Tag Archives: earthquake

Crack Open the Goodness (Make-Up Post)

Enduring an earthquake does not only shatter the ground on which Lila and Elena tread upon, but their lives and the lives of those around them are ironically brought to a stand still, forcing them to focus on the present moment to put the pieces of their homes and families back together. The terror that envelops Lila during those tumultuous moments are more than just her constant nightmare of dissolving boundaries coming to life right before her eyes. Furthermore, it is a rude awakening that signals to Lila that despite her efforts to transform violence, hatred and corruption into a world of magnificent peace and beauty, there will always be outside forces present that will destroy those endeavors. Lila, in her constant energetic movements, helps friends here, creates a flourishing business there, destroys some of the corruption at its Solara roots, and attends to her family, reflecting her never ending attempts to escape the perilous rabbit hole of her neighborhood and discover a light at the end of the tunnel. In her desperate rants she admits to Lenu, “You remember when I married Stefano and I wanted the neighborhood to start again from the beginning, to be only beautiful things, the ugliness of before was not supposed to be there anymore. How long did it last?” (Ferrante 178). In Lila’s desperate period of terror, she now sees the earthquake as evidence that goodness is always overshadowed by malevolence and catastrophe, taking apart her good intentions and kindness, thread by thread. Her admiration for Stefano stemmed from his supposed desire to start peaceful relations among the families of the neighborhood and give up ancient resentments. Lila’s obsession with perfecting the grocery stores and the shoe store, aiding her friends with job placements and financial necessities had been reflections of her attempts to bring justice and peace to all the problems of her home. Yet all of this soon started to fall apart at the seams, from her marriage to her pregnancy to her familial relations. The unpredictable catastrophes that followed seemed to erase every good deed that Lila carried out and dissolve the goodness that she had seen in Stefano. At this moment, even as Lila has been able to acquire yet another position in which she is in control and is able to help her friends and family, yet again, mother nature retaliates as if to remind her that her intentions are useless, for instability will always triumph in the end. The world is an amorphous and unstable place and Lila is still struggling to understand that the goodness of the world cannot exist without the evil that constantly strives to silence it. If Lila is to triumph in ensuring that her neighborhood will not always remain a place of ugliness and tragedies, she must learn to accept that these malevolent forces are simply natural and do not guarantee a complete unraveling of the home she is knitting back together.

Loss of Control

Throughout the Neapolitan Novels Lila experiences episodes, she calls dissolving boundaries. Figures and people spill over their outlines and become shapeless and Lila experiences this in 1958 on New Year’s Eve when her brother Rino and his friends battle with fireworks to show up the Solaras. The dissolving of boundaries is attached to a loss of control. This sensation terrifies Lila and she expresses, “All my life I’ve done nothing, Lenù, but hold back moments like those” (TSLC, 177). But, when an earthquake hits the neighborhood, Lila is enveloped in a situation far beyond her control as she feels her own boundaries and the boundaries of the neighborhood dissolve.

When the earthquake hits, Lila has no control over anything, and it terrifies her. Earlier in the novels whenever things would scare Lila, she would use the men in her life to hide behind: Marcello, Stefano, Michele, Nino, and Enzo. When she fears one man she moves to the next and in this cycle, she has control. Lila has this natural control over men. Lila used men as a tool to avoid the episodes of dissolving boundaries but when the earthquake hits, she has no one to hide behind because it’s all around her. The fear and sensation of smarginatura engulfs Lila and she is left as helpless as ever.  

Metapost

This week the posts varied by three categories: focusing on the earthquake, highlighting other aspects of The Story of the Lost Child, or commenting on Lucamente’s article.

Most of the students chose to react to the effects of the earthquake. Ariana focuses on what the earthquake symbolizes by comparing the scientific cause and effect of earthquakes to the experiences the characters must endure from the disaster. She states, “Lenu is experiencing moments which lead to her own personal earthquake,” as she decides to leave the stability of Pietro to return to the chaos of Nino.” Next, Paul pays attention to the significance the earthquake has on Lila and Elena’s relationship. He emphasizes how earthquakes are uncontrollable and unable to be manipulated by humans and this catastrophe, out of Lila’s power, forces her to “finally confess to Elena all the reasons for her behavior.” Similarly to Paul, Kelsey notes how, on account of the earthquake, Lila is “stripped of the ability to precisely calibrate her thoughts, words, gestures, tactics, and strategies.” Kelsey also highlights how Elena notices the difference in Lila’s fear compared to her own fear of the event. Julie concentrates on the comparison between the earthquake and Elena, noting how the literal foundations of Naples and the foundations of Elena’s life overlap and suffer “violent breakage and destruction,” at the same time. While Naples shatters, Elena’s personal life faces catastrophe – she gives birth, her mother dies, and Nino cheats.

Shoshanna and Skevi both chose to focus on different aspects of the novel. Skevi focuses on the compelling passage that took place at the gynecologist. She comments on Elena describing Lila as “malicious” and “anxious.” Skevi finds that Elena has constructed an image of Lila that is inferior to the image she thinks and wants people to have of herself. She also notes how it is contradicting that Elena finds Lila to be “anxious” when Elena constantly questions her own life decisions. Shoshanna’s post discusses Elena’s rocky transition through motherhood. She highlights how the constant turbulence and “unmotherly” actions will affect Dede and Elsa, mentioning the idyllic image the girls hold of Lila, which juxtaposes with the image they have of their own mother. Shoshanna theorizes that is is easy for children to idealize other parents when they don’t witness the punishment and negativity.

Lastly, Katherine focuses on Lucamente’s article. She notes how this piece swayed her view of Elena. Lucamente describes Elena as an exploitative person, rather than a dependent one. Katherine finds that Elena’s actions are usually always self-sufficient and one-sided, as “most of the relationships she creates are because she can benefit from them,” socially, financially, and academically.

From the posts, it is evident that the earthquake had a notable effect on both readers and characters. The event undoubtedly changed Lila and Elena. It is also clear that this volume displays the repercussions Elena faces regarding her life decisions and the complexities she encounters juggling her personal and professional life.

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.