La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  No, therefore, what unites the throng of the neighborhood is, in actuality, inevitably corrupt and, in my view, a curse. Naturally, however, that throng is made up of individual people, and people always have, amid innumerable contradictions, their humanity, which is extremely precious and which any story must take account of, if it doesn’t want to fail. Especially since people move between good and bad almost without realizing it. The neighborhood is imagined in this way, and Lila and Elena are made of the neighborhood’s matter, but a fluid matter that drags everything along in its wake. I wanted them, against the closed, fixed state of the environment, to be mobile, so that nothing could truly stabilize them and they themselves would pass through each other as if they were air—but without ever freeing themselves from the gravitational pull of their birthplace. They, too, had to feel it, above all and in spite of everything.

  There, perhaps it’s precisely that “in spite of everything” that is difficult to explain. You have to pay attention to the “everything,” you mustn’t forget it, you must recognize it in its every disguise, even if the emotional ties, the habits acquired in childhood, the smells, the tastes, the sounds charged with dialect seduce us, soften us, make us waver, make us ethically unstable. Maybe capturing the fluidity of existences on the page means avoiding stories that are too rigidly defined. We’re all subject to continuous modification, but, to escape the anguish of impermanence, we camouflage it, until old age, with countless impressions of stability, the most important of which emanate precisely from narratives, especially when someone tells us: that’s how it happened. I don’t particularly like that kind of book; I prefer books in which not even the narrator knows how things happened. For me, telling a story has always meant reducing the techniques that present facts as incontrovertible milestones and reinforcing those that emphasize the instability. The long story of Elena Greco is marked everywhere by instability, maybe even more than the stories of Delia, Olga, or Leda, the protagonists of my earlier books. What Greco lays out on the page, at first with apparent assurance, becomes increasingly less controlled. What does she really feel, this narrator, what does she think, what does she do? And what does Lila do and think, and whoever else bursts into her story? In the Neapolitan Quartet, I wanted everything to take shape and then lose its shape. In her effort to tell the story of Lila, Elena is compelled to tell the story of all the others, herself among them, encounters and clashes that leave very varied impressions. The others, in the broad meaning of the term, as I said, continuously collide with us and we collide with them. Our singularity, our uniqueness, our identity are continuously dying. When at the end of a long day we feel shattered, “in pieces,” there’s nothing more literally true. If we look carefully, we are the destabilizing collisions that we suffer or cause, and the story of those collisions is our true story. To tell that story is to describe interpenetration, turmoil, and also, to be precise, an incongruous mixture of expressive registers, codes, and genres. We are heterogeneous fragments that, thanks to impressions of unity—elegant figures, beautiful form—stay together despite their arbitrary and contradictory nature. The cheapest glue is stereotype. Stereotypes calm us. But the problem is, as Lila says, that even just for a few seconds, stereotypes can lose their boundaries and drive us into panic. In the Neapolitan Quartet, at least in intention, there is a careful calibration of stereotype and dissolving boundaries.

  Lagioia: Although Lila, when she goes to see Pasolini with Nino, shows her appreciation for him, there is not even the shadow of a Ninetto Davoli9 type in the Neapolitan Quartet. Not to mention a Gennariello, full of innocence and inner beauty—the very archetype of certain Neapolitan boys that Pasolini (described by Nino, in that same scene, as a “fag” who makes “more trouble than anything else”) depicted in Lettere luterane (Lutheran Letters). What I mean to say is that in your novel the subproletariat has no redemptive power. Though the underclass is historically on the side of right, in practice it is always brutally on the side of wrong. It’s hard to admit, but those who grew up in those environments or who know them well can’t help but appreciate, even love and be moved by the absolute truth of the scenes you describe.

  There are critics who have compared you to Anna Maria Ortese and to Elsa Morante—correctly, in my view. And yet your underclass is more like the terrible human horde described by Curzio Malaparte in La Pelle (The Skin) than that described in Ortese’s Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples). Is that type of plebeian class truly irredeemable?

  Ferrante: I don’t know about Malaparte, I should reread him. I’ve never felt any conscious affinity with The Skin, which I read long ago. But I have to admit that I’ve always felt that Gennariello, as well, is very distant from my experience. It’s the chapter from The Sea Doesn’t Bathe Naples titled “The Involuntary City” that, at different stages of my life, seemed to me a necessary point of departure, if I was ever going to try to describe what I thought I knew about my city. But it’s always hard to talk about literary influences: a halting verse, two forgotten lines, a beautiful page that at the time we didn’t appreciate—often, through hidden pathways, these come to matter more than the literary emblems that, in good faith, we flaunt in an attempt to impress. But what can I tell you? My intention, at least, was not to show that Lila and Elena are born and grow up within a terrible human horde. But there is no neighborhood Gennariello, either. In any case, Pasolini himself believed Gennariello to be a miracle of his own imagination, an exception among so many disgusting fascists, as he wrote. The plebeian city I know is made up of ordinary people who don’t have money and who seek it, who are of the underclass and yet violent, who do not have the intangible privilege of a good education, who mock those who think of saving themselves through education and yet still consider education valuable.

  Lagioia: For Lila and Elena, studying is crucial. Getting an education is the only really worthy way to escape the condition of inferiority. Despite the many troubles they confront in the course of their lives, rarely do the two friends lose faith in the power of learning. Even when studying doesn’t lead to any practical outcome, Elena and Lila don’t question its importance in the construction of every individual. What do you think of Italy today, full of university graduates who are adrift? It’s true that some of these youths don’t have the almost desperate relationship with education that Lila and Elena do, and it’s true that for the next generations (for Dede and Elsa, for example) there might be other tools with which to cross the shadow line. And yet, all in all, education doesn’t strike me as a tool of emancipation like any other.

  Ferrante: First of all, I would not reduce education to a mere tool of emancipation. Education has mainly been considered essential to social mobility. In post-World War II Italy, education cemented old hierarchies, but it also allowed for a modest assimilation of the deserving, so that to some extent those who remained at the bottom could say to themselves: I ended up here because I didn’t want to study. Lenù’s story, but also Nino’s, demonstrates this use of education for upward mobility. But in the story there are also signs of dysfunction: some characters study and yet still they stumble. In other words, there was an ideology of education that no longer functions today. Its failure has become obvious: the directionless graduates are dramatic evidence that the long crisis in the legitimization of social hierarchy based on the credentials of an education has come to a head. But the story also demonstrates another way of understanding education: Lila’s. For Lila, deprived of the opportunity to complete her education—at a time when this was crucial especially for women, and for poor women—and projecting onto Lenuccia her own ambitions of sociocultural ascent, education becomes the manifestation of a permanent anxiety about intelligence, a necessity imposed by the relentlessly chaotic circumstances of life, a tool of daily struggle (a function to which Lila tries to reduce even her friend, “who has studied”). While Lena, in short, is the tormented omega of the old system, Lila embodies the crisis and, in a certain sense,
a possible future. How the crisis will be resolved in our own tumultuous world, I’m not sure—we’ll have to see. Will the contradictions of the educational system become increasingly evident, signaling its decline? Will education be refined and accessible without any connection to the ways we earn a living? Will we have more cultured diligence and less intelligence? Let’s say that in general I’m captivated by those who produce ideas, rather than by those who comment on them. I’d feel better in a world of imaginative creators of grand ideas—even if this seems to me, admittedly, a formidable goal.

  Lagioia: If it’s true, as I’ve read in more than one article, that My Brilliant Friend presents no possibilities for transcendence (at least in the way transcendence is rendered in most twentieth-century literature), what do we make of Lina’s smarginature, her episodes of dissolving boundaries? That is to say, the crucial moments when the world comes unglued before Lina’s eyes, when it goes off its axis, appearing in its unbearable nakedness: a chaotic and shapeless mass, “a sticky, jumbled, reality” without meaning. They are revelatory instants, and the revelations are consistently terrible. Rather than the flashes of illumination experienced by the Dostoyevskian epileptics, these episodes call to mind one of the last chapters in Anna Karenina, when the protagonist observes from her carriage the streets crowded with people, and is convinced that life has no meaning, that love doesn’t exist, that we are creatures hurled into chaos and governed by forces that the last shreds of illusion would call bleak—and that, even worse, those forces simply are what they are, no more or less meaningful than the law of gravity. Soon afterward Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.

  I can’t understand (and I won’t ask you) whether Lina’s anguish derives from the fact that, during the episodes of dissolving boundaries, the universe appears to her inexorably devoid of meaning, or from an awareness that that trance state offers the broadest view granted to man, a view from which one intuits that, on the contrary, “meaning” (and therefore the possibility of peace, of happiness) exists in the abstract, but is eternally not only unattainable but also indecipherable to our senses. What interests me concerns, rather, the fiction. “Unreal things,” as Lina calls them, “which with their physical and moral solidity pacified her.” Unreal things are barriers against the disorder and violence that surround us. From this point of view, literature is an unreal thing, as is law or philosophy. On the one hand, this assumes that we are condemned to unhappiness, because all that can soothe us is an illusion, a belief in the truth of an unreal thing. But on the other hand I wonder whether it is not, perhaps, simply our nature to create “unreal things” that might let us reach our ultimate goal: true communication with each other and with the world?

  Ferrante: I’m always surprised when someone points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence. Here I’d like to move on to a statement of principle: since the age of fifteen, I haven’t believed in the kingdom of any God, in Heaven or on earth—in fact, wherever you place it, it seems dangerous to me. On the other hand, I share the opinion that most of the concepts we work with have a theological origin. Theology helps us understand the origins of the dregs we even now resort to. As for the rest I don’t know what to tell you. I’m comforted by stories that emerge through horror to a turning point, stories in which someone is redeemed as confirmation that peace and happiness are possible, or that one can return to a private or public Eden. But I tried to write a story like that, long ago, and I discovered that I didn’t believe in it. I’m drawn, rather, to images of crisis, to seals that are broken, and perhaps the dissolving boundaries come from these. When shapes lose their contours, we see what most terrifies us, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Clarice Lispector’s extraordinary Passion According to G.H. You don’t go beyond that; you have to take a step back and, to survive, re-enter some good fiction. I don’t believe, however, that every fiction we orchestrate is good. I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions. I love unreal things when they show signs of firsthand knowledge of the terror, and hence an awareness that they are unreal, that they will not hold up for long against the collisions. Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening.

  Lagioia: The Neapolitan Quartet is full of memorable quarrels. The fights, the angry outbursts of the various characters are rendered magisterially—they’re almost contagious. Every so often while reading I felt like pounding a fist on the table for the sole purpose of physically emphasizing some verbal explosion of Nunzia Cerullo or Elena’s mother. I’ve always been struck by how certain poor people in Italy ignite. The repertoire is incredibly vast. Swear words, vomited up without a pause. Fierce, absurd accusations. Hair-tearing. Increasingly fantastic curses. My maternal grandparents were small independent farmers, while my paternal grandfather was a truck driver. I heard them rail at each other, or, more often, at themselves or at fate, in a manner I’ve rarely found in other places (though it happened more frequently in the cities than in the countryside). Sometimes I really miss it. I don’t believe those bursts of rage are common to all oppressed peoples. In France, in England, things function more or less the same way. But in some Asian countries (Thailand, for example) the poor, at least on the outside, get angry with fate in a much less violent way.

  So, on the one hand, I understand that the spectacle of foul language can be sad and degrading, even bestial. On the other hand, I would ask you: isn’t it also a wail of civilization, the instinctive understanding of poverty as injustice?

  Ferrante: Here let’s return to the quarrels. And yes, let’s say that with poor people the quarrel is a threshold. The threshold is an interesting rhetorical device; metaphorically, it represents a suspension between two opposing sides, and it effectively summarizes the time we live in. With the concept of class consciousness and class conflict defeated, the poor, the desperate, whose wealth consists only of angry words, are kept, by means of words, on the threshold—between the degrading explosion, which makes them like animals, and the liberating one, which humanizes and initiates a sort of purification. But in reality the threshold is continuously breached, it becomes bloodshed, a bloody war among the poor. Or it leads to reconciliation, but in the sense of a return to acquiescence, to the subservience of the weak toward the strong, to opportunism. The wail of civilization arises, if you like, from the intuition of one’s own dignity that accompanies the necessity for change. Otherwise, the quarrels of the poor are simply another version of the capons of Renzo Tramaglino.10

  Lagioia: Forgive me for returning to Malaparte. At a certain point I remembered a passage in The Skin where he writes: “What do you hope to find in London, Paris, Vienna? You will find Naples there. It’s the fate of Europe to become Naples.”

  I couldn’t help associating it—albeit in a mirror-image way—with some of Lenuccia’s insights: “Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city—I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism—is useful for a single thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”

  This distrust of history recalls the ultimate distrust of the cosmos, or of nature, that the narrator talks about at the start of the third volume: “I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it�
�s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.”

  I would stop at history. The Neapolitan Quartet is also a sorrowful hymn to the illusions of the second half of the twentieth century, or perhaps of all modernity. I was frightened recently by the declaration by some historians that the forty years from 1950 to 1990 (the period in which inequalities diminished, social mobility became a reality, and the masses were often protagonists) could be read, in the grand scheme of things, as a small moment of discontinuity in a larger picture where vast inequalities are the rule. The twenty-first century began with the violent widening of the gap between rich and poor. Do you think that the second half of the twentieth century was really only a digression? Isn’t it, rather, more realistic to think that the future remains, as ever, unwritten?

  Ferrante: Yes, I think that’s true: the future is always unwritten. But history and stories are written, and they are written from the balcony of the present, looking out on the electrical storm of the past; that is to say, there is nothing more unstable than the past. The past, in its indeterminacy, presents itself either through the filter of nostalgia or through the filter of preliminary impressions. I don’t love nostalgia; it leads us to ignore individual sufferings, large pockets of misery, cultural and civil poverty, widespread corruption, regression after minimal and illusory progress. I prefer acquisition to acts. The forty years you cite were in reality very difficult and painful for those who started from a position of disadvantage. And by disadvantage I also mean, above all, being a woman. Not only that: starting in the seventies, the masses that endured inhuman sacrifices to climb a few rungs up the social ladder were already experiencing the torments of defeat, as were their children. Not to mention a sort of latent civil war; so-called world peace, always at risk; and the beginnings of one of the most devastating technological revolutions, which paralleled one of the most devastating deconstructions of the old political and economic order. The new fact is not that the millennium begins with the widening of the gap between rich and poor—that is a given, let’s say, part of the system. The new fact is that the poor no longer have any horizons in life besides the capitalist system, or any horizons for redemption besides religion. Religion now manages both earthly resignation, in anticipation of the kingdom of God in heaven, and insurrection in the name of a kingdom of God on earth. Theology, which I mentioned earlier, is taking its revenge. But, as you said, nothing is written, and what will happen can only surprise us. I’m not fond of the technicians of prediction. They work on the past, yet they see only the past that is comfortable to see. Navigating by sight is less progressive and impulsive but more sensible, especially when there are a lot of whirlpools. To me living on the edge of chaos seems inevitable, it’s the fate of those who feel—and a writer has no choice but to feel it—the precarious balance of all existences and of all that exists. It’s right, and stimulating, to always keep in mind that while on that precipice things still function somewhat, elsewhere nothing functions, and the distant imbalance is the sign of an imminent collapse.