In the Margins. On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing by Elena Ferrante

Author:Elena Ferrante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions (UK) Ltd.
Published: 2022-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

HISTORIES, I

Ladies and gentlemen,

I will begin this final meeting with a short poem by Emily Dickinson, about history and witches, in order to pick up the discussion of last time, when I was talking about the Neapolitan Novels and writing that inspires and activates other writing. It’s just a few lines:

Witchcraft was hung, in History,

But History and I

Find all the Witchcraft that we need

Around us, every Day—

What I’ve always liked about this handful of words is the “and” that proudly unites “History and I.” In the first line is the written account we call History, which has hung witchcraft on the gallows. In the three other lines, introduced by an adversative “but,” is the “I,” the “I” that unites with the story of the past and thus, every day, thanks to that union with History, finds, around itself, all the witchcraft it needs.

I read the poem more or less like that for some decades, and the reference to the witches made me fantasize excitedly that, from the writing that suffocated the spells, a female “I” would derive a writing that, as needed, would return to complete them in daily life, joining people and things that supposedly couldn’t be joined. Thus, among the suggestions that led me to the Neapolitan Novels, I must surely add the image that those lines have always evoked for me: a woman who sits at a table and writes “History and I” as a challenge, almost a confrontation, and with that juxtaposition gives a furious start to a thread of words that from the hostile writing of the witches’ art extracts a story that draws on that art. Over time, I think, I gave that figure of a woman a modern posture when I saw her, brow furrowed, gaze intense, writing on the computer in an apartment in Turin, trying to invent other women, mothers, sisters, friends—a witch friend—and places in Naples, and small ordeals and sufferings of relatives and acquaintances, and the past sixty years of History, appropriating them from the many texts that had already put them in writing. I felt she was true, with a truth that had to do with me.

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