So I grasped around, trying to make sense of what had happened and in so doing extend the immersive reading experience a wee bit more. I just want to keep talking with my brilliant friend. I inhaled every recent interview with the elusive Elena Ferrante (who would point out that she is in fact NOT my friend) that I could find online. The famously absent author has done a few, via email, and one in person, for the Paris Review.
She made me think about how living out feminist values - and maybe by this I mean living an authentic and engaged life, especially on an interpersonal level - and writing and reading are all part of the same daunting gesture. How literature and the intimate politics of the personal are intertwined.
Here's what she said about the old slogan in Vanity Fair (all bold is mine):
It’s only a few words, but with their fortunate ability to synthesize they should never be forgotten. They convey what we are made of, the risk of subservience we are exposed to, the kind of deliberately disobedient gaze we must turn on the world and on ourselves. But “the personal is political” is also an important suggestion for literature. It should be an essential concept for anyone who wants to write.
And later:
In general, we store away our experiences and make use of timeworn phrases—nice, ready-made, reassuring stylizations that give us a sense of colloquial normality. But in this way, either knowingly or unknowingly, we reject everything that, to be said fully, would require effort and a torturous search for words. Honest writing forces itself to find words for those parts of our experience that [are] crouched and silent. On one hand, a good story—or to put it better, the kind of story I like best—narrates an experience—for example, friendship—following specific conventions that render it recognizable and riveting; on the other hand, it sporadically reveals the magma running beneath the pillars of convention.
I had a teacher in college who told me that in order to write well, one must take out all the lies. This is extremely difficult to do. It demands, as Ferrante says, a torturous search for words, a willingness to open oneself beyond reassuring familiar phrases to reach for the unexpected and disorienting. It is an emotionally rigorous enterprise (something I often validate for the students I see in therapy who are laid low by the experience of being in the grip of writing a serious paper).
Over and over while reading the Neapolitan novels I was struck by the unwavering, disruptive honesty of the writing. The magma. (Excellent choice for characters living at the foot of Vesuvius).
And then this, on why although she is a passionate reader of feminist thought, she can never be an idealogue:
Our heads are crowded with a very heterogeneous mix of material, fragments of time periods, conflicting intentions that cohabit, endlessly clashing with one another. As a writer I would rather confront that overabundance, even if it is risky and confused, than feel that I’m staying safely within a scheme that, precisely because it is a scheme, always ends up leaving out lots of real stuff because it is disturbing. ... In short, cultural struggles are long, full of contradictions, and while they are happening it is difficult to say what is useful and what isn’t. I prefer to think of myself as being inside a tangled knot; tangled knots fascinate me. It’s necessary to recount the tangle of existence, both as it concerns individual lives and the life of generations. Searching to unravel things is useful, but literature is made out of tangles.
Within my own tangle (which surely resembles other women's unique tangles): the lure of subservience and the yearning for frank self-assertion; the wish to please and the itch to rebel; the desire for recognition and the dream of solitude; the drive to give and the quickness to anger; the embodied desire to nurture, the embodied desire for stillness. An essential part of me flourishes when I care for my children. I need to touch them, to feed them, to feel their sleepy heads nestle against my neck. But it is easy to hide myself in those activities, to allow that particular thread in the tangle to pull too tightly and make it hard to breathe.
Historically I'm an accommodater, a caregiver. The risk of subservience is real and comes from without and within, a sub-tangle of social forces and relationships and temperament. But I'm not sure a disobedient gaze is what's called for. At 38, I'm more inclined to cast, rather, a naive gaze around at the bits and pieces of my life. A writer's gaze. Maybe that's the same thing as disobedience. This terrifying year has given me a gift. Every so often I feel brave enough to invite those experiences, memories, inclinations that are hidden and crouching to saunter into the light and make themselves known. And when I do I feel emboldened. Honest. Less accommodating, yet no less myself.
What I love about "crouched" is that it suggests something lurking and ready to spring: a predator within that can be transformed by words. In therapy I join with people who, sometimes, have been attacked - by another, by themselves. Or who are afraid of being attacked, and doing everything imaginable to distract themselves from that fear. I try to create a holding environment of acceptance, safety and consistency that enables my clients to put language onto those crouching parts, to bring them into the light of a narrative, to integrate them, to welcome them. To disentangle enough to breathe and grow.
This too, connects to my last post, and suggests how our relationships come first, the foundation that enables us to give ourselves shape, and thus do the courageous work of honest writing/speaking/living.
Whew.
Geez, you guys. Thanks for sticking with me through these ponderous musings. Now go write that novel!
