The popular Italian writer known as Elena Ferrante has an exceptionally dark view of the human condition and of society, believing, among other things, that violence is "an essential trait of the human animal."
Violence in her view stems from nature rather than nurture, or to put the world nurture another way, from how societies happen to be organized. And each generation, she believes, is obligated to rediscover and verify the horrors of society, only to also discover their impotence to correct them.
Ferrante, which is a pen name, is most famously the author of four books known as "The Neapolitan Quartet," but she also earlier published three other novels. While she has declined to reveal her real identity or appear as Elena Ferrante in public, she has provided written answers to many questions and a great number of these have been collected in a book called "Frantumaglia," and subtitled "A Writer's Journey."
As a representative of her publisher explains: "The little problem was that, having promised the first publishers to whom we sold the rights that Elena would do an interview for each of those countries, the author suddenly found herself having to respond to some forty interviews, from all over the world."
In this post, I'm going to cherry pick her responses to various questions, starting with one from 2003 and proceeding forward in time.
Asked whether her fiction was undergoing a change after she had described the arrogance and insolence of a particular character and compared the character to the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, Ferrante replied as follows:
"I don't know, I hope not. Let's say that I am interested in understanding the fact that everything in life is turning into a show, draining the very concept of citizenship. I'm also struck by how the person is more and more unhappily dedicated to becoming a personage. And it frightens me that a classical effect of fiction -- the suspension of disbelief -- is becoming an instrument of political domination in the very heart of democracies."
Then, in 2006, a reader asked Ferrante how would she explain what the reader viewed as an increase in violence in Naples. Ferrante's response was:
"In Naples nothing more and nothing less is happening than what has happened for decades: an increasingly vast and well articulated intertwining of the illegal and the legal. The new fact isn't the explosion of violence, but how the city, with it's ancient problems, is being traversed by the world and is spreading through the world."
Then, at one point in 2014, Ferrante was asked to comment on the then-current state of Italy. Here is what she said:
"Italy is an extraordinary country, but it has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest. This confusion, concealed behind verbose self-promotion of all kinds, runs through criminal organizations as well as political parties, government bureaucracies and all social classes." That makes it difficult, she went to say, to be a truly good Italian, but the country does still have some excellent citizens.
Asked again, in 2015, about violence in Southern Italy, Ferrante replied:
"Violence is an essential trait of the human animal and it's always lying in wait, everywhere even in your marvelous country [Norway]. The perpetual problem is how to keep it under control." Later in the same interview, she declared that "our fundamental rights have to be won over and over again."
Again in 2015, Ferrante is asked why she finds the theme of "erasure" -- erasing oneself, or being erased by others; disappearing or being disappeared -- so compelling. The answer, in part:
"Every day we find ourselves faced with the intolerable, and no promise of utopia -- whether it be political, religious or scientific -- is capable of calming us. Each generation is obliged to verify this horror anew for itself, and to discover that it is impotent."
Later in the same year, Ferrante is asked, in effect, why she doesn't write more optimistic stories.
"I'm always surprised," she responds, "when somebody points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence."
By way of explanation she says: "Since the age of 15, I haven't believed in the kingdom of any God, in Heaven or on earth -- in fact, wherever you place it, it seems dangerous to me." But at the same time, she says, she believes most of the concepts we work with have a theological origin and that she is comforted stories than emerge through horror to redemption. "But I tried to write a story like that, long ago, and I discovered that I didn't believe in it. … I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions."
"Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening."
Ferrante's stories are full of people quarreling and on that topic she sees a quarrel as a rhetorical device that metaphorically represents a suspension between two sides [or states of being], "and it effectively summarizes the time we live in."
Continuing … "With the concept of class consciousness and class conflict defeated, the poor, the desperate, whose wealth consists only of angry words, are kept, by means of words, on the threshold -- between the degrading explosion, -- which makes them animals, and the liberating one, which humanizes and initiates a sort of purification. But in reality, the threshold is continuously breached, it becomes a bloodshed, a bloody war among the poor. Or it leads to acquiescence, to subservience of the weak toward the strong, to opportunism."
Asked her view of the last 40 years of the 20th century, which in the view of one questioner, were a favorable period relative to the "violent widening of gap between rich and poor" in the early years of the current century, Ferrante responded as follows:
"History and stories are written from the balcony of the present, looking out on the electrical storm of the past; that is to say there is nothing more unstable than the past. The past, in its indeterminacy, presents either through the filter of nostalgia or through the filter of preliminary impressions. I don't love nostalgia; it leads us to ignore individual sufferings, large pockets of misery, cultural and civil poverty, widespread corruption, regression after minimal and illusionary progress. I prefer acquisition to acts. The forty years you cite were in reality very difficult and painful for those who started from a position of disadvantage. And by disadvantage, I also mean, above all, being a woman. Not only that, starting in the seventies, the masses that endured inhuman sacrifices to climb a few rungs up the social ladder were already experiencing the torments of defeat, as were their children. Not to mention a sort of latent civil war; so called world peace, always at risk; and the beginnings of the most devastating technological revolutions, which paralleled one of the most devastating deconstructions of the old political and economic order. The new fact is not that the millennium begins with the widening of the gap between rich and poor -- that is a given. The new fact is that the poor no longer have any horizons in life besides the capitalist system, or any horizons for redemption besides religion."
Asked about the family, Ferrante responds:
"The family is violent in itself, as is everything that is based on blood ties -- that is to say ties we don't choose, ties that impose on us responsibility for the other even if we never chose to take it on. … Principally, it's hard to accept that bad feelings are provoked not only by the stranger, the rival -- the one who is on the other shore of 'our' body of water, who is not on our soil and does not share our blood -- but, perhaps with even greater compulsion, by those who are close to us."
What is at the bottom of this seemingly hopeless situation? Once again we are back to Pogo and his observation that "we have met the enemy and he is us."
"What corrupts us is the passion for ourselves, the urgent need for our own primacy," Ferrante says.
Welcome to the "it's-all-about-me" culture where we are all supposed to create, develop and ultimately monetize our own personal "brand." Collective approaches to betterment are passé.
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