In the Margins. On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
ALSO BY
ELENA FERRANTE
The Days of Abandonment
Troubling Love
The Lost Daughter
The Beach at Night
Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey
Incidental Inventions
The Lying Life of Adults
MY BRILLIANT FRIEND
(The Neapolitan Quartet)
My Brilliant Friend
The Story of a New Name
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The Story of the Lost Child
Europa Editions
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Copyright © 2021 by Edizioni e/o
First publication 2022 by Europa Editions
Translation by Ann Goldstein
Original Title: I margini e il dettato
Translation copyright © 2022 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Jacket illustration © Andrea Ucini
ISBN 9781787704176
Elena Ferrante
IN THE MARGINS
ON THE PLEASURES
OF READING AND WRITING
Translated from the Italian
by Ann Goldstein
IN THE MARGINS
EDITOR’S NOTE
This book originated in an email from Professor Costantino Marmo, director of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Umanistici Umberto Eco. It read, in part:
I like to think that the autumn of 2020 would be the ideal time for Elena Ferrante to give three lectures at the University of Bologna, on three successive days, open to the entire city. These lectures would discuss her work as a writer, her poetics, her narrative technique, or anything else she wants, and would ideally be of interest to a broad, non-specialist audience.
The Eco Lectures belong to a tradition of lectures given by figures from the national and international world of culture which Umberto Eco, then director of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, decided to offer the university and the city of Bologna in the early years of this century. The first series was given by Elie Wiesel (in January of 2000), the most recent by Orhan Pamuk (in the spring of 2014).
Then came the pandemic and the lockdowns, and public events were impossible. In the meantime, however, Ferrante, having accepted the invitation, had written the three lectures. And so in November of 2021 the actress Manuela Mandracchia, in the guise of Elena Ferrante, presented the lectures at the Teatro Arena del Sole in Bologna, together with ERT, Emilia Romagna Teatro.
The author’s exploration of reading and writing continues here with Dante’s Rib, an essay composed at the invitation of the ADI, the Association of Italianists, under the auspices of Professor Alberto Casadei and the president of the ADI, Gino Ruozzi. The essay concluded the conference Dante and Other Classics (April 29, 2021), where it was read by the scholar and critic Tiziana de Rogatis.
Sandra Ozzola
PAIN AND PEN
Ladies and gentlemen,
this evening I’m going to talk to you about the desire to write and about the two kinds of writing it seems to me I know best, the first compliant, the second impetuous. But I will begin, if I may, by devoting a few lines to a child I’m very fond of and her first attempts at the alphabet.
Recently Cecilia—as I will call her here—wanted to show me how well she was able to write her name. I gave her a pen and a sheet of paper from the printer, and she commanded: Watch. Then, with intense concentration, she wrote “Cecilia”—letter by letter, in capitals—her eyes narrowed as if she were facing some danger. I was pleased, but also a little anxious. Once or twice I thought: Now I’ll help her, guide her hand—I didn’t want her to make a mistake. But she did it all by herself. She didn’t worry in the least about starting off at the top of the page. She aimed sometimes up, sometimes down, assigning the letters—each consonant, each vowel—random dimensions, one big, one small, one medium-sized, leaving a lot of space between the individual marks. Finally she turned to me and, almost shouting, said, See?, with an imperative need to be praised.
Naturally I feted her—effusively—but I felt a little uneasy. Why that fear that she would make a mistake? Why that impulse of mine to guide her hand? I’ve thought about it lately. Surely, many decades earlier, I, too, had written in the same irregular manner, on some random piece of paper, with the same concentration, the same apprehension, the same need for praise. But, in all honesty, I have to say I have no memory of doing so. My first memories of writing have to do with elementary-school notebooks. They had—I don’t know if they still do—horizontal black lines, unevenly spaced, so that they defined areas of different sizes. Like this:
The size of these areas changed from first grade to fifth. If you disciplined your hand and learned to line up small, round letters and letters that ascended or descended, you passed, and the horizontal segments that divided the page got smaller from year to year until they became, in fifth grade, a single line. Like this:
You were big by now—you had begun your school journey at six and now you were ten—and you were big because your writing flowed in an orderly way across the page.
Flowed where? Well, defining the white page were not only the horizontal black lines but two vertical red lines, one on the left, one on the right. The writing was supposed to move between those lines, and those lines—of this I have a very clear memory—tormented me. They were intended to indicate, by their color as well, that if your writing didn’t stay between those taut lines you would be punished. But I was easily distracted when I wrote, and while I almost always respected the margin on the left, I often ended up outside the one on the right, whether to finish the word or because I had reached a point where it was difficult to divide the word into syllables and start a new line without going outside the margin. I was punished so often that the sense of the boundary became part of me, and when I write by hand I feel the threat of the vertical red line even though I haven’t used paper like that for years.
What to say? Today I suspect that my writing—let’s say—like Cecilia’s, ended up in or under the writing in those notebooks. I don’t remember it, and yet it must be there, educated at last to stay on the lines and between the margins. Probably that first effort is the matrix from which I still get a self-congratulatory sense of victory whenever something obscure suddenly emerges from invisibility to become visible, thanks to a sequence of marks on the page or the computer screen. It’s a provisional alphabetical combination, surely imprecise, but I have it before my eyes, very close to the brain’s first impulses and yet here, outside, already detached. There is such a childish magic to this that if I had to symbolize its energy in graphic form I would use the disorderly way Cecilia wrote her name, insisting that I watch her and in those letters see her and enthusiastically recognize her.
In my longing to write, starting in early adolescence, both the threat of those red lines—my handwriting now is very neat, and when I’m using the computer I go, after a paragraph or so, to the alignment icon and click on the option that evens the margins—and the desire and fear of violating them are probably at work. More generally, I believe that the sense I have of writing—and all the struggles it involves—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.
I started
with a child trying to write her name, but now, to continue, I’d like to invite you to look for a moment between the lines of Zeno Cosini, the protagonist of Italo Svevo’s greatest book, Zeno’s Conscience. We’re catching Zeno right in the effort of writing, and his effort, in my eyes, isn’t that far from Cecilia’s.
Now, having dined, comfortably lying in my overstuffed lounge chair, I am holding a pencil and a piece of paper. My brow is unfurrowed because I have dismissed all concern from my mind. My thinking seems something separate from me. I can see it. It rises and falls . . . but that is its only activity. To remind it that it is my thinking and that its duty is to make itself evident, I grasp the pencil. Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looms up and blots out the past.
(Translated by William Weaver)
Not infrequently the writer starts the story at the very moment when he is preparing to carry out his task; in fact I would say that it’s always been like that. The way we see ourselves dragging outside, by means of the written word, an imaginary “inside,” which is by its nature fleeting, deserves more attention in discussions of literature. I have felt its fascination, I obsessively collect instances of it. And this passage of Svevo has always impressed me, since I was a girl. I wrote all the time, even if it was laborious and almost always disappointing. When I read that passage, I was convinced that Zeno Cosini had problems like mine, but knew a lot more about them.
Svevo, as you’ve heard, makes the point that everything begins with pencil and paper. Then a surprising split takes place: the I of the writer separates from its own thought and, in the separation, sees that thought. It’s not a fixed, well-defined image. The thought-vision appears as something in motion—it rises and falls—and its task is to make itself evident before disappearing. The verb is precisely that, “make evident,” and, significantly, it refers to an action carried out by the hand. The something that the I sees—something moving, therefore alive—has to be “grasped by the hand” holding the pencil and transformed on the piece of paper into a written word. It seems like an easy operation, but Zeno’s brow, smooth before, wrinkles; it’s no small struggle. Why? Here Svevo makes an observation that is important to me. The struggle is due to the fact that the present—the entire present, even that of the “I” who writes, letter by letter—can’t maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.
I read those few lines, I took out the irony, I adapted them, I applied them to myself. And I imagined that I was in a race against time, a race in which the writer always lagged behind. While, in fact, the letters were rapidly lining up next to one another, asserting themselves, the vision fled, and writing was destined to a frustrating approximation. It was too slow to capture the brain wave. The “so many letters” were slow, they strove to capture the past while they themselves became the past, and much was lost. When I reread myself, I had the impression that a voice flitting around my head was carrying more than what had actually become letters.
I don’t recall ever thinking, when I was young, that I was inhabited by an alien voice. No, that bad feeling I never experienced. But things became complicated when I wrote. I read a lot, but what I liked was almost always written by men, not women. It seemed to me that the voice of men came from the pages, and that voice preoccupied me, I tried in every way to imitate it. Even when I was around thirteen—just to hold on to a clear memory—and had the impression that my writing was good, I felt that someone was telling me what should be written and how. At times he was male but invisible. I didn’t even know if he was my age or grown up, perhaps old. More generally, I have to confess, I imagined becoming male yet at the same time remaining female. This impression, luckily, disappeared almost completely with the end of adolescence. I say “almost” because, even if the male voice had departed, there was a residual stumbling block: the impression that my woman’s brain held me back, limited me, like a congenital slowness. Not only was writing difficult in itself but I was a girl and so would never be able to write books like those of the great writers. The quality of the writing in those books, their power, fired me with ambitions, dictated intentions that seemed far beyond my possibilities.
Then, maybe at the end of high school, I don’t remember exactly when, completely by chance I came across the Rime of Gaspara Stampa, and one sonnet in particular made a deep impression. I understand now that she was using one of the great clichés of the poetic tradition: the insufficiency of language in the face of love, whether love of another human being or love of God. But at the time I didn’t know that, and I was captivated by the way she expressed lovesickness and the written word in a continuous cycle, which led her, inevitably, to discover the disparity between the poem and the subject of the poem, or, in one of her formulas, between the living object that kindles the fire of love and “the mortal tongue encased in human flesh.” The lines, which I read as if they were addressed directly to me, are these:
If, a lowly, abject woman, I
can carry within so sublime a flame,
why shouldn’t I draw out at least
a little of its style and vein to show the world?
If love has lit a new and unheard-of spark
to raise me up to a place I’d never gained,
why, with equally uncommon skill,
can’t it make my pen and pain the same?
And if the force of sheer nature’s not
enough, why then some miracle that often
conquers, breaks, and ruptures every limit.
How this could be, I can’t exactly say;
I know only that my great destiny’s
impressed upon my heart a sweet new style.
(Translated by Jane Tylus)
Later, I studied Gaspara Stampa more systematically. But at the time, as you see, that declaration in the first line struck me immediately, “lowly, abject woman.” If I, Gaspara said to me, I who feel that I am a woman to throw out, a woman without any value, am still capable of containing in myself a flame of love so sublime, why shouldn’t I have at least a little inspiration and some beautiful words to give shape to that fire and show it to the world? If Love, lighting a new, unheard-of spark, has raised me up high, to a place that had been inaccessible to me, why can’t it violate the usual rules of the game, and allow my pen to find words that will reproduce, as truly as possible, the pain of my love? And if Love can’t count on nature, couldn’t it perform a miracle, one of those which can break through any existing limit? I can’t say precisely how it happened; but I can prove that a new style has been impressed on my heart.
At the time I also considered myself a lowly, abject woman. I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express. For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?
Time passed, I read many other writers, and I realized that Gaspara Stampa was doing something completely new: she didn’t confine herself to utilizing the great cliché of male poetic culture—the arduous reduction of the immeasurable pain of love to the measure of the pen—but grafted onto it something unexpected: the female body that fearlessly seeks, from the “mortal tongue,” from within her own “human flesh,” a garment of words sewn with a pain of her own and a pen of her own. Given that between pain and pen, for the male as well as the female, there remains a sort of innate imbalance, here was Stampa saying to me that the female pen, precisely because it is unexpected within the male tradition, had to make an enormous, courageous effort—five centuries ago, as today—to employ “uncommon skill” and acquire “style and vein.”
At this point—I was around twenty, I think—a sort of vicious circle established itself clearl
y in my mind: if I wanted to believe that I was a good writer, I had to write like a man, staying strictly within the male tradition; although I was a woman, I couldn’t write like a woman except by violating what I was diligently trying to learn from the male tradition.
From then on, for decades, I wrote and wrote, locked in that circle. I would start from something that seemed urgent, absolutely mine, and go on for days, weeks, sometimes months. Although the effects of the initial impulse faded, I kept going, the writing continued to advance, every line constructed and reconstructed. But the compass that had directed me had lost its needle; I seemed to be lingering on every word because I didn’t know where to go. I will tell you something that may seem contradictory. When I finished a story, I was pleased, having the impression that it had come out perfectly; and yet I felt that it wasn’t I who had written it—that is, not the excited I, ready for anything, who was called to write, and who during the entire draft had seemed to be hidden in the words—but another I, who, tightly disciplined, had found convenient pathways solely in order to say: look, see what fine sentences I’ve written, what beautiful images, the story is finished, praise me.
It was here that I began to think explicitly of having two kinds of writing: one that had been mine since my school years, and which had always assured me praise from the teachers (Brava, you’ll be a writer someday); and another that peeped out by surprise and then vanished, leaving me unhappy. Over the years that unhappiness took different forms, but in essence it’s still there.
I feel cramped, uncomfortable, in the well-balanced, calm, and compliant writing that made me think I knew how to write. To stick with Gaspara Stampa’s image of the spark that triggers the shot, modernizing the old Cupid’s arrow, with that writing I kindle the spark that lights the gunpowder and open fire. But I realize that my bullets don’t travel far. So I look for a more impetuous style, but—can’t be helped—it seldom takes off. It appears, as far as I can tell, in the first lines, but I can’t sustain it, and it disappears. Or it erupts after pages and pages and advances insolently, without tiring, without pausing, careless even of punctuation, strong only in its own vehemence. Then suddenly it leaves me. For much of my life I’ve written careful pages in the hope that they would be preliminary pages, and that the irrepressible burst would arrive, when the I writing from its fragment of the brain abruptly seizes all the possible I’s, the entire head, the entire body, and, so empowered, begins to run, drawing into its net the world it needs. Those are wonderful moments. Something asks to become evident, said Svevo, to be grasped by the hand that writes. Something of me, a lowly, abject woman, said Gaspara Stampa, wants to leave the usual game and find vein and style. But in my experience that something easily eludes the grasp and is lost. Of course, you can recall it, you can even encapsulate it in a beautiful sentence, but the two moments—the moment it appeared and, right after that, the moment you started writing—either find the magical coordination that leads to the joy of writing or you have to be content to fiddle around with words, waiting for another dazzling occasion that will catch you more prepared, less distracted. It’s one thing to plan a story and execute it well, another is that completely aleatoric writing, no less active than the world it tries to order. Now it erupts, now it disappears, now it’s one alone, now it’s a crowd, now it’s small, whispered, now it gets huge and shouts. In other words it watches over, doubts, rolls, glitters, and meditates; it’s like Mallarmé’s proverbial throw of the dice.