I felt different from that Naples, I experienced it with revulsion, I ran away as soon as I could. I brought it with me as a synthesis, a surrogate, that would always remind me that the power of life is damaged, humiliated by unjust modes of existence. But for a long time I’ve looked at it under a microscope. I isolate fragments, I descend into them, I discover good things that as a child I didn’t see and others that appear to me even more wretched than they did then. But not even for these do I feel the old bitterness. In the end it’s an experience of a city that can’t be erased even if you wanted to, and turns out to be useful everywhere. I can wander through streets and alleys simply by lying in bed with my eyes closed: when I return I have initial moments of uncontainable enthusiasm; then, in the space of an afternoon, I move on to hating it, I regress, I’m mute again, I feel a sense of suffocation, a diffuse anxiety. I seem to have grasped as a child not a phase limited in time and space but the signs of a degeneration that has now spread, so that ultimately the city, with its calls of a lost time to find again, or sudden remembrances, acts like a perverse siren, using streets, alleys, this ascent, that descent, the poisoned beauty of the bay, but remaining a place of decomposition, of dislocation, of panic; and, outside of it, I struggled to learn to make it function a little. And yet it’s my experience, and contains a lot of meaningful emotions; I feel its human richness, the complex layers of its cultures. I’ve stopped avoiding it.
I don’t know how to answer the questions you ask about Delia and Amalia. It doesn’t seem to me that I consciously established a metaphorical connection between Amalia and Naples. Naples, in my book and in my intentions when I wrote it, is thought of as pressure, a dark force of the world that weighs on its subjects, the sum total of what we call the threatening reality of today, engulfing, through violence, every space of mediation and civil relationship around and within the characters. But, that said, in my book Delia must simply manage to tell herself a story, which she knows well from beginning to end—which she has never repressed. The story has remained entangled in certain spaces of the city, in the dialectal voices through which it took shape. This woman comes into the labyrinth of Naples to capture it, put it in order, arrange space and time, finally tell her own story out loud. She tries and in doing so understands that, if she succeeds, she will also succeed in finally adding to herself her mother, her mother’s world, her wrongs, struggles, passions consummated or imagined, inhibited energies and those which expanded within the few accessible channels. That’s all. Even the mystery of Amalia’s death slowly becomes irrelevant for Delia; or rather it becomes a minor part of her and her mother’s story.
Naturally it’s true, Naples isn’t purely background. As I was writing, I realized clearly that there was not a place or a gesture in the story that was not marked by a certain Neapolitanness, unredeemed and unredeemable, lacking narrative value, irritating. On the other hand Delia’s effort consisted mainly in telling what had for a long time seemed to her not worth telling, and going down that road was useful to me. It’s possible that in the end the most elusive, hardest to grasp, most densely ambiguous person, this Amalia who absorbs difficulties and beatings but doesn’t give in, was charged with the least definable Neapolitanness, and so is a sort of woman-city who is tugged, trapped, shaken, pursued, humiliated, desired, and yet endowed with an extraordinary capacity to endure. If it were so, I would be happy about it. But I don’t know how to confirm that for you.
Besides, I confess that I don’t like a narrative that tells me programmatically what Naples is like today, what its young people are like today, what the women have become, how the family is in crisis, what ills Italy suffers from. I have the impression that such works are almost always the staging of media clichés, the poeticizing of a magazine article, of a television segment, of sociological research, of a party position. What I expect, instead, from a good story is that it will tell me about today what I can’t know from any other source but that story, from its unique way of putting something into words, from the feeling that it implies.
I don’t have the right tools to talk about Mario Martone’s film and so I will say nothing. I wrote to him, but then I didn’t send the letter: it seemed to me that I could tell him only things he already knew. I can, on the other hand, talk to you about the screenplay, which at the time I read and reread. In my book, the weave of past and present is entrusted to the alternation between the said and the not said, an alternation determined in absolute autonomy within the narrator. Delia, that is, on the page, is a literary first person, the only source of speech and the only source of the truth of the story; no one will ever really intervene from outside her narrator’s voice. In the cinema, instead, the narrator’s voice, when it’s there, has to reckon with its own body-object displayed on the screen; it has a surface that is dominant, and so it’s always a pale semblance of the literary voice. Thus it seemed to me natural that Martone would have to go in other directions and probably set other goals.
For example, the story of Delia, once it was embodied, had to be inscribed within the real city and its real dialect. As a result, once Delia was fixed outside the narrator, it was obvious that, even using her silences and her half-sentences, she had to be represented from the outside, in search of something that she doesn’t know and has to discover, a journey that requires the overexplaining you allude to, and that, if it wants to exploit fully the possible margins of ambiguity, has of necessity to place, show, state, deny, clarify more than the first-person literary narrative does.
To me, especially when I read the final version of the screenplay, it seemed that Martone had found intelligent and creative solutions. I’ll give you just one example, in order not to drag this out too much. In the few words of the final scene, I worked more or less consciously on a play of tenses: “Amalia had been there. I was Amalia.” The pluperfect of the first sentence was meant to imply that Amalia’s story concluded not with her death but with the transfer, now completed, of the truth of her experience to her daughter. The imperfect of the second sentence, and the transformation of the subject of the first into the predicate, was intended to revive Amalia’s life, to let it be fulfilled again in Delia, to transform it into a more that, if it doesn’t say anything about Amalia, now can help her daughter to fully be. I didn’t intend the I was to have a pathological function. It’s not—at least as far as what I had in mind, while I was writing—a loss of identity. It is, rather, a recovery of the little Delia’s childish game in the cellar, when she played with Antonio and pretended she was Amalia, but it’s a recovery whose function is reversed. That game now helps her tell herself that a terrible side of herself as a child has become adult, has been accepted, can share with others its time as a grown woman. The solution invented by Martone—the simple answer (“Amalia”) to the young man who asks her her name—seemed to me as good as could be done, within a film, to hold together all the things that I tried to put into those two sentences. For that and other inventions I’m very glad that Martone took on Troubling Love.
I hope that, as far as possible, I’ve been thorough, and I’m happy to have had a chance to speak to you with a certain freedom. I’d like you to consider these pages, which cost me some effort, a sort of thank you to a person who, by calling himself my affectionate admirer, made me happy for a whole day.
NOTE
Unsent letter (1995). The critic and magazine editor Goffredo Fofi sent Ferrante a number of questions through her publishers. The letter that appears above is the author’s reply to his questions:
1. Mario Martone’s film is very respectful toward your novel, but he chooses to make a clear distinction between the present and the past (through flashbacks), while in the novel everything happens in the present, in Delia’s reflections. The other difference between the novel and the film lies in the fact that the film explains a lot, including what in the novel was unsaid or implicit. The third, finally, is a kind of greater modesty (male?) on the part of Martone in a
ccepting Delia’s sexuality in the past, in adhering, one might say, to the psychology of the child Delia. In that part, in the film, Amalia is only a victim. What do you think of these interventions, and do you attribute the differences to Martone’s different sensibility or, rather, to the need for cinema to be, in itself, in its obligation to show, more didactic?
2. The Naples you describe with extreme precision and decisiveness (places and neighborhoods, besides human environments, behavior) has not been described much in cinema, as literature has not described the passage from the still proletarian peasant periphery to the city of the lowest bourgeoisie, to which Delia’s family belongs. What impact does this Naples have, and what do you think has changed in the city’s current process of renewal? Have you followed this process? Do you still feel involved in Naples and by Naples? Is your geographical distance from the city a definite choice (like Delia’s) or is it due to other factors? Would you go back to living in Naples today? And will Delia return to live in Naples? In other words, can one consider the reconciliation of Delia and Amalia a reconciliation with a Neapolitan identity—irksome and pathological, but nevertheless one from which one must start again? In still other words, Amalia is a mother-Naples: can she be seen as a metaphor of Naples?
3. When the novel came out, you won the Procida Prize—Elsa Morante, and critics saw a sort of connection between your novel and certain of Morante’s works (especially Aracoeli). Do you accept this connection? And how does one become disconnected from it? (Like Delia from Amalia?) Did you ever meet Morante? And what other female writers—and in what way—have influenced your development (Ortese, for example)?
4. What is your new novel about, if I may ask?
5. Did you imagine that the main characters of your novel would look like Angela Luce and Anna Bonaiuto? In what way do they seem to you to have best captured the character of the protagonist? And in what are they distant from it?
6. What is the underlying reason for keeping your distance from the media: is it a feeling of distrust (vis-à-vis the society of the spectacle)? A form of reserve? Today, when the tendency is to personalize works as the products of recognizable authors who regularly appear in the pages of the newspapers and on the television screen, as if these appearances were indispensable, your situation is truly anomalous. Even without wanting to make it too much of an example, one has the temptation to take it as a model. What do you think of this possibility?
7. Have you ever been in analysis? Have you had a psychoanalytic type of education? A feminist type?
Thank you, and warm regards from your affectionate admirer,
Goffredo Fofi
10.
WORKING WOMEN
Dear Sandra,
I owe you an explanation. The manuscript I promised to give you to read will not reach you. I see that you’ve already tried to find a title (I like Working Women; I rule out Women Workers), but I’ve changed my mind, the story doesn’t seem ready to be read yet. In the past week I myself couldn’t read even a line without feeling disgusted. I need time to return to it calmly and understand what to do with it. But as soon as I’ve made a decision I’ll let you know.
Now, don’t think it’s your fault, you were right to insist. In all these years every time you’ve pressed me to let you read something I’ve begun to write with greater motivation; I was glad that at least one person—you—was waiting for my new book. In this case maybe it was a mistake to summarize the contents of the book. I must have perceived your editorial disappointment; or I became worried because of the length of the manuscript—you’ve always said that, except for thrillers stuffed with adventures, books that are too long put readers to flight. But, even if that were the case, my decision not to keep my promise has other motives.
I wrote this story because it has to do with me. I was inside it for a long time. I kept shortening the distance between the protagonist and me, I occupied all her cavities, and there is nothing about her, today, that I wouldn’t do. So I’m exhausted, and now that the story is finished I have to catch my breath. How? I don’t know, maybe by starting to write another book. Or reading as many as possible on the subject of this story, and so remaining nearby, on the sidelines, and testing it the way you test a cake to see if it’s baked, poking it with a toothpick, pricking the text to see if it’s done.
I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages. The question in every story is the same: 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? The answer is uncertain, even when you get to the end. What happened in the lines, between the lines? Often, after struggles and joys, on the pages there is nothing—events, dialogues, dramatic turns, only that—and you’re frightened by your very desperation.
To me it happens like this: I always struggle at first, it’s hard to get started, no opening seems really convincing; then the story gets going, the bits already written gain power and suddenly find a way of fitting together; then writing becomes a pleasure, the hours are a time of intense enjoyment, the characters never leave you, they have a space-time of their own in which they are alive and increasingly vivid, they are inside and outside you, they exist solidly in the streets, in the houses, in the places where the story must unfold; the endless possibilities of the plot select themselves and the choices seem inevitable, definitive. You begin every day by rereading to get energized, and rereading is pleasant, it means perfecting, enhancing, touching up the past to make it fit with the story’s future. Then this happy period comes to an end. The story is finished. You have to reread not the work of the day before but the entire narrative. You’re afraid. You test it here and there, nothing is written as you had imagined it. The beginning is insignificant, the development seems crude, the linguistic forms inadequate. It’s the moment when you need help, to find a way to draw the ground the book rests on and understand what substance it is truly made of.
Now I’m just at that anguished point. So, if you can, help me. What do you know about novels that tell a story of women’s work obsessively observed by an idle, malicious, sometimes fierce gaze? Are there any? I’m interested in anything that focuses on the female body at work. If you have any title in mind—it doesn’t matter if it’s a good book or junk—write to me. I doubt that work ennobles man and I am absolutely certain that it does not ennoble woman. So the novel is centered on the hardships of working, on the horror implicit in the necessity of earning a living, an expression in itself abominable. But don’t worry: I assure you that, although I’ve used all the jobs I am thoroughly familiar with because I’ve done them myself, and also those I’m familiar with thanks to people I know well and trust, I haven’t written an investigation into women’s labor: the story has great tension, all kinds of things happen. But I don’t know what to say about the result. Now that the book seems to me finished I have to find reasons to calm myself. Eventually, in all serenity, I will tell you if the novel can be read or not, if it can be published or should be added to my writing exercises. In the latter case I would be truly sorry to have disappointed you again. On the other hand, I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn’t it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
Until next time,
Elena
NOTE
Letter of May 18, 1998. The publisher never received the novel under discussion.
11.
LIES THAT ALWAYS TELL THE TRUTH
Dear Sandro,
You say it’s necessary to do interviews, at least, an
d that’s fine, you’re right. Tell Fofi to send me the questions, I’ll answer. In these ten years I hope I’ve grown up.
In my own defense, however, I will say only this: in the games with newspapers one always ends up lying and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role, with the makeup we imagine is suitable.
Well, I don’t at all hate lies, in life I find them useful and I resort to them when necessary to shield my person, feelings, pressures. But lying about books makes me suffer, literary fiction seems to me made purposely to always tell the truth.
Therefore I care deeply about the truth of The Days of Abandonment, I wouldn’t want to talk about it meekly, complying with the expectations implicit in the interviewer’s questions. The ideal for me would be to obtain, through short answers, the same effect as literature, that is, to orchestrate lies that always tell, strictly, the truth. Let’s see, in other words, what I’m capable of, I feel I’m in good shape, I tend to tell true lies even if I’m writing a note of congratulations. As soon as you have the questions send them to me.
NOTE
Letter of January, 2002. Between 2002 and 2003, after the publication of The Days of Abandonment in Italy, Elena Ferrante gave three interviews. The questions were sent to her through the publisher. The interviews follow.
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