Elena Ferrante's writing and perspective are so intoxicating—these parts of her essays have stayed with me deeply:
“Dante the author constructs the episode in such a way that success and failure are two faces of the same coin. The sweet word, in its quantum leap from the interior heart to the exterior of writing, needs a switch-capable scribe.”
“…My emotion, naturally part of my personal experiences, gradually—I began to find—it could be effective in a literary work, not used as it typically is in the realist tale but as a subterranean stream, a cadence within the language, a caption, a disturbance in the writing that suddenly erupts with few, usually obscene, words. The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we are shut up in.It’s a painful contradiction—how can one use a cage with freedom, whether it is a solid literary genre, or established expressive habits, or even the language itself—dialect?”
“…We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own. In my view, that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel, essay, and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one's own dizzying, crowding individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune.
We mustn’t let ourselves be flattered by those who say—you’re someone who has a tonality of her own. Everything in writing has a long history behind it. Even my uprising, my spilling over the margins, my yearning, is a part of an eruption that came before me and goes beyond me.Thus, when I talk about my ‘I who writes’, I should immediately add that I am talking about my ‘I who has read’, even when it is a question of distracted reading—the trickiest kind of reading—and I should emphasise that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I have taken in. That is: writing about our own joys, wounds, and sense of the world means writing in every way, always knowing that we are the product—good or bad—of encounters and clashes, sought out and accidental, with the stuff of others. The most serious error of the ‘I who writes’, the most serious naïveté, is the Robinsonian: imagining oneself, that is, as a Robinson who is smug about his life on the desert island, pretending that all the odds and ends that he carried off the ship haven’t contributed to his success, or like a Homer who doesn’t confess to himself that he is working on materials that have been elaborated and transmitted orally. We don’t do that—but we remake real life. And as soon as we realise it, and we aren’t cowards, we search desperately for a way to tell the genuine, real life.”