All of us, like Chéreau, read books by no one. I, for example, long ago read a Return that was like a stutter. The characters spoke only in cut-off sentences: the nameless wife broke off in mid-sentence, as did the husband, Alvan, and so they misunderstood each other, they didn’t comprehend each other. Their attempt to stay together made use of the disconnected, reticent sentence, precisely because if the sentences had been spoken in their entirety the break would inevitably have taken place. And then there were the distorted sensations, each of which was a sign of dissolution. What really made that story, in my view, was the disconnected sentences and the warped senses. A groan emitted by the wife seems to Alvan to come from his own body. When he is about to place a glass on the table, he no longer perceives the dimensions of the piece of furniture, he has the impression that the glass goes past the wood, falls into emptiness. If he tries to open the door, he can’t, he persists, he no longer remembers having locked it. The story for me was that. When, after seeing the film, I reread it, I found not only that what had seemed to me the heart of the story occupied just a few lines but that in fact I attributed to Conrad pages I had never read, that he had never written, and that there was naturally no trace of in Chéreau’s film.
The Return that I draw on is therefore a very different story from the one that Chéreau draws on. In his, a wife of the late nineteenth century has an explicit, lashing, and bold language. While the husband remains a bourgeois man of a hundred years ago, Gabrielle has the exceptional nature of a woman of today. If Conrad sets most of the story in a room full of mirrors that multiplies the couple into a crowd of people like them, Chéreau keeps only his Alvan-Jean in the reflections, while he removes from Gabrielle every symbol of averageness. The Alvan of the writing feels so threatened by the shadowy enigma of women that he goes so far as to plan the firing of the silent maids in order to hire only males, a gender more reassuring to him. In Chéreau’s film, on the other hand, there is an especially bold, especially talkative maid whose presence is important to the story. In other words, the film is the visible trace of another text, neither written by Conrad nor findable in the pages we have before our eyes as readers nor present in those which we think we read in the past. It is from this other text, created by Chéreau’s world, by his sensibility, by the requirements of his job, by the needs of the film industry, that the film was truly “derived.”
Is the right text the wrong one? I think a value judgment is legitimate but not conclusive. The force of literature lies precisely in this permanent possibility of a dream reading, of a fantastic stimulus, of a starting point for other works. I imagine that there are an infinite number of other “places” for Conrad’s text, all inhabitable, all generators of stories, which on every rereading I don’t see, I will never see, owing to the simple fact that I immediately rush to occupy the places that are more congenial to me. That’s what reading is like for me.
Therefore I always listen with great curiosity to people who talk about books I love. I hear them discussing, precisely, books by no one. Between the book that is published and the book that readers buy there is always a third book, a book where beside the written sentences are those which we imagined writing, beside the sentences that readers read are the sentences they have imagined reading. This third book, elusive, changing, is nevertheless a real book. I didn’t actually write it, my readers haven’t actually read it, but it’s there. It’s the book that is created in the relationship between life, writing, and reading. Traces of such an object are found in the words of writers who reflect on their own works, or in the discussions of passionate readers. But it becomes evident above all when the reader is a privileged reader, one who isn’t limited to reading but who gives a form to his reading, for example with a review, an essay, a screenplay, a film. It is, in particular, films inspired by literature that, precisely because they produce in a different language another, perfectly autonomous narrative organism, testify to the existence of that third book, not sold at booksellers, not to be found in libraries, and yet alive and active. It is from that book that the film derives, together with everything else generated by a text.
Naturally not all those intermediate books give good results. Among the many ways of reading, I disapprove of the one that smooths, normalizes stories. Movie readings often run that risk. Film increasingly digs into literature absent-mindedly, in search only of a starting point, raw material. What in a text is anomalous or disquieting the film often considers a negative and eliminates or doesn’t even notice. It prefers to take from the book what is proved and what is assumed the audience will want to see and see again. It is therefore not the anarchic ransacking of a literary work that should worry the writer: a novel is written precisely so that its readers can appropriate it. Nor is there any need, on the part of directors with a strong authorial sense, to hide or deny by every means the literary origin of their own work: not to recognize their debts is a widespread vice and doesn’t in the least damage the work they are indebted to, at most it wounds the vanity of the writer. It is, rather, the cinematographic normalization of the literary text that is disturbing. To return to Gabrielle, although Isabelle Huppert gives the best of herself and Chéreau’s film engages us through the figure of the woman she depicts, we feel that the hospitality of Conrad’s words has been abused, that the woman on the screen is less disturbing than the anonymous wife of the page, that the shadowy house that the writer has built for us has been exchanged for a habitation that is easily habitable. This, and only this, should grieve those who love literature.
NOTE
Unpublished, dated October 10, 2005.
6.
WHAT AN UGLY CHILD SHE IS
France for me—long, long before Paris—was Yonville-l’Abbaye, eight leagues from Rouen. I remember crouching inside that place-name one afternoon, when I was barely fourteen, traveling through the pages of Madame Bovary. Slowly, over the years, thousands of other names of cities and towns followed, some near Yonville, others far away. But France remained essentially Yonville, as I discovered it one afternoon decades ago, and it seemed to me that at the same time I came upon the craft of making metaphors and upon myself.
I certainly saw myself in Berthe Bovary, Emma and Charles’s daughter, and felt a jolt. I knew that I had my eyes on a page, I could see the words clearly, yet it seemed to me that I had approached my mother just as Berthe tried to approach Emma, catching hold of her par le bout, les rubans de son tablier (“the ends of her apron strings”). I heard clearly the voice of Madame Bovary saying, with increasing annoyance, “Laisse-moi! Laisse-moi! Eh! Laisse-moi donc!” (“Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Won’t you leave me alone!”), and it was like the voice of my mother when she was lost in her tasks or her thoughts, and I didn’t want to leave her, I didn’t want her to leave me. That cry of irritation of a woman dragged away from her own bouleversements, like a leaf on a rainy day toward the black mouth of a manhole, made a deep impression on me. The blow arrived right afterward, with her elbow. Berthe—I—alla tomber au pied de la comode, contre la patère de cuivre; elle s’y coupa la joue, le sang sortit (“fell at the foot of the chest of drawers, against the brass fittings; she cut her cheek, it began to bleed”).
I read Madame Bovary in the city of my birth, Naples. I read it laboriously, in the original, on the orders of a cold, brilliant teacher. My native language, Neapolitan, has layers of Greek, Latin, Arabic, German, Spanish, English, and French—a lot of French. Laisse-moi (“leave me alone”) in Neapolitan is làssame and sang (“blood”) is ’o sanghe. It’s not so surprising if the language of Madame Bovary seemed to me, at times, my own language, the language in which my mother appeared to be Emma and said laisse-moi. She also said le sparadrap (but she pronounced it ’o sparatràp), the adhesive plaster that had to be put on the cut I’d gotten—while I read and was Berthe—when I fell contre la patère de cuivre.
I understood then, for the first time, that geography, language, society, politics, th
e whole history of a people were for me in the books that I loved and which I could enter as if I were writing them. France was near, Yonville not that far from Naples, the wound dripped blood, the sparatràp, stuck to my cheek, pulled the stretched skin to one side. Madame Bovary struck with swift punches, leaving bruises that haven’t faded. All my life since then, I’ve wondered whether my mother, at least once, with Emma’s words precisely—the same terrible words—thought, looking at me, as Emma does with Berthe: C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide! (“It’s strange how ugly this child is!”) Ugly: to appear ugly to one’s own mother. I have rarely read-heard a better conceived, better written, more unbearable sentence. The sentence arrived from France and hit me right in the chest, it’s still hitting me, harder than the shove with which Emma sent—sends—little Berthe against the chest of drawers, against the brass fittings.
The words entered and emerged from me: when I read a book I never think of who has written it, it’s as if I were doing it myself. So as a child I didn’t know the names of authors; every book was written by itself, it began and ended, it excited me or not, made me cry or made me laugh. The Frenchman named Gustave Flaubert came later, and by then I knew quite a lot about France: I had been there not only thanks to books and not happily, as in books; I could measure the true distance between Naples and Rouen, between the Italian novel and the French. Now I read Flaubert’s letters, his other books. Every sentence was well shaped, some more than others, but not one—not one ever had for me the devastating force of that mother’s thought: C’est une chose étrange comme cette enfant est laide! In certain phases of my life I’ve imagined that only a man could conceive it, and only a man without children, a peevish Frenchman, a bear shut up in his house honing his complaints, a misogynist who thought of himself as both father and mother just because he had a niece. In other periods I’ve believed, angrily, bitterly, that men who are masters of writing are able to have their female characters say what women truly think and say and live but do not dare write. Today, instead, I’ve returned to the beliefs of early adolescence. I think that authors are devoted, diligent scribes, who draw in black and white following a more or less rigorous order of their own, but that the true writing, what counts, is the work of readers. Although the page of Flaubert is in French, Emma’s laisse-moi, read in Naples, has Neapolitan cadences, the brass fittings make ’o sanghe gush from Berthe’s cheek, and Charles Bovary stretches the child’s skin by sticking ’o sparatràp on it. It’s my mother who thought, but in her language, comm’è brutta chesta bambina (“How ugly this child is”). And I believe that she thought it for the same reason Emma thinks it of Berthe. So I’ve tried, over the years, to take that sentence out of French and place it somewhere on a page of my own, write it myself to feel its weight, transport it into the language of my mother, attribute it to her, hear it in her mouth and see if it’s a woman’s phrase, if a female really could say it, if I’ve ever thought it of my daughters, if, in other words, it should be rejected and erased or accepted and elaborated, removed from the page of masculine French and transported into the language of female-daughter-mother. That is the work that truly leads to France, juxtaposing sexes, languages, peoples, eras, geography.
NOTE
The central passages of this essay were conceived as a response to the Swedish publisher Bromberg, who, after acquiring the rights to The Days of Abandonment and reading the translation, decided not to publish it, considering the behavior of Olga, the novel’s protagonist, toward her children morally reprehensible. The essay was later published, with some modifications, by Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, of Amsterdam, for the 2004 Paris Book Fair, in the anthology Frankrijk, dat ben ik (Wereldbibliotheek; 2004), under the title “Het gewicht van de taal” (“The Weight of Language”). It also appeared in la Repubblica of June 28, 2005.
7.
STAGES IN A UNIQUE QUEST
Answers to questions from Francesco Erbani
Erbani: How are you?
Ferrante: An interview that begins with “How are you” is a little frightening. What do you want me to say? If I start digging into the “how,” I’ll never stop.
So I will say: fine, I think, and I hope that you are, too.
Erbani: After so many years, are you still convinced by your decision to remain in the shadows?
Ferrante: “Remain in the shadows” is not an expression I like. It hints of plots, assassins. Let’s say that, fifteen years ago, I chose to publish books without having to feel obliged to make a career of being a writer. So far, I haven’t regretted it. I write and I publish only when the text seems of some value to me and to my publishers. Then the book makes its way, and I go on to occupy myself with something else. That’s it, and I don’t see why I should change my behavior.
Erbani: How do you feel about the questions that are raised about your identity—are you amused, irritated, or something else?
Ferrante: They are legitimate, but reductive. For those who love reading, the author is purely a name. We know nothing about Shakespeare. We continue to love the Homeric poems even though we know nothing about Homer. And Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Joyce matter only if a talented person changes them into the subject of an opera, a biography, a brilliant essay, a film, a musical. Otherwise they are names, that is to say labels. Why would anyone be interested in my little personal story if we can do without Homer’s or Shakespeare’s? Someone who truly loves literature is like a person of faith. The believer knows very well that there is nothing at all at the bureau of vital statistics about the Jesus that truly counts for him.
Erbani: Among the identities that have been proposed for you—the novelist Domenico Starnone, the critic Goffredo Fofi, the writer Fabrizia Ramondino—which one intrigues you most?
Ferrante: None: it seems to me a banal media game. An insignificant name, mine, is associated with names of greater substance. The opposite never happens. It would not occur to any newspaper to fill a page with the hypothesis that my books were written by an old retired archivist or by a young, newly hired bank clerk. What can I tell you? I’m sorry that people I respect should be annoyed by this.
Erbani: When people speak of your novels, the problem of your identity often overshadows the literary questions. Does this disturb you? How do you think it can be avoided?
Ferrante: Yes, it disturbs me. But it also seems to me the proof that the media care little or nothing about literature in itself. Let’s take these questions of yours: I’ve published a book, but, despite knowing that I would answer in very general terms, you have focused the whole interview on the theme of my identity. Up to now, if you will allow me to say so, there’s been nothing that touched on The Lost Daughter, its subject, or its writing. You ask me how to keep people from talking only about who I am, and neglecting the books. I don’t know. Certainly you—forgive me—aren’t doing anything to reverse the situation and confront what you call the literary questions.
Erbani: Is one of the other reasons for your insistence on privacy still valid, that is to say the presence in your novels of autobiographical roles variously combined and disguised but still recognizable?
Ferrante: Yes. Like anyone who writes, I work with events, feelings, emotions that belong to me very intimately. But over time the problem has changed. Today it’s important to me above all to preserve the freedom to dig deeply, without self-censorship, into my stories . . .
Erbani: What do you think of the attention that has been focused on Naples recently? In your view is it a media exaggeration or has the pressure of crime in fact become more acute?
Ferrante: It’s a media exaggeration. Naples should always be in the spotlight. It has a long history of decline; it’s a metropolis that has anticipated and anticipates the troubles of Italy, perhaps of Europe. So we should never lose sight of it. But the media makes its living on the exceptional: murders, garbage piling up, the wonderful book Gomorrah, by Roberto Saviano. The daily standard of unli
vability isn’t news. So when the exceptional passes, everything is silent and everything continues to rot.
Erbani: Naples, you said once, makes you extremely uneasy: a violent city, of sudden quarrels, beatings, a vulgar city, where people are rowdy, self-aggrandizing, quick with small cruelties. Does it still give you that feeling?
Ferrante: Yes, nothing has changed, except the fact that what seemed to me particular to my city, to my region, because of its history, now seems to be spreading into the rest of Italy.
Erbani: You escaped from this Naples as soon as you could, and yet you have carried it with you as “a surrogate for always keeping in mind that the power of life is damaged, humiliated by unjust modes of existence.” Have you ever gone back? Would you ever live there again?
Ferrante: I return from time to time. As for living there, I don’t know. I would if I were convinced that the change is not a rhetorical trick but a true political and cultural revolution.
NOTE
From an interview with Francesco Erbani that appeared in la Repubblica, December 4, 2006 entitled “Io, scrittrice senza volto” (“I, a Writer Without a Face”). Erbani noted in the introduction: “Elena Ferrante didn’t like some of the questions, but she didn’t avoid them. Owing to the way the interview was conducted, her answers are given without the interviewer having had the opportunity to reply.”
8.
THE TEMPERATURE THAT CAN IGNITE THE READER
A Conversation with the Listeners of Fahrenheit
Why are your characters women who are suffering?
Eva
La frantumaglia Page 18
