Jensen: The Days of Abandonment communicates powerful emotions to the reader. How do you manage to obtain such a “clean” writing style that is able to communicate those emotions? What is your method of writing?
Ferrante: I work by contrast: clarity of facts and low emotional reaction alternating with a sort of storm of blood, of frenzied writing. However, I try to avoid dividing lines between the two moments. I tend to make them slide into one another without a break.
Jensen: Today, in your opinion, is it important to be capable of communicating strong feelings in order to sell books, as Andrea De Carlo, among others, maintains?
Ferrante: A writer seeks above all a form for his world. Naturally it’s an interior world, hence private, not yet public or only partly public. In that sense “publishing a book” means deciding to offer to others, in the form that seems to us most fitting, what intimately belongs to us. Asking instead what the public wants (strong feelings or weak ones or something else) seems to me to go in a completely different direction. In this second case it’s no longer my individual world seeking a public dimension through literary form but the public dimension of the consumer imposing on me and my writing. I don’t say that it’s wrong to work in that manner, the roads to a good book are infinite. But it’s not my way of looking at the creative process.
Jensen: Would you call The Days of Abandonment a feminist novel?
Ferrante: Yes, because it’s sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn’t aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile. When I write I construct a story. I make it with my experience, my feelings, my readings, my convictions, and above all with my most secret and uncontrolled depths, even though these often fight with good readings and just beliefs. I never worry about constructing a story that illustrates, demonstrates, spreads some conviction, even if it’s a conviction that counted and counts for me.
Jensen: The Days of Abandonment is the story of a person who loses love. Forgive the banal question, but what does love represent for you?
Ferrante: A living and benevolent force both for the individual and for the community. When love abandons the individual and, even worse, the community, the actions of human beings become deathlike, and both stories and history take the route of wholesale slaughter.
Jensen: Ten years passed between your first book and this recent one. Would you call yourself a perfectionist?
Ferrante: No, only someone who writes when she wants to and publishes when she’s not too ashamed of the result.
Jensen: After the success of The Days of Abandonment, are you not tempted to strike while the iron is hot, to try to finish a book in a shorter time?
Ferrante: A bit of success warms the heart and provokes a desire to start work again right away. It also happened ten years ago. If the books that I tried to write in that time had seemed suitable for publication, I would have printed one with no trouble even every six months. But it didn’t go like that.
Jensen: Are you pleased that some consider you “the greatest female Italian writer since the time of Morante”?
Ferrante: Of course, I love the works of Morante. But I know perfectly well that it’s a journalistic exaggeration.
Jensen: I find it odd that in the two books that have had perhaps the greatest success in Italy in the past year (besides yours, Don’t Move, by Margaret Mazzantini) the male protagonists have the role of the coward, the scoundrel. They’re stories in which the men are weak and the women strong. What do you think?
Ferrante: In my intentions Mario, Olga’s husband, is neither cowardly nor a scoundrel. He’s just a man who has stopped loving the woman he lives with and comes up against the impossibility of breaking that bond without humiliating her, without hurting her. His behavior is that of a human being who deprives another human being of his love. He knows it’s a terrible action, but his need for love has taken other pathways, and he can’t do anything but fulfill it. Meanwhile he takes time, he tries to slow down the effects of the wound that he has inflicted. Mario is an ordinary person who is facing the discovery that to do harm is often painfully inevitable.
Jensen: In a male chauvinist society like Italy’s, is the female in reality the stronger sex, in that women are forced to develop special talents and a strong character in order to survive or make it?
Ferrante: I dismiss the idea that women have become the strong sex. I think, rather, that we are increasingly constrained, in our actions, to subject ourselves to punishing trials involving the reorganization of our private life and admission to public life. It’s not a choice, it’s not the effect of a transformation: it’s a necessity. To avoid these trials would mean a return to being swallowed up by subordination, to giving up ourselves and our specificity, to being absorbed again by the universal Man.
Jensen: You wrote a short story on the theme of conflict of interest in which you tell the tale of a negative character of your childhood? At the end of the story there is an open reference to Berlusconi as another negative character. What do you think of the governing political class in Italy today?
Ferrante: I am repulsed by it.
Jensen: On the cover of your book there is a painting by a Danish artist, Christoffer Eckersberg (“Nude from Behind, Morning Toilet”), and in the novel the male protagonist goes to Denmark. Do you have a connection with Denmark, and, if so, what is it?
Ferrante: I’ve been to Denmark only a few times. On the other hand as a child I loved the stories of Andersen and as an adult I adored those of Karen Blixen. The connections that I have with places are almost always those which I establish through books that tell me about them.
NOTE
The interview appeared August 17, 2003, in the Danish weekly Weekendavisen, on the occasion of the publication of The Days of Abandonment in Denmark.
15.
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
Dear Sandro,
I wrote the story reluctantly and instead of hiding my reluctance I inserted it directly into the text. I’m afraid you won’t like this, so I’ll try to explain why I did it.
To tell you the truth, I don’t believe that political stories have a decisive function, especially when freedom of opinion and of the press are still well protected and the writer certainly may risk something but not prison or his life. Indignation at how badly the government is run frequently stimulates the imagination and can inspire memorable invective, great allegories, fables that satisfy the aesthetic sense of adults and even of children. But what of any real political effect? In general it seems to me disappointing: a rhetorically complicit nudge given to a public that is already convinced, already in agreement, and whose agreement, beyond a guarantee of success, is also one of the many safeguards against harassment, retaliation, insults, lawsuits, work restrictions, and other common misfortunes that those who express themselves in black and white against the opposing party are exposed to.
To be more explicit, but also to justify myself to you, I will list the questions I asked myself while I was writing. Who is hurt, in the fierce dark political theater of today, by the allusions of a minor story about grandmothers and apartment buildings, like mine? Why, when the newspapers and the essay collections in bookstores are full of misdeeds clearly attributed to the head of the government, do I choose to express my anti-Berlusconi-ism in a coded way, telling a small family story from years ago? And even if I had invented some other more effective, stinging, amusing, grotesque, anguished, satirical parable, would it make political sense, today, to express oneself obliquely, by apparently talking about something else?
Just to get out of these self-critical convulsions I tried, as you’ll see, to write the name of Silvio Berlusconi at the end of the story. Beware, though, I did it not to say that a political story, in the current portrait of our civi
l society, has the duty to emerge from metaphor (literature, good or bad, is always metaphor) but, rather, to indicate that narratives that can state more directly, even if through literature, the reasons for our repugnance as citizens are necessary. In other words, blunt questions of the following type should be transformed into novels: Is it true that Berlusconi can be a great statesman because he is a great entrepreneur? How did we become convinced that there is a connection between the two things? Was it the great and good works of that grand entrepreneur that convinced us? What are those works? What is the meritorious work that persuaded us of his capacities as a great statesman? Maybe it’s his bad television empire, created by his highly prized and highly paid employees? Hence, does one become a great statesman by being the great entrepreneur of a bad television company that has vulgarized all the other television companies and also, out of a crossover attraction, cinema, newspapers, supplements, publicity, the supporting literature, the entire Italy of TV ratings? Is it possible? If the great work of the entrepreneur Berlusconi is what we have before our eyes every evening, how could it happen that half of Italy believed that he really could, as he says, fix the nation? And, besides, what Italy does this man want to fix, if he governs alongside someone who would rather dismantle Italy, in the name of a good and very pure geographical area that he has christened Padania?
It’s this credulity not of citizens but of the audience that I find narratively interesting. If I were capable of writing about our Berlusconian Italy not through allegories, parables, and satires, I would like to find a plot and characters that could represent the mythology within which the symbol Berlusconi is dangerously encysted. I say symbol because the man will disappear, his personal troubles and those of his management have their power, one way or another the political struggle will remove him from the scene, but his ascent as supreme leader within democratic institutions, the construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television duce, will remain a perfectible, repeatable model.
A model that naturally has a history (and if one day you have the desire and the time we’ll squabble about this, you, Sandra, and I, to understand how big a part the left itself had in this transformation of citizens into an enthusiastically credulous audience). Berlusconi, for me, is the most garish expression (for now) of the traditional illusionism of politicians, of their capacity to pretend, even within the democratic institutions of which they should be the willing servants, that they are benevolent divinities on some Olympus from which they govern the fates of wretched mortals. That illusionism (which has fed both democracies and totalitarianisms: I think among other things of the invention of the body of the leader, of the macho, of the best, the body like a saint’s reliquary, of a heavenly nature) unfortunately for us has been definitively welded, thanks to a bold proprietary relationship, to the fictions of what is today the most powerful means of mass communication: television, that factory of characters and protagonists, as the media call them, justly adopting the terminology of products of the imagination. And the characters, the protagonists of social-television mythology, are experienced by the audience just as characters are in novels, by suspending disbelief, accepting, that is, an agreement on the basis of which you are willing to take as true everything you are told.
Berlusconi the statesman is possible only thanks to his tendentious monopoly of the medium that best realizes and imposes that suspension of disbelief. The great protagonist (what an abuse of greatness the media have accustomed us to) in effect has completed the transformation of citizens into an audience and is for now the most unprincipled exponent of the reduction of democracy to imaginary participation in an imaginary game. His money, his television channels, his market surveys have practically demonstrated that the interests of an individual can be installed overnight, thanks to a business group (not a party), on top of the political dissatisfaction of half of Italy, higher classes and lower classes, passed off as a heroic story of national salvation and, above all, without extinguishing democratic assurances.
It’s not a nice thing, especially for true liberals. A novel about today that is engaging and full of characters and events should be a novel about and against the suspension of disbelief—here’s a nice paradox I’d like to work on. It would describe the political dangers of today but also ask if it’s still possible that from a credulous audience critical citizens can emerge, so as to knock the great characters and great protagonists off the media Olympus, reducing them to the measure of people among people.
But for now read my little story; after so much talk, it’s all that I really have to offer you, for your initiative. I apologize meanwhile for the pointless outburst: if I don’t have an outburst with you with whom would I?
Fondly,
Elena
Beautiful Form
I don’t know what to write, I don’t know if I can write. Reluctant, I have in mind only Matteo Carraccio, a dark figure of twenty years ago. For years I sent Carraccio letters, written by me and signed by my grandmother: her name, her surname, her address. She lived in Camaldoli.
Carraccio was a man in his fifties, jovial, always slightly excessive in his voice, his gestures, his clothes—everything he wore was expensive. My grandmother told me his misdeeds on the telephone, I put pen to paper, but in vain.
They were small wrongs, quarrels about the apartment building up in Cappella Cangiani, amid the asphalt and concrete of the hill in Naples, four hundred meters above sea level. Carraccio didn’t want her to use a certain passageway in the building. Carraccio extracted money for repairs that were never done. Carraccio maintained that he alone could park in the courtyard or have parties on the building’s terrace. Carraccio claimed contributions for expenses necessary only for maintaining his own property. And although at the time I was overwhelmed by brutal university exams, I was forced to attend the building meetings to raise my voice in place of my grandmother, or write beautifully formulated, vainly threatening letters of protest.
A waste of time: powers great or small do not fear fine words, or even harsh ones. In fact they often make books of them through their publishing firms, and with concise arguments, with similes and metaphors, they gain advantage. Property appropriates for itself commas, periods, signs, bitterness, pale memories.
Carraccio was the owner of a great number of the apartments in the building; he himself occupied a very large one with all his numerous family. An engineer who was the son of an engineer, he had houses scattered over the Vomero hill. When the weather was good he sat on the terrace amid little trees and flowers of every type chatting with his wife and children; when it rained he was nervous, he was afraid, I think, that a chasm somewhere would swallow up his bricks. He had sold my grandmother her two-bedroom apartment. He hadn’t wanted checks, he had insisted on cash. We grandchildren shouldn’t have agreed, but my grandmother was so fond of the apartment, she was in love with it, and besides everyone said that paying in cash was normal; the notary himself was neither opposed nor surprised, he said merely: I, however, mustn’t know anything about what you’re doing. I had crossed Naples, I remember, with my heart racing, fearful that I would be robbed. I was young, however, and doing things that involved some risk also excited me. Less exciting was dealing with a man who respected no rule, while pretending to respect them all.
I’ve had a cup of tea. Now I’m writing again, but I can’t wait to get to an ending and stop making a memory into a metaphor. Real names would be useful, nouns without adjectives, to describe how the rules of civic cohabitation come undone.
Carraccio, empowered because of the enormous number of square meters he possessed, had been named president, secretary, and administrator of the condominium. He always had a majority for every question and if someone challenged him he turned bitter and said he was the only one who had the good of the building at heart.
The worst fight with my poor grandmother exploded because of some small plants that, because she didn�
��t have balconies, she kept on iron supports that she had had attached to the external wall, under the windowsills. My grandmother was very fond of those plants, some of which she had nurtured for years, some even for decades. But Carraccio found the iron supports illegal; he ordered her to get rid of them and have the damage done to the building wall repaired.
In response to my letters of protest he held a meeting of the condominium at which he proposed a new article in the rules which strictly forbade iron supports for plants under the windowsills, and had it voted on and approved. He succeeded not because he had the right but because he had the force.
Sometimes a memory is a tremor of resentment. I worked all afternoon to make a story out of something I detest, but I’m not pleased. It depresses me that the truth of an abuse of power seems an effect of rhetoric.
When the plants began to die, my grandmother, too, declined.
I drink another cup of tea, leaving on the monitor a long white space, then I began again from the beginning, still reluctantly. I wrote “Silvio Berlu,” tapping the keys with one finger. “Sconi” I added later and felt annoyed.
NOTE
The letter is from April, 2002, and refers to an initiative of Edizioni E/O, which had asked its Italian authors to write a short story on conflict of interest. “Beautiful Form,” reprinted here with some small corrections, appeared first in Sette, a supplement to Corriere della Sera, May 3, 2002, and then in Micromega, issue 3, 2002.
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