Ferrante Unframed
Authorship, Reception and Feminist Praxis in the Works of Elena Ferrante
Edited by Roberta Cauchi-Santoro and Costanza Barchiesi studi 45
studi 45
Ferrante Unframed Authorship, Reception and Feminist Praxis in the Works of Elena Ferrante Edited by
Roberta Cauchi-Santoro and Costanza Barchiesi
Società
Editrice Fiorentina
© 2021 Società Editrice Fiorentina via Aretina, 298 - 50136 Firenze tel. 055 5532924 info@sefeditrice.it www.sefeditrice.it isbn: 978-88-6032-615-7 ebook isbn: 978-88-6032-623-2 issn: 2035-4363 Proprietà letteraria riservata Riproduzione, in qualsiasi forma, intera o parziale, vietata
Table of Contents
7 Preface 11 Introduction
21
39
55
77
89
101
Chapter 1 My Anti-Globalist Friend: The Global Novels of Elena Ferrante Elisa Sotgiu Chapter 2 The Dolls and the Penates: Narrative Symbolism and Classical Myth in the Neapolitan Novels Costanza Barchiesi Chapter 3 Olga fra “vuoto di senso” e lingua materna ne I giorni dell’abbandono Federica Soddu Chapter 4 Quando la “frantumaglia” preme per diventare racconto. Il ruolo della scrittura nei romanzi di Elena Ferrante Irene Bianchi Chapter 5 Hidden Authoriality in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels Giulio Genovese Chapter 6 Shattered Vision: From Anna Maria Ortese to Elena Ferrante Sarah Atkinson
115
125
Chapter 7 After Ferrante: Subtitles, Translation, Stereoscopic Reading Giancarlo Tursi
Chapter 8 There Are No Stupid Questions: FAQs for the Ferrante Scholar Maria Florence Massucco
137
The Authors
139
Index of Names
Preface
For many Neapolitans, and especially for those who had to flee the city for a shot at life, the protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s first novel Troubling Love was a familiar presence, a kind of mirror. We could feel her physical memory of violence and abuse; we shared with her the agonizing fear of falling back into the rabbit hole. And so, many of us were initially surprised—maybe even annoyed—by the international acclaim that was showered on that book and on Ferrante’s later novels, and also, more importantly, by the millions of readers who went on identifying with her protagonists’ struggles or emotional tribulations. How did they dare compare their experience with ours? What did they know about the bittersweet experience of surviving Naples’ often toxic dynamics, its always “troubling love”? And yet Ferrante’s success was the catalyst for an epiphany. Soon enough, in fact, we had to learn that the emotional strength required of Neapolitan women and gender nonconforming men to navigate a violent and phallocentric world was required by many others, indeed was necessary for survival in peripheral spaces all around the globe, where sexism and poverty were eroding human decency. Ferrante Unframed is a testament to interrelated strategies of emancipation, growth, and self-affirmation, which by and large are feminine in nature. The essays in this collection question the dichotomy of highbrow/lowbrow literature by unmasking its collusion with a sexist discourse, and in so doing offer a new way of entering the literary arena and viewing Italian culture more broadly. For centuries, literature has been a predominantly masculine domain. In Italy, such a prerogative has been especially hard to challenge. Indeed, over the last century the literary value of Italian writers has been constantly measured against their civic engagement or political affiliation—that is, using a parameter which mirrors gender disparities in terms of access to the public sphere. Ferrante, however, has situated herself within a long line of local writers who have chosen to participate in politics from a more personal vantage
8 Preface
point, in particular by highlighting the societal and physical restrictions they experienced vis-à-vis the body of Naples. As this volume shows, Ferrante’s name has been previously associated with that of writer Anna Maria Ortese. The reasons for this comparison, however, are at once obvious and elusive. On the one hand, the two writers share a lovehate relationship with Naples, which provoked them to write pungent, nostalgic, and disconcertingly blunt urban narratives. On the other hand, Ortese’s early experience of death (both her older brother and her twin died at sea) inspired her construction of a visionary lens through which to escape reality, well before she parted ways with the city and its hostile cultural circles. By contrast, Ferrante’s escape strategy has seemed inevitably to pass through alltoo-real sexual encounters, corporeal violence, and physical displacement. Thus, whereas Ortese is the representative of social pariahs whose invisibility has threatened to erase them from history altogether, Ferrante speaks for a generation of postwar women whose bodies have been tainted by capitalistic commodification. In this regard, Curzio Malaparte and Domenico Rea are closer to Ferrante than Ortese, though they are generally forgotten by Ferrante’s critics. By delving into the contextual and philological reality in which Ferrante’s stories take place, the essays in this volume connect Ferrante to her predecessors, open up new trajectories for research, and also emphasize her narrative specificity. This volume also has the potential to address the presence in Ferrante of a “genius loci”, as symbolically represented by Elena and Lila’s dolls in the Neapolitan Novels, who function as contemporary penates. For the same reason, one would be remiss not to mention that this Napoletanità does not simply exist in novels portraying Naples’ relatively recent history—as in Ortese, Rea, or Malaparte—but is also a feature (or narrative colouring) shaped by the rehashing of the seventeenth-century myth of Naples as “city of devils”, and more specifically as the city of female devils. For instance, when reading Giambattista Basile as the father of Neapolitan literature—and the local equivalent of Dante or Petrarch—one is confronted with feminine muses that are quite far from the Tuscan and idyllic phantasy embodied by Beatrice or Laura. Rather, what we see in Basile are highly sexualized women and pitiless mothers who raise their children with equal doses of resentment, grit, and ferocity. It is this ancestral and bestial femininity that has pervaded Ferrante’s imagery since her first book; it appears in the secret nature of Amalia in Troubling Love, with the Mother as primal occurrence; in the “poverella” of Days of Abandonment; in Nina, deuteragonist of Lost Daughter; in Lila’s multiple instantiations in the Neapolitan Novels; and, most recently, in aunt Vittoria in The Lying Life of Adults. Through repetition and polysemic declination Ferrante wages a war against both this folkloric background and her inner drives. And yet at the same time, she draws on their power. There is a caveat, however, for it is only by harnessing these ancestral forces and by gauging the Dio-
Preface 9
nysian impulses inside her that the author, as a voice for Neapolitan women and women around the world, acquires narrative agency. It is for all these reasons and many more that, in my view, this collection of essays makes a fundamental contribution to Ferrante Studies, and more broadly to the critical study of women’s literature. In fact, what Cauchi-Santoro, Barchiesi, and their contributors demonstrate is that the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” only acquire meaning in opposition to one another, and they are always in an imperfect balance. From Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and Basile and now to Ferrante, this has been a lesson passed down throughout the great works of the European literary canon. When we acknowledge such fluidity, Ferrante, unframed, can enter. Alessandro Giardino St. Lawrence University, N.Y.
Introduction
This collection of essays attempts to counter the oftentimes problematic framing of author Elena Ferrante. The ongoing debate around her work seems to be primarily concerned with whether it is “lowbrow”, or else whether the claims about Ferrante’s global writer status are indeed justified. Our decision to “unframe” Ferrante, releasing the author from the tight confines of this debate, resonates with an increasing body of academic work that has consistently shown that in Ferrante’s writings, not only is there more “highbrow” than meets the eye, but there is also a deliberate juxtaposition of contrasting styles that has permitted Ferrante to write aesthetically sophisticated page-turners that reach many different audiences worldwide. Indeed, there is no doubt at this point that the global visibility of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels in both mainstream media and in scholarly publications has firmly established the author as a powerful voice in contemporary World Literature. It is thus necessary to dismantle the plethora of hackneyed viewpoints and speculations built up in recent years around the wild success of this author. It is not surprising that Ferrante has so far been more appreciated—by readers and scholars alike—outside of Italy, despite the fact that she was famously nominated for the most prestigious Italian literary prize: the Premio Strega. In spite of, or probably because of, the international reputation that the writer has achieved through the sale of over sixteen million copies of her works, as well as translation rights sold to more than fifty countries and the adaptation of her tetralogy into an acclaimed HBO series1, establishment critics, particularly in Italy, have been quick to shun her writing. Their pre1 Now already in the filming stage of its final seasons which have, interestingly, contributed to a touristic boom in Ischia and the areas in Naples where the series was first filmed in 2018-19. The first series (2018-19) and the second (2020) seasons have been aired on Italian national television and on HBO. Ferrante’s 2019 La vita bugiarda degli adulti will also be adapted as a series on Netflix.
12 Introduction
dictable argument is that a writer’s commercial success in the Anglophone world does not necessarily reflect writing talent in Italian literature. Indeed, her international success notwithstanding, Ferrante’s novels have not been admitted into the canon of Italian literature. We can still hear echoes of the now-infamous judgment of novelist Francesco Longo who, in 2015, stated in «Il Messaggero» that «Ferrante is a powerful storyteller, but not a writer»2. Such disparaging evaluations, which attempt to dismiss anything Ferrante writes or inspires (whether the writer or writers behind the pseudonym is or are in fact female, male, or both)3, are sadly common, particularly from male Italian writers and/or critics. These dismissals are symptomatic of a literary scene that remains, despite significant strides made by contemporary Italian women writers, a male domain. For centuries, publishers, critics, and allmale prize committees in Italy have continued to ignore or even dismiss as secondary Italian women’s literature (or literature that is construed as having been written by women). It is undeniable that Elena Ferrante has become a literary sensation, generating a brand of enthusiasm that has been dubbed “Ferrante Fever”—as in the title of the famous documentary film (directed by Giacomo Durzi, 2017). As proof of her extraordinary popularity, it suffices to note two important facts: the publication of The Lying Lives of Adults (translated a year after publication of La vita bugiarda degli adulti) was one of the most anticipated book events in 2020, and the Neapolitan Novels have consistently been ranked among the top books of the last decade. The arguments around the identity of the writer or writers behind the pseudonym, some of which seem problematically rooted in biological essentialism, are often seen as a core part of Ferrante’s sensational reception. And yet, as Tiziana de Rogatis puts it, the choice to create a pseudonymous female persona could not have worked to create the sensation: This is no easy choice in a country like Italy, where male-dominated journalism, publishing, and academia den[y] visibility—and I should add respect—to women writers, despite a long stream of extraordinary women of letters. Nonetheless, Ferrante has chosen to identify as a woman. In essence, this means that, for a long time, the author chose to count for less: she’s had fewer opportunities for publications; she’s been labelled as a writer 2 Anna Momigliano, ‘The Ferrante Effect.’ In Italy, Women Writers are Ascendent, «New York Times», 9th Dec 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/books/elena-ferrante-italy-women. Accessed 20th August 2020. 3 Claudio Gatti has produced well-documented evidence that Elena Ferrante is Anita Raja. He also produced evidence that married writers Anita Raja and Domenico Starnone have some history of writing collaborations, particularly on the translations of Christa Wolf ’s work. Furthermore, Gatti reported that in 2006, after analyzing Ferrante’s books with text analysis software, a group of physicists and mathematicians at La Sapienza University in Rome concluded that there was a high probability that Starnone was not only the co-author but the principal author behind the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. Claudio Gatti, Elena Ferrante: An Answer?, «New York Review of Books», October 2nd, 2016. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/
Introduction 13 of sentimental novels aimed at a female readership; and she’s been ignored by cultural reviews4.
There are, thus, several fundamental reasons to militate against the framing of Ferrante as a popular, sentimental woman writer who has mostly attracted attention through mystified authorship. Indeed, in both the taut, highly structured novels—like L’amore molesto, I giorni dell’abbandono, La figlia oscura, or La vita bugiarda degli adulti—and the four sprawling, decades-spanning novels of the Neapolitan tetralogy, Ferrante creates compelling narratives of female characters who, despite growing up on the margins of Italian society, define themselves in the present with the inherent radicalism of contemporary female identity. These female protagonists resist the mechanisms that try to generate female subalternity and attempt to turn subalternity instead into agency by recuperating female subjectivity and snatching back the female body from the clutches of patriarchal society. The Ferrantian female protagonists thus inhabit a profoundly Southern, or more specifically Neapolitan, space, while raising issues of national and transnational concern. The Neapolitan Novels narrate the gender inequality and the political, sociocultural, and environmental crises that have plagued the last decades, particularly in the post-1989 world order. It is no wonder that Ferrante has touched a chord with women readers across nations, social classes, races, and sexual orientations who identify with her protagonists and find the narratives powerfully resonant. It is thus high time to reframe Ferrante’s work firmly within a more globalist literary perspective. Already in Adam Kirsch’s 2016 The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century, the name Ferrante appears alongside literary giants known for centring women’s perspectives, such as Margaret Atwood. Indeed, following James Wood’s 2013 review in The New Yorker, renowned journals and news portals in the English-speaking world have increasingly drawn readers’ attention to Ferrante’s ability to locate the extraordinary in the ordinary while negotiating local and transnational tensions in her novels. Most importantly, and against the current of Italian mainstream literary criticism, since the publication of her tetralogy Ferrante has inspired an increasingly voluminous corpus of scholarly studies that have raised debate on pressing, topical issues. Foremost amongst these are issues related to the collaborative nature of authorship; Italy’s paradoxical history in the first Republic; the ascendancy of Italian voices from the margins; the re-shifting of focus to the traditionally marginalized South; the thorough re-evaluation of Neapolitan-ness, including the Neapolitan dialect and its metanarrative tech4 Tiziana De Rogatis, Uncovering Elena Ferrante and the Importance of a Woman’s Voice, «The Conversation», October 5, 2016. http://theconversation.com/uncovering-elena-ferrante-and-the-importance-of-a-womans-voice-66456
14 Introduction
niques in written Italian as well as its prominence in film; and the cross-pollination of elitism and popular culture, which appeal to a vast international audience, including Italian immigrants and people of Italian heritage across the globe. Furthermore, if Ferrante’s literary worth has not been recognized outright and celebrated in Italy, the “Ferrante effect” (as it has been dubbed in the journalistic world) has had prominently visible repercussions on the vast, rich, and oftentimes ignored literature of modern and contemporary Italian women writers. Indeed, Ferrante’s international reputation as the best-known Italian novelist of the twenty-first century to date has significantly contributed to an emerging interest in uncovering Italian female writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether male establishment critics are willing to concede to this or not, all of the present academic and journalistic attention is contributing to a marked adjustment in the provenance of Italy’s top literary tier. The worldwide interest in Ferrante has shone a spotlight on Italian women writers who are being translated and read in English. Helena Janeczek, for example, won the 2018 Premio Strega with The Girl with the Leica (published in English in October of 2019), and data released by Informazioni Editoriali has revealed that between 2016 and 2019 novels by Italian women writers constituted almost half of Italy’s top twenty bestselling works of fiction5. All of Ferrante’s works, including her latest novel La vita bugiarda degli adulti, have helped to generate interest in other Italian female writers, including many nineteenth- and twentieth-century Neapolitan women writers like Anna Maria Ortese, whose similarities to Ferrante are explored in this volume by Sarah Atkinson. The international interest in Italian women writers also includes writers from minority groups, like Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego. Indeed, several post-WWII women writers like Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg, and writers and thinkers who participated in Italian second-wave feminism, like Adriana Cavarero and Luisa Muraro (both of whom Ferrante has cited as a major inspiration)6, are being retranslated and republished, whilst other female writers like Goliarda Sapienza and Giovanna Giordano are attracting increasing international attention7. Apart from the interest Ferrante’s works have generated in other Italian women writers, many of whom are listed as foremothers in Ferrante’s note Anna Momigliano, ‘The Ferrante Effect.’ In Italy, Women Writers are Ascendent, cit. In Frantumaglia Ferrante writes, «I’ll name some women to whom I owe a great deal: Firestone, Lonzi, Irigaray, Muraro, Cavarero, Gagliasso, Haraway, Butler, Braidotti. In short, I am a passionate reader of feminist thought», NY, E/O Editions, 2016, p. 332. Adriana Cavarero and Luisa Muraro have responded to Ferrante’s texts, thus creating a two-way conversation. Cavarero reads Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels in relation to the theory of the narratable self in Storytelling, Philosophy and Self Writing: Preliminary Notes on Elena Ferrante. Interview with Adriana Cavarero, Trans. Stiliana Milkova and Isabella Pinto, «Narrative», 28, 2, pp. 236-49. Muraro, together with Marina Terragni, interviewed Ferrante in 2007 (Frantumaglia, pp. 218-226). 7 In 2020, Sicilian writer and journalist Giovanna Giordano was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel prize in Literature. 5
6
Introduction 15
books, La frantumaglia, there has also been increasing attention paid in academic scholarship to the long-neglected city of Naples, its history, as well as the Neapolitan dialect, which holds a certain magnetism despite its violent sound. As Ferrante explains in an interview published in «The Guardian» in August 2020, «In my books, the narrator is the “voice” of a woman with Neapolitan origins, who knows dialect well, who is well educated, who has lived far from Naples for a long time, and who has serious reasons for hearing Neapolitan as the language of violence and obscenity. I’ve put ‘voice’ in quotation marks here because it’s not at all about voice but about writing»8. In Ferrante, the Neapolitan “voice” becomes an idiosyncratic way of writing an Italian that inscribes itself from the margins. This writing is as fluid in Ann Goldstein’s translations, which have certainly contributed to Ferrante’s explosive popularity in an international setting, as it is in the original. Studies on the metalinguistic attention to the Neapolitan dialect in Ferrante, pioneered by Jillian Cavanaugh, as well as on the Neapolitan setting and its radical importance, both of which have been fundamental aspects of the HBO series, have captured the attention of scholars and are investigated in this volume by Giancarlo Tursi. The influence of the Neapolitan dialect, and Ferrante’s parallels with other Italian women writers, are two among many important themes receiving focused attention in recent scholarship. Indeed, the work in the growing field of Ferrante Studies has become so voluminous that it can now be divided into several different strands, many of which the contributors explore in this volume. One of the most topical themes, mentioned at the outset of this Introduction, is Ferrante as a globalized writer9. Elisa Sotgiu’s opening chapter in this book takes up the question of what it means to write from the margins as opposed to the global centre, and further explores Ferrante as a global novelist. Giulio Genovese and Maria Florence Massucco explore global notions of Ferrante authorship and readership respectively. Another strand of Ferrante scholarship that has proven to be particularly fruitful is the one spearheaded by De Rogatis, which explores the Ferrantian oeuvre’s rich intertextual relationship with classical mythology. Costanza Barchiesi’s contribution in this collection sheds further light on this topic. There is also an emerging body of scholarship, pioneered by Stiliana Milkova and Laura Benedetti, on the role of ekphrasis in Ferrante’s writings; Irene Bianchi’s article in this collection adds another perspective to that body of works. Dulcis in fundo, an area of scholarship that probes the prominent influence of 1970s feminist theory on Ferrante’s work was first explored by Laura Benedetti and Stiliana Milkova, and in8 Eduardo Castaldo, Elena Ferrante: ‘We don’t have to fear change, what is other shouldn’t frighten us’, «The Guardian», 29th August, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/29/ elena-ferrante-we-don’t. Accessed 30th August 2020. 9 This is also a main theme of the special issue of «MLN», Elena Ferrante in a Global Context, edited by Tiziana de Rogatis, Stiliana Milkova, and Katrin Wehling-Giorgi («MLN», vol. 136, 2021).
16 Introduction
spires Federica Soddu’s contribution to this volume. All of the articles in this collection thus add important analyses of Ferrante’s works in line with emerging strands in Ferrante Studies. The first article in Unframing Ferrante, by Elisa Sotgiu, explores the ways in which Ferrante qualifies as a global novelist, particularly in the Neapolitan Novels. To contextualize the discussion, the chapter considers criticism about the global novel, specifically the genesis, boundaries, and rules of the field of global literature, and analyzes the extent to which Ferrante’s work responds to these parameters. Within this framework, the chapter assesses how Ferrante’s “post-postcolonial” work is authentically marginal and ethically and/or politically relevant in a way that makes it truly global. The way that Ferrante shapes the Neapolitan Novels can be seen as a denial of the core-periphery structure wherein the United States is the centre that legitimizes literature in order for it to ascend to international relevance. Sotgiu asserts that Ferrante’s disavowal of this centre in the Neapolitan Novels proves her marginality yet at the same time can be viewed as a betrayal because it is an exploitation of the marginal used to gain the approval of the educated elite. The essay also probes Ferrante’s anonymity, seeing it as contributing to a narrative solution through disappearance, which is a reassurance of faithfulness to marginality. Sotgiu interprets Ferrante’s so-called loyalty to lowbrow tastes as further proof of authentic marginality and ethical/political relevance, and in this manner she turns the tables on such superficial framing of Ferrante’s works. In the second essay, Costanza Barchiesi unearths several classical intertexts in Ferrante, examining the role played by Tina and Nu, the dolls belonging to Lila and Elena in the Neapolitan Novels. Barchiesi unpacks the idea that these are not merely childhood toys; rather, the destinies of the dolls mirror those of their owners, while also reflecting Ferrante’s interest in classical sources. Barchiesi draws a linguistic link between the notion of “geniale” in the title L’amica geniale, representing the reciprocity and mutuality of friendship shared by Elena and Lila, and the concept of “genius” in ancient Rome. Barchiesi then explores an association between the dolls and the penates, the household gods representing the spirits of dead relatives in pagan religion. Through an intertextual comparison to the role of the penates in the Aeneid, Barchiesi suggests that the dolls represent the girls’ ancestors and their utopic ideal of a “feminine city”, mentioned in La frantumaglia and played out and fulfilled in the Neapolitan Novels. At the end, the essay connects the role of dolls in Graves’ Greek Myths (mentioned in La frantumaglia as one of Ferrante’s source text for classical mythology) to Tina and Nu; more specifically, when the myths of Ariadne and Erigone are read in conjunction with Ferrante’s work, Barchiesi argues, the childhood dolls can be interpreted not only as symbols of a feminine foundation, but of a mythical regeneration connected to ancient funerary rituals. Federica Soddu’s Olga fra ‘vuoto di senso’ e lingua materna ne «I giorni dell’abbandono» utilizes foundational concepts of feminist theory from Mura-
Introduction 17
ro, Sedgwick, and Braidotti to reframe readers’ understanding of Olga’s metamorphic experience in Ferrante’s earlier novel The Days of Abandonment. Soddu argues that Olga can radically upturn her life, transforming its total lack of meaning after her husband has left her («vuoto di senso») into a plenitude of the senses («pienezza di sensi») through a troubling negotiation and reappraisal of three main realms of signification: language, space, and the body. This shift in meaning involves a redefinition of the gendered category of woman that moves from the phallogocentric system to Muraro’s symbolical order of the mother. The hypermetaphorical language of phallogocentric thought (Muraro), which controls and disciplines Olga’s life with her husband, is dismantled by the experience of «frantumaglia» that the protagonist undergoes when she describes in vivid and obscene language a sex scene between her husband and his new girlfriend. The place where space, language, and the body were still one is, for Olga (as for Ferrante in La frantumaglia), Naples. It is a constant in Ferrante Studies to view Naples as the real origin of the author’s language and inspiration. Soddu, however, links this city-concept to Muraro’s symbolical order of the mother as a way to reconfigure Olga’s path as the revolutionary creation of a new feminine order of expression. Irene Bianchi’s Quando la ‘frantumaglia’ preme per diventare racconto: Il ruolo della scrittura nei romanzi di Elena Ferrante uses both Ferrante’s concepts of “frantumaglia” and “smarginatura” (“dissolving boundaries”) as metaliterary tools to investigate the role of writing in the novels. Starting with a citation from La frantumaglia that explains the eponymous concept, Bianchi then investigates meta-writing in I giorni dell’abbandono. There, Olga first transcribes her interior “frantumaglia,” which she will later recompose to create the text we finally read. Writing for Lila in L’amica geniale is a way to shore up the “smarginatura,” but she also hates its excessive orderliness and fakeness. In the tetralogy, however, writing has the fantastic power to give concreteness to fragmented identities. Bianchi ends her article with a coup de théâtre by interlacing the question of metaliterary writing with that of Ferrante’s authoriality. Ferrante’s protagonists can only begin their writing in the absence of a loved one (as in L’amica geniale and L’amore molesto, for instance), and this, Bianchi argues, mirrors Ferrante’s own absence as a writer. In his essay, Giulio Genovese too focuses on hidden authoriality in the Neapolitan Novels. While acknowledging the mainstream obsession with identifying the real person behind the pseudonym Ferrante, this chapter concentrates on blurred identity in My Brilliant Friend and the hidden authoriality in the tetralogy. He probes only this narratological realm and does not seek to uncover Ferrante’s empirical identity; rather, his focus is the semiotic mechanisms at play in the creation of a text. Through the double authoriality of the protagonists’ writing history, Genovese argues, Ferrante navigates the problem of agency within a text: Lila becomes the co-author both through her own talent and drive, and because of Elena’s insecurity. This article goes on to pos-
18 Introduction
it that Elena’s cyclical questioning of her writing co-dependency causes her to erase her own agency and assign Lila as the real—but hidden—author. In light of this, the chapter considers Ferrante’s decision to use a pseudonym, forcing us to assess the tetralogy as a mise-en-abyme that incorporates a theme of authorial uncertainty—and ultimately to accept that single authorship is finally impossible. In her chapter, Sarah Atkinson delves into the influence of other Italian women writers on Ferrante’s work. She begins with an exploration of some of the literary antecedents of Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, with particular reference to Anna Maria Ortese’s short story collection Il mare non bagna Napoli (1953), whose influence Ferrante herself readily acknowledges. The chapter goes on to unpack the relationship between Ortese’s and Ferrante’s poetic projects, which can be seen as related but distinct; each one provides a means of reading the other. Ferrante’s concept of smarginatura (“dissolving boundaries”) extends Ortese’s depiction of impaired vision in the opening story of her volume, Un paio di occhiali. Both writers explore disorientation, the emotional and physiological distress of protagonists made vulnerable by brutal realities. However, Atkinson shows that for Ortese and Ferrante, writing is more than a means of representing this state of being. It is also a means of correcting, containing, and mediating it. Positioning Ferrante in relation to Ortese helps us to better understand the former’s intellectual project: to write nuanced portraits of women that pay heed to their postures and gestures, both bodily and intellectual. Next, Giancarlo Tursi’s contribution sifts through the various layers of translation that exist in Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and the television adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, exploring the effect of moving back and forth between these layers. This involves a process of “stereoscopic reading”—to draw on Lili Robert-Foley’s appropriation of translation theorist Marilyn Gaddis Rose’s concept—by which the reader shifts (sometimes simultaneously) between oral, written, and visual codes. In the novel, narrator Lenu translates her lived experiences from the Neapolitan dialect into the standard, national language. In the second volume, we learn that much of what Lenu has recounted thus far comes from Lila’s journals, now discarded. The version of the story to which we have access is a copy, a translation of an earlier text. The television series takes an additional translational turn. The characters speak in dialect, while the standard language appears in subtitles. Then there is the voiceover narrative, read by Florentine actress Alba Rohrwacher, who speaks with a decidedly Northern inflection. These and the many other voices and texts that contradict, challenge, complement, and augment one another make for a particular kind of reading and viewing experience. A stereoscopic reading, as Tursi seeks to demonstrate, offers a fragmented portrait of the characters and their relationship to their world, where the truth of their experience may be found in multiple locations.
Introduction 19
The final contribution by Maria Florence Massucco is about the oft-mentioned mix of high- and lowbrow forms in Ferrante’s repertoire, which is reflected in the variegated spectrum of Ferrante readers, who range from casual enthusiasts to specialists, but whose responses are all equally valuable and illuminating. Massucco’s contribution focuses on the questions readers ask of and about the texts and their author. More than the answers, it is the questions that offer us access to the preoccupations and proclivities of the readers. Question one, for instance, invites readers to align themselves with one of the two protagonists in the Neapolitan series. However, it also speaks to the particular kind of female friendship that Ferrante explores. It is an opportunity for readers to acknowledge and reflect on their own “amica geniale”, or perhaps lack thereof. The questions asked and examined are also a reminder of another important relationship forged around the mysterious author, Ferrante: the relationship of reader and book. In the case of Ferrante’s novels, the moorings of the texts to any anchoring author have long been cut off by the writer/s behind the pseudonym. Instead, the reader is uniquely positioned to fashion their own brilliant friendship with the book.
studi 1. Anton Ranieri Parra, Sei studi in blu. Due mondi letterari (inglese e italiano) a confronto dal Seicento al Novecento, pp. 188, 2007. 2. Gianfranca Lavezzi, Dalla parte dei poeti: da Metastasio a Montale. Dieci saggi di metrica e stilistica tra Settecento e Novecento, pp. 264, 2008. 3. Lettres inédites de la Comtesse d’Albany à ses amis de Sienne, publiées par Léon-G. Pélissier (1797-1802), Ristampa anastatica a cura di Roberta Turchi, pp. xvi-492, 2009. 4. Francesca Savoia, Fra letterati e galantuomini. Notizie e inediti del primo Baretti inglese, pp. 256, 2010. 5. Lettere di Filippo Mazzei a Giovanni Fabbroni (1773-1816), a cura di Silvano Gelli, pp. lxxxvi-226, 2011. 6. Stefano Giovannuzzi, La persistenza della lirica. La poesia italiana nel secondo Novecento da Pavese a Pasolini, pp. xviii-222, 2012. 7. Simone Magherini, Avanguardie storiche a Firenze e altri studi tra Otto e Novecento, pp. x-354, 2012. 8. Gianni Cicali, L’ Inventio crucis nel teatro rinascimentale fiorentino. Una leggenda tra spettacolo, antisemitismo e propaganda, pp. 184, 2012. 9. Massimo Fanfani, Vocabolari e vocabolaristi. Sulla Crusca nell’Ottocento, pp. 124, 2012. 10. Idee su Dante. Esperimenti danteschi 2012, a cura di Carlo Carù, Atti del Convegno, Milano, 9 e 10 maggio 2012, pp. xvi-112, 2013. 11. Giorgio Linguaglossa, Dopo il Novecento. Monitoraggio della poesia italiana contemporanea, pp. 148, 2013. 12. Arnaldo Di Benedetto, Con e intorno a Vittorio Alfieri, pp. 216, 2013. 13. Giuseppe Aurelio Costanzo, Gli Eroi della soffitta, a cura di Guido Tossani, pp. lvi96, 2013.
14. Marco Villoresi, Sacrosante parole. Devozione e letteratura nella Toscana del Rinascimento, pp. xxiv-232, 2014. 15. Manuela Manfredini, Oltre la consuetudine. Studi su Gian Pietro Lucini, pp. xii152, 2014. 16. Rosario Vitale, Mario Luzi. Il tessuto dei legami poetici, pp. 172, 2015. 17. La Struzione della Tavola Ritonda, (I Cantari di Lancillotto), a cura di Maria Bendinelli Predelli, pp. lxxiv-134, 2015. 18. Manzoni, Tommaseo e gli amici di Firenze. Carteggio (1825-1871), a cura di Irene Gambacorti, pp. xl-204, 2015. 19. Simone Fagioli, La struttura dell’argomentazione nella Retorica di Aristotele, pp. 124, 2016. 20. Francesca Castellano, Montale par luimême, pp. 112, 2016. 21. Luca Degl’Innocenti, «Al suon di questa cetra». Ricerche sulla poesia orale del Rinascimento, pp. 160, 2016. 22. Marco Villoresi, La voce e le parole. Studi sulla letteratura del Medioevo e del Rinascimento, pp. 276, 2016. 23. Marino Biondi, Quadri per un’esposizione e frammenti di estetiche contemporanee, pp. 452, 2017. 24. Donne del Mediterraneo. Saggi interdisciplinari, a cura di Marco Marino, Giovanni Spani, pp. 144, 2017. 25. Peter Mayo, Paolo Vittoria, Saggi di pedagogia critica oltre il neoliberismo, analizzando educatori, lotte e movimenti sociali, pp. 192, 2017. 26. Antonio Pucci, Cantari della «Guerra di Pisa», edizione critica a cura di Maria Bendinelli Predelli, pp. lxxvi-140, 2017. 27. Leggerezze sostenibili. Saggi d’affetto e di Medioevo per Anna Benvenuti, a cura di Simona Cresti, Isabella Gagliardi, pp. 228, 2017. 28. Manuele Marinoni, D’Annunzio lettore
di psicologia sperimentale. Intrecci culturali: da Bayreuth alla Salpêtrière, pp. 140, 2018.
38. Per Franco Contorbia, a cura di Simone Magherini e Pasquale Sabbatino, 2 voll., pp. xviii-1028, 2019.
29. Avventure, itinerari e viaggi letterari. Studi per Roberto Fedi, a cura di Giovanni Capecchi, Toni Marino e Franco Vitelli, pp. x-546, 2018.
39. Ettore Socci, Da Firenze a Digione. Impressioni di un reduce garibaldino, a cura di Giuseppe Pace Asciak, con la collaborazione di Marion Pace Asciak, pp. xl196, 2019.
30. Mario Pratesi, All’ombra dei cipressi, a cura di Anne Urbancic, pp. lx-100, 2018. 31. Giulia Claudi, Vivere come la spiga accanto alla spiga. Studi e opere di Carlo Lapucci. Con tre interviste, pp. 168, 2018. 32. Marino Biondi, Letteratura giornalismo commenti. Un diario di letture, pp. 512, 2018. 33. Scritture dell’intimo. Confessioni, diari, autoanalisi, a cura di Marco Villoresi, pp. viii-136, 2018. 34. Massimo Fanfani, Un dizionario dell’era fascista, pp. 140, 2018. 35. Femminismo e femminismi nella letteratura italiana dall’Ottocento al XXI secolo, a cura di Sandra Parmegiani, Michela Prevedello, pp. xxxiv-302, 2019. 36. Maria Bendinelli Predelli, Storie e cantari medievali, pp. 188, 2019. 37. Valeria Giannantonio, Le autobiografie della Grande guerra: la scrittura del ricordo e della lontananza, pp. 368, 2019.
40. Massimo Fanfani, Dizionari del Novecento, pp. 168, 2019. 41. Giulia Tellini, L’officina sperimentale di Goldoni. Da «La donna volubile» a «La donna vendicativa», pp. 264, 2020. 42. Hue de Rotelande, Ipomedon (poema del XII secolo), traduzione e introduzione di Maria Bendinelli Predelli, pp. liv-266, 2021. 43. Marco Lettieri, Word and Image in Alfonso d’Aragona’s Manuscript Edition of the «Divina Commedia», pp. 132, 2021. 44. Giovanni Bianchini, «La nostra comune patria». Uomini, letterati e luoghi di cultura del Seicento aretino, pp. xxiv-240, 2021. 45. Ferrante Unframed. Authorship, Reception and Feminist Praxis in the Works of Elena Ferrante, Edited by Roberta Cauchi-Santoro and Costanza Barchiesi, pp. 144, 2021.
