Joos: Have you ever been afraid of being unable to reach that degree of intensity again?
Ferrante: Yes, but I’m not distressed about it. Writing, trying and trying again, has always been part of my private life, and that’s fine. No one obliges me to publish. If a book doesn’t come out the way I want, I don’t publish it. And if I never again write a book that comes out the way I want, I won’t publish anymore.
Joos: It will soon be twenty-five years since your début: what do you feel about this? And about the fact of having been translated into so many languages?
Ferrante: I’m happy for my books. They’re still in good health and they travel all over the world. They’ve been lucky.
Joos: When did you realize you were a writer? When did you begin to feel you were a writer?
Ferrante: I realized early, as a child, that I liked to tell stories. But I say to you in all frankness that, if by writer you mean someone who has a role that defines her socially and in the working world, I don’t feel and have never felt myself a writer. I wrote and I write whenever I can, but for a long time I’ve done other work.
Joos: Do you think that writing about female characters from a female perspective requires courage? And, if not, why, in your view, has it been done so rarely and with so little care?
Ferrante: I don’t know if it takes courage. Certainly you have to get beyond the female gender, beyond the image, that is, that men have sewed onto us and that women attribute to themselves as if it were their true nature. You have to project beyond the great male literary tradition, which is arduous but easier than it was a century ago: we have an outstanding female tradition, which by now has some real high points. But above all we have to look beyond the new image of woman that has been constructed in the daily struggle with the patriarchy; this image is essential on the social, cultural, political plane but dangerous for literature. The writer has to tell what she truly knows or thinks she knows, even if it contradicts the ideological structures that she subscribes to.
Joos: Are you aware that you often confront your readers with “an inconvenient truth”?
Ferrante: Inconvenient truths are the salt of literature. They don’t guarantee that the results will be good, but it’s where words derive their power and flavor.
Joos: Do you know that some readers feel an aversion for what you write about women, about mothers and daughters, and about their relationships, while others have the sensation that you know them profoundly?
Ferrante: A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world. Then it can end up on a shelf or in the trash.
Joos: Are you ever frightened by the fact that your readers feel so close to your work, as if you were saying for them what can’t be said?
Ferrante: If it were true, I would feel happy about it and also distressed. To say what is unsayable is the task of literature and, at the same time, a grave responsibility. But it happens to very few and I don’t think it’s true in my case. I try only to be a truthful witness of what I’ve seen in myself and others.
Joos: Do you have an idea of what we lose by reading your novels in a language different from the original? Does it distress you to “abandon them” to another language?
Ferrante: At first I thought I could maintain control over the translations. But it’s impossible. The books leave and one has to hope only that the other languages are, within the limits of possibility, sensitive and generous hosts.
Joos: What is the function of dialect in your novels? And of the different registers?
Ferrante: Dialect for me is the repository of primary experiences. Italian extracts them and arranges them on the page in a search for adequate expressive registers. But my characters always have the impression that Neapolitan is hostile and holds secrets that will never be able to enter completely into Italian.
Joos: What’s special about the Neapolitan dialect? What can be said in that dialect that can’t be said in Italian?
Ferrante: My conquest of Italian was arduous; I felt Neapolitan as a claw that was holding me down. Over time things changed, but in my mind they remain two enemy languages, and Neapolitan can say of me, of my women friends, of our doings, many things that I’m ashamed of, or that I love, but anyway more than can be transferred into Italian.
Joos: A recurring theme in your novels is that of borders and passing beyond them: inside and outside the city, inside and outside the I, inside and outside motherhood, marriage, borders that vanish . . .
Ferrante: Borders make us feel stable. At the first hint of conflict, at the least threat, we close them. The border serves to gather us into a unit, to diminish the hidden centrifugal thrusts that undermine our identity. But it’s purely an appearance. A story begins when, one after another, our borders collapse.
Joos: What’s the value of crossing borders?
Ferrante: The basic value that limits have. To calm us within a perimeter, so that we can look critically inside and outside. Until we try to stick our nose out to cross it.
Joos: Are women more conscious of that crossing?
Ferrante: The history of women in the past hundred years is based on the very dangerous “crossing of the boundary” imposed by patriarchal cultures. The results have been extraordinary in all fields. But the force with which they want to carry us back inside the old borders is no less extraordinary. It is manifested as pure crude, bloody violence. But also as the good-natured irony of educated men who belittle or demean our achievements.
Joos: A step beyond the borders can involve disappearance, another major theme in your work. What is the meaning, the value of disappearance? (It’s one of the most interesting themes in the work of Siri Hustvedt, just to give an example: she, too, has mothers who disappear.)
Ferrante: My first book, Troubling Love, was the story of a disappearance. The disappearance of women should be interpreted not only as giving up the fight against the violence of the world but also as clear rejection. There is an expression in Italian whose double meaning is untranslatable: “Io non ci sto.” Literally it means: I’m not here, in this place, before what you’re suggesting. In common usage, it means, instead: I don’t agree, I don’t want to. Rejection means shunning the games of those who crush the weak.
Joos: Do you find it natural that we as readers have the feeling that we know you? Do you feel comfortable in that situation?
Ferrante: Authors, as authors, live in their books. It’s where they appear most truthfully. And good readers have always known it.
NOTE
The interview with Ruth Joos: appeared in the daily De Standaard (Belgium) on August 21, 2015, under the title Ongemakkelijke waarheden zijn het zout van de literatuur.
13.
THE MAGMA BENEATH THE CONVENTIONS
Answers to questions from Elissa Schappell
Schappell: You grew up in Naples. It’s been the setting for a number of your books—what is it about the city that inspires you?
Ferrante: Naples is a space containing all my primary, childhood, adolescent, and early adult experiences. Many of my stories about people I know and have loved come to me both from that city and in its language. I write what I know, but I nurse this material in a disorderly way—I can only extract the story, invent it, if it appears blurred. For that reason, almost all of my books, even if they unfold today or are set in different cities, have Neapolitan roots.
Schappell: Can we assume that the friendship between Lena and Lila is inspired by an actual friendship?
Ferrante: Let’s say that it comes from what I know of a long, complicated, difficult friendship that began at the end of early childhood.
Schappell: The fact that Lena is telling the story, and that the narrative subverts stereotypical notions of female friendship—friendship is forever, steady and uncomplicated—feels radical. What made you want to mine this material in this way?
Ferrante: Lena is a compl
ex character, obscure to herself. She takes on the task of keeping Lila in the net of the story even against her friend’s will. These actions seem to be motivated by love, but are they really? It has always fascinated me how a story comes to us through the filter of a protagonist whose consciousness is limited, inadequate, shaped by the facts that she herself is recounting, though she doesn’t feel that way at all. My books are like that: the narrator must continually deal with situations, people, and events she doesn’t control, and which do not allow themselves to be told. I like stories in which the effort to reduce experience to story progressively undermines the confidence of she who is writing, her conviction that the means of expression at her disposal are adequate, and those very conventions that at the start made her feel safe.
Schappell: Friendship between women can be particularly fraught. Unlike men, women tell each other everything. Intimacy is our currency, and, as intimates, we are uniquely skilled in eviscerating each other.
Ferrante: Friendship is a crucible of positive and negative feelings that are in a permanent state of ebullition. There’s an expression: With friends God is watching me, with enemies I watch myself. In the end, an enemy is the fruit of an oversimplification of human complexity: the hostile relationship is always clear, I know that I have to protect myself, I have to attack. On the other hand, God only knows what goes on in the mind of a friend. Absolute trust and strong affections harbor rancor, trickery, and betrayal. Perhaps that’s why, over time, male friendship has developed a rigorous code of conduct. The pious respect for its internal laws and the dire consequences that come from violating them have a long tradition in fiction. Our friendships, on the other hand, are a terra incognita, unknown even to ourselves, a land without fixed rules. Anything and everything can happen to you, nothing is certain. Its exploration in fiction advances arduously, it is a gamble, a strenuous undertaking. And at every step there is the risk, above all, that a story’s honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating.
Schappell: Do you ever make a conscious decision to write against conventions or expectations?
Ferrante: I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, especially literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.
Schappell: What fiction or nonfiction has most influenced you as a writer?
Ferrante: The manifesto of Donna Haraway, which I am guilty of having read quite late, and an old book by Adriana Cavarero (Relative Narratives; Storytelling and Selfhood). The novel that is fundamental for me is Elsa Morante’s House of Liars.
Schappell: One of the most striking aspects of the novels is the uncanny way you are able to capture the complexity of Lena and Lila’s relationship without lapsing into cliché or sentimentality. The description of the relationship between Lila and Lena is ruthlessly honest, maybe even brutal, and yet for a woman reader—or at least for me—it’s not only absolutely right but liberating.
Ferrante: In general, we store away our experiences and make use of timeworn phrases—nice, ready-made, reassuring stylizations that give us a sense of colloquial normality. But in this way, either knowingly or unknowingly, we reject everything that, to be said fully, would require effort and a torturous search for words. Honest writing forces itself to find words for those parts of our experience that are hidden and silent. On one hand, a good story, or, rather, the kind of story I like best, narrates an experience—for example, friendship—following specific conventions that render it recognizable and riveting; on the other hand, it sporadically reveals the magma running beneath the pillars of convention. The fate of a story that tends toward truth by pushing stylizations to their limit depends on the extent to which the reader really wants to face up to herself.
Schappell: The unsparing, some might say brutally honest way you write about women’s lives, your depictions of violence and female rage, as well as the intensity of feeling and the eroticism that can exist in female friendships, especially those between young women, is astonishingly spot on. Liberating. Given that we know how fraught and full of drama female friendships are, why do you think we don’t read more books that depict these intense relationships more honestly?
Ferrante: Often that which we are unable to tell ourselves coincides with that which we do not want to tell, and if a book offers us a portrait of those things, we feel annoyed, or resentful, because they are things we all know, but reading about them disturbs us. However, the opposite also happens. We are thrilled when fragments of reality become utterable.
Schappell: There is a “personal is political” brand of feminism running throughout your novels. Do you yourself consider yourself a feminist? How would you describe the difference between American- and Italian-style feminism?
Ferrante: I owe much to that famous slogan. From it I learned that even the most intimate individual concerns, those most extraneous to the public sphere, are influenced by politics; that is to say, by that complicated, pervasive, irreducible thing that is power and its uses. It’s only a few words, but with their fortunate ability to synthesize they should never be forgotten. They convey what we are made of, the risk of subservience we are exposed to, the kind of deliberately disobedient gaze we must turn on the world and on ourselves. But “the personal is political” is also an important suggestion for literature. It should be an essential concept for anyone who wants to write.
As for the definition of “feminist,” I don’t know. I have loved and I love feminism because in America, in Italy, and in many other parts of the world it managed to provoke complex thinking. I grew up with the idea that if I didn’t let myself be absorbed as much as possible into the world of eminently capable men, if I did not learn from their cultural excellence, if I did not pass brilliantly all the exams that world required of me, it would have been tantamount to not existing at all. Then I read books that exalted the female difference and my thinking was turned upside down. I realized that I had to do exactly the opposite: I had to start with myself and with my relationships with other women—this is another essential formula—if I really wanted to give myself a shape. Today I read everything that emerges out of so-called post-feminist thought. It helps me look critically at the world, at us, our bodies, our subjectivity. But it also fires my imagination, it pushes me to reflect on the use of literature. I’ll name some women to whom I owe a great deal: Firestone, Lonzi, Irigaray, Muraro, Caverero, Gagliasso, Haraway, Butler, Braidotti.
In short, I am a passionate reader of feminist thought. Yet I do not consider myself a militant; I believe I am incapable of militancy. Our heads are crowded with a very heterogeneous mix of material, fragments of time periods, conflicting intentions that cohabit, endlessly clashing with one another. As a writer I would rather confront that overabundance, even if it is risky and confused, than feel that I’m staying safely within a scheme that, precisely because it is a scheme, always ends up leaving out a lot of real stuff because it is disturbing. I look around. I compare who I was, what I have become, what my friends have become, the clarity and the confusion, the failures, the leaps forward. Girls like my daughters appear convinced that the freedom they’ve inherited is part of the natural state of affairs and not the temporary outcome of a long battle that is still being waged, and in which everything could suddenly be lost. As far as the male world is concerned, I have erudite, contemplative acquaintances who tend either to ignore or to recast with polite mockery the literary, philosophical, and all other categories of work produced by women. That said, there are also very fierce young women, men who try to be informed, to understand, to sort through the countless contradictions. In short, cultural struggles are long, full of contradictions, and while they are happening it is difficult to say what is useful and what isn’t. I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tang
led knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, as it concerns both individual lives and the life of generations. Seeking to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.
Schappell: I’ve noticed that the critics who seem most obsessed by the question of your gender are men. They seem to find it impossible to fathom that a woman could write books that are so serious—threaded with history and politics, and evenhanded in their depictions of sex and violence. That the ability to depict the domestic world as a war zone and the willingness to unflinchingly show women in an unflattering light are evidence that you’re a man. Some suggest that not only are you a man but, given your output, you might be a team of men. A committee. (Imagine the books of the Bible…)
Ferrante: Have you heard anyone say recently about any book written by a man, It’s really a woman who wrote it, or maybe a group of women? Owing to its exorbitant might, the male gender can mimic the female gender, incorporating it in the process. The female gender, on the other hand, cannot mimic anything, for it is betrayed immediately by its “weakness”; what it produces could not possibly fake male potency. The truth is that even the publishing industry and the media are convinced of this commonplace; both tend to shut away women who write in a literary gynaeceum. There are good women writers, not so good ones, and some great ones, but they all exist within the area reserved for the female sex, and must address only certain themes and in certain tones that the male tradition considers suitable for the female gender. It is fairly common, for example, to explain the literary work of women writers in terms of some variety of dependence on literature written by men. However, it is rare to see commentary that traces the influence of a female writer on the work of a male writer. The critics don’t do it, the writers themselves don’t do it. Thus, when a woman’s writing does not respect those areas of competence, those thematic sectors and the tones that the experts have assigned to the categories of books to which women have been confined, the commentators come up with the idea of male bloodlines. And if there’s no author photo of a woman then the game is up: it’s clear, in that case, that we are dealing with a man or an entire team of virile male enthusiasts of the art of writing. What if, instead, we’re dealing with a new tradition of women writers who are becoming more competent, more effective, are growing tired of the literary gynaeceum and are on furlough from gender stereotypes. We know how to think, we know how to tell stories, we know how to write them as well as, if not better than, men.
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