“Good books are stunning charges of vital energy” — Elena Ferrante
The literary world of the 2010s was largely dominated by autofiction. The trend may have peaked with the 2022 Nobel Prize going to Annie Ernaux, a leading practitioner of this genre of writing. Between Ernaux’s work and the other writers toiling in this field (Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, et al) there would appear to be little left to do formally. Because of the confessional nature of the genre, however, I’m guessing there will always be someone who wants to center themselves as the driving force of a narrative, but one senses a growing weariness with this style of writing. Except perhaps as a curious artifact of an era that has passed, moving forward it seems unlikely that even a thoughtful writer will achieve serious consideration for a work of autofiction — no matter how compelling — because this field is now fallow. Which is to be expected. After all, no one is writing the next Nouveau Roman à la Alain Robbe-Grillet. Systems novels (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, et al) are pretty much an extinct species. Fads and styles come and go. Anyway, we are tired of personal stories. We want something more, something new. Something different. In the interregnum between now and whatever the future brings — I’ll not venture to prognosticate — I’m going to take about five thousand words (including footnotes!) to revisit a work of fiction that appeared during the heyday of autofiction’s reign.
There are many outstanding books to choose from, but one of the broadest in social scope and in psychological depth (to my mind at any rate) is the work of the Italian writer Elena Ferrante, who, in the 2010s, published four books (she considers them as one novel) usually referred to as the Neapolitan novels: My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). Translated by Ann Goldstein, this magisterial novel cycle — an epic bildungsroman and a sociopolitical history of Italy during the second half of the 20th century — as well as a psychography of two BFFs — covers over six decades and stands at over 1600 pages.
The story lines that loop through the Neapolitan novels are principally about women and about women battling men. Ferrante has said these “are all echoes of real women who, because of their suffering or their combativeness, have very much influenced my imagination: my mother, a childhood girlfriend, acquaintances whose stories I know.” Her writing has a specific objective: to bring to the fore the female experience and establish a female subject, a female “I”. And, additionally, to create for women “an ethics of our own to oppose that which the male world has imposed on and claimed from us.”
As many readers are aware, Elena Ferrante is a pen name1 and speculation over her identity has not ceased despite the claims of some who believe it has been established. Ferrante has not deigned to comment on the validity of any claims about her identity and continues to maintain her anonymity. She also refuses to partake in the media circus that frequently surrounds best sellers, as have such recent luminaries as, say, Sally Rooney, et al. The publicity hoopla that has engulfed the contemporary literary world holds no allure for Ferrante. She has said she is against “the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media. This demand for self-promotion diminishes the actual work of art, whatever that art may be...” Thus, she continues to absent herself from the marketing of her work. While acknowledging her position is extreme, she maintains “that a book has to absolutely make it on its own; it shouldn’t even use advertising.”
That being said, Ferrante does accommodate inquiries about her life and her writing — but only in writing — and she does not give “interviews” as she pointed out in an exchange with Sheila Heti:
“You think that we’re doing an interview? I don’t. In an interview the person being interviewed entrusts his body, his facial expressions, his eyes, his gestures, the way he speaks — an often-improvised speech, inconsistent, poorly connected — to the writing of the interviewer. Something that I can’t accept. What we are doing resembles, rather, a pleasant correspondence…It’s writing, in other words, and I like/am fond of all occasions for writing.”
Like Thomas Bernhard or, say, J.M. Coetzee, Ferrante’s work is generally both humorless and ferocious and comes from a hard-bitten place. Her sentences come at you baring their teeth. She delivers cold, propulsive prose replete with descriptive power but devoid of sentimentality. In the same discussion with Heti, she said: “I detest vapid, sugary, sentimental tones and I try to get rid of them. I detest refinement when it cancels out naturalness, and so I look for precision without going too far,” adding that for her sincerity is “the engine of every literary project.” She strives for literary truth in her writing, which she defines as “entirely a matter of wording” which is “directly proportional to the energy that one is able to impress on the sentence.” This is a skill Ferrante says she has acquired over years of literary production — she began writing when she was fifteen.
Not everyone agrees that she possesses this writerly skill. Writing in The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks, the writer and critic, claimed he can’t read more than fifty pages of Ferrante’s writing. He finds it “wearisomely concocted, determinedly melodramatic.” As an example, he cites a fight scene between two neighbors in My Brilliant Friend. The women grapple with each other and roll down the stairs “entwined.” One of their heads hits the floor of the landing — “a few inches from my shoes,” reports Elena, “like a white melon that has slipped from your hand.” Parks comments: “As in a B movie, a head hits the floor a few inches from our hero’s shoes. Then comes the half-hearted attempt to transform cartoon reportage into literature: ‘like a white melon that has slipped from your hand.’” He claims Ferrante should have put that metaphor aside and sought another one since this one shows “no effort of the imagination,” and simply “announces melodrama.” He is “astonished that other people are not irritated by this lazy writing.” Parks might also feel the same way about her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, which has largely been met with a tepid response. Judith Thurman, writing in The New Yorker notes: “Had this [novel] been a young writer’s coming-of-age story, one could praise its abundant flashes of brilliance and forgive its excesses. Coming from a master, its puerility is a mystery.”
Setting aside one less-than-stellar work, and taking into account the scope and depth of her oeuvre2, I’m inclined to believe that more readers are likely to agree with the critic James Wood, a champion of Ferrante, than with Tim Parks. Writing in The New Yorker Wood has pointed out that Ferrante’s “writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backward to its most radical birthing.” “Her prose has…a bare lucidity, and is often aphoristic and continent.” He calls her novels “intensely, violently personal.”
Ferrante’s writing has been influenced by second-wave feminist writers such as Margaret Drabble and Hélène Cixous. She has acknowledged her familiarity with the work of Cixous and Luce Irigaray, as well as Julia Kristeva. When asked what nonfiction has most affected her, Ferrante named Donna J. Haraway (known for, among other works, A Cyborg Manifesto) and “an old book” by Adriana Cavarero. (As for which works of fiction have influenced her, see below.3)
Cavarero is a leading Italian philosopher and feminist thinker. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (1997) addresses the subject of female identity. Cavarero posits the theory of the “narratable self” and the idea that identity is not an innate quality we master and express, but rather the outcome of a relational practice, something given to us from another, in the form of a narratable “life-story,” which turns the narrator into a biographer.
In Relating Narratives Cavarero offers an example of how identity is given from one to another in the chapter “The Paradox of Ulysses.” She chooses the scene from the Odyssey in which Odysseus, at the court of the Phaeacians, listens to a blind rhapsod recount his exploits in the Trojan war. He weeps, because for the first time he becomes aware of the meaning of the story of which he is the hero. Prior to its recounting by an ‘other’ “Odysseus did not yet know who he was: the story of the rhapsod, the story told by an ‘other,’ finally revealed his own identity.”
Cavarero then provides a “lived” example of two women: the “life-story” of Amalia and Emilia, who meet at an adult education class devoted to raising the consciousness of Italian women.4 Emilia talks about herself constantly, telling Amalia that she has lived a repressed life. Yet she cannot shape a coherent narrative out of her experiences that makes sense to her: “she wasn’t able to connect any of it up.” Amalia helps her by writing the story of her life based on what Emilia told her. “Once I wrote the story of her life […] she always carried it in her handbag and read it again and again,” and, like Odysseus, she was “overcome by emotion.” The story of Emilia’s life set down in writing by Amalia made her recognize that “my ‘I’ exists.” She needed this ontological affirmation in the form a narration of herself to be told to her by an ‘other’ in order to understand and see that “my ‘I’ exists.” In a Paris Review interview Ferrante emphasized her commitment “to bring to the fore the female experience and establish a female subject, a female ‘I’”:
“The ‘I’ who narrates my stories is never a voice giving a monologue. It’s always a woman writing, and this writer always struggles to organize, in a text, what she knows but doesn’t have clear in her mind.”
This search for clarity and the discovery of the “I” is present in all of Ferrante’s fiction. In The Days of Abandonment, the protagonist, Olga, is abandoned by her husband and graphically chronicles her descent into a temporary psychotic state after his departure. As she struggles to remain “healthy” while surviving the dissolution of her married identity she ponders what will become of her. “What was I?” she wonders. She says: “This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else.” And this someone else wanted “to be me.”
The same struggle to recognize an “I” is also manifest in The Lost Daughter. Leda, a divorced mother of two, is vacationing at the beach. She befriends a vacationer, Nina, and her young daughter Elena. One day, spontaneously, Leda steals the little girl’s doll.5 She took the doll because it “was the shining testimony of perfect motherhood.” Leda hides the doll in her apartment. For her, the doll is a talisman, bringing back unhappy memories of her married life and the pain she caused her daughters by abandoning them and her husband for another man. The theft of the doll is a symbolic reenactment of the way she shattered her “perfect motherhood” in which she felt trapped and overwhelmed and fearful that her love for her daughters was keeping her from becoming herself. “I had a sense of dissolving, as if I, an orderly pile of dust, had been blown about by the wind all day and now was suspended in the air without a shape.”
In Troubling Love, Delia, reflecting on her fraught relationship with her mother Amalia, who has washed up drowned on the Italian shore, a likely suicide, thinks about how throughout her life, she had wanted to distance and detach herself from her mother, whom she hated “Because she had left me in the world to play alone with the words of a lie, without limits, without truth.” This hatred (fueled by a fear of becoming her mother) made her want “to eliminate every root I had in her, even the deepest.” Upon Amalia’s death, she realizes she had never been able to detach herself from her:
“There would not be anyone more or less between me and another aspect of myself. I would remain me until the end, unhappy, discontent with what I had furtively taken from the body of Amalia…I had carried away from it less than nothing! I was no I.”
The last lines of the novel reveal her failure to construct an independent self. Delia puts on her mother’s suit: “Amalia had been. I was Amalia.”
Elena Greco, the narrator of the Neapolitan novels, is the direct descendant of Delia, Leda, and Olga, women Ferrante has been writing about for decades: women who are divorced or separated, vaguely middle aged, educated, industrious, and have risen above the poverty of their youth, but still have to fight for the nominal bourgeois social station they now inhabit. They are no strangers to rage, resentment, and existential angst as they struggle to discover themselves, to become who they are, or who they continually hope to be.
Of these characters, Elena’s tribulations appear somewhat more banal than her predecessors — “I want to get a driver’s license, I want to travel, I want to have a telephone, a television, I’ve never had anything.” — and directed toward achieving material and monetary success. In the third volume of the quartet, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, after Elena has achieved success and become a published author, happily married, she reflects that she has always been fascinated by the word “become”: “Become. It was a verb that had always obsessed me […] I wanted to become, even though I had never known what. And I had become, that was certain, but without an object, without a real passion, without a determined ambition.”
At one point in the novel, Elena’s mother-in-law gives her some books on Italian feminism by Carla Lonzi, one of the founders of the Rivolta Femminile, an Italian feminist collective. Elena tells her she knows well enough what it means to be a woman, and puts them away. But one day she picks up Lonzi’s seminal manifesto, “Let’s Spit on Hegel,” and it leaves her agape:
“How,” she wonders “is it possible […] that a woman knows how to think like that. I worked so hard on books, but I endured them, I never actually used them, I never turned them against themselves. This is thinking. This is thinking against. I — after so much exertion — don’t know how to think.”
Weary of her marriage, of domestic banality, Elena feels suffocated by the life she chose. In light of her reading, she tries to imagine what another life could be, wonders how she can create her “I,” but her imagination fails her. She is jealous of her sister-in-law who is single, attends political meetings, and is active in feminist causes.
Elena’s life begins to careen from one thing to another, it is always “complicated” and hurried. She grows tired of her husband and develops an “eagerness for violation” and chooses to engage suitors: “I was attracted by any man who gave me the slightest encouragement. Tall, short, thin, fat, ugly, handsome, old, married or a bachelor, if the [man] praised an observation of mine […] my availability communicated itself.” But, despite her education and exposure to “literary” texts, her desire to “become” someone does not lead her to seek the causes of her taedium vitae, or to transform herself and transcend her current situation: it leads only to an illicit love affair
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, (whom Ferrante references) experiences a similar restlessness after marriage. No sooner is Emma ensconced in her country house with her husband than she finds herself unhappy — burdened with household chores and so disappointed in marriage that she begins to wish she was back in the convent in which she was raised. She dreams of escaping her fate. “But how,” Emma wonders, “to speak about so elusive a malaise, one that keeps changing its shape like the clouds and its direction like the winds?”
Elena’s malaise also remains unnameable and she laments not being able to find her “true life”. She continues to analyze her predicament until Ferrante allows her to free herself (at least temporarily) from her unhappy state and shows us, briefly, what living without the debilitating ennui is like. Late in the last volume of the quartet, Elena, who has abandoned her husband and her children, is living with her lover, Nino:
“It was then that — we said to each other — our true life had begun. And what we called true life was that impression of miraculous splendor that never abandoned us even when everyday horrors took the stage. […] We hurried to dinner, to good food, wine, sex.”
So “true life” appears to be, in fact, the simple, sensual pleasures we all enjoy, nothing more nor less than the commonplaces of bourgeois material success.
Elena says “we” but Nino does not seem to agree with her assessment of their situation. While she is waxing elegant about the “true life” they are leading, he is busy having sex with the nanny. Soon, the couple separates and Elena discovers her notion of “true life” is just as misguided as Emma’s belief that “certain portions of the earth must produce happiness — as though it were a plant native only to those soils and doomed to languish elsewhere.”
Elena frustrates us because of her inability to transform herself even though she has the intellectual capacity for it. We feel the tension between her lucid self-awareness and latent self-actualization. We keep hoping for a moment of transcendence, or a catharsis — but one never comes.
Lila, on the other hand, is a marvel. She and Elena have known each other since childhood, and have remained best friends through adulthood. Unconventional, volatile, violent, ambitious, by turns emotionally stingy and generous, Lila is both intellectually gifted and entrepreneurial. She is self-possessed and unpossessable. By the time she is an adolescent, it is apparent to Elena that Lila “took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.” While Elena worries about her appearance and her attractiveness to boys, Lila has already apprehended how the world works. From an early age, she is keenly aware of both the social and political injustices people of her impoverished class are forced to suffer, and she also grasps, with Roquentin-like perspicacity, the meaninglessness of existence.
At 15, just before Lila is married, Elena, proud of her book learning, attempts to impress her friend with her knowledge of theology. Lila responds tartly: “You still waste time with those things? […] There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears.”
Unlike Elena, throughout her childhood and youth, Lila takes more beatings than MMA champion Ronda Rousey. Her father throws her out the window and breaks her arm. Her brother pummels her over a disagreement about the shoes they are designing. “Every time Lila and I met,” says Elena, “I saw a new bruise.” Her boyfriend, and later husband, Stefano, beats her relentlessly, sometimes even punching her in the face. He rapes her on their honeymoon, from which she returns black and blue, and her married life is characterized by systematic abuse. Elena is continually amazed at her friend’s capacity for suffering, but Lila explains: “What can beatings do to me? A little time goes by and I’m better than before.”
Lila is “capable of anything.” Within the first year of her marriage, she embarks on a reckless affair with the love of Elena’s life, Nino. She then leaves her husband, an act unheard of in those days, to move in with him. As Nino says, “[S]he doesn’t know how to submit to reality […] and takes no account of police, the law, the state.” When they break up, she takes another lover, with whom she founds a business and makes a success of herself. When, in The Story of a New Name, the Mafioso Michele Solara and his brother want to use her photograph to sell shoes that she has designed, Lila defaces the picture. Using glue, scissors, paper, paint, she “erases” herself, refusing to allow anyone to appropriate her image for any purpose. In the final volume, The Story of the Lost Child, even after having had great success in the computer business, she tells Elena, “I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.”
Like Elena, Lila writes. Over the years, she amasses volumes of notebooks of her thoughts and observations, and in The Story of a New Name she gives them to Elena to keep her husband from finding them. Lila makes Elena promise she won’t read them. Naturally, Elena devours the texts. She is overwhelmed and “diminished” by them. She devotes herself to learning passages by heart — “the ones that thrilled me, the ones that hypnotized me, the ones that humiliated me.” Eventually, she throws the notebooks off a bridge in order to free herself from feeling Lila “on me and in me.” But she can’t erase Lila from herself.
Late in life Lila begins another writing project, one she will not share with Elena, which once again makes Elena feel inadequate. When Elena then suggests she may write about Lila, Lila says, “Let me be.” Lila wants nothing more than to disappear, while Elena “wanted her to last […] I wanted it to be I who made her last.” Elena wants to write her life-story.
Against Lila’s wishes Elena writes and publishes a book about the two of them, which she titles A Friendship. The book is a success and revives Elena’s sagging career, but after its publication, the two women never speak again.
Contrary to Cavarero’s contention, Lila doesn’t want a life-story written about her in order to affirm her “I” because she already is who she is and believes that if another were to write her life-story, she would be turned into “fiction,” taken possession of, exploited. Just as she never let anyone possess her throughout her life, she has no intention of allowing that to happen once she is gone. She won’t participate in a practice that reduces her ontological presence to words on a page, a fetishized object between covers. By vanishing, Lila asserts her right to live a “mere empirical existence.” Thus, in a metafictional twist, Ferrante endows Lila with sufficient agency to take an ethical stand and to refuse being subjugated to the art of “story telling, ” wandering off the page, never to be seen again, even as her story is told in the book we are reading.
Midway before the end of the quartet, Elena who is at the height of her success, goes to visit Lila, who is at her nadir, a proletariat slaving away at a sausage factory right out of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Elena has come to brag about her success as a writer: “I had made that whole journey mainly to show [Lila] what she had lost and what I had won.” Instead, she finds Lila
“explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
And indeed, Elena and Lila will continue to echo each other, and to resonate in the mind of anyone who reads these novels, in all their irreducible complexity.
Throughout her career Ferrante has insisted upon her anonymity, saying there is nothing to know about her. In an ‘interview’ (actually in many interviews) she has defended her nom de plume: “Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her … What I mean is that the author is the sum of the expressive strategies that shape an invented world, a concrete world that is populated with people and events. The rest is ordinary private life.” And that life she guards tenaciously. However, this has not prevented literary sleuths from attempting to uncover her identity. The most ambitious and controversial claim has been by the Italian journalist Claudio Gatti who believes he has identified her. According to Gatti, Elena Ferrante is Anita Raja, a translator for the publishing house Edizione E/O who lives in Rome and is married to the Neapolitan writer Domenico Starnone. Gatti’s principle evidence for adducing that Raja is Ferrante is the enormous sums of money the publishing house where Raja works — which is the house that publishes Ferrante’s work — has transferred to Raja: far in excess of what here salary would be.
The interesting(?) part of his investigation is that, if true, Ferrante’s repeated claim that she grew up impoverished in the slums of Naples — the source she draws from for all her work — is a lie. If Ferrante is the mask that Raja wears it means her mother was not a seamstress from Naples, but a teacher, who, moreover, was not from Naples, but born in Worms, Germany, into a Polish/Jewish family that fled to Italy in 1937. Golda Frieda Petzenbaum is Raja’s mother’s name. She married a Neapolitan magistrate and the family moved to Rome, in 1956, when Raja was three.
On the other hand, Raja’s husband Domenico Starnone is from Naples and spent his formative years there. Starnone is a prominent author in his own right, and has won numerous literary prizes throughout his prodigious career, having published 22 books since 1987. Some are available in English: First Execution (2009), Ties (2017), Trick (2018), Trust (2019) — and they make for delicious reading. There is some similarity in style to Ferrante’s writing. Which brings us to another point. Some people believe that Starnone is the author behind Ferrante. Starnone denies this. And as the journalist Costanza Rizzacasa d’Orsogna noted, there is a kind of “ferocious sexism of thinking that, as she is so good, Elena Ferrante must be the pseudonym of a man.”
Aside from the sexism, however, lies the fact that Starnone, as noted, has published more than 22 books since 1987 alone. On a practical basis, the possibility of having written those works and Ferrante’s novels and her non-fiction publications seems like a herculean task (where does one find the time?) and well nigh impossible.
Ferrante’s earlier novels include: The Days of Abandonment (2005), Troubling Love (2006), and The Lost Daughter (2008). She has since gone on to publish a children’s novel The Beach at Night (2016) —a rather grim telling of doll left alone on the beach. Her latest novel, The Lying Life of Adults, was published in 2019. Her non-fiction Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey (2016) and Incidental Inventions (2019) include her reflections on the writing process, letters and interviews, her thoughts on culture, politics and other matters.
“I devoured novels in which the female characters had ill-fated lives in a fierce, unjust world. Between 12 and 16 I eagerly looked for any books that had a woman’s name in the title: Moll Flanders, Jane Eyre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina. But the book I read and reread obsessively was Wuthering Heights. The Guardian.
The story of Amalia and Emilia recounted by Cavarero first appeared in Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice (1987), published under the auspices of The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, which is considered one of the most outstanding examples of Italian feminism. Sexual Difference may also have influenced Ferrante’s thinking about the friendship between Elena and Lila, the two main characters in the Neapolitan novels. The social practice of “entrustment,” the idea that one woman “entrusts” herself symbolically to another woman is one of the major underlying concepts of Italian feminism and is evident in Ferrante’s writing. For example, in My Brilliant Friend, Elena tells us of her decision to reject her mother as a model and give herself over to Lila: “I decided that I had to model myself on that girl, never let her out of my sight.” This practice is viewed as necessary “because of the irrepressible need to find a faithful mediation between oneself and the world: someone similar to oneself who acts as a mirror and a term of comparison, an interpreter, a defender and judge in the negotiations between oneself and the world.”
Children are regularly treated brusquely, beaten, and/or suffer from benign, and not-so-benign, neglect in Ferrante’s novels. In the essay “What an Ugly Child She Is,” Ferrante responds to a Swedish publisher’s refusal to publish The Days of Abandonment because of the “morally reprehensible” way in which the protagonist treats her children. In that novel, Olga is chiefly guilty of neglect and indifference, abruptness and aloofness in her treatment of them; she does not harm them physically, although she is a bit rough in removing the makeup from her daughter who has, to her disgust, made herself up to look like her.
In defense of her portrayal of Olga’s behavior, Ferrante references Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and the scene in which Emma Bovary, upon being pestered for attention by her young daughter, Berthe, angrily shoves the girl with her elbow, causing the child to fall against a chest of drawers and cut herself. The wound begins to bleed. Emma lies to the maid, telling her: “The baby fell down and hurt herself playing.” The wound is superficial. Emma stops worrying about what she had done, forgives herself for her abusive behavior, and chides herself for being “upset over so small a matter.” And then, still sitting by her daughter’s side as she recuperates, adding insult to injury, she thinks: “It’s a strange thing […] what an ugly child she is.”
Ferrante comments that only a man could write such a sentence. She claims (“angrily, bitterly”) that men “are able to have their female characters say what women truly think and say and live but do not dare write.” She says her attempt has been, “over the years, to take that sentence out of French and place it somewhere on a page of my own.”
She does create a scene similar to Flaubert’s in The Lost Daughter. Leda, the narrator, tells us that when her daughter was young, she gave her a doll that had belonged to her since infancy. Leda expected her daughter to love the doll. But her daughter strips the doll of her clothes and scribbles over her with markers. When Leda discovers her sitting on the doll one afternoon, she loses her temper, “gives her a nasty shove,” and throws the doll off the balcony. It is run over and destroyed by the passing traffic. Leda’s only (ominous) comment about this incident: “How many things are done and said to children behind the closed doors of houses.”