The explosion of the "Neapolitan Tetralogy" is undoubtedly a phenomenon-level literary event. The writer Elena Ferrante thus became the most popular and mysterious writer in Italy. The "Neapolitan Quadrilogy" set off a "Ferrante fever" around the world, and millions of readers were impressed by the extremely true, sharp, and unvarnished description of female friendship in the book. Although the author never discloses his gender, the media and critics judge her as female from its "autobiographical" overtones.
In the first half of this year, the series "My Genius Girlfriend", based on the novel of the same name, aired a third season, and it was also announced that it would be renewed for a fourth season.
Stills from the third season of My Genius Girlfriend.
Elena Ferrante's novels all take place in Naples, Italy. Beginning in 2011, Ferrante has published four novels – My Genius Girlfriend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), The Departed, The Left Behind (2013) and The Missing Child (2014), which tell the story of two poor girls growing up in Naples in the 1950s.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym whose true identity remains a mystery. But in the dizzying reading experience of the novel, a curiosity gradually becomes a driving force, that is, repeatedly asking in the sigh of "where did its charm come about?". We must understand what kind of revolutionary shock a literary event will bring to the literary activity that creates feelings and perceptions. In such a process, what kind of experiences and perceptions were "liberated" by writers like Elena Ferrante?
"My Genius Girlfriend" is often labeled as a female friendship, or even a promotional slogan stamped with the label of "plastic sisterhood", saying that it contains a dark psychology that only women understand. But in this article, the author tries to tear this label away, starting from the comparison between the drama adaptation and the original novel, revealing how literature as a language art liberates women's thinking and feelings. In particular, through Ferrante's exploration, how to achieve this valuable practice. At the same time, it should be noted that this article explores not how women's writing is suppressed, but the generation of women's writing.
In friendship, "My Genius Girlfriend" is a story about writing
In the first half of the year, HBO announced the renewal of the fourth season of "My Genius Girlfriend". At the end of the recently aired third season, "Young Lennon", who has left the family, looks at himself in the mirror of the plane bathroom, and "Middle-aged Lennon" smiles back at her — a set of shots that bring tears to the eyes of readers who love Ferrante around the world.
This remake series has been faithful to the original for most of the time, but this scene comes from the director's original, which predicts that the next season will change actors, and the protagonists are about to enter their mature and new stages of life full of new conflicts. In addition, for the reader, a glimpse of the new "Elena" face, as if staring at the author of the same name himself (speculation about the mysterious Elena Ferrante's life has been boiling for many years), the director vaguely arranged a kind of writer and character face, with an intellectual, beautiful, and kind face, as close as possible to the reader's imagination of Elena Ferrante, illuminating the enthusiastic reader's exuberant curiosity.
At the end of the third season of "My Genius Girlfriend", the "young Lennon" who left the family looked at himself in the mirror of the plane bathroom, and the "middle-aged Lennon" smiled back at her.
Speculating on the director's intentions in this way is not empty. The fourth part of the novel "Neapolitan Quadrilogy", "The Missing Child", also has such a cryptic narrative of "breaking the fourth wall". As the final chapter of the quadrilogy, the middle-aged Lennon and Lila will be reunited in Naples, where their fate and old age, the history and future of the neighborhood, and Lila's mysterious ending will be explained, and at the end of the novel, Ferrante chooses to use a "meta-narrative" perspective to break the mystery that runs through the four parts.
Stills from the first season of My Genius Girlfriend.
The pair of dolls thrown into the cellar open up a lifelong friendship between the two protagonists who invaded each other, were inseparable, and connected them with the darkest and bloodiest history of Naples—but towards the end, the novel tells us that all foreshadowings and signs are false, and that the story we see may be the story that Lennon wrote at the end.
"The Missing Child", author: [Italian] Elena Ferrante, translator: Chen Ying, version: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, July 2018
And in this story, the doll and Lila's missing daughter happen to have the same name as Lennon's fiction, a narrative trick she deliberately arranged, and in order to make everything look more dramatic, Lennon in the novel betrays her only promise to Lila: "You can never write about me." Not only did she write, but she wrote in the way Lila hated the most— "Things are what they should be, you don't write a little bit of truth here, and make it up a little bit there." Lennon saved her career as a writer in her later years, and the novel about Lila and her missing children was a great success, but her lifelong bond with Lila was finally broken—Lila completely disappeared from her life.
The ending of Lennon's last novel shares a timeline with the author's success in reality on the one hand, and on the other hand, this practice of "breaking the fourth wall" is synchronized with the intention of the plot of the novel—they deconstruct the meaning of writing in both form and content.
So why is "writing" deconstructed?
Open to change and write in fragments
The question can be asked in a different way– why does Lennon's writing always appear in the book as a kind of existence that is criticized and ridiculed by [Lila]? Now that the fourth wall has been broken, let's take a look at Elena Ferrante's own views on writing. When Ferrante talked about fiction writing, she said:
"The stories you tell, the vocabulary you use, the tasks you want to give life to, these are just tools that allow you to create something that is indescribable, perishable, shapeless, and belongs only to you, but it is a key that can open many doors." 」
"For every novel, the question to be asked is always these: Does this story capture the living things hidden deep inside me? If so, has it spread to every page of the novel, giving them a soul? ”
"But when I write, the reader is not the main thing, the main thing is that I have to find an energy to dig deeper into the story I am about to tell."
Fragments, Elena Ferrante, People's Literature Publishing House, October 2020
The concept of creation, she talks about the real experience of working as a novelist: the vivid display of those anonymous feelings in the heart. In Ferrante's view, text symbols such as "vocabulary" and "plot" are signifier tools, information from the external world, like an ornament, and what the writer should really grasp is "fragment".
The word, derived from the Neapolitan dialect "La frantumaglia", used by her mother, refers to the destructive energy experienced by individuals who encounter contradictions and chaos, but the writer develops it into his own literary theme and tries to unleash the liberating power of the word over the years of creation: the writer has to face this vortex of power, face the risk of losing control, and arrive at a real experience that makes himself and the reader strange.
Stills from the first season of My Genius Girlfriend.
In order to better understand the meaning of The "La frantumaglia" that Ferrante valued, and to better understand the core of the writing of the fate of Lennon and Lila, we must first withdraw our gaze from the fascinating narrative fog and turn to the philosopher's paved reflection on the inner nature of the present.
Fragments, by Elena Ferrante, translated by Chen Ying, edition: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, October 2020
Gillez offers a series of approaches to "how to think about literature". He reminds us that all minority literature is directly political, not that it contains political information, but because its mode of expression breaks through the boundaries and boundaries of the subject of speech (Introduction to Deleuze). We have to keep in mind this dilapidated and new definition of speech, in order to get closer to the core of women's writing and understand the revolutionary significance of "they are writing". Before Deleuze, metaphysics had reached the limits of heidegger's language. In I, Eyes, and Voices, Giocho Agamben clearly combs through the philosophical vein of logos around the subject of speech that speaks in a presupposed language.
Traced back to the Stoic definition of "passion": "excessive impulse beyond the scale of language". Among them, the root teino corresponding to "more than" comes from tomos, which means "the tension of the string consistent with the pitch", and the Stoics believe that all emotions are violent, irrational, and beyond the scale of "logos"; The "terzo" and the witness (testis) are etymally related, and Testis comes from the ancient tristis, which indicates "a person as a third party". It is the "my me" that exists between the eyes and the world, between me and myself. These two etymologies and their evolution correspond to the "sound" and "eye" of the world that "I" perceive, deriving two paths of Western metaphysics.
The former is connected with Aristotle's Rhetoric, in which man obeys passion "i.e., beyond the pitch of reason" and thus becomes an animal capable of speaking, alluding to the relationship between sound and existence—if man is silently and ineffectually in a primitive openness—in which Heidegger identifies the existence of beings; The latter opened up the metaphysics of Valery and Descartes, which was based on the presence of the gaze/consciousness of real human beings, that is, man could always see himself in the mirror. Valery introduced the "hypothesis of delay and division"—assuming that the speed of light takes a century to reflect yourself from the mirror, then in this delayed dizziness, the "I" within "me" will return, the other eye open, another inhuman, immaterial, angelic gaze. Valery sets an eternal introspector within "me", pushing the function of the self to the extreme, and never opening the way to existence (I, Eyes, Voice).
"My Genius Girlfriend", by Elena Ferrante, translated by Chen Ying, edition: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, January 2017
Regardless of the metaphysical march, if our reflection on the perceptual world stays in "I listen" and "I see", the literary text carried out on this basis will always presuppose the subject of the same narrative. That is, the process of literary creation is seen as "man" feeling the pre-existing world, and through the symbol system to reproduce, construct or organize the world. "Symbols are composed of a signifier and an indication, the signifier surface constitutes the expression surface, and the pointed surface constitutes the content surface." Structuralism sees language as the medium used to convey information by pre-existing "I's" that can only reach humans in descent.
Rather, the theory/writing practice of postmodern writers refutes the assumption that the concept of "signifier" exists for the speaker, that language is a visible thing in their texts, not dependent on human language or mind, but inherent in things from beginning to end. They are a noise, a rhythm, a mantra in great literature, flowing as a feeling, it is they who shape the speaker, and when they are bet on different intensities, each character is open to generation.
The destruction of the signifier may have hidden Lila's motives and power to go to great lengths to destroy Lennon's writing. For Lennon, writing was a tool for acquiring knowledge of the essays and a ladder out of commoner status, and writing took her out of the lower town of Naples, into the higher schools of Pisa, and sat at the end of the dinner table of a higher-class family.
When did Lila start rejecting literature? Perhaps for the first time with Lennon to Go to Teacher Galliani's house, the cold reception she received made her realize that literature rejected her origin with mendi's arrogance, and she also rejected literature, and from this moment on she no longer believed that writing had the power to change the world, a power she had felt when she read Little Women as a child.
Stills from the first season of My Genius Girlfriend.
Lennon, a friend who once read Little Women together, reads classical literature, obeys scholastic training, and finds a path to writing, but her writing inspiration comes almost always from the life experience she shared with Lila. When Reinventing Lila's Blue Fairy many years later, Lennon realized that what she had struggled to write over the years had been written by Lila at the beginning of the enlightenment. She asked herself, who is writing it? The clever Lennon worked the road of article knowledge, and the moment she began to write was actually from the seashore, her physical experience with Lila no longer coincided, she lost her virginity on the beach, returned to pizza, did not understand what happened to her, and she had her first novel. For her novels, critics of Lennon's contemporaries did not give the most accurate answer, great writing is not the inheritance of the "literary tradition", let alone a repetition of the existing symbol system of interpreting the world, all great writing, as Deleuze said, must be open to change, and the language of writing is the carrier of creating identity rather than the expression of identity.
The novels written in this way are regarded as female obscenity in Lennon's world, and today's film and television adaptations are also Chinese streaming media are labeled with "plastic sisterhood" promotional copy. Faced with this situation, we have no choice but to declare that there is no place for women's writing in the "palace of literature" for the time being, and when the brilliant literary tradition meets the "fragments" of women's writing, and meets the bodies of childbirth, excretion, and aging in the content, most of them come up with the message after reading that "this is not real literature."
In her Diary of a Walk in Language, Japanese female writer Hachi tawata took Ito Hirumi's poem as an example and described the seemingly antagonistic relationship between "poetic language" and "female language" as the relationship between "climbing" and "excretion" in an easy-going and vivid way:
"The language of poetry has a function that allows us to abandon the body of childbirth, excretion, aging, and pain, and climb upward to a place of 'sublime'. The poem written by Ms. Ito seems to deny this, and it is precisely pulled to the body that gives birth, excretes, and ages. Naked women like shell meat deny the language of shells that protect themselves from the outside world. As a result, it is scarred. At this time, she wants to get relaxation and recovery from the inside through rice. In this way, today I can enjoy the Japanese 'yu rice' cooked by Ms. Ito. ”
"The Diary of Walking with Language", Tawada Leaf, Henan University Press, July 2018
Tawada's reflection on this small language experiment also takes on a postmodern look. In her opinion, female authors who write in both their mother tongue and other languages will produce a new language that fits their body's feelings. Words that exist as media are not things that overflow from the inside, but have long existed and have their own history. For example, the word "sadness" does not feel sad in itself, but the living body and mind are sad, and Tawada Yezi is committed to conveying feelings from the language to the body outside the language when writing the novel, so as to avoid the "scabization" of language.
The metaphor of scabs is associated with Tawada leaf from meditation. Meditation is also a linguistic activity, and zazen is not to put people into a languageless state, but to let the useless language in the brain be driven out by other languages. Perhaps this is similar to the process of literary language production, so that those inexplicable emotions become scabs and fall off, so that the mind and senses are not rigid. In postmodern theory, literature operates precisely as a consciousness that produces and feels perception and explores its own direction.
Elena Ferrante published her debut novel "Annoying Love" in 1992, and Leaf Tawada's famous work "Dog Son-in-Law" was published in 1993. Two female writers who are "peers" in their creative lives write different stories in different languages, different literary experiences, and different stories, but in the text a kind of "collusion" is born, a consensus that language is a visible thing, and perhaps such writing is exactly the equivalent of what Deleuze said, "a revolutionary minority literature for all literature", and if we use their texts as a reference, or as a tool, we may be able to find more evidence.
Explore languages and create a mother tongue that is appropriate for women
Tawada's writing is a conscious experiment, and her strong interest in language comes from her life experience of writing across borders. After graduating from the Faculty of Literature at Waseda University, he studied in Germany and lived here for a long time, completing novels and literary essays in Japanese and German. In her essays, she recorded what she frequently found in between the two languages, and observed that it was not easy to translate novels written in Japanese into German, but it was easier to translate German back to Japanese, and even benefited. In her opinion, this process of translating can "expand her Own Japanese" and "give up her intimacy and deception with her native language."
What is "cheating" in the native language? When language is used at a certain intensity, it will have the feeling of detachment from the body and become a rigid symbol system. "Betting or perceptual appreciation is interpreted as symbols that we perceive as some kind of pre-existing representation of reality, so we assume that there is a humanity that precedes betting and assembly." To advocate and reshape the power of literary free discourse, Tawada Leaf on the one hand gains renewed vitality from the energy of the mutual destruction of the two languages, and on the other hand, pays attention to the spoken language in daily life, and uses feelings and intuition to construct sentences. In her opinion, when borrowing spoken language when writing written language, it becomes much more vivid to repeat some feelings. This mood of writing coincides with the wandering of Claude Lévi-Strauss's thought as an anthropologist, and in the discipline of anthropology, the telling of human history is divided into two types, one is a civilization that has fallen on words, and the other is an oral civilization with primitive purity. True literary language should be able to restore intuitive experience from the rhythm of whispering, so as to avoid the "scab" of language. Treating language as an object of intensity and treating it with caution became a fluid style in the text of Tawata's novels.
Does this fresh style and vitality of writing stem only from the transboundary geographical/living environment? The intensity of two languages destroying each other is often not reciprocal. In observing her own process of borrowing spoken language to transform written language, Tawada said, "When writing in Japanese, this borrowing is taken for granted, and when writing in German, it is subject to self-censorship." Wanting to enter a foreign language world through writing and thus being in constant self-censorship is the experience of Towada Leaf as a minority. And the language's internal self-censorship and monitoring Ferrante has also suggested that in her eyes, it is a feminine state:
"(Surveillance) is not a bad word. It contains a confrontation against dullness and dullness, a metaphor that can fight death, numbness. What stands out is being sober, being alert, and being a way of feeling life. Men turned surveillance into the work of guards, guards, and spies. But surveillance, if you want to understand clearly, is the emotional setting of the whole body, the things that are generated and extended around the body. ”
"The female body has realized that it needs to be monitored to pay attention to the extension and energy of the body. Yes, energy. The term seems to be directed at the male body. But I suspect that at first it only refers to the characteristics of women, whose vitality is particularly like the vitality of plants, expanding life, such as vine plants. I especially like women who are vigilant and they are able to monitor, self-monitor, that's what I mean by that. ”
Fragments, Elena Ferrante, People's Literature Publishing House, October 2020
Stills from the third season of My Genius Girlfriend.
In Ferrant's eyes, "monitoring" is a state of keeping the body active and awake, a universal state that belongs to all women. Because women are always alert to their bodies, and mothers have a natural "monitoring" of their children, a perception that is as constant as an ocean wave, in which writing becomes self-evidently an activity: faithful to the body's feelings rather than external speech, leaving the body open to speak. In her essay, Tawada also said that her extraordinary sensitivity and interest in language did not motivate her to become a linguist, and it seemed that she would only be interested when language fit the skin's feelings, and when it was associated with other subjects and she poured out to the body.
In the relationship between things and nouns, Benjamin once argued that things first communicate themselves to humans, so that humans can name these things. Like animism, she perceives that language and sound are inherent in everything. Unlike a priori theory, it does not presuppose the idea of the existence of an object and then the naming of a person, but that all things can tell themselves to human beings, and the noun of things can only be close to the essence of things when people who do not know a language read it aloud. When Tawada Yezi gave the example of reading a novel by an Indian writer when he was a child, who wrote a story that took place on the Chinese stage in English, when confronted with the reader's question that "you have never visited China", the writer replied: Once he read European novels without understanding "cappuccino", although he could not appear in his mind to correspond to words, he could feel joy from words.
"Accidental Creation", author: [Italy] Elena Ferrante, translator: Chen Ying / Zou Yingdi / Chen Yangqi, version: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, April 2022
Words have their weight, and they can take away a person's heart. "Anorexia" is also known as "tableware disease" because it is a disease that occurs after leaving the mother's breast and having to touch the inorganic tableware. The same is true of people who swallow language, and if language is no longer suitable for the body, they will suffer from the "anorexia" of language. Such cases are numerous in the text, transforming and multiplying like a kaleidoscope. The form of language and the content of its speech are almost exactly synchronized, using invented language to describe how we are generated in language, and using language experiments to write out what language is a visual object, which is an exploration and game of the irreducibility of language.
In this kind of anagram and game, the essence of things is constantly explored. The density and intensity of the anagrams were so great that they finally conspired to give birth to new nouns, new female bodies, so that when reading it, they felt very fresh, and at the same time, they also realized that all this was the true appearance of the things mentioned before. This exploration of the ontology of language seems to have unconsciously created a mother tongue that never existed, the mother tongue of the woman (body). Words and phrases, whispering to our bodies.
The Story of a New Name, by Elena Ferrante, translated by Chen Ying, edition: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, April 2017
Female Writing: Gypsy Legends Wandering in The Mother Tongue
Wandering through The Various Texts of Ferrante Elena, we seem to be approaching the answer to the "same destination" in women's writing.
Great literature is not based on established identities and linguistic orders, and the literary traditions that once shut Lila out rejected countless female writers. In Joanna Russ's view, the view that women's writing is not worth mentioning, obscene, and amusing is a kind of "self-deception" from the whole society, and the view that "women's experience is not equal to the experience of all human beings" is a prejudice deliberately created by society today, and this prejudice still exists even after information about women's experience has long been widely known.
However, this article explores not how women's writing is suppressed, but the generation of women's writing.
In the midst of countless debates or irreparable disagreements, talented female writers are writing literary texts that deserve to be valued and deeply interpreted. There are more stories of Lennon and Lila being told. Although their life stories are used as a reference in the above discussion, we should turn our gaze back to them again after a long conceptual statement—a scene that Lila had clearly described to Lennon a scene in which she feared so much, of the "disappearance of boundaries" of all things, feeling trapped in a slimy messy world.
"Leaving, Staying", by Elena Ferrante, translator: Chen Ying, edition: 99 Readers| People's Literature Publishing House, October 2017
There the sense of touch will be involved in the vision, the vision will be involved in the sense of taste, and it is no longer possible to judge the real world with the solid and unchanging things such as the stars, the sea, the night sky, and there is no clear boundary between man and everything, between man and woman, they are like some material mixed together. Lila clearly describes a world where symbols are no longer secure, a world in which her brain involuntarily re-weaves everything. This was once unthinkable for Lennon, because in the first three novels Lennon was calm and obedient, and her mother-in-law, husband, and even mother repeatedly told her that it was a miracle of class transition, and that she could do all this precisely because she did not obey the rules of the world like Lila.
But when she returns to Naples in the fourth part, the reader will realize that this woman did not really have the ambition and intention to seize power subjectively, and that the driving force of her life was not the secrets, hatreds, and plans in male society, but only obeyed the mechanics of power itself, and there was always a more powerful person who carried a talented and obedient woman upwards. Her attraction to the class of power is far greater than the attraction of power to her, and her obedience is also constructed by the channel that power has created for her. Lila never had such a passage, so Lila predates Lennon and perceives with physical experience that the boundaries of this world are disappearing, and Lila becomes the "witch" of Naples.
The real thing in Lennon's life that can be called "passion" is the love for Reno that sprouted in her youth, which has a limited limit and will eventually end, and only the stimulation and inspiration that Lila brings her. At the end of the day, the only thing worthy of female writers' devotion is the language that acts on the body, which allows us to go beyond the language we were acquired at birth — neapolitan dialect, Japanese or other mother tongues — and also beyond the languages taught by society — Italian, German or Chinese... And become a gypsy between language and country.
Perhaps this is exactly what Deleuze puts it, that women, as people of minority sex, open up to new possibilities.
Text/峖沛沛沛
Edit/walk away
Proofreading/Lin Zhao