“Ladies and gentlemen, this evening I am going to talk to you about the desire to write and the two kinds of writing, it seems to, I know best, the first compliant, the second impetuous.”
There’s probably going to be a whole series of literature that stems from the pandemic (and already has) and then a further subset of that literature where something was upended by the pandemic. Here, we have a series of lectures originally planned to be delivered live from Elena Ferrante — though it is doubtful that she herself would have delivered them — and later given by a well-known Italian actor.
The three lectures discuss: two types of writing that Elena Ferrante has thought a lot about, the women in her books, and Dante, as a kind of spectre over Italian literature.
The first essay begins with Ferrante reflecting on the literal confines of school notebook paper, blue vertical lines housed in by red vertical lines, comprising a kind of box or matrix in which all writing must be contained. This leads her to reflect on the kinds of writing that this taught her — primarily from men first, and then in reaction from women — that she both read and emulated in her career.
The next essay deals primarily with the kinds of women who inhabit her books and what kinds of stories they tell. All of Ferrante’s novels are written in first person, but not all of the same kind. One of the more interesting parts of this section is hearing the kinds of novels she tried writing, but couldn’t quite make work, and as brilliant and wonderful as all of her novels are, some of the other attempts sound so good and interesting, but also, don’t exist.
And lastly, her essay on Dante and the language he used and the way it clouds Italian writing. She mentions how she can’t think of any other writer who so captured the full breadth of the world, and also the deep intimacy of a single life — coming up only with Proust as another possibility. For me, Shakespeare and Chaucer come to mind too. But Italians are going to Italian.
