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.
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.
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.
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