Some time ago, when my experience as a substitute mother expanded entirely, becoming responsibility and transforming my solidarity to emotional commitment, I felt the need to express myself. Mothering without being a mother, feeling divided between willingness and fear, alone and with no category to which I belonged, I looked around and fished out of my memory recollections of childhood and my relationship with my mother. I sought images that would give a narrative structure—which only now, after The Lost Daughter, seems clear to me—to the scenographic logic that day by day was being composed on paper. It all started with photos, with black-and-white photos that were taken at the seaside. I arranged the scenes on the sand. Little girls sitting in fifties poses, Barbies buried amid pails and shovels, mother Barbies, big and bright-colored, like plastic totems, little girls walking along or playing pianos made of sand. Closeups, action plans.
For an entire year I did nothing else: many drawings, employing all techniques, illustrations that were technically passable but artistically embarrassing, because they recounted my anxiety. Producing images as therapy in an attempt to grow. Lost daughters without mothers and mother dolls hidden in the sand. The other day I reopened the folder and I understood that those works were my way of dealing with the question of maternity, and that those dolls of mine (buried in the sand, mothers and friends, sisters) are like the characters in your book. The doll, Leda, Elena, Nina, Marta, Bianca . . .
With infinite admiration,
Miriam
Dear Miriam, I don’t think that on the artistic level there is ever anything to be embarrassed about. It is you, a private individual, who, following that phase of artistic expression, find that you have returned to yourself, to normality, and, standing before your work, feel that there’s something indecent about it. I understand this and I feel close to you. I’m curious about your manipulation of dolls and sand. If you want, you can send me a few photos. I know little about the symbolism of dolls, but I’m convinced that they are not merely a miniaturization of the daughter. Dolls can be stand-ins for women, in all the roles that patriarchy has assigned us. Do you remember the doll-sister of the future Nun of Monza? I was interested in recounting how an educated woman of today, a “new” woman, reacts to the age-old symbolic stratification.
Dear Signora Ferrante,
I am writing to you after having read the interview that you gave to la Repubblica. Of your books, I have read only The Days of Abandonment, and later I saw the film. As often happens, the passage from one art form to another left me unsatisfied. Despite the success of the film, I felt that your writing had abandoned me.
Like everyone else, I don’t know your real name or even your gender, which, I admit, makes me happy. It’s not simply that in this way, as you explain, you have assured yourself the freedom to manage your personal life, thus allowing yourself even greater ability to dig into your stories. Your choice is also a guarantee for us readers, to whom you speak as an “absolute author,” in much the same way that Battisti and Mina did, with obvious differences, did before you. Free from the onus of your image, you remain “only” what you write. We must concentrate “only” on that. And in a world in which image and notoriety crush content and identity, that is a lot. As I read The Days of Abandonment (a book I found myself discussing a couple of months back with a colleague, who had just emerged from a marriage that was destroyed owing to adultery—his, with a younger woman, obviously), even your writing felt “absolute.” At times difficult and harsh, with your tense and analytical approach, but always and only “absolute.”
If you are a woman, emotion in you is not transformed into sentimental whimpering. If you are a man, you have been able to understand and describe without distracting sexist pieties. For me, the mother of a three-year-old daughter, a wife who is at times crushed by a stressful routine, a misunderstood daughter-Cassandra, a journalist with no career, a woman over forty but perennially in search of balance and identity, your reflections on the period in which the main character weaned her children, on the smell of formula and milk that sticks to the flesh, becoming an oppressive emanation of it, were especially important. I’m grateful to you for what you’ve written, for many reasons that are too long and boring to explain. And in reality I don’t think there is any need, whether you are a woman or a man, a daughter, son, father, or mother.
Mafalda C.
Dear Mafalda, thank you so much for your letter. I like your way of reasoning with “if” and with double genders. I believe that we need to consider all authors in the same way. I don’t think, however, that it is possible to be an “absolute” author. There is nothing absolute in this world, not even in the deepest depths of our biology. Naturally, gender is decisive, I know that my books can only be female. But I also know that female (or male) absoluteness is inconceivable. We are tornadoes that pick up fragments with the most varied historical and biological origins. This makes of us—thankfully—fickle agglomerations that maintain a fragile equilibrium, that are inconsistent and complex, that can’t be reduced to any fixed framework that does not inevitably leave out a great deal. Which is why the more effective stories resemble ramparts from which one can gaze out at everything that has been excluded.
NOTE
The letters published here were sent to Elena Ferrante by listeners of Fahrenheit, a radio program devoted to books and broadcast by Radio 3, Italy. The occasion was the Rome book fair for small and mid-sized publishers, Più libri, più liberi (More Books, More Freedom), in December, 2006. Elena Ferrante’s answers were read by the journalist and writer Concita De Gregorio, during the broadcast of December 7, hosted by Marino Sinibaldi.
The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that Ferrante refers to is entitled L’essere abbandonato (The Abandoned Being), a collection of three essays published in Italy by Quodlibet.
9.
THE EROTIC VAPOR OF THE MOTHER’S BODY
Answers to questions from Marina Terragni
and Luisa Muraro
Terragni and Muraro: Nina’s child is named Elena, like you: is it a coincidence? You describe her as “off,” dirty, homely. In your novels this pairing recurs, a beautiful, sensual mother, who emanates a magic vapor, and a dull, cold daughter, “with veins of metal,” from whom the mother tries to flee. As if in the reproduction the power of the mother had weakened, become inferior.
Ferrante: In my experience the dominance of the mother is absolute, with no terms of comparison. Either one learns to accept her or one sickens. I have to admit that I never stopped feeling like a dull daughter, even when I became a mother. Rather, the tangle of the double function—the daughter with no weight who assumes the dominance of the mother—became even more snarled. There was a phase in which I planned to tell the story of the future very beautiful Helen of Troy as an unattractive child, full of animal fears and crushed by the splendor of her mother, Leda, loved by Zeus in the form of a swan. But the myth is very complex, with variants each more complicated than the next, and I did nothing. In The Lost Daughter the names remained: Elena, Leda come from that.
Terragni and Muraro: You say that in your writing you try “to seize what lies silent in my depths, that living thing which, if captured, spreads through all the pages and gives them life”: for you, is it the relationship with the mother that asks insistently to be narrated?
Ferrante: I think so. I’ve written a lot of stories, over the years, but in the end none of them seemed to have any necessity. It was only with Troubling Love that I had, for the first time, the impression that I had touched on something compelling.
Terragni and Muraro: You quote Morante: “No one, starting with the mother’s dressmaker, thinks that a mother has a woman’s body.” What does one discover, in freeing the body of the mother from shapelessness?
Ferrante: A desire for redemption. And everything that we are unable to see and are unable to understand. But my books don’t focus on that. I’ve tried to describe the
painful, more or less unhappy journey of the fabric—let’s say—with which even we ourselves, the daughter-dressmakers, make the mother’s body shapeless.
Terragni and Muraro: This unhappiness between mother and daughter, which lies at the heart of the relationship between women, through the thought of the difference becomes a point of leverage, a potentiality. Does it also constitute an opportunity for you? In Neapolitan civilization, for the women of that city, it seems instead to remain only unhappiness, a mortal illness that men take advantage of.
Ferrante: I don’t know what the Neapolitan mother is like. I know what some mothers I’ve known are like, who were born and grew up in that city. They are cheerful and foul-mouthed women, silent victims, desperately in love with males and male children, ready to defend and serve them even though the men crush and torture them; prepared to claim that men have to be men; and incapable of admitting, even to themselves, that, with that, they drive them to become even more brutish. To be female children of these mothers wasn’t and isn’t easy. Their vital, obscene, suffering subjugation, full of plans for insurrection that end in nothing, makes both empathy and disaffected rejection difficult. We have to escape from Naples to escape from them as well. Only later is it possible to see the torture of women, to feel the weight of the male city on their existence, feel remorse at having abandoned them, and learn to love them, to make them, as you say, a point of leverage in order to redeem their hidden sexuality, and start again from there.
Terragni and Muraro: Leda’s mother continually threatens to leave. Leda actually leaves, realizing her mother’s dream. But then she returns home, says that she was fortunate to have taken only three years to understand, and that the risk was that she would never understand. Do women run that risk today?
Ferrante: Returning home, to her daughters, for Leda means putting at the center of her search not the pure and simple fact of having given birth to them but the totality of maternity. First, by fleeing, she has sought an emancipation and a confrontation on equal terms with the male world. Afterward, on her return, her public life, work, thoughts, loves center on what I would define as the dominance of the maternal function. The risk that Leda runs seems to me all in that question: can I, a woman of today, succeed in being loved by my daughters, in loving them, without having of necessity to sacrifice myself and therefore hate myself?
Terragni and Muraro: You say that there is more erotic power in the relationship of Elena with the doll and with her mother than in what she would ever feel in life: do you mean that women are wrong in wishing to escape from that relationship, in thinking that they are losing who knows what, in not enjoying that eroticism?
Ferrante: I mean that for our whole life, in the most varied circumstances, the erotic vapor that the maternal body gives off for us alone will be at the same time a cause for regret and a goal. Leda has the impression that she sees in the relationship between the child Elena and her doll a kind of happy miniature of the mother-daughter relationship. But a miniature is still always a simplification. And simplifications are blinding.
Terragni and Muraro: The doll that Leda steals seems the guardian of an apparently perfect maternity. But in her stomach there is a putrid liquid, a worm: is it the maternal ambivalence that we have to be able to accept?
Ferrante: I don’t know. In an early version the story placed a strong emphasis on the crude concreteness of pregnancy, of birth. There were very harsh passages on the body that rebels, on the nausea, on the morning sickness, on the swelling of the belly, the breasts, on the initial pain of breast-feeding. I reduced that. But I remain convinced that it’s also essential to describe the dark side of the pregnant body, which is omitted in order to bring out the luminous side, the Mother of God. In the story of Leda there is a pregnant woman, Rosaria. She’s a Camorrist, without physical refinement or refinement of thought. For Leda, a cultivated woman, her pregnancy is coarse, uninteresting. But readers of the book will discover, page by page, that a thread of fury unwinds precisely from Rosaria’s world. We tend to keep distant from us everything that hinders consistency, but a story shouldn’t be consistent, in fact it’s in inconsistency that we should find nourishment.
Terragni and Muraro: A word that recurs in The Lost Daughter is “revulsion.” There are the insects, the cicada, the lizards, the flies, the worm, which accentuate the basic nausea. What is it, this repellent?
Ferrante: For Leda everything that refers to our animal nature is repellent. The relationship we have with insects, with creeping creatures, with all non-human living material, is contradictory. Animals frighten us, repulse us, remind us—like pregnancy when suddenly it changes us, bringing us much closer to our animal nature—of the instability of the forms assumed by life. But later—much more than men—we admit them among our words, we take care of them as of children, cancelling out fear and disgust with love. Recently, I’ve been trying to write a short story at whose center is the female attraction-repulsion toward the animal world and hence toward the animal nature of our bodies. I would like to narrate in a meaningful way how a woman approaches, through the requirements of caring for someone, through love, the repulsiveness of the flesh, those areas where the mediation of the word becomes weak. We are disgusted, of course; it’s the disgust induced by taboos. But we also have the capacity to push ourselves along, in contact with the living material, to where language becomes reticent and leaves a space, enclosed between obscenity and scientific terminology, where everything can happen.
Terragni and Muraro: Leda says that since the time of her youth “the world . . . had not improved; in fact it had become crueler for women.” What does she mean?
Ferrante: I think that the drive toward equality has put us in a competition with men but also with each other, multiplying the ferocity of the relations between woman and man and woman and woman. The sexual difference, repressed in the name of a disguised egalitarianism, is in danger of being pushed back into old roles that we ourselves have slightly touched up or eliminated out of opportunism. The patriarchy, in short—I say this in anger—seems to me more alive than ever. It holds the planet firmly in its hands and whenever it can it insists even more than before on making women cannon fodder. That doesn’t mean that the truths we’ve brought to light haven’t produced change. But I write stories, and whenever the words arrange things with beautiful consistency I become suspicious and I keep an eye on the things that ignore the truth of words and mind their own business. It seems to me that we are in the midst of a very hard battle and every day we are at risk of losing everything, even the syntax of truth.
Terragni and Muraro: “I’m dead but I’m fine,” the novel concludes. Does it mean: I’m dead but I’m reborn, I’ve made my journey of passion, I’ve been through all the stations, all the reckoning I had to do?
Ferrante: I don’t think that all the stations and all the reckoning are ever done. As for that final remark, I use “die” in the sense of eliminating something from oneself forever. An action that can have at least two results: mutilation, irreparable disfigurement; or removal of a living but sick part, with right afterward a sense of well-being. All three of the women in my books know, in a different way, both things.
Terragni and Muraro: Your protagonists move on dangerous ridges, they live on borderlines, they shatter, they are in danger of dissolution—we’re thinking especially of Olga—and then find a more coherent unity, more compatible with life, in which they learn to live with their ghosts: it seems like the journey of a successful analysis.
Ferrante: I’ve never been in analysis. But I know what it means to break apart. I observed it in my mother, in myself, in many women. The process of fragmentation in a woman’s body interests me very much from the narrative point of view. It means telling the story of a present-day female I that suddenly perceives itself disintegrating, it loses the sense of time, it’s no longer in order, it feels like a vortex of debris, a whirlwind of thoughts-words. It stops abruptly and
starts again from a new equilibrium, which—note—isn’t necessarily more advanced than the preceding or even more stable. It serves only to say: now I’m here and I feel like this.
Terragni and Muraro: Do you think that this emotional journey, this coming apart into a jumble of fragments and then putting oneself back together, is an inevitable passage in the lives of women, with or without analysis?
Ferrante: In the women I feel close to it was. In some cases it seemed to me that feeling literally in pieces could be traced back to that sort of original fragmentation that is bringing into the world-coming into the world. I mean feeling oneself a mother at the price of getting rid of a living fragment of one’s own body; I mean feeling oneself a daughter as a fragment of a whole and incomparable body. Leda is the explicit product of that suggestion.
Terragni and Muraro: In your writing it’s as if the phantoms and the flesh, as if what happens, what could happen, and memory stood on the same plane, had the same density as reality. Is that space which lacks distinction a female space? Is that female writing?
Ferrante: I don’t know if it’s female writing. Certainly in my experience the word is always flesh. I write with greatest pleasure when I feel that the story has no need of preamble or even of a perspective. There it is, it’s there, I see it and feel it, it’s a world made up entirely of living material, of breath, of heat and cold. I who am writing sit with fingers on the keys of the computer and, at the same time, in the middle of that world, and I let myself be carried along by its vortex, which drags in everything, without before or after. Over the years, I have to admit, I’ve come closer and closer to the idea that real writing is what emerges by itself, from an ecstatic condition. But often I discover that ecstasy is imagined as a disembodiment. The ecstasy of writing is feeling not the breath of the word that is liberated from the flesh but the flesh that becomes one with the breath of the words.
La frantumaglia Page 20
