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Yet while The Great Gatsby or A Separate Peace or On the Road—these bro-love tales of masculine exceptionalism—suggest to us that bright-burning human fireworks like this might actually exist somewhere, Ferrante's brilliant friend[s] show[s] us the opposite. Rather, I wonder if Ferrante's point is to highlight the fact that all friendships—especially real, deep, true ones—are, on some level, built on fantastic projections. We don't get to know the real Lila (Lina to everyone else in the neighborhood) and can't ever, really. For as long as Lend is our narrator, we'll be blinded by the too-bright blaze of her particular and singular understanding of Lila as her enigmatic and brilliant friend, her opposite, her better half. It's a weird depiction of friendship that offers a frightening revelation: that to some extent, perhaps all our friends are imaginary ones. But even if our friends are somehow unreal to us, it doesn't mean that friendship, and friend-love, aren't real or true. And even if this sounds shifty and makes me seem like something of a sociopath, I don't honestly think it's a bad thing. It's also kind of a beautiful thing—it's what lets us see our close companions through the bifocals of friendship (critical on top, rose-colored on bottom), to describe them in that particular nonerotic language of love that Jill evoked. It's the imaginary, malleable quality of our friends that allows us to shape them into desirable and aspirational definites, visions of personhood clearer than our own uncomfortable partial views of our misshapen, amorphous selves. Thus, a large part of Lila's magnetic draw is in the specificity of her depiction. [...]
Solidarity to Lenu is both a dream and a nightmare; she wants to join in, but she is too afraid to relinquish her unique self to give in to the triumphal we that Jill highlighted in Balestrini. To her, that “we” is irreconcilable with the solitude of independent being or, more specifically, the desired solitude of the autonomous female being. For increasingly, as she walks through the mass of protesters looking for a familiar face or name (her own), Lent finds it particularly hard to articulate the women from the mass or from each other. She sees men in passing and notes them individually as “handsome, ugly, well-dressed, scruffy, violent, frightened, amused,” yet the women she sees “stayed close together ... they shouted together, laughed together, and if they were separated by even a few meters they kept an eye on each other so as not to get lost” (TWL, 69). Only a few individuals “by themselves or at most in pairs,” move amongst the groups of men, and they are marked by their hard-won distinction from the other women: “they seemed to me the happiest, the most aggressive, the proudest.” It is 1968 and while Lent struggles to absorb “the lesson from France,” she is deeply terrified by the idea of losing the distinctly singular, female self she has worked so hard (albeit confusedly) to keep cleanly defined and bounded, in order to join the massed bodies of implicitly male solidarity.
[...] Lila is the most clearly defined character at various points, yet she is also the most willing to embrace phase changes and transformations, at once the most and least solid of forms. Thus, both her magical changeability and her lifelong nightmare of slowly dissolving margins—perhaps migraine or madness or something more mystical—might both be incomplete, primitive stages on the way to her ultimate desire and destiny, the sudden “elimination without a trace.” Maybe her proximity to the void is what makes Lila at once the most empathetic character (who feels other minds; around whom others dissolve) and the most remote one, that distant figure nobody can comprehend or touch, she who refuses to leave traces for anyone to hold onto (“I’ll come look in your computer, I’ll read your files, I'll erase them” [TWL, 29]).
When the four of us began this whole enterprise, we met in person to talk about our projections and anxieties about writing together. Over pasta and wine, we worried about the idea of reading books together, long-term: What if we all came up with the same ideas? How would we distinguish our voices as writers? What if we weren't original enough? It turned out that none of these concerns came to anything, though of course we all fell into certain patterns of reading and even raised the same questions or terms or ideas. We never thought the same things or repeated each other. It seems so obvious now: of course we wouldn’t, we are different people. And yet, that anxiety was so strongly felt. Why?
These are, of course, the very same fears that Lila and Lent express in their different ways—the fears of pollution and codependence that inevitably accompany intimacy of any kind. Considering Lila and Len, considering us, considering this venture and the novels it springs from, I wonder if there is a way to be confident in solidarity—in a personal way (and in a political one too, I think) but not subsume each other; to experience an intellectual and emotional togetherness that feels the giddiness of being overwhelmed with feeling but does not itself overwhelm. If there is a way to truly be with one another, and infiltrate one another, and communicate deeply, but not get lost in other minds. If there is a way to both be your friend and be yourself and not betray either. If there is a way to dissolve margins but not give in to the seductions of madness or self-obliteration. Perhaps that is the most defiant challenge of these novels to their characters and to their readers.
The Story of the Lost Child is no manifesto. Who would want it to be? It is the story that an imposter might write, knowing herself to be one. An upstart’s novel, of bad mothers and bad feminists, bad politicos, of the kind of self-regard necessary to close oneself off in a room of one’s own and write away the day. Or better, it is a story of the trade-offs that went into the making of Elena Greco, the novelist. Maybe it is better to say that my disappointment lies with the realism of the novels that is so like this world, where there is no purely good choice, no correct answer in choosing between mother, friend, feminist, radical, writer, lover.
But I don’t think that these superficial delights, redolent though they are of the standard practices and conventions of what some critics might brush off as mere pleasure reading, are at all the things that generate the most intense pleasure in reading Ferrante—at least, not for me. No, the strange, disturbing, confusing, magnetic, compulsive, and often horribly ecstatic pleasure of reading Ferrante’s fiction is in fact situated in the ungraspable nature of its perturbations. The clearly defined aspects of structural convergences, descriptive writing, character work—these small formal satisfactions drift limply atop the vast, seething unknowability of the real real that strains to break through these artificial constraints, the irrepressible and irresistible disorder that Ferrante calls frantumaglia that churns under the shaky scaffolding of the knowable or sayable. To me, it becomes increasingly clear that the dangerous height of my pleasure in reading Ferrante is the feeling that she, and we with her, are on the cusp of disintegration of the safely contained forms of fiction and of life. To give yourself over to the Neapolitan novels is to feel at once like you are wholly enclosed within the world of the books (both within their surprising unities of place, action, and time, and within their luxuriant, multivolume bulk) and like that entire, encompassing world is always on the brink of utter rupture and dissolution.
The pleasure one finds in the supposed perfection of novelistic form, in the precise and proportional lineaments of a world made by, say, Henry James, is the very opposite of the visceral pleasure-unpleasure I find in Ferrante’s writing, where “everything take[s] shape and then loses its shape.” Like the relationships and the disorderly city it depicts, the Neapolitan Quartet is caught up in an endless struggle between the desire to inhabit a singular, stable form and the impartially cruel impossibility of that desire—the undeniable multidirectional tide of the frantumaglia, the hectic but irresistible activity of unforming and being unformed that undoes any progress that the busy work of form might accomplish.
[...] In Frantumaglia, Ferrante writes that, “We are heterogeneous fragments that, thanks to impressions of unity—elegant figures, beautiful form— stay together despite their arbitrary and contradictory nature” (FR, 368). The truly marvelous unpleasure of reading Ferrante has to do with the fact that she forcibly reveals those fragments that always hide under the mask of beautiful form in a text (or in a person) whether we want to see them or not. In so doing, we might look inwards and see our own rough, unfinished seams, not completely stitched together, perhaps already in the midst of falling apart. Through reading the stories of Lila and Lent and how they read each other over the years, I am given a strange and agonizing lesson in how to read myself—not in the way that one might initially read a formative text (as a kind of knitting pattern, a design for the garment of personality) but as its opposite, a text that demands that you brutally rip away the garment of beautiful form and reveal the raw-edged fragments beneath. Not in the manner of Roland Barthes’s coy textual striptease (texte de plaisir) or in his evocative but rather bloodless “cut” or “gape” (texte de jouissance), but rather, with a bodily urgency and violence. Reading Ferrante fills me with a dangerous abandon and wild disregard for disciplined self-containment. More than anything, she makes me want to write as she writes—viscerally, bloodily, “like butchering eels”—and in so doing to somehow know, like Lila rework- ing the portrait, that ecstasy and clarity of vision that comes with making-by-unmaking one’s own form, to be both Orpheus and the frenzied Maenads.
Where Ferrante’s guidance seems most apparent is in Costanzo’s attempt to make the depth and disorder of a character’s consciousness visible, a technique he and Ferrante both refer to as “acquiring density.” Density works by cutting against psychological realism, casting off deterministic explanations for why characters do what they do: a girl defies her father because of her nascent feminist sensibilities; a father beats his child because he believes women must be kept in their place. These interpretations may be true, but they are too abstract, too neat—they have little to do with how a reader experiences a character’s actions as real. “What decides the success of a character is often half a sentence, a noun, an adjective that jams the psychological machine like a wrench thrown into the works and produces an effect that is no longer that of a well-regulated device, but of flesh and blood, of genuine life, and therefore incoherent and unpredictable,” Ferrante writes to me. “It’s the moment when the psychological framework breaks and the character acquires density.”
What first got me hooked on the Neapolitan novels, almost from the start of My Brilliant Friend, was the way in which the many things Lenu and Lila fervently desire—books, money, power, knowledge, experience, boys, sex, beautiful objects, political change, respect, escape, superiority, each other—refuse to arrange themselves into a fixed hierarchy. Any of these, in the girls’ cosmology, may act in the service of any other at any given moment; all may be means and all may be ends. Which are which shift so frequently that the desires consistently catch the desirers themselves off guard.
I fell in love with something similar when I started reading Doris Lessing a couple of years ago; it was, in fact, a friend on whom I'd pushed Lessing, in longstanding feminist tradition, who pushed Ferrante on me. Lessing is a progenitor of what Sarah described as Ferrante’s fever dream realism, and much of her work is similarly devoted to acidly representing the sexual politics of the postwar global Left. I had never read anyone else who better captured the vexed intersection of communism and boys until I read Ferrante or grasped why that obscure crossing is so terribly important to understand. [...]