By AFRANIO CATANI*
Commentary on Elena Ferrante's book
1.
Talking about Elena Ferrante is always, or almost always, a mystery. This is because her name is a pseudonym of an Italian writer (or writer?) whose identity remains a secret. The answers about her are nothing more than entertaining speculations. It can be said with some degree of reliability that she was born in Naples – or at least lived or lives there –, the setting of almost all of her books.
In rare interviews given to the press, always in writing and mediated by her Italian publishers, she revealed that she was the daughter of a seamstress and had three sisters, having written around ten novels and several non-fiction books and received several literary awards.
He knows Naples well and is well acquainted with Greek and Latin authors; it is said that Elena Ferrante is actually Domenico Starnone (1943), an excellent writer, novelist, journalist, screenwriter and winner of important literary awards – he denies having written the works signed by Elena Ferrante. Others claim that she is the writer Marcella Memmo, while many have concluded that she is the Roman translator Anita Raja, daughter of a German who immigrated to Italy after the Holocaust, and married to Domenico Starnone. In short, many hypotheses and no conclusions.
2.
The fact is that this mystery is far from being solved in Margins and Dictation: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, originally published in 2021; backwards.
Let me explain: in the “Note from the Italian Publisher”, signed by Sandra Ozzola, it is reported that of the four texts that make up the book, three were read in Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici “Umberto Eco”, from the University of Bologna. Elena was preceded by, among others, Elie Wiesel and Orhan Pamuk. In the invitation made to her by Constantino Marmo, director of the Center, it was suggested that the talks to be presented on consecutive days could refer to “subjects related to her activity as a writer, her poetics, her narrative technique or any other topic of her interest that might be of interest to a large non-specialized public” (p. 7).
Well, if no one knows for sure who Elena Ferrante is, how would she manage to keep her identity hidden in the speeches that took place in November 2021? Simple: “the actress Manuela Mandracchia performed the three texts, dressed as Elena Ferrante, at the Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna, in collaboration with ERT – Emilia Romagna Theatre” (p. 8). The fourth work, the conference “Dante’s Rib”, written at the invitation of the Association of Italianists, was read by scholar and critic Tiziana de Rogatis on April 29, 2021 (p. 9). Therefore, the mystery about the writer's identity remains.
3.
In “The Pen and the Feather” she talks about her first contact with the alphabet, the difficulties in writing her name on a sheet of paper, especially when she had to deal with elementary school notebooks, which had horizontal black lines and also two vertical red lines, one on the left and one on the right. “Writing was moving within those lines, and those lines (…) were my cross” (p. 16). She says that she was easily distracted and, although she always respected the left margin, “I would often go beyond the right, either to complete a word or because I had reached a point where it was difficult to divide it into syllables and move on to the next line without going beyond the margin. I was punished so often that the notion of limits became part of me and, when I write by hand, I feel the threat of that vertical red line, although it has long since disappeared from the sheets of paper I use” (p. 16).
Even when writing on the computer, after just a few lines Elena Ferrante says she goes straight to the alignment icon and clicks on the option that makes all the lines the same length.
“More generally, I think that my idea of writing – and also all the difficulties I carry with me – is related to the satisfaction of staying completely within the margins and, at the same time, to the impression of a loss, of a waste, for having succeeded” (p. 17-18). This imprisonment exerted by the horizontal and vertical lines will be revisited in the following pages of this first lecture, as well as in the others.
Elena Ferrante masterfully works with excerpts and/or poems contained in works by Italo Svevo (1861-1928), Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554), Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), to agree with the British author, according to whom “it is a mistake to think that it is possible to produce literature from raw material. We need to get away from life (…), we need to become strangers to everything: extremely concentrated, on a single point; without having to resort to the scattered parts of our personality, building stable dwellings in the brain” (p. 30). For Elena, Virginia’s idea is quite clear: “writing is camping inside one’s own brain, without dispersing oneself in the numerous, varied, subordinate modalities with which, like Virginia, one lives a raw life” (p. 30).
She defines her work as being based on “patience” (p. 33). The notebooks from elementary school, with their horizontal black and vertical red lines, “were undoubtedly a cage,” because it was there that Elena Ferrante began to write little stories that were, initially, well-behaved, in a clean and orderly narrative (p. 28). However, as time went by, the act of writing became “…giving shape to a permanent balancing/unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a mold and waiting to unmold it.” Thus, “the love story begins to satisfy me when it transforms into a heartbreak story. The detective story begins to captivate me when I know that no one will discover who the murderer is. The coming-of-age story seems to me to be on the right track when it becomes clear that no one will graduate. Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses harmony and has the desperate strength of the ugly” (p. 39).
“Água-Marinha”, the second conference, says that in three of his books, One love discomfort, days of abandonment e the lost daughter, begins with an aggregating writing, fueled by coherences, “that builds a world with all its scaffolding in the right place. It is a solid cage and I build it with the necessary effects of reality, with encrypted quotations from ancient and modern mythographies, with my baggage of readings” (p. 56-57). Then it is time to transform all of this into “convulsive, disaggregating writing, generating oxymorons, ugly-beautiful, beautiful-ugly, that reflects inconsistencies and contradictions” (p. 57).
This set of operations, according to Elena Ferrante, causes the past to be brought into the present and the present into the past; “it confuses the bodies of mother and daughter, subverts pre-established roles, transforms the poison of feminine pain into a true poison that envelops animals, merges with humans and kills them, transforms a door that works normally into one that no longer opens and then opens, makes trees, cicadas, the rough sea, hatpins, dolls, sandworms threatening or suffering or lethal or salvific” (p. 57).
When referring to her characters Délia, Olga and Leda, from the three books mentioned, she states: “I would say that I am their autobiography just as they are mine” (p. 58).
In “Stories, I”, the third of the conferences, works by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) and María Guerra (1939-2019) are invoked to structure his speech, which begins with a well-known poem by Emily Dickinson:
In History, witches were hanged
but me and History
we have all the witchcraft we need
every day between us.
He says that the image of such verses, especially in their Neapolitan Tetralogy, they invoked “a woman who sits at the table and writes as a challenge, almost a settling of accounts: 'me and History', an approach that begins, with impetus, a thread of words that extracts, from the writing that is the enemy of the art of witches, a story that resorts to that art…” (p. 74).
Elena adds that she was typing in an apartment in Turin, “while I tried to invent other women, mothers, sisters, friends – a witch-friend – and places in Naples, and little vicissitudes and sufferings of relatives and acquaintances and the last sixty years of history, extracting them from the many texts in which they were already written. I felt it to be true, a truth that concerned me” (p. 74).
He defends the thesis that it is from “living life”, for those with literary ambition, “that come the great and small reasons that drive the hand to write: the desire to tell the sorrow of love, the sorrow of living, the anguish of death; the need to straighten out the crooked world; the search for a new ethos that reshapes us; the urgency to give voice to the last, to expose power and its atrocities; the need to prophesy misfortunes, but also to architect worlds perhaps to come” (p. 80). This set of motives leads her to write the opening lines of a story, “Soon a long tradition of other people’s narratives that have moved or outraged me and that resemble my own gathers around me, not to mention the language of books, newspapers, films, television, songs, as well as a lot of good tricks for pushing ‘living life’ into writing, all the things I have learned almost without realizing it” (p. 80).
From then on, according to Elena Ferrante, writing is like “entering an infinite cemetery in which each tomb waits to be desecrated (…) Writing is taking possession of everything that has already been written and slowly learning how to spend that enormous fortune (…) In writing, everything has a long story behind it (p. 81-82). In short, “writing is a cage that we enter straight away, with our first line. It is a problem that has been faced with suffering, I would even say with anguish, precisely by those who have worked on it with the most commitment and involvement” (p. 83).
She thought that writing would be better in the Triestine dialect, not imagining that it would be possible to narrate Naples without its language. However, after writing long passages of some of her books, such as a troublesome love and Neapolitan Tetralogy, in dialect, ended up erasing them and transforming them into an Italian with a “Neapolitan cadence”, because once written, “the Neapolitan dialect seems sterilized. It loses passion, it loses affection, it loses the sense of danger that it often communicated to me. In my experience as a child and adolescent, it was the language of gross male vulgarity, the language of violence with which I was insulted in the street or, on the contrary, the sugary language used to deceive women” (p. 90-91).
The challenge of writing is to learn to freely use the cage in which we are trapped. “It is a painful contradiction”, but it is necessary to continue “adapting and, at the same time, deforming (…) In short, to inhabit [all] the [conventional] forms and then deform everything that does not contain us entirely, that cannot contain us in any way” (p. 92). He reiterates that he did this in The lying life of adults and Neapolitan Tetralogy.
In “Dante’s Rib”, the last text in the book, Elena Ferrante outlines the ways in which she appropriated the work of the Italian writer, with whom she began to come into contact at the age of sixteen, a time when, more than anything else, she wanted to write.
We may not know who Elena Ferrante is, but we can estimate her age, since she says she first studied Dante “fifty years ago” (p. 105). Her analysis is erudite and detailed, and at this point I would have difficulty grasping all the analytical dimensions that the writer mobilizes. However, Elena Ferrante points out that “Dante obsessively narrated the act of writing, in both a literal and figurative sense, continually representing its power and its inadequacy, the transience of good results and failure” (p. 106).
Dante, for her, knew, feared and fought against the insufficiency of writing, considering it “part of the limitation and transience of the human being” (p. 110). Recovering the idea of the limitation of writing, she states that “the more disciplined the pen, the faster we became (…) and [we were able to] capture that which had invariably escaped the written tradition: that, in short, every form was a cage that was not lasting, but necessary, if we aspired to write as no one had ever written before” (p. 110-111).
But perhaps Dante's greatest influence on Elena Ferrante's writing is the fact that Dante leaves behind “not only his notion of beauty, but also ours; we are accustomed to reading and writing with excessive caution, we are vile; not him, he tries to make poetry even with the negation of poetry” (p. 114).
In short, Margins and Dictation: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing shows readers some aspects involving the way in which the writing of the enigmatic Elena Ferrante was constituted, as well as the successful ways she constructed to escape the solid cages that imprison those who write – and, it is no exaggeration to say, Elena Ferrante did it, and continues to do it, with mastery.
*AFRANIO CATANI He is a retired professor at the Faculty of Education at USP and is currently a senior professor at the same institution. Visiting professor at the Faculty of Education at UERJ (Duque de Caxias campus).
Reference

Elena Ferrante. Margins and dictation: on the pleasure of reading and writing. Translation: Marcello Lino. New York, New York, 2023, 128 pages. [https://amzn.to/40zf4c6]
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