Eva: What distinguishes writing that goes smoothly from writing that doesn’t?
Ferrante: The attention that I put into every word, every sentence. I have stories, unpublished, in which the attention to form was inordinate, I couldn’t go on if every line didn’t seem perfect. When that happens, the page is beautiful but the story false. I want to insist on this point, it’s something I’m very familiar with: the story moves forward, I like it, in general I finish it. But in fact it’s not a narrative that gives me pleasure. The pleasure—I soon discover—all came from my obsessive refinement of expression, from maniacally polishing the sentences. I would say, in fact, that, at least as far as I’m concerned, the greater the attention to the sentence, the more laboriously the story flows. A state of grace begins when the writing is concerned only with hanging on to the story. With the Neapolitan Quartet that happened immediately, and it lasted. Months passed, the story spun out rapidly, I didn’t even try to reread what I had written. For the first time, in my experience, memory and imagination provided me with an increasingly substantial quantity of material that, instead of crowding the story and confusing me, arranged itself there in a sort of tranquil crush, useful for the increasing needs of the narrative.
Eva: In that state of grace the writing emerges without corrections and reworkings?
Ferrante: No, the writing no, but the story yes. And that happens when you have a clamor in your head and you continue to write as if taking dictation, even while you’re doing the shopping, even when you eat, even in your sleep. Thus the story—as long as it keeps going—has no need of reorganization. For all sixteen hundred pages of the Neapolitan Quartet I never felt the need to restructure events, characters, feelings, turning points, reversals. And yet—I am amazed myself, since the story is so long, so rich in characters who develop over a long period of time—I never resorted to notes, chronologies, plans of any sort. I must say, however, that it’s not unusual, I’ve always detested preparatory work. If I try to do it, the desire to write passes, I feel that I can no longer surprise or excite myself. Thus everything happens in my head and, in essence, while I’m actually writing. Then a moment arrives when I need to catch my breath. I stop, reread, and work with pleasure on the quality of the prose. But in the previous books that happened, I don’t know, after two, three, four pages, at most ten—in My Brilliant Friend it happened after fifty or even a hundred pages that were written without rereading.
Eva: Attention to form seems to have an ambiguous value for you—it can be positive or negative for the story.
Ferrante: Yes. Beauty of form, at least in my experience, can become an obsession that hides more complex problems: the story isn’t working, I can’t find my way, I lose faith in my ability to tell a story. The opposite of this is those moments when the writing seems to be concerned only with getting the story out. Then the joy of writing is there. I’m sure that the narrative has gotten started, and now it’s a matter of making it flow better.
Sandra: How do you proceed in the second case?
Ferrante: I reread from time to time, and I intervene mainly to take out or to add. However, that first reading is very far from a meticulous examination of the text, which comes only when the story is finished. At that point there will be various drafts and corrections, reworkings, inserts, until a few hours before the book goes to press. In that phase I become sensitive to every detail of daily life. I see an effect of light and make a note of it. I see a plant in a meadow and try not to forget it. I make lists of words, I write down phrases I hear on the street. I work a lot, on the proofs, too, and there is nothing that can’t, at the last moment, end up in the story, become an element in a landscape, the second term of a simile, a metaphor, a new dialogue, the not trite and yet not outlandish adjective I was looking for. The first reading, on the other hand, is only a recognition. I take possession of what I’ve written, I get rid of redundancies, I fill in what seems barely sketched, and I explore paths that the text itself now suggests to me.
Sandra: Do you mean that there’s a phase in which it’s the existence of the text that further determines the story, that amplifies it?
Ferrante: In essence, yes. It’s a relief to have some pages, when before there was nothing. In their pure and simple combination of signs, the words, the sentences are material, you can now act upon them with all the skill you have. The places are places, the people are people, what they do or don’t do is there, it happens. And all this, as one looks it over, demands to be perfected, to be increasingly vivid and true. So I begin a reading by rewriting. And this reading by rewriting is great. I must say it always seems to me that skill truly plays a part during this first reading-writing. It’s like a second wave, but one that is less laborious, less anxious, and yet—if the pages don’t disappoint me—even more absorbing than the first.
Sandra: Let’s go back to the Neapolitan Quartet. What happened that was new, compared with your previous experiences?
Ferrante: There were many new things. First, at no moment in my previous experience had I intended to write a story so long. Second, I didn’t imagine that such an extensive historical period, so full of changes, could be important in the life of the characters in such a complex way. Third, I would never have dreamed of managing so many minor figures. Fourth, I had always rejected, out of a personal distaste, giving space to social ascent, to the acquisition of a cultural and political point of view, to the instability of the convictions acquired, to the weight of class origins, a weight that not only doesn’t disappear but doesn’t even really diminish. My themes and also my abilities seemed ill-suited to these questions. And yet in effect that story wouldn’t end. The historical period slipped naturally into the characters’ gestures, thoughts, and choices about life, although it never imposed itself, settling outside them as a detailed background. As for the minor characters, it seemed natural for each of them to have his good or bad moment in the life of the protagonists and then slip into the background, just as when we think back on our existence and, of the many people who entered the flow of our lives, remember almost nothing. As for my distaste for politics and sociology I discovered that it was a screen, behind which lurked the pleasure—yes, I mean it—the pleasure of narrating a sort of female alienation-inclusion.
Eva: Alienation and inclusion in relation to what?
Ferrante: I felt as if Elena and Lila were alienated from History, with all its political, social, economic, cultural apparatus, and yet included in it almost without knowing it, in every word or act. That alienation-inclusion seemed to me outside the frame, difficult for me to recount, and so, as usual, I decided to do it. I wanted the historical period to be a faintly defined background and also to emerge from the changes that had an impact on the characters’ lives, from their uncertainties, decisions, actions, language. Naturally even the tiniest sense of a false tone would have been enough to stop me. But the writing continued to glide along, and I almost always felt certain—wrongly or rightly—that the tonality supported and gave to the small facts of the Neapolitan Quartet that truth which, if it succeeds, makes the larger facts less trite.
Sandra: And the novelty of female friendship as a theme? Everyone today is suggesting that there wasn’t, before the Neapolitan Quartet, a literary tradition to draw on. You yourself, in your previous books, told stories of women alone, without friends to turn to. Although when Leda is at the beach—as you pointed out—she tries to establish a friendly relationship with Nina, she left for her vacation in absolute solitude, as if she had no friends.
Ferrante: You’re right. Delia, Olga, and Leda confront their experiences without ever turning to other women for help or support. Only Leda in the end breaks out of her isolation and establishes a friendly relationship with another woman. But meanwhile she performs an act that in essence means that her need for friendship cannot be met. Elena, on the other hand, is never truly alone, her life is closely bound up with that of her childhood friend.
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Sandra: However, if you think about it, Lila as a child does something equally serious and carries that childhood decision with her for her whole life.
Ferrante: It’s true. But before considering the originality of the two protagonists and their friendship, let me emphasize a couple of features that remain identical from one book to the other. All four of the stories are told in the first person, but, as I’ve already noted, in none of the stories did I imagine the narrating “I” as a voice. Delia, Olga, Leda, Elena write, they have written or they are writing. On this I would insist: the four protagonists are imagined not as first but as third persons who have either left or are leaving a written testimony about their experience. It very often happens that women, in moments of crisis, try to calm ourselves by writing. It’s private writing intended to control unease—we write letters, diaries. I always started from this assumption—women who write about themselves in order to understand themselves. The assumption becomes explicit, however, in fact an essential part of the narrative development, only in the Neapolitan Quartet.
Sandro: Why are you eager to emphasize that point?
Ferrante: To indicate that my women figures have expressed themselves in the way they write. Italo Svevo believed that, even before the reader, the writer had to believe in the story he was telling. More than in the story, I have to believe in how, I don’t know, Olga or Leda is writing her experience; it’s principally the truth of her writing that engages me. And here I come to the second constant I mentioned: in all four novels the narrator preserves a basic characteristic that is entrusted completely to the writing. Delia, Olga, Leda, Lenù seem to know thoroughly what they have to tell. But as the story advances, the more uncertain, reticent, unreliable they appear, almost without realizing it. There, that’s the trait I’ve worked on the hardest in these years: to achieve a feminine “I” who, in her vocabulary, in the structure of her sentences, in the oscillation of expressive registers, would demonstrate solidity of intention, sincere thinking and feeling, and at the same time would have reprehensible thoughts, feelings, and actions. Naturally what was most important to me was that there be no hypocrisy: my narrator had to be honest with herself in both cases, she had to consider herself honest when she is tranquil, and when she is enraged, envious, and so on.
Sandra: Elena is the one who most explicitly has those characteristics.
Ferrante: Yes, and it couldn’t be otherwise. Lenù intends, in the first pages, to prevent her friend Lila from disappearing. How? By writing. She wants to fix everything she knows about her in a minutely detailed story, as if to convince her that cancelling herself out is impossible. At first Elena seems to be in a position of strength; she expresses herself as if she were certainly capable of capturing her friend with her writing and bringing her home. In reality the more the story continues, the less successful she becomes at pinning Lila down.
Eva: Why? Does Lenù discover that she can’t subdue her friend even with writing?
Ferrante: Here we come to the basic characteristic of Lenù’s writing. It is imagined as dependent on Lila’s. Of what Lila writes we know little, but we know a lot about how and the extent to which Lenù makes use of it. The pages of the Neapolitan Quartet are thought of as the point of arrival of Lila’s long influence on Lenù in two different ways: first, through what she has written, which Lenù has been able to read; second, through the writing that Lenù on various occasions believes her to be capable of and which she tries to conform to, with a permanent sense of dissatisfaction. In every case Lenù as a writer is destined to constantly question herself. Her success proves that she is good, but she feels insufficient, since Lila is more and more elusive in a story that should capture her fully.
Sandra: But if Elena’s writing is in fact yours, aren’t you almost systematically displaying your insufficiency?
Ferrante: I don’t know. Certainly, starting with Troubling Love, I have produced writing that is dissatisfied with itself, and Lenù’s writing not only declares and recounts that dissatisfaction but speculates that there is a writing that is more powerful, more effective, which Lila has always known and practices, but that is barred to her. The mechanism is, I repeat, the following: Lenù is a writer; the text we’re reading is hers; Lenù’s writing originates, like many other things in her experience, in a sort of secret competition with Lila; Lila herself, in effect, has always had a writing of her own, a writing that is not imitated and perhaps not imitable, and which goads Lenù; no doubt the text we’re reading therefore shows traces of that goad; Lila’s writing, in other words, is inscribed in Elena’s writing, whether or not she has intervened directly in the text. That’s it in a nutshell. But it’s a fiction, naturally, which is part of the many other fictions that make up the story. My act of writing, which is the most impalpable, the least reducible to all rules, is inventing everything.
Eva: When you talk about Lila’s elusive writing are you alluding symbolically to an ideal writing, a writing that you aspire to when you write?
Ferrante: That’s certainly the case for Lenù. It’s always struck me how writers circle around their writing and in the end avoid it, they start talking about the rituals that help them get to work, but not actually about writing. I am no different and, even though I’ve always thought about writing and have tried to focus on the self-sufficiency of the writing by exiling myself from my books, I nevertheless haven’t much to say. So I’ll try to return to my experience and to Keats, in his letter to Woodhouse, cited above. He said that the poem is not in the person of the poet but in the making of the lines, in the faculty of language that is made apparent in writing. I’ve already mentioned, I think, the fact that for me the story truly functions when you have in your head the steady sound of the frantumaglia that has prevailed over everything and now is pressing steadily to become a story. You the individual, you the person, in those moments aren’t there, you’re only that noise and that writing, and so you write, you continue to write even when you stop, even when you’re busy with daily life, even in your sleep. The act of writing is the continuous conveyance of that frantumaglia of sounds, emotions, and things to the word and the sentence, to the story of Delia, Olga, Leda, Lenù. It’s a choice and a need, a flow, like running water, and at the same time the result of study, the acquisition of techniques, skills, a pleasure and an unnatural effort of the brain and the whole body. In the end what is set on the page is a highly composite, immaterial organism, made up of me who writes and of Lenù, let’s say, and of the many people and things she narrates and the way in which she narrates and in which I narrate her, not to mention the literary tradition I draw on, and learned from, and everything that makes the writer a component of a creative collective intelligence—the language as it’s spoken where we were born and grew up, the stories that were told to us, the ethics we acquired, and so on—in other words the fragments of a very long history that drastically reduces our function as “authors,” as we understand the word today. Is it possible to make of that immaterial organism a concretely narratable object, that is, to employ techniques capable of conveying that organism to the reader as one does with the wind, the heat, a feeling, the events that make up the plot? To control that noisy permanent fragmenting in your head, explore that transformation into words that lasts as long as the story lasts is, I think, the secret ambition of anyone who fully dedicates himself to writing. When Keats said the poet has no identity he meant, I think, that the only identity that counts is that of the immaterial organism that breathes in the work and that is released for the reader, not, certainly, that which you attribute to yourself afterward when you say: I’m an author, I wrote that book.
Sandra: A last question. Lila’s writing is very present in the story and has an influence on Elena starting in childhood. What are the characteristics of Lila’s writing?
Ferrante: We’ll never know if Lila’s rare writings really have the power that Elena attributes to them. What we know is, rather, how t
hey end up producing a sort of model that Elena strives to adhere to all her life. She tells us something about that model, but that’s not what counts. What counts is that without Lila Elena wouldn’t exist as a writer. Any writer takes his texts from an ideal writing that is always before us, unreachable. It’s a fantasy, which can’t be grasped. As a result the only trace that remains of how Lila writes is Lenù’s writing.
NOTE
The interview—a long conversation with Sandra Ozzola, Sandro Ferri, and Eva Ferri—appeared in an edited form in the spring of 2015 in The Paris Review (U.S.A.), under the title “The Art of Fiction No. 228: Elena Ferrante.” The version published here is less structured and more wide-ranging. The interview in The Paris Review had the following introduction:
Our conversation with Ferrante began in Naples. Our original plan was to visit the neighborhood depicted in the Neapolitan Quartet, then walk along the seafront, but at the last moment Ferrante changed her mind about the neighborhood. Places of the imagination are visited in books, she said. Seen in reality they may be hard to recognize; they are disappointing, they might even seem fake. We tried the seafront, but in the end, because it was a rainy evening, we retreated to the lobby of the Hotel Royal Continental, just opposite the Castel dell’Ovo.
From here, out of the rain, we could every so often glimpse people passing along the street and imagine the characters who have for so long occupied our imaginations and our hearts. There was no particular need to meet in Naples, but Ferrante, who was in the city for family reasons, invited us and we took advantage of the occasion to celebrate the completion of The Story of the Lost Child. The conversation continued late into the night and resumed the next day over lunch (clams), then again in Rome, at our house (tea and tisane). At the end, each of us had a notebook full of notes. We compared them and reorganized the material according to Ferrante’s directions.
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