stuck in the neighborhood

I increasingly like Lenu. the more I see her from the outside, from Lila's perspective or as a character in a story rather than a voice in my head, the more I feel for her. even within her narration there's a lot to like, admire, and sympathize with. however I resist this trend in the fandom to act like it's a cardinal sin to dislike her. I understand wanting to defend her from misogynistic hate. at the end of the day though, she's a very well-drawn character. her life is recounted to the reader in incredible detail. in all those words, don't you think it would make sense for her to at times be unlikable? and, just like we can with people in real life, isn't it possible to find patterns in her behavior and attitudes which are questionable? can't she do things we find difficult to forgive? I refuse to turn off my critical faculties because someone else has identified with Lenu to the point where they are irrationally defensive of her, or because they think any and all dislike of her is misogyny, or whatever else drives this kind of discourse. negativity is useful, tells us things we ought to pay attention to.

re: that last post, this is why I see the key tragedy of Lila's life not as her lack of literary achivements, but as her inability to leave the neighborhood, to live free of violence and oppression. she went up against some very powerful forces, and she was defeated, so there isn't anything to show for her struggles. I think there's some hope to be found in the fact that she came to deliver those dolls to Lenu in the end, since somehow I have no doubt it was Lila who delivered them herself, by hand. however any transcendence found in that does not outweigh the suffering she went through. it does a violence to the character to see her only in terms of her symbolic potentialities; as readers we are asked to confront her pain, which is not an easy thing to do. it is easier to hide away with our interpretations and our intellectualizations.

Ferrante: I don’t see the end of the line of anything. I don’t like either pessimists or optimists; I try only to look around. If the goal is a life that is tolerable, if not happy, there is no end of the line; rather, there’s a constant reconsideration of the route, which concerns not only single lives but—as I told you—generations. Neither you nor I—nobody—is restricted only to this “time-now” or even to “recent decades.”

Ferrante: First of all, I would not reduce education to a mere tool of emancipation. Education has mainly been considered essential to social mobility. In post-World War II Italy, education cemented old hierarchies, but it also allowed for a modest assimilation of the deserving, so that to some extent those who remained at the bottom could say to themselves: I ended up here because I didn’t want to study. Lenù’s story, but also Nino’s, demonstrates this use of education for upward mobility. But in the story there are also signs of dysfunction: some characters study and yet still they stumble. In other words, there was an ideology of education that no longer functions today. Its failure has become obvious: the directionless graduates are dramatic evidence that the long crisis in the legitimization of social hierarchy based on the credentials of an education has come to a head. But the story also demonstrates another way of understanding education: Lila’s. For Lila, deprived of the opportunity to complete her education—at a time when this was crucial especially for women, and for poor women—and projecting onto Lenuccia her own ambitions of sociocultural ascent, education becomes the manifestation of a permanent anxiety about intelligence, a necessity imposed by the relentlessly chaotic circumstances of life, a tool of daily struggle (a function to which Lila tries to reduce even her friend, “who has studied”). While Lena, in short, is the tormented omega of the old system, Lila embodies the crisis and, in a certain sense, a possible future. How the crisis will be resolved in our own tumultuous world, I’m not sure—we’ll have to see. Will the contradictions of the educational system become increasingly evident, signaling its decline? Will education be refined and accessible without any connection to the ways we earn a living? Will we have more cultured diligence and less intelligence? Let’s say that in general I’m captivated by those who produce ideas, rather than by those who comment on them. I’d feel better in a world of imaginative creators of grand ideas—even if this seems to me, admittedly, a formidable goal.

I would feel like a liar if I considered the legacy of my neighborhood a positive one. I understand that the enduring interconnectedness of the world I’ve described may seem to be an antidote. There are many moments, in the Neapolitan Quartet, where the environment in which Lila and Elena are submerged seems, in spite of everything, gentle and welcoming. But one mustn’t lose sight of that “in spite of everything.” The ties to the neighborhood are confining and harmful, they corrupt and they abet corruption. And the fact that one can’t cut them, that they reappear after every apparent dissolution, is not a good thing. The sudden emergence of bad manners from within good ones, followed again by a smile, still seems to me the symptom of an unreliable community held together by opportunistic complicities, and thus a community careful to ration rage and hypocrisy in order to avoid an all-out war that would require conclusive choices: you’re on this side, I’m on that. No, therefore, what unites the throng of the neighborhood is, in actuality, inevitably corrupt and, in my view, a curse. Naturally, however, that throng is made up of individual people, and people always have, amid innumerable contradictions, their humanity, which is extremely precious and which any story must take account of, if it doesn’t want to fail. Especially since people move between good and bad almost without realizing it. The neighborhood is imagined in this way, and Lila and Elena are made of the neighborhood’s matter, but a fluid matter that drags everything along in its wake. I wanted them, against the closed, fixed state of the environment, to be mobile, so that nothing could truly stabilize them and they themselves would pass through each other as if they were air—but without ever freeing themselves from the gravitational pull of their birthplace. They, too, had to feel it, above all and in spite of everything.

Ferrante: I never write with a carefully developed outline. In general, I know in a very cursory way the point of arrival and some important intermediary points, whereas I don’t know anything about the countless small way stations—I identify those as I write. If it were not so—if I knew everything about the events and the characters—I’d get bored and forget the whole thing. And in fact that often happens. I go on for a long time, attending to the framework of the story and to the writing. Then I realize that I’m bearing a kind of false witness, and I stop. In this I’m very different from Lena. The obsession that everything should hold together coherently and beautifully seems to me a capital sin against the truth.

Ferrante: I have always been fascinated by those people who, faced with a world so full of horrors it can seem intolerable, claim that the human condition is unchangeable, that nature is a monstrous machine, that humanity has produced an endless cycle of inhumanity even when animated by good intentions, and then back away. The problem is not what other people do to you. The problem is to stand impotent before the horror that afflicts the majority of people, the most precarious of our fellow human beings. Every day we find ourselves faced with the intolerable, and no promise of utopia—whether it be political, religious, or scientific—is capable of calming us. Each generation is obliged to verify this horror anew for itself, and to discover that it is impotent. So either you take a step forward or you take one back. I’m not talking about suicide. I’m talking about refusing to engage, about removing oneself from the picture. The sentence “No, I will not,” when it comes from the depths of the intolerable, seems to me to be weighty, full of meaning, with everything to recount.

Çongar: In interviews, you have often paid homage to writing by women, and the struggles of women, for their part in your own development. And several critics, including James Wood, see your novels as écriture féminine in the sense that Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, and others intended it. Do you want in your writing to contribute to the feminist struggle or feminist discourse? Do you think your novels have a feminist function or mission? Is it possible not to give in to political ideology or social conventions when writing about the inequalities and sufferings caused by the class-bound and patriarchal structure of society? Ferrante: The passage through feminist culture is an indispensable part of my experience, of my way of being in the world, but telling a story doesn’t, for me, mean making it part of a political-cultural battle, even a just one. I fear the linearity of militant causes; in literature they have a terrible effect. I describe points of incoherence. The more intensely a moment of my experience struggles within the set of formulas that guide me even in daily life, the more right and urgent it seems to me to make a story out of it.

Çongar: In your recent interview in The Paris Review you talk about a conscious effort to resist “domesticating the truth’’ while writing, and you explain that as “taking overused expressive paths.” In the Neapolitan novels your subject is—on one level—the most domestic and common there is. It’s the story of a neighborhood, a family, a friendship, growing up, maturing, etc. Your style is also far from being overtly experimental. Given all that, how do you manage to avoid “reducing your story to clichés”; what is it in your writing that opens up an unused path of expression? What do you think makes your voice so new? What is the untamed truth of your novels? Ferrante: I don’t know what results I’ve achieved as a writer, but I know what I aim for when I write. I don’t care whether the story has been told before: the stories that are presented to readers as new can always be easily reduced to an ancient core. Nor am I interested in revitalizing some overused tale by injecting into it a beautiful style, as if writing were the continual embellishment of a story. Further, I tend not to deconstruct time, or space, when it would be more a proof of skill than a narrative necessity. I describe common experiences, common wounds, and my biggest worry—not the only one—is to find a tone in writing that can remove, layer by layer, the gauze that binds the wound and reach the true story of the wound. The more deeply hidden the wound seems—by stereotypes, by the fictions that the characters themselves have tacked on to protect themselves; in other words, the more resistant it seems to the story—the harder I insist. Beautiful writing doesn’t interest me; writing interests me. And I resort to everything tradition offers, bending it to my purposes. What’s important is not innovation but the truth that we ourselves, out of prudence, or conformity, conceal within shapely forms, or, why not, within experimental exercises.

Meireles: You were a finalist for the Strega Prize, the most important Italian literary prize. What does this mean to you? Ferrante: Nothing.