She's probably afraid of plants. (The Lost Daughter)
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One might, with a little effort, recall a literary scandal of late 2016. James Wood, a few years earlier, had written a rave review of My Brilliant Friend, the first Neapolitan novel to be published in English. “Elena Ferrante, or ‘Elena Ferrante,’ is one of Italy’s best-known least-known contemporary writers”, he wrote. She had kept her identity unknown from the 1992 publication of her first novel, the uneven Troubling Love, through to the 2002 triumph of Days of Abandonment. In that slim novel, narrated by a woman whose husband leaves her for his lover, emerged the shatteringly harsh emotional reality that would become Ferrante’s signature: a limpid and authoritative style where cruelty is eternal and infinite, where women live at the razor’s edge of collapse.
Those themes achieved astonishing proportions with the four Neapolitan novels, released in English from 2012 to 2015. The series was a rare work-in-translation to sell millions of copies in the Anglo world, in what was embarrassingly called “Ferrante fever”. Indeed, it achieved a kind of popularity rarely seen in books at all, where even writers at major publishers typically make zero royalties whatsoever.
But in 2016, Ferrante was revealed. Absolute disaster was avoided — she wasn’t, as rumour had suggested and feminists had dismissed, novelist Domenico Starnone, but, according to financial sleuthing, Starnone’s wife: Anita Raja.
In English, most outlets besides the New York Review of Books declined to sully their pages with the revelation. Ferrante’s anonymity was seen as feminist defiance, and her reveal a sexist attack. In The Guardian, Suzanne Moore proclaimed: “Who cares who Elena Ferrante really is? She owes us nothing”. Aaron Bady, in The New Inquiry, called it “a violation, and a desecration”. The New Republic dubbed the whole affair “The Sexist Big Reveal“.
That autumn, her lengthy book of letters and interviews Frantumaglia appeared in English; in 2018, an HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend; in 2019, her disappointing novel The Lying Lives of Adults; in 2021, the star-studded adaptation of The Lost Daughter; and now, in 2022, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing, a collection of Ferrante lectures. Indeed, she’s even had a weekend column in The Guardian — producing the iconic headline “Elena Ferrante: ‘I devote myself to plants. Is it because I am afraid of them?’ So much, then, for staying “in the margins”. So much for the threat made in a 2014 interview, that: “I remain Ferrante or I no longer publish”.
Curiously, In the Margins doesn’t make a single reference to the author’s anonymity. This wouldn’t be remarkable under ordinary circumstances, but in a volume centred around a young woman’s journey to the writer’s life, it’s quite the dodge to duck her most shocking decision. It’s more remarkable still in a book which, though quietly disappointing like so many craft essays, raises fascinating questions about the relationship of the author to the work of art.
Ferrante doesn’t have to acknowledge the reveal, since the rest of the educated world has chosen not to. Though the Raja theory has not been discredited, it’s been rejected as a violative and violent thrusting of a woman into the public against her will. In a 2018 retrospective, The Cut podcast remarked on how inspiring it was for a woman to stay anonymous, refusing the usual pressure on women to perform the emotional work of social harmony. Sensitive as I am to the pressures on women writers, this explanation, inflected by the Clinton-Trump election, doesn’t quite convince me, given that these critics never proffer a single example of another woman unveiled, or a man given privacy. Ferrante’s obvious comparator would be Karl Øve Knausgård, whose My Struggle six-part autobiography was published almost contemporaneously; but he didn’t even change the names of others, let alone his own. More importantly, these defences of Ferrante are a little over-tinged with projection, as if Ferrante putting her name on her novels were nothing different from the “emotional labor” of a woman with her social set.
I wonder if Ferrante could get away with it today, when even an Oprah’s Book Club pick like American Dirt could be trashed for “opportunistically” “appropriating” experiences foreign to the writer. Quaint as it seems now, “cultural appropriation” was a new and controversial concept back in 2016, and as a New York Times op-ed weakly pointed out, perhaps the bigger Ferrante scoop was an opportunity to discredit it. After all, Anita Raja wasn’t a working-class girl raised on the violent streets of Naples; she was born in Naples, sure, but moved to Rome at age three, and her father was a magistrate. As Gatti pointed out with disgust, ‘Ferrante’ had said her mother was a seamstress who spoke in the Neapolitan dialect, who had grown up in Naples until she “ran away”. “These crumbs of information,” he said, “seemed designed to satisfy her readers’ appetite for a personal story that might relate to the Neapolitan setting of the novels themselves”.
The Neapolitan novels even end with the narrator writing a novel about the girls’ friendship, before her best friend, to everyone’s torment, disappears. Few of us seem upset by what, almost undeniably, was a case of an upper-class woman passing herself off as lower-class in the marketing (yes, marketing) of best-selling novels almost universally received as autobiographical.
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SubscribeGrappling, as you say, ‘with a question both tedious and unanswerable.’ But mostly tedious.
Exactly. Only academe and the commentariat give two hoots about this. Does a reader like these books? Then….like them. The whole fandango seems shriekingly overthought.
Indeed – very little point to all this. I will stick with that sublime novel sequence, Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time” which is, admittedly, semi-autobiographical but in a less convoluted way.
Oh gosh, I don’t want to be philistine, and there is no reason we shouldn’t have articles on literature and even writers on UnHerd, but boy did this go on, and on, and on!
There is something very suspect about someone writing anonymously in the 21st century; the Brontes had a good reason, she does not.
Ferrante had a reason to write anonymously. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, the only important thing is authenticity and, if you can fake that, you have it made.
I just got bored halfway through as I appreciated this is just wokinistas dancing on the head of their collective safe area and went to comments.
“As literature limps along to its final extinction, regarded as irrelevant, abrasive, and even suspect by its few remaining consumers …”
Oh yeah? What’s the evidence that literature is on the way out? I’m skeptical.
Clearly some people want it to be on the way out … https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9174027/As-academics-banish-Chaucer-syllabus-historian-says-poets-work-relevant.html
Yes, some characters seem to be trying to build a species of nihilistic career for themselves, by predicting literature’s demise and working to fulfil that prophecy. Let’s hope they don’t garner any significant audience.
Well Jack Higgins died the other day.
Just go the new fiction section of any Waterstones. It’s all dross aimed at confused women.
Several publishers have stated that they don’t intend to publish a single book by a male writer this year.
I think that explains the fiction section at Waterstones.
I’m sceptical but there is a case to he made in western countries. Things have changed radically even in the last 5 years. Everything is now about ‘relevance”, ‘cultural appropriation’ is out, and almost every real life author is likely to fall foul of the hysterical and fanatical wokies who seem to inhabit most publishers
Not 100% sure this relevent, but from Simone Weil’s brilliant essay ‘Human personality’ : “When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestations of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.”
“As literature limps along…” what hyperbolic nonsense.
I’m only reading books written by white men until wokeness dies.
You shouldn’t take it out on, say, African authors who aren’t responsible for woke nonsense.
How could someone write an entire essay about an Italian novelist and issues of her identity and never once use the word Italian? I suspect that there’s no uproar about Ferrante’s being “an upper-class woman passing herself off as lower-class” because the Italians don’t find it problematic in the way we in the US, who are obsessed with identity politics, do. Perhaps the land that gave us the Renaissance is perfectly fine an artist redefining herself however she wants and giving life to any experiences she cares to, as long as the result is
excellentbrilliant?Oh dear. The title of this piece is absurd and the piece itself, well, shall we say a waste of ink.
I’ll take Flashman over any woman’s angry screed.