Incidental Inventions
(From an interview on June 8th, 2015, at: https://www.europaeditions.com/review/2104)
Interviewer: “You’ve mentioned disappearance—it’s one of your recurring themes.
Elena Ferrante: “It’s a feeling I know well. I think all women know it. Whenever a part of you emerges that’s not consistent with some feminine ideal, it makes everyone nervous, and you’re supposed to get rid of it in a hurry. Or… if you refuse to be subjugated, violence enters in. Violence has, at least in Italian, a meaningful language of its own—smash your face, bash your face in. You see? These are expressions that refer to the forced manipulation of identity, to its cancellation. Either you’ll be the way I say, or I’ll change you by beating you till I kill you.”
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I’ve recently been reading two non-fiction books I bought some time ago, War and Children, written in 1943 by psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, which focuses on how war affects the development of children, and who assert that “development demands its own conditions, irrespective of war and peace or all other happenings in the outer world,” and Incidental Inventions, a collection of short pieces by Elena Ferrante. I wrote about both books simulataneously, thinking that I might post both pieces together, but decided to upload the text related to Ferrante, and save the article on Freud and Burlingham’s work for August.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym for an Italian novelist / writer, who has been lauded as ‘one of the great novelist of our time,” and who has received several awards. However, despite her fame and success she has chosen to keep her identity hidden; wanting to remain totally private. Maintaining her anomymity possibly allows her to write about things she might not otherwise have had the courage to write about, and to preserve a space of creative freedom, enhancing her capacity to both create and publish on her own terms. She has stated that shyness is also one of the reasons behind her choice, and perhaps remaining anonymous also makes it easier for her to exist and work within her environment. However, although Ferrante shuns publicity, the mystery surrounding her identity and the speculation that has grown around it has probably also sparked more interest in her work. In written interviews (she avoids face to face interviews) she says that the readers can extract the author’s shape from the book and the text itself. In the interview mentioned above Ferrante noted that it seems to her that “the emptiness created by my [her] absence was filled by the writing itself.”
From her interviews and non-fiction works, it is known that Ferrante was born in Naples, is the daughter of a seamstress, and has lived outside Italy. She appears to have studied the classics and to have been married. She is a mother and grandmother. She has stated that in addition to writing, she studies, translates and teaches. Critics and readers of her work have deduced much more from her fictional heroines, but a lot of these conclusions might actually not be precise. Similarities between her characters and what is known about her life lead critics to consider her work autobiographical to a great extent or to suggest that the novelist in her Neapolitan novels, Elena Greco, is Ferrante’s avatar;. However, what can really be known from her fiction books are her words and sentences, and patterns of her mind and imagination. In the interview cited above, Ferrante refers to O’Rourke who wrote that “the reader’s relationship to a writer who chooses to separate herself, radically, from her own book “is like that which we have with a fictional character. We think we know her, but what we know are her sentences, the patterns of her mind, the path of her imagination.”
Incidental Inventions, which Ferrante describes as “brief trickles of ink,” consists of a collection of short pieces she wrote over a year (2018), for a weekly column in The Guardian. The book was first published in 2019, and is illustrated by Andrea Ucini.
Her subjects are diverse: first times and first love, climate change, enmity and competition among women, and people more genrally, friendship and the rarity of great friends, the process of adapting her novels for film and television, marriage, laughter, her past smoking addiction, fears, ellipses, motherhood and daughters, keeping a diary, the urgency of writing, how writing distances the writer from other aspects of life, the role of luck in an artists’ breakthrough, linguistic nationality, translation, her exercise in re-thinking male heroes in literature as female, anonymity and what can be discovered about an artist through their work alone, questions of feminism and art produced by women, the difficulty of women becoming themselves in a world made for men, the sense of feeling as not being enough, poetry and prose, the past I or me in a photograph, the weather and the seasons, exclamation marks, death, religion and the trembling of the three Marys, insomnia, the pleasure of learning, the politics of her country, Italy, and the danger to democracy, “as [the demagogue leader] bangs his xenophobic and racist fists on the table,” psychoanalysis and therapy and the power indifferences inherent within the analyst-client relationship, how the classification of human beings into winners and losers is both cruel and arbitrary because the conditions at the point of starting out are too unjust to think of as a competition in which the odds are not stacked, love of films and the screen versions of many actors and actresses, and how reality can’t stay inside the elegant moulds of art, the desperation and the sense of loss that dominates Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, mobile phones, interviews, her love and fear of plants, stereotypes, writing for the screen, the age-old discussion of talent, the deluge of news nowadays, literary novelty, lies, change and clean breaks, and more.
A selection of a few interesting or wise points she makes in the book on a variety of topics:
About first times and first love she says that even though we attribute to them the power of the unrepeatable, ultimately they get swallowed up by all the times that have followed or by their transformation into habit. She notes that what we were at the beginning is only “a vague patch of colour contemplated from the edge of what we have become.” In her piece on fear she points out that what perhaps should be feared most is the fury of frightened people. On death she tells us that as time has gone by the idea of death itself seems increasingly pallid, and what is truly terrifying is the end of an enjoyable life, of a full life. In relation to the age old discussion of talent she notes that the poet (or artist) has to have not only the gift of talent, and the privilege and the culture of being able to nurture and refine it, but also luck.
Concerning fiction and non-fiction, she states that the dividing line is rather, as Virginia Woolf said, how much truth the fiction inherent in writing is able to capture. On laughter and its power, she believes that no power has ever yielded an inch thanks to a laugh. “Ridicule, yes, annoys the powerful, but it doesn’t bury them. Yet for the moment we’re laughing, we feel their grip on our life relax a little. Laughter is a short, very short, sigh of relief.” In her enjoyable piece on the exclamation point Ferrante first tells us that she tries to express with restraint, tending towards self-mockery, and she admires those who maintain a calm demeanour during an argument. She then says that in a passage an exclamation should be understood by reading and there is no need to add it at the end, but nowadays writers are lavish with exclamation marks in text messages, in WhatsApp chats, and in emails. She finally adds: “At least in writing we should avoid acting like the fanatical world leaders who threaten, bargain, make deals, and then exult when they win, fortifying their speeches with the profile of a nuclear missile at the end of every wretched sentence.”
There’s also an interesting short essay titled Linguistic Nationality. She tells us that although she loves her country, simplified versions of national characteristics should be contested. She herself, for instance, digests pizza poorly and eats very little spaghetti, doesn’t speak in a loud voice, doesn’t gesticulate, and hates all mafias. Being Italian, for her, begins and ends with the fact that she speaks and writes in the Italian language, which like all languages is “a compendium of the history, geography, material and spiritual life, the vices and virtues, not only of those who speak it, but also of those who have spoken it through the centuries. The words, the grammar, the syntax are a chisel that shapes our thought….” There’s also a piece dedicated to translation, in which she notes that “translators transport nations into other nations.” As for her past smoking addiction she comments that she discovered that she couldn’t let go of cigarettes, because she was afraid of seeing the world in all its sharp-edged clarity.
On art and anonymity Ferrante tells us that ever since adolescence, she liked the term “unknown,” which, she explains means that all we can know of the person who made a painting is the work we have before our eyes. She says that before her is simply the composition of a human being who summoned their inventive energy to create and that she can devote herself to the pure result of a creative gesture, without worrying about a big or small name. She also writes about how when writing she likes to dig into common situations and feelings, and she insists on expressing everything that we tend to be silent about. She’s interested in causing confusion, pushing herself to go beyond appearances, sweeping away the resistance of the ordinary and looking for words that will pull out at least a little of the extraordinary that is concealed in the ordinary.
On creative freedom she says that although a part of her would like the story in the film adaptation of her novel to adhere faithfully to her story, her less primitive and possessive self knows that there’s something much more important at stake than this instinct to protect her own inventions, because women writers (artists) are still assigned to the balcony…. She writes, “Another woman has found in that text good reason to test her creative capacities. Gyllenhaal has decided, that is, to give cinematic form not to my experience of the world but to hers….. In the great warehouse of the arts, set up mainly by men, women have for a relatively short time been seeking the means and opportunities to give a form of their own to what they have learned from life. So I don’t want to say: you have to stay inside the cage that I constructed.”
This collection of short essays also includes a piece on the bond between mothers and daughters. She notes “A secret cord that can’t be cut binds us to the bodies of our mothers: there is no way to detach ourselves, or at least I’ve never managed to. It’s impossible to go back inside her; it’s hard to move past her shadow.” Concerning the younger generations, she fears the generations who don’t proudly leave their parents behind, but also those who, at twenty, leave their parents behind to embrace the mores of grandparents and great-grandparents and desire to replace the world of today with “a golden age when everyone knew their place, that is, in an order based on sexist and racist hierarchies.” She goes on to tell us that she loves young people who fight to give their time a new form and demand a better life for the entire human race, and hopes that her daughters stay that way for a long time., and then as is in the natural order of things as they get older “they’ll find me within themselves, discovering physical details, flashes of personality, thoughts, and will learn to welcome me, make room for me. As happened with my mother and me, they’ll discover that, even admitting they’re partly me, they’ll continue to be themselves. In fact they’ll be themselves more fully, with greater autonomy.”
On the future of humanity she comments that it’s urgent that we humans learn to be self-critical and learn to confront the truth of ourselves, before we’re destroyed by our obstinate determination to become immortal. “The future that interests me,” Ferrante writes, “is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.” And elsewhere she asks: “Was it possible the animal man, that infinitesimal piece of nature, in the course of his brief history had managed to irreversibly damage all the rest?” As for the flood of news, fake and real, she notes that for her “the problem is not, therefore, to stay well informed, but to track within the mass of pointlessly amplified news that which will help me to distinguish, over time, the true and the false, the best and the worst: this is an extremely difficult task.” She ponders why certain people seem to us so different that we can’t accept them, can’t recognise their humanity, and wonders whether a little goodwill could remove any reason for hostility. She concludes with thoughts about the issue of inequality, which she points out “generates an extraordinary waste of minds and creative energies, which, if they were trained and put to use, would likely make our history an active laboratory for repairing the damage we’ve caused so far—or at least of controlling its effects, rather than an unbearable list of horrors.”
To conclude, I felt that each short piece allows us to catch a glimpse of her inner world and life, and also provides insights into her outlook on life. Her writing here seems self-investigative, urgent and intimate, while also maintaining her anonymity. Ferrante notes that writing these weekly essays has been a permanent exposure of fragments of herself. It also informed by a feminist outlook. In one review of her work, one critic writes that her books are influenced by second wave feminism, particularly Italian feminists like Luisa Murano and writers like Helene Cixous, who has written that “women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away……….. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history…..” Ferrante calls this reclaiming of voice, female alientation-inclusion. She seems to be drawn to the ways that women operate and survive in a society dominated by men and their power. It is also useful to bear in mind that her stories are embedded in particular contexts and times. She writes about what surrounds her heroines, postwar Naples, for instance, how others and their voice permeate them, and what it means to absorb another’s voice.