Orr: It’s widely assumed that you use a pseudonym not only to protect your own privacy but also that of a real Neapolitan community from which you draw your inspiration. Is that assumption correct?
Ferrante: Yes, it’s one of the factors that motivated me.
Orr: What were the other factors?
Ferrante: The wish to be freed from all forms of social pressure or obligation. Not to feel tied down to what could become one’s public image. To concentrate exclusively and with complete freedom on writing and its strategies.
Orr: Do you have a sense of how people in the community feel about the books?
Ferrante: No. But it must be said that I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.
Orr: Philip Roth says that “discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.” How far would you agree with him on this?
Ferrante: I prefer to call it illicit appropriation rather than indiscretion. Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything along with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others. Not to mention the ransacking of the enormous warehouse that is literary tradition.
Orr: In My Brilliant Friend, the patronage of a schoolteacher helps the main character Elena from an early age. But the teacher rejects her best friend Lila. Was the schoolteacher unfair in favoring Elena, or did she understand that Lila was a person who would always want to rely only on herself and make her own way?
Ferrante: The school notices both Lila and Elena. But both feel constrained. Lila is the kind of person who cannot bring herself to accept boundaries except to break them, but then gives up under the strain. Elena learns immediately to make use of the school environment, as she will later learn to make use of the many other spaces she occupies in the course of her life, at the same time gathering and covertly putting into circulation some of her friend’s strength.
Orr: Staying with the protagonists of the Neapolitan Quartet, Lila is a highly original thinker, and also susceptible to dissociative fugues. Would it be right to view Lila as a savant, gifted in a way that Elena isn’t?
Ferrante: No. The structure of the narrative is such that neither Lila nor Elena can ever be definitively locked within a formula that makes one the opposite of the other.
Orr: The contrasting characters of the two women make for narrative drama. But did you see them as archetypes you wanted to examine for particular reasons?
Ferrante: Maybe that’s true—it definitely happened with Olga in my second book, The Days of Abandonment, but in this case I didn’t feel that either Lila or Elena could be reduced to some sort of original model that would ensure her coherence.
Orr: From the start, Lila and Elena have very different attitudes toward men and sex. Do you view Lila’s disinterest as the source of her power over men? Or does the contrast between the two women serve a different purpose?
Ferrante: I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that, especially in this context, the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle. The ways Elena and Lila behave are just two different aspects of the same arduous and almost always unhappy adjustment to men and their sexuality.
Orr: Is it fair to say that the world depicted in your work offers few respectable ways out of a quite narrow, quite compromised life other than academic and intellectual success, for the men as well as the women?
Ferrante: No. I care a lot for Enzo’s character; his journey is a hard one, but worthy of respect. And anyway, it’s above all the narrator, Elena, who considers culture, education, as a way to pull herself out of misery and ignorance. Her journey is seemingly successful. But profound changes take generations; they must involve everybody. At times Elena herself feels that individual lives, even the most fortunate, are ultimately unsatisfactory and in many ways at fault.
Orr: Has that changed since the nineteen-fifties, when the Neapolitan story cycle starts, or do you think it’s become more entrenched—the idea that only obvious exceptionality among the “lower classes” should be rewarded?
Ferrante: This is how it’s going to be as long as class disadvantage and privilege exist. I have met truly exceptional people in whom the stubborn urge to climb the social ladder is absent. And so the most serious problem is that in deceptively egalitarian societies such as ours, much intelligence—women’s especially—is squandered.
Orr: Would you describe the relationship between Lila and Elena as competitive? And is that something you see as important to women’s place in the world?
Ferrante: No, competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy, and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings. Of course, this makes for a very tangled skein of relationships, but that’s fine. Our way of being is—for historical reasons—much more tangled than that of men, which is accustomed to using simplification as a quick way to solve problems.
Orr: Despite Elena’s material success, Lila emerges as the dominant character. The reader understands that this may be an aspect of Elena’s self-deprecating narration—she may simply feel dominated by Lila. Is it possible that you’d ever be tempted to let Lila tell her own story?
Ferrante: No. In the first draft there were long episodes written by Lila but I later excluded this path. Lila can only be Elena’s tale: outside that tale she would probably be unable to define herself. It’s the people who love us or hate us or both—who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
Orr: Which of the two women do you feel most affection for?
Ferrante: I love Lila a lot; that is, I love the way in which Elena tells her story and the way in which Lila tells her own story through her friend.
Orr: Do you ever feel that your anonymity limits your ability to shape the debate inspired by the books?
Ferrante: No, my work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being—questions and answers—it means I was wrong to have them published. At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I’ve recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions such as yours. Twenty years ago, it was more difficult for me; I’d try but eventually give up. Now I see it as a useful opportunity: your questions help me to reflect.
Orr: The choice of Elena as your pseudonym and also the name of your protagonist in the Neapolitan novels invites people to assume they are romans-à-clef. Is this a literary device or a genuine hint to your readers?
Ferrante: Using the name Elena helped only to reinforce the truth of the story I was telling. Even those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief,” as Coleridge called it. The fictional treatment of biographical material—a treatment that for me is essential—is full of traps. Saying “Elena” has helped to tie myself down to the truth.
Orr: One of the wonderful things about your novels is that they’re strongly and richly narrative, leaving the reader to come to her own conclusions, or at least feel that she’s coming to her own conclusions, about the mass of issues raised. Was it a conscious decision, to show rather than tell?
Ferrante: Yes. What is important in storytelling are the characters’ actions and reactions, the spaces in which they move, the way in which time flows over them. The narrator composes a score; readers perform and interpret it. A story is an anomalous kind of cage, one that traps you within its strategies and yet, conversely, makes you feel free.
Orr: What are the most important things you’d like to see readers learning or thinking about as a consequence of reading your books?
Ferrante: Allow me not to answer this question. Novels should never come with instructions for u
se, least of all when drawn up by those who write them.
Orr: Do you aim to speak primarily to women in your writing?
Ferrante: One writes for all human beings, always. But I am happy that my readers are first and foremost women.
Orr: Why?
Ferrante: We, all of us women, need to build a genealogy of our own, one that will embolden us, define us, allow us to see ourselves outside the tradition through which men have viewed, represented, evaluated, and catalogued us—for millennia. Theirs is a potent tradition, rich with splendid works, but one that has excluded much, too much, of what is ours. To narrate thoroughly, freely—even provocatively—our own “more than this” is important: it contributes to the drawing of a map of what we are or what we want to be. There’s a quote from Amelia Rosselli—one of the most innovative and unsettling Italian poets of the twentieth century—that dates from the nineteen-sixties. Years ago I adopted it as a literary manifesto that is at once ironic and dead serious. It’s an exclamation: “What black deep activism there is in my menstruation!”
Orr: Your female characters seem locked in a fight between past and future, traditional and modern, conventional and unconventional. It’s a plight familiar to most women of recent generations. Where do you think women are now, in Italy and globally?
Ferrante: I believe all of us, of whatever age, are still in the thick of the battle. The conflict will be long, and even if we think we have left behind the culture and language of patriarchal society once and for all, we just have to look at the world in its entirety to understand that the conflict is far from over and that everything we have gained can still be lost.
Orr: Ambivalence—about success, money, career, motherhood, marriage—suffuses your books. Women have made progress. But what are the battles that feminism still has to win? And does it have to change its tactics to do so?
Ferrante: First of all, we must never forget that there are vast areas of the planet where women live in the most terrible conditions. But, even in those areas where many of our rights are safe, it’s still hard to be a woman who challenges the way in which even the most cultured and forward-thinking men represent us. We are at a crossroads. We vacillate between rooted adherence to male expectations and new ways of being female. Although we are free and combative, we accept that our need for fulfilment in this or that field should be ratified by men in authority, who co-opt us after having evaluated whether we have sufficiently absorbed the male tradition and are able to become its dignified interpreters, free of female issues and weaknesses. Instead, we must fight, so as to bring about change that is profound. This will be possible only if we build a grand female tradition that men are forced to measure themselves against. It’s going to be a long battle, centered on women’s industry in every field, on the excellence of female thought and action. Only when a man publicly recognizes his debt to a woman’s work, without the condescending kindness typical of those who feel themselves superior, will things really start to change.
Orr: What can you tell us about what you’re working on now?
Ferrante: I never tell anyone the stories I have in my head. I would lose the desire to try and write them down.
Orr: Last question—will you accept the sincere thanks of this very grateful reader?
Ferrante: I must thank you, rather. When readers send me words such as yours, I am the first to marvel at My Brilliant Friend’s good fortune. What is actually inside a book is a mystery above all for its author.
NOTE
The interview with Deborah Orr, translated by Daniela Petracco, appeared in The Gentlewoman (U.K.) February 19, 2016, under the title “Elena Ferrante: In a Manner of Speaking.”
17.
IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING
Answers to questions from Nicola Lagioia
Lagioia: One of the most powerful aspects of the Neapolitan Quartet is the way in which the interdependence of the characters is rendered. In the relationship between Lila and Elena, each manages to enter the form of the other, which continues to act, as an actual form of autonomous life, beyond the bounds of the physical presence that produced it. Each time Lila vanishes from the horizon of Elena’s experiences, she nevertheless continues to act in her friend, and presumably the opposite is also true. Reading your novel is comforting because this is what occurs in real life. The people who are truly important to us, the people we’ve allowed to break us open inside, do not stop questioning us, obsessing us, pursuing us, and, if necessary, guiding us, even if they die, or grow distant, or if we’ve quarreled. This phenomenon, it seems to me, alters even the construction of memories. The way we reread the novel of our life depends partly on how those crucial people act silently within us (modifying the junctions). Because of the way you manage to convey these mechanisms, the Neapolitan Quartet seems to me an utterly modern novel.
But in the four books this interdependence extends throughout the entire world of the two friends: Nino, Rino, Stefano Carracci, the Solara brothers, Carmela, Enzo Scanno, Gigliola, Marisa, Pasquale, Antonio, even Professor Galiani. Despite the fact that their rules of mutual attraction are not so intense as those that bind Elena and Lila, they all remain in the same orbit. To escape each other is impossible; they constantly reappear in one another’s lives. Certainly they quarrel, they betray each other, in some cases they nearly kill each other. They say or do things that in other contexts would be reason enough to cut off relations forever. And yet that almost never happens. There is always a small opening (I think, for example, of Marcello Solara, who continues to be cordial toward Elena even after her attacks in L’Espresso). It seems that only death—or extreme old age—can break their bonds.
When you think of what these bonds are made of, it might seem to be a curse—but shouldn’t it also be considered a blessing? The alternative is to risk absolute solitude. In some cases I confess I have envied these characters.
Ferrante: Where do I start? In my childhood, my adolescence. Some of the poor Neapolitan neighborhoods were crowded, yes, and rowdy. To gather oneself, so to speak, was physically impossible. One learned very early to have the greatest concentration amid the greatest disruption. The idea that every “I” is largely made up of others and by the other wasn’t theoretical; it was a reality. To be alive meant to continually collide with the existence of others and to be collided with, the results being at times good-natured, at others aggressive, then again good-natured. The dead were brought into quarrels; people weren’t content to attack and insult the living—they abused aunts, cousins, grandparents, and great-grandparents who were no longer in the world as if it were quite normal. And then there was the dialect and there was Italian. The two languages referred to different communities, both jam-packed. What was normal in one wasn’t normal in the other. The bonds that you established in one language never had the same substance as those in the other. Customs varied, the rules of behavior, the traditions. And if you sought a middle ground, you would assume a false dialect that was a sort of trivialized Italian.
All of this shaped me (us), but even now there is no particular order or hierarchy to its influence. Nothing has faded, everything is here in the present. Of course, today I have small quiet places where I can gather myself—but I still feel that the idea is slightly ridiculous. I’ve described women at moments when they are absolutely alone. But in their heads there is never silence or even focus. The most absolute solitude, at least in my experience, and not just as a narrator, is always, to paraphrase the title of a very good book by Hrabal, too loud. To the writer, no person is ever definitively relegated to silence, even if we long ago broke off relations with that person—out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can’t even think without the voices of others, much less write. And I’m not talking only about relatives, female friends, enemies. I’m talking about others, men and women who today exist only in images: in television or newspaper images, sometimes heart-rending, sometimes offensive in their opulence. And
I’m talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I’m talking about all those others who were once in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection—I call it a tangle, or, rather, frantumaglia—to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it. In the most absolute tranquility or in the midst of tumultuous events, in safety or danger, in innocence or corruption, we are a crowd of others. And this crowd is certainly a blessing for literature.
But when we consider the materiality of days, the daily struggle of living, it’s hard to play this game of reversals: curse/blessing, blessing/curse. I would feel like a liar if I considered the legacy of my neighborhood a positive one. I understand that the enduring interconnectedness of the world I’ve described may seem to be an antidote. There are many moments, in the Neapolitan Quartet, where the environment in which Lila and Elena are submerged seems, in spite of everything, gentle and welcoming. But one mustn’t lose sight of that “in spite of everything.” The ties to the neighborhood are confining and harmful, they corrupt and they abet corruption. And the fact that one can’t cut them, that they reappear after every apparent dissolution, is not a good thing. The sudden emergence of bad manners from within good ones, followed again by a smile, still seems to me the symptom of an unreliable community held together by opportunistic complicities, and thus a community careful to ration rage and hypocrisy in order to avoid an all-out war that would require conclusive choices: you’re on this side, I’m on that.
La frantumaglia Page 33