Tag Archives: Benjamin

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.

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.