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Elena Ferrante, The Art of Fiction No. 228
Interviewed by Sandro Ferri & Sandra Ferri
ISSUE 2 12 , SPRING 2015
NOTES FROM ELENA FERRANT E’S FINAL REVISIONS TO THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD .
Over the past ten years, the translation into English of Elena
Ferrante’s novels—including Troubling Love, The Days of
Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and the first three volumes of the
tetralogy known in English as the Neapolitan Novels—have won her a
passionate following outside her native Italy; the fourth of the Neapolitan
Novels will appear in English, as The Story of the Lost Child, this fall. It is
now common to hear Ferrante called the most important Italian writer of
her generation, yet since the original publication of her first
novel, Troubling Love, in 1992, she has rigorously protected her privacy
and has declined to make public appearances. (“Elena Ferrante” is a pen
name.) She has also refused to give any interviews over the telephone or
in person, until now.
Her interviewers—her publishers, Sandro and Sandra Ferri, and their
daughter, Eva—describe how the interview was conducted:
“Our conversation with Ferrante began in Naples. Our original plan
was to visit the neighborhood depicted in the Neapolitan Novels, then
walk along the seafront, but at the last moment Ferrante changed her
mind about the neighborhood. Places of the imagination are visited in
books, she said. Seen in reality they may be hard to recognize; they are
disappointing, they might even seem fake. We tried the seafront, but in
the end, because it was a rainy evening, we retreated to the lobby of the
Hotel Royal Continental, just opposite the Castel dell’Ovo.
“From here, out of the rain, we could every so often glimpse people
passing along the street and imagine the characters who have for so long
occupied our imaginations and our hearts. There was no particular need
to meet in Naples, but Ferrante, who was in the city for family reasons,
invited us and we took advantage of the occasion to celebrate the
completion of The Story of the Lost Child. The conversation continued
late into the night and resumed the next day over lunch (clams), then
again in Rome, at our house (tea and tisane). At the end, each of us had a
notebook full of notes. We compared them and reorganized the material
according to Ferrante’s directions.”
—The Editors
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a new work?
FERRANTE
I can’t say precisely. I don’t think anyone really knows how a story takes
shape. When it’s done you try to explain how it happened, but every
effort, at least in my case, is insufficient. There is a before, made up of
fragments of memory, and an after, when the story begins.
But before and after, I have to admit, are useful only in answering your
question now in an intelligible way.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “fragments of memory”?
FERRANTE
You know how when you have in your head a few notes of a tune but you
don’t know what it is, and if you hum it, it ends up becoming a different
song from the one that’s nagging at you? Or when you remember a street
corner but you can’t remember where it is? That kind of thing. My
mother liked to use the word frantumaglia—bits and pieces of uncertain
origin which rattle around in your head, not always comfortably.
INTERVIEWER
And any of them could be the origin of a story?
FERRANTE
Yes and no. They might be separate and identifiable—childhood places, -
family members, schoolmates, insulting or tender voices, moments of
great tension. And once you’ve found some sort of order, you start to
narrate. But there’s almost always something that doesn’t work. It’s as if
from those splinters of a possible narrative come equal yet opposing
forces that need to emerge clearly and, at the same time, to sink farther
into the depths. Take Troubling Love—for years I had in my mind many
stories about the periphery of Naples, where I was born and grew up. I
had in my mind cries, crude family acts of violence I had witnessed as a
child, domestic objects. I nourished Delia, the protagonist, on those
memories. The figure of the mother, Amalia, on the other hand, appeared
and immediately withdrew—she almost wasn’t there. If I imagined
Delia’s body so much as brushing against her mother’s, I felt ashamed
and moved on to something else. Using that scattered material I wrote
many stories over the years—short, long, very long, all in my eyes
unsatisfying, and none having to do with the figure of the mother. Then,
suddenly, many of the fragments vanished, while others stuck together,
all against the dark background of the mother-daughter relationship.
Thus, in a couple of months, Troubling Love emerged.
INTERVIEWER
And The Days of Abandonment?
FERRANTE
Its birth certificate is even more vague. For years I had in mind a woman
who closes the door of her house one night, and in the morning when she
goes to open it she realizes she’s no longer able to. Sometimes sick
children came into it, sometimes a poisoned dog. Then, quite naturally,
everything settled around an experience of mine that had seemed to me
unspeakable—the humiliation of abandonment. But how I moved from
the frantumaglia that I’d had in my mind for years to a sudden selection
of fragments, welded into a story that seemed convincing—that escapes
me, I can’t give an honest account. I’m afraid that it’s the same thing as
with dreams. Even as you’re recounting them, you know that you’re
betraying them.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write down your dreams?
FERRANTE
The rare times that I seem to remember them, yes. I’ve done it since I was
a girl. It’s an exercise that I would recommend to everyone. To subject a
dream experience to the logic of the waking state is an extreme test of
writing. You can never reproduce a dream exactly. It’s a losing battle. But
putting into words the truth of a gesture, a feeling, a flow of events,
without domesticating it, is also an operation that’s not as simple as you
might think.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by “domesticating the truth”?
FERRANTE
Taking overused expressive paths.
INTERVIEWER
In what sense?
FERRANTE
Betraying the story out of laziness, out of acquiescence, out of
convenience, out of fear. It’s always easy to reduce a story to clichés for
mass consumption.
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