Break on Through to the Other Side

On Breakthroughs and Ferrante's

This past week in my seminar on the Neapolitan novel we ended up talking about artistic breakthroughs. How does an artist get from doing good but not great work or great but shy of genius work to suddenly seeing what they intuited lurked somewhere all along—why they were pursuing the work to begin with—and then being able to execute it. For surely the Neapolitan novel is a breakthrough work. It has the quality that I think of as presence, or possibly eternity. I have read it a few times now and am more and more enspelled by it, find myself in day by day dialogue with it, particularly with the character of Raffaella Cerullo, better known as Lila. The more I reread the less human she seems‚ more as though she is making a brief appearance on earth from the realm of the goddesses and then as she always said she wanted to, disappearing without a trace. She is taking up a part of my mind that I can go to for necessary conversations where I need an intelligence other than my own to figure something out.

This is something special a work of art can offer us, a representation of another consciousness so alive that that we can carry their differences as alternate and illuminating intelligences inside of us. The texts that led to religions behave this way—they are alive texts. But a work can be something more mundane, as long as it is different.

I am going to write separately about how and why some artworks transcend all time and place, or my theory about it, at least. But for purposes of discussing breakthroughs and the second half of Ferrante’s lecture “Aquamarine,” I am assuming that the Neapolitan novel is a work of great and lasting genius that represents a tremendous leap for the author.

Comparable breakthroughs that we discussed in class were particular poems, and the best known works by artists such as Jackson Pollack and Agnes Martin. One thing I learned from a Pollack show at MOMA years ago was that he finished his paintings even if they weren’t what he wanted them to be. I walked through galleries and galleries of finished paintings that were accomplished but not marvelous. Then I turned a corner and was faced with an enormous drip painting. I thought I was going to faint. I knew what Pollocks looked like, of course, but the journey of the exhibition prepared me to see them with beginner’s mind. The painting was transcendent, extraordinary, a fully realized expression of an intelligence that had before then been cramped. What happened? What changed?

I learned two things that day. One was to finish work. I had a habit of abandoning things at the point I knew they weren't going to be great. (Everything.) I thought that was intelligent and I was thereby not wasting my time. But Pollack convinced me otherwise. Finish, finish, finish, give every effort its due. Move along step by step. Notice I didn’t say forward because progress isn’t always forward movement. Things don’t always move forward, they branch off and follow tangents. Move toward the finish line, and finish. So many lessons are learned by finishing that evaporate when a work is abandoned. You will never know what might have happened. So what if a piece isn’t good? A finished work has value. It is a full on effort, an execution of skill and imagination. The three-quarters attempt is an empty gesture.

How did Ferrante get to writing the Neapolitan novel? I’m going back into the second lecture in the book, “Aquamarine,” to see how she traces her development. We left her after she had discovered the woman who is writing (as differentiated from the woman who writes) and how she deployed that first person figure made of words into her short, extremely subjective novels. She pushed that as far as she could, and considered The Lost Daughter a final book. “My women, because I could see only one way that adequately and truthfully described them and myself, ended up, against my will—I insist: you don’t tell the story without the shoves of others; that old principle has remained firm—in a sort of solipsism, without which, however, I saw, for me as an author, only a regression toward the inauthentic.” p.54

“Then, completely by chance, I returned to a book…published in English in 2000 as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood by Adriana Cavarero.” She describes how she’d read the book before but on the second reading “what kindled my imagination was an expression: the necessary other. It serves as the title of an entire chapter, is set up by a complex dialogue with Hannah Arendt, skirts the theme of narcissism, and arrives, finally, at the following definition: ‘The necessary other is…a finitude that remains irremediably an other in all the fragile and unjudgable insubstitutability of her existing.’ It was, as I recall, a real shock. An other seemed to me what I needed in order to leave the three earlier books and yet stay within them.” p. 54

Within the Cavarero book she finds mention of many other books, including Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social Symbolic Practice. Within that book is the story of an encounter between two women, Emelia and Amalia, against the background of a workers’ strike in the 1970s. A union victory gives the workers the right to take 150 hours of courses (can you imagine this now?) and these two women end up in the same class. There they read each others writing. Amalia is the better storyteller, and “Emelia admires Amalia’s writing to the point where it makes her weep, [so] Amalia has the urge to write the facts of her friend’s life and to make her a gift of the text: a gift that Emilia, overcome by emotion, will carry forever in her purse.”

Ah. This gives me gooseflesh. Here is Flaubert hearing a story about a young mother carrying much shopping debt who kills herself, here is Tolstoy reading Madame Bovary and being fired up by it, here is Proust flooded with memory by the taste of a Madeleine…here is imagination awakened.

Unlike these examples, Ferrante’s spark comes after she has absorbed the idea of the necessary other, so her imagination construes the story of two people and their effect on each other. She begins to think about Emilia and Amalia and to imagine the texts the women had written. “I began to exaggerate, as I typically do. Caverro writes: ‘We do not come to know the adored pages Emelia preserves in her handbag.’ But she doesn’t regret the loss of Amalia’s text or the loss of Emilia’s fragments, which she calls ‘awkward biographical attempts.’ …. Whereas I regretted not having those texts: I felt that they were close to my problems as a narrator, because I knew what diligent writing was and I knew what writing that goes over the margins was. And I imagined—I thought—that if I had at least Amalia’s text I would be able to discern Emilia’s true and profound sentences rising up in it. I’m almost positive that the dynamic between Elena’s writing and Lila’s came to me from those thoughts.”

Yup, that’s a reasonable conclusion. I love how she writes “I imagined” and then glosses it with “I thought".” I love that she is “almost positive.” The intimation of second guessing implies a space between one thought and another, one person and another, the second one being necessary to create a boundary, without which the singular intelligence might collapse into a solipsism and regress toward the inauthentic. An aspect of these lectures I love and find funny is how Ferrante’s serious seeking and intellectual struggle might be paraphrased in far simpler terms, like “I realized people affect each other, and that to write about two characters who are intimately connected in life and through their writing might possibly (;)) have greater possibilities than one writing /woman.”

In the words of John Lennon, “better get yourself together, darling, and join the human race.”

We all shine on.

The essay ends with a description of how she reread The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas “in the phase when I was writing my long draft,” prompted by Cavarro’s description of it. She quotes Cavarro describing what Stein accomplished:

“The autobiographical and biographical genres are superimposed upon one another…Gertrude writes her own life story making it told by another: by Alice, her friend and partner, her lover…The gigantic egotism of Gertrude Stein succeeds in thus producing a literary fiction of stories that intersect where she herself stands out and where Alice—the lover, her friend—still appears as the other who watches her and as the other who tells her story.”

She goes on the say that “it’s probably starting here that the relationship between Lenu and Lila, and between their writing, became clearer to me. And it’s probably starting here that I began to think that I could leave Olga, Delia, and especially Leda (the protagonists of her writing/woman books) by working on a sort of mutual necessary otherness, describing, that is, a bond between two people merged with one another but not reducible to one another.”

Yes. It is the merger that compels and that affords growth. The competition, envy, embitterment, hate, and the love, extraordinary appreciation and connection between Lenu and Lila ratifies and gratifies because they can’t be reduced from two to one. Yet they are indeed merged, in many sequences of the Neapolitan novel they do as the other did, live as she lived, and become more themselves in the doing. This kind of intimacy is not for the faint of heart. They both hate it from time to time, yet they keep coming back. The other is necessary for growth and they want to grow. Their intellectual-emotional bond is such that everything is filtered through the fact of the other. The fact. For isn’t the necessary other the one who makes us understand that there is a world outside our selves? Lila and Lenu are each other’s higher power. There is no bigger breakthrough in life than realizing someone or something else has an existence as important and meaningful and powerful as our own. That is a good idea.