Ferrante: Yes, but it’s a thought I rejected; I didn’t want Lila to be reducible to anything. I wanted, rather, the constant shifting of all the characters, from childhood to old age, to spill out onto the topography of the neighborhood and the whole city. Naples is hard to write about because it isn’t linear, opposites shade into one another, its extraordinary beauty becomes ugly, its highly refined culture becomes ordinary, its famous cordiality turns into violence.
Aguilar: When Lena recalls the presentations she gives during the book tours, she seems to realize that she has used the lives of others. The same thing happens when she writes the novel about her childhood neighborhood. Do you think that fiction writing always involves some sense of guilt?
Ferrante: Absolutely yes. Writing—and not only fiction—is always an illicit appropriation. Our singularity as authors is a small note in the margin. The rest we take from the repository of those who have written before us, from the lives, from the most intimate feelings of others. Without the authorization of anything or anyone.
Aguilar: Who are your favorite women writers? And who are the women characters who have fascinated you?
Ferrante: The list would be very long; I’d like to spare you. I’d prefer to point out instead that in the course of the twentieth century the tradition of women writers became extraordinarily robust, and not only in the West. My generation, I think, is the first to stop thinking that to write a great book you have to be male. Today we can believe with assurance that it is possible to emerge from the literary gynaeceum in which we tend to shut ourselves, and to seek the comparison.
Aguilar: Which male character in the Neapolitan novels do you feel closest to?
Ferrante: Alfonso, Lena’s schoolmate.
Aguilar: What do you think is so special about friendship between women? It’s a subject that has barely been treated in literature; do you have any idea why?
Ferrante: Male friendship has a long literary tradition and a very elaborate code of behavior. Friendship between women, on the other hand, has a rudimentary map that has only recently begun to be made more precise, with the risk that the shortcut of the edifying cliché might obstruct the effort involved in taking difficult paths.
Aguilar: Lena displays an increasing disaffection for feminism (something that is in a sense personified in the character of her former sister-in-law). What do you think about feminism?
Ferrante: Without feminism I would still be a girl overburdened with male culture and a subculture that I touted as my own free thought. Feminism helped me grow up. But today I see and feel that the new generations are laughing at us. They don’t know that our gains are very recent and hence fragile. All the women I’ve written about know this to their cost.
Aguilar: In the last book of the Neapolitan novels, Lena rushes through decades, and the rhythm seems to change. It’s as if for you it was more difficult to write the story the closer it gets to the present. Was it hard to end the series? Do you still think about your characters?
Ferrante: It’s too soon to feel truly distant. In fact, it’s as if I were still writing. About the present it’s hard to say—it’s by nature volatile. If I described it, I did so imagining it as a precipice, the evaporating spray of a waterfall. And yet the hardest volume to write wasn’t the fourth but the third.
Aguilar: The protagonists of your books are always women writers. Why? Another subject that recurs often is motherhood: is it hard to write openly about it?
Ferrante: Women write a lot, and not as a job but out of necessity. They resort to writing especially in moments of crisis, to explain themselves to themselves. There’s a lot about us that hasn’t been told completely, in fact a lot that hasn’t been told at all, and we discover it when daily life gets tangled up and we need to put it in order. Motherhood seems to me precisely one of those experiences which are ours alone and whose literary truth has yet to be explored.
Aguilar: Your works are in a way pervaded by a sense of fate, and even of classical tragedy. How much have classical Greek works influenced you?
Ferrante: I did classical studies, and as a girl I translated a lot, for my own pleasure, from Greek and Latin. I wanted to learn to write, and it seemed to me an extraordinary exercise. Then I no longer had enough time, and I stopped. You say that my education is evident in my books, and I would happily believe you. But I must say that I’ve always thought of my women as enclosed within historical-cultural boundaries, and not trapped by fate.
Aguilar: Are you working on a new book?
Ferrante: Yes, it’s rare for me to go for long periods without writing. But to finish a book doesn’t happen often. And when it does happen, I don’t publish willingly. Writing puts me in a good mood, publishing doesn’t.
NOTE
The interview with Andrea Aguilar appeared in Babelia/El País (Spain) November 11, 2015, under the title Elena Ferrante “Escribir es una apropiación indebida.”
15.
WOMEN WHO CROSS BORDERS
Answers to questions from Liz Jobey
Jobey: When did you start to write?
Ferrante: In late adolescence.
Jobey: You have said that for a long time you wrote without the intention of publishing, or even without having others read what you were writing. What function did writing have for you in the beginning?
Ferrante: I wrote to learn how to write. I thought I had things to say but at every attempt, depending on the mood I was in, I felt I lacked either talent or adequate technical skills. I generally preferred the second hypothesis, the first scared me.
Jobey: Your novels are concerned with women’s lives, and with how women react to men, both privately and in society. Was this your aim when you decided to publish—to speak to women about women’s experiences?
Ferrante: No, I didn’t have a plan then, and I still don’t. The only reason I decided to have Troubling Love published was that I felt I had written a book I could permanently detach from myself without later regretting it.
Jobey: There was a ten-year gap between your first book, Troubling Love, and your second, The Days of Abandonment. Was there a particular reason for that gap?
Ferrante: Actually, there was no gap. I wrote a great deal in those ten years but nothing I felt I could trust. The stories I wrote were overworked, very controlled but without truth.
Jobey: There are very few positive male characters in your books. Most of the men are weak or boastful or absent or bullies. Is that a reflection of the society you grew up in, or does it reflect the imbalance of power between men and women in the wider society? Has that imbalance improved or changed in recent years?
Ferrante: I grew up in a world where it seemed normal that men (fathers, brothers, boyfriends) had the right to hit you in order to correct you, to teach you how to be a woman, ultimately for your own good. Luckily, today much has changed, but I still think the men who can really be trusted are a minority. Maybe this is because the milieu that shaped me was backward. Or maybe (and this is what I tend to believe) it’s because male power, whether violently or delicately imposed, is still bent on subordinating us. Too many women are humiliated every day and not just on a symbolic level. And, in the real world, too many are punished, even with death, for their insubordination.
Jobey: Your novels seem to be concerned with boundaries—emotional, geographical, social—and what happens when those boundaries are crossed or broken down. Is that something that particularly affects women of a certain age or class, or does it apply to all?
Ferrante: Limits are still drawn around women—I’m talking about women in general. This isn’t a problem if one is dealing with self-regulation: it’s important to set limits for oneself. The problem is that we live within limits set by others, and we feel guilty when we fail to respect them. Male boundary-breaking does not automatically entail negative judgments; it’s a sign of curiosity and courage. Female boundary-breaking, espec
ially when it is not undertaken under the guidance or supervision of men, is still disorienting: it is loss of femininity, it is excess, perversion, disease.
Jobey: You refer to characters “dissolving” boundaries as a way of describing emotional breakdown. Is that a feeling you recognize—in yourself? In others?
Ferrante: I have seen it in my mother, in myself, in many women friends. We experience too many bonds that choke our desires and ambitions. The modern world subjects us to pressures that at times we are unable to bear.
Jobey: The narrators in your novels find motherhood difficult. It devours them, reduces them, they long to escape it, and when they do, they feel liberated. Do you feel women would be stronger if they didn’t have to bear the burdens of motherhood?
Ferrante: No, that’s not the point. The point is what we tell ourselves about motherhood and child-rearing. If we keep talking about it in an idyllic way, as in many handbooks on motherhood, we will continue to feel alone and guilty when we come up against the frustrating aspects of being a mother. The task of a woman writer today is not to stop at the pleasures of the pregnant body, of birth, of bringing up children, but to delve truthfully into the darkest depth.
Jobey: The Neapolitan novels have similarities of character and plot to your three earlier novels. Are you, in some ways, telling the same story?
Ferrante: Not the same story but definitely the same features of a single malady. Life’s wounds are incurable and you write them and rewrite them in the hope of being able, sooner or later, to construct a narrative that will account for them once and for all.
Jobey: Should we assume the story to be your story—as readers clearly do—or is that a failure of imagination on their part, a symptom of the modern trend that always looks for the author in the work?
Ferrante: The four volumes of the Neapolitan novels are my story, yes, but only in the sense that I am the one who has given it the form of a novel and used my life experiences to inject truth into the literary invention. If I had wanted to recount my own story, I would have established a different pact with the reader, I would have signaled that I was writing an autobiography. I have not chosen the path of autobiography, nor will I choose it in the future, because I am convinced that fiction, when it works, is more charged with truth.
Jobey: Could you explain why you decided to keep your identity hidden—to maintain an “absence,” as you put it, from the business of publishing and promoting your books?
Ferrante: I believe that today it’s a mistake to fail to protect writing by guaranteeing it an autonomous space, far from the demands of the media and the marketplace. My own small cultural battle, now two decades long, is aimed mostly at readers. I think authors should be sought in the books they put their names to, not in the physical person who is writing or in his or her private life. Outside the texts and their expressive techniques, there is only idle gossip. Let’s restore authentic centrality to the books themselves and, if it’s appropriate, discuss the possible uses of idle gossip as promotion.
Jobey: Do you feel that fame will always cause damage to a writer’s work—or to the work of any creative person?
Ferrante: I don’t know. I simply believe that today it’s a mistake to let one’s person become better known than one’s work.
Jobey: Do members of your family and your friends know you are the author of your novels? Are there people you feel would be upset, or would make your life difficult, if your identity as the author of your novels were known?
Ferrante: At first I worried I would cause suffering to the people I care for. Now I no longer feel the need to protect my loved ones. They know writing is my life and they leave me alone in my little corner. The only condition is that I should do nothing to make them feel ashamed.
Jobey: How do you work with your English-language translator Ann Goldstein? Can you assess whether the voice that comes in your translated works is your “true” voice?
Ferrante: I trust her completely. I believe she has done everything possible to accommodate my Italian into her English with the best intentions.
Jobey: One of your self-criticisms—about The Days of Abandonment—is that you fear some parts might have “only the appearance of good writing.” What, for you, is the difference between “good” writing and “true” writing—or, at least, the kind of writing you feel you produce at your best?
Ferrante: A page is well written when the labor and the pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.
Jobey: You have said, talking about women writers today, that “we have to dig deep into our difference, using advanced tools.” Are there other writers who do that? Could you give some examples of women writers you admire—or writers in general?
Ferrante: The list would be too long. The present landscape of women’s writing is wide and very lively. I read a lot and the pages I love most are those that make me exclaim, “Here’s something I would never be able to do.” With those pages I am putting together my own personal anthology of regret.
Jobey: I know that many women write to you after reading your books. Do men?
Ferrante: At first there were more men than women. Now women outnumber them.
Jobey: When you have finally published a book, do you need a period of recuperation, of recovery? [Are there periods when you don’t write at all]
Ferrante: No. There is always something on my mind that bothers me, and writing about it puts me in a good mood.
Jobey: You have said that to reveal your identity now would be “deplorably inconsistent.” But do you nevertheless feel under pressure from your success? How does it feel when you walk into a bookshop, or an airport, and see a wall of your books on sale?
Ferrante: I carefully avoid such spectacles. Publication has always made me anxious. My text reproduced in thousands of copies strikes me as a form of presumption, makes me feel guilty.
Jobey: Do you feel that your identity is gradually being revealed? To unmask you now, for some literary journalists, would be considered a scoop.
Ferrante: A scoop? What nonsense. Who would be interested in what remains of me outside my books? The attention paid to them seems too much already.
Jobey: You have said that Lenù could not exist as a writer without the character of Lila. Is that true for you, too?
Ferrante: I perceive writing as if it were motivated and fed by the accidental bumping of my life against the lives of others. In this sense, yes, if I became impermeable, if other people no longer sowed disorder in me, I think I would stop writing.
Jobey: Are you writing another book?
Ferrante: Yes. But—right now—I doubt I will publish it.
NOTE
The interview with Liz Jobey, translated by Daniela Petracco, appeared in the Financial Times (U.K.) under the title “Women of 2015: Elena Ferrante, Writer.”
16.
THE SQUANDERING OF FEMALE INTELLIGENCE
Answers to questions from Deborah Orr
Orr: Usually, at this point in an interview, the writer sketches the subject and her surroundings. Under the circumstances, Elena, can I ask you to do this yourself, please?
Ferrante: I can’t. I don’t know how.
Orr: Can we assume, then, that you see Elena Ferrante as a somewhat mysterious person, without a home, without a family, who exists inside your head?
Ferrante: No, Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself—perhaps even too much—in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness. What I mean is that the author is the sum of the expressive strategies that shape an invented world, a concrete world that is populated by people and events. The rest is ordinary private
life.
Orr: Do you think it’s harder for women—especially mothers—to keep their creative lives and their private lives separate?
Ferrante: Women, in all fields—whether mothers or not—still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections. To give an outlet to their creativity is thus especially arduous. It requires strong motivation, strict discipline, and many compromises. Above all, it entails quite a few feelings of guilt. And in order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
Orr: Your novels are intimate, often domestic, but always with a strong sense of the socioeconomic forces under which your characters have been formed. Can you tell us a bit about the issues that have forged your own political consciousness?
Ferrante: I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring. I confuse names, minor events, political positions. But I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up surrounded by affluence. Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me, and I still feel a great deal of guilt toward those I left behind. I also had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder. Even when our circumstances improve, it’s like the color that inevitably rises to one’s cheeks after a strong emotion . . . I believe there is no story, however small, that can ignore that coloring.
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