I believe that the sense I have of writing — and all the struggles it involves — has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success.
In an opening Editor’s Note, it is explained that Elena Ferrante had been invited to give a series of three lectures on writing, open to the public, at the University of Bologna. Pandemic-related restrictions ultimately prevented her from giving the lectures in person, but an actress delivered them in her stead and those lectures (plus a fourth essay written for a conference on Dante and Other Classics) are compiled here in In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. I do find it fascinating to learn of writers’ processes — and especially when I’ve read widely and pleasurably of an author — and Ferrante took this assignment seriously; the result is scholarly, thoughtful, and eye-opening. No wonder I find Ferrante’s fiction so engaging: it is a reflection of her lifetime of close reading, deep thinking, and hard won craftsmanship. Probably most suited for fans of her novels, this certainly worked for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The lectures:
Pain and Pen
A sort of vicious circle established itself clearly in my mind: if I wanted to believe that I was a good writer, I had to write like a man, staying strictly within the male tradition; although a woman, I couldn’t write like a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition.
Ferrante was a literary child — a constant reader and praised writer of small fictions — and she was precocious enough to recognise early in life that there are rules to fiction; structures that both support and limit a writer (like the ruled lines and margins in a school notebook). In this lecture, Ferrante describes the conflict these rules created for her budding voice and she shares some of the writings that encouraged and influenced her: Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience (“My thinking seems something separate from me”), Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary (“I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie”), Gaspara Stampa’s poem Rime (from the POV of “a lowly, abject woman”) and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (“I’m in words, made of words”).
Aquamarine
I thought: everything that randomly kindles the start of a story is there outside and hits us, we collide, it confuses us, gets confused. Inside — inside us — is only the fragile machinery of our body. What we call “inner life” is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing. So I looked around, waiting, for me at the time writing had, essentially, eyes: the trembling of a yellow leaf, the shiny parts of the coffee maker, my mother’s ring with the aquamarine that gave off a sky-blue light, my sisters fighting in the courtyard, the enormous ears of the bald man in the blue smock. I wanted to be a mirror. I assembled fragments according to a before and an after, I set one inside the other, a story came out. It happened naturally, and I did it constantly.
A teacher once quoted from Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master as a piece of advice for the young Ferrante: Tell the thing as it is. This was advice that the young writer found paralyzing — understanding that she can only describe things as they are filtered through her own consciousness — and ultimately, Ferrante says of the main characters in her first three novels (Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, and The Lost Daughter), “I am, I would say, their autobiography as they are mine.” Ferrante then notes some readings that showed her new ways of looking at fiction (Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) and these were the springboard to a new narrative voice (examining characters through “a necessary other”) that she would go on to use in My Brilliant Friend.
Histories, I
A woman who wants to write has unavoidably to deal not only with the entire literary patrimony she’s been brought up on and in virtue of which she wants to and can express herself but with the fact that that patrimony is essentially male and by its nature doesn’t provide true female sentences.
Quoting from poets Emily Dickinson (“Witchcraft was hung, in History”), María Guerra (“I lost a poem”), and Ingeborg Bachmann (“We have to work hard with the bad language that we have inherited”), Ferrante makes the case that if the words we write are influenced by everything we’ve ever read (those words that set the margins of what is acceptable and possible), then women writers have the disadvantage of having not seen enough of their own language in print. Ferrante struggled with finding her own female voice — went back and forth between writing in dialect and formal Italian for her Neapolitan Novels, looking for that voice — and ultimately found it in the interplay between the characters Lila and Lenù; between what they write about each other, as women.
Dante’s Rib
If I had to name what really struck me as a teen-ager — and not so much as a student but as a fledgling reader and aspiring writer — I would start with the discovery that Dante describes the act of writing obsessively, literally and figuratively, constantly presenting its power and its inadequacy, and the provisional nature.
Although there are a couple of references to modern writers who have critiqued Dante’s Commedia, this lecture is essentially about Ferrante’s love of Dante’s writing, and especially his treatment of Beatrice over the course of the epic. Beatrice goes from a mute paragon of girlish beauty to “a woman who has an understanding of God and speculative language, modeling her — I like to think — in the likeness of such figures as Mechtild of Magdeburg, Hildegarde of Bingen, Juliana of Norwich, Marguerite Porete, and Angela da Foligna, magistra theologorum. He does it naturally by bestowing on a female figure scientific, theological, mystical knowledge that is his, that he gets from his studies, from his rib. But in doing this — in that inleiarsi, so to speak, entering into, becoming her —he ventures to imagine, with his mystic-leaning rationalism, with his visionary realism, what is possible for women.” And so, it would seem, there are feminine role models in the patrimony (even if they were written by men) if one knows where to look for them.
Overall, I think these lectures would have had more impact in person — they read like speeches more than essays — but I was fascinated to learn how deeply Ferrante has struggled to find and shape her voice. I’m definitely pleased to have added this collection to what makes up my own sensibilities.
