The writer behind Elena Ferrante may well hide behind a pen name, but she sometimes delivers herself without artifice and without restraint. This is the case, among others, in the little book Between the margins. Conversation on the pleasure of reading and writingtranslated into French this year by Gallimard.
This little book, thanks to which the writer takes us to some extent into the genesis of her works, is taken from a lecture given by the novelist at the University of Bologna. From the outset, she discusses the two modes of writing that she says she knows best: “the first; docile, the second; impetuous”. It is the docile writing style that she thinks of when she observes a little girl, Cécilia, who laboriously traces the letters of her name on the paper.
She transposes there the child that she herself was, who tried to contain her writing well between the red margins of her notebook. Then, there is the other writing, unbridled, almost destructive, which according to her is the real writing. It often arises unexpectedly, in the middle of applied writing sessions. “Beautiful writing acquires its beauty, writes Ferrante, when it loses its harmony and takes on the desperate force of ugliness. »
This force, underground and capricious, feeds the momentum, leads the pen. Readers who have devoured the multiple volumes of Ferrante’s saga, The prodigious friendwill have fun seeing in these two modes the opposition between Lenu, the narrator, and her friend Lila.
In Elena Ferrante’s toolbox there are of course all kinds of reading. And it is from some of them that the inspiration for his books arose. Among these, she cites for example Adriana Cavarero, who evokes “the literary character of female friendships”. But also a text entitled Don’t think you have any rights, the story of a group of women in Milan in 1970, where two friends, Amalia and Emilia, share the desire to write. “I detected in Amalia, who loved to write and who felt she was talented, an irrepressible admiration for Emilia’s attempts at writing,” writes Ferrante. I even thought I sensed a kind of jealousy about the result that Amalia, while talented, felt unable to achieve. I started to amplify things, as usual. »
One is seized by the impression, in reading Ferrante, of touching the source of the great saga of The prodigious friend, and the complex duality of the friendship between Lenu and Lila. Elena Ferrante also mentions, among other things, The Autobiography of Alice Toklas, by Gertrude Stein. It is again Adriana Cavarero who describes this book thus: “The autobiographical genre and the biographical genre overlap. […] Gertrude writes the story of her life by having it told by another: Alice, her friend and companion, her lover. »
We are still in the crossed feminine destinies. “It’s probably from there that I started to understand the relationship between Lenu and Lila, between their writings,” writes Ferrante.
By closing this little gem, we like to hope that Gallimard will be inspired by it to create a collection, in which we could dive to go to the source of the great novels that made us dream.