Ferrante shows us how she works – but do we really want to know?
IN THE MARGINS by Elena Ferrante, tr Ann Goldstein
172pp, Europa, £12.99, ebook £7.59 ★★★ ★★
Elena Ferrante’s disclosures about womanhood and motherhood and self-determination, postwar Italian society and the ambivalent depths of friendship are such a joy to her readers that I suspect we don’t mind about her non-disclosure, of who she is. Which is as it should be: a writer’s truest identity is in their writing.
If we mind about anything concerning the author of the Neapolitan Novels and, most recently, The Lying Life of Adults, it is only that what makes her novels so successful is subtle, difficult to catch, unanalysable. In this slim collection of four essays, published in Italian in November and out in English on March 17, she offers some feelings about, and insights into, her writing – and the great irony is that this openness is often harder to enjoy than the elusiveness of her fiction.
The first three texts are her Umberto Eco Lectures, given in 2021 (by an actress playing Ferrante) at Bologna. In “Pain and Pen”, she remarks that “writers talk about writing too often in an unsatisfying way”, and explains how two kinds of writing exist within her. There’s the “writing that keeps me diligently within the margins”, and a writing that Ferrante doesn’t know how to control – a “pure sensibility that feeds on the alphabet”. “I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition,” she explains, “and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray, for the lowly, abject woman I am to find a means of having her say.”
Writers through whose writing she found her own voice include Virginia Woolf, something of an avatar here, alongside Beckett’s The Unnamable, the marvellous Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience and the great Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa.
Many writers – and readers – would cheer at what Ferrante says: that language is inadequate, and that writing’s struggle is to overcome that inadequacy. But her argument feels weakened by a recurring emphasis on the male-dominated literary tradition she has had to struggle against.
Of course, that patrimony has existed, and it’s reasonable to say, as she does later, “by its nature [it] doesn’t provide true female sentences”. But it is frustrating not to find out what, for Ferrante, constitutes such a sentence. Some frustration may have its source in the translation – I’m not satisfied by the English version of Stampa’s sonnet, which projects an inferiority, rather than the more likely humility, of Stampa’s “lowly, abject woman”.
Ferrante’s openness here is ironically harder to enjoy than her usual elusiveness
A fascinating line, nevertheless, flows directly into her novels from her contentions that women have historically been seen as excessive and that their words “get lost in the wind”. Getting lost, disappearing, are her ever-present fictional themes. In the Neapolitan Novels, the disappearance of Lila’s daughter Tina and Lila herself, of Olga’s husband in The Days of Abandonment, of Elena and Leda in The Lost Daughter – not to forget Ferrante’s own disappearance into pseudonymous anonymity and re-emergence through authorship.
In later lectures, “Aquamarine” and “Histories, I”, she documents benchmark discoveries. How her teacher’s advice to “Tell the thing as it is” paralysed her; how the author’s self is as enmeshed in a story as her characters are; and that after reading the philosopher Adriana Cavarero and Gertrude Stein, she realised she could narrate her characters boldly, even immodestly, in the voice of a “necessary other”, the voice that later defined My Brilliant Friend.
The final article, “Dante’s Rib”, feels something of a space-filler after this excavation, expending its energy on Dante’s ability to go further than most male writers in his imagining of Beatrice. But it also contains a good piece of writerly advice: to overcome language’s inadequacy, write fast to keep up with what the world’s dictating to you.
Visceral, luminous, audacious, brutal, doubly-layered by that “necessary other”, Ferrante’s fiction is charged with a compulsive, unsentimental potency, which these essays work hard to illuminate, and often succeed. The only objection I have is not that In The Margins doesn’t possess her alchemical refashioning of life’s messes into the more satisfying messes of her novels – how could it? – but because a magically good novelist lets us glimpse her occasionally protesting too much.
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