7.
EXTREME PEOPLE
Answers to questions from Gudmund Skjeldal
Skjeldal: I’ve been told that people take sick leave from work in order to read the novels. They’re absent-minded, as if they were drugged; will I be able to read Ferrante while I’m standing in line over there? Or in the lavatory? They forget about their children, they forget about their spouse. Are you aware of what you’re doing to your readers? Doesn’t it make you want to meet them? Go on tour and visit literary festivals the way other authors do?
Ferrante: I’m happy when my books establish an intense and lasting relationship with readers. It seems to be proof that I’ve given the books what’s necessary and that they truly have no more need of me. If now I were to accompany them throughout the world, I would feel like those mothers who follow their children around even when the children are adults, and who on every occasion speak in their place or embarrass them by singing their praises.
Skjeldal: The second volume of the series has just come out in Norwegian. And I feel torn between waiting for Kristin Sørsdal’s excellent translation of the last two books, to be published in March next year, or buying them in English. Do you follow the work of your translators? Are they able to consult with you, as translators often do with writers?
Ferrante: The translators write and I respond. Their queries can take me a long time. I like helping them find solutions.
Skjeldal: When I told my nine-year-old son about the book I’m reading, he was bewildered by the fact that you don’t want to be known: everybody wants to be famous, in his view. What do your daughters say? Do they understand your decision?
Ferrante: My daughters and I have a long-standing pact: I can do what I want, except things that could embarrass them. I don’t know that I’ve always respected our agreement. Certainly they’ve appreciated and appreciate the fact that I’ve managed to resist the desire for self-promotion, the mania for success. For children parents are always a burden. But parents who draw too much attention to themselves are intolerable.
Skjeldal: The Neapolitan Quartet is about two girls—and then women—Lila and Elena. Would I be wrong to think that they would not have understood your choice of anonymity? Their dream is to get out of Naples, to become rich and famous—and then, they hope, free.
Ferrante: Elena would say that she envied my choice and then would have continued on her path. Lila would have found it insufficient and would ask me to give up writing even these answers. As for me, I long ago got rid of my desire for fame. But I’m very happy about the fame that Lila and Lenù are gaining in the minds of readers.
Skjeldal: The Neapolitan Quartet has a definite feminist vein: it can be seen in the two women’s struggle against tradition, in how they feel persecuted by men. Yet your books made me reflect on my male friendships, on how involved I am, and on our competitiveness. I identify even more with the two girls than with the men portrayed in the books. Have there been major changes in the male culture of Naples in the decades of the nineteen-fifties and sixties, compared with today?
Ferrante: Males have changed a lot, in Naples and in the world, as, indeed, we women, too, have changed. But we’d have to discuss the depth of the changes. In not a few of the characters in my book, male and female, the changes are superficial and regression is always possible. The problem is that real change takes a long time, while life hits us right away, now, with all its contradictions.
Skjeldal: The dynamics between the two friends, Elena and Lila, are wonderfully portrayed: the close but competitive relationship, the impulse toward both mutual dependence and distance. I can’t think of anything like it in what I’ve read. Do you have any thematic ideals, or did you set out to clear new literary terrain with this friendship?
Ferrante: I’m convinced that the reality of the facts, which we generally appeal to as if it were simple and linear, is an inextricable tangle, and that the task of literature is to enter that tangle without convenient or easy plans. Exploring the disorderliness of female friendship meant learning to set aside every literary idealization and every temptation to instruct.
Skjeldal: I read in an interview that the novel that is most important to you is Elsa Morante’s House of Liars. Could you describe why?
Ferrante: It’s the book through which I discovered that an entirely female story—entirely women’s desires and ideas and feelings—could be compelling and, at the same time, have great literary value.
Skjeldal: It’s tempting to interpret the importance given in your novels to friends and siblings in a person’s development as a revolt against all the portraits of parents we find in novels (see, for example, the works of the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård). It’s not clearly stated, but could it nevertheless be interpreted as a corrective to Freudian psychology?
Ferrante: I don’t know. Parental figures can’t be ignored, and in my books they have an important role, especially mothers. But siblings and friends are no less critical. How do we fabricate their images? Hard to say. Siblings and friends seem extraordinarily like us and yet they remain the Other, never reducible to us, never completely reliable, and so at times dangerous, treacherous. They make up a small world where we can joust without the great risks we’ll be exposed to when we cross over to find ourselves among the strangers of the big world. Sometimes we resort to siblings and friends to take a breath, to feel that we’re understood. But more often it’s to give vent without restraint to our frustrations and our rages, as if they were the primary cause of some infinite disappointment.
Skjeldal: Do you yourself understand Lila? She marries far too young, even though she doesn’t really need to; she’s good and bad at the same time; she absorbs the energy from everything; and yet, for Elena, she colors everything. Maybe with Lila you thought of a less ordinary, possibly Nietzschean, character, given the way she embodies the Dionysian force in the world, while with Elena you imagined a more rational woman?
Ferrante: I’ve always been fascinated by people who are extreme in their every manifestation. Lila has many features of a friend of mine who died some years ago. There was nothing Dionysian about her. She was, rather, one of those people who are curious about everything and who without apparent effort are good at everything, except then they get bored and enthusiastically move on to something else. I tried to describe the wake of sparkling incompleteness that trails behind these many-sided intelligences, who can never be defined.
Skjeldal: If I were a scriptwriter I think I’d be very happy to work on these four books. Films have been made from several of your earlier books. Do you think in scenes? Or do you concentrate, rather, on making good sentences? Is it possible to separate these two passions?
Ferrante: Shklovsky said that we don’t know what art is but in exchange we regulate it punctiliously. Borders are fixed, rules are established. One of these is that the evil spells of cinema and television disturb the chiseled quality of the sentences, poison the literature. And yet the writer, precisely in the name of literature, has the duty to frequent all languages and violate them all, if it’s useful. I’ve never worked in cinema or television, but I’ve been an assiduous spectator for a long time and when I write I have recourse to films but also to paintings, and to everything that lies in the great repositories of artistic tradition. Literature dries up if it erects dividing walls.
Skjeldal: If I may mention something that I find slightly irritating: the detailed description of the characters at the beginning of each book: they have a disorienting effect, as if these were characters or actors in a play. Does the reader really need that sort of help in an otherwise crystal-clear text?
Ferrante: The reason for the detailed list of characters is that although the four volumes make up a single story, they came out a year apart. The list was to function as a memory aid to the reader. But now that the entire story is available, from the first page to the last, there’s no longer any need and in a likely definitive edition
those lists will be eliminated.
Skjeldal: We are often, perhaps far too often, told that the novel is dead. Knausgård, for example, captivated the entire world by pulling the veil off reality. You, however, with your Bildungsroman in four volumes, have demonstrated that the novel is anything but dead. And your work is so convincing that I don’t feel I’ll need to read essays about Italy ever again. Is the novel the only literary genre that interests you?
Ferrante: I’m very interested in autobiographical writings, private writings, diaries, chronicles. The Italian tradition is full of them. I’m interested mainly in writings in which educated modes of expression are not imitated, or, even more, those where the educated, in the grip of emotion, set aside elaborate formulas. I’m looking for a truth in the writing that can be studied, learned. I’m not interested, I have to say, in the fate of the novel. What interests me, I think, is a writing of truth. It’s an arduous and increasingly rare thing, but also the only one that can demonstrate, as in my view Knausgård does, that the novel isn’t dead.
Skjeldal: One thing that really made an impression on me, in the first volume, is that these Neapolitan kids don’t get to see the ocean before they are teenagers. It reminded me of something Martin Scorsese said about Little Italy in Manhattan: that as a child he never once left the neighborhood. Was your childhood similarly confined to certain Neapolitan streets?
Ferrante: I was born in a city on the sea, but I discovered it late and it became part of me only as an adult. It’s hard to explain, but often between the poor areas and the rich areas there are distances that can’t be crossed. For my friends and me to leave the rough streets we had known since birth and go to unknown places, with handsome buildings and the avenue along the sea and a beautiful view over the bay, was a dangerous adventure. Somewhat the way it happens today on a vast scale: if the poor spill over, washing up against the borders of prosperity, the wealthy get frightened and turn violent.
Skjeldal: The childhood narrated in the first and also the second volume is seething with violence. Vesuvius is mentioned at one point. At another point Elena claims that violence is something that Neapolitans have in their blood. In a third place class conflict is offered as an explanation for the high level of violence in Naples. What do you think is the source of this violence, and how might Southern Italy emerge from it?
Ferrante: Violence is an essential trait of the human animal and it’s always lying in wait, everywhere, even in your marvelous country. The perpetual problem is how to keep it under control. Naples is one of many places in the world where the factors that lead to violence are all present and all ungoverned: intolerable economic inequalities, poverty that provides manpower to powerful criminal organizations, institutional corruption, the extremely culpable lack of organization of civic life. But it’s also a city of spectacular beauty, with great traditions belonging to both élite culture and popular culture. This means that the infected wounds in its body are more visible and more intolerable. What we could be, on this planet, and what, instead, unfortunately, we are, can be seen more clearly in Naples than elsewhere.
Skjeldal: The human heart never changes, according to several poets, at least here in Norway. But I wonder if my children, and perhaps yours, can ever really understand the upbringing that Elena and Lila had? They take freedom for granted, almost like the air they breathe. Or am I wrong?
Ferrante: It’s likely that the human heart will never change, but I’m no longer so sure of it. Biotechnologies are always creating new, astonishing, anguishing miracles. Certainly, the circumstances in which our hearts beat are always changing. And it’s this which in the end produces stories, always the same and always different. Like us, our children will reckon with the small and large shocks that overturn what today seems to them stable and conclusive. And, like us, they will learn to their cost that nothing, for good and for ill, is given to us forever, and that our fundamental rights have to be won over and over again.
Skjeldal: The Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland has said that the only thing he finds restful is to start a new project. Do you feel the same way, after the Neapolitan Quartet? Are you on to a new project?
Ferrante: I have many projects—it’s always been that way. What I don’t know is if one of them will succeed in asserting itself strongly enough to become a book.
NOTE
The interview with Gudmund Skjeldal appeared in Bergens Tidende & Aftenposten (Norway), under the title Den briljante Ferrante, online on May 1, 2015, and in print on May 2nd.
8.
THIRTEEN LETTERS
Answers to questions from Maurício Meireles
Meireles: It’s impossible not to construct stories around your biography. Whether you’re a woman or not, Italian or not, a mother, et cetera. The novel you’ve constructed and are constructing about your life keeps pace with your novels, with the fictions you create. Many readers try to find signs of the writer, and it’s as if there were two levels of reading, the one that comes from the fiction and the one that you suggest regarding the creator of that fiction. She remains a mystery, in spite of some details disclosed in the interviews you’ve given in recent years. I’d ask you to analyze this idea: the novelized biography and the Elena Ferrante who works on the fiction of herself.
Ferrante: My experiment is intended to call attention to the original unity of author and text and to the self-sufficiency of the reader, who can get all he needs from that unity. I’m not inventing a biography, I’m not concealing myself, I’m not creating mysteries. I exist intentionally both in my novels and in these answers to your questions. The only space in which the reader should seek and find the author is his writing.
Meireles: In an interview about the reasons for your anonymity you said that “writing in the knowledge that I will not appear produces a space of absolute creative freedom.” Do you think your writing would be different if you hadn’t decided not to reveal who you are?
Ferrante: I’m sure of it. Sending one’s person around, along with the book, in accord with the rituals of the culture industry, is completely different from shutting oneself up in the text and not coming out except in the imagination of the reader.
Meireles: The name Elena Ferrante begins and ends in the pages of each of your books. Your name came with your writing, which gave you an identity. Much has been written about you. I’d like you to describe yourself. Who is Elena Ferrante, writer? How would you define her?
Ferrante: Elena Ferrante? Thirteen letters, no more or less. Her definition is all there.
Meireles: In your case it’s impossible not to make a distinction between author and work. You’ve always wanted the author to remain discreet, almost invisible, while your work slowly made its way, until it became impossible not to speak of the author. What has watching this process been like? How have you experienced it?
Ferrante: The path of my works is my path. Readers are content with that, and some have even written asking me not to reveal other, more private and therefore less interesting facts. It’s the media which, by their nature, are not content with the works but want faces, persons, fanciful protagonists. But one can easily do without what the media want.
Meireles: In the Neapolitan Quartet Lenù pursues an honest form of writing. What does honesty in literature mean for you?
Ferrante: To tell the truth as only literary fiction can dare to tell it.
Meireles: How and when does writing impose itself?
Ferrante: How? Gently. And when? When you no longer feel you’re struggling to find the words.
Meireles: Where does everything begin? An idea, an image, a person, a place?
Ferrante: I don’t know. In the beginning there may be flashes, collisions, words that emerge to form vaguely defined images. It’s not much, but still it has to be tested. In general I don’t go beyond half a page, a note. Sometimes I write a lot, but I’m not satisfied, the words remain crude and ordinary. Only w
hen the writing extends like a fishing line and then begins to pay out rapidly—then I know that the hook was good and I start hoping to get something meaningful.
Meireles: In one interview you describe yourself as a storyteller, something that in a certain sense is contrary to the Italian way of writing.
Ferrante: When I say I’m a storyteller, I go back to a very Italian tradition in which writing is one with the story and is “good” because it has the energy to create a world, not because it strings together metaphors. Our literature is full of possibilities, some to be rediscovered; the would-be writer has only to read the texts and will surely find what he needs. The problem, if anything, is the cult of the beautifully wrought page, a recurring feature that I’ve long struggled with in myself. Today I throw out the pages that are too written—I prefer the rough draft to the final version.
Meireles: Geography is a defining feature in your stories, as if they could happen only in that place. How much does the space determine your writing?
Ferrante: A story has a time and that time has to have a precise space within which to flow in a linear manner or rise suddenly into the present from the past, bringing with it traditions, ways of using the language, gestures, feelings, the rational and the irrational. Without a space that is drawn precisely, yet with broad margins of indeterminacy offered to the reader’s imagination, the story is in danger of losing concreteness and not gaining purchase.
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