La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  Terragni and Muraro: Among the many identities the media attribute to you a good majority are of the male sex: do you recognize something non-female in your writing?

  Ferrante: I’m afraid I learned to write by reading mainly works by men and constantly redoing them. It took time for me to learn to love women writers. The female of men, I must admit, attracted me more than the female of women. Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, even Chekhov’s ladies with the little dog—those, yes, they seemed like real women. It’s likely, of course, that my reading of literature as a young woman endures in aspects of my current writing, but I don’t think that’s the problem. At some point, it will be necessary to describe what it means to write like a woman, what it means to seriously reckon not only with the male but with that female of males which belongs to us and inhabits us. It’s not our relationship with the masculine that is primary today but the much more complex relationship with the masculine feminine or the feminine masculine.

  Terragni and Muraro: You have said that you don’t value a life in which literature counts more than every other thing, and that your desire to write was also fed by certain low sources, like photo-romances. What did you find, in those depths?

  Ferrante: The taste for engaging readers. The photo-romance was one of my early pleasures as a fledgling reader. I’m afraid that the obsession with achieving a very tense narrative, even when I’m telling a short story, comes to me from there. I feel no pleasure in writing if I don’t feel that the page is exciting. Once I had very grand literary ambitions and I was ashamed of that impulse toward the techniques of popular novels. Today I’m pleased if someone says to me that I’ve written an absorbing story—for example, like those of Delly.8

  Terragni and Muraro: Women who read you often say that your writing is irresistible but “disturbing”: what do you think it is that is disturbing?

  Ferrante: I’ve received letters that speak of this double effect. I think it depends on the fact that, when I write, it’s as if I were butchering eels. I pay little attention to the unpleasantness of the operation and use the plot, the characters, as a tight net to pull up from the depths of my experience everything that is alive and writhing, including what I myself have driven away as far as possible because it seemed unbearable. In the first drafts, I must admit, there is always much more than what I later decide to publish. It’s my own fastidiousness that censors me. I feel, nevertheless, that this is not always the right thing to do, and often I reintegrate what I’ve eliminated. Or I wait for an occasion to use elsewhere the passages that were taken out.

  NOTE

  The interview with Marina Terragni and Luisa Muraro appeared in Io Donna, January 27, 2007, under the title “Elena Ferrante Speaks: The Writer Without a Face. ‘Thus I describe the obscure love of the mother.’”

  III

  LETTERS: 2011-2016

  A COMPANION BOOK

  Dear Sandra,

  Maybe we ought to tell readers why we’ve decided to collect some of these interviews. It’s something I’ve felt we should do since September 23, 2015, when your cryptic email arrived, with a file of interviews attached and, as the only text, the subject line, which said: “Interviews. Will you let me know if you can open them and understand anything?” When did it begin to seem to you and Elena that it made sense to collect them?

  In the interviews Elena speaks of the importance that the point of view of others, the written dialogue with journalists from so many countries, has had in nurturing her own reflections on writing, and that much is clear to me. But when did you two look each other in the eye and think: it would be nice to collect them, so that readers, too, can find them all in one place? You didn’t at first have the idea of a whole section, right, and wanted to publish just a few? Or maybe you didn’t look each other in the eye?

  Ciao, Simona

  Dear Simona,

  I’m going to answer—Elena wanted to but says she would drag it out and bore you.

  So, as to your little question, we didn’t look each other in the eye because we were on the telephone. I told the author that we were going to reprint Frantumaglia in Italy and suggested that it might be a good idea to publish the text in English as well, because in English we had brought out only a few excerpts, and they had appeared only in digital form.

  As you know, I am extremely fond of this book, which to me reads almost like a story, with its variety of themes and characters. So I thought it could be enhanced with a collection of the interviews that Elena has done since the publication of the four installments of My Brilliant Friend, or the Neapolitan Quartet, as it’s called in English.

  The little problem was that, having promised the first publishers to whom we sold the rights that Elena would do an interview for each of those countries, the author suddenly found herself having to respond to some forty interviews, from all over the world. Certainly too many for an appendix. We thought it would be helpful to bring you into the discussion as we tried to figure out what to do and how to organize the section.

  Anyway, looking through the interviews we realized that the material is consistent with the structure of Frantumaglia, which over all contains the now twenty-five-year history of an attempt to show that the function of an author is all in the writing: “It originates in it, is invented in it, and ends in it,” as Elena says. And I think that readers would be interested in the growing number of questions in recent years about the literary and cultural tradition that the novels draw on, about the role of female thought in the construction of figures like Lena and Lila, about the reasons that the two girls have broken through into contexts and cultures far from Naples and from Italy.

  Michael’s observations also seemed important to the author, helping to clarify the point of this last part of the book. Michael says that with this section we’ll give readers a sort of internal history of Elena’s motivations, of the struggle to give them shape, and of how they changed over time. Which is true. In her answers one feels the effort involved in finding the words, in explaining herself; I like this, and I know she does, too. After all, the Frantumaglia project has always been to give her readers, from Troubling Love up to now, work that, without too many veils, and by making use of various fragments, notes, explanations, even contradictions, accompanies the works of fiction like a companion book.

  Ciao, Sandra

  NOTE

  In this e-mail exchange, the editors referred to are Simona Olivito, of Edizioni E/O, and Michael Reynolds, of Europa Editions.

  1.

  THE BRILLIANT SUBORDINATE

  Answers to questions from Paolo di Stefano

  Di Stefano: Elena Ferrante, how did you make the transition from one type of psychological-family novel (Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment) to a novel that, like this, promises to be the first of a trilogy or a tetralogy, and which is in plot and in style so centrifugal and, at the same time, so centripetal?

  Ferrante: I don’t feel that this novel is so different from the preceding ones. Many years ago I had the idea of telling the story of an old person who intends to disappear—which doesn’t mean die—without leaving any trace of her existence. I was fascinated by the idea of a story that demonstrated how difficult it is to erase yourself, literally, from the face of the earth. Then the story became complicated. I introduced a childhood friend who served as an inflexible witness of every event, small or large, in the life of the other. Finally, I realized that what interested me was to dig into two female lives that had many affinities and yet were divergent. That’s what I did. Of course, it’s a complex project, as the story covers some sixty years. But Lila and Elena are made of the same material that fed the other novels.

  Di Stefano: The two friends whose childhood story is told, Elena Greco, the first-person narrator, and her friend-enemy Lila Cerullo, are similar yet different. They continuously overlap just when they seem to be growing apart. Is it a novel about friendship and how an encounter can det
ermine a life? But also about how attraction to the bad example helps develop an identity?

  Ferrante: Generally, someone who asserts his personality, in doing so, makes the other opaque. The stronger, richer personality obscures the weaker, in life and perhaps even more in novels. But, in the relationship between Elena and Lila, Elena, the subordinate, gets from her subordination a sort of brilliance that disorients, that dazzles Lila. It’s a movement that’s hard to describe, but for that reason it interested me. Let me put it like this: the many events in the lives of Lila and Elena will show how one draws strength from the other. But beware: not only in the sense that they help each other but also in the sense that they ransack each other, stealing feeling and intelligence, depriving each other of energy.

  Di Stefano: How did memory and the passage of time, distance (temporal and perhaps spatial), influence the development of the book?

  Ferrante: I think that “putting distance” between experience and story is something of a cliché. The problem, for the writer, is often the opposite: to bridge the distance, to feel physically the impact of the material to be narrated, to approach the past of people we’ve loved, lives as we’ve observed them, as they’ve been told to us. A story, to take shape, needs to pass through many filters. Often we begin to write too soon and the pages are cold. Only when we feel the story in each of its moments, in every nook and cranny (and sometimes it takes years), can it be written well.

  Di Stefano: My Brilliant Friend is also a novel about violence in the family and in society. Does the novel describe how a person manages (or managed) to grow up in violence and/or in spite of violence?

  Ferrante: In general, one grows up warding off blows, returning them, even agreeing to receive them with stoic generosity. In the case of My Brilliant Friend, the world in which the girls grow up has some obviously violent features and others that are covertly violent. It’s the latter that interest me most, even though there are plenty of the first.

  Di Stefano: On page 130 there’s a wonderful sentence, about Lila: “She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words.” And then on page 227: “The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me . . . It was completely cleansed of the dross of speech.” Is that a statement of style?

  Ferrante: Let’s say that, among the many methods we employ to give a narrative order to the world, I prefer one in which the writing is clear and honest, and in which when you read about the events—the events of everyday life—they are extraordinarily compelling.

  Di Stefano: There is a more sociological thread: Italy in the years of the boom, the dream of prosperity that reckons with ancient hostilities.

  Ferrante: Yes, and that thread runs through to the present. But I reduced the historical background to a minimum. I prefer everything to be inscribed in the actions of the characters, both external and internal. Lila, for example, already at the age of seven or eight, wants to become rich, and drags Elena along, convinces her that wealth is an urgent goal. How this intention works inside the two friends; how it’s modified, how it guides or confuses them, interests me more than standard sociology.

  Di Stefano: You seldom yield to dialectal color: you use a few words, but usually you prefer the formula “he/she said in dialect.” Were you never tempted by a more expressionistic coloring?

  Ferrante: As a child, as an adolescent, the dialect of my city frightened me. I prefer to let it echo for a moment in the Italian, as if threatening it.

  Di Stefano: Are the next installments finished?

  Ferrante: Yes, in a very provisional state.

  Di Stefano: An obvious but necessary question: how autobiographical is the story of Elena? And how much of your literary passions are in Elena’s readings?

  Ferrante: If by autobiography you mean drawing on one’s own experience to feed an invented story, almost entirely. If instead you’re asking whether I’m telling my own personal story, not at all. As for the books, yes, I always cite texts I love, characters who molded me. For example, Dido, the Queen of Carthage, was a crucial female figure of my adolescence.

  Di Stefano: Is the game of alliteration “Elena Ferrante—Elsa Morante” (a passion of yours) suggestive? Is any relationship of Ferrante to Ferri (your publishers) only imaginary?

  Ferrante: Yes, absolutely.

  Di Stefano: Have you never regretted choosing anonymity? Reviews tend to linger more on the mystery of Ferrante than on the qualities of the books. In other words, have the results been the opposite of what you were hoping for, in emphasizing your hypothetical personality?

  Ferrante: No, I have no regrets. As I see it, extracting the personality of the writer from the story he offers, from the characters he puts onstage, from the landscapes, from the objects, from interviews like this—in short, from the tonality of his writing entirely—is simply a good way of reading. What you call emphasizing, if it’s based on the works, on the energy of the words, is an honest emphasis. What’s very different is the media’s emphasis, the predominance of the author’s image over his work. In that case the book functions like a pop star’s sweaty T-shirt, a garment that without the aura of the star is completely meaningless. It’s this last type of emphasis that I don’t like.

  Di Stefano: Does the suspicion that your work is the product of several hands bother you?

  Ferrante: It seems a useful example for the conversation we’re having. We are accustomed to deriving a body of work’s coherence from the author, not the author’s coherence from the work. That particular woman or that particular man has written the books and that is enough for us to consider them elements of a journey. We’ll speak with assurance of the author’s beginnings, of successful books and others that are less successful. We’ll say that he immediately found his way, that he has experimented with different genres and styles, we’ll trace recurring themes, circumstances, an evolution or an involution. Let’s say instead that we have available House of Liars and Aracoeli, but not a writer named Elsa Morante. We are so unused to starting from the works, to seeking in them coherence or difference, that we’re immediately confused. Accustomed to the supremacy of the author, we end up, when the author isn’t there, or is removed, seeing different hands not only in the development from one book to the next but even from one page to the next.

  Di Stefano: So will you tell us who you are?

  Ferrante: Elena Ferrante. I’ve published six books in twenty years. Isn’t that sufficient?

  NOTE

  The interview with Paolo Di Stefano appeared in the Corriere della Sera (Italy) November 20, 2011, under the title “Ferrante: Felice di non esserci” (“Ferrante: Happy Not to Be There”) and with the following introduction:

  My Brilliant Friend is very different from Elena Ferrante’s earlier novels. It’s a wonderful Bildungsroman, or, rather, two, or more than two—it’s the story of a generation of friends-enemies. An interview with Ferrante requires the mediation of her publishers, Sandro Ferri and Sandra Ozzola. The questions are asked by e-mail and answered by e-mail.

  2.

  FEAR OF HEIGHTS

  Answers to questions from Karen Valby

  Ferrante: I don’t have a routine. I write when I want to. Telling stories requires a lot of effort—what happens to the characters also happens to me, their good and their evil feelings belong to me. This is how it has to be, or else I don’t write. When I feel exhausted, I do the most obvious thing: I stop writing and busy myself with the thousands of urgent matters that I’ve ignored and without which life no longer functions.

  Valby: Elena and Lila’s friendship is so messy and true, a great portrait of female friendship (of which there are too few in literature). What was your inspiration for these women?

  Ferrante: I had a friend whom I cared for very much, and I began from that experience. But real events don’t count much when one writes; at most they are like getting shoved while out on t
he street. Rather, a story is a deep chasm of very different experiences that have accumulated in the course of a lifetime, and that miraculously nourish events and characters in the story. There are some experiences that are difficult to use, that are elusive, embarrassing, at times unsayable, because they belong to us so intimately. I am in favor of stories that are fed by these kinds of experience.

  Valby: Between Elena and Lila, whom do you relate to more, and who causes you the most suffering?

  Ferrante: Neither one of them came easily to me. I love Lila more, but only because she forced me to work very hard.

  Valby: Has there been interest in adapting the series for movies or TV, and can you bear such an idea?

  Ferrante: Two movies have been made from my books, a fact that makes me curious. There is talk of a TV series for the Neapolitan novels. I don’t care for directors and screenwriters who approach a book with arrogance, as if it were a mere catalyst for their own work. I prefer those who dive into the literary work, taking inspiration from it for new ways of telling a story with images.

  Karen Valby: Why did you decide to write under a pseudonym? Why did you choose to use the name Elena? Have you ever regretted not revealing your identity? Felt a surge of ego that made you want to throw open your window and cry “It’s I who have created this world!”? What would you lose by living a public life?