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.     

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

Getting ready for post 3

Dear students,

This is a reminder that short prompts for your blog posts are always to be find in the section “course schedule”. For next week I ask you to finish reading the first volume. Study again the essay on Naples by Benjamin and choose one specific aspect of that essay that you want to use a lens to read Ferrante. You can look for analogies but also differences. In the first part of your post introduce the idea you want to explore, then explain in detail how Benjamin defines it and what examples he offers. State how the same notion (or the opposite one) emerges in Ferrante, or maybe how Ferrante represents it but in different ways. Use quotations from Ferrante, but don’t leave them without comments.

Leave a comment if you have any questions. I look forward to reading your posts.

Enjoy the book!

 

My “Brillant” Friend

I am beginning to wonder whether Lila is truly the brilliant friend in this book. Granted, she does fit the description of being clever and talented, but these factors don’t make you truly brilliant. Elena has emphasized about Lila’s hidden potential and how intimidating her intellect can bring. Although Elena sees this as a competition, Lila seems to be in her own league apart from Elena. Now what does it mean to be brilliant. I believe that positive actions are required for a person to be qualified as brilliant. These actions make the person virtuous. This is what being brilliant truly means, and so far, I don’t recall a moment where Lila empathize or sacrifice her time for others.    

In fact, in section 16 in Adolescence Elena indicates that Lila is like the living embodiment of chaos. According to her, “it slowly became clear to me not only to me, who had been observing her since elementary school, but to everyone, that an essence not only seductive but dangerous emanated from Lila.”(Ferrante 143). Maybe as I continue reading this book, events will shed light about the brilliancy about Lila or maybe I’m being presumptuous and the actual brilliant person won’t come into play until later in the book