"Only when I adopt a simple, sober, strong female voice, similar to the voice of the intellectual women of the middle class in this era, and I start writing with this voice, will I feel that I can write a good story." 」
--Elena Ferrante
Note: This article is excerpted from Elena Ferrante's collection of letters and interviews, Fragments, originally published in the 2015 Paris Review. Due to space constraints, the content has been curtailed.
Eva: What do you think is the fundamental difference between male writing and female writing?
Ferrante: I answer your question through my personal experience. I grew up —twelve or thirteen years old— very convinced that a good book must have a male protagonist, and that made me very frustrated. This phase lasted more than two years, and when I was fifteen years old, I became keen to read the stories of brave teenage girls in distress. But I continue to think—arguably, the idea is more explicit—that the great novelists are all men, and I'm going to learn to tell stories like they do. At that age, I read a lot of books, and to be clear, I imitated male writers. Even when I write girls' stories, I always let my heroine go through the wind and frost, very free, very perseverance.
I try to imitate great works written by men. To be more specific, I didn't want to write like those female writers, for example, like Madame Lafayette or Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters—at the time, I knew very little about contemporary literature—and the writers I wanted to imitate were Defoe, Fielding, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and even Hugo. I felt at the time that there were very few female writers worth imitating, they were relatively weak, and the works of male writers were very numerous and more fascinating. I didn't want to get too far into the conversation, that phase was a long one for me, it lasted until I was twenty years old, and it had a big impact on me. In my opinion, the male fiction tradition offers something rich and constructive, and I feel that women's fiction lacks that.
Movie "Becoming Jane Austen"
Eva: So do you think women's writing is relatively weak?
Ferrante: No, not at all. I'm talking about what I thought when I was a teenager. Later, my perspective changed dramatically. For historical reasons, women's writing traditions are not as colorful as men's writing, but they have also left behind some high-standard works, some of which are very creative, such as the works of Jane Austen. In the twentieth century, the situation of women has changed radically. Feminist thought and feminist practice have released a lot of energy, promoted deeper and more radical transformations, and produced many profound changes. Without these women's struggles, feminist articles, and women's literature, I wouldn't be able to recognize myself, and these works made me a mature woman.
My experience in writing novels, whether unpublished or those that have already been published, takes shape after the age of twenty, and I try to write stories that match my gender and reflect the differences of women. But for some time now, I've been thinking that we should build our own traditions for women, and we should never give up the skills left behind by our predecessors. As women, we want to build a strong, rich and vast literary world, as rich as, if not richer, than the literary world of male writers. Therefore, we must be better armed, we must dig deep into our differences, and we must use advanced tools to dig. In particular, we cannot give up our freedom.
Every female writer, as in other fields, aims not only to be the best of women writers, but to be the best of all writers, both men and women, to exert their literary talents as much as possible. In order to do this, we must not be bound by any ideology, we must be free from all mainstream, correct lines and ideological guidance. The only thing a woman who writes, the only thing she should consider is to tell what she knows and experiences, whether beautiful or ugly, whether there is a contradiction or not, without having to follow any guidelines, not even following women of the same front. Writing requires great ambition, freedom from prejudices, and a systematic revolt.
Sandra: Which of your works do you think makes you fully engaged and has the characteristics you just mentioned?
Ferrante: It's the book that makes me feel most guilty— The Daughter in the Shadows. I put the protagonist in the book in a situation that I couldn't stand when I was writing. Leda said: "The hardest things to tell are the things that we can't understand ourselves. We can say that this is a proverb, and it is the foundation of all my books. Writing should go down a difficult path, and in fictional fiction, a woman who writes, the narrator "I", is never a single voice in the story, but the writing itself. The narrator faces a very difficult challenge: she should organize in words what she knows but has not yet figured out.
That's what happened to Delia, and it also happened to Olga, Leda, and Elena. But Delia, Olga, and Elena go through their journey, and by the end of the story, they are gloomy, but they are saved. But what Leda wrote was something she couldn't stand, whether as a daughter, a mother, or a friend of another woman. Especially that subconscious action, she took the doll— this is the core of the whole story, the meaning of this action is something she did not expect, of course, in the writing can not explain. Here, I expect to show more than the words I write: a very true, convincing story can achieve such an effect, even if the person who wrote it does not understand the meaning, because if she knew the answer, she could die. "Daughter in the Shadows" is the most painful of all the novels I have published, and it is also the most closely related to me.
Eva: You've been emphasizing the central role of writing, and you say it's like a chain of water drawn from a deep well. What are the characteristics of the way you write?
Ferrante: I am only convinced of one thing: I can only feel that I can write a good story if I adopt a simple, sober, strong female voice, similar to that of the middle-class intellectual women of this era, and I start writing with this voice. I need a crisp start, clear sentences, and no need to show beautiful words or style. Through this tone, the novel can be written steadily, and I wait with a nervous mood for another moment to come, that is, I can interrupt those gentle and stable voices with a series of vicissitudes, harshness, excitement, intermittent sounds, and may collapse at any time.
"My Genius Girlfriend", People's Literature Publishing House
When I first changed my tone, it was accompanied by excitement, uneasiness, and anxiety. I like to break down the cultured, cultured shells of my characters, to make them exude rough souls, to make them noisy, perhaps hysterical. Therefore, I put a lot of thought into the transition between the two tones, and I hope that the process of the tone becoming intense is amazing, and at the same time naturally return to calm. Actually, it's easier for me to break the sound of the narration because I can't wait for the moment, I slide into that state contentedly, and I'm worried about the moment when the voice returns to calm. I'm worried that the narrator won't be able to calm down, especially since now the reader knows that her calm is false and won't last long, that the order of the narration will soon be disrupted, that she will show her true state with greater determination and fun, and that I need to put some thought into making that calm real.
Eva: Now let's talk about the Neapolitan Quadrilogy, the relationship between Lila and Elena is not like fiction, nor is it like it is told in the usual way, as if it comes directly from the subconscious.
Ferrante: We say that the Neapolitan Tetralogy does not find a way in "fragments," that is, in material that is messily mixed together, as in other works. I felt from the beginning that everything was a new experience, that everything was in the place where it should have appeared, perhaps because of my relationship with Daughters in the Shadows. By the time I wrote this book, for example, I had realized the importance of the image of Nina. It was a young mother, at odds with the environment in which the "Kermora" elements were rampant, and it was because of this that she attracted Leda. The first episode that came to my mind, of course, was two lost rag dolls, and later lost daughters. But now, I don't feel the need to enumerate the connections between my several novels.
What I would say is that for me it was a whole new experience, and I felt that the material was naturally ordered and came from other novels. As far as I know, the theme of female friendship, which is also related to the female friend I mentioned in the Corriere della Sera who died a few years ago: this is the original prototype of the story of Lila and Elena. Later, I had my own private "storeroom"—some novels that were fortunately unpublished—in which there were a lot of uncontrollable girls and women, their men and circumstances trying to suppress them in vain, they were exhausted but still bold, and they were always easy to get lost in the "fragments" of their own brains, concentrated in the mother Amaria in "Annoying Love". Now that I think about it, Amalya resembles Lila in many ways, including her "disappearance of boundaries."
Eva: Whether it's Lila or Elena, these two characters are fundamentally different, but they are easy to resonate with the reader and make the reader feel empathy, how do you explain this situation? Does this have anything to do with the difference between the two? Both characters are voluminous and have many layers, but in general, Elena is a figure closer to reality, while Lila seems to be above reality, as if she were a mysterious material composition, digging deeper, sometimes with some symbolic features.
Ferrante: The difference between Elena and Lila has greatly influenced the choice of narrative strategy, but both of them have experienced a time of change, where the situation of women has changed, which is at the heart of the story. Thinking about the role of reading and going to school, Elena is very demanding of herself, she is very diligent, and she can find the tools she needs every time. With a restrained pride, she recounts her journey to becoming an intellectual, and she participates actively in the world, emphasizing that Lila has been left far behind by herself. But her narration would be interrupted from time to time, because Lila was more active than she was, especially more intensely and thoroughly involved in the world, and it could be said that Lila was lower and more heartfelt.
Childhood Elena in the TV series My Genius Girlfriend
Lila would end up actually leaving the stage, leaving the whole stage to Elena, and Lila fell prey to what she feared most: the disappearance of boundaries, the disappearance of the self. What you call the difference, which arises in the constant wandering of the relationship between the two characters, is also the structure of Elena's story. This distinction makes female readers, who should also include a subset of male readers, feel like Lila and like Elena. If two friends follow the same steps, it's like a copy of the other, they're mirrors of each other, and they take turns telling in secret voices, but that's not the case. This step was broken from the start, and it was not only Lila who made the difference, but also Elena. When Lila's steps become unbearable, the reader clings to Elena; but when Elena is lost, the reader trusts Lila.
Sandro: What does the "Neapolitan Quadrilogy" series have to do with your previous writing experience, and has there been any new situation in the process of writing this book?
Ferrante: There are a lot of new experiences. First of all, in my past experience, I've never written a story that long. Secondly, I never imagined that I could write about the lives of these characters in such detail, spanning such a long historical stage, full of ups and downs and changes. Third, because of my personal preferences, I have always rejected the subject of social advancement, telling how easily it is for a character to acquire a certain political and cultural position, or how easily people's beliefs are to change, or to emphasize the class of the character's origin, the importance of the origin has not been erased, or even really weakened. The subjects of my writing, as well as my writing skills, and these questions do not fit. But in fact, when I write, I write endlessly: the historical background is naturally integrated into the behavior, thoughts and life choices of the characters. I never imagined that the historical background was like a set, outside the story; I was originally a little repellent and bored with politics and sociology, but I later found pleasure in it. I'm right, it's fun that allows me to talk about the "alienation" and "inclusion" of women.
Eva: Is it relative to what alienation and naturalization?
Ferrante: Elena and Lila feel that history and all the politics, society, economy, and culture have nothing to do with them, but without them noticing, their words or actions are contained in history. This alienation and naturalization seemed to me to be unplanned and difficult for me to tell, and as usual, I decided to challenge myself and decided to start telling. I hope that history is like a very vague background, and that this context will change, that will impact the lives of these characters, that will change their beliefs, decisions, actions and language. Of course, if there is a false tone, it may make me get stuck. But the novel was written very smoothly, and I was always convinced—wrong or right—that I felt that the tone would hold on, give all the events of the Neapolitan Quadrilogy a sense of reality, and make the telling of those grand events less banal.
Sandra: Isn't the emergence of female friendship as a new literary theme unusual? Now everyone acknowledges that before the Neapolitan Tetralogy, there was no literary tradition of female friendship. In previous novels, you also told the story of lonely women who had no female friends to rely on and talk to. Even though Leda was at the beach – that's what you mentioned – she would love to have a friendly relationship with Nina. But she went on vacation alone, in a state of absolute solitude, as if she had no female friends.
Ferrante: You're right. Delia, Olga, and Leda are all left to their own problems on their own, and they don't have any other women to turn to for support. Only Leda later broke a state of isolation and wanted to have a sympathetic relationship with another woman. But at this time, she did an incomprehensible thing, so that this friendship had no possibility of development. Elena was never alone, and all her stories were intertwined with her childhood friends.
The adults Elena and Lila in the TV series My Genius Girlfriend
Sandra: But come to think of it, Lila has done something very serious since she was a child, and her childhood decisions have had an impact on her whole life.
Ferrante: It's true. But before confronting this new subject, before talking about these two heroines, and their friendships, I want to emphasize some common features between previous and later novels. The three novels I've written before, and the Neapolitan Tetralogy, are all told in the first person, but as I mentioned earlier, in any novel I don't have a setting, and the narrator "I" is a human voice. Delia, Olga, Leda and Elena are all writing, they were writing before, or they were writing. On this point, I want to stick to this: the story of these four characters, I conceived not in the first person, but in the third person, they all left through words, or are leaving behind what they experienced. This often happens to us women, and in the face of a crisis, we try to write and calm ourselves down. This kind of private writing can control our suffering and allow us to write letters and diaries. I always start with this starting point, those women write their stories, just to understand their own situation. In the "Neapolitan Tetralogy", this premise becomes apparent and becomes the main driving force behind the story.
Sandro: Why are you stressing that?
Ferrante: I'm trying to show that I think of the women I write about who express themselves in writing, and it makes me think that their writing reveals the truth. Italo Svevo argues that before the reader, authors should first believe in the story they tell. For myself, in addition to believing the stories I tell, I should also believe that Olga and Leda are writing about their experiences, and especially that the truth they write will move me. One of the characteristics of the narrators in all four novels is that they are very dependent on writing. Delia, Olga, Leda, and Lennon seemed to know the minutiae of the story they were going to tell. But the more the story moves forward, the more uncertain, silent, and untrustworthy they become without them realizing it. This is where I have focused my thinking for so many years: finding the female "me" in the language, wording, sentence structure, and stylistic transformation, showing a determined gaze, sincere thinking and feelings, while retaining some very unstable thoughts, actions and emotions. Of course, the thing I care about most is to avoid any hypocrisy, and in any case, my narrator should be very honest with herself, and she should be as real in her calm as she is when she is angry and jealous.
Sandra: One last question. Lila's writing occupies an important place in the novel, profoundly influencing Elena from childhood. What are some of the characteristics of Lila's writing?
Ferrante: Lila has written very few texts, and whether these words are as powerful as Elena says, we will not know. What we do know is that these words eventually became a template for Elena to learn and a goal she had worked so hard to achieve all her life. Elena has something to say about the characteristics of this ideal writing, but that doesn't matter. Most importantly, Elena wouldn't have become a writer without Lila. Everyone who writes will always start from an ideal writing and get his own text, which will always appear in front of us and cannot be reached. It's a ghost in the head that can't be captured. As a result, the only trace of Lila's writing was Elena's writing.
This article is excerpted from
Fragments
Author: [Italian] Elena Ferrante
Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House
Producer: 99 readers
Original name: La frantumaglia
Translator: Chen Ying
Publication year: 2020-10