“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.
