Guess What I Found the Ferrante Essay
my tech support is tops!!!
I promised to go on discussing Ferrante’s collection of lectures, In the Margins. There are three, and together they move from a place of individual effort and self-doubt through a series of specific influences each of which serve as a fresh stage in her thinking, finally arriving at the conclusion that all women’s voices are needed to hear a women’s language.
I have lots of thoughts about what she says, and I’ll sprinkle them through. These are more or less hot takes, based on reading and cogitating; no scholarship implied.
The first essay is called “Pain and Pen.” She begins by saying “there are two kinds of writing I know best…the impetuous and the compliant.” This remains a binary for most of the book, but her inquiries and experiments break the binary down and open it out. The compliant writing plagues her until she comes to terms later with the necessity of form, which she accepts after reading a passage from Becket. (I don’t know what’s meant to be funny, but that is.) She tells about watching a child she is fond of who is learning to write and who is more concerned with forming the letters than with positioning them conventionally on the page. She then thinks back to her own efforts to write between the margins of her school paper but having trouble in the early days. She wrote on what looks to be that kind of soft cream colored paper with black horizontal lines and red vertical lines indicating the margins. In her earliest writing she was unable to to stay within the margins and ran over the right edge repeatedly, which caused her great stress. She doesn’t like doing it wrong. Eventually she learns how to plan to move neatly to the next horizontal line by either breaking a word properly or writing it on the next line. She never says this in the book, but I felt she experienced a great loss in learning to make this calculation. She was no longer writing in the present moment and solely concentrating on forming the letters. She had learned to think ahead, and this awareness, with the self-consciousness it brings to the act, replaced what had been a direct experience of page and pen, and that was painful. She is ever after trying to locate a similar uncontrolled writing, which she calls impetuous.
…the sense I have of writing—and all the struggle 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. P. 21
I really loved all this. I can’t remember having that same exact thought, but I do remember early efforts at manipulating a pencil and a paintbrush and how difficult it was. I had a sense that there was a door to be unlocked somehow, and that people who could write and draw well had opened that door and passed through it smoothly. My sense of struggle was situated in my hand and trying to make it move with more precision. It seemed to have a wild mind of its own and would veer off on a tangent, leaving a line flying across the page that I wasn’t aware of having wanted to make. I watched other girls form their letters and draw trees and learned by imitation. Ferrante doesn’t seem to yet—that comes later. As I said, she never claims a grief for losing her pure orientation toward the page of not knowing where she is going, yet that is what she later craves. However, it’s not the same, as she craves what she calls going beyond the margins (key Lila’s dissolving margins) in a broader sense that depends on experience way beyond a child’s. I’m still thinking about this.
She then reflects on becoming stuck inside the margins, primarily for the reason that she believes men’s writing is the real writing. Those are her examples and she is finely attuned to the limits bequeathed to her as a girl writer in a male literary world. This affects her so deeply that she doubts her capacity to write anything great. Yet she writes and writes a lot, mostly stories that she discounts. She is a natural writer whose sense of her own potential and future is thwarted by the cultural conditions into which she was born. She begins to question the idea that men are intrinsically more suited to writing when she comes across a stanza written by Gaspara Stampa in an earlier century that asks, if I feel the same level of passion as a man, can’t I find a language for it coming out of my own experience, between pain and pen? The stanza that jumped out at her begins
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?
As she contemplates this poem, over time she comes to understand it to not just be thinking about the same old quandry of how to express the immeasurable pain of love in writing, but she was doing something new—she
“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. … 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.” P. 27
She is twenty when she gets this point. Yet she is stuck with trying to write within the male tradition. She starts out a piece feeling that the writing is hers, but as she moves forward she loses that sense, and the male margins impose themselves. This goes on for decades.
When I finished a story I was pleased, having the impression that it had come out perfectly; and yet I felt it wasn’t I who had written it, not the excited I, ready for anything, who was called to write, and who during the entire draft seemed to be hidden in the words–but another I, who, tightly disciplined, had found convenient pathways solely in order to say: look, what fine sentences I’ve written, what beautiful images, the story is finished, praise me. P. 28
The dutiful schoolgirl, the ambitious female writer hoping to crash the gates of the male writing world, developing the skills to produce praiseworthy work yet having the sense that she has done so in bad faith, untrue to her authentic self. She says she still feels this unhappiness.
I feel cramped, uncomfortable, in the well-balanced, calm, and compliant writing that made me think I knew how to write. P.29
What strikes me here is the tamping down of her initial excitement, having it wither in the course of writing a story until she finds the end result good but not her. This draining away of excitement does feel like a great part of the struggle for women. Our excitement, whether it be intellectual, sexual, emotional, or creative has not exactly been welcomed, valorized, promoted, or protected by men. Historically it has been the other way around. What woman reading this has not been criticized and corrected for being too excited about an idea, an event, a feeling? Even now, even when we have passed through many liberation struggles, both internal, external, and political, I daresay the resistance to female excitement (hysteria, anyone?) still exists. This external inhibition does affect our creative work. What do we do about that? I am tempted to expand beyond the category of women to all those who feel inhibited about their excitement, but that may be making too excited a reach. Please, speak for yourselves and let me know your perspectives.
Ferrante fervently wants to break out of her careful writing.
It’s one thing to plan a story and execute it well, another is that completely aleotoric writing, no less active than the world it tries to order. P30
Good line!
She turns to Virginia Woolf to get at the origin of writing that eludes her. She shares two excerpts from Woolf’s writing that influenced her. The first is the famous quote from a conversation with Lytton Strachey.
“And your novel?” (he asks.)
“Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”
“That’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.”
“Yes, I’m, 20 people.” P. 30
In the interest of promoting dictionary use, I’m not going to reveal what a bran pie is for those who don’t know. I will say it isn’t a pie. What Ferrante gleans from this is that Woolf doesn’t write from a singular sensibility and that writing tempts fate. She interprets Woolf as meaning that when she writes, even she doesn’t know who she is, nor does she want to. Her second Woolf quote further supports the idea that everyday Virginia is not the writing sensibility that pulls from the bran pie. Ferrante loves this idea of a writing self that is autonomous and separate from the self moving through the world, but she doesn’t in the end buy into it. As she examines herself further, she finds that she can’t separate her two kinds of writing. “The first, the usual, contains the second. If I deprived myself of it I couldn’t write at all.” P. 33 She observes that by doing this kind of in the margins writing that she learned at school that she is laying the groundwork for something wild and unplanned.
My work, in fact, is founded on patience. I start from writing that is planted firmly in tradition, and wait for something to erupt and throw the papers into disarray, for the lowly abject woman I am to find a means of having her say.” P.33
She has a method, but she still wants to explode this and do something really radical and free. (Who doesn’t?) But she is reminded by Beckett that everything in life needs form. She quotes a passage from him that ends with an image she relates to, about being one a long chain of caged beasts seeking words that are also caged beasts…grim, but she likes it. It brings up another image of what writing is, what her mother called a frantumaglia, a whirlpool of fragment words, how her mother described what went on inside her head. This frightened the child Ferrante, naturally. Yet as an adult developing an understanding of what her writing is she combined the two, putting the frantumaglia inside the cage…the careful notebooks with their lines with the occasional breaking through of the “discordant clamor in (her) head” that finally persuades her to publish books.
“Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.”
She seeks to subvert convention.
Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite.”
She ends by quoting the witches of MacBeth, “fair is foul and foul is fair,” as a lead in to the next essay.
I love all this. It’s not possible to know if it’s an actually intellectual history or a constructed facsimile, with examples, of how she developed as a writer over time. Her pseudonymity has led me to question all her self-representation. Either way it is the beginning of a cogent and quite beautiful argument about the impossibility of writing in a vacuum or out of individual impulses. This is meaningful to me, particularly after having taught a course called Literary Fan Fiction for several years. I grew up thinking I had to be original, that all my writing had to be sui generis. I bristled when I read scholars discussing influence and argued for the possibility that writers and painters come up with ideas themselves. This feeling was based on how I was taught and also on plain ignorance. It’s too bad, because I wasted many years hating my own sentences and being all tied up in perfectionism. Now I am interested in how writers talk to each other across time, often in the form of a book responding to another book, and that is so lovingly reflected in In The Margins. She never ascribes her advances in thinking to her own cogitation, but always frames them as responses to the triggers of reading the writing of another. There is scant egoism in this book. Just desire. On to the next essay next week.