La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  Erbani: You recently described, in a kind of moral fable, the arrogance and insolence of a character and compared it to the figure of Silvio Berlusconi. Now you propose to write something on the transformation of Italians in public life. Does this signify a change of direction in your fiction?

  Ferrante: I don’t know, I hope not. Let’s say that I’m interested in understanding the fact that everything in life is turning into a show, draining the very concept of citizenship. I’m also struck by how the person is more and more unhappily dedicated to becoming a personage. And it frightens me that a classical effect of fiction—the suspension of disbelief—is becoming an instrument of political domination in the very heart of democracies. It seems to me that for now Berlusconi embodies, more completely than Reagan or Schwarzenegger, the change taking place in the democratic election of representatives. But if I had to work in fiction on a subject like that (and it’s only a remote hypothesis, inspired by indignation), I would turn to the expressive means that I’ve tried to develop over the years.

  NOTE

  The interview with Francesco Erbani appeared in la Repubblica, October 26, 2003, under the title “La scrittrice senza volto. Il caso di Elena Ferrante” (“The Writer Without a Face: The Case of Elena Ferrante”).

  3.

  THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT AT A CROSSROADS

  Letter to Roberto Faenza

  Dear Faenza,

  Thank you for sending me your screenplay to read. I recognized events and characters of my book, reused more or less faithfully, and that gave me pleasure. I must confess, however, that I had a hard time imagining the film: I don’t know how to read this type of writing, which tears off the literary covering and reduces events and characters to naked movements of bodies. As in the case of Troubling Love, I first had to find some reassurance. I said to myself that the stage directions will disappear, the dialogue will have the warmth of words thought and said, and the story will exist in the actions of living bodies, in real voices, in the strong sense of involvement produced by the setting. But I didn’t really feel satisfied until I got over the impact of the reduction to scenes.

  That doesn’t mean that I don’t have some questions, and I’ll list them here.

  1. The first scene seems to me very effective. Among other merits, it keeps Olga from returning in her thoughts to the first marital crisis, to her jealousy of Gina, to the discovery of the attraction between Mario and Carla. That creates a problem, however. We no longer know that Olga is a woman who is able to manage calmly, with equilibrium, with discipline, her marital relationship. And this weakens the impression that she is able to control the effects of abandonment, like a cultivated woman of today, and unlike the broken women of yesterday. Thus that first scene and the ones that immediately follow are fine, but they risk losing an essential passage. Maybe it should be said in some other way that Olga isn’t inexperienced, she doesn’t easily lose her head, she knows how to confront the risks of a sentimental breakup. Because if that isn’t communicated, the character is impoverished, the story is in danger of recounting yet again, and ineffectually, what Virgil already described in Dido. What The Days of Abandonment narrates, on the other hand, is how a woman who has an array of defenses is struck by one of the most unendurable experiences of disintegration, is overwhelmed by it, and yet she resists and, although disillusioned, saves herself and her children from death.

  2. It seems to me that the “absence of sense” is cited too many times and in ironic contexts that diminish the value of the expression. Perhaps it’s better not to wear out a statement that has a central role in the book and in the screenplay. Olga, abandoned, traverses precisely the absence of sense that for her husband is only a wretched self-justification. We have to feel its full weight when she emerges from her crisis and discovers that her love for Mario is finished.

  3. It’s true that the character of the poverella should have an important role from the start. But it seems to me that the hallucination of the tunnel arrives too soon, when Olga hasn’t even begun her true descent to the depths. It contributes to making her seem fragile from the start and reduces the possibility of narrating her crisis as something that intensifies. Olga’s initial solidity instead reinforces the dramatic effect of the collapse. So the memory of the dead woman should make slow progress in her, until it “emerges” and acts as a double.

  4. I said that the screenplay used a great deal of the book. But something essential has been left out: the moment when the woman gives the paper cutter to her daughter and tells her to prick her whenever she might appear absent. The request conveys two important things: that Olga intends to resist in every way possible the looming loss of herself; and that, to react, all she can count on is that small female creature who follows her around the house wavering between devotion and hostility. I don’t really understand why that passage was taken out. In my book the mother-daughter relationship is very important.

  5. The dog: maybe his intense bond with Mario, with Mario’s things, should be emphasized. Neglecting it or making it inactive risks simplifying Olga’s relationship with Otto and weakening the drama of the animal’s death.

  6. Carrano: His figure should perhaps be more disquieting at first (not aggressive: disquieting, as disquieting as it is seductive) and less sweet at the end. His role as savior and the symbolism of the metronome aren’t convincing to me. I would prefer the character to preserve its ambiguity. I admit that there are reasons having to do with representation, but still I would trust more decisively in a figure at first irritating, then reassuring, then engaging and yet not decisive. Not coincidentally does the story end on that “I pretended to believe him,” the point of arrival of Olga’s journey to hell.

  As you see, a great many of my fears are centered on the crescendo of Olga’s days in hell. That doesn’t mean that the text as it is doesn’t already contain that journey. You have only to decide whether to make it more intensely marked, so as to reach a conclusion that sounds like a clear, disillusioned liberation.

  Thank you for your good work.

  NOTE

  The screenplay referred to is taken from The Days of Abandonment, and the letter, unpublished, is dated June 3, 2003.

  4.

  THE UNEXPECTED OLGA OF MARGHERITA BUY

  Answers to questions from Angiola Codacci-Pisanelli

  Codacci-Pisanelli: Another book of yours has become a film. What impression do you have on “seeing” your stories?

  Ferrante: It’s hard to say. When you write stories you daydream about them. When they become a film, you’ve already, in fact, “seen” them. The result is that for you the film inspired by your book is never a first viewing. Like it or not, you have to reckon a second time with the emotional complexity and imaginative density of what you did the first time, which is what really belongs to you. So I try to be sensible, and I go to the movies not to see my book but to see what someone else has seen in it.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: Have you seen Faenza’s film? What do you think of it?

  Ferrante: I saw a videocassette, without music, when it was still being worked on, and I would be unjust to Faenza if I expressed a judgment on a work not yet completed. I prefer to form an opinion based on seeing it in the theater. Still, even though I saw it in those conditions, certain parts made a very favorable impression. Olga’s violent or humiliating moments are powerful, they draw you in, and the actors are so good that they leave you speechless. I must confess that for Olga I would never have thought of Margherita Buy and just for that reason, perhaps, her brilliance struck me particularly. Words have a concreteness different from images, the worlds and figures they evoke seem to us precise and instead are malleable. Margherita Buy became an unexpected Olga, but one that I like.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: Did you work on the screenplay of Faenza’s film? Did you ask to see it?

  Ferrante: He sent me the screenplay, I read it, I wrote down a few notes that I sent the director
. No more than that.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: In an interview Faenza said that he had “humanized” the character of the husband. But in the novel what drags Olga into tragedy is precisely his utter coldness.

  Ferrante: Zingaretti is good. His portrayal of the character of a man who no longer feels love for the woman he lives with is effective. He is in love with someone else and doesn’t have the strength or the courage or the cruelty to tell his wife that love is gone. Mario, in the book, is that, and it seems to me that he is on the screen as well. The problem is that Olga’s story is a first-person story and films always have trouble with the first person. The story of Olga is the story of an intensifying disintegration that reaches the threshold of infanticide and madness, then abruptly stops. In the vortex of her monologue the “I” pulverizes everything and everyone, especially the husband. Probably what Faenza calls the humanization of Mario indicates only the difficulty of keeping together, on the screen, the bourgeois realism of a common marital crisis and a first-person woman’s journey that is tense, anguished, borderline.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: What relation did you have with the previous film, made from Troubling Love?

  Ferrante: Martone sent me several drafts of the screenplay, we had a good correspondence. He invited me to see the film, but after much hesitation I decided not to. I saw it in the theater, some time after it came out, and it made a deep impression. It wasn’t, naturally, what I had “seen” when I was writing. But at times I felt that it had expanded the book by other means, approaching in an extraordinary way the reality that I had disguised or hidden in telling the story. Maybe, when one chooses a book to make a film out of, the problem isn’t to respect the structure faithfully or to violate it capriciously. The real problem, for a director, is to find solutions, the language with which to get the truth of his film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: A “hidden” author like you has of necessity to use others to get your stories to the screen. Have you ever thought of directing?

  Ferrante: For a lifetime I’ve been trying to learn to tell a story with written words. It would take another to learn to do it with images.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: In a recent article in la Repubblica you spoke about Madame Bovary. How much of Madame Bovary is there in Olga, the protagonist of The Days of Abandonment?

  Ferrante: Bovary and Karenina are, in some way, descendants of Dido and Medea, but they have lost the obscure force that pushed those heroines of the ancient world to use infanticide or suicide as rebellion or revenge or curse. Rather, they experience the time of abandonment as a punishment for their sins. Olga, on the other hand, is an educated woman of today, influenced by the battle against the patriarchy. She knows what can happen to her and tries not to be destroyed by abandonment. Hers is the story of how she resists, of how she touches bottom and returns, of how abandonment changes her without annihilating her.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: Are you working on a new novel?

  Ferrante: No. I’m only putting in order an old story about children, dolls, beach, and sea.

  Codacci-Pisanelli: A few months ago the fires of the search for your true identity were rekindled. An analysis of the text—the same weapon that led, in Holland, to “unmasking” Marrek van der Jagt, a pseudonym of Arnon Grunberg—led a philologist to name the novelist Domenico Starnone. What effect did that have on you? Will you ever come out into the open? (I myself remain faithful to one of the final dialogues in To Kill a Mockingbird: “I think I’m beginning to understand why Boo Radley’s stayed shut up [in the house all the time] . . . it’s because he wants to stay inside.”

  Ferrante: I come out into the open every time I publish something, even just the answers in this interview of yours. It seems to me sufficient. Otherwise I don’t know what there is to discover. Words that become public belong to everyone. That one attributes them to this person or that is their fate. On the other hand, doesn’t someone who reads one of my books make space in his own vocabulary for my words, doesn’t he appropriate them, if necessary doesn’t he reuse them? Books belong to those who have written them only when their cycle is complete and no one reads them anymore.

  NOTE

  The interview, with Angiola Codacci-Pisanelli, appeared in Espresso, September 1, 2005, under the title “Olga, la mia felice Madame Bovary” (“Olga, My Happy Madame Bovary”), on the occasion of the presentation, at the Venice Film Festival, of Roberto Faenza’s film The Days of Abandonment.

  5.

  THE BOOK OF NO ONE

  I saw Patrice Chéreau’s Gabrielle and I read Conrad’s The Return, the story that Gabrielle is taken from. I wondered what “taken from” means, but I found no comprehensive answers. Even to say that a film “is inspired” by a book wasn’t convincing to me, and when I was informed that there exists an unpronounceable word, “transduction,” which expresses with greater precision the passage from book to film, it didn’t seem to me that the word helped; it merely indicated an operation of transferral. I said to myself: better to return to “taken from,” “inspired.” If the film Gabrielle is taken from the story The Return, does it mean that the story is a larger container than the film? Or: if a film is inspired by a book does it mean that the written page speaks through the film, like Apollo through the breast of the Pythia?

  I don’t know. The viewer who sees Gabrielle and has read The Return recognizes from the first scenes the literary source. But from the first scenes he is also aware that there are many differences between the film and the story. For example, we are not in London but in Paris. The male character is no longer named Alvan but Jean. And it doesn’t take long to see that an Alvan, a wealthy Englishman in London at the end of the nineteenth century, is not identical to a Jean, a wealthy Frenchman in Paris in the early twentieth century. But above all it is not irrelevant that, in the transfer from the page to the film, a story in which there is a wife who returns after having left and a husband who never returns after trying desperately to stay ceases to be called The Return and is called instead Gabrielle.

  Who is Gabrielle? In the story there is no Gabrielle. The wife, who, after leaving her husband a letter in which she says that she is abandoning him for another man, has second thoughts and, in the space of a few hours, returns to the conjugal roof, has no name in Conrad’s pages, and it’s significant that she doesn’t; a reader of the story knows that that choice of anonymity is important. Why, then, is the nameless wife of Alvan, in becoming the wife of Jean, christened Gabrielle? Why does a story of male fear and trembling promise in the title the centrality of the female character? What pushes Chéreau to choose a name for the wife of Alvan-Jean, and even to title the film after her?

  Those questions, in my opinion, have little to do with film and much with literature. I don’t know how to say anything about the psychology of reading or the psychology of the spectator. But I’ve never believed that the thread of literary writing is an Ariadne’s thread to be obediently unrolled. Of course, the reader holds that thread and is guided by it. Of course, the combination of words and phrases is, for the reader, as constricting as that which opens a safe. But there is no correct way to activate the power of a written story, and instructions for use are not worth much. The “right reading” is an invention of academics and critics. Every reader gets from the book he is reading nothing else but his book. The shelves where we line up the volumes we’ve read are deceptive. We have available there only titles, covers, pages. But the books we’ve truly read are phantoms conjured up by reading with no rules. Once, that lack of regulation was a purely private fact, at most leaving some public traces in the pages of professional readers. Things aren’t like that anymore. The Internet is crowded with readers who write about their book. And screenwriters and directors more and more use literary texts as a runway for their imagination to take off from. This material testifies in a compact way to a single thing: that narra
tive writing remains today the most welcoming dwelling place for the turbulent or mute world of those in need of stories, both those who have only the capacity to read, and those who work as transductors from word to image. The as yet unsurpassed force of literature lies in its capacity to construct vibrating bodies from whose veins anyone can drink, as from those of the mythical Asclepius, gaining from them life or death, other works that have great power or are thin and pallid.

  The director and the screenwriter of Gabrielle were nourished by Conrad’s The Return. But, as is natural, their reading generated another story, different from the original, even though it respects all its points and even its literary quality. Is that story still Conrad’s story or is it mainly Chéreau’s story? Neither. I think it’s a story by no one, even though it has its origins in the generous hospitality of Conrad’s text. Chéreau entered and found in the silences of the wife’s character, in the few sentences she utters, sufficient stimulus to imagine that he was reading the story of a rebellious and overwrought woman, desperate and ruthless, disgusted by her husband and her possible lover, a woman without love, suffocated by her role as wife. He derived, that is, from Conrad’s story, even more than his film, a story that isn’t written, isn’t printed, isn’t readable anywhere.