"I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what? What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly–they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced."
Hemholtz, Brave New World
It may seem a strange thing, to begin a post on lines from a contemporary, realist Italian novel about poverty, women, education and friendship, with a quotation from Aldous Huxley's dystopic classic Brave New World. The texts have little in common other than, perhaps, the fact that I read them both in the same month. I'm not going to attempt to compare the two, but when reading Ferrante's work, the above lines kept coming back to me, again and again.
To my mind, Hemholtz's words could be written about Elena Ferrante's novel. As a young girl, Ferrante's narrator Lenu is desperately striving to say something important, but she struggles to shed the high-tones of her education, which is for her both a liberation and a limitation. Her knowledge of religion and the classical languages weighs her down, suffocates her writing. In contrast, her uneducated best friend Lila has an academically untainted clarity; she knows how to pierce, how to hurt. However, the most important thing the Ferrante-Lenu narrator does is tell the story of her childhood in Naples; a story of women, a story of violence, told in language that quietly pierces – it's only after putting the books down that you realise the impact of what you've read.
There's so very much I could talk about in relation to Ferrante; the symbolic use of dialect, feminism, the value of education, even the political power structures in Italy, but I'll stick to the purpose of this blog and take a closer look at the following passage:
“That day, instead, I saw clearly the mothers of the old neighbourhood. They were nervous, they were acquiescent. They were silent, with tight lips and stooping shoulders, or they yelled terrible insults at the children who harassed them. Extremely thin, with hollow eyes and cheeks, or with broad behinds, swollen ankles, heavy chests, they lugged shopping bags and small children who clung to their skirts ... they appeared to have lost those feminine qualities that were so important to us girls ... They had been consumed by the bodies of husbands, fathers, brothers, whom they ultimately came to resemble, because of their labours or the arrival of old age, of illness. When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?”
Ferrante's novel is a bildungsroman of sorts, and so the first think we should notice is the importance of the opening signifier. The 'day' in question is a visual awakening for the narrator, Lenu, both in the moment of realisation and in the delayed action of recounting it – she is writing many years later, and inviting us to realise as she did, and by inviting us to participate in her new (old) clarity, she achieves it again. The the specificity of 'that day' is, then, almost misleading, as what initially appears to be a sudden clarity is something that has grown and stayed with the narrator over many years. This manipulation of time is core to Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, both in the dual action of the book (the events as the happened and the events of the narrators life in the present), and in Lenu's fascination with the cyclical nature of history, from the events in the history of her town, to her country, to grander narratives of classical civilisation.
Throughout the novel there is a juxtaposition between the minutiae of life in provincial Italy, family feuds, scraped knees and love affairs and lost dolls, and the parallels Lenu finds in her academic awakening, which, while initially distancing her from her simple neighbourhood, offers a prism through which she can see it. Dido's agony echoes around the piazza, only in Naples she takes the form of a widow who daily washes the stairs of apartment buildings, driven mad by the abandonment of her lover. Lenu sees 'the mothers of the old neighbourhood' for the first time; this phrase does not feel in anyway specific to one day, or moment. The 'old neighbourhood' is not necessarily just an old town on the outskirts of Naples – the Ferrante-Lenu narrator could be referring to any point in history, and Lenu is not only seeing the mothers of her youth and of her friends, but the very first mothers of the neighbourhood. Considered in this light, a seemingly demonstrative phrase becomes timeless.
Ferrante then immediately emphasises the visceral physicality of the neighbourhood which textures Lenu's understanding of it; before Lenu can truly understand her grand, perhaps even high-minded narrative, she must first confront what is before her – decay, rage, neglect, wounds. A fatal combination of passivity and aggression. For Ferrante's language, that combination is not fatal but life-giving and world-making. The text is heavy with asyndeton and formulaic patterns: 'they were nervous, they were acquiescent.' The women of the old neighbourhood have lost all sense of individuality, reduced by both their circumstances and their narrator to a homogenous plural pronoun: 'they.' Ferrante strips these women of their identities, of their 'feminine qualities', enacting in her own lexis the process Lenu witnesses. The women are rendered increasingly grotesque by Ferrante's synecdoche; they are 'hollow' eyed, with 'broad behinds', 'swollen ankles' and 'heavy chests', they are a collection of noun-phrases. These epithets once again connote a mythological timelessness – the women could be old witches, harpies, fallen goddesses.
The painfulness of the passage lies in this transference of ugliness – the neighbourhood's women are made to suffer, to be the physical manifestations of a generational, unquestioned abuse. Ferrante frames this abuse as a macabre form of consumption – the body of the woman is consumed, or perhaps subsumed by the body of the man, by his name, his home, his desires. As with earlier elements of the passage, this image could be drawn from a classical myth in both its horror and its absurdity.
The end of the passage, however, brings us firmly back to the cold reality of this particular 'transformation':
"When did that transformation begin? With housework? With pregnancies? With beatings?”
When *did* that transformation begin? Did it begin the moment Eve was violently torn from Adam's ribcage? There is, in this passage, a surety surrounding this treatment of women. But in this passage, social, historical and even mythical precedent are reduced to three piercing phrases. The first two, striking in their domesticity, juxtaposed with the harshness of the third. Except, in the neighbourhood, being a victim of abuse is not in tension with daily life, rather it is a part of it. Housework, pregnancy and beatings are the transformative trinity, and here Ferrante leaves us wondering – what will Lenu's realisation concede? Will she take her place in the neighbourhood, will she be unable to separate the tangible violence from the generational myth? Or will she use her newfound mastery of language to quietly pierce it? This is just an excerpt of Ferrante's work, and it's had me on edge for months. A remarkable passage from a remarkable series of novels.
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