Lagioia: The end of The Neapolitan Quartet seems to coincide with the end of a certain idea of Italy. Something that had been revived in the immediate aftermath of the war is beginning to seem worn out. I wonder if this is really true, or whether it’s just that Italy often seems to be dangling above some type of abyss—perhaps because, at times, as in the preceding quotation from Lenuccia, it does risk anticipating, concisely and nakedly, discourses that other countries of the world then digest rhetorically in a less immediate and less shocking way. We frequently find ourselves with no ground under our feet. Basically, if the Neapolitan Quartet had ended in the summer of 1992, after the death of the two Italian anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, there would have been a similar sense of being at the end of the line. The same could be said for 1994, or after the earthquake of 1980. Or this time, on the contrary, is our country turning (or has it finished turning) the page forever?
Ferrante: I don’t see the end of the line of anything. I don’t like either pessimists or optimists; I try only to look around. If the goal is a life that is tolerable, if not happy, there is no end of the line; rather, there’s a constant reconsideration of the route, which concerns not only single lives but—as I told you—generations. Neither you nor I—nobody—is restricted only to this “time-now” or even to “recent decades.”
Lagioia: We are the country of amoral family-ism. The family is the first social nucleus we experience and, often, also the last. The fact that we have historically been so uninterested in the common good beyond the door of our own home does not, I think, contradict the fact that the family is also a place of extremely violent clashes. For Lila and Elena it’s like that, continuously. Blood ties continue to want to be cut and, at the same time, to possess us. We agree that every rite of passage has a price. But is freeing oneself from the family impossible in Italy, even today, without passing through an absolutely useless amount of violence and suffering?
Ferrante: The family is violent in itself, as is everything that is based on blood ties—that is to say, the ties we don’t choose, ties that impose on us responsibility for the other even if we never chose to take it on. Feelings are always excessive in the family, both the good and the bad: we exaggeratedly confirm the former and exaggeratedly deny the latter. God the father is excessive. Abel is as excessive as Cain. Bad feelings are especially unbearable when someone related to us provokes them. Cain kills in order to cut the blood tie. He no longer wants to be his brother’s keeper. To be the keeper is an intolerable task, a wearying responsibility. Principally, it’s hard to accept that bad feelings are provoked not only by the stranger, the rival—the one who is on the other shore of “our” body of water, who is not on our soil and does not share our blood—but, perhaps with even greater compulsion, by those who are close to us, our mirror, the neighbor we must love, ourselves. Emancipation without trauma is possible only within a nucleus in which the self-referential has been opposed from the start and one has learned to love the other not as oneself—a tricky formula—but, rather, as the only possible way of experiencing the pleasure of being in the world. What corrupts us is the passion for ourselves, the urgent need for our own primacy.
Lagioia: Someone who is truly rooted in life doesn’t write novels. The relationship between Elena and Lila seems to me archetypal, from that point of view, in the sense that many friendships and rivalries function according to this dynamic. It is, if you will, the dynamic that binds artists to their muses, although the muses in this particular case are anything but ethereal. On the contrary, they are earthly to their core, committed to confronting life, to clashing with it wholeheartedly. It’s Lila who feels the things of the world in a more visceral way. And yet, for that very reason, she cannot bear witness in the way Elena can. Although Elena fears that sooner or later her friend will manage to write a marvelous book, a book capable of objectively restoring the balance between them, that can’t happen.
The implacability of such a rule is so recurrent that it makes me uneasy. To feel guilty about something that, if it suddenly had no more reason to exist, would be transformed into a threat. That is one of the paradoxes that seem to bind Elena to Lila. How can one try to undo it, or live with it? To bear witness on behalf of someone who will not do so herself might seem either a generous act or one of enormous arrogance. Or again—and this is the most painful hypothesis—it becomes a weapon to render the people we love harmless, even if it means that we crush them. What relationship do you have with writing from this point of view?
Ferrante: Writing is an act of pride. I’ve always known that, and so for a long time I hid the fact that I was writing, especially from the people I loved. I was afraid of exposing myself and of others’ disapproval. Jane Austen organized herself so that she could immediately hide her pages if someone came into the room where she had taken refuge. It’s a reaction I’m familiar with: you’re ashamed of your presumptuousness, because there is nothing that can justify it, not even success. However I state it, the fact remains that I have assumed the right to imprison others in what I seem to see, feel, think, imagine, and know. Is it a task? A mission? A vocation? Who called on me, who assigned me that task and that mission? A god? A people? A social class? A party? The culture industry? The lowly, the disinherited, the lost causes? The entire human race? The elusive subject that is women? My mother, my women friends? No—by now everything is simple, and it’s blindingly obvious that I alone authorized myself. I assigned myself, for motives that are obscure even to me, the job of describing what I know of my era, that is—in its simplest form—what happened under my nose, that is to say the life, the dreams, the fantasies, the speech of a narrow group of people and events, within a restricted space, in an unimportant language made even less important by the use I make of it. One tends to say: let’s not overdo it, it’s only a job. It may be that things are like that now. Things change and the verbal vestments in which we wrap them change. But pride remains. I remain, I who spend a large part of my day reading and writing, because I have assigned myself the task of describing. And I cannot soothe myself by saying: it’s a job. When did I ever consider writing a job? I’ve never written to earn a living. I write to bear witness to the fact that I have lived and have sought a means of measuring myself and others, since those others couldn’t or didn’t know how or didn’t want to do it. What is this if not pride? And what does it imply if not, “You don’t know how to see me and see yourselves, but I see myself and I see you?” No, there is no way around it. The only possibility is to learn to put the “I” in perspective, to pour it into the work and then go away, to consider writing the thing that separates from us the moment it’s complete, one of the many collateral effects of an active life.
NOTE
The interview with Nicola Lagioia (Italy) appeared on April 3, 2016, in La Repubblica (Italy), under the title “Perché scrivo. Elena Ferrante sono io” (“Why I Write. Elena Ferrante c’est moi”).
Following is the e-mail exchange between Nicola Lagioia, Sandra Ozzola, and Elena Ferrante that accompanied Lagioia’s questions.
February 3, 2015
Dear Elena Ferrante,
Thank you for agreeing to this conversation. But first I want to thank you for having written a work as beautiful, potent, and humane as the Neapolitan Quartet. The way this work raises the bar—or puts it back where it ought to be—makes those who do not hold themselves to that standard culpable.
As you’ll see, my questions are more like reflections, or the beginning of a conversation. They’re my response to the books, and I hope you might consider them starting points for further conversation on the friction between our world and the world you’ve created. It’s been wonderful to be in the company of your voice.
Fondly and with admiration,
Nicola Lagioia
February 27, 2015
Dear Nicola Lagioia,
I don’t know how to apologize. I very much apprec
iated your observations and your questions, I attempted to answer them, but I have to admit that, at least for now, I haven’t succeeded. First I had a nasty flu that prevented me from answering, and now there’s this business of the Strega Prize.11 I feel such a sense of unease and distrust these days that I can no longer write even half a word without fearing that, once published, it might be distorted or purposely taken out of context and used in a malicious way. So I stopped working on the answers; I can’t do it with serenity. Instead I’m reading your Ferocity with great enthusiasm. I seem to find on every page confirmation of the great, truthful passion for literature that I immediately perceived in your questions and the way you explained them. I will certainly continue with the interview, if only because of the trust you inspire and for the pleasure of talking to you. But not during this especially depressing period. I hope that you’re not angry with me—I would be sorry for it.
Elena Ferrante
February 28, 2015
Dear Elena Ferrante,
In Italy there is nothing literary about literary gossip: it’s merely wearisome. Among other things, I myself did not know, when I sent you the questions, that Einaudi would nominate me for the Strega, and I suppose you didn’t know about your nomination, either. Immediately after learning about our nominations, I thought: maybe our talk could be seen as a liberating moment of fair play between two nominated writers who prefer simply to talk about literature, because that is the only thing that interests them. I also understand, however, that there are those who are ready to seize the slightest opportunity to spread gossip and stupidity. Yet I won’t stay away from the reading on March 13th. I will go with great pleasure to read some pages of the Neapolitan Quartet at Libri Come. If at some point in the future you’d like to resume our conversation, I’d be pleased. Gossip passes, good books remain, and it’s never too late to talk about them.
Fondly,
Nicola
September 30, 2015
Dear Nicola, our author asks us to forward you these answers to your wonderful questions/non-questions. It seems to me that a very interesting dialogue emerges. But she asks that for the time being it not be published. Warm wishes from all of us,
Sandra
Dear Nicola,
I had promised you I would try to answer your questions once the tension of the Strega was over. Now I have done so, but I ask you not to publish anything, for the moment. Some of the answers are disproportionately long, on some points they’re confused, and I’m afraid that here and there I’ve been rash. I’m sending you the text anyway, but only because every promise is a debt and because I have great respect for you.
I was happy to proceed by themes, as you suggested. But I tried, within the limits of the possible, to keep the discussion away from the Neapolitan Quartet. Like all books—whether good or bad—the Neapolitan Quartet is an elastic organism, and for readers it should remain so: open to every impression. I often quote with pleasure the page that Barthes, commenting on Balzac’s Sarrasine, dedicated to the role of the S and the Z. Whether it’s a solid critical piece or highly fanciful nonsense, that page is an extraordinary demonstration that a text is full of possibilities and that not just the sentence, not just the name, but even the individual letters of a story exist precisely to ignite the mind of the reader. To ruin its flexibility by providing, as the author, the “right interpretation,” is therefore a mortal sin. Every time I do it, I regret it. And yet surely, even in this case, I’ve done it here and there. Maybe we should always assume that what the author imagines he has written is no more or less valid than what the reader imagines he has read. By this I don’t mean that your observations are off base; I’m only trying to separate my book from my thoughts about it, and from what I wrote in this specific case.
Elena
October 1, 2015
Dear Sandra,
Please thank Elena Ferrante for me. Many of the answers seem to me not only good but important, because they take on the theme of literary writing (the approach to the page on the part of a writer) in a manner that’s hard to find in the cultural debate, especially in Italy.
As for possible future publication: let’s do what seems best to Elena Ferrante. If she wants to adjust, polish, clarify the argument, that’s fine, of course. For me literary needs always take precedence over journalistic ones.
Fondly,
Nicola
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elena Ferrante is the author of The Days of Abandonment (Europa, 2005), Troubling Love (Europa, 2006), The Lost Daughter (Europa, 2008) and the Neapolitan Quartet (Europa, 2012-2015). She is also the author of a children’s picture book illustrated by Mara Cerri, The Beach at Night.
NOTES
1Luce Irigaray (1932, Belgium) is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and cultural theorist.
2Luisa Muraro (1940, Italy) is an Italian feminist, philosopher, and historian.
3Salvatore Di Giacomo (1860-1934) was a Neapolitan poet, songwriter, and playwright.
4Francesco Jovine (1902-1950) was an Italian novelist, journalist, and essayist.
5Adriano Sofri: (b. 1942, Trieste) is a journalist, writer, and former leader of the left-wing militant movement Lotta Continua. He was sentenced in 1988 to twenty-two years in prison for instigating the murder of the police officer Luigi Calabresi. Sofri was released in 2012.
6Harvard University Press, 2006. Trans. Howard Eiland
7L’indice dei libri del mese, Italian monthly magazine founded in 1984.
8M. Delly was the pseudonym of the siblings Jeanne-Marie Petitjean de La Rosière (1875-1947) and Frédéric Petitjean de La Rosière (1876-1949), authors of popular romance novels.
9Ninetto Davoli: an Italian actor (b. 1948) who appeared in many films directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
10The main character in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed.
11Italy’s best known literary prize. Both Ferrante and Lagioia were finalists for the 2015 prize. Lagioia’s Ferocity won.
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