other hand, appeared and immediately withdrew—she almost wasn’t there. If I imagined Delia’s body merely touching her mother’s I was ashamed of myself and I went on. Using that scattered material I wrote many stories over the years—short, long, and very long, all in my eyes unsatisfying, and none having to do with the figure of the mother. Then suddenly many of the fragments vanished, while others came together, before the dark background of the mother-daughter relationship. In this way, over a couple of months, Troubling Love emerged.

  Sandro: And The Days of Abandonment?

  Ferrante: Its birth certificate is even more vague. For years I had in mind a woman who closes the door of her house one night, and in the morning when she goes to open it she realizes she’s no longer able to. Sometimes sick children came into it, sometimes a poisoned dog. Then in a natural way everything settled around an experience of mine that had seemed to me indescribable: the humiliation of abandonment. But 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.

  Eva: Do you write down your dreams?

  Ferrante: The rare times that I seem to remember them, yes. I’ve done so since I was a girl. It’s an exercise that I would recommend to everyone. To subject a dream experience to the logic of the waking state is an extreme test of writing. A dream has the virtue of showing us clearly that reproducing something exactly is always a losing battle. But putting into words the truth of a gesture, a feeling, a flow of events, without domesticating it,
is also an operation that’s not so simple as you might think.

  Sandra: What do you mean by domesticating the truth?

  Ferrante: Taking overused expressive paths.

  Sandra: In what sense?

  Ferrante: Betraying the story out of laziness, out of compliance, out of convenience, out of fear. It’s easy to reduce a story to well-tested representations that are fit for mass consumption and are therefore effective.

  Sandro: This seems to me a subject we should look at more closely. James Wood and other critics have admired the authenticity, even the brutality, of your writing. How do you define sincerity in literature?