La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  Ferrante: Two decades are a long time, and the reasons for the decisions I made in 1990, when we first considered my need to avoid the rituals that accompany the publication of a book, have changed. Then I was frightened by the possibility of having to come out of my shell—timidity prevailed, the desire for intangibility. Later, it was hostility toward the media, which pays scant attention to the books themselves, and tends to assign importance to a work especially if the author already has a solid reputation. It’s surprising, for example, how the most widely admired Italian writers and poets are also well-known academics or are employed in high-level editorial jobs or in other prestigious fields. It’s as if literature were not capable of demonstrating its seriousness of intention simply through texts but needed to provide “external” credentials as proof of its quality. In a similar category—if we leave the university or the editorial office—are the literary contributions of politicians, journalists, singers, actors, directors, television producers, etc. Here, too, the works do not have intrinsic authorization for their existence but need an entry pass generated by work done in other fields. “I’m a success in this or that field, I’ve acquired an audience, and therefore I wrote and published a novel.” The media place great importance on this nexus. It’s not the book that counts but the aura of its author. If the aura is already there, and the media reinforce it, the editorial world is happy to open its doors and the market is very happy to welcome you. If it’s not there but the book miraculously sells, the media invent the author, engaging a mechanism by which the writer sells not only his work but himself, his image.

  Sandra: You were saying that the reasons for staying in the shadows have changed a bit.

  Ferrante: I’m still very interested in testifying against the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media. The demand for self-promotion not only diminishes the role of the works in every possible sector of human activity; it now rules everything. Nothing can function without the designated media protagonists. And yet there is no work that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence. By insisting on a protagonist—a protagonist, note, not an individual, not a single person, whose function is fundamental—we wrongly diminish the role played by this collective intelligence. But, I must say, what has never lost importance for me, during what has been by now a long period of absence, is the creative space that it opens. Here I’d like to return to the writing itself. Knowing that the book, once completed, will make its journey without being accompanied by my physical person, 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.

  Eva: You mean you felt you’d been censoring yourself?

  Ferrante: No, self-censorship doesn’t enter into it. I wrote for a long time without the intention of publishing or having others read what I was writing, and it was important training in not censoring myself. I mean, rather, a problem affecting the writing’s potential. Keats said that for him the poet is everything and nothing, that it’s not him, that he has no self, that he has no identity, that he is whatever there is that is most unpoetic. In general one reads that letter of his as an announcement of aesthetic chameleonism. I on the other hand see in it an untying in which the author boldly separates himself from his writing, as if he were saying: writing is everything and I am nothing, address it, not me. It’s a disruptive position. Keats draws the poet away from his own art, calls him unpoetic, denies him an identity outside of writing. And today it seems important to remember this. Removing the author—as understood by the media—from the result of his writing highlights a sort of new creative space that requires expert attention. Starting with The Days of Abandonment, it seemed to me that what the media considered to be the empty space created by my absence was filled up by the writing.

  Eva: Could you explain more clearly?

  Ferrante: Let me try to explain it from the reader’s point of view, which was summarized well by Meghan O’Rourke in The Guardian. O’Rourke emphasized that “our relationship to her,” meaning the relationship that is established between the reader and the writer who chooses to separate herself in a radical way from her own book, “is like that which we have with a fictional character. We think we know her, but what we know are her sentences, the pattern of her mind, the path of her imagination.” It may seem like a small distinction, but to me it’s not. It has become natural to think of the author as a particular individual who exists, inevitably, outside the text, and if we want to know more about what we’re reading we should address that individual—to understand the works better we should find out everything about his more or less banal life. Yet, if we simply remove that individuality from the public eye, it’s evident that what O’Rourke points out is true: the text has more in it than we imagine. It has taken possession of the person who writes, and if we want to find that person, she, too, is there, revealing a self that she may not even truly know. When one offers oneself to the public as a pure and simple act of writing—the only thing that really counts in literature—that self becomes inextricably part of the story or the verse, part of the fiction. This is what I have been working on over the years with increasing awareness, especially in My Brilliant Friend. The truth of Elena Greco, who is very different from me, depends on the truth with which my writing creates her, and thus on the truth with which I can refine my writing.

  Sandro: You mean that while the media rush to fill the empty space you have left by your absence with gossip, readers fill it, more appropriately, by reading, finding all that they need in the text?

  Ferrante: Yes. But I also mean that, if this is true, the task of the writer is further enhanced. If there is a blank space, in terms of social or media rituals, which for the sake of convention I call Elena Ferrante, I, Elena Ferrante, can and should exert myself—am obliged by my curiosity as a novelist, by the craving to test myself—to fill that empty space in the text. How? By providing the reader with the elements that enable him to distinguish me from the narrating “I,” whom I call Elena Greco, and to perceive me as true and present precisely in what I say about Elena and Lila, precisely in the ways in which I combine words in a vivid and authentic way. The author, who outside the text doesn’t exist, inside the text offers herself, consciously adds herself to the story, exerting herself to be truer than she could be in the photos of a Sunday supplement, at a presentation in a bookstore, at a festival of literature, in some television broadcast, in the spectacle of a literary prize. The passionate reader deserves to be enabled to also extract the author’s physiognomy from every word or grammatical violation or syntactical knot in the text, just as happens for characters, for a landscape, for a feeling, for a slow or agitated act. So the writing becomes even more crucial both for the one who produces it (who has to offer himself to the reader with the utmost honesty) and for the one who enjoys it. This seems to me much more than signing copies in a bookstore, defacing them with trite phrases.

  Sandra: You were saying that the Neapolitan Quartet is the novel in which you worked most consciously on the possibilities offered by the creative space that you produced.

  Ferrante: Yes. But first comes the experience of The Lost Daughter. If in the first two books I published I was almost frightened by recognizing myself in the writing—above all in the use of that double register I mentioned—in this third book I was afraid of having pushed myself too far, as if I could not control Leda’s world by following the same procedure I had employed in the first two stories. I realized later that with the act of stealing the doll, and in Leda’s fascination with the mother of the girl who’s been robbed, there was technically no return. Those two elements—the dark background of the mother-daughter relationship and a budding friendship that’s equally dark—carried me farther and farther into the compl
icated relationship that forms between women. 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. If Leda couldn’t get to the bottom of that act—something that she was more and more mired in: she, an adult, stealing a doll from a child—I was drowning with her as I wrote, and I couldn’t get either of us out of the vortex as I had done with Delia and Olga. Eventually the story was finished, and feeling great anxiety I published it. But for several years I continued to circle around it, I felt I had to return to it. 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. It seemed to me that there was something that needed to be articulated again.

  Eva: Let’s move on to the Neapolitan Quartet. The relationship between Lila and Elena doesn’t seem to be invented, or even to be narrated by means of standard techniques; it seems to flow directly from the unconscious.

  Ferrante: Let’s say that The Neapolitan Quartet doesn’t have to make its way like the other stories in the frantumaglia—that mass of incoherent material. From the start I had the sensation, completely new for me, that everything was already in place. Maybe that was the result of the connection with The Lost Daughter. There, for example, Nina, the young mother who clashes with the camorristic context she’s inserted into, and who, for that very reason, fascinates Leda, already occupies a central position in the story. With the Neapolitan Quartet the first narrative blocks that I had in mind were certainly those concerning the loss of the two dolls and the loss of the child. But it seems pointless to make a list of the more or less conscious connections that I see between my books. I only mean to say that the impression of order, surely deriving from various pre-existing ideas for the story, was something new for me. I don’t know, the very theme of female friendship is certainly connected, at least in some respects, to a friend of mine, whom I talked about some time ago in the Corriere della Sera, a few years after her death: that’s the first written trace of the friendship between Lila and Lenù. And then I have a small private gallery—stories, fortunately unpublished—of uncontrollable girls and women, who in vain are repressed by their men, by their environment, they are bold and yet weary, always a step away from disappearing into their mental frantumaglia, and who converge in the figure of Amalia, the mother in Troubling Love. Amalia, yes, if I think about it, has many features of Lila, even her dissolving margins.

  Eva: How do you explain the fact that readers find it easy to recognize themselves in both Elena and Lila, in spite of their profoundly different natures? They’re both very complex, and yet while Elena tends to extreme verisimilitude, Lila has a sort of superior truth, she seems to be made of a more mysterious material, delineated with greater depth, and with a sometimes symbolic significance.

  Ferrante: The difference between Elena and Lila influences quite a few narrative choices, but they can all be traced back to the changing condition of women that is at the center of the narrative. Think of the role of reading and studying. Elena is extremely disciplined; she diligently acquires, each time, the tools she needs, she recounts her journey as an intellectual with controlled pride, she demonstrates her intense engagement with the world and at the same time emphasizes how Lila has remained behind, in fact she repeatedly insists on how she has outdistanced her. But every so often her story breaks down and Lila appears much more active, above all more ferociously—I would say also: more basely, more viscerally—involved. But then she truly withdraws, leaves the field to her friend, remaining a victim of what most terrorizes her: dissolving margins, disappearing. What you called a difference is an oscillation innate in the relationship between the two characters and in the very structure of Lenù’s story. It’s this difference that allows female readers in particular—but I think also male readers—the possibility of feeling that they are both Elena and Lila. If the two friends had the same pace, they would be doubles of each other, by turns they would appear as a secret voice, a mirror image, or something else. But it’s not like that. The pace is broken from the start, and it’s not only Lila who produces the gap but also Lenù. When Lila’s pace becomes unsustainable, the reader grabs onto Lenù. But if Lenù falls apart, then the reader relies on Lila.

  Sandra: You’ve mentioned disappearance—it is one of your recurring themes.

  Ferrante: Yes, I think so, in fact I’m certain it is. It has to do with being driven back, but also with driving oneself back. It’s a feeling I know well, I think that all women know it. Whenever a part of you emerges that’s not consistent with the canonic female, you feel that that part causes uneasiness in you and in others, and you’d better get rid of it in a hurry. Or if you have a combative nature, like Amalia, like Lila, if you’re not someone who calms down, if you refuse to be subjugated, violence enters. Violence has, at least in Italian, a meaningful language of its own: smash your face, bash your face in. You see? These are expressions that refer to the forced manipulation of identity, to its cancellation. Either you’ll be the way I say or I’ll change you by beating you till I kill you.

  Eva: But one cancels oneself, too. Amalia may have killed herself. And Lila can’t be found. Why? Is it a surrender?

  Ferrante: There are many reasons to disappear. The disappearance of Amalia, of Lila, yes, maybe it’s a surrender. But it’s also, I think, a sign of their irreducibility. I’m not sure. While I’m writing I think I know a lot about my characters, but then I discover I know much less than my readers. The extraordinary thing about the written word is that by nature it can do without your presence and also, in many respects, without your intentions. The voice is part of your body, it needs your presence—you speak, you have a dialogue, you correct, you give further explanations. Writing, on the other hand, once it’s fixed on a support structure, is autonomous, it needs a reader, not you. You, let’s say, you leave your act of writing, and go away. The reader reckons, if he likes, with the way you’ve put together the words. Amalia, for example, is filtered through Delia’s writing, and the reader has to unravel the knot of the daughter if he wants to try to unravel the knot of the mother. Even more complicated is the setting of Lila inside Lenù’s story: the plot, the narrative fabric of their friendship, is very elaborated. Yes, maybe the Delia-Amalia relationship is at the origin of the Lenù-Lila relationship. The books slip inside one another without you the writer realizing it; one experience of writing feeds a new experience and gives it strength. For example, a figure from childhood, a woman who has gone off the rails, is central in The Days of Abandonment, and there she’s called the poverella, the poor woman. Well, I realize only now that the poverella is reincarnated in Melina, a character in the Neapolitan Quartet. It’s probably this essentially unconscious continuity among many experiences of writing, both published and unpublished, that with the Neapolitan Quartet gave me the impression of having in hand a simple story. Unlike the other books, which derived from an abrupt selection of many fragments that were in my mind, this book, it seemed to me, was all ready, and I knew just what to do.

  Sandro: What is your relationship with plot, and how much, in the Neapolitan Quartet, did it change along the way?

  Ferrante: Plot is what excites me and my readers. But for that very reason it is woven with the thread of the writing. It comes in large part while I’m writing, always. I know, for example, that Olga will remain locked in her house, without a telephone, with her sick son, her daughter, and the poisoned dog. But I don’t know what will happen when these elements are set in motion. It’s the writing that pulls me along—and it has to pull me seriously, in the sense that it has to involve me, agitate me—from the moment the door doesn’t open to the moment it opens as if it had never been locked. Naturally I speculate about how things will develop, before and while I write, but I keep these speculations in my head, in a confused way, ready to vanish as the story advances. For example, a character may
lose substance simply because I can’t resist talking about him or her with a friend. The story told aloud instantly destroys everything. However remarkable the development I had in mind, from that moment on it doesn’t seem worth the trouble of writing it. In the case of Lila and Lenù, however, the plot unfolded with naturalness, and I rarely changed course.

  Sandra: Some of your stories have the pacing of thrillers, but then they become love stories, or something else again.

  Ferrante: Naturally plot is equated with genre fiction, and here things get more complicated. I use plots, yes, but, I have to say, I can’t respect the rules of genres—the reader who reads me convinced that I will give him a thriller or a love story or a Bildungsroman will surely be disappointed. Only the weave of events interests me and so I avoid cages with fixed rules. In the Neapolitan Quartet the plot crossed every area like that, without getting stuck, and in fact it progressed without faltering and without second thoughts on my part. Despite the fact that it developed not over months but, rather, over years, what emerged as I wrote generally stayed in the final, published version.

  Sandro: And yet it is a very complex book, far from simple both in its conception and in its writing.

  Ferrante: Maybe, but I would insist: at first I didn’t feel that way about it. When, almost six years ago, I began to write, I knew clearly the story I would tell: a friendship that begins with the treacherous game of the dolls and ends with the loss of a daughter. I had in mind a story no longer than Troubling Love or The Lost Daughter. As a result there wasn’t a phase of looking for the heart of the narrative. As soon as I began to write, it seemed to me that the writing went smoothly.