Category Archives: Post 8

Lombardi’s Lecture on MBF

I am having trouble catching up on all the reading, but I still want to post so instead I want to talk a little about Professor Lombardi’s lecture this past Thursday. I’ll start off by saying that I really enjoyed learning more about the connections between the novel and HBO series and how it helps us better understand the complex nature of the relationship between Lila and Lenù.

In case anyone couldn’t make the lecture, I want to express a point made by Professor Lombardi that particularly struck me and that I believe is a very important peek into the true characters of Lila and Lenù. Lombardi talked about the scene in My Brilliant Friend where Lenù expresses to Lila that she is having trouble with Latin. Lila helps Lenù understand Latin because she too is studying Latin on her own.

“Read the whole sentence in Latin first, then see where the verb is. According to the person of the verb, you can tell what the subject is. Once you have the subject you look for the complements: the object of the verb is transitive, or if not other complements. Try it like that.’ I tried. Suddenly translating seemed easy” (MBF, 111).

Lenù initially looks for the subject/noun within the Latin sentence but Lila suggests that it’s easier to look for the verb first because then it’s easier to identify the subject/noun that performs the verb. Professor Lombardi proposed during his lecture that this interaction is linked to the characteristics that make Lila and Lenù who they are. Lila immediately looks for the verb which correlates to her inclination to act and do as she pleases without really thinking about how it will affect those around her. On the other hand, Lenù immediately looks for the subject/noun which correlates to her inclination to repress her actions and feelings because she constantly thinks about how others will react to them. I had never made this connection so I’m glad that Professor Lombardi shared this connection at the lecture.  

Back to the future

In the Elena Ferrante interview by Nicola Lagiola Ferrante speaks of the “those freeing themselves of gravitational pull of their birthplace”. This is consistent theme in her Neapolitan novels. It’s the constant pull and push that Elena feels from her birthplace. We see her trying to liberate herself from her native language, break though cultural and social barriers from her past. But can it ever be completely done? It would be like erasing a paper written in pencil, you may remove the lead but the impression on the paper will last forever. I believe the reason Elena constantly refer back to Naples is because regardless of it’s violence, crime, regardless of the terrible events that happened to her in her youth, it is still her safe space. When ever she feels out of sorts she quickly reverts to what is visceral. “And I realized that my voice was taking on the tones of the dialect, out of nervousness, that the words were coming to me in Neapolitan of the neighborhood, that the neighborhood-from the stradone and the tunnel-was imposing its language on me, it’s mode of acting and reacting, its figures, those which in Florence seemed faded images and here were flesh and blood(twlatws pg 326)”.  The past follows us through our lifetime, sometimes the good times maybe remembered as the bad times and sometimes the bad times can be interpreted as the good “The past, in its indeterminacy presents itself either through the filter of nostalgia or the filter of preliminary impressions (Ferrante). Here in America nostalgia is a big business. All around the country we have high school reunions. The four years in high school are for many the worst times in their lives, yet we celebrate and many go to them every 10 years or so, so they can see who got fat, old or ugly. Are we reliving a miserable past or has the past been filtered and become good with time? Like a high school reunion Elena will continue to return to Naples because she can’t help it.

The Weight Of The Other

According to Ferrante in a interview titled In Spite of Everything, the individual represents as a collection of ideas (people, ideas, and actions) that are born or transformed by others; good development (364).In the third volume, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Ferrante,  Lila challenges Ferrante’s idea about the subject of others in relation to one’s transformation. She is unable to recognize the weight of the “others”, putting a value or evoking change in her transformation. For example, Lila tries to defend her progress Professor Galiani (143). Admittedly, she states that she doesn’t have “the ability”, in addition she claims that the act of studying makes a person wicked. This excuse is suppose to satisfy Professor Galiani’s inquiry, but she immediately counterpoints Lila’s assumption by mentioning Elena’s academic studies, and her missing wickedness. This prompts Lila to be indifferent, and tries to occupy her thoughts about the significance of Professor Galiani’s response by tending to her child. In addition, Lila disregards Elena’s announcement about her pregnancy. Lila informs her to be caution for a change like that brings disaster to one’s life (233). Lila goes into detail about her previous pregnancies and the burden it caused her. Like a warning, she informs Elena to expect these troubles. Here, Lila once again fails to see the positive aspects of expecting a child. These examples illustrates the challenge in Ferrante’s idea about the individual.

“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.

Nino the Player

Unfortunately I was unable to attend the lecture by Professor Lombardi on Thursday night due to a medical procedure. Instead, I will write on another topic that has fascinated me, Nino Sarratore. Nino plays a significant role throughout the Neapolitan novels. Just when the reader thinks they have seen the last of him, Nino reappears. The second and third books both end on cliffhangers involving Nino. In The Story of a New Name the book ends with Elena seeing Nino at a reading of her book. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay ends with Elena and Nino on a plane together after Elena leaves her husband. Why is Nino given such importance? It seems to me that Elena finally realizes that Nino was just a “player” when she learns of the child he fathered with Silvia. Elena notes, “Nino was not fleeing his father out of fear of becoming like him: Nino already was his father and didn’t want to admit it” (88). Nino’s father is the gross, forty year old man that Elena lost her virginity to when she was a teenager. Nino’s father cheats on his wife constantly and does not care about the women he sleeps with. It is not a compliment to say that Nino is like his father. I was happy when Elena finally made this realization because I had been building a steady hatred for Nino and wanted Elena to hate him as well. Elena’s feelings change at the end of the book when she starts an affair with Nino. In the end, though, after a lifetime of Elena loving him, Nino admits his love for Elena and they start sleeping together.

There are many reasons that Elena could have started this affair with Nino, but my biggest question is whether this affair is really about Elena, or if it is secretly about Lila. Before the affair starts, but after Nino had become present in Elena’s life again, Nino says to Elena, “What I had seen in you, I then stupidly seemed to find in her [Lila]” (371). In essence Lila has become this omnipresent figure lurking above their relationship. Is Elena with Nino because she really loves him? Is it because Pietro does not pay enough attention to Elena and Nino does? Maybe it’s because Elena is finally fulfilling her childhood dream of being with Nino. I think it is much deeper than that. I think being with Nino is just part of Elena’s competition with Lila. Lila may have won Nino in the past, but now Elena has him. Especially when you look at the above quote, it seems that Lila is playing a much bigger role in the relationship between Nino and Elena than Elena even realizes. I’d be interested to hear what others think on this topic.

Nicola Lagioia Interview

One of the first things that interested me in this interview is actually concerning something that we have talked about in class so many times before, and that is “language“. “And then there was the dialect and there was Italian. The two languages referred to different communities, both jam-packed. What was normal in one wasn’t normal in the other. The bonds that you established in one language never had the same substance as those in the other. Customs varied, the rules of behavior, the traditions. And if you sought a middle ground, you would assume a false dialect that was a sort of trivialized Italian”. Language to me is always important. Since I chose Italian as my major, I want to know everything about the language. It’s fascinating how language and dialect play such an important role in the lives of Ferrante’s protagonists. Each one of them uses a different kind of Italian, whether that is the “standardized” form of it, or the Neapolitan dialect. We have noticed so many times that the characters code-switch almost all the time, depending on the environment they are found in, and of course the people they are referring to. It’s also extremely interesting that the book was written in Italian; but the HBO TV Show only used Italian when Elena (the narrator) was talking-the rest of the show was all in dialect. In English it is kind of hard to tell what is going on with language because even though we know that characters like Lenu, Lila, and Nino can use both “formal” Italian and dialect equally well, the parts that say “…said in dialect” or “…said in Italian” is very confusing. Another thing that I though is worth mentioning is the fact that she states that each form of Italian has its own customs and traditions and you shouldn’t mix them up. I would love to read the novels in Italian and make comparisons between Italian/dialect, the English translations, and the TV show we watched.

In Spite of Everything

I found the Ferrante interview with Nicola Lagioia to be quite compelling. On the topic of interdependence, Ferrante states, “I wanted them against the closed, fixed state of the environment, to be mobile, so that nothing could truly stabilize them and they themselves would pass through each other as if they were air – but without ever freeing themselves from the gravitational pull of their birthplace” (Frantumaglia, 367). I find this to be a perfect representation of the relationship the girls have with each other and with Naples. Once Elena physically leaves Naples, there will always be a force that always attracts her back mentally and sometimes physically.

Another quote from Ferrante’s interview that I like is “people move between good and bad almost without realizing it” (367). Lila, Lenu, as well as some of the other secondary characters certainly have their good moments and their imperfect moments where they display unfavorable qualities. I think that both Lila and Lenu are insecure in different ways when it comes to their relationship. The power and competition they possess over each other leads each of them to at times demonstrate harshness. I think both girls more often than not realize how they are acting towards each other because they do so to invoke a reaction.

Lastly, Ferrante states, “Writing is an act of pride” (379). This is visible through many of the characters who write like Elena, Nino, Donato, and Lila. Each of these characters at some point feels a sense of satisfaction based on their own literary achievements or abilities. Writing is especially significant for characters in the Neopolitan Novels because it enables them to assert their awareness of Italian. Elena advances in life, socially and economically, because of her expertise in writing Italian, which for a time being provides her with self-fulfillment.

Narration in My Brilliant Friend

I feel the TV version of My Brilliant Friend took away a lot of the personality from Lenù. I think this is due to the lack of the voiceover/narrator for the most part in the show. Instead of having a running narration as we do in the books, the voice over occurs in the show only to reinforce something’s importance. However, in the books, most of her personality came out in her narration, as we have little direct speech from her, only her narration.

It seems for the most part in the show, Lenù is observing the scenes from the background, rather than being active in the scenes. Many of the times she appears onscreen, she does not participate in the action. I believe this is because, in the novel she must be present in those scenes, so that she knows about them in order to write about it. The fact that she isn’t active in many of the scenes she is in highlights the fact that it is often Lila, or other characters, driving the action, with Lenù as more of an observer looking in.

Layers from Page to Screen

Something that has fascinated me while reading the first 3/4 of Ferrante’s series is the way in which a scene from the text can be interpreted and imagined in the mind. Since the series has been translated to screen in the form of a T.V series, the reader can see how that particular director has envisioned the characters in order to transform the texts into another medium. This can be applied to the emotionally charged moments of the texts that more often than not involve Lenu and Lila.

An interesting interpretation from page to screen can be taken from a particular passage in the third novel of series. The text states , “I began to have some ugly thoughts on the beach. Lila, I said to myself , deliberately pushes away emotions, feelings. The more I sought tools to try to explain myself to myself, the more she, on the contrary hid. The more I tried to draw her into the open and involve her in my desire to clarify, the more she took refuge in the shadows. She was like the full moon when it crouches behind the forest and the branches scribble on its face (The Story of A New Name 310)”.

This passage makes me think about what Professor Lombardi said during his lecture in regards to how scenes are interpreted by the Director. In particular how he pointed that in the HBO series of Ferrante’s series, there was a scene where Lenu was a child and Lila clearly in adolescence, can be seen extending her hand toward Lenu and telling her to look deeper, in the dialect of course. He pointed out that while this depiction was not realistic, it would provide the necessary reaction and depth of the overall story being told. It most certainly did. This passage and in particular, the descriptive imagery used made me think of Professor Lombardi’s words in respect to this aspect of storytelling. I more specifically thought about how a director would bring this scene to screen and the creative way that they would approach the scene while keeping its emotional intensity.

Readings and post 8

Dear All,

For next week (Nov. 13) please finish reading the third volume of the quartet, and this Interview.

For your post 8, please consider commenting on Lombardi’s talk, on this interview, or – again – about history in the novel.

I hope to see many of you tomorrow at the lecture!

PS: I had the wrong information: the new novel will come out in English in a few months. The Italian version comes out tomorrow and it’s titled The Lying Life of Adults.