Elena Ferrante's Key Words by Tiziana de Rogatis

Author:Tiziana de Rogatis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Two Languages, Emigration, and Study

1. Emigration and Exile:

Those Who Leave Are Those Who Stay

In the quartet there is an inextricable link between emigration and Elena and Lila’s friendship. The dynamic of their bond is one of additions and subtractions, gains and losses (cf. 2), which creates a text that contrasts belonging with displacement: a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit clash between Lila and Elena, between those who fall into the cave and those determined to dig themselves out of it, those who stay in Naples and those who leave Naples. Thanks to her scholastic career, continued through classical high school—and financed and sustained by Lila, who was kept from studying beyond elementary school—Elena wins a fellowship from the prestigious Scuola Normale di Pisa and departs for Tuscany in 1963. Her emigration to Central and Northern Italy is the least tragic and radical form of exile, what Edward Said calls “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (Said 173).

It is to this rift that the title of the third volume of the quartet, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, alludes. Beginning with her formative experiences at the Normale, Elena lives her sixteen years of exile as a period of radical detachment from Naples, for during those years the social and linguistic divide between the popular rione and bourgeois Italy is unbridgeable. Even after four years at the university, Pisa remains a confining, alienating space for Elena: “[ . . . ] routes that were the same and yet alien even when the baker said hello and the newspaper seller chatted about the weather, alien in the voices that I had nevertheless forced myself to imitate from the start, alien in the color of the stone and the plants and the signs and the clouds or sky” (snn 402). At the same time, Elena’s brief return to the rione upon finishing university feels nothing like a homecoming. This produces a sense of instability no less disturbing than that which she perceived in Pisa, now described with a weather-related metaphor: “My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind” (snn 436). The city is portrayed as a stepmother ready to commandeer what Elena has obtained while away from home: “upon every return to my own city I feared that some unexpected event would keep me from escaping, that the things I had gained would be taken away from me” (tlts 26). Following her first emigration to attend the university, the narrator of the quartet launches out on a relentless centrifugal movement toward emancipation from the rione and its dialect, and toward success as an Italian writer at home and abroad.

Elena leaves, Lila stays. Lila has always stayed. One of the first initiation rites of their childhood friendship is built on this contrast. During the girls’ first adventure outside the rione, their flight to the beach of Naples, Lila loses herself, while Elena finally finds a reason for living (cf.

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