La frantumaglia

by Elena Ferrante

  Ferrante: As far as I’m concerned it’s the torment and, at the same time, the engine of every literary endeavor. You work for your whole life trying to gain adequate expressive tools for yourself. In general the most urgent question for a writer may seem to be: what experiences do I know I can be the voice of, what do I feel able to narrate? But it’s not so. The more pressing questions are: what is the word, what is the rhythm of the sentence, what is the suitable tone for the things I know? These seem like questions of form, of style, all in all secondary. But I am convinced that without the right words, without long practice in putting them together, nothing alive and true emerges. It’s not enough to say, as we are increasingly accustomed to do nowadays: these are events that truly happened, it’s my real life, the names and last names are real, I’m describing the real places where the events occurred. Writing that is inadequate can falsify the most honest biographical truths. Literary truth isn’t founded on any autobiographical or journalistic or legal agreement. It’s not the truth of the biographer or the reporter or a police report or a sentence handed down by a court; it’s not even the plausibility of a narrative constructed with professional skill. Literary truth is the truth released exclusively by words used well, and it is realized entirely in the words that formulate it. It is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype, cliché, worn baggage of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects everything to its needs.

  Sandra: How does one obtain this truth?

  Ferrante: It’s certainly the product of skill, and that can always be improved. But in large part that energy simply appears, happens, and you can’t say how, you can’t say how long it will last, you tremble at the idea that it might suddenly stop and leave you midstream. If the writer is frank with himself, he has to admit that he never knows if he has found the right kind of writing and has been able to get the most out of it. To be clear, anyone who puts writing at the center of his life ends up in the situation of Dencombe, in Henry James’s The Middle Years, who, at the peak of his success, as death approaches, hopes to have another opportunity to test himself and discover if he can do better than what he’s already done. The writer always has on the tip of his tongue the desperate exclamation of Proust’s Bergotte before Vermeer’s little patch of yellow wall: “I should have written like that.”

  Eva: When was the first time you thought you had written with that truth?

  Ferrante: Late, with Troubling Love. If that impression hadn’t persisted, I wouldn’t have published it.

  Eva: You said that you worked on that material for a long time unsuccessfully.

  Ferrante: Yes, but that doesn’t mean that Troubling Love was the product of a long effort. It’s exactly the opposite. The effort was all spent on the unsatisfying stories that had preceded it over the years. They consisted of obsessively worked-over pages, certainly truthful—or rather they possessed a truth that was packaged according to the standards of more or less well made stories about Naples, the periphery, poverty, jealous males, and so on. Then all of a sudden the writing assumed the right tone, or at least it seemed that way to me. I realized it from the first paragraph: that that writing told a story that until that moment I had never attempted, or, rather, I hadn’t even tried to conceive it—a story of love for the mother, an intimate, carnal love mixed with an equally carnal repulsion. Then suddenly it filtered out of the depths of memory, and I didn’t have to look for words; instead, it was the words that seemed to dislodge my most secret feelings. I decided to publish Troubling Love not so much because of the story it told, which continued to embarrass me and frighten me, but because for the first time it seemed to me that I could say: here’s how I have to write.

  Sandra: Let’s pause on the writing of Troubling Love. You’re talking about it as of a surprising achievement, and you perceive a disconnection between what you were writing before, for yourself, and which didn’t seem to you worthy of publication, and this book, which, instead, was born over a couple of months and without the effort of the preceding texts. Does an author therefore have several kinds of writing? I ask because quite a few Italian reviewers and writers, either truly disoriented or provoked by baser sentiments, attribute your books to different authors.

  Ferrante: Evidently, in a world where philological education has almost completely disappeared, where critics of style no longer exist, the decision not to be present as an author generates ill humor and this type of fantasy. The experts stare at the empty frame where the image of the author should be and they don’t have the technical tools, or, more simply, true passion and sensitivity as readers, to fill that space with the works. So they forget an obvious fact: that every instance of writing has its own individual story, and the disconnections between these stories are very often conspicuous—so conspicuous that they can make the common features difficult to see. To be clear, only the label of the author’s name or a rigorous philological examination allows us to accept that the author of Dubliners is the same who wrote Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. And I could continue to list apparent disparities between works that are unequivocally by the same hand. In other words, the cultural education of any high-school student should include an introduction to the idea that a writer adapts his writing to ever-changing expressive needs and that a higher or lower note doesn’t mean that the singer has changed. But evidently it’s not like that. For a long time, the prevailing belief has been that to write a story all you need is to be somewhat literate, and few by now recall that wanting to write means above all working hard to learn a flexible skill, ready for the most disparate trials, the outcome of which, naturally, is uncertain.

  Sandra: So not several kinds of writing but a single hand that laboriously fashions a tool and each time probes its possibilities?

  Ferrante: I would say yes. The writing of Troubling Love was for me a small miracle that arrived after years of practice. With that book, for example, it seemed to me I had achieved writing that was firm, lucid, controlled, and yet open to sudden breakdowns. The satisfaction didn’t last, however; it diminished and soon vanished. That result seemed fortuitous, and it took me ten years to separate the writing from that specific book and make an autonomous tool that could also be used elsewhere, like a good solid chain that can pull up the full bucket from the very bottom of the well. I worked a lot, but only with The Days of Abandonment did I feel that I again had a text that could be published.

  Sandro: When does a book seem to you publishable?

  Ferrante: When it tells a story that for a long time, unintentionally, I had pushed away, because I didn’t think I was capable of telling it, because telling it seemed to me uncomfortable. Also in the case of The Days of Abandonment, the writing both outlined and freed the story in a short time, during a summer. Or, rather, it was like that for the first two parts. Then suddenly I began to make mistakes. I lost the tone that had seemed right, I wrote and rewrote the last part all that fall. It was a time of great anxiety. It doesn’t take much to convince yourself that you no longer know how to tell a story. You feel a strong sense of regression, you’re sure you’ve lost the story forever. It was like that with the last part of The Days of Abandonment. I didn’t know how to get Olga out of her crisis with the same truth with which I’d narrated her falling into it. The hand was the same, the writing was the same, the same choice of vocabulary, same syntax, same punctuation, and yet the tone had become false. I feel a similar thing when the authority of someone else, male or female, seems so strong that I lose faith in myself, my head is emptied out, I no longer know how to be me. For months I felt that the preceding pages had emerged as pages that I would never have thought myself capable of writing, and now I no longer felt equal to my own work. You prefer losing yourself rather than finding yourself, I said to myself bitterly. Then everything started up again. But even today I don’t dare reread the book, I’m afraid that the last part has only the
features of good writing.

  Eva: Does the anxiety associated with publishing nothing less than the best book you’re capable of seem to you to be a characteristic of female writers? Let me explain: have you published so little out of fear that you’re not the equal of male writers? Or rather: does being a woman mean that you have to work harder to produce work that the male tradition can’t dismiss as merely “women’s fiction”? Put more simply, do you think there are fundamental differences between female and male writing?

  Ferrante: I’ll answer with a story. As a girl—twelve, thirteen years old—I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its protagonist, and that depressed me. That phase ended a couple of years later, and at fifteen I began to put brave girls who were in serious trouble at the center of the stories I was writing. But the idea remained—in fact, I would say, it became firmer—that the great, the greatest narrators were men and that one had to learn to narrate like them. I devoured books at that age, and—it’s pointless to beat around the bush—my models were masculine. So even when I wrote stories about girls I tried to give the heroine a wealth of experiences, a freedom, a determination that I sought to imitate from the great novels written by men. To be clear, I didn’t want to write like Madame de La Fayette or Jane Austen or the Brontës—at the time I knew very little about contemporary literature—but like Defoe or Fielding or Flaubert or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or even Hugo. While the models offered by women novelists were few and seemed to me for the most part thin, those provided by male novelists were numerous and almost always dazzling. That phase lasted a long time, till I was in my twenties, and left profound traces. To my eyes the male narrative tradition offered a richness of structure that didn’t seem to exist in fiction written by women.

  Eva: So you think that female fiction is constitutionally weak?

  Ferrante: No, not at all, I’m talking about my adolescent anxieties. Many of the opinions I had then changed later. For obvious historical reasons, women’s writing has a less dense and varied tradition than male writing, but it has extremely high points and also an extraordinary foundational value—the works of Jane Austen, for example. The twentieth century, besides, was a century of radical change for women. Feminist thought and feminist practices liberated energies, set in motion the most radical and profound transformation of the many that took place in the last century. I wouldn’t recognize myself without women’s struggles, women’s nonfiction writing, women’s literature: they made me adult. My experience as a novelist, both published and unpublished, culminated, after twenty years, in the attempt to relate, with writing that was appropriate, my sex and its difference. But for a long time I’ve thought that if we have to cultivate our narrative tradition, we should never renounce the entire stock of techniques that we have behind us. We have to demonstrate, precisely because we are women, that we can construct worlds as wide and powerful and rich as those designed by male writers, if not more. So we have to be well equipped, we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools. Above all we mustn’t give up our greatest freedom. Every woman novelist, as with women in many other fields, should aim at being not only the best woman novelist but the best of the most skilled practitioners of literature, whether male or female. To do so we have to avoid every ideological conformity, every false show of thought, every adherence to a party line or canon. Writers should be concerned only with narrating as well as possible what they know and feel, the beautiful and the ugly and the contradictory, without obeying any prescription, not even a prescription that comes from the side you’re on. Writing requires maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and programmatic disobedience.

  Sandra: In which of your books do you feel that you were able to do this most thoroughly?

  Ferrante: In the book that made me feel most guilty, The Lost Daughter. I pushed the protagonist much farther than I thought I myself, writing, could bear. Leda says: “The most difficult things to tell are those which we ourselves can’t understand.” It’s the motto—can I call it that?—which is at the root of all my books. Writing should always take the most difficult path. The narrating “I” in my stories is never a voice giving a monologue; she is writing—that is, struggling to organize in a text what she knows but doesn’t have clear in her mind. Delia, Olga, Leda, and Elena are all doing this. Delia, Olga, and Elena set off on their path and arrive at the end of the story bruised but safe. Leda on the other hand develops a text that leads her to tell things that are intolerable to her both as a daughter and as a mother, and as the friend of another woman. And mainly she has to account for a reckless gesture—the heart of the story—whose meaning not only escapes her but surely can’t be deciphered if she remains inside her writing. There I demanded of myself more than I could easily give: a story that was compelling but, at the same time, whose meaning the writer, by the very nature of what she is narrating, is unable to understand; because, if she did, she might die of it. The Lost Daughter is, among the stories I’ve published, the one I’m most painfully bound to.

  Eva: You insist on the centrality of the writing, you called it a chain that pulls up water from the bottom of a well. What are the features of your approach to writing?

  Ferrante: The only thing I know for certain is this: it seems to me that I work well when I can start from a flat, dry tone, that of a strong, lucid, educated woman, like the middle-class women who are our contemporaries. At the beginning I need curtness, terse, clear formulas that are free of affectations and demonstrations of beautiful form. Only when the story begins to emerge with assurance, thanks to that initial tone, do I begin to wait with trepidation for the moment when I will be able to replace the series of well oiled, noiseless links with a rusty, rasping series of links and a pace that is disjointed, agitated, increasing the risk of absolute collapse. The moment I change register for the first time is both exciting and anguished. I very much enjoy breaking through my character’s armor of good education and good manners, upsetting the image she has of herself, undermining her determination, and revealing another, rougher soul; I make her raucous, perhaps crude. I work hard to make the fracture between the two tonalities surprising and also to make the re-entry into the tranquil narration happen naturally. While the fracture comes easily—I wait for that moment, and slip inside it with satisfaction—I very much fear the moment when the narrative has to compose itself again. I’m afraid that the narrating “I” won’t be able to calm down. But above all, now that readers know her calm is false, that it won’t last, that the narrative orderliness will break up again, with ever greater decisiveness and pleasure, I need to take care to make that transitory calm believable.

  Sandra: Your openings have often been praised, especially by English and American critics. Do they have to do with this alternation of smooth narration and sudden breaks?

  Ferrante: I think so. Right from the first lines, I strive to establish a tone that is placid but with unexpected wrinkles. I’ve always done this, except where there is a sort of prologue—as in The Lost Daughter and My Brilliant Friend—that by its nature has a duller tone. But in every case when I get to the real start of the story I tend toward an expansive sentence that has a cold tone but at the same time exposes a magma of unbearable heat. I want readers to know from the first lines what they are dealing with.

  Sandro: Are you concerned with your readers? Do you think it’s important to excite them, challenge them, even trouble them?

  Ferrante: I publish to be read: it’s the only thing that interests me about publishing. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal, paradoxically, is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.

  Sandro: The novel, since its beginnings, has aimed at keeping nar
rative tension high. Then, in the twentieth century, everything seemed to change. Which tradition is the literature of the twenty-first century following?

  Ferrante: I think of literary tradition as a single large depository, where anyone who wants to write goes to choose what is useful to him, without excluding anything. And it seems to me that today we have a need for precisely this. An ambitious novelist has a duty, even more than in the past, to have a vast literary culture. We live in times of great change, and the outcomes are unpredictable; it’s good to be prepared. We need to be like Diderot, the author of both The Nun and Jacques the Fatalist and His Master, capable, that is, of reusing both Fielding and Sterne. The great twentieth-century quest can and should be connected to the great foundational novels, the violations of their tenets, and even the most effective devices of genre literature. Without ever forgetting that a story is truly alive not because the author is photogenic or the reviewers say good things about it or the marketing makes it desirable but because in a certain number of dense pages it never forgets the reader—for it is the reader’s job to light the fuse of the words. I renounce nothing that can give pleasure to the reader, not even what is considered old, trite, vulgar. As I was saying, what makes everything new and acceptable is literary truth; whether a text is short, long, or endless, what counts above all is richness, complexity, the fascination of the narrative texture. If a novel has these qualities—and no trick of marketing can truly provide them—it needs nothing else, it can continue on its way, drawing its readers along, even, if necessary, in the direction of the antinovel.

  Sandro: Only the quality of the writing counts, and it redeems everything: this seems to be an important point and I’d like to return to it later. Many American reviews seem to make a direct connection between your writing—its sincerity, its honesty—and your keeping out of the public eye. As if to say, the less one appears, the better one writes.