Ferrante: Anyone who writes knows that the most complicated thing is the rendering of events and characters in such a way that they are not realistic but real. In order for this to happen it’s necessary to believe in the story one is working on. I gave my name to the narrator to make my job easier. Elena is, in fact, the name that I feel is most mine. Without reserve, I can say that my entire identity is in the books I write. Your image of the window is amusing. My home is on the upper floors, I’m afraid of heights, and my ego gladly avoids leaning out the window.
NOTE
The interview with Karen Valby, translated by Michael Reynolds, appeared in Entertainment Weekly (U.S.A.), under the title “Elena Ferrante: The Writer Without a Face,” on September 5, 2014, online and in the print issue of September 12th.
3.
EVERY INDIVIDUAL IS A BATTLEFIELD
Answers to questions from Giulia Calligaro
Calligaro: How do you produce a story like this? And what did you know about it when you started?
Ferrante: I had thought for years about certain events that were important to me and that I wanted to write about: the business of the lost child, for example. But the story as a whole emerged as I wrote, and I never imagined that it would be so long. It’s the writing that brings a story to light, that breathes life into the inert material preserved by memory and draws it out of oblivion. If one hasn’t perfected, over the years, an adequate expressive tool, through trial and error, the story doesn’t emerge, or emerges without truth.
Calligaro: The obsessive comparison between Lila and Elena teaches us that friendship between women, even if it’s affectionate, is always antagonistic. Why this fear of coming in second?
Ferrante: Friendship between women has been left without rules. Male rules haven’t been imposed on it, and it’s still a territory with fragile codes where love (in our language the word “friendship”—amicizia—has to do with love, amare), by its nature, carries with it everything, lofty sentiments and base impulses. As a result I described a very strong bond that lasts a lifetime, and that is made up of affection but also of disorder, instability, incoherence, feelings of inferiority, bullying, bad moods.
Calligaro: Love is the engine of the story. But the happy parts are those which the reader experiences with the most suspicion: one knows that sooner or later there will be a hitch. What stands in the way of a happy ending?
Ferrante: The Neapolitan Quartet is a story conceived in such a way that the most intense, most lasting, happiest, and most devastating relationship turns out to be the one between Lila and Lena. That relationship endures, while relations with men begin, develop, and die. Neither of the two devotes herself to a man to the point of conclusively leaving the emotional field of the other. In such a long story, there are moments when the relations between woman and man are happy; you’d just have to break off the story there and you’d have a happy ending. But the happy ending has to do with the tricks of the narrative, not with life, or even with love, which is an uncontrollable, changeable feeling, with nasty surprises that are alien to the happy ending.
Calligaro: Men are inadequate. What gets in the way of the encounter between the sexes? Have the struggles for equality increased the distance?
Ferrante: Female expectations became very high. The behavioral models that made the sexes mutually recognizable, unfortunately, were torn apart and couldn’t be mended, nor has a radical redefinition of mutual satisfaction been possible so far. The greatest risk now is female regret for the “real men” of bygone days. Every form of male violence should be fought against, but the female desire to regress should not be neglected. The crowd of women who adore the sensibility and sexual energy of the worst male characters in My Brilliant Friend illustrate this temptation.
Calligaro: Lila and Elena “dramatize” the duel between Nature and History. Elena seems to “make it,” but in reality everyone becomes what he or she has always been. Can nothing change? And is the mixing of social classes an arduous undertaking?
Ferrante: The drive to change one’s state must face countless obstacles. One can act on genetic conditioning but not ignore it. Belonging to one class or another can be camouflaged but not canceled out. The individual is in the end only a battlefield, in which privileges and disadvantages war fiercely. What counts in the end is the collective flow of generations. Even when there is both merit and luck, the efforts of a single individual are unsatisfying.
Calligaro: The neighborhood is the laboratory where the fragility of History is revealed. About progress you write: “The dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.” What is the alternative? Is Naples a testing ground for national events?
Ferrante: For Lila and Lena, Naples is the city where beauty spills over into horror, where good manners can be instantly transformed into violence, where every Reclamation covers a Demolition. In Naples one learns immediately to distrust, laughing all the while, both Nature and History. In Naples progress is always the progress of the few to the detriment of the many. But, as you see, we are speaking no longer of Naples but of the world. What we call unlimited progress, for example, is the great cruel squandering of the wealthy classes of the West. Things may go a bit better when we prefer to take care of the entire planet and each of its inhabitants.
Calligaro: About Nino, loved by Lila and then by Lena, you say: “One who seeks more to be likable to the powerful than to defend an idea at all costs.” Later: “He has the worst kind of meanness, superficiality.” About Lila: “She stood out among so many because she, naturally, did not submit to any training, to any use, or to any purpose.” Two opposing versions of humanity. Will you comment on them?
Ferrante: Nino’s traits are more widespread today. Wanting to please those who exercise any sort of power is a characteristic of the subordinate who wants to emerge from his subordinate position. But it’s also a feature of the permanent spectacle in which we are immersed, which by its nature goes hand in hand with superficiality. Superficiality is a synonym not for stupidity but for the display of one’s own body, pleasure in appearances, imperviousness in the face of the spoilsport par excellence, the suffering of others. Lila’s traits instead seem to me the only possible pathway for those who want to be an active part of this world without submitting to it.
Calligaro: You’re an international success, among both general readers and intellectuals. Now in the United States you’re being compared to Elsa Morante. What is the target you’ve hit that is common to so many readers?
Ferrante: I don’t know if I’ve hit a target. I’m interested in stories that are hard for me to tell. The criterion has always been this: the more uneasy a story makes me, the more stubbornly I persist in telling it.
Calligaro: This might also be the story of Lila’s erasure. What does erasure mean to you?
Ferrante: To remove oneself systematically from the cravings of one’s own ego, to the point of making it a way of life.
Calligaro: We readers don’t know how we’ll manage: how will you manage without Lila and Lenù?
Ferrante: It was wonderful and demanding to live with them for years. Now I feel the need to move on to something else, as happens when a relationship is over. But with writing the rule is simple: if you have nothing worth writing, don’t write anymore.
NOTE
The interview with Giulia Calligaro appeared in Io donna (Italy) November 8, 2014, under the title “È ora di dire addio a Elena e Lila” (“It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Elena and Lila”).
4.
COMPLICIT EVEN THOUGH ABSENT
Answers to questions from Simonetta Fiori
Fiori: The American magazine Foreign Policy included you in the hundred most influential people in the world, for your capacity “to write honest, anonymous fiction.” How do you explain “Ferrante fever”?
Ferrante: I’m especially pleased that Foreign Policy generously gives me credit fo
r having demonstrated that the power of literature is autonomous. As for the success of my books, I don’t know the reasons for it, but I have no doubt that they should be sought in the story the books tell and how they tell it.
Fiori: More than twenty years ago, you wrote: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.” Don’t you think that that bet has been won, and that your books therefore no longer have any need for anonymity?
Ferrante: My books aren’t written anonymously; they have a name on the cover, and have never needed anonymity. It happened simply that I wrote them, and then, avoiding common editorial practice, I put them to the test without any protection. If there is a winner, they are the winners. It’s a victory that testifies to their autonomy. They have won the right to be appreciated by readers just as books.
Fiori: Hasn’t the decision to remove yourself been transformed into its opposite? The mystery rouses curiosity, the author thus becomes a Personality.
Ferrante: I fear that such considerations concern only the narrow circle of those who work in the media, and, with the usual exceptions, have too much on their plate and either are not readers or are hasty readers. There is a much wider world outside the media circuit, with different expectations. That is, like it or not, you, because of your job and apart from your sensibility as a cultured person, feel called on to fill in the space that I purposely left empty with a face, while readers fill it in by reading.
Fiori: Are you really convinced that the life of an author doesn’t add anything? Italo Calvino avoided personal questions, but we know a lot about him and his editorial work.
Ferrante: There’s a statement of Calvino’s that made a great impression on me as a girl. He said, more or less: Go ahead and ask me about my private life; I won’t answer you or I’ll always lie. Northrup Frye, later, seemed to me even more radical, saying: writers are rather simple people, at most neither wiser nor better than anyone else. And he continues: what matters about them is what they can do well—string together words. King Lear is marvelous even if all that remains of Shakespeare is a couple of signatures, some addresses, a will, a certificate of baptism, and a portrait that shows a man with the face of an idiot. Well, I see it exactly like that. Our faces, all of them, do not do us any favors, and our lives add nothing to the work.
Fiori: If you revealed your identity, the curiosity would decrease. Don’t you think that insisting on the mystery risks making you complicit?
Ferrante: May I answer you with another question? Don’t you think that if I did as you say I would betray myself, my writing, the pact I’ve made with my readers, my motivations, which they have in essence sustained, even with the new way they’ve ended up reading? As for my complicity, look around. Don’t you see the crush there is around Christmastime to appear on TV? Would you still talk about complicity if at this moment I were in front of a camera, or would you simply find it normal? No, to say that absence is complicity is an old, predictable game. As for morbid curiosity, it, too, seems to me only pressure from the media machine, intended to make me not only complicit but inconsistent.
Fiori: Is it onerous to have to dissemble?
Ferrante: I don’t dissemble. I live my life, and those who are part of it know everything about me.
Fiori: But how does one live in the lie? You insist on anonymity in part to protect your life. But what can have a greater effect—on a person’s life—than secrecy surrounding his or her job?
Ferrante: Writing for me is not a job. As for the lie, well, technically literature is one, it’s an extraordinary product of the mind, a self-contained world made up of words that are directed toward telling the truth of the writer. To sink into this particular type of lie is a great pleasure and a difficult responsibility. As for petty lies, well, in general I don’t tell them to anyone, except to avoid danger, to protect myself.
Fiori: My Brilliant Friend is being made into a TV series, and the writing has been entrusted to Francesco Piccolo. What do you expect?
Ferrante: I expect that the characters won’t be simplified and that the story won’t be impoverished or distorted. If I make any contributions to the screenplay, I’ll do it by e-mail.
Fiori: Anonymity in a time of total exposure has something heroic about it, but doesn’t success now oblige you to “show your face”?
Ferrante: Our prime minister often uses that expression, but I’m afraid that it serves to conceal rather than to reveal. The limelight does that: it conceals, it doesn’t reveal, it disguises democratic practice. It would be nice if, instead—not in a few months or years but now—we could evaluate clearly what is coming and avoid disasters. Yet we have not works to examine but faces, which beyond the clamor of television are all by their nature like that of Frye’s Shakespeare, whether they’ve written King Lear or are touting the Jobs Act. I, success or not, know enough about mine to choose to keep it for myself.
Fiori: Your friend the editor Sandra Ferri is convinced that if your identity were discovered you would be unable to write anymore.
Ferrante: I say a lot of things to my friend Sandra, all of them true. But I have to explain that I was talking about publishing, not writing. And then I want to add that something has changed. At first, anxiety about the story I was telling weighed on me. Then the small polemic against every form of publicity was added to it. Today what I fear most is the loss of the completely anomalous creative space I seem to have discovered. It’s not a small thing to write knowing that you can orchestrate for readers not only a story, characters, feelings, landscapes but the very figure of the author, the most genuine figure, because it’s created from writing alone, from the pure technical exploration of a possibility. That’s why either I remain Ferrante or I no longer publish.
NOTE
The interview with Simonetta Fiori appeared in La Repubblica (Italy) on December 5, 2014, under the title Elena Ferrante “Se scoprite chi sono mollo tutto” (“If You Discover Who I Am I’ll Give It All Up”) and with the following text.
To the editors: There must have been a misunderstanding. “Metterci la faccia” (“Show Your Face”) was, in a word, supposed to be an article on the prime minister. Politics, in other words: it had almost nothing to do with my decision to be an absent author. But never mind, I must tell you that in the end I was just as glad to answer your questions.
Thank you.
Elena Ferrante
From misunderstandings many things can arise, including an unusual interview. At first, there was to be an article written by Ferrante on the subject that she suggested: “Show Your Face.” Given the mystery of her identity, magnified by her global success, the idea seemed to us timely and unambiguous. Then, however, Ferrante couldn’t write her article, and it was replaced by the format of an interview, which inherited its perspective: the presence/absence of an author in today’s celebrity society, the reasons for a withdrawal that has been stubbornly defended for twenty years. Written questions and answers, without the possibility of a dialogue. An agreement happily made, which today we discover was based on a misunderstanding. Let misunderstandings flourish. There exist only a few doubts about the author’s convictions. Is it really true that readers don’t care about her identity? Is the biography of a writer really so irrelevant? Is the media world merely a horde of obsessed illiterates? Maybe things are a bit more complicated, but a great writer is allowed anything, even caustic answers.
Simonetta Fiori
5.
NEVER LOWER YOUR GUARD
Answers to questions from Rachel Donadio
Donadio: You insist on anonymity and yet are developing a cult following, especially among women, first in Italy and now in the United States and beyond. How do you feel about the reception of your books in the United States in recent years, and your growing readership, especially after James Wood’s review in The N
ew Yorker, in January, 2013?
Ferrante: I appreciated James Wood’s review very much. The critical attention that he dedicated to my books not only helped them find readers but in a way also helped me to read them. Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories. What happens to the reader when he reads a story for the first time is effectively what the narrator experiences while he writes. The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would. Critics like Wood not only help readers to read but especially, perhaps, help the author as well. Their function also becomes fundamental in helping faraway literary worlds to migrate. I never asked myself how the women in my stories would be received outside Italy. I wrote first and foremost for myself, and if I published I did so leaving the task of finding readers to the book itself. Now I know that thanks to Europa Editions, to Ann Goldstein, and to Wood and so many other reviewers and writers and readers, the heart of these stories has burst forth, and it is not only Italian. I’m both surprised and happy.
Donadio: Do you feel your books have found the following they deserve in Italy?
Ferrante: I don’t do promotional tours in my own country or anywhere. In Italy my first book, Troubling Love, sold immediately, thanks to the word of mouth of readers who discovered it and appreciated the writing, and to reviewers who wrote about it positively. Then the director Mario Martone read it and turned it into a memorable film. This helped the book, but it also shifted the media attention onto me personally. Partly for that reason, I didn’t publish anything else for ten years, at which point, with tremendous anxiety, I decided to publish The Days of Abandonment. The book was a success and had a wide readership, even if there was also a lot of resistance to Olga’s reaction to being abandoned—the same kind of resistance faced by Delia in “Troubling Love.” The success of the book and of the film that was made from it focused even more attention onto the absence of the author. It was then that I decided, definitively, to separate my private life from the public life of my books, which overcame countless difficulties and have endured. I can say with a certain pride that in my country, the titles of my novels are better known than my name. I think this is a good outcome.
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