Category Archives: Post 3

Porosity: Private is Public

I chose to write about Benjamin’s idea of porosity and the intermingling of private and public life in Naples. Benjamin describes this particular attribute of Naples as, “… each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life” (174). The line between private and public life in Naples is blurred and this also rings true in the life of Lila Cerullo.

            When Benjamin talks of porosity, he states, “So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out” (174). In other words, private life bursts out of homes in a way that privacy can no longer exist in the home. Without privacy, that home no longer feels like a place of refuge but more like an extension of street life where anything becomes a spectacle. This reminds me of how Lila explains her summer through the letter she sends Lenù while she is in Ischia. While Lenù is gone, Lila’s home life becomes street life as Marcello Solara continuously invites himself over for dinner at the Cerullo house. Lila not only has to deal with Marcello’s love conquest but also the scrutiny of those around her concerning her and Marcello’s relationship:

“Otherwise, everyone’s anger was unloaded on her: her brothers anger because she had abandoned him to his fate as a slave of their father while she set off on a marriage that would make her a lady; the anger of Fernando and Nunzia because she was not nice to Solara but, rather, treated him like dirt; finally the anger of Marcello, who, although she hadn’t accepted him, felt increasingly that he was her fiancé, in fact her master, and tended to pass from silent devotion to attempts to kiss her, to suspicious questions about where she went during the day, whom she saw, if she had other boyfriends, if she had even just touched anyone” (228).

 Lila’s home life becomes even more public when Marcello buys the Cerullo home a television to which Lenù explains, “… and now half the neighborhood, including my mother, my father, and my sister and brothers, came to the Cerullo house to see the miracle” (228). Lila explains this constant pervasion of her home life as, “… feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her” (229). Benjamin explains this exact pervasion of the home by stating, “Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and alter, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room” (174). Lila is faced with the porosity of life in Naples in which private and public are one and the same. This characteristic of the rione leaves Lila feeling as though she has no refuge and is simply stuck in the public eye.     

Delight Within The Structure Of Naples

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unforeseen constellations.(Benjamin 167-168)

This quote above is from Walter Benjamin, “Naples” and it resonated with me for I saw Naples as a stage where it was easy to hide true intentions. The way this city was built allowed some force or someone who is pulling the strings decide what the audience gets to see. Everything else that was considered to be too harsh or extreme were kept behind the stage.

I wasn’t the only one who saw “Naples” as place where one can succumb to delight without the need to attract attention. Jacqueline Vargas’s post, Porosity: Private is Public touches the contradiction within how life is depicted in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The private vs. public life is at a equilibrium here. Lila has the life of the city within her home, but It’s not necessarily public to everyone around.

Irini Belitsis bought up an interested notion in her post The Clichéd View of Naples in which tourist don’t see Naples as it truly is. A city that has seen its fair share of chaos. Everyone else in the novel My Brilliant Friend is well aware of its harshness but the international audience don’t see it as so. When people who are not from Naples think of this place as a magnificent paradise that is untouched by the outside world. You and I know that it’s false, but Naples does not reflect that sense. This city is isolated to the effects of the world, and I wonder if there a isolation within the isolation. Specifically, the realness the depicted in the novel and how it’s not public knowledge and the deeper isolation from the world that is oblivious to this.

Ariana Guzman’s excellent post Naples as a Theater mentioned what I wanted to touch in my meta post that Naples is a stage in itself. As Guzman said herself that Lila’s name carries weight and value that only has structure because it’s an element within the stage. With that in mind, as William Shakespeare coined the phrase in Act-II, Scene-VII of the play As You Like It “All the world’s a stage,/ And all the men and women merely players”.

Why So Serious[ly]…Grey?

1950s Fruit Market in Santa Lucia, Naples https://www.alamy.com/travel-to-naples-italy-in-1950s-fruit-market-in-santa-lucia-naples-obstmarkt-im-viertel-santa-lucia-in-neapel-italien-image-date-1954-photo-erich-andres-image238538713.html

Benjamin introduces the notion of Naples’s characteristic grayness, a color that indicates lifelessness, lack of vigor as well as a lack of ferocity that entices and enchants outsiders in a gentle rather than fearful manner. He goes on to point out that, “Fantastic reports by travellers have touched up the city. In reality it is grey: a grey-red or ochre, a grey-white. And entirely grey against sky and sea. It is this, not least, that disheartens the tourist,” (Benjamin 169). He begins this section of the article by making it clear that Naples should not be regarded as an animated city, as false advertising might say. Furthermore, Benjamin views this city as being entirely embraced by this gray color that sets the mood as one cruises through its mazes. The use of the words ‘sky’ and ‘seas’ is an allusion to the organs of a city that reflect the health and happiness of the people and animals who inhabit it as well as the places themselves, with their unique foods and styles. According to him, these elements as a whole create a disappointing and downtrodden image of a forgotten city in the eyes of a curious and eager tourist who may have simply read travel brochures and read about the most wonderfully wealthy and touristy spots, yet did not and will not wish to become exposed to the city’s realities.

This seems to have an element of truth to it, according to Elena’s inside perception. After returning from a month long vacation in the island of Ischia, which had been both refreshing and heartwarming, aside from the traumatic and horrendous assault during the last night, she not only notices physical differences on herself but the ‘grey[ness]’ of the city is highlighted before her eyes. She makes a note, “As long as I had been immersed in the colors of Ischia, amid sunburned faces, my transformation had seemed suitable…The people, the buildings, the dusty, busy stradone had the appearance of a poorly printed photograph, like the ones in the newspapers,” (Ferrante 233). There are two important points here. Primarily, although she is now satisfied with her outward appearance, having rid of her physical insecurities thanks to the sea and sunshine, she still feels out of place. The clean and healing sea air combined with the never-ending sunshine and the healthy appearances of people who enjoy such natural luxuries every day, had made her feel at home. While she now has a renewed sense of health and beauty, the return to her old neighborhood invokes a sense of being an outsider. The familiar neighborhood of her childhood now appears, before her eyes, to be an ancient and ruined ‘photograph’. Such a description indicates that it is both a forgotten and unnecessary city, not only to her new healthy self but to the outside world in general. It is a harsh observation that implies a longing on Elena’s part to return to the peaceful, carefree and clean atmosphere of the Ischia sea. She even uses the word ‘dusty’ which gives an ill demeanor to the city while its business and activities do not signify livelihood but rather repetition and mindlessness: a collective forgetfulness that a happier outside world exists. In summary, Elena’s description is reminiscent of her old desires to escape the neighborhood and supports Benjamin’s perception of a cohesively grey Naples. However unfair it may seem, as an outsider, as well, it is hard to distinguish between whether the city, itself, is grey or the grayness flows within Elena or even Benjamin, creating a river of yearning for an unfamiliar city.

What do I have?

“Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other. She has Stefano, I said to myself after the episode of the glasses. She snaps her fingers and immediately has my repaired. What do I have? I answered that I had school, a privilege she had lost forever. That is my wealth, I tried to convince myself. And in fact that year all the teachers began to praise me again….I displayed my successes as if they were my mother’s silver bracelet, and yet I didn’t know what to do with that virtuosity. (Ferrante 259)”

Not only does this passage give insight to Lila and Lenu’s relationship, it also brings up the question of what people truly consider valuable when they are living in poverty or any other unfortunate circumstance. Benjamin’s piece on Naples puts emphasis on the poverty that the residents live under. Often times it is seen that individuals that live under unfortunate circumstances often find something to make them feel grateful for the livelihood they do have. In this case, Lenu does not have money so she attempts to find virtue in scholarly praise, chance at education, and good grades. When examining all the things she listed, you can clearly see that what she considers wealth is her education and the experience that comes along with it. Ultimately, while it is a great thing to find the good in everything despite adversity you may face, Lenu is stuck wondering what to do with what she considers her wealth.

The Clichéd View of Naples

Walter Benjamin’s take on Naples includes ideas about the “banal tourist” (164). The tourist visits the city to observe much of the other topics of Benjamin’s essay such as the crime, poverty, Camorra, and the gray working-class rione. Benjamin writes that the tourist “fares no better” in Naples (164). I interpreted this as the idea that the tourists who may visit the city with all clichéd purposes and stereotypes in mind may not end up as satisfied once they authentically experience real Naples.

One could argue, as many Italians probably do, that Ferrante’s novel is crowded with these same clichés of Naples recovering from WWII. While corruption, violence, poverty, and strife were certainly prevalent, as they were in many Europeans cities post-war, Ferrante’s book advocates the usual stereotypes that enthrall the foreign reader and tourist into Naples.

The foundations of Ferrante’s plot consist of two poor girls navigating their way through a difficult life. The version of Naples full of the Camorra, disorder, and discomfort is attractive to readers outside of Italy because it is how the city is constantly depicted for the international eye. It is difficult for me to fully decide my take on this novel because it seems rather challenging to write about this period of time in Naples without including the clichés, of which many hold truths to them.

Benjamin’s Image of Naples

In “Naples,” Walter Benjamin focuses a lot on the poverty of Naples. He makes note that even though many households in Naples are very poor, they still work to make themselves seem more affluent. Benjamin says, “Even the poorest . . . [household] is as full of wax candles, biscuit saints, sheaves of photos on the wall, and iron bedsteads, as the street is of carts, people, and lights” (Benjamin 171). This quote shows that even the very poor work hard to decorate nicely and show off in any way they can.

This is very similar to the Naples shown in My Brilliant Friend. Lila and Elena have both grown up in a poor neighborhood, but now Lila finds herself engaged to a rich man, and she is no longer poor like her family. Lila is planning an extravagant wedding and inviting everyone in the neighborhood. It is said that that “In the houses of the neighborhood the mothers, the grandmothers had been working for months to make dresses, to get hats and purses, to shop for a wedding present, I don’t know, a set of glasses, of plates, of silverware” (Ferrante 303). The women of their neighborhood are spending all their time and the little money they have left in order to attend Lila’s wedding looking nice and bearing lavish gifts. Even Antonio spends money he does not have to buy a suit in order to look nice as Elena’s date to the wedding. The wedding is an opportunity for communal theater where, as Benjamin says, social life and stage performance mirror one another (168). This is especially relevant when Lila starts noticing things going awry at the wedding. The poorer guests do not get the same quality food or the same service as the richer guests (323-324). The poor who had spent all their money to attend this wedding were being treated as lesser. We can read Ferrante’s novels through the lens of Benjamin’s essay because it explains the view of the poor in Naples. The way the poor families of Naples take pride in what little they have and always try to seem put together.

Naples and Catholicism

Reading Benjamin’s essay alongside with Ferrante’s book helps one understand the book better, since Benjamin is discussing many things that he encountered while visiting Naples that Ferrante also mentions in her story. They both usually talk a lot about the Camorra and that is a part of people’s lives in Naples or how poverty is a major issue in the city; but especially in the outskirts of it. One thing that I thought was “against” Benjamin’s observations religion.

Walter Benjamin specifically wrote: “In this city, does Catholicism strive to reassert itself in every situation. Should it disappear from the face of the Earth, its last foothold would perhaps not be Rome, but Naples.” (Benjamin, 167). This quote clearly indicates that the inhabitants of Naples take religion, Catholicism to be precise, very seriously. To them, church is extremely important and they value it a lot.

Since Ferrante’s story takes place in Naples, one would expect to read quite a lot about Catholicism and how important it is for the people of the stradone. However, Ferrante hasn’t been talking about religion or her religious beliefs throughout the novel. At some point, Lenù says: “The fact that I, who had successfully completed a theological correspondence course, raised my hand and said that the human condition was so obviously exposed to the blind fury of chance that to trust in a God, a Jesus, the Holy Spirit- this last a completely superfluous entity, it was there only to make up a trinity, notoriously nobler than the mere binomial father-son-was the same thing as collecting trading cards while the city burns in the fires of hell”(Ferrante, 296).

The Holy Trinity really confused Lenù- she had no idea why the Holy Spirit was essential in any way, and why believing in a God was beneficial. She basically referred to “faith” as something with completely no importance or use- just like the trading cards in the middle of a burning city. To Lenù, Catholicism basically means nothing. Her life does not depend on it. Even when she is talking about the city, she has not been talking about churches or icons inside the houses, which means that to her, they are invisible and without meaning. Benjamin is saying how Naples could even be the center of Catholicism, and then Lenù could not care less about it.

“There is a poverty that makes us all cruel”

Benjamin’s essay on Naples speaks of the entrenched poverty in Naples. Benjamin writes that in Naples “Poverty and misery seem as contagious as they are pictured to be to children”. Living surrounded in poverty, it is impossible to not also fall into poverty too.

The characters in Lenù’s neighbourhood are in poverty. Lenù and Lila’s reaction to this is a desire to escape their poverty, and by extension the neighbourhood too. When they are children, they dream of writing a successful novel, inspired by reading Little Women, and to be wealthy as a result. Benjamin’s essay reflects the friends’ view of poverty. They see it all around them, have been impacted by it. Lack of money is a constant obstacle in Lenù’s education, and was one of the factors that prevented Lila from continuing her education. A desire to pull themselves out of poverty underlines many things they do. 

Lila and Lenù have many reasons why they want to escape poverty. It prevents them from doing many things ie school, but it is summed up aptly with a line from Lila to Lenù: “There is a poverty that makes us all cruel” (261). It is not just poverty they want to escape, it is the violence and depravity that it creates. Towards the end of the first novel, Lila is in a situation where she has money to spare when she becomes engaged to Stefano. However, Elena notes that during this time she realised that money itself was no longer the object for them, but the protection that money offers themselves and the ones around them. She writes that the dream of “The treasure chests full of gold pieces ..when we published a book like Little Women – riches and fame- had truly faded. Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our experience and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured…” (248). Lenù is realizing here, that they do not want money, they want the safety and the privilege that having money creates.

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.

Benjamin’s love letter

I imagine Benjamin experienced culture shock in Naples. He was born in Germany, a country where the social norms are linear, cut and dry, black and white, legal or illegal. Where everything has it proper place and nothing is out of order. Where rules are to be kept without exception, where people maintain private lives behind walls, where individual expression and artist ways are out of the norm. This is the society that Walter Benjamin grew up.

Then imagine the first impression of his experience in Naples where culture, tradition and history is inexplicably part of its people whether they know it or not. Catholicism, Benjamin argues is at the heart of the city where it can accommodate both swindler and whore with the simple act of confession. I would argue that in a city with so much poverty a little faith gives many hope and a bit of stability.

Benjamin sees the city as porous without wall, there are no defined lines, where everything and everyone is up for a debate, where legally is just a measure in the eye of the beholder, where honor and respect tumps any law, where there is no place for anything or rather the same place can be used for anything, where people’s lives intermingle and spill into the street, where everyone from the fruit vendor to the bus driver to a pick pocket can be an artist.

This is the world Benjamin writes about. It is his captivating love letter to Naples. Like a young boy’s wide eyed open mouthed first visit to a carnival. The barker draws him in and he can’t resist it’s temptation.  It is a breath taking world, both beautiful and disturbing.  There are sights, sounds and smells that he has never experienced. It is strange to him, dangerous, mysterious and alluring.  And what boy wouldn’t love to run away with the carnival? Yet he can’t. He knows intellectually all the nooks and crannies of the city and is an excellent observer of the Neapolitan way of life. The yearning to be part of this beautiful kaleidoscope of Naples which is so foreign to him is undeniable. But it is a love affair that he can only have at the safe distance of a paper and pen.

post 3