In the Margins

Even today I have trouble understanding what he did. Gorni has correctly pointed out that Beatrice “is the only woman in all of Western literature to be invested with such an honorable role.” But why does Dante alone place his woman so high in the contemporary hierarchy of the female? What strategies does he use to get to the point of plausibly assigning her such an honor?

At this point I’d like to make a small correction. I said that I decided to write this essay out of love for Dante. And it’s true. But since I intend to make an effort to speak as “truthfully” as possible—truth is always at the top of a writer’s thoughts, especially Dante—I want to explain that that love for Dante immediately became one with his boldest creation: Beatrice. In fact, if I’m faithful to my memories as an adolescent reader, I should add that it was she who made me love Dante right away. I was immediately grateful to him for the way he had portrayed the fearful man, lost in the dark wood, subject to weeping and fainting at the suffering of others, and saved by a believable Florentine woman who started the work of salvation by refusing to greet him and then, having gone to a better life, re-educated him by removing him conclusively from the condition of a delirious child.

I got the impression, at the age of sixteen, that love was suffering, exposing oneself to certain danger. And not so much because death was always around the corner but because of the very nature of love, because of an energy it had that heightened and at the same time stunned and humiliated the spirit of life. Meanwhile, however, deeply etched in me was the notion that without love it was impossible to greet others, and thus save ourselves, in heaven as on earth, since exposing oneself, risk, was inevitable.

I think it’s right to make a distinction between a beautiful poem, a good story, an attractive, clever novel by an average person and the work of one who is inevitably an author. It’s a distinction that’s fundamental for the fate of literature.

And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I’ve taken in. That is, writing about our own joys and 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.

Notes from Underground

Witchcraft was hung, in History,

But History and I

Find all the Witchcraft that we need

Around us, every Day—

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

The Lost Daughter is, programmatically, more radical. Leda carries out an act—stealing the doll—that she is unable to give meaning to, either at the beginning of her story or at the end. And I myself, Elena Ferrante, conceived my writing and hers in such a way that in both of us the absolute, concentrated isolation of the narrative discourse would reach a point of no return. We are both simply driven to exhaustion, summarized in Leda’s final remark, to her daughters: “I’m dead, but I’m fine.”

In Troubling Love and in The Days of Abandonment this self-imprisonment was a conscious aesthetic choice. For example, neither Delia nor I knows what happened to Delia’s mother on the beach; for example, neither Olga nor I knows why the door of the apartment suddenly won’t open and suddenly opens. I can, like Delia, like Olga, construct hypotheses, and like them I have to be content with those, we have no way of verifying them.