Schappell: Because girls grow up reading books by men, we are used to the sound of male voices in our heads, and have no trouble imagining the lives of the cowboys, sea captains, and pirates of he-manly literature, whereas men balk at entering the mind of a woman, especially an angry woman.
Ferrante: Yes, I hold that male colonization of our imaginations—a calamity as long as we were unable to give shape to our difference—is, today, a strength. We know everything about the male symbol system; they, for the most part, know nothing about ours, above all about how it has been restructured by the blows the world has dealt us. What’s more, they are not even curious, indeed they recognize us only from within their system.
Schappell: As a female writer I take offense at the idea that the only war stories that matter are those written by men crouching in foxholes.
Ferrante: Every day women are exposed to all kinds of abuse. Yet there is still a widespread conviction that women’s lives, full of conflict and violence in the domestic sphere and in all of life’s most common contexts, cannot be expressed other than via the modules that the male world defines as feminine. If you step out of this thousand-year-old invention of theirs, you are no longer female.
Schappell: When you set out to write the Neapolitan novels, did you know the entire arc?
Ferrante: No. I knew only the basic stages of the story and even those as if through a fog. But that’s been true for all of my books.
Schappell: Do you normally have a very clear picture of what shape the work will take?
Ferrante: I never know exactly what shape a story will take. What is clear to me, always, is that the writing must never lose sight of truth as its ultimate goal. Page after page, the drive to capture what is true, and not what resembles the truth, shapes the work. If, even for a few passages, the tone becomes false—that is, too studied, too limpid, too regimented, too well-phrased—I am obliged to stop and to figure out where I started to go wrong. If I can’t, I throw everything away.
Schappell: You have been praised for your spare, muscular prose. There are no pyrotechnics, the language never draws attention to itself, and the effect is powerful. Do you start in this more spare and dialed-back register, or is the work in earlier drafts messier and more emotional?
Ferrante: I tell stories about middle-class women who are cultivated and capable of governing themselves. They have the tools to reflect on themselves. The slow, detached language I use is theirs. Then something breaks and these women’s boundaries dissolve, and the language with which they are attempting to say something about themselves also is loosed, unbounded. From that moment, the problem—a problem that is, above all, mine, as I write—becomes how to rediscover, step by step, the measured language they started with and, with it, the kind of self-governing ability that stops the characters from falling into depression, into self-degeneration, or into dangerous feelings of revenge, aimed at themselves or at others.
Schappell: Was there one novel in the series that was more difficult to write? Is there one that you feel most connected to or proud of?
Ferrante: The entire story, in each of its four installments, was, for me, a satisfying labor. Perhaps because of the themes it addresses, the most difficult to write was the third. And, again owing to its thematic considerations, the second was the easiest. But the first and the fourth are the ones to which I dedicated myself without reserve, every day mixing different genres, pleasure and pain, obscurity and clarity. I love them very much for this reason.
Schappell: Did you know from the beginning that there would be four books? If not, when did it become clear to you?
Ferrante: Six or seven years ago when I started working on these books I was convinced that a single, albeit long, volume would be enough. But when I got to the story of Lila’s wedding, I realized that I was going to need an exorbitant number of pages. I never thought of them as separate novels. While there are four volumes, for me the Neapolitan novels are one compact story, one very long novel.
Schappell: What do you do to relax?
Ferrante: I devote myself to boring domestic chores.
Schappell: Do you ever find yourself working against a certain kind of writing or writers?
Ferrante: I am curious about work that is very different from mine. I devote special attention to books that I could never write myself. If something feels foreign to me, but not annoyingly so, I try to study it to understand how it was made and what I can learn from it. It has never occurred to me to argue with other writers.
Schappell: Are you making a conscious choice when you sit down to write to create characters who won’t play by the rules of polite society, or is it as Grace Paley puts it, “It’s not that you set out to oppose authority. In the act of writing, you simply do.”
Ferrante: I deliberate a lot over what I would like to do with writing. I have always read a great deal in order to borrow what I need from tradition. But then when I start working I just write, without worrying if something seems too trivial or refined, comfortable or uncomfortable, obedient or rebellious. The problem is one and only one: to tell a story in the most effective way.
Schappell: Where do you actually physically work?
Ferrante: Wherever I can. The important thing is that it is a little corner somewhere. That is to say, a very small space.
Schappell: The subject of abandonment appears in a lot of your work. What is it about abandonment that strikes such a chord with you?
Ferrante: Abandonment is an invisible wound that does not heal easily. As a storyteller, I am attracted to it because it synthesizes the general precariousness of all we consider constant, the deconstruction of everything that seemed “normal.” Abandonment corrodes those certainties within which we believed we lived safely. Not only have we been abandoned but we may not hold up when faced with the loss; we abandon ourselves, we lose the consistency that we have gained through the sweet habit of entrusting ourselves to others. So, to get through it, you must find a new equilibrium while at the same time acknowledging a new fact—namely, that everything you have can be taken from you, and with it your will to live.
Schappell: Have you ever abandoned a book? Why?
Ferrante: I have abandoned many books, and some when they were already completed. The reason is always the same: I put aside everything that, even if the pages are well manicured and beautiful, strikes me as lacking truth.
Schappell: The theme of erasure—erasing one’s self, being erased by the culture—also reappears in the novels. What is it about disappearing, or being disappeared, that you find so compelling?
Ferrante: I have always been fascinated by those people who, faced with a world so full of horrors it can seem intolerable, claim that the human condition is unchangeable, that nature is a monstrous machine, that humanity has produced an endless cycle of inhumanity even when animated by good intentions, and then back away. The problem is not what other people do to you. The problem is to stand impotent before the horror that afflicts the majority of people, the most precarious of our fellow human beings. Every day we find ourselves faced with the intolerable, and no promise of utopia—whether it be political, religious, or scientific—is capable of calming us. Each generation is obliged to verify this horror anew for itself, and to discover that it is impotent. So either you take a step forward or you take one back. I’m not talking about suicide. I’m talking about refusing to engage, about removing oneself from the picture. The sentence “No, I will not,” when it comes from the depths of the intolerable, seems to me to be weighty, full of meaning, with everything to recount.
Schappell: It’s interesting that you yourself have—by choosing to keep details of your identity secret—in a sense erased yourself. Could you write as honestly if you were a public figure? Or does it matter not at all?
Ferrante: No, if you write and publish you are hardly erasing yourself. Indeed, I have my private life and as far as my public lif
e goes I am fully represented by my books. My choice was something different. I simply decided once and for all, more than twenty years ago, to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what. This was an important step for me. Today I feel, thanks to this decision, that I have gained a space of my own, a space that is free, where I feel active and present. To relinquish it would be very painful.
Schappell: Still, I am curious why an author—especially one so successful and critically acclaimed as you are—would choose to remain anonymous?
Ferrante: I have not chosen anonymity. My books are signed. Rather, I have withdrawn from the rituals that writers are more or less obliged to perform in order to sustain their books by lending them their author’s expendable image. And it’s worked out fine so far. My books increasingly demonstrate their independence, so I see no reason to change my position. It would be deplorably inconsistent.
Schappell: The writer never wants the reader to feel his or her presence, never wants to call attention to himself, and yet a careful reader should be able to detect here and there a few of the creator’s fingerprints. What direction might you offer the reader desperate to find you in the work (beyond telling him to piss off)?
Ferrante: As far as I know, my readers do not despair at all. I receive letters of support for my little battle in favor of the centrality of the work. Evidently, for those who love literature, the books are enough.
NOTE
The interview with Elissa Schappell, translated by Michael Reynolds, came out on the Web site of Vanity Fair (U.S.A.) in two parts. The first part appeared on August 27, 2015, under the title “The Mysterious, Anonymous Author Elena Ferrante on the Conclusion of Her Neapolitan Novels”; the second on August 28th, under the title “Elena Ferrante Explains Why, for the Last Time, You Don’t Need to Know Her Name.”
14.
SYSTEMATIC DISCONTENT
Answers to questions from Andrea Aguilar
Aguilar: How long did it take you to write the four Neapolitan novels? Has the increasing success of the books affected you? Do you read reviews or what is published about you?
Ferrante: In general I read every critical piece carefully, but only when it seems to me that the book is sufficiently distant. In this last case it was impossible. My Brilliant Friend for me is a single long, very dense novel. But its publication in four volumes—one volume a year—meant that, while I was finishing the story, I was getting the reviews of the first volume and letters from readers. It was like refining and completing a book while it’s already generating a range of opinions and expectations among readers. It’s an experience I still have to reflect on.
Aguilar: How do you relate to Lena’s struggles as a writer? After she publishes her first book, it takes her a while to get started again; she seems to lose herself after the publication of each of her books. A portrait emerges of the insecurities she has to overcome, of how she feels lost when she’s looking for a subject for a new book. Do you share this feeling? How did you start writing the tetralogy?
Ferrante: I’ve always written a lot. I conceive of writing as a craft that needs constant practice. Practicing it to acquire competence has never made me anxious. Publishing, however, still makes me anxious. And in fact my decision to publish is accompanied by a lot of hesitation and only if the story seems to me very truthful. I know how to recognize literary truth. If it arrives, it arrives when I’ve used up all my resources for writing and no longer expect it.
Aguilar: In a conversation with Lila, Lena explains that she feels obliged to connect every event to the one before, so that everything is coherent in the end. Is that how you felt while you were writing this saga? The power of the story of these two women is truly remarkable, but there are also many characters around them, and in the background is the history of Italy. How did you work on the plot? You start off with Lila’s disappearance, and Lena’s decision to write originates in a sense of revenge, in a way, as though Lila wanted to leave no trace and Lena would not allow it. Did you have a clear idea of everything that would happen to Lila and Lena?
Ferrante: I never write with a carefully developed outline. In general, I know in a very cursory way the point of arrival and some important intermediary points, whereas I don’t know anything about the countless small way stations—I identify those as I write. If it were not so—if I knew everything about the events and the characters—I’d get bored and forget the whole thing. And in fact that often happens. I go on for a long time, attending to the framework of the story and to the writing. Then I realize that I’m bearing a kind of false witness, and I stop. In this I’m very different from Lena. The obsession that everything should hold together coherently and beautifully seems to me a capital sin against the truth.
Aguilar: Going back to Lena’s struggles as a writer—I read in The Paris Review interview what you say about the ten years that it took to separate your writing from Troubling Love—I wondered if you think that women are more critical, more clear-eyed, and harsher regarding their own work.
Ferrante: I don’t know. I do think, though, that if a woman writer wants to achieve her utmost, she has to impose on herself a sort of systematic dissatisfaction. We compare ourselves with giants. The male literary tradition has an abundance of marvelous works, and offers a form for everything possible. The would-be writer must know the tradition thoroughly and learn to reuse it, bending it as needed. The battle with the raw material of our experience as women requires authority above all. Further, we have to fight against submissiveness, and boldly, in fact proudly, seek a literary genealogy of our own.
Aguilar: Starting with the third book, and then, later, in the fourth, Lena goes on various book tours and gives interviews (one of them with tragic consequences, according to Lila), and her reputation as a public figure grows. Encountering her readers seems to help her define her public voice and her arguments. “Every night, I improvised successfully, starting from my own experience,” Lena writes. Would it be fair to say that your writing proceeds in the same fashion?
Ferrante: No. Writing is different from any public exhibition. In these written responses, for example, I’m an author who addresses readers under the stimulus of your questions, which are also written. I’m not improvising answers, as in other types of exchanges, I’m not onstage. I set aside much, very much, of my individuality, which in different forms of communication I would display without any difficulties. Writing for me is an activity aimed at a single possible encounter: reading.
Aguilar: The reviews of Lena’s book, as you write in Book 3, are not always positive. You also write about the promotional tours that she undertakes. Was it your intention to write ironically about the situation for writers today? Why did you choose to write extensively about Lena’s public life as a writer? In doing so have you had further confirmation of your own position?
Ferrante: I am not being ironic about the status of the writer today. I confine myself to describing how it acts on my two protagonists: Lena lives it, alternating adherence with discouragement; Lila clashes with it through her friend, and sometimes submits to it, sometimes tries to use it, sometimes deconstructs it.
Aguilar: Did you at any point consider inserting passages from Lena’s books? Readers know them only through Elena’s memories, and the same thing applies to Lila’s writings. Your novels seem in some sense to reject pure fact in favor of feeling and memory. Do you think these elements make the story stronger and somehow more realistic? Given the intense subjectivity of this story, can we say that the underlying enigma is whether the beauty and the marvelous qualities that Lena finds in Lila are only in the eyes of the beholder?
Ferrante: I almost immediately discarded the idea of deploying passages of Lena’s books as well as of Lila’s notebooks. Their objective quality doesn’t count much for the purposes of the story. What’s important is that Lena, in spi
te of her success, feels her works as the pale shadow of those which Lila would have written; in fact she perceives herself the same way. A story acquires power not when it imitates in a plausible way persons and events but when it captures the confusion of existences, the making and unmaking of beliefs, the way fragments from varying sources collide in the world and in our heads.
Aguilar: In the fourth book the city of Naples becomes increasingly important; it’s described and studied. What is the greatest difficulty in attempting to write about Naples? Also, as the story progresses Lila seems to embody the city. Was this something that you had in mind?
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