In her refusal to emerge as a figure of flesh and blood, Elena Ferrante is an anatopism in today’s publishing industry. This is part of her project of un-personifying the author, allowing her works to speak louder than her physical presence, but it also has the effect of drawing our attention to the position of “artists” within her works.
As Claudette pointed out in our discussion, My Brilliant Friend is a powerful antidote to the myth of authorship, eroding the notion of the artist as a monolithic figure. It is no coincidence that Ferrante (one who has shirked the limelight of celebrity) is deeply concerned in the Neapolitan Novels with what it means to be a writer. And more specifically, a female one. Even if Ferrante is absent in interviews, there is the sense that she is present throughout My Brilliant Friend: the novel is a meditation on the circumstances and relationships that propel girls (presumably like Ferrante herself) into self-manifesting out of obscurity.
In this first part of Lenu’s story, we see the genesis of the ethos which dictates her professional life: emancipation through education and literary creation. This process of self-actualisation, however, is not one of chrysalis, where the moth emerges untethered from a process of invisible transformation. And whilst Elena’s development and transformation has been compared to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, I would argue that Ferrante is looking towards those ancient writers who are part of the myth-making diegesis of Western and Italian identity: Homer and Virgil. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Elena Greco translates to “Helen the Greek”: Lenu’s voice displaces Homer’s to Rage–Goddess, sing the rage of women. Besides the presence of ancient writers, My Brilliant Friend is infused with other elements of myth and fantasy. The Mafioso Don Achille is ‘the ogre of fairytales’, Lila is a Cinderella-figure with her shoes, and Elena’s porter father is like Charon, taking the girl across the Styx to the Elysium of school. By constantly reflecting back on these stories of origin, Ferrante places My Brilliant Friend within a canon, elevating the girls’ tale to one of identity-creating relevance.
By drawing upon ancient myth, Ferrante is able to attack the presumptions that have been inculcated in us in the handing down of these stories. This is part of the novel’s feminist project: by usurping the mythic male voice which has determined the role of woman as wife and mother, Ferrante is able to redefine the limits of female writing (as James Wood has argued, Ferrante’s narrative voice is the realisation of Cixous’ l’écriture feminine). The creation of a feminine writing is made manifest in the novel through Lenu’s self-reflexive artistic process, through which she explores questions of narrative voice and identity. In particular, her creative relationship with Lila. Similarly to the historical reality of “Homer” being multiple wandering bards, so too is Lenu’s writing dependent on the voice of another in order to create.
The passages of My Brilliant Friend that are devoted to Elena’s artistic self-discovery usually take the tone of a jeremiad that mourns a lack of creative independence. And yet, what brings Elena closest to a feeling of jouissance are her discursive intellectual conversations with Lila. Indeed, the novel’s epigraph, taken from Goethe’s Faust, points towards Elena’s need for a darker force to push her forwards:
Man’s active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level;
Unqualified repose he learns to crave;
Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave,
Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil.
Both girls act as the other’s creative-destroyer Mephistopheles. From Elena’s perspective, it is only with Lila sitting on her shoulder that she can be inspired. In conversation, the two girls build upon each other’s ideas: Lenu’s infatuation with Nino becomes Dido and Aeneas’ love affair becomes the destroyed Melina and the philanderer Donato Sarratore becomes a city devoid of love becomes Naples herself. It is interesting, I think, that Elena and Lila spend so much time discussing this Roman story of origin for Italy, a story about a queen whose only recourse from a love affair with a free-wheeling man is self-immolation (this story continues to haunt the women later in the series). In their youth, however, the quandry of this myth is one of artistic identity. After receiving the highest possible grade at school from handing in an essay based on this discussion, Elena undergoes a crisis:
Of course, I said to myself, the essay on Dido is mine, the capacity to formulate beautiful sentences comes from me; of course, what I wrote about Dido belongs to me; but didn’t I work it out with her, didn’t we excite each other in turn, didn’t my passion grown in the warmth of hers? And that idea of the city without love, which the teachers had liked so much, hadn’t it come to me from Lila, even if I had developed it, with my own ability? What should I deduce from this?
Lenu feels that without Lila she is unable to write, that underneath her linguistic flourishes it is really Lila’s voice she is trying to emulate. As Elena writes, after she receives a letter from Lila, ‘Would I know how to imagine those things without her? Would I know how to give life to every object, let it bend in unison with mine?’. Elena’s attempts throughout the novel to annex Lila’s voice is ironically how she strives towards intellectual and creative independence throughout the rest of her life. This is one of Elena’s greatest naiveties: whilst she realises that she needs Lila for inspiration, she is unable to collaborate without envy, to be influenced without a feeling of inferiority. Elena spends much time obsessing over Lila’s childhood story, The Blue Fairy, sempiternally ruminating over how her own work cannot compare. Ferrante makes us consider how art cannot be made in a vacuum, that it is constant push-pull, collaboration-competition that acts as the heuristic mechanism behind writing. As she (is said to have said) in a recent interview, ‘there is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this collective intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art’. By integrating and usurping the dynamics of ancient myth into My Brilliant Friend, Ferrante is creating a vision for feminine writing that is multifaceted, dependent (without the negative connotations), and unfettered from masculine muthos.
This takes us back to Greek myth. The fact that one of Elena’s major creative moments in the novel is tied to Virgil’s Aeneid reveals how Ferrante is coming up against the long history of male-centric stories in her pursuit of a l’écriture feminine. In her lecture, “The Public Voice of Women”, Mary Beard details how one of the origin stories of the Western world contains the silencing and enclosure of women. Early on in Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus’ son Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to, ‘go back up to your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff… speech will be the business of men’. Telemachus’ response may seem extreme, but let’s not forget that The Odyssey is part of our artistic consciousness, a story from whence so many others have been derived. I come to similar conclusions as Claudette in my feelings about Ferrante’s literary project: by attacking the source of male voice and storytelling, My Brilliant Friend is positing a literary discourse where female writing is not macaronic within the male. Elena’s difficulty in her literary relationship with Lila, I think, stems from her inability to disconnect from notions of the independent-male-genius-artist. Ironically enough, the original one of these, Homer, was in fact multiple. The polyphonic, blooming, discursive, reliant discourse of the two young girls is represented as an ideal of female speech, one from which new stories can grow. Speech is now the business of women.
—Gabriella Edelstein, February 2016
