Ferrante: My books belong to those who read them. I have great respect for all readers, and it changes nothing if they are prize jurors, academics, journalists, radio or television hosts. A published book has its journey: what’s essential is that it should make it without me, or rather without the part of me that has remained rigorously outside the pages.
Çongar: In your work, the interior life of your characters, especially the women, is very vivid. What is the relationship between the frantumaglia—to use your mother’s word—and that interiority?
Ferrante: The frantumaglia is the part of us that escapes any reduction to words or other shapes, and that in moments of crisis dissolves the entire order within which it seemed to us we were stably inserted. Every interior state is, ultimately, a magma that clashes with self-control, and it’s that magma we have to try to describe, if we want the page to have energy.
Çongar: Do you write in a state of frantumaglia? Or is it a more disciplined, planned, calculated process? Does it differ from book to book?
Ferrante: I have to start from an orderly place; I have to feel safe. But I also know that every book becomes in my eyes worth writing only when the order that has allowed me to begin shatters and the writing flows, and puts me, above all, at risk.
Çongar: What’s next? Are you currently working on a new book? What will follow the Neapolitan novels?
Ferrante: I’m writing, but it will take some time before I’m persuaded to publish something else.
NOTE
The interview with the Turkish journalist Yasemin Çongar appeared on July 20, 2015, in the online journal T24, in the cultural section, K24, under the title Yazarın görevi metinden kaçanı anlatabilmektir.
10.
THE TRUTH OF NAPLES
Answers to questions from Árni Matthíasson
Matthíasson: What led you to write? Was it a desire to emulate any favorite writer or writers, or did you feel a need to express yourself?
Ferrante: I write out of a desire to tell a story. Writing, naturally, is nourished by the pleasure of reading and the wish to understand how that pleasure is achieved. Everything I’ve learned I’ve learned by reading and rereading books. I don’t know how many times I’ve read Les Misérables without knowing absolutely anything about Victor Hugo.
Matthíasson: Your first novel, Troubling Love, was published in 1992. Did you see that as a start of your writing career or were you not looking any further than getting that one story published?
Ferrante: I never thought of any sort of career as a writer. I wrote, yes, but I had a different job. I didn’t feel the publication of that first book as a beginning. I continued to write, but I didn’t publish a new story until ten years later. The truth is that I’m never sure of having written something that’s worth publishing.
Matthíasson: For a journalist, writing about a book in the absence of the author, without a photograph or a biography, can be problematic. I’m not complaining, but I think that when people talk about your books your absence too often becomes a prominent part of the discourse and can obscure the book itself. You’ve said that you prefer that the books speak for themselves: do you think that people put too much emphasis on your anonymity?
Ferrante: It’s not my absence that generates interest in my books but the interest in my books that generates media interest in my absence. I’m afraid, in other words, that my decisions are more a problem for journalists—that said, it is their job—than for the public. In my view, what interests readers is the book and the energy it releases. If there’s no photo on the cover, so what. If the author doesn’t appear on television, so what. In fact, readers find my true image as an author in the writing. If the book doesn’t work, why should the reader be concerned with the author? And if it does work, doesn’t the author, too, emerge from it, like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp? The book is everything and comes before everything, if we really love reading. Outside of my books what am I? A woman not unlike many others. Forget about authors, then; love—if it’s worthwhile—what they write. This is the meaning of my little polemic.
Matthíasson: In a recent interview you said that the Naples described in your novels is a place of the imagination. Do you mean that the city of your youth has changed over time or that it is continually modified by a sort of reworking of the past?
Ferrante: The Naples I describe is part of me, I know it thoroughly. I know the names of the streets, the colors of the buildings, the shops, the dialectal voices. But whatever piece of reality enters a story has to reckon with literary truth, which is a truth different from that of Google maps.
Matthíasson: There has been a lot of discussion in the past few years about the situation of women in the arts: how they are often marginalized, and have to raise their voices to be heard. Take, for example, Björk, who said recently: “Everything that a guy says once, you have to say five times.” It seems to me that this is even more true of the literary world, where it’s easier to get published as a male writer and books by male writers are more likely to be reviewed and win awards. Yet women read far more than men. Did this influence you in any way when you started writing?
Further: researchers claim that men read books by men, whereas for women it doesn’t matter if the work was written by a man or a woman. The idea of a female protagonist seems especially troubling for male readers, and your Neapolitan Quartet has women at the center. Was the decision to have women as the focus a choice, or was it implicit in the original idea?
Ferrante: What to say? I wanted to tell the story of a friendship between women; and so it was inevitable that two women should be at the center of the story. As for the fact that the audience is now substantially female, yes, it’s very true, but that hasn’t improved the situation of women writers. Although there has been a robust, distinguished female literary tradition for a long time, books written by women have a hard time getting attention. Or, rather: they are judged by the critics according to their merits only within the category of books by women and for women, that is, as texts that can’t be compared with the powerful age-old male tradition. For most people—sometimes for women, too—great literature is generally felt to be literature made by men. Apart from a few fine souls, men don’t read books by women, as if such reading would weaken their virile power. But it’s a subject that concerns women’s creations in every field. Educated, broad-minded men treat female thought with polite irony, as a by-product, good only as a pastime for women.
Matthíasson: The Neapolitan cycle is developed in four novels. Did you have in mind all four books or did the story develop gradually?
Ferrante: I thought for a long time that I could contain the story in a single volume. In general, when I start telling a story, I never know how many pages I’ll need. I work and don’t worry that the first draft comes out like a waterfall—in fact I’m glad. It means that the story is developing easily, and that’s what counts. Afterward—I think—I’ll throw away a good half of what I write, and never mind. It’s something I’m used to, and I do it willingly when the story has assumed the right form and it’s just a matter of working with the scalpel and the hatchet. But in the case of My Brilliant Friend cutting out the superfluous and the unsuccessful was of little use. At a certain point, and with regret, I had to give up the idea of the single volume and accept the idea that the story, in spite of its unity, had to be published in four heavy tomes.
Matthíasson: You have been called the most important Italian writer of your generation. Does that have any effect on your writing?
Ferrante: In general, in the game that the cultural pages play, a flattering judgment is flanked by a devastating criticism and vice versa. For more than twenty years I’ve let go of the anxiety of success and the anguish of lack of success. I write as I like and if I want to. And I publish only when it seems to me that the book can find its way on its own. Otherwise I leave it in the drawer.
Matthíasson: What
other Italian writers do you read or would you recommend?
Ferrante: I’ll purposely name only some women, who are very different from one another in their interests, thematic and expressive choices, cultural background: Simona Vinci, Michela Murgia, Silvia Avallone, Valeria Parrella, Viola Di Grado. I could continue, but making lists isn’t that useful. You have to read the books.
NOTE
The interview with Árni Matthíasson: appeared on August 16, 2015, in the daily Morgunblaðið (Iceland) under the title Skrifað af ástríðu.
11.
THE WATCH
Answers to questions from the art magazine Frieze
Frieze: What images keep you company in the space where you work?
Ferrante: A reproduction of a Henri Matisse painting (an open window, a woman reading at a table with a child); a print by the illustrator Mara Cerri; a small, round pebble that perfectly recalls an owl; an early-nineteenth-century painted fan folded up in an antique case; a faded red metal bottle cap that I picked up off the street when I was twelve years old and that I have managed to hold on to for my whole life.
Frieze: What was the first piece of art that really mattered to you?
Ferrante: Certainly, in early adolescence, I was overwhelmed by Caravaggio’s The Seven Acts of Mercy: my veneration for this artist started then and continues to this day. But the first piece of art that really mattered to me—I say this only half in jest—was the shape of a watch a childhood friend would make on my wrist by biting it. It was a game. Her teeth left a circle on my skin that I would look at, pretending to tell the time, until the circle faded away. Except I didn’t pretend: I really thought it was a beautiful watch.
Frieze: If you could live with only one piece of art, what would it be?
Ferrante: I don’t know. It’s difficult to give a single answer that would be true. Maybe I’d choose the folder where I keep all the versions of the Annunciation I’ve been able to find. That’s it: a single subject, rather than a single work of art. Ever since I was a young woman I’ve been interested in the way in which the moment Mary is forced to put aside the book she’s reading has been imagined. When she opens it again, it will be her son who tells her how to read.
Frieze: What is your favorite title of an art work?
Ferrante: Untitled. I’d like to use it as a book title; I don’t know if it’s been done already. I also love The Artist Is Present. I admire the reversal that Marina Abramovic´ imposed on a formula that I once detested. The artist is present, but as body/work.
Frieze: What subjects do you wish you knew?
Ferrante: Math, physics, astronomy—to understand what stage we’re at in the universe and if we’ll be able to clarify our ideas before the human race is extinguished.
Frieze: What would you like to change?
Ferrante: The amount of time I’ve dedicated to writing. I could have done with more.
Frieze: What would you like to keep the same?
Ferrante: The desire to tell stories.
Frieze: What could you imagine doing if you didn’t do what you do?
Ferrante: Being a dressmaker.
Frieze: What music are you listening to?
Ferrante: I know an inordinate number of songs, but I don’t have a proper musical education. At times, books have prompted me to listen to great music: for example, after reading Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, I went on a Beethoven binge. Similarly, having recently read the letters that Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann exchanged about Doctor Faustus, I have gone on to listen maniacally to anything by Schoenberg I can find. But it’s an effort that requires willpower; musically I remain a novice.
Frieze: What are you reading?
Ferrante: Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The book is based on two seminars led by Agamben at Princeton University in 2001. In the second, he works on the very famous etching on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. I’ve always been fascinated by those who use images to make history, philosophy, literature. I’ve just finished reading Triptych: Three Studies After Francis Bacon, by Jonathan Littell.
Frieze: What do you like the look of?
Ferrante: I belong to the ranks of those who feel attracted to anything that is enclosed within a frame, partly because it helps me to imagine what has remained outside it.
NOTE
The interview with the magazine Frieze (U.K.), translated by Daniela Petracco, appeared in the August 16, 2015, issue under the title “Questionnaire: Elena Ferrante.”
12.
THE GARDEN AND THE WORLD
Answers to questions from Ruth Joos
Joos: What is the mystery of your opening lines? The first time I read the start of one of your books, it took my breath away. Is it a special element in your writing, something you pay particular attention to? Or do those first sentences write themselves?
Ferrante: I generally need a beginning that gives me the impression of being on the right path. It rarely comes right away, but it happens. Mostly I work and rework for a long time. Sometimes, after several attempts, I may seem to have found the beginning that’s useful to me, and I go on. But then I realize that it has led me astray, that I’m struggling. What decides if a beginning is good or not is the energy with which the story starts to flow.
Joos: The Irish writer Anne Enright once told me that the first page is of primary importance. “Read all the classics,” she said, “it’s all there, right from the start.” Do you agree with her? In what sense (or not)? Can the importance of that first sentence be paralyzing for you?
Ferrante: I don’t know if everything is in the beginning. Of course, I look for first words as a magic formula that can open the only true door to the story. Often first sentences are found at the end of a long journey of writing. Then I have to have the strength to throw away everything except those few words, and start again from there. Otherwise readers will have the impression that the truth and the power of the story are coming in too late.
Joos: Do you share our impression that your first novels were necessary in order for you to develop the broader perspective, the more detailed narrative of the Neapolitan Quartet? As if The Days of Abandonment and The Lost Daughter had to be written before you could then write something with a slower pace? Something less immediate? More epic?
Ferrante: Over the years I’ve written much more than I’ve published, and so it’s hard to answer. I might think of everything I have in my drawer as part of a chain that leads necessarily to the four volumes of the Neapolitan Quartet, link after link. In reality the tetralogy was a surprise for me, too: I didn’t think I was capable of completing such a long and wide-ranging story. That said, I don’t think I’ve gone far from the tonality and the intentions of the earlier novels.
Joos: In the Neapolitan novels, can Elena and Lila be interpreted as a single character? As two sides of a single person? Does every writer consist of two halves?
Ferrante: If we were made only of two halves, individual life would be simple, but the “I” is a crowd, with a large quantity of heterogeneous fragments tossing about inside. And the female “I”, in particular, with its long history of oppression and repression, tends to shatter as it’s tossed around, and to reappear and shatter again, always in an unpredictable way. Stories feed on the fragments, which are concealed under an appearance of unity and constitute a sort of chaos to depart from, an obscurity to illuminate. Stories, characters come from there. Reading Dostoyevsky when I was young, I thought that all the characters, the pure and the abominable, were actually his secret voices, hidden, cunningly wrought fragments. Everything was poured, unfiltered, and with extreme audacity, into his works.
Joos: What do you think of the relationship between the particular and the universal? Are you surprised by the fact that the setting of your stories (Naples, the various social classes, the landscape, the language)
doesn’t get in the way of understanding, even far from Italy?
Ferrante: It’s an old subject, and difficult to sort out. I think it has to do not with the technical skill of the writer but with the power of the authentic. If the representation goes beyond a skillful verisimilitude, carrying with it the pure and simple truth, maybe it can transform its own private little plot of land into a garden open to all. But nothing guarantees this outcome. The task of the writer is to give shape, without self-censorship, to the reality that he or she knows well, as if he or she were the only possible witness.
Joos: As a reader I’ve rarely had an experience as intimate as reading The Lost Daughter: it’s almost embarrassing to read—it touches something almost unspeakable. It’s as if the beating heart of your work could be found precisely in that novel. What do you think?
Ferrante: I’m very fond of The Lost Daughter. It cost me a lot to write. A story has to push beyond your very capacity to write it, you have to fear at every line that you won’t make it. The books I’ve published all originated like that, but The Lost Daughter left me feeling the way you do when you swim until you’re exhausted and then realize you’ve gone too far from the shore.
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