It’s hard to adequately describe just what is so alluring about Elena Ferrante’s writing. As Gabriella and I discuss in our conversation, it is a voice—as it is translated by Ann Goldstein—that is quite different to what both Gabriella and I are usually drawn to. In our previous discussion of Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I mentioned that the prose I like best is opalescent: lyrical, dense, and full of ornamental cadence. It is a type of voice decidedly different from Ferrante’s own. So what accounts for the attraction, the almost compulsive need to devour each and every page of Ferrante’s quartet of novels? I’m afraid I can’t explain it clearly enough (although I will try). I feel that only the superlatives by which Elena describes Lila’s writing—writing unseen by the reader—truly reveal the attraction of Ferrante’s own:
The voice set in the writing overwhelmed me, enthralled me even more than when we talked face to face: it was completely cleansed of the dross of speech…
Prose cleansed from dross is the perfect way to describe Ferrante’s writing. It is not a voice devoid of emotion—in fact, hers might be the most vividly felt and emotionally acute in recent literature. Yet—and I feel that this is critical to Ferrante’s allure—it is a voice that is never melodramatic or overwrought. Instead, Ferrante’s writing is unrelenting in its savagery. Her world and her characters are drawn so precisely, so viscerally, that they seem as if flayed from the skin of memory. In Ferrante’s hands, literature is a layer of epidermis scraped through with a scalpel, so that we as readers may look on with pale horror (and morbid curiosity) at the grisly sinew of human emotion.
Re-reading My Brilliant Friend again I was struck by sense of déjà vu—not just because I was again returning to the brutal landscape of Ferrante’s Naples—but because it reminded of another voice, a voice that I had not read for many years until I re-opened Orlando last December, a voice that, like Ferrante’s, seemed scored with savage fury. When I was the age that Elena and Lila are at the end of My Brilliant Friend (that is, 16), I discovered Virginia Woolf. Unlike Ferrrante, Woolf has a truly opalescent voice. Her writing seems to me the literary analogue to Expressionism: quixotic and elusive yet vivid, palpable, and as acutely real as anything that up to this moment has been created. Yet it was the anger, the fury of Woolf’s voice—particularly in A Room of One’s Own that emerges spectre-like when re-reading My Brilliant Friend. Now having returned to both works, I cannot help but see My Brilliant Friend as Ferrante’s fictional response to Woolf, a literary addendum to the unsolved problem that Woolf explores in A Room of One’s Own: the problem of women and fiction.
As Woolf explains, the key conduit between women and fiction—or really, any type of creative pursuit—is ultimately money: “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. This problem of money—and the ancillary pre-occupation of class—is at the root of the separation and conflict between these two brilliant friends of Ferrante’s novel. It is money that defines the fates of these two girls, and the lack of it in the novel is a hamartia that haunts them, but most particularly, Lena. Elena’s father is a porter and Lila’s is a shoemaker—a difference that seems minute at face value as both are from the labouring class—yet it is a distinction that becomes an inescapable gulf between the two girls. For Elena’s father can afford to send her to middle school and Lila’s father cannot, a divergence in choice that leads the two girls onto very different paths. For as we are told at the book’s prologue, Elena will succeed as a novelist of note, while Lila’s later life—we assume—seems destined for infinite obscurity.
The other solution to the problem of women and fiction is “a room of one’s own”. Both Ferrante and Woolf argue that it is impossible to have a room of one’s own if the length and breadth of woman’s life is merely the circumference of the man to which she belongs. In My Brilliant Friend, the oppressive force of maschismo is primordial and deeply destructive, informing the ways in which the men of Elena and Lila’s town control every aspect of their women, so that even their interior lives—their metaphysical rooms—are no longer their own.
Most of this is found in explicit physical violence where little girls are thrown out of windows and young women are kidnapped and raped, and in an endless, exhausting parade of domestic abuse, so frequent as to be considered an essential aspect of ordinary life. The relentlessness of violence against women is so recurrent and so pervasive in My Brilliant Friend that it acquires an almost atavistic quality. Yet the destructive force of maschismo also lurks in quieter, more mendacious corners as well, as when Donato Sarratorre—rail conductor and erstwhile poet—drives the pitiful Melina to madness with his indifferent seduction, as well as paralyzing Elena herself with shame and fear when he molests her in Ischia. It is also shown in the figure of Marcello Solara, who never lays a hand on Lila but through the manipulative wooing of her family and the seizing of the very first pair of shoes that she creates (Lila’s first unequivocal creative output since The Blue Fairy at age seven) shows the brutal extent of his claim of ownership over Lila. For the Solara male, it is not enough to merely own Lila’s body by law and physical consequence, he must own her mind as well. Lila resists Solara as much as she can, against her family and even Elena’s recriminations, only to be led into the arms of Stefano Carraci, who she eventually marries. Unfortunately this act of defiance is ultimately impotent, as Stefano is revealed as yet another man controlled by the vicious hands of the Fascist Camorra duo of the Solaras. This existential portrait of marriage as a cyclical-narrative of subjugation, a narrative that subsumes generations and is inescapable—even for the cleverest, most brilliant of us—is perhaps the saddest story in this indisputably bleak book.
Ferrante’s exploration of the physical violence—so endemic in the neighbourhood—finds root in the disperazione experienced by the men of the town, a condition of abject hopelessness enlarged by the scum of poverty:
At the Bar Solara, in the heat, between gambling losses and troublesome drunkenness, people often reached the point of disperazione—a word that in dialect meant having lost all hope but also being broke—and hence of fights….. Blows were given and received. Men returned home embittered by their losses, by alcohol, by debts, by deadlines, by beatings, and at the first inopportune word they beat their families, a chain of wrongs that generated wrongs.
Disperazione and its violent ramifications are not just omnipresent; they are the skeins that connect one generation to the next. Yet as Ferrante explores with the figure of Donato Sarratorre, and as she would extract in the later Neapolitan books with rapier-like intent, the maschismo, the force of will of men upon women is not merely confined to the streets of poverty-stricken Naples, it is a miasma that infects all of Italy, if not of history itself. The ferocity of Ferrante’s vision calls nothing so much to mind as Woolf’s own savage words on the subject:
If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (…) as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact (…) she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.
Yet as much as Ferrante reflects the savagery of Woolf’s vision of history, she also echoes Woolf’s deep reverence for those tenacious voices that somehow penetrated through the masculine film that coats communal memory. Such voices that were simply too impossible to ignore, too glittering as to be confined to a cabinet of literary curiosities. Among the voices that Woolf invokes are Austen’s, the Bronte’s, Miss Mitford’s, Mister Eliot’s and Mistress Gaskell’s. Ferrante posits not one but two tenacious voices for our own edification: Lila’s—elusive yet seemingly touched with genius—and Elena, the narrator. Pathologically insecure, Elena is one of the most compelling yet repellent narrators I’ve ever encountered. It is her great love—and concurrent loathing—of her brilliant friend, and vice versa, that is ultimately, the strongest source of allure in My Brilliant Friend, beyond Ferrante’s voice and virtuosic eye for novelistic detail. For the greatest violence in a novel filled with violence is the violence of Elena’s love/hatred, pleasure/fear of Lila. Once you have read her words, it is a voice impossible to ignore and harder to forget, haunting you with the memory, or perhaps the continuing existence, of your own dysfunction, your own ferocious passion. Passion that you’ve been taught to suppress and modulate in the world we live in now, a world which in many ways is the antithesis of Ferrante’s Naples, but in other horrifying ways, is corrosively similar. Yet it is this combination of pleasure/pain that drives you to read the Neapolitan quartet with a sort of frenzied compulsion, it is this passion that is the root of the alchemy that is Ferrante’s writing. I feel that Woolf says it best:
…who shall measure the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?
—Claudette Palomares, February 2016
