William Faulker’s “Dry September” as a Possible Opera

           The opera takes place one exceptionally hot afternoon and evening in a small town named Jefferson in the American south just after WWI, perhaps around 1920 during the Jim Crow era of strict racial segregation.  A rumor is sweeping town that a Black man has done something transgressive to a local white woman, but no details have been forthcoming.

Principal characters:

           Minnie Cooper (soprano), an unmarried woman about 39, who lives with her ailing mother and a problematic aunt. She’s “on the slim side of ordinary,” frequently goes into town wearing new, voile dresses and tries to represent herself as younger and more desirable than she actually is, asking the children of friends she knew in school to call her “cousin” rather than “auntie.” That’s been the case for several years now, after she had a four-year relationship with a widowed bank clerk about 15 years older than she was. The affair, her first such relationship, ended when he left for Memphis without her and although he returns to Jefferson every Christmas, he has had no interest whatsoever in seeing any more of Minnie.

           Will Mayes (tenor or baritone), an attractive Black man, probably in his late thirties or early forties, who works as a night watchman at an ice-making plant outside of town. Little else is known about him in Faulkner’s story, but in the opera, he recently did an odd job for Minnie.

           Hawkshaw (tenor or baritone), a middle-aged white man who works as a barber with two or three other barbers in a shop in Jefferson. He claims to know both Minnie and Will and insists that if a negro was involved in the rumored incident, it couldn’t have been Mayes. He urges restraint until the facts are known.

            McLendon (bass), a man in his 30s who led troops in WWI and was decorated for his service. He is insistent that whether the rumor is true or not, the untouchable status of white womanhood, and thus of the prevailing order of society, must be maintained whether the facts are clear or not. He questions anyone who would believe a Black man before a white woman. Carrying a pistol, he declares himself the man to lead a mission of retribution and urges others to join him

 Prelude (in front of the curtain)

             There are brief scuffling noises of an indeterminate nature off stage left and Minnie, somewhat disheveled, appears. She starts to run across the stage, but suddenly pauses, quickly glances about, and then briefly checking her attire, tugging a shoulder strap or sleeve down a bit more. She then resumes running in an agitated state. She seems to be saying something, but nothing comprehensible.

 Scene One (a barbershop in town, late on a hot Saturday afternoon)

             The curtain rises on an animated discussion among a group of men – three barbers, a couple of customers in the chairs plus various other men awaiting their turns or just hanging about. Hawkshaw’s chair is downstage and he is shaving a client, evidently a traveling salesman known as a “drummer” passing through town. Prominent among the others is a poorly spoken, hulking youth called Butch.

During the discussion, which is mainly if not entirely sung, Hawkshaw, seemingly out of the blue, declares that if anything did happen, and he doubts it did, that Will Mayes was most definitely not the culprit. He repeatedly says he knows Mayes and that Mayes is “a good nigger.” Hawkshaw’s client accuses him of being “a hell of a whiteman” and the youth accuses him of being “a nigger lover.”

 Another man attempts to quiet the youth, who had lept to his feet. But the salesman backs Buck up, declaring “if there ain’t any white men in this town, you can count on me even if I’m a stranger.”

The man who first attempted to quiet Butch says there is plenty of time to look into things. But the stranger insists there can’t be anything that excuses a nigger for molesting a white woman. He accuses the man of being from somewhere up North and the man responds by saying he was born and raised in Jefferson.

During the course of the discussion, Hawkshaw says he also knows Minnie and implies she’s too much of a spinster to attract the attentions of a man.   Another man asks her age and Hawshaw says she’s about 40. No one says anything more about her.

The youth fulminates, struggling without success to explain his thoughts. (He’s clearly threatened if Blacks are allowed to advance.)

Suddenly a door bangs and there stands McLendon, heavy set, wearing an open white shirt, and a felt hat. “Well,” he sings,” are you going to sit there and let a black son rape a white woman on the streets of Jefferson?”

“That’s what I been telling them,” sings Butch, cursing and fulminating in a ever-more agitated fashion.

­Aria:  McLendon sings an aria in which he mentions his citation for valor in the recent war, says he is ready to lead an immediate mission of retribution and calls on others to join. During the course of this, he advances themes associated with what are known as “the lost cause” of the Confederacy and the Southern way of life, centering on the inviolable nature of fragile, vulnerable women. Such women, the symbol and essence of a superior culture, must be protected at all cost. Blacks, who must keep their place, can’t be allowed to think otherwise. It’s a slippery slope and any perceived transgressions must be nipped in the bud.

 "But did it really happen?” one of those present asks.

 "Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?" McLendon says as he demand of the group: “Who’s with me?”

Butch jumps up eagerly and several others follow more reluctantly.  McLendon whirls around to head out, the butt of a pistol visible in his back pocket. Hawshaw hesitates for a while, looking at the other two barbers who have remained at their chairs.  Then suddenly, tossing down a towel, he heads after the group.

Scene Two (a deserted property, ice plant visible in the background, a bit later in the afternoon as dusk is just starting to fall.  A black man stands alone, thinking about things.)

 Aria: Will Mayes sings an aria about what it is like to be a Black man in the Jim Crow era. Among other things, he sings about the difficulty of getting an education and finding decent work (he’s about to start his shift as a night watchman). He sings of doing odd jobs for whites, most recently for Millie Cooper and her mother who needed porch steps repaired, grateful that they at least paid him promptly. He sings about wanting to get married and have a child, but also that he’s hesitant to bring anyone else into the world as he experiences it. But he ends on a hopeful note.

The men led by McLendon suddenly arrive, surprising Mayes who asks what they want.

“What is it captains?” Mayes sings, adding “I ain’t done nothing.” He looks at the men, mentioning some names, but not that of Hawkshaw who has claimed to know him.

“Get him into the car,” McLendon demands.

A brief scuffle ensues, during which at one point, Mayes lashes out, randomly hitting Hawkshaw in the mouth, who hits him back.  But he’s rapidly subdued and the men haul him off-stage toward the car (headlights can be seen shining).

 Hawkshaw at first starts to follow, then declares he isn’t going.  They leave him behind.

 Aria: Hawkshaw sings of the hopeless state of things and his own inability to effectively act on what he thinks is right. Society doesn’t have to be this way, but what can change it? What can one man do?

As Hawshaw is finishing his aria, a single shot rings out in the distance, off-stage – far enough away to be somewhat muffled, but still audible.

 Scene 3 (Minnie’s house. She is wearing a robe and bathing out of a tub on the floor. Her aunt is helping her while her mother sits nearby. She’s in an odd mood, a bit distracted, it seems, reminiscing about the past.)

 Aria:  Minnie (with her aunt and/or mother occasionally joining in) reviews her past life: how pretty she was as a girl, how things were going well until other kids started saying rude things about her behind her back (you didn’t understand our station, her aunt or mother sings. We’re proud people who can take care of ourselves even after your father died, but those others don’t think we’re as good as they are. Some families have been here a long time, some even owned slaves.) Minnie continues, singing about her friends pairing up, getting married, having children. They started getting their children to call Minnie “aunty.”  Then the bank clerk with the new car came along (Minnie brightens up) and started “courting her.” (that’s not how the town people saw it, her aunt reminds her. It was like adultery in their eyes).  Minnie bristles. His wife had died, he was a widower. I was still young and pretty, she insists, and he showed me off as we drove around in his car – the first in town.  I was ever so proper in my motoring bonnet and veil. (But he tired of you, picked up and moved to Memphis just like that, the aunt or mother sings). Comes back every Christmas, but not to see you. You’ve got nothing left but the whiskey he taught you to drink).  Minnie’s mood darkens and she starts to sing a different song, but there is a knock on the door.

Two of Minnie’s women friends arrive and the mother and aunt leave the room.

They tell Minnie they are so sorry about what happened and ask her if she feels well enough to go out.  She nods and asks if they can hand her first her underwear and then her new, pink voile dress, all of which is laid out near by.

“When you have had time to get over the shock, you must tell us what happened. What he said and what he did; everything,” one of her friends sings.

Aria:  (Minnie sings as she puts on her sheer underclothes and then her new pink voile dress). I’m not sure what I can tell you because I’m not sure just who he was. I was out back, in a laid back chair in the shade of the two big trees. It was so hot I felt faint and my eyes were closed. I think I was almost sleeping when I felt it like a dream – a hand on my breast. Just every so lightly, you know, that I didn’t move at first. But I awakened and tried to cry out as I rose up, but nothing came out.  The hand was gone and at first I was scared to turn around, but I did and no one was there.  I heard some movement, but couldn’t see anything because of the trees. (She shudders and stops in mid phrase).

"It's alright, Minnie," one of her friends assures her.

 “So he didn’t ….?

 “ … rape me? I …I … I …”

 “McLendon says he deserves to pay if he even thought about it.”

 “McLendon?”

 Minnie for some reason starts to laugh, tries to control it, but can’t. Her friends look confused, then worried.

Aria resumes: Minnie sings in what sounds like a confused state – phrases, then laughter, then phrases – something about men, what they want, what a woman pays, the bank clerk, children, she will show them – more laughter, more confusion – she did what she needed to do. And as she passed through town in her pink voile dress in the wake of the rumor, even lounging young men followed with their eyes. So Faulkner tells readers. So Minnie sings in feverish triumph.

 Minnie’s friends try to calm her.

 “I heard McLendon and some men have gone after Will Mayes,” says one.

 “Will Mayes?”

 “Well, he was at your place, doing some work for you, wasn’t he?”

 Minnie sits up, puts her hand up to her mouth, but can’t stop a hysterical laugh that rapidly turns into screams.

 “Go fetch a doctor” one friend says to another as Minnie’s mother and aunt reappear.

 Aria resumes: Minnie’s hysteria results in her “mad scene” aria along the lines of Lucia’s, or even better (in my humble opinion) the “mad scene” aria sung by Electra in “Idomeneo.” The society of which she is a victim has sacrificed an innocent on its behalf using her plight as an excuse for atrocity. Madness is a salvation.

[What’s going on here?  Minnie, increasingly sexually frustrated after having been abandoned by the bank clerk, a man to whom she sacrificed her reputation as well as perhaps other things, and upon realizing she is reaching the end of the line in such matters at only age about 40, loses her senses and commits a desperate act.

 She invented an incident to make society still see her as a desirable woman without considering the possible consequences. Learning what has transpired, she realizes she has in all probability just killed Will Mayes.

 The desperation of an abandoned woman, in the tradition of Medea, Dido and a host of other, is a  trope, if you will, most recently extensively mined by Elena Ferrante, author of  "The Days of Abandonment" and four novels known as "The Neopolitan Quartet." Abandonment is a major subject for her, Ferrante makes clear in series of interviews.

Minnie, in her days of abandonment, began drinking whiskey supplied by a clerk at a soda fountain, and continued to go out into town in her new voile dresses, insisting that the children of her friends call her “cousin” rather than ”aunty” to reinforce the notion she is still young and potentially desirable.  But it was no use. “Lounging men did not even follow her with their eyes anymore.”

Based on what Ferrante, if no one else, tells us about abandoned women, Minnie’s resentments were thus continuing to build along with, one can fairly assume, her sexual frustrations. Surely her four-year relationship with the bank clerk, given his background, age and likely desires, was not devoid of intimacy.

On the day in question, on the single afternoon and evening during which the story takes place, readers, though the narrator’s eyes, are allowed to see Minnie late in the day, feverish (presumably as a result of the rumored incident) and having trouble dressing while three seemingly sympathetic, but also salaciously curious, female friends await her story.

“While she was still dressing her friends called for her and sat while she donned her sheerest underthings and stockings and new voile dress.” Her friends told her (the narrator relates) that when she got over the shock, she was to tell them everything – “what he said and did.” Who was “he?”

In the eyes of a John McLendon, a WWI veteran who commanded troops and was cited for valor, any Black male would do. “What the hell difference does it make?” he asks when Hawkshaw suggests the sheriff investigate the rumored incident to discover who, if anyone, is to blame. “Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?” (my emphasis), McLendon says.

But again back to Minnie: eventually she sallies forth, escorted through the town to a film by her friends, “fragile in her fresh dress” – pink in color readers eventually learn thanks to one observer.

And rather than the apparent lynching, about which readers are told nothing, what happened to Minnie is described in some detail. She wanted to break out laughing and hoped the film would help the laughter under control “so it would not waste away so fast and so soon.” She clearly wants to enjoy something she has apparently pulled off, but to no avail. Her friends hear her, take her home in a taxi “where they removed her pink voile and sheer underthings and stockings.”  They put her to bed and as her laughter, increasingly hysterical, turns to screams, send for a doctor, but since it was a Saturday evening, one couldn’t easily be found.

An abandoned woman, one might argue, is a force of nature. While Dido limited the destruction by killing herself with a sword Aneas, her lover and the founder of Rome, had left her as a souvenir, Medea murdered her own sons by Jason, who abandoned her, as well as various others.

“Can one continue to live if one loses love?” Ferrante asks in an essay contained in her book of miscellany called Frantumaglia. “It seems like a pretty much discredited subject; in reality it’s the question most crudely posed by female existence. The loss of love is a failure; it causes an absence of sense.” [my emphasis]]

 Scene 4 (About midnight, at Mclendon’s neat new, but very small house)

 Mclendon returns home and discovers his wife sitting up, waiting for him. He demands to know why, telling her he has repeatedly told her not to.

 Aria:  McLendon’s wife sings “what kind of a man have you become since you went away to the war?  I still want you, but I don’t know you anymore. Within you there is no longer love, but hatred.”

When she has finished, McLendon slaps her and pushes her half over the chair where she remains, sobbing.

McLendon walks over to a screened-in window and gazes vacantly outward, removing his shirt, which he uses to wipe down his sweat-coved body. The butt of a gun is visible in his rear pocket.

Curtain

 

 

 

 

The Literature of Olivia Rodrigo's "Sour" & Elena Ferrante

This is another post in which I look at the lyrics of popular songs from a literary point of view. It deals with a recent, very popular album called “Sour,” written and sung by Olivia Rodrigo, that consists of a number of closely linked songs akin to the chapters of a book.

The point of view is first person singular and genre is essentially “chic lit,” the topics being mainly those that would resonate with women in the teenage to Young Adult age spectrum. Despite certain shortcomings, I think it is a very commendable effort and perhaps even more so if one listens to the music, which I didn’t.

The topic is all too familiar: a girl has lost her boyfriend to another girl and in that context, it is interesting to compare it to the approaches taken by both Taylor Swift, who dealt with a similar  situation by way of three songs on her recent “Folklore” album, and with Elena Ferrante, author of a number of books, most famously four novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet.

Let's take Ferrante first because Rodrigo's effort is all about a young woman who has been abandoned by her boyfriend and that is a recurring theme throughout Ferrante's writing. Indeed, one of her novels is entitled "The Days of Abandonment" and asked whether it was feminist in nature, Ferrante replied:

"Yes, because it's sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn't aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile."

That's a comment one should keep firmly in mind when considering "Sour."

Shifting gears, Taylor Swift, who Rodrigo has said she greatly admires, tried to get to the heart of her breakup story by looking at what happened through the differing points of view of the three protagonists whereas Rodrigo sticks to just that of the abandoned woman. But in my view, Swift failed to take good advantage of her technique.

Both Swift and Rodrigo seem to have difficulty fleshing out the character of a man and that's one of the reasons their lyrics are chic-lit in nature. In both instances, their men are one-dimensional – akin to cardboard cutouts -- and it’s hard to see why the women who lost them found them attractive in the first place. They are simply foils for the expression of female emotions ranging from love to hate plus much in between, which is probably nothing new when it comes to songwriting. But as literature, it can be a major shortcoming.

In any event, “Sour,” like a good opera, opens in media res with our 17-year-old songwriter heroine – why not call her Olivia? -- proclaiming insecurity and wallowing in self-pity.

“I’m not cool and I’m not smart and I can’t even parallel park,” she moans, declaring her ego to be in such a crushed state that she wishes she could disappear.

 Life is brutal thanks to a traitor -- a boyfriend who has just left her for another girl. She’s a loser (this will be of considerable significance in due course) and that’s tough apart from lost love, or perhaps lost late adolescent infatuation. In short, she's been abandoned and as a result, is left feeling both highly vulnerable and in her view, justifiably angry.

The young man’s departure was apparently not all that unexpected. As the story proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that he meant a lot more to Olivia than she did to him, but Olivia has trouble believing that and accepting the idea that what a person says can easily be situational as opposed to valid for all time.

A major reason she can’t accept what has happened is because she consistently failed to be true to herself throughout the relationship.

“I kept quiet so I could keep you,” she says. Winning is apparently what it was all about.

While her boyfriend was clearly no great prize -- “loved you at your worst, but that didn’t matter” -- she wasn’t either.

The young man in question has taken up with an older girl (even a couple of years can seem significant when one is 17) who is more sophisticated and more comfortable in her own skin than is our heroine.

“She’s everything I’m insecure about,” Olivia bleats.

And to make matters worse, the new girl – no need to give her a name because she’s essentially a trope – has blonde hair. Life is unfair, Olivia eventually comes to understand -- to her credit.

As a budding teenage songwriter, Olivia finds comfort in the power and validity of music. As such she can’t believe her former boyfriend can actually get along without her because of what he said in a certain song he wrote. Surely a song is where truth lies.

But with such thoughts predictably going nowhere, Olivia turns to more prosaic matters, revolving around a teenage rite of passage – a driver’s license.

Despite her inability to parallel park, she somehow managed to get one just the previous week. This was at the urging of her boyfriend who had wanted her to be able to drive over to his place as opposed to him having to spend time picking her up.

“I know we weren’t perfect,” she admits, which is undoubtedly an understatement.

Moving on is necessary, but not easy. At times, Olivia feels she is taking 1 step forward only to then take not just the usual two, but 3 steps back.

Much of this has to do with her acquiesce to subservient status in a relationship within which she felt “pretty” or “fun” only if her boyfriend told her such was the case.

“I hate that I gave you power over that kind of stuff,” she complains, without much justification. After all, as she says, she was the one who set things up in that fashion.

But then the story gets murky as self-abasement rears its ugly head.

Maybe, she says, she found it exciting to never really know how her boyfriend was going to treat her next: love her, want her, hate her, walk her to her door, send her home crying?

“The roller coaster is all I’ve ever had,” she tells us, the word “ever” suggesting her recent failed relationship may be just the proverbial tip of an iceberg.

In fact, Olivia may well be in therapy (she has told us nothing about her background) and perhaps that’s how she was able to find a therapist for her boyfriend, who she sees as having  benefitted from such help – far more than she herself has, it appears.  Olivia still believes she has to make herself into someone she isn’t.

Her former boyfriend is looking happy and healthy since he left her and is even a better man for his current girl. He has purchased a new car and his career is taking off, leaving her crying on her bathroom floor, his apathy salt in her wounds.

Good 4 u she thinks (tweets?), with sarcasm rather more hopeful than genuine.

Then Olivia steers off in a different direction. Perhaps it was fortunate her boyfriend dumped her, she decides to believe, depicting him as damaged goods. His new relationship isn’t so great. Rather, (pardon Olivia’s French) it’s déjà vu.

While the blonde boasts to her friends the young man is “unique,” Olivia sees his prevailing behavior (which she seems to know a lot about), as just a replay of the things he did with her.

Like trading jackets, or recycling jokes Olivia told him, or enjoying a particular Billy Joel song with his new girl, like they did.

“When are you going to tell her we did that, too?”

To his credit – although perhaps unfortunately for others – the young man remains true to himself, a characteristic Olivia finds infuriating.

While he made no concessions, she eviscerated her true self in an effort to become the person she thought he wanted. This, by the way, could be straight out of "Days of Abandonment" and Ferrante's depiction of her heroine, Olga.

Rodrigo's heroine wore makeup because she thought her boyfriend liked the Prom Queen look. She learned how he wanted his coffee and memorized his favorite songs. She read his self-help books so he would think she was smart.

“All I ever wanted was to be enough for you.” (Such was the case with respect to Olga as well.)

But the remake didn’t work (Olivia failed to become "exciting") and is left feeling “I just want myself back.”

Time goes by – it’s now a month later – and Olivia is somewhat more reconciled to the loss of  “all the sunlight of our past.”

The young man’s current girl friend is sweet and pretty and apparently also able to bring out the better in him, but perhaps to an insufficient degree. Olivia believes he is lying to her as well.

She can't give up the notion she and the young man had really been happy together before it all unraveled and, with a certain degree of noblesse oblige, even expresses hope he’s happy with the new girl, as long as he isn’t happier. In other words, Olivia still isn’t willing to admit defeat. She was the real thing; he just hasn’t figured it out. She isn't a loser!

But wait a minute: there's at least one more possibility. Perhaps society is to blame. What a concept!

Girls are pushed into presenting themselves with perfect bodies and white teeth and there they all are, out on social media, looking too good to be true.

Olivia, fixated with having failed to measure up, wants to throw away the phone upon which she views the competition – Instagram or wherever.

“I know their beauty is not my lack, but it feels like that weight is on my back.” 

She so desperately wants to be like such girls: happier, prettier, jealously, jealously. This is straight out of Edvard Munch. Olivia would fit right into "The Frieze of Life."

Well, those thoughts, too, are unproductive so it’s time for yet another tack. How about a notion of complicity?

Dumping her was her boyfriend’s favorite crime, she decides, but what if she was his accomplice? Only one person’s heart was broken, but “four hands bloody.” Knowing full well what he was capable of, she told lies and defended him to others “just so I could call you mine.”

That pretty much brings us to the end of the story, except that, like a good, old-fashioned tale, it has a moral to it.

Olivia has become a better person as a result of her misfortune in the sense that she is now able to see less fortunate members of society – a somewhat dorky boy she once knew and a lonely girl struggling to get away from dreadful parents – in a new light.

The aren’t the losers she probably once thought they were when she was riding high. They simply were unlucky – they got a bad deal of the cards of life when they were born as she herself did if for a girl, looks, and especially blonde hair, are pretty much everything.

She hopes the boy somehow converted his lousy hand into a royal flush and she decides the girl is commendably courageous in her attempt to “unlearn all their hatred.”

Nothing is forever, nothing is as good as it once might have appeared, and every door is hard to close. Those are Olivia’s closing thoughts as she realizes her setback was nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary in the grand sweep of things. She’s learned the value of empathy and compassion. A life worth living is not “all about me.”

Her teenage Dream was just that and her boyfriend’s behavior was not all that bad.

“We don’t talk much, but I just gotta say. I miss you and I hope you’re ok.”

Like Ferrante, Rodrigo does not ultimately brand male behavior as vile.

The ending saves it and as a result, I'd give this one a B+.

Ferrante's "The Days of Abandonment" Can Feel Out of Date

Emily Temple, a senior editor at Literary Hub, just published a recommended list of relatively short contemporary works of fiction entitled "The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages." Sadly, my novella, Manhattan Morning isn't among them.

But that isn't why I bring this up. Rather, one of the books on Temple's list is "The Days of Abandonment," by Elena Ferrante, the author of a series of novels known as the Neapolitan Quartet.

"This is the real Ferrante. I mean, look, I love the Neapolitan series as much as everybody ... but in my opinion, this short novel about a woman unraveling is her true masterpiece," Temple says.

I am not a woman and therefor probably relatively unqualified to make the following observations, but I read this book and its depiction of a woman's place in a marriage struck me as out of date.

This is the story of Olga whose husband leaves her for a younger woman after 15 years of marriage, a distressing upheaval no doubt, but one that is particularly shattering for Ferrante's heroine because she feels her very identity has been wiped out.  That's because, and this seems particularly odd for an educated woman in a feminist-sensitive Western world, Olga has given herself over to her husband in totality on the believe that this is what love, in the context of marriage, is all about.

At a couple of points in the story, Olga enumerates lists of things that she did for her husband, starting with getting him through university and supporting him in his work life to the point where she had "made him what he had become." 

In the process, "I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his," she says, noting that she "had had no work, any sort of work, even writing. for at least five years," as she took care of the house, the children and the family finances including the income taxes.

"While I was taking care of the children, I was expecting from Mario [her husband] a moment that never arrived, the moment when I would again be as I had been before my pregnancies, young, slender, energetic, shamelessly certain I could make of myself a memorable person."

Instead, she at one point spends several evenings searching through old photographs "for signs of my autonomy."

As she disintegrates, Olga feels not only the loss of her identity and sexuality, she most fundamentally feels increasingly vulnerable and, in the end, instead of remaking herself as an independent woman, settles for safety above all else in a relationship with an older neighbor.

Asked in an interview (re-published in her book "Frantumaglia," or jumbled fragments) if she would call "The Days of Abandonment" a feminist novel, Ferrante replied yes, and no.

"Yes, because it's sustained by the female reaction to abandonment, from Medea and Dido on. No, because it doesn't aim at telling what is the theoretically and practically correct reaction of the contemporary woman faced with the loss of the beloved man nor does it brand male behaviors as vile," Ferrante said.

Mario, Olga's husband, simply fell in love with someone else.

Awaiting Ferrante: Femininity Toxic and Nourishing

Followers of fiction are probably already well aware that the English-language translation of Elena Ferrante's latest novel, "The Lying Life of Adults," will be released in the U.S. in June.

It has already been published as "La Vita Bugiarda Degli Adulti" in Italy and is apparently enjoying considerable success in that market.

I was reminded of this when reading a profile of Edie Falco, probably best known as the wife of the mob boss in "The Sopranos," in the Sunday New York Times of Jan. 9, 2020. The profile consisted largely of a list of 10 things Falco said she could not live without and third on the list was "Elena Ferrante's Books."

"She really seemed to get all the complexities of relationships with girls that are fraught and deep and toxic and nourishing. I'd never seen it depicted in a way that I recognized quite as accurately," Falco is quoted saying.

The new novel is again set in Naples, but this time the chief protagonist, an adolescent girl named Giovanna, is from a family that is well off economically. According to an article in The Washington Post, the new book will largely satisfy Ferrante fans with fraught friendships, heady descriptions of Naples, and "wow-she-went-there" ways of depicting family.

One can ague that Ferrante has an exceptionally dark view of human nature as I do here. (Please click on the word "here" at the end of that sentence.)

"Juno," Abortion, Elena Ferrante, "Gina/Diane" Linkage

“I never worry about constructing a story that illustrates, demonstrates, spreads some conviction, even if it’s a conviction that counted and counts for me,” Elena Ferrante told an interviewer who had questioned whether her first novel, “The Days of Abandonment,” was a feminist work.

I bring up that quote, which can be found in Ferrante’s “Frantumaglia,” because Diablo Cody recently expressed what might be considered regrets over having written the film-script for the 2007 Oscar-winning movie “Juno.”  That film was about a 16-year-old girl who becomes pregnant and decides to have the baby, and give it up for adoption, as opposed to having an abortion.

“I don’t even know if I would have written a movie like ‘Juno’ if I had known the world was going to spiral into this hellish alternative reality that we now seem to be stuck in,” she said in an interview on the “Keep-It”podcast. The interview was picked up by the Washington Post, which expanded on it.

Cody was referring to strict anti-abortion legislation that was very recently passed by legislators in states such as Alabama, Georgia and Missouri. 

The author said that when she initially wrote “Juno,” she was just trying to come up with “a story that’s never been told.”   

"I wasn't thinking as an activist. I wasn't thinking politically at all," she said.

But now, because the film has been depicted as sending a strong pro-life message in a highly charged political climate, Cody said “I think I probably would have just told a different story in general.” That's as opposed to the idea of changing the film so as to have its young protagonist grappling with legislation that would block a woman's right to choose.

From a literary point of view (and film scripts are literature), that’s the wrong attitude, as per the Ferrante quote that begins this posting. Stories should stand on their own inner truths.  If they don’t, they aren’t literature, they are propaganda. 

This issue is of interest to me because when I was writing my second novella, “Gina/Diane,” a story about a woman who had a life-affecting botched abortion when she was 17, I sent drafts to various friends for comment.  A couple women told me they didn’t like the story because it could be viewed as supporting the anti-abortion movement. In their opinion, publishing a book like “Gina/Diane” was an almost traitorous act.

I see the novella as one woman’s story, and the attempt of one man to come to terms with what happened to her. It is not a tract for or against the general proposition of a  woman’s right to choose.

Elena Ferrante's Exceptionally Dark View of Humanity

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.

Elena Ferrante Seen as a Writer of "Competition"

I was scanning through the New York Times  Sunday Magazine today and came across an interview with Marilyn Minter, an artist who once painted women's public hair for "Playboy Magazine," only to have the magazine ultimately decide not to print the images.

Now they are hanging on a wall at the Brooklyn Museum as one part of a major retrospective of Minter's work entitled "Pretty/Dirty."

Time and Distance as Devices of Literary Style

There is obviously a well-understood relationship between time and distance: it takes a certain amount of time to go a certain distance, and since we understand that, the notion that these two concepts go together is a comfortable one.  A character travels and time passes.

We're also familiar with the often circular nature of travel. A character sets off for a particular destination and then returns home. The end of the trip is also the end of the story. It's a satisfying relationship -- everything neatly tied up.

A Book to Read After Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet

If you have read and enjoyed one or more books of Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet -- it starts with "My Brilliant Friend" -- you might also like to read "Eva Sleeps" by Francesca Melandri.

The books of both authors were originally written in Italian, but the English translations are of high quality.

Whereas Ferrante's four novels examine slices of Italian post-World War II history and society from the point of view of blue-collar southern Italians, often looking north, Melandri's book covers much the same time period, but from a different perspective.  "Eva Sleeps" is set deep in the history of an alpine Italian province known as Alto Adige that was once part of Austria, when it was known as South Tyrol. There, except for a brief period when Hitler essentially ruled Italy, the residents -- mostly German speaking -- look south, often warily if not with outright hostility.

How Much Of Your Manuscript Will A Publisher Read?

That's an interesting question, and I suspect there are as many answers as there are publishers.

But since I've just written a post on Elena Ferrante, a contemporary literary sensation, how about her publisher? How many pages of your manuscript would Michael Reynolds, the chief editor of Europa Editions, read?

Thanks to Literary Hub, we know the answer: 30 pages.  But his mind may actually have been made up much earlier.

What follows is the key interchange in an interview of Reynolds by Francesca Pellas:

FP: How do you select manuscripts here at Europa? How much do you read before making a decision?

MR: I read everything that comes in, but I don’t read the pitch first, nor the cover letter. I start with the manuscript. I look at the email just to make sure it’s not something that we don’t publish, and then go straight to the manuscript. I read 30 pages and decide whether it’s worth continuing or not. Sometimes I know from the second line that it’s not going to work for us, but I always, always, give these manuscripts the benefit of the doubt and read those 30 pages. I’ve never changed my mind, but I feel that’s the least I can do out of respect for someone who spent so much time writing something.

The bottom line: make sure you get the second line right!