Friday, March 29

In the Margins by Elena Ferrante review – a portrait of the artist | Essays


FFor 30 years, the Italian novelist Elena Ferrante has been publishing pseudonymously. “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors,” she wrote to her publisher in 1991. “If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.”

Initially, this seemed to mean that Ferrante would neither appear publicly nor comment on her work. Too bad the books were so good, and – in the case of the Neapolitan quartet, the passionate, class-conscious saga of Lila and Lenù’s lifelong friendship – phenomenally successful. In recent years, Ferrante has allowed herself to be drawn out, offering words beyond her novels de ella. She’s given countless interviews, many of which were collected in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey. She’s written a weekend column for this newspaper, covering such topics as house plants and children who lie for no reason. And now she has published In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, developing ideas scattered throughout her previous writings. Together, these four essays are the closest Ferrante has come to an articulation of her literary methodology.

Conceived as a series of lectures, and translated by Ferrante’s trusted English-language hand Ann Goldstein, the essays are primarily concerned with the dialectics of the artistic process. The first, “Pain and Pen”, is a meditation on learning to write in a grammar school notebook, on the horizontal black lines and between the vertical red ones. “The writing was supposed to move between those lines, and those lines – of this I have a very clear memory – tormented me,” Ferrante writes, sounding a lot like the diligent, self-loathing Lenù. “They were intended to indicate, by their color as well, that if your writing didn’t stay between those taut lines you would be punished. But I was easily distracted when I wrote, and while I almost always respected the margin on the left, I often ended up outside the one on the right…” The notebook and its straight lines thus becomes a part of Ferrante’s origin story, telling us something about her psychology as a writer – her respect for order married to a need for chaos.

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In the second essay, “Aquamarine”, Ferrante describes her adolescent “passion for real things” and her observational approach to writing (an approach devoted readers will recognize as Lila’s): “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.”

What she’s describing, of course, is her training in realism, the literary aesthetic that aims to represent reality “as it is”. For the young Ferrante, realism was so powerful, and so seductive, that it appeared to be literature itself – a frustrating standard when she found herself unable to describe her mother’s aquamarine ring in words that didn’t render it false.

So if realism was not for Ferrante, what was it? She tried variations on gothic and fantasy, with little satisfaction. She simply couldn’t shed her need to work with the things that had really happened to herself and others. Eventually, through reading, she came to understand that “Telling the real… you have to deal with the fact that the teller is always a distorting mirror.” A ring is never just a ring; it’s an object mediated by time, space, people and feelings, all of which are changeable and ever-changing. In embracing her own distortion, and focusing specifically on the element of narration, she could have the order she craved as well as the chaos she couldn’t help creating:

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“I developed a first-person narrator who, excited by the random collisions between her and the world, deformed the form that she had been laboriously given, and from those dents and distortions and injuries squeezed out other, unsuspected possibilities: all this as she made her way through a story that was increasingly uncontrolled, maybe wasn’t even a story but a tangle, in which not only the narrator but the author herself, a pure maker of writing, was enmeshed.”

If narrator and author are enmeshed in the story, so are they all – narrator, author, story – enmeshed in the literary tradition from which they spring. This is the subject of the final two essays: “History, I”, which deals with Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein and other influences; and “Dante’s Rib”, a feminist reading of the medieval poet widely considered the progenitor of Italian literature. Ferrante might be invisible as a person, but she’s clearly traceable in the literary tradition.

The portrait of the artist Ferrante offers here is at once earnest and devious. She is both less aggressive and less elusive than she appears in her interviews, laying out her ideas of her in a straightforward manner, defining her terms of her and identifying her sources of her, both personal and literary. In her apparently uncoded words of her, and in the traditional form that they take, we feel a writer chasing authenticity.

But we also feel, as in everything Ferrante writes, a brilliant subterfuge. The first three lectures were delivered in November 2021 by the actor Manuela Mandracchia in the guise of Ferrante, the fourth at a Dante conference that April, by the scholar and critic Tiziana de Rogatis. In the Margins is a convincing argument – ​​one this reader happens to buy – but it’s also a performance of traditional authorship, the great writer explaining it all.

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Her title is revealing. In the Neapolitan quartet, the crusading Lila periodically experiences a kind of identity breakdown. It’s all but untranslatable, but she gives it a word anyway: smarginatura, a printer’s term that refers to the bleed and the trimming of margins. In her defining moment of radical dissolution, Lila makes herself a book. So does Lenù, who narrates their tangled story of her. And so does their author of her in these disciplined essays.

We don’t get to see her, but we do get to have her between covers, and that, Ferrante wants us to know, is really the most we can ask. After all, writing is words, not eyes.

Katherine Hill is assistant professor of English at Adelphi University and co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, is published by Europa Editions (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.


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