'Til we meet again to Ferrante and onward to writing

Classes for ‘22-’23 are over. Exhale. The Ferrante seminar ended wonderfully, with lots of speculation about (SPOILER ALERT) what the reappearance of the dolls meant, where they came from, and so on, but then we decided that things were often very trippy in the novel and we’d forego trying to pin it down. What a wild work this is. What a great class we had, and as much as I sensed in the way that teachers do that it is time for the semester to be over, I was sorry the class had to end. For it became more than a class. It was a meeting of minds that no one could have predicted based on the bios of the seven people in the room. Three were in the MFA program to study poetry, two fiction, one getting her MA in English who happened to be taking another course where she read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and supplied knowledge helpful to our reading of the text. Together we produced a 200 page single-spaced Google doc of responses to the text which was life changing for all seven of us. I will never forget it and am deeply grateful to my six students who gave themselves over to this work with such open hearts.

Why was this reading experience different than other classes or than any book group I have been in? Writing the Google doc played a big part. I got the idea to engage with Ferrante through letters after reading The Ferrante Letters by Merve Emre, Sarah Chihaya, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards. These four scholars read the book and wrote letters to each other about it, published in a book of their own. The subtitle is An Experiment in Collective Criticism, an appealing idea and a step in a good direction away from isolated thinking and research. It’s one of the great desires in life to think deeply with another, or at least I have always desired it, and I was immediately attracted to their project and resolved to adapt it to my classrooms. I have taught classes on the Neapolitan novel using letter writing responses ever since, but this was my first grad class and the first where I assigned all four volumes. We wrote in our doc every week and the entries ranged from the deeply personal to literary criticism to beautiful meditations on reading and writing and craft elements in the book. At first we wrote them dutifully in a timely manner so we could read them all before class, but as the semester reached its usual fever pitch and everyone was overwhelmed with responsibilities, the letters often came in minutes before class, so we began to read them aloud and discussed them when we were together. I daresay we all felt a communal energy each week that was unique in our lives.

Another reason was luck, the right seven minds in a room together in a moment in each one’s life where dedication to this group effort could be a priority. The big reason is the text itself. It’s alive. I am temped to claim that all the greatest books are alive in the same way the great religious texts are—able to be engaged with in the permanent present. I’m not sure about that, but it seems right. I am not religious yet I did develop a vibrant relationship with Jesus when I was a child and renewed it in my early forties. I do think through him and how he behaved in certain circumstances, in much the way Ferrante describes the relationship between the purported author Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is the biography of Gertrude Stein, written by Stein, imagined through Toklas. Ferrante returns to this relationship in the last lecture in In the Margins, pointing to Stein as one of the great influences on the composition of the Neapolitan novels. She found inspiration in Stein’s accomplishment, which she thinks gets at a truth, a greater truth than her acolyte Hemingway was able to get at because “she takes a highly structured genre like autobiography and deforms it. …Stein is demonstrating that writing about the true Gertrude isn’t simply a matter of writing truthfully but involves applying force to the great containers of literary writing, to forms that at the moment seem most comfortable, most beautiful, and instead are a death trap for our intention to write ‘truthfully.’”

Stein’s distortion of the form of autobiography “upends the traditional relations between invented story, autobiographical truth, and biographical truth, making Stein’s book a great lesson for the “I” who wants to write, surely a more stimulating lesson, today, than what we might get from Hemingway’s books.” That’s a burn on Hemingway who has enough troubles in these times, but sometimes points must be grasped at with great force to sink in. Stein’s example sunk in, along with all the other literary influences Ferrante names in In the Margins, and led her to “try to tell a story structurally based on the fact that ever since they were children the two protgonists have tried to subjugate the hostile world around them through reading and writing. They buy the first book in their lives with the money of an camorrist. (Little Women.) They read it together and plan to write a book together to become rich and powerful. But Lila breaks the pact and writes a child’s book by herself, whose writing so impresses Lenu that for the rest of her lief she is driven to try to contain it in her own.”

So interesting, and so rings a bell as to how wonderful writing lands on us. We are admiring, jealous, threatened, in love, and inspired by it. We want to contain it in our own writing. Lenu is entrusted with Lila’s notebooks when they are in their twenties and is shocked to discover how hard Lila has been secretly working on her writing all along. How does Lenu contain that writing? She throws the notebooks in the river. For the rest of her life she imagines Lila writing and writing and is haunted by the possibility of that better writing even as she establishes a successful literary career and Lila turns to computers and writes in a binary language consisting of only two symbols. All during the Neapolitan novel after Lila has disappeared without a trace as she has always longed to do, Lenu hopes that somehow Lila has gotten into her computer and is adding to the text she is writing about their lives, and that when she goes back and reads the document she will find Lila there, disrupting her version of events even as Lenu is containing Lila in the text. The idea of emergence through another is a great theme of the novel. The past emerges through the present. Parents emerge through their children until their children come to resemble them. The writing of others emerges through our own writing; there is no original writing in the sense we are taught to produce, no sui generic work of genius. “Writing inevitably has to reckon with other writing, and it’s from the terrain of the already written that the sentence might jump out that sets in motion a small admirable book or the great book that displays a trajectory and constructs a unique world of words, characters, and conflicts.”

So now it is time to finish up my discussion of Ferrante’s In the Margins. The final lecture is called Histories, I. I am not going to track the whole argument but to offer her two interpretations of the following Emily Dickinson poem:

Witchcraft was hung, in History,

But History and I

Find all the witchcraft that we need

Around us, every Day—

She describes how she has always read the poem. In the first line “is the written account we call History, which has hung witchcraft on the gallows. In the three other lines, introduced by an adversative “but,” is the “I,” the “I’ that unites with the story of the past and thus, every day, thanks to the union with History, finds, around itself, all the witchcraft it needs.”

She goes on to say that this poem is included among her writing that influenced her own writing of the Neapolitan novels because of the image it evoked for her, “a woman who sits at a table and writes ‘History and I’ as a challenge, almost a confrontation, and with that juxtaposition gives a furious start to the thread of words that from the hostile writing of the witches’ art extracts a story that draws on that art.”

She then gave that witch a modern aspect and saw her at a typewriter in Turin writing about the last sixty years of history in Naples. “I felt she was true, with a truth that had to do with me.”

She goes through her whole argument, which is a deep pleasure to read so do so if such things appeal to you, and ends the lectures series with a later interpretation of the poem. “I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female “I” to History changes History. The History in the first line, the one that hangs the witches work on the gallows—note, something important has happened—is not, can no longer be the History of the second, the one with which we find, all around us, all the witchcraft we need.”

And I, reading her, reinterpreted the title, Histories, I, which I first read as Histories, One, but came to understand as Histories, I, the author. The I that depends on other voices, that understands how we emerge through each other, who wrote a nearly 2000 page novel about how we affect each other, write and overwrite each other, hate and love each other.

What word do we use now that replaces masterpiece? Overwrites the master?

I am going off to a residency now to work on my own writing for a month. Fortunately I no longer feel haunted as Lila does by the specter of better writing. I have come to terms with what I am capable of, and enjoy it. So I won’t take Ferrante with me, but I will take the feeling of my class. For in the end it turned out we weren’t a class at all. We were a place like the one that so shaped Lila and Lenu. Not literally the poor section of Naples where they grew up and suffered, but a much more nourishing one of our own mutual creation. We were a neighborhood.