Meireles: Naples is an emblematic place, almost one of the main characters. What is your relation to the city, or how did it happen that the city became so significant in your writing?
Ferrante: Naples is my city, and I don’t know how to break away from it even when I hate it. I live elsewhere, but I have to return often, because only there do I feel that I can redeem myself and go back to writing with conviction.
Meireles: Your female characters are almost always women in extreme situations, who experience moments of passion or abandonment, who are disappointed, marked by a past from which they can’t free themselves. Where do those voices come from?
Ferrante: From myself, from the experiences that were important to me. And from what I’ve known and seen of the lives of other women that has wounded, angered, depressed, gladdened me.
Meireles: It was those female characters who unveiled you, and who lead us to think that you must be a woman. It’s considered impossible for a male writer to get so close to the female, to express such apprehension about the condition of many women. Some critics have called you a feminist writer. What is your view of that?
Ferrante: Feminism was very important to me. I learned to dig inside myself thanks to the practice of consciousness raising, and it was women’s thought that redeveloped my point of view. It’s in the confrontation between women, which can be harsh, that I seemed to understand that to write you can’t be distant from the facts but, rather, need to reduce the distance until it’s unbearable. Anyway, I don’t write to illustrate an ideology—I write to tell without distortions what I know.
Meireles: What are your habits when you write?
Ferrante: The only important thing is urgency. If I don’t feel the urgency to write, there is no propitiatory rite that can help me. I prefer to do something else—there’s always something better to do.
Meireles: You pay a lot of attention to surroundings. Can you describe for us the place where you usually write?
Ferrante: I don’t have a specific place; I settle down anywhere. But in general I prefer small spaces, or a hidden corner in a big space.
Meireles: What authors have influenced and influence you?
Ferrante: Writers often give themselves grand literary forebears whose echo in their works is in fact tenuous. So it’s better not to name famous names—they indicate only the degree of our pride. I would prefer instead to present a method: since we are influenced more by what the specialists say about great books than by reading them, it’s better to read the texts, whether great or minor, in order to look for the pages that, now and here, help us to get away from the obvious.
Meireles: Do you read what is written about your books?
Ferrante: Yes, everything my publisher sends me. But I do it systematically, with some delay, when my books are sufficiently distant and I can accept that they are, for good or ill, in the words of others.
Meireles: You were a finalist for the Strega Prize, the most important Italian literary prize. What does this mean to you?
Ferrante: Nothing.
Meireles: Can you tell us a little who Elena Ferrante is when she’s not writing, the person who has made her books possible?
Ferrante: Someone who always carries a book and a notebook in her purse as she goes about her daily life.
Meireles: You have written: “The point of every story is always this: is this the right story to seize what lies silent in my depths, that living thing which, if captured, spreads through all the pages and gives them life?” Does the story originate in a confrontation with the external world?
Ferrante: Perhaps “right story” is an expression that I was led into by laziness. In fact I never have in mind a story that is complete enough for me to evaluate whether it’s right or not. I need to work on it for a long time and understand where it’s taking me. The confrontation with the world, as you call it, happens in this phase, and in fact it’s hand-to-hand combat with the words. I have to find an opening, to have the impression that daily life will allow me to give the sentences more meaning. If it doesn’t happen, I retreat. I have drawers full of failed attempts.
NOTE
The interview with Maurício Meireles appeared on May 28, 2015, in O Globo (Brazil), under the title Elena Ferrante, que esconde sua identidade há mais de 20 anos, tem livro lançado no Brasil.
9.
NARRATING WHAT ESCAPES THE NARRATIVE
Answers to questions from Yasemin Çongar
Çongar: The letter you sent to your publisher in 1991 explains the reasons for your decision to be “absent” from the life of your books from the moment of publication. Yet there are many articles about your work these days—my own recent essay on the Neapolitan novels included—and inevitably they deal with this “absence.” The discussion of your identity may sometimes overshadow reflections on your books. Do you ever feel uneasy about the speculations concerning your identity? Do you think that your decision to be absent might have backfired, provoking an even stronger “presence,” and that the subject of your identity is discussed at the expense of your writing?
Ferrante: For almost twenty years, in Italy and abroad, my books had an audience and a good critical reception, despite my absence, which people became aware of slowly and without any special insistence from the media. It was the publication, both here and abroad, of the Neapolitan Quartet, and its success, that roused the interest of editorial offices, especially in Italy. And the media, addressing the audience of the tetralogy, put my identity at the center. In brief: one need only glance at the publication history of my books to realize that it’s not the absence of the writer that has produced their success but their success that has made the subject of my absence central, and frankly this doesn’t seem surprising to me. Rather, what has been surprising is the discovery that those who became aware of the books later, and at times as a result of the media attention, at least here in Italy, encounter them with an initial distrust, if not hostility, as if my absence were an offensive or culpable type of behavior.
Çongar: What do you think is the source of this “initial distrust”? How do you manage not to be affected by it?
Ferrante: This distrust is provoked by media gossip about the absence of the author. The only thing I can do is continue my small battle to put the work at the center. What is important about the writer is, I believe, there in its most complete form, and is one with the text.
Çongar: You have presented yourself in interviews and essays as a woman and a mother. One also senses a strong “female voice” in your novels, so strong I felt that only a woman and a mother could write so authentically about the ordeals of womanhood and motherhood, even though this goes against my own belief that a good novelist can identify with anyone—Madame Bovary, c’est moi! Am I mistaken? If you were a man, could you have written with such frankness about women? Can you name the male writers who you think have depicted female characters with the same authenticity as you have? Are there any such writers?
Ferrante: I agree with you. A good writer—male or female—can imitate the two sexes with equal effectiveness. But to reduce a story to pure mimesis, to the technical skill with which it represents the experience of the other sex, is wrong. The true heart of every story is its literary truth, and that is there or not there, and if it’s not there, no technical skill can give it to you. You ask me about male writers who describe women with authenticity. I don’t know whom to point you to. There are some who do it with verisimilitude, which is very different, however, from authenticity. So different that when verisimilitude is well orchestrated it risks asserting itself to the point of making the truth of female writing seem inauthentic. And that is bad. And it’s the reason that the pure and simple genuineness of women’s writing is always inadequate: that I, a woman, write is not sufficient; my writing has to have adequate literary power.
Çongar: Would you elaborate on the difference between verisimilitude and
authenticity in literature? When and why does “pure and simple genuineness” fall short?
Ferrante: To obtain an effect of resemblance to the true is a matter of technical skill. Authenticity in literature, on the other hand, sweeps away tricks and effects. The true sweeps away any false semblance of truth, and that is often disorienting. We prefer the impression of truth rather than the irruption of the authentic into the sphere of the symbolic.
Çongar: In the writings of which women authors do you find the kind of literary power that you mention in your answer?
Ferrante: Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf. Elsa Morante. Clarice Lispector. Alice Munro. I could continue; finally, it’s a long list, and, finally, it includes an astonishing variety of female writing from the classics to today. But it’s hard to acknowledge. For example, women writers are still compared only with one another. You can be better than other well-known women writers but not better than well-known male writers. Just as it’s extremely rare for great male writers to say they’ve taken as a model great women writers.
Çongar: In your recent interview in The Paris Review you talk about a conscious effort to resist “domesticating the truth’’ while writing, and you explain that as “taking overused expressive paths.” In the Neapolitan novels your subject is—on one level—the most domestic and common there is. It’s the story of a neighborhood, a family, a friendship, growing up, maturing, etc. Your style is also far from being overtly experimental. Given all that, how do you manage to avoid “reducing your story to clichés”; what is it in your writing that opens up an unused path of expression? What do you think makes your voice so new? What is the untamed truth of your novels?
Ferrante: I don’t know what results I’ve achieved as a writer, but I know what I aim for when I write. I don’t care whether the story has been told before: the stories that are presented to readers as new can always be easily reduced to an ancient core. Nor am I interested in revitalizing some overused tale by injecting into it a beautiful style, as if writing were the continual embellishment of a story. Further, I tend not to deconstruct time, or space, when it would be more a proof of skill than a narrative necessity. I describe common experiences, common wounds, and my biggest worry—not the only one—is to find a tone in writing that can remove, layer by layer, the gauze that binds the wound and reach the true story of the wound. The more deeply hidden the wound seems—by stereotypes, by the fictions that the characters themselves have tacked on to protect themselves; in other words, the more resistant it seems to the story—the harder I insist. Beautiful writing doesn’t interest me; writing interests me. And I resort to everything tradition offers, bending it to my purposes. What’s important is not innovation but the truth that we ourselves, out of prudence, or conformity, conceal within shapely forms, or, why not, within experimental exercises.
Çongar: Naples, of course, is central to these four novels. Whether it is Elena and Lila’s old neighborhood or the beach in Ischia or more affluent parts of Naples, there is always a very strong sense of place. However, you achieve this without writing lengthy descriptive passages about the scenery, without romanticizing the images of the city. How do you manage to achieve an almost cinematic vividness of place? What do you think is the reason that I—a reader from Turkey—feel not only that I really see those places where I have never been but also that I belong there, that I come from the same neighborhood. What enlivens the place? What makes it breathe in your pages?
Ferrante: If that happens, it happens thanks to the filters I use. The presence of the city is never given in itself; I don’t think it would be possible except by producing labels, pure illustrations. My goal is, rather, to provide impressions perceived or imagined by Lenù and, through her story, by Lila. It’s a double layer that makes the neighborhood not the background of the story, not a distant behind-the-scenes, but a world learned, a world perceived, a world imagined.
Çongar: In interviews, you have often paid homage to writing by women, and the struggles of women, for their part in your own development. And several critics, including James Wood, see your novels as écriture féminine in the sense that Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, and others intended it. Do you want in your writing to contribute to the feminist struggle or feminist discourse? Do you think your novels have a feminist function or mission? Is it possible not to give in to political ideology or social conventions when writing about the inequalities and sufferings caused by the class-bound and patriarchal structure of society?
Ferrante: The passage through feminist culture is an indispensable part of my experience, of my way of being in the world, but telling a story doesn’t, for me, mean making it part of a political-cultural battle, even a just one. I fear the linearity of militant causes; in literature they have a terrible effect. I describe points of incoherence. The more intensely a moment of my experience struggles within the set of formulas that guide me even in daily life, the more right and urgent it seems to me to make a story out of it.
Çongar: For you the rhythm, the tone of every sentence are as important as—if not more important than—the story that is being told. Why is that so? Do you ever struggle with finding the right tone, the right language in which to tell your story? When do you know you have it? In what writers have you found the rhythm and the tone to be perfect?
Ferrante: The search for the right tone is for me the synthesis of every possible experiment. I think it’s the impetus that drives all literary writing, but in the past century it’s become an obsession. What is the magic spell that brings me close to the thing, to its truth? How must I act to decipher the world, make the illegible legible, what strategies should I follow not to find the right distance but to reduce it as much as possible? The “search for tone” is the formula I use to synthesize the long struggle in twentieth-century writing between decipherability and indecipherability of the other. In the Neapolitan Quartet the synthesis is represented by the collision between staying within the boundaries and dissolving the boundaries.
Çongar: Elena and Lila’s friendship is extremely nuanced and feels amazingly real to the reader. Moreover, the conflict between the two women is perceived as an internal conflict present in each of them separately. In the differences between the two friends we can recognize the divergent impulses that we carry inside ourselves.
“You’re my brilliant friend,’’ the line in the first installment that provides the title, belongs to Lila. It’s what she says to Elena to encourage her to continue her education. Yet the “I’’ in the book is Elena, and it is through her narration that we see Lila as her “brilliant friend.’’
Why did you place the friendship of these two very different but equally effective characters at the center of the four books? What is the function of the continuous differences between them?
Ferrante: I wanted to tell the story of a lifelong friendship and I wanted to tell the story in all its complexity. But, as I usually do, I also wanted to tell it in a way so that the narrative voice is openly silent about a part of the story, as if she couldn’t complete it, or as if its pages were the rough draft of a story that will never achieve a finished version, because it’s the other, she who doesn’t describe but is described, who has the power to bring it fully to the end. When I write I have two objectives: to tell everything I know and at the same time to let into the story everything that I don’t know, that I don’t understand. In the Neapolitan Quartet this second objective is obsessively pursued. I think that the power of the story, if it exists, lies in what reaches the page not in spite of the writer but in spite of what is written.
Çongar: Italo Calvino famously asked: “How much of the I who shapes the characters is in fact an I who has been shaped by the characters?” How much of Elena Ferrante is shaped by Lila and Elena?
Ferrante: All. As long as you write you are only what you write; the nest is there, holding you, intertwined with you. The rest, what you are outside the writing, is an invisible gutter.
> Çongar: The recurring themes in your novels, the common features of your characters, and the places you write about have convinced many people that your fiction is autobiographical. To what extent is your writing autobiographical?
Ferrante: I use my experience a lot but only if I can put it into a plot without losing its truth.
Çongar: Karl Ove Knausgård, the Norwegian writer whose six-volume My Struggle has been very successful and has been compared to the Neapolitan Quartet, stated in the second volume that he decided to write an autobiographical novel at a time of crisis, when he felt that “the nucleus of all fiction, whether true or not, is verisimilitude and the distance it maintains from reality is constant.” Do you ever feel troubled by the distance between narrative verisimilitude and reality when you are reading a literary work? How do you overcome that distance when you write?
Ferrante: It happens to me only when the goal of the writer is pure verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is the real that has long since found a reassuring symbolism. The writer, on the other hand, has the job of describing what escapes the story, what escapes the narrative order. We have to get as far away as possible from verisimilitude and instead shrink the distance to the true heart of our experience.
Çongar: Roberto Saviano and others publicly nominated you for the Strega Prize, and now you’re among the finalists. Your publisher Sandro Ferri has said that you would be happy if you won, but he adds that this prize is very much part of the establishment that you have chosen not to be part of. How do you think recognition—or the lack of it—by the establishment (prize juries, critics, literary theoreticians, the academy) influences the written word? Can being recognized and/or ignored by the establishment hamper the freedom that is essential to writing?
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