For thirty years, the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante (pen name) published anonymously, without revealing personal information, not appearing in public, and not giving interviews. In a 1991 letter to publishers, she wrote: "I believe that once a book is written, the author loses its usefulness. If the book itself has something to say, they will find the reader. If not, there will be little attention. ”
But the "Neapolitan Quadrilogy" was too successful, and Lila and Lenu's friendship covered the problems that women would face in their lifetimes, and people could not restrain the desire to know the author. Ferrante's Lenu pondered, Lila practiced, and sometimes the opposite. They do not tolerate themselves, because there is no ready-made road, so they walk alone into the thorns. In the book, Lila and Lenu eventually grow old and are able to calmly look back on the lives they had lived. Outside of the book, Elena Ferrante in recent years has been willing to jump out of her identity as an author and say a few more words. She began giving interviews, mostly in Frantumaglia: A Writer's Journey. She writes a column for a newspaper that ranges from houseplants to child lying.
Elena Ferrante "Neapolitan Quadrilogy"
Ferrante recently published a book called In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, which contains ideas for writing. The short book consists of four essays from four lectures. Elena Ferrante herself still did not appear, and the speech was read by someone else, with the English translation by Ann Gostann.
The first, Pain and Pen, she wrote about how she learned to write in a workbook at grammar school. That kind of exercise has its own rules, black horizontal lines, longitudinal red lines. The text was confined to it, "very much tortured me". "The material of writing should be inspiring, but our practice is not like that. If you write out the scope it prescribes, you will be punished. When writing in such a book, Ferrante was often distracted. She cherished the blank part on the left side of the book, and always did not want to destroy it, and the result was that the words were piled on the right. The disciplined sense of the exercise book enters Ferrante's subconscious as he writes and becomes part of the author's psyche—following the rules and longing for chaos.
In the second essay, Aquamarine, Ferrante recounts her "passion for the real thing" and the way she writes through observation. "For me, what matters most is the eyes when I write: the trembling yellow leaves, the details of the coffee machine, the sea and sky glow emanating from my mother's aquamarine ring, the sisters playing in the clearing, the bald man in the blue blouse." She wants to be a mirror, "collecting fragments based on past and future situations, determining their location, and a story is born." Stories always happen naturally."
Elena Ferrante's belief is that reality is "what reality looks like." In her youth, realism seduced her and led her to believe that realism was all there was to literature. When found that his mother's aquamarine ring could not be accurately described in words, Ferrante was frustrated. Truthfully describing, mirroring others is an almost unattainable goal. Even if the words can't do it, the ring is still there, glowing intoxicatingly in the dark.
What if realism were an illusion? Later, she tried to write gothic and fantasy novels, and the satisfaction of writing was low. Through extensive reading, Ferrante began to understand a truth: "In order to write truth, you must accept the fact that the writer is a distorted mirror." "A ring is more than just a piece of jewelry. It is the product of time, space, and human emotion. Since these elements are constantly changing, so will their products. Accepting this, Ferrant focused his efforts on the narration of the narration.
Stills from "My Genius Girlfriend"
In the Neapolitan Tetralogy, Lenu is the narrator. Narration is her greatest ability. In this way, she copes with the chaos of life, to poverty, violence and depression, to the storms in her own head. From the time he and Lila were preparing to write books as children, Lenu began to exercise this ability, using observation and analysis to control the uncontrollable parts and create his own order.
"I use the first-person narrative in the book, because Lenu's life has been stirred by her frequent collisions with the world. She had worked hard to establish this pattern of thinking, and the accumulated scars inspired possibilities she had never thought about. As she weaves through an increasingly out-of-control story in this way, perhaps it's no longer a story, but a chaos in which the narrator and the characters are entangled. The author is also inevitably involved in the story. ”
Elena Ferrante is not the first author to be so involved. Some writers go further, and in the novel, they directly turn the author himself into a character and write it into the book. Ferrante did not do this, instead she hid herself for a long time. Even so, in her book, the author's personality, experience, and ideas are still significant.
The interweaving of multiple identities became the subject of the latter two articles. In History, I, Ferrante talks about writers who have had a profound impact on her: Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and others. Ferrante is invisible to the public, but she does not hesitate to share these literary threads so that we can weave her appearance from history.
Elena Ferrante in interviews is vague and changeable, and in these manuscripts that talk about literature and writing, she appears more sincere and direct, expressing herself in definite language, tracing the personal and historical sources of an inspiration. We can take the guess as fun: which is the more authentic writer himself?
We know that the speaker of the four-seat speech was Ferrante's actor. The man who held the pen, whose real name was not Elena Ferrante. She had actor Manuela Mandracchia play her, giving her first three speeches in November 2021. The fourth speaker was the scholar and critic Tiziana de Rogatis. In the literary world that Ferrante and she created, identity is an important element.
Lila has experienced many episodes of identity collapse and reconstruction in her life. Ferrante uses the word "smarginatura" to describe this state. The word is associated with the "margin" in the title, which means a change and dissolution of boundaries. Lila often had an urge to delete herself or turn it into a book in the second half of her life. Lenu acts as a book writer, dissolving himself and turning himself into words. They are constantly creating and being deprived. Trying to get what you want, the dolls that were thrown into the cellar and the daughter who disappeared never came back (really?). ）。 The starry sky was asphalt covered with broken glass, and Lila finally disappeared as she wished. She hadn't changed the world, and the people of the old neighborhood still seemed to be walking around in the gray-yellow set, but if you looked closely, many of them were dead.
At one point, Lila and Lenu quarreled, accusing her of "you people who always like to use the words 'suddenly, blink of an eye', but things never happen suddenly". The author, who is hidden behind Elena Ferrante, understands the length of life and knows that it is impossible to write the lives of two women in four books, but she still lets go and uses herself as a distorted mirror to slowly write about the process of everything that happens.