Elena Ferrante is, as all the world knows by now, the pseudonym for the elusive author of, among other books, “The Lost Daughter,” which was recently made into a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and the four extraordinary “Neapolitan novels,” the first of which — “My Brilliant Friend” — is now an HBO series. Ferrante champions the view that, as she said in a 2015 interview with the Paris Review, the “author” is merely a “manufactured image” of a “writer-hero”:
“There is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence. We wrongfully diminish this collective intelligence when we insist on there being a single protagonist behind every work of art.”
Her new book, “In the Margins,” is a slim collection of four public lectures on writing and literature that were presented in Italy last year — three at the University of Bologna and one at a conference of Dante scholars. Note my use of the passive voice: “were presented.”
Ferrante did not deliver them in person — of course. Instead, they were given voice by an actress playing Ferrante and by a Dante scholar. This contrivance surely served only to highlight the absence of Ferrante herself, thus keeping the audience’s attention fixed on the figure of the missing “writer-hero” she disdains. (The author photo for “In the Margins” is a postcard-perfect image of Naples.)
It’s tough to prevent such extreme aesthetic convictions, no matter how sincerely embraced, from devolving into gimmicks. In the second lecture here, called “Histories I,” Ferrante ruminates on Gertrude Stein, a writer/soul mate whose resistance to the literary status quo also opened her to charges of gimmickry. In her sly 1934 memoir, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” Stein — the Great Trickster Mother of Modernism — appropriated the voice and life story of Toklas, her intimate life partner, as a way of writing her own autobiography from the outside, as it were. Following Stein’s lead, Ferrante talks of taking a sledgehammer to not only the “manufactured image” of the author but also the prefabricated constructs of language and genre — what she refers to as “the great containers of literary writing, … [that] instead are a death trap for our intention to write “truthfully.”
Are you taking notes? There’s a whiff of the graduate school seminar room, especially about the first three lectures here. (The final piece is a more straightforward appreciation of Dante, or, rather Beatrice, the character Ferrante regards as Dante’s “boldest creation.”) Granted, these lectures were written to be delivered to scholars and other strains of intellectuals, but they feel dated, as if they were written in the late 1970s or early ’80s, when literary theorists were still parsing the epiphanies of Roland Barthes’s famous 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” and exposing the internal contradictions of literary form. Indeed, although Ferrante presents her views as somewhat revolutionary, this passage from “Histories I,” reads like a throwback to the prevailing critical theories of that time:
“We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering into an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned … Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read … And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writers that, consciously or inadvertently, I’ve taken in.”
Perhaps it would be more revelatory to hear Ferrante’s responses to contemporary critical views that underscore the connection between personal identity and art. I’d like to know, for instance, what she thinks about the censoring of books because of the misdeeds of their authors. I’m curious about how Ferrante reconciles the fiction of the individual “writer-hero” with the politics of identity and heightened demands for more diversity of representation in literature.
For those who can’t get enough of Ferrante, even the pedantic Ferrante who prevails here, the first lecture, called “Pain and Pen” is the best of the lot because it feels (please don’t snicker at my naivete) the most personal. Here, Ferrante summons up the image of the kind of notebooks that once were given to children practicing their alphabet. Ever slippery, Ferrante focuses on the penmanship efforts of a young girl she says she’s “fond of” whom she calls “Cecilia.” Describing Cecilia’s attempts to keep her letters within the lines causes Ferrante to recall her own early efforts. (Or, maybe Cecilia is a younger incarnation of Ferrante — identity is malleable, right?). Toward the end of this section, Ferrante makes an unexpected confession:
“In my longing to write, starting in early adolescence, both the threat of those red lines … and the desire and fear of violating them are probably at work. More generally, I believe that the sense I have of writing … 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.”
The idea that adhering to form, as beautifully as Ferrante does in her celebrated novels, simultaneously signals the abandonment of all that’s left outside that form is a truth known to anyone who’s ever had the impulse to write. It’s Ferrante’s distinct articulation of that loss here — the voice and tone whose singularity she undermines in the other lectures — that makes the experience freshly melancholy. The other three lectures “In the Margins” should only hold the attention of those fans who will read anything and everything by that manufactured construct known as “Elena Ferrante, author.” But “Pain and Pen” has the extended poignancy that the great sportswriter, Red Smith, compressed into one deathless remark: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.”
Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.
In the Margins
On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
By Elena Ferrante. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Europa Editions. 112 pp. $21.95
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