Author Archives: Julie Anne Forgione

The Earth Moves, But Not in a Good Way

Stefania mentioned early in the semester that Ferrante’s symbols are pretty obvious.

Of all the dissolutions, blurring of boundaries, penetrations, and loss of control that occur in the novel, the earthquake (the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, in fact) is by far the most dramatic: a life-threatening event delivered up by the physical world which occurs when Elena and Lila, both pregnant, are sitting in Lila’s kitchen having a conversation that Elena secretly hopes will yield up Lila’s unpleasant knowledge about Nino.

Just before her body registers the imminent earthquake – “I tried to resume the conversation but something wasn’t right…” (169) – Elena has a confused thought about changing the way she writes to be more like the way Lila talks, that is, leaving gaps that the reader has to fill in rather than telling everything. She envisions the influence of the Solara brothers penetrating the neighborhood anew with their heroin distribution and has flashes of other kinds of penetration: homosexual acts, shooting up. In short, the merging of “desire and death” (169).

Likewise Elena changes her mind, knowing that Lila would penetrate her mind with information she is not ready to handle, and she moves to push it all out of her mind. Then the earthquake hits, finishing the work of repressing her thoughts and petty feelings.

Her description of the shock, of the earthquake “crashing and shattering” “our foundations” (170) seems baldly metaphoric because of what follows. During the evening and night of the earthquake, Lila, terrified and stripped bare of her defenses, confesses in stark terms her smarginatura, revealing to Elena her lifelong, intricate, and painstaking strategies to keep it at bay. Then, very soon afterward, Elena’s mother is finally, clearly, terminally ill; Elena gives birth to the child she so ardently desired; her mother dies; and she discovers Nino in flagrante delicto with the maid in her bathroom. Her “foundations” (170) and the foundations of Naples have suffered violent breakage and destruction; her overlapping of the two is another instance of the tenuous nature of boundaries, in this case the ones between herself and the city itself.

Elena Lets Go

Lila has the capacity to code-switch as much as Elena, but they do so for vastly different reasons. In her daily life Lila has no need for Italian; her vernacular is dialect, and only in polite company does she use standard Italian to show she has a grasp of an elevated subject, using elevated language. But she doesn’t use it fluidly – her Italian can be somewhat fusty or too literary.

Elena, on the other hand, by the time she is thirty or so, resorts to dialect when she is under duress or attack. She’s lived among the intellectual class since Pisa, where she diligently applied herself to blending in. Yet there she first discovers the power of her dialect. When a female acquaintance at the Scuola Normale accuses her of stealing, she slaps and insults her in dialect, and the girl backs down.

Elena refers to other occasions in her marriage when she insults Pietro, but she uses reported speech and does not specify that she has mixed dialect words in with Italian (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, chapter 121). Also, when Lila and Elena talk on the phone, Elena never says if they switch back and forth or not.

Elena telephones Nino and speaks to Eleonora (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, chapter 118), who cries that she will smash her face if she calls again. In her mental diatribe against Eleonora, Elena finds herself using insults in dialect (chapter 119). She is beside herself, ready to do worse damage than what Eleonora threatened. She refers to “another” self “buried under a crust of meekness” who mixes dialect and Italian.

I can’t help but think of the screaming fights of the mothers in the street that she witnessed as a girl. Her carefully built, assiduous habits of study, her discipline, her pitiless self-assimilation, splinter under the force of the violence of desire and rebellion that simmered and were repressed for so long.

“Things Fall Apart”

Paola Agosti - Roma, gennaio 1975
Manifestazione femminista per la depenalizzazione dell’aborto, Roma gennaio 1975. Paolo Agosti.
Manifestazione davanti al tribunale per il processo ai violentatori di Claudia Caputi. Roma, 4 aprile 1977. Paola Agosti

“The long story of Elena Greco is marked everywhere by instability…I wanted everything to take shape and then lose its shape” (Frantumaglia, 368).

For me, there is an interweaving between the meta nature of this book; the social and political history that inserts itself into the narrative and into Elena’s life; and Ferrante’s thoughts on the instability or blurring of boundaries (personified by Lila’s experience of smarginatura) and of the past and on Elena’s futile attempt to order her life into a narrative (as with her lived life, Ferrante says that any order or structure in her narrative breaks down in the end).

In the interview with Nicola Lagioia in Frantumaglia, Ferrante says that about Elena’s life there is nothing stable. I think the instability of her life is a stand-in for anyone’s life in contemporary society, the Italian particulars aside. Ferrante speaks of the illusion of an individual alone and separate in the world; she can’t even write without remembering and feeling the presence of others (365). The times in which she lives – which are also the times in which Ferrante and all of us in the class have lived, if only partially – are marked by upheaval, change, and uncertainty. The exterior mirrors the interior, and vice versa. No one who has lived from the end of World War II to the present in Italy has escaped this instability. In life as in fiction.

When Elena’s resolve and the life she so studiously built are in the midst of breaking down, she takes her family to visit Naples with some idea of rescuing her sister Elisa from the clutches of Marcello Solara. The visit (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay 319-347) does not go as she hopes. No one (an Italian, anyway) can break the “ties to the neighborhood”; Ferrante speaks of those ties reappearing whenever the individual thinks they are gone (367), and for Elena they return with a vengeance: “I realized my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect…that the neighborhood…was imposing its language on me, its mode of acting and reacting…” (328).

And every time Elena resolves to break with Lila – and she’s done this 3-4 times so far – she can’t. After the visit, she tells herself, “I had wanted to become something…only because I was afraid that Lila would become someone and I would stay behind. My becoming was a becoming in her wake. I had to start again to become, but for myself, as an adult, outside of her” (347).

She finds her visits to Mariarosa’s both a frustration and a haven, but that is where she has some new thoughts about the way men are only interested in women to show them that they could do it better. Mariarosa’s genuine interest in her ideas sparks her desire to write again, and she writes a short book. But she cannot share her interest in new feminist ideas with Lila. They no longer understand each other, they can no longer step in and out of each other. Neither has told the truth about her life to the other for years already.

And then, the ultimate happens. Nino reappears. When she runs away with him and takes her very first flight, the book ends with her telling us that the very floor of the airplane, “the only surface I could count on – was trembling.” Nothing is solid anymore. Everything is dissolving: her resolve, her family, her carefully constructed life.

Il Sessantotto: Social and Political Upheaval in 60s and 70s Italy

The larger world imposes itself briefly on Elena in volume 1, in Pasquale and Lila’s conversations about the Fascists, Monarchists, and camorristi in the rione. At Pisa, she allows herself to be carried along on her Communist boyfriend Franco’s passion for revolution, but has no real feeling about it. Early on in the third volume, Nino irrupts into Elena’s life, bringing politics and current events with him (Those Who Leave, p. 30-32), and from there they impose themselves on her life.

Elena marries Pietro in May of 1967 or 1968. In 1968, known as Il Sessantotto, the student and worker revolt began in earnest. It had started in fall 1967 in Turin and spread to Milan, Pisa, Florence, Rome, and Naples (“Italian Students in Revolt against Universities,” NYT, 2/9/1968). Autunno caldo of 1969–70 followed.

Students rose up because, with Italy’s economic miracle, many students from a peasant or working class background (Elena would not have been the only one) had entered university (Those Who Leave, p. 26-7, 54), and they were responsible for the beginnings of a revolt against an antiquated, rigid educational system and a capitalist, patriarchal society.

I am posting a few photographs (and an excerpt from a blog) for those who are too young to remember, and for myself, to remind myself, young as I was when it was happening, what those years were like. I had no idea then that young people and workers were protesting not only in the United States but also in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and other countries.

https://digilander.libero.it/latesina2004/storia_2.htm
Student at nonviolent demonstration being carried out of a university, 1968. Author unknown. Wikimedia Commons.
Demonstration: clashes in the piazza, early 1970. A. Bonasia. Wikimedia Commons.
File:Roma68.jpg
Rome, February 1968. Student demonstration in front of the department of literature. Fausto Giaccone. Wikipedia.
Roberto Bartoli. http://robertobartali.it/cap01.htm
“Fu in un’università degli Stati Uniti, a Berkeley in California, che ebbe inizio la contestazione giovanile, una sorta di virus destinato presto a diffondersi in tutto il mondo. La protesta investì i valori di una società individualista e conformista, negando la presunta neutralità della scienza e delle istituzioni sociali; si rifiutò la repressione e l’autoritarismo delle vecchie generazioni in nome di un mondo più libero” (Il Sessantotto).
This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.png
Women’s demonstration in defense of the abortion law. Florence, 1975. Dino Fracchia/Alamy Stock Photo

Mom, Is That You?

Sorrows, oil on linen. Titian. 1554. Prado, Madrid.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, oil on canvas. Richard Rothwell. 1840. National Portrait Gallery, London.

“As women, workers, writers, and mothers, Ferrante’s characters seek fulfillment outside the role of mother as well as in it” (293). Would we agree, though, that the novels “revolve around the maternal figure” (294) in order to create “a new maternal signifier” (294)? I have thought of the friendship between Elena and Lila as being the central relationship of the novels. And now, exploring the novels as metafiction is kind of making my head explode, because I think I am mapping out a framework for the novels, which exists beyond (meta!) any plot or psychological or character or archetype concerns.

According to Van Ness, Ferrante “creates…an image of motherhood that is nuanced, complex, and alive with contradiction” (294). Perhaps as infants we experienced the undifferentiated Mother and always want to go back there. But women, who must face the choice of becoming mothers or not, know that, though they may be their child’s mother, they are Subject, not Other (see de Beauvoir). An individual woman lives and breathes as a mother, and an individual mother lives and breathes as a woman: she is an actual individual, not the archetype that Van Ness describes. I think this struggle on Elena and Lila’s part to be subject, not object, is what Ferrante is taking on regarding “the maternal figure” (294). Van Ness writes that the novels go against the suffering, undifferentiated Mother (294): “Ferrante…’births’ her novels as maternal ‘word flesh,'” defying the stereotype of the mother who exists only for her child (295).

The pairing of the “maternal sublime” with the “artistic sublime” (295-6) makes me think of Elena’s writing of her short novel. Afterward, she must make corrections and edits and she even submits to her boyfriend’s judgment (Pietro is going to be a problem – he doesn’t wholly accept who Elena is) that she should tone down the sex scene, but the writing of the novel is one continuous experience, a kind of trance in which she is suspended for a number of days. How often is writing actually like this?

Finally, Van Ness claims Elena is a “maternal figure” (295) because she births a books and later she’ll have a child. She has to leave her dialect, the neighborhood, her family, Naples, and Lila to become a “speaking mother” (296). She has to leave the undifferentiated Mother behind (when she throws Lila’s doll into the cellar, right after Lila threw her doll [297-8]). Thus women “birth” works of art, but men do not. We can’t get away from our biology or the archetype.

Why is this kind of story – grappling with the Mother figure, having a friendship with another girl that towers over every other subsequent relationship – still so…unusual in western literature. So noteworthy. Women play numberless roles in the domestic sphere and in public life, doing vast – vast! – amounts of unpaid work, yet these roles and this labor is unremarked upon, unappreciated, invisible. Elena will finally be recognized, differentiated from her own mother, from the rione, from her “mother tongue” (299), i.e., her dialect.

Our Heroine Is Breathless Only on the Inside

Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960). Rialto Pictures/StudioCanal.

The Prologue closes as Elena begins to type in the middle of the night, is she typing out all four books at one go? We don’t know, but we know it’s impossible. But when I sit to type out a remembered conversation or encounter, of necessity I type quickly, perhaps writing run-on sentences as I go. As Christopher Warley writes, “Ferrante deploys the run-on to create a momentum that is headlong and occasionally breathless but still intimate—here you are, inside the operation of Elena’s head, everything she thinks coming out in the order it occurs to her….” But let’s be clear: Ferrante’s run-ons are clearly stylistic choices or, to be more precise, a style employed to build a cumulative effect with language, with structure, on a sentence level. This is something you can only do by writing purposely, by planning, by rereading and editing your own writing. The prologue, the impulse to sit down to write it all out, is a conceit that I was acutely aware of the first time I read the novel(s). No one can write even a tenth of that at one sitting.

Not only does Ferrante use the comma splice to create her run-ons, she uses semi-colons. Also, in lists, she does not use “and” before the last thing in the list: “…[I]t had become clear to her that her life would forever be Stefano, the grocery stores, the marriage of her brother and Pinuccia, the conversations with Pasquale and Carmen, the petty war with the Solaras” (161).

Here’s an example of Warley’s claim: “[Lila] admitted she had been sure she would be attractive to the males, she always was. Instead she immediately felt voiceless, graceless, deprived of movement, of beauty. She listed details: even when we were next to each other, people chose to speak only to me; they had brought me pastries, a drink, no one had done anything for her; Armando had shown me a family portrait, something from the seventeenth century, he had talked to me about it for a quarter of an hour; she had been treated as if she weren’t capable of understanding” (161).

Lenù is using information she gained from the notebooks (and, I wonder, is she here mimicking Lila’s style of notebook writing, its structure?). But, in the moment, she only knows that after the party Lila spitefully ridicules the evening, the people and the conversation, and even Lenù herself. Thus, from that night, begins Lenù’s “first break and a long separation from Lila” (163). And so Ferrante uses run-ons to signal a transition to a new period in Lenù’s life.

When I tutor I tell beginning writers who use run-ons that they shouldn’t use them because the professor will expect them not to; because they do not know they are writing them; because they have to learn how to structure sentences. But I almost always also say that we speak in run-on sentences, and in fiction and poetry you can do anything you want. The point is to use any construction, device, or strategy consciously as part of your style. Same with fragments, for example.

I use run-on sentences in my creative writing, but not only in my draft. I use them with purpose. I like that they plunge the reader forward and are, as Warley says, “breathless.” They’re good for interiority, which is one (of the many) frame(s) for the whole book. Run-ons don’t give the character time to pause and reflect; as Warley points out, Elena remains caught in the action, in the scene, by means of those sentences. Maybe I started using them from reading Ferrante years ago.

Is This Now, or Is This Then?

November 24, 1954: Actress Pier Angeli and singer Vic Damone were married from 1954-1958 ..... (Wife # 1)
Pier Angeli with husband Vic Damone, St. Timothy’s Church, Los Angeles, 1954. Alamy stock photo.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing, it doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.” – Amy Adams, speaking to her daughter at her birth, in Arrival

Apparently it is not only Walter Benjamin who sees time as porous, though he speaks specifically of Naples, and he confines the porosity to days within a week, not to a mix of past and present: “…[T]he festival penetrates each and every working day….A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday, and how much weekday in this Sunday!” However, implied throughout “Naples” is the sense of the Neapolitans’ way of life as being from the past. Ferrante/Elena (F/E) feels the past so keenly that she says to herself, in My Brilliant Friend‘s prologue, “We’ll see who wins this time” (23), as she begins to write her and Lila’s history. On a personal note, as someone who has been around for a while, I can testify that Faulkner’s words ring true. And as for Austen…well, chin up, old girl, it ain’t happening here.

As she does in the first volume, F/E disrupts the chronology when she begins the second volume, Story of a New Name. After the prologue of My Brilliant Friend, F/E disrupts the chronology a few more times around key events. The chronology is so complex (to me) that I don’t want to attempt it in this blog. I’ll limit the discussion to a couple disruptions: immediately after the brief account of the doll-throwing incident the narration switches, to go back in time to give the reader context and come back to that day. Later, the author(s) fast forwards to the stone throwing incident and jumps back again.

The Story of a New Name, unlike My Brilliant Friend, is not divided into a prologue and several chronological books. Rather, the author(s) dives right in; the story simply resumes. The way the chapters are only signaled by modest little numbers that do not even begin on a new page adds to the feeling that we are simply and immediately being plunged into the action in New Name. And while volume I is divided into two chronological sections- “Childhood” and “Adolescence,” in New Name one chapter simply follows another.

Chapter 1 takes place in 1966 in the framework of Elena again looking back from the present, to when Lila gave her a box of notebooks. The notebooks record events from before 1966, so again the narration takes a step backward as Elena describes some of their contents. The last episode in the notebooks that Elena refers to, before she pushes the box into the river, is Marcello Solara’s showing up at the wedding wearing the shoes – which the first volume closed with.

Then chapter 2 begins, immediately jumping back to that same moment/sequence, Elena continuing the story with only the information she had that day, not adding what the notebooks tell her. We do not return to 1966; and she does not use information from the notebooks till much later in this volume — with the notable exception, in chapters 6-8, of Stefano’s brutal rape of Lila on their wedding night and their return to Naples. In chapter 9, Elena’s eyewitness account resumes.

Time is fluid, not just porous; F/E is omniscient, and that omniscience is slowly revealing itself; she knows the story so well that she can easily disrupt the chronology at key points. In Arrival, Amy Adams’ character actually begins to experience time as the visiting aliens do: not as linear, but as looping in on itself, taking you with it so that one moment is “now” and the next is “then,” and so “now” becomes the future.

The Porosity of the Female Body

A woman reading a book in the Mergellina area at the foot of Posillipo hill. Naples, 1963.
Mondadori Portfolio—Getty Images

In “Naples,” Benjamin writes of the porosity of private life there: “Similarly dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life” (174). For Benjamin, an upper class Jew from Berlin, the lack of boundaries between the public and the private in Naples must have been stark. Ferrante writes about the porosity of the private and public existence of the families of the neighborhood but goes a step further, writing from the inside–unlike Benjamin, who writes as an observer–about the porosity of the girls’ lives and bodies:

​”I looked at her from the window, and I felt that her earlier shape had broken, and I thought again of that wonderful passage of the letter, of the cracked and crumpled copper [229]. It was an image that I used all the time, whenever I noticed a fracture in her or in me. I knew–perhaps I hoped–that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again” (Ferrante, 265-6).

Containment and porosity run through the book: Lenù watches Lila from an interior, through the window; the copper pot inexplicably explodes; Lila is a young woman who cannot be contained (though we will see just who tries to do so); women’s lives and bodies are by nature fragmented; their efforts to hold themselves together by controlling and directing outside events, through consulting, scheming, strategizing with each other, are futile. Lenù struggles to simultaneously contain herself and control events by holding in her emotions (joy, moroseness, depression, disappointment) and by ordering and directing events with Lila. Lenù is constrained from acting true to herself, whereas Lila shows her violent emotions. Both are trying to survive but use opposite tactics.

A little later in his observations regarding private life, Benjamin claims, “each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life,” (174) which contrasts starkly with the Northern European custom of dividing public and private. I’ve been thinking that, as a product of an ordered and rigid society, he is idealizing the Neapolitan porosity of the domestic and the street: “Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most radiant freedom of thought” (175), but when I did a little research, I found that he is on the side of experiential knowledge, so he is writing a kind of love letter to Naples (as Paul writes in his Post 3), so now I think he’s willingly giving himself up to his direct experience of Naples and sees the Neapolitans as able to live something that is “radiant,” something he cannot do. Ferrante’s view, on the other hand, is pretty tarnished.
There is some research on the history of privacy in Northern Europe, but I have found nothing on the subject re Southern Europe. Privacy is a way of controlling others’ access to you. Privacy was and is a privilege of the wealthy, the middle class. Working class and poor people, who inhabit smaller spaces and typically live close to their neighbors, have it to a much lesser extent. In the Naples of Ferrante, neither Lenù nor hardly anyone she knows has the luxury of privacy; perhaps Maestra Oliviera is the exception. The whole neighborhood knows when a family explodes into a quarrel. Arguments, beatings, and worse happen in public spaces. And to take it further, to the body: a body cannot be separate from the state of things, and certainly not a female body, which by its nature is open to penetration.

Luck and Stealth Are for Escape Artists

In my Post 1, about Lenù’s first lesson in a skill “at which [she] would later excel” (54) – holding back her fear and despair – I focused on a passage within the section about the beginning of the girls’ friendship. Lila’s throwing Lenù’s doll down the grate is only one example of her systematic testing of her friend. Lenù rises to the challenge, choosing between “two agonies” and throwing Nu down the abyss as though it were a natural gesture, even as she keenly feels the risk she is taking.

This is not the only time Lenù keeps her thoughts and feelings to herself when she’s with Lila. Though initially she has the impulse to tell Lila that she has seen Nino at middle school, she decides not to tell her (158). When Lila tells Lenù that gramophone is a Greek word, Lenù makes an excuse and leaves (141). She has hidden feelings of upset at other times too, like when she realizes that Pasquale paid attention to her only to get close to Lila (130). And when she can’t hold back her feelings, she makes an excuse – she tells Lila that she was crying “because of the bracelet” after Lila threatens to kill Marcello Solara (136).

Lenù is luckier than her friend in getting to go to middle school and, later, high school, A sequence of events will lead her to a different kind of life. The teacher’s invitation for Lenù to spend part of her fifteenth summer on Ischia is one of those lucky events; on Ischia, she “bloom[s]” (209).

http://www.naviearmatori.net/ita/foto-38241-4.html

In addition to being luckier than Lila regarding going past elementary school, it’s through stealth that Lenù will succeed in getting away. As smart as Lila is, it’s Lenù who is the one who ultimately understands that she has grown too big for the neighborhood. Rejoicing in the new (like when her father shows her Naples [138] or her time on Ischia) and her skill at not blowing up when she’s angry are going to get her out of the dead end life of the rione.