12.
THE CITY WITHOUT LOVE
Answers to questions from Goffredo Fofi
Fofi: Naples, Turin: two very different settings, and, frenzied as the Neapolitan atmosphere was (or so we remember it, thanks to Martone’s film, which exaggerated its characteristics), so the Turinese is cold and, besides, in summer, sparsely inhabited and fairly quiet. Was it necessary to further detach the character of the protagonist, in her crisis of abandonment and near madness? Of Turin one “sees” little, it’s only a background. Why? Is the “ghost” of the abandoned Neapolitan woman, a memory that becomes an obsession, what ties this novel most closely to the previous one?
Ferrante: Olga is a woman not alone but isolated. I wanted to tell the story of her isolation, it was what interested me most. I wished to follow moment by moment the contraction around her of spaces both real and metaphorical. I wanted Turin and Naples, although distant and different, to coincide as places without community, backdrops for individuals stunned by grief. Delia, in Troubling Love, still manages to find in Naples a story of her own that is gripping, and places in the city that have an enveloping power. Olga, on the other hand, in Naples as elsewhere, today finds only names that are increasingly incapable of retaining warmth and meaning. It’s this growing failure of the cities that flings her out of the background.
Fofi: As the background fades, the crisis that the novel narrates becomes more invasive and explosive, central. Do the protagonist’s references to Anna Karenina and to de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed also indicate the perpetuity of a situation: abandonment is abandonment, the crisis that follows from it is inevitable, and it recurs outside of time and culture?
Ferrante: No, I don’t think Olga starts from that sequence of ideas. She is combative, she doesn’t want to be Anna Karenina or a broken woman. Above all she doesn’t want to be like the abandoned woman of Naples who made an impression on her as a child, she feels that she is the product of a different culture, a different female story, she thinks that nothing is inevitable. Of course, she feels deeply that every abandonment is a vortex and an annihilation, maybe also an indication of the desert that has expanded around us. But she reacts, she recovers, she lives.
Fofi: Olga, a woman of middle age, has not found in writing any sublimation or fulfillment. Do feelings remain the keystone of every human experience, in particular that of women?
Ferrante: For Olga, writing is enduring and understanding. Writing has no magical or mystical coloration, at most it’s the need for style. As a girl she claimed from writing much more; now it’s useful only as a means of keeping under control the problem she’s encountered—can one continue to live if one loses love? It seems like a pretty much discredited subject; in reality it’s the question most crudely posed by female existence. The loss of love is a failure, it causes an absence of sense. The city without love is an unjust and cruel city.
Fofi: To what degree have you been influenced by feminism (Italian, of the seventies), and did you think about the achievements of feminism in writing your novel?
Ferrante: I’ve read a fair amount of feminist writing, and passionately, yet I have no militant experience. I have a lot of sympathy for the thinking of difference feminism, but it’s something that has more to do with me than with the story of Delia or of Olga. A story takes its own path, it’s the receptacle of everything and the opposite of everything, it functions only if we allow it to take what it needs to seek its truth. I don’t think one can know more about a work by having information about the reading habits and the tastes of the one who wrote it.
Fofi: Olga seems to reject every “transcendence,” every dimension of existence that is not “secular” and earthly, except in the dimension of hallucination; and yet there are in the novel hidden threads, strange correspondences, echoes of presences, and central to it is the relationship (which has something of a primary identification) with an animal, the dog Otto—true scapegoat in the structure of the story. Is it a contradiction?
Ferrante: Olga is strictly secular. But the experience of abandonment consumes her in her convictions, in her way of being, in her expressive register, even in her emotional reactions. That coming apart lets filter in fantasies, beliefs, emotions, and buried feelings, a physical primitivism that, yes, weaves its own strands, difficult to control, but without transcendent results. Olga in the end discovers that suffering won’t sink us or raise us up and concludes that there is nothing either high or low that can console her. As for the dog Otto, I don’t want nor do I know how to tell you anything, except that he is the character, if I can put it like this, who caused me the most suffering.
Fofi: This novel comes out at a particular moment in Italian history, dominated by a return to a “private” utilitarian boorishness and a sort of collective public hypocrisy, as in a television show. Your first novel came out many years ago, and one assumes that The Days of Abandonment was written in the course of many years. Were you thinking about the “Italian background” of those years: do you recognize it as the background of Olga’s story?
Ferrante: Yes, that background you speak of shows, I think, especially through the new features that Olga’s husband slowly reveals, through some of his references to a disillusioned political realism. But I don’t think that the time in which a story originates and is conceived is revealed through imitation of the repulsive features of the contemporary world. Not even a detailed anthology of our present extremely vulgar times would be enough to make a story. When one writes, one hopes, rather, that the particularity of the era is caught in the workings of the text; in the actions of the abandoned Olga, for example, a prisoner in her apartment, isolated in the heart of the absent city.
Fofi: Is Olga’s acceptance of Carrano, the musician neighbor, also acceptance of a fragility common to men and women? What can it be a prelude to in Olga’s life? The question is stupid but necessary. Thank you.
Ferrante: Olga is helped by Carrano to draw close to men again after every feeling has dried up, after the loss of love has demonstrated to her the naked brutality of relations between the sexes and not only between the sexes. Carrano is not a linear character; he even has some repulsive aspects, but Olga prefers him to the veterinarian, for example, to his flaunted, put-on pleasantness. It’s Carrano who at the end moves her and gives her a new emotional persepective. I think that the men we choose say, like many other important choices, what sort of women we are, what women we are becoming.
NOTE
The interview appeared in Il Messaggero, January 24, 2002, preceded by an introduction by Goffredo Fofi and entitled “Ferrante: Journey to the Center of the Planet Woman.”
13.
WITHOUT KEEPING A SAFE DISTANCE
Answers to questions from Stefania Scateni
Scateni: The Days of Abandonment describes a terrible moment in a woman’s life and does so with a naked sincerity, especially regarding the protagonist. Do you think your anonymity was helpful?
Ferrante: I don’t know. I’ve always had a tendency to separate everyday life from writing. To tolerate existence, we lie, and we lie above all to ourselves. Sometimes we tell ourselves lovely tales, sometimes petty lies. Falsehoods protect us, mitigate suffering, allow us to avoid the terrifying moment of serious reflection, they dilute the horrors of our time, they even save us from ourselves. Instead, when one writes one must never lie. In literary fiction you have to be sincere to the point where it’s unbearable, where you suffer the emptiness of the pages. It seems likely that making a clear separation between what we are in life and what we are when we write helps keep self-censorship at bay.
Scateni: Why did you choose not to become a public personage?
Ferrante: From a somewhat neurotic desire for intangibility. The labor of writing touches every point of the body. When the book is finished, it’s as if you had been rudely searched, and you desire only to regain integrity, to return to being the person you usually are, in occu
pations, in thoughts, in language, in relationships. The work is public: in it, there is everything we have to say. Today, who really cares about the person who wrote it? What’s essential is the finished work.
Scateni: Your writing does not seem to be written for readers; rather, it seems to have originated as private writing, without any interlocutor but the page (or the computer) or yourself. Is that true?
Ferrante: No, I don’t think so. I write so that my books will be read. But while I’m writing that isn’t what counts; what counts is finding the energy to dig deeply into the story I’m telling. The only moment of my life in which I don’t let myself be disturbed by anyone is when I’m searching to find the words to go beyond the surface of an obvious gesture, a banal phrase. It doesn’t even frighten me to discover that the digging is futile, and under the surface there’s nothing.
Scateni: Reading your book, I thought of the life that makes writing, that the tempo of living is that of writing. Is that why you’ve written two books in ten years?
Ferrante: I have to admit with some embarrassment that I haven’t written two books in ten years, I’ve written and rewritten many. But Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment seemed to me the ones that most decisively stuck a finger in certain wounds I have that are still infected, and did so without keeping a safe distance. At other times, I’ve written about clean or happily healed wounds with the obligatory detachment and the right words. But then I discovered that that is not my path.
Scateni: On the same subject, your writing is very concrete, physical, as if the body had become the carrier of words. It’s a writing composed of gestures, the daily gestures made fluent by habit, which are shed at the moment of the “illness.” In short, it’s female writing. Are there women writers (or male writers) to whom you feel close?
Ferrante: When I was very young, my goal was to write with a masculine tone. It seemed to me that all the great writers were male, and hence it was necessary to write like a real man. Later, I began to read women’s literature attentively and I embraced the theory that every little fragment that revealed a feminine literary specificity should be studied and put to use. Some time ago, however, I shook off theoretical preoccupations and readings, and began to write without asking myself what I should be: masculine, feminine, neuter. While I’m writing, I confine myself to occasionally reading books that keep me company not as entertainment but as solid companions. I have a modest list, I call them books of encouragement: Adele, by Federico Tozzi, The Best of Husbands, by Alba de Cespedes, Morante’s House of Liars and Arturo’s Island, etc. Incongruous as it might seem, the book that was my closest companion while I was working on The Days of Abandonment was The Princess of Clèves, by Madame de La Fayette.
Scateni: Olga, the protagonist of The Days of Abandonment, had found a meaning for her existence in a relationship, in the rituals of a relationship. Left alone, she has to start again from zero, realizing her mistake, and she approaches another relationship, with Carrano, armed with a great deal of skepticism. What do you think of love?
Ferrante: The need for love is the central experience of our existence. However foolish it may seem, we feel truly alive only when we have an arrow in our side that we drag around night and day, everywhere we go. The need for love sweeps away every other need and, on the other hand, motivates all our actions. Read Book 4 of the Aeneid. The construction of Carthage stops when Dido falls in love. The city would continue to grow powerful and happy if Aeneas stayed. But he goes away, Dido kills herself, and Carthage, potentially a city of love, becomes a city with a mission of hatred. Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves and to others.
Scateni: The Days of Abandonment might seem to be a “feminist” novel . . . Do you feel in agreement with Simone de Beauvoir and her book The Woman Destroyed?
Ferrante: No, not anymore. I used that book, in the story of Olga, just as I could have used Dido, who, having been abandoned, wanders through the city beside herself, and stabs herself with Aeneas’ sword, one of the “souvenirs” he has left her. In reality, Olga is a woman of today who knows that she can’t react to abandonment by breaking down. In life, as in writing, the effect of this new knowledge interests me: how she acts, what resistance she offers, how she fights against the wish to die and gains the time necessary to learn to bear her suffering, what stratagems or fictions she employs in order to accept life again.
Scateni: What do you think of Roberto Faenza’s plan to adapt The Days of Abandonment into a film? Are you involved in the project?
Ferrante: No, for the moment no. I love the cinema but I don’t know anything about the language of film. I hope that his Days of Abandonment turns out better than mine.
NOTE
The interview with an introduction by Stefania Scateni, appeared in l’Unità on September 8, 2002, under the title “Elena Ferrante, la scrittura e la carne” (“Elena Ferrante, Writing and the Flesh”).
14.
A STORY OF DISINTEGRATION
Answers to Questions from Jesper Storgaard Jensen
Jensen: Thanks to the success of The Days of Abandonment, you could have had the sort of fame that many people seek. Why, instead, have you chosen not to appear?
Ferrante: In Totem and Taboo Freud tells of a woman who had forced herself not to write her own name anymore. She was afraid that someone would use it to take possession of her personality. The woman began by refusing to write her own name and then, by extension, she stopped writing completely. I am not at that point: I write and intend to continue to write. But I have to confess that when I read that story of illness it right away seemed wholly meaningful. What I choose to put outside myself can’t and shouldn’t become a magnet that sucks me up entirely. An individual has the right to keep his person separate, if he wants, even his image, from the public effects of his work. But it’s not only that. I don’t think that the author ever has anything decisive to add to his work: I consider the text a self-sufficient body, which has in itself, in its makeup, all the questions and all the answers. And then real books are written only to be read. Increasingly, the promotional activity of authors tends, instead, to cancel out the works and the need to read them. In many cases the name of the writer, his image, his opinions are better known than his works, and that goes not only for contemporary writers but unfortunately, by now, also for classics. Finally, I have a life, both private and public, that is quite satisfying. I don’t feel the need for new equilibriums. I prefer that the corner for writing remain a hidden place, without surveillance or urgency of any type.
Jensen: Although you’ve chosen anonymity yourself, don’t you miss direct contact with your readers?
Ferrante: Readers, if they want, can write to the publisher. I’m happy with that. I respond more or less punctually.
Jensen: Are you willing to give a brief description—and, if you like physical, as well—of yourself?
Ferrante: No. And allow me to cite, for this somewhat abrupt answer, Italo Calvino, who, convinced that only the works of an author count, in 1964 wrote to a scholar of his books: “I don’t give biographical facts, or I give false ones, or anyway I always try to change them from one time to the next. Ask me what you want to know, but I won’t tell you the truth, of that you can be sure.” I’ve always liked that passage, and I’ve made it at least partly mine. I could tell you that I am as beautiful and athletic as a star, or that I’ve been in a wheelchair since adolescence, or that I’m a woman afraid even of her own shadow, or that I adore begonias, or that I write only between two and five in the morning, and other nonsense. The problem is that, unlike Calvino, I hate answering a question with a chain of lies.
Jensen: Surely you must have followed the attempts on the part of certain persons in the Italian press to discover your identity. Have you gotten any amusement out of the theories according to which you are a well-known critic (Goffredo Fofi), a Neapolitan writer (Fabrizia Ramondino), or a Neapolitan h
omosexual?
Ferrante: I very much respect the writers you’ve mentioned, and the idea that my books could be attributed to them is flattering. I even rather like the gay hypothesis. It’s the evidence that a text can accommodate more than what the writer knows about himself.
Jensen: Could you tell us the origin of the book’s plot?
Ferrante: At its origin there is certainly a German shepherd, a German shepherd I loved. The rest came slowly, accumulating over the years.
Jensen: Is there an autobiographical component to the book, given the expressive form that renders so effectively the sense of disgust and disaffection that Olga feels for herself and for sex, among other things?
Ferrante: There is no story that doesn’t have roots in the feeling that the writer has about life. The more that feeling filters into the story, into the characters, the more distinctly the page gives form to an incisive effect of truth. But what counts, in the end, is what I would call the graphic quality of that effect, the ways in which the writing achieves it and enhances it.
Jensen: What is the theme that you were interested in investigating through Olga’s story?
Ferrante: I wanted to tell a story of disintegration. Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we’ve worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it’s the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it’s the discovery of one’s own dispensability and perishability.
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