Farewell to Naples: Ferrante’s Story of a New Name

Article Farewell to Naples: Ferrante’s Story of a New Name Forum Italicum 0(0) 1–14 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0014585818757206 journals.sagepub.com/home/foi Pina Palma Southern Connecticut State University, USA Abstract In Ferrante’s Story of a New Name, the protagonist’s journey to self-knowledge and self-realization is mapped through a farewell trip to Naples before she begins her studies in Pisa. As the centerpiece and background around and against which Elena’s accomplishments, failures, and societal pressures revolve, Naples emerges as a mosaic of energy and lethargy, unbreakable traditions and negligible innovations. While these elements mirror the protagonist’s powerlessness in changing the ‘‘norms’’ to which she is expected to adhere, they also function as her spur to a steady shift toward self-understanding. In this article, I analyze the ways in which Ferrante’s use of the beauty and lure, corrosiveness and lethality of Naples parallel her discourse on the protagonist’s search for self-understanding, a process that will ultimately enable Elena, the protagonist, to find self-realization. Keywords authorship, labyrinth, memory, reading, self-fulfillment, self-knowledge, urban space On the eve of her departure for Pisa where she will study at the Normale, Elena Greco, the first-person narrator in Book Two of Ferrante’s Neapolitans Novels, decides to ‘‘give a kind of farewell to Naples’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 329). The promenade that delivers her from her old neighborhood begins on foot at Corso Garibaldi and takes her along via dei Tribunali. She then reaches Piazza Dante where she boards a bus to Via Scarlatti. From there, on foot, Elena moves on to the Santarella (Via Luigia Sanfelice) and, via the funicular, she descends to Piazza Amedeo. From this piazza Elena turns onto Via Filangieri. Here she realizes that she is not far from Corresponding author: Pina Palma, Department of World Languages and Literatures, Southern Connecticut State University, D159 Engleman Hall, 501 Crescent Street, New Haven, CT 06515, USA. Email: [email protected] 2 Forum Italicum 0(0) Piazza dei Martiri, the epicenter of her friend Lila’s public victories and private frustrations. An irregular, triangular space wedged between Via Calabritto, Via Alaberdieri, and Via Morelli, the piazza, where Lila’s shoe store is located, entices Elena. To a certain extent, its asymmetrical triangularity evokes not only the image of friendship, but also of the acrimony and antagonism that from time to time ruffle the lives of the novel’s main characters: Elena, Lila, and Nino. The other streets that branch off from Piazza dei Martiri—Via Carlo Poerio, Via Alabardieri, Via Santa Caterina, and Via Filangieri—at times, and in part, intersect each other; yet each street follows its own trajectory, leading away from or, depending on the direction one travels, back to the piazza. But in spite of the autonomous relationship the streets maintain from each other, in the Neapolitan collective mindset they are considered natural extensions, and benefit from the same prestigious repute, of Piazza dei Martiri. In much the same fashion, the lives and experiences of Elena, Lila, and Nino that started in, and are shaped by, the poverty of the old neighborhood follow different paths; yet emotionally and professionally, they cross and intersect with one another. And as they follow their respective trajectories—each one a testament to the limitlessness of the human spirit—searching for answers about who they are and who they are capable of becoming, the three friends trace their transformations to events, experiences, and circumstances set into motion in the old neighborhood. Situated in the historic center of Naples, with its back to the Riviera di Chiaia that opens onto the sea, Piazza dei Martiri functions as a gateway to the city’s different quarters. By moving beyond its limits, one can experience the diverse historical, cultural, and social layers defined by millennia of history that shape every Neapolitan urban space. In a way, the different neighborhoods that the piazza leads to bring to mind the narrative possibilities that Elena Greco (and Elena Ferrante through her) explores as an author. The narrative styles—from dialogue to memoir—and languages—from standard Italian to Neapolitan dialect—that Ferrante employs to sway, entice, and charm her readers evidence this. In the end, because it embraces the old and the new (from architecture to commerce), it functions as a gateway to urban (and personal) choices and possibilities, and sits at the edge between land and water—an island of mature concreteness adjoining the fluid waters of youthful dreams—in Elena’s view, Piazza dei Martiri simultaneously epitomizes and legitimizes Lila’s achievements. She believes that the store’s success stands for Lila’s path not only to affluence, but especially to the physical and emotional well-being that the first affords. The complex friendship with Lila, who harbors no illusion about the callousness of human nature, has enabled Elena to vicariously experience some joys and, more so, ordeals that Neapolitan culture of the 1950s imposed on girls of their age. It also reinforces Elena’s understanding of social and economic structures. In her experience, an independent and respected life is anchored in wealth. In the absence of similar means and perceived certitudes, Elena realizes that her own way to success and freedom requires a detachment from the geographical, social, and emotional periphery that has confined her. But in her youthful eagerness she is unsuspecting of the responsibilities and inquietudes that moving beyond those limits—and the resulting freedom—entail. Palma 3 Strangely, the haphazard trajectory she follows through the streets of Naples shows neither a logical nor purposeful progression. Rather, it points directly to the slippery relationship and blurred boundaries between memory and reality. In this regard, Elena’s reminiscence about her leave-taking from Naples brings to mind both Benjamin1 and Vico’s discourse on memory. Elena’s dislocation in time and space that marks her reconstruction of events—past events that memory anachronistically turns into present ones—is a reminder of the alterations, overlaps, and entanglements that memory produces. For Giambatticta Vico, as Mazzotta (1999) reminds us, the version of events that memory brings forth is synonymous with imagination. This suggests that Elena’s memory might well result from a confection of additions to and omissions from the details of her journey. But as she reconstructs and reinterprets her past through the filter of time, making it an integral part of the story she narrates, the lack of absolute accuracy becomes secondary to the precise, sustained discourse on subjectivity that memory brings forward. And although imagination might well permeate her story, memory is still informing her understanding on how her self is shaped by, and in turn shapes, its experiences. Memory, according to Vico, is the key to learning. For Elena, learning must begin with the self. This becomes evident years later, when away from Naples and driven to finally confront who she has become and why, Elena strategizes on ways to turn memory from the ‘‘passive copy of experience’’ into a plan of action for her future (Mazzotta, 1999: 59, 147). But in spite of this, her portrayal of Naples traceable to real places leaves one wondering why would a Neapolitan follow a labyrinthine path from Vomero to Toledo and then back to Piazza Amedeo to reach Piazza dei Martiri.2 Benjamin’s belief that city and memory are labyrinths that one traverses in an asymmetrical and non-linear fashion hardly suffices to explain fully her seemingly erratic trajectory from the margins to the center of Naples.3 Yet her path does hint at a Narrator who, while navigating through the treacherous waters of memory and the apparently oblique and unplanned, constructs a metaphor that mirrors the connection between the labyrinthine-like progress of Elena’s journey through the city, self-knowledge, and writing. The maze-like route that Elena follows evokes the ‘‘tortuous path principle’’ that regulates the labyrinth. By definition, its circuitous, deceiving configuration persistently redirects the wayfarer away from the center. But for every failed attempt to arrive at the center, the walker becomes simultaneously more familiar with and more resilient in prevailing over the hindrances that impede reaching the goal. In the end, the experience acquired through repeated tries allows the tenacious, determined individual to grasp the complexity of the journey and, most importantly, to develop the strategy that leads to the center. Capacity to endure adversities and maintain resolve are essential for this endeavor. And although it proves to be a solitary place, it is only in the center that, alone, the wayfarer can confront and come to grips with the challenge(s) and meaning(s) that the center represents. Like Petrarch’s ascent to Mont Ventoux and Augustine’s nosce te ipsum, the most immediate result of this version of self-analysis redirects the self onto itself so that, through this, the self is led to come to grips with, and hew to, its role in life’s journey. 4 Forum Italicum 0(0) The absence of dialogue during her farewell outing evidences Elena’s voiceless condition in the urban setting. Beyond demonstrating her inability to vocalize her reactions to the city, this silence dramatizes the impasse she has stumbled upon and this, in turn, points to her powerlessness. In contrast to the talkativeness that marks her life in the neighborhood—where, as it appears throughout the tetralogy, she is admired for her judicious insights and well-spoken views—Elena’s urban voicelessness becomes even more remarkable because it underscores her isolation in a place that is associated with familial continuities and informed by shared concerns. Because she neither interacts with nor takes into consideration anything she passes by and sees, Elena does not possess the traits of Baudelaire’s flâneur. And contrary to the ordinariness of her daily experiences, where her voice functions as a coping mechanism for survival as well as a way to deflect the humiliation and shame she feels, this silence hints at her craving for a wholeness of being that is detached and independent from everything that her neighborhood and her past represent. Although her silence contains the kernels of the transformation that she plans to undergo, it also exemplifies her lack of self-awareness. This understanding brings to mind Benjamin’s notion of ‘‘impotence before the city’’ (Benjamin, 1979: 294). Yet if for him impotence sums up his ineptitude in navigating the urban space because of his poor sense of direction, for Elena it denotes her inability to use language to mediate between reality and her hopes. To be sure, she is as clear about the places she wants to reach as she is about the paths she plans to follow; yet at no point is she concerned about the circuitous trajectory she chooses. For this reason, her wandering through Naples, which literally and metaphorically appears to have no fixed end, paired with the absence of her voice, illustrates anew the powerlessness and passivity that she embodies as an unengaged traveler. The fact that as she roams through the streets she neither mentions nor focuses on any landmark visible along her route is also evidence of her disengaged self. The urban fragmentation and discontinuity revealed by her meandering journey, more than just translating onto the page Elena’s transient city experience, lay bare her still unrealized sense of self: throughout the tetralogy she is torn between the love / hate feelings that mark her tense relationship with her mother, family, and friends; she is overwrought over her secret—and unreciprocated—love for Nino; and is all too aware of the pressure that inventing her future entails. For Elena’s determination to bury her past, which emerges in all four works that make up Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, does not erase the uncertainties and challenges the future presents. Still, while the city she erratically traverses allows her to experience the freedom she is eager to possess, it is also a reminder that freedom becomes a productive activity only through self-knowledge. Clearly, participation demands voice and action, elements that forever call into question, and upend, the powerlessness that the voiceless individual incarnates. This is based on the notion that voice and action require the coherence that only self-confidence accords. In the end, to benefit from and play a part in the city one must never be remote from collective experiences that include, among other things, memories and remembrances (Benjamin, 1968: 98). Palma 5 Because they commemorate, and at times celebrate, the past, monuments are repositories of collective memory. For the same reason, they lend themselves to the exploration of the events that led to their erection. In a similar way, the walker’s examination of the self deepens if it is powered by, and takes into account, the inner experiences that the past triggered and the subsequent transformations that, in turn, they produced. Like monuments that in their static fluidity are a reminder of the city’s shifting past, the self in its dynamic involutions relies on the past to understand the present that will shape its future. Although driven to undo her past in order to weave the web of her future, Elena (a modern Arachne) at this point lacks the self-confidence that would lend her a voice in the Neapolitan reality of her youthful years. Her maze-like quest to reach and be part of a social and intellectual center parallels her desire for Nino. But because of her feelings of shame and inadequacy, she has kept her emotions hidden from all, including him.4 As a result, her labyrinthine farewell to the city also becomes the metaphor of her frustrated erotic desire. This is to say that Elena’s emotional vulnerability, rooted in her lack of self-assertiveness, has a ripple effect: although an accomplished, ambitious student and keen observer of her surroundings, one who conceptually understands what she wants, she lacks the sense of orientation, agency, and self-confidence necessary not only to make her feelings known to Nino, but especially to tame the socio-cultural fears that paralyze her life. Were she to give voice to her feelings, she could grapple with her ambitions and confront the obstacles that interfere with them. This would allow her to reach the center (of which Nino is but one element) and satisfy her want. But Elena has yet to make sense of her life and gain an enlightened perspective on how she wants to live it. And because she is fighting, among other things, against cultural norms, she not only makes perceptual mistakes that derail her journey toward her erotic ‘‘center’’ (Nino), but also feels inadequate for the intellectual and social milieus that animate life in the city.5 Accordingly, the outsider’s (her) urban penetration has as its counterpart the lover’s (her) frustrated desire. It comes as no surprise that the end of her erratic journey through the streets of Naples coincides with her discovery of the ongoing love affair between Lila—her self-sufficient friend with a damaged soul—and Nino. This discovery changes the dynamics of the old friendship. By deciding to shift her attention solely to her studies, Elena drifts further apart from her childhood friends. On a more abstract level, her discovery strengthens the notion of the city as a conflict zone between the insider and the outsider, wealth and poverty, introspectiveness and lack of it, power and powerlessness. The spaces she navigates bring into focus the idea of Naples as a legible text that lies before the walker’s eyes. Specifically, the historical contexts and cultural traditions evoked by the streets that Elena traverses are suggestive of the challenges she faces. For example, Piazza Garibaldi, where the journey begins, is home to Naples’s main train station that connects Southern Italy to Northern Italy and both to Europe. Its namesake played a major role in the Italian Unification. Via dei Tribunali is where the Academia Pontaniana was located. Giovanni Pontano, who presided over it, is one of the Renaissance poets who wrote about Naples’s 6 Forum Italicum 0(0) mythological beginnings. In his account, the city’s origin was traceable to the Siren Parthenope whose beautiful singing led voyagers to their death—except for Ulysses who conceived the stratagem that allowed him to listen to her song without suffering its enchantment. Historically, the street led to Castelnuovo. This castle, renovated and enlarged by Alphonse of Aragon who used it as a personal residence as well as a fortress, was built by the same wall where the door leading out of Naples was originally located. Piazza Dante brings to mind its namesake who undertook ‘‘the journey’’ par excellence in search of answers through self-knowledge. To this day the square remains the cradle of Naples’s book world. The Vomero, the affluent residential neighborhood developed on the hill that commands an unimpeded view of the Gulf of Naples, looks down at the city below with unfeigned arrogance. It encompasses Castel Sant’Elmo, San Martino, and Villa Floridiana. In the symbolic order of Neapolitan spaces, it reigns above the city, like an Icarus that flies above the water indifferent to Daedalus’s devices and labyrinths in the city below because those are entrapments inflicted on common people. By virtue of its geographic position, the Vomero stands as proof and reason of the financial and social standing of its dwellers. The Santarella, in reality Via Luigia Sanfelice, commemorates the poet and revolutionary aristocrat involved in the revolt against Ferdinand I to establish the Parthenopian Republic modeled after the French one during the French Revolution. For her actions she was executed. Piazza dei Martiri is Elena’s perceived center of the city (Ferrante, 2013: 346), the name of which evokes the notion of abnegation and that literally means ‘‘witness.’’ Etymologically, ‘‘martyr’’ also implies to be anxious or thoughtful. Both of these connotations accurately depict Elena’s sense of unease and anticipation as she approaches the piazza. They also capture the sense of emptiness, which no dream of the future can assuage, that overcomes her as she leaves the piazza aware of Lila and Nino’s ongoing affair. The piazza of Lila’s store is also graced by Palazzo Portanna built for and by the Duchess of Floridia, morganatic wife of King Ferdinand I. Today the square exemplifies the point of convergence among the Neapolitan intellectual, political, and business worlds. Clearly, the social, political, cultural, and historical layers that the places Elena traverses epitomize could enhance her understanding of Naples because, just like a descriptive text, they impart immediate lessons to the attentive walker / reader. By reading the multi-layered signs of this urban text, she could grasp the sense of contradictions that Naples gives prominence to without being overcome by it. And through this reading, Elena could gain a perspective into her desires, her sense of self—which is as multi-layered as Naples’s—and especially into the future she wants to carve out for herself. As the repository of people’s memories, and through the authority that time grants them, the city affords lessons that Elena—the walker—should appropriate as a way to explore her own depth. Put differently, the understanding that she could gain from Naples’s text, more than just guiding her through the city’s past, could provide her with a sense of self-direction that begins with self-knowledge. By steering her through the limitations she faces, it would lead her to self-sufficiency, an essential element in dealing with the burden of the familiar.6 Palma 7 By turning into a narrative that discloses street by street (chapter by chapter, as it were) the overlapping layers of events that contributed to its making, Naples also reveals the attitudes toward people and power that triggered those events. Like a text whose verbal properties and rhetorical figures guide the reader through the author’s thoughts and intended meanings, the city provides the (capable and willing) walker/reader with the occasion for countless historical, cultural, and social references. These traverse space and time which cue the walker / reader toward a cognitive map that enlightens the self, leading it to its desired center. Stated differently, once established, the cognitive map binds the walker / reader to its environment in a relationship that ‘‘aspires to new levels’’ (Smith, 1977: 171). This assertion suggests that the walker / reader becomes a decoder as well as a beneficiary of the meanings, messages, and values that the city imparts. Smith’s words implicitly link the complex nature of reading to the labyrinth: reaching the center requires an attentive reading and interpretation of the ‘‘signs’’ found along the way. In the same fashion, this understanding also applies to the self in the labyrinth of writing. For the writer’s ability to fashion representations of the world and people’s experience in it, to draw pictures, and tell stories that turn into persuasive arguments, not only is based on experience that does away with moral certainties and familiar ways of thinking, but requires, as a starting point, self-knowledge. By underpinning one’s purpose in life, self-knowledge stirs up the eagerness to decipher and interpret the signs that the everydayness presents. Through this, the writer’s creativity shatters conformity and silence; and the shock of the new replaces the comforts of the old. But because Elena remains an unengaged ‘‘reader’’ of the urban text unfolding in front of her, she does not see the concrete evidence of the human struggle between reason and desire, of the ambiguities and perils that govern it, and of the politics that through the ages regulated the advancement of one over the other without ever solving the original conflict. For the same reason, Naples’s signs, present everywhere along her itinerary, lend her an insight neither into the human struggle for self-realization nor into the web of ideological and political discourses that undergird them and that, like her resolve to break away from the chains of traditions, run counter to prescribed ideas. According to Borges (1964: 170), the way in which one reads foreshadows the likelihood of reshaping the divisive way in which one interacts with others. Were Elena capable of reading Naples’s text unfolding in front of her eyes, she would experience the transformative meanings that it holds and come closer to understanding herself. Through this, she could come to terms with and, perhaps, dispel the doubts that lack of self-knowledge engenders. In other words, if she were to ask demanding questions about herself and her relation to others in and from the city, and reflect about what draws her to them and gives scope to her objectives, Elena would find illuminating answers in the varied and conflicting truths found—like in Borges’s library—in the historical and cultural contexts of the Neapolitan streets that she mindlessly traverses. 8 Forum Italicum 0(0) But she remains indifferent to the places she goes past in part because she is—selfishly and naively—engrossed in a narrowly focused personal quest that precludes any sense of obligation and responsibility toward others: I had passed the exam. I would have a place of my own . . . I, Elena Grieco, the daughter of the porter, at nineteen years old was about to pull myself out of the neighborhood, I was about to leave Naples. (Ferrante, 2013: 327) Her words, spoken to summon the courage to carry on as well as in self-praise for having prevailed over the financial and social hurdles on her way to a liberating education, draw attention to Elena’s self-centered perspective. This inability to transcend her narrow interests and open her mind to the possibilities that the world she has imagined provides for her and those around her, further evidences Elena’s lack of introspection. Its absence, which mirrors the maze-like outing she undertakes, affects her understanding of what is real and important around her. That she misses the link between Naples’s history and her life, because life, like the city, is always shaped by various, intricate, and overlapping experiences, spotlights again Elena’s imprisonment in the labyrinth of the unexplored self. Thus, her failure to grasp what she must do to achieve her desired objectives is one and the same with her lack of confidence in pursuing them. And while the streets function as her (inconclusive and defeating) conduit to the topographical and self-fulfilling center she has long aspired to reach and belong to, by remaining oblivious to the ‘‘text’’ they produce, Elena turns into an individual whose walk, according to De Certeau’s (1984: 103) analysis, embodies ‘‘the definite process of being absent and in search of a proper’’ because ‘‘to walk is to lack a place.’’ Elena’s inattentive hunt for a ‘‘proper’’ emotional and personal center that emerges in her wandering through the city, her incapacity to decode Naples’s text—and her role in such a text—also discloses what De Certeau considers an ‘‘absence.’’ This stems from the fact that without a voice she can neither assert herself nor be part of the greater whole the city exemplifies.7 Because she fails to recognize the city as something greater than just the various neighborhoods that she traverses, Elena embodies dislocation. A still untrained master of signs in the labyrinth of self-discovery, she also misses the subtle parallels between Naples and her emotional fluctuations. The death place of Vergil whose Aeneas, through the guidance of the Cumaean Sybil, descended to the underworld where he learned from his father’s spirit about his future accomplishments and the destiny of Rome; a city with a past defined by internal uprisings and revolutions, prized by both French and Spanish powers who fought to subjugate it without ever quite completely succeeding. Throughout the centuries, Naples was celebrated for its ebullient spirit enmeshed in an unrivaled capacity for self-affirmation grounded in self-reflection; because of this, the city modeled a rehabilitative mindset rather than a retributive one. Naples reflected the intensity of its ways in all forms of art that it fostered, as well as culture, philosophy, and commerce. Its fame and achievements endured, etched on the imagination of ‘‘modern’’ Europe of which it was, along with Paris, the unrivaled Palma 9 capital. But none of this concerns Elena who is driven by her more compelling, if less cohesive, purpose. In this manner, unwittingly, and ironically, she turns into the writer of her own text (thereby adding another layer to the city’s). Hers, however, is one that, because of her insecurity, spells subjugation and passivity even while her desire for freedom and self-realization requires a source of agency, will, and self-reflection that can only be drawn from within. And self-knowledge is the starting point. In Foucault’s view, the transformation that the authorial self undergoes is tantamount to an aesthetic experience. According to him, through observation the beholder / reader experiences a change because of the self-involvement and self-reflection that are central to gazing as much as to reading (Lamb, 2005: 45–46). In this manner, the artist turns into her own spectator; and this experience leaves her changed.8 Foucault’s understanding sheds light on Elena’s (and Ferrante’s through her) discourse on the authorial self that is both the shaping force of writing and the object of its own reading. Elena’s awareness of herself as a changed, introspective, self-searching person surfaces when, as a published author, in Book Three of the tetralogy, she recognizes her book advertised in a store window and reflects: ‘‘the effort of finding a form had absorbed me. And the absorption had become that book, an object that contained me’’ (Ferrante, 2014: 53). Yet beyond illustrating her novel awareness of her authorial persona, these words sum up her understanding of the fraught and burdened relationship that links the writer to her book. Her reflection on the complex and ambivalent role of authorship, how it influences, shapes, and re-shapes the self, lays bare Elena’s grasp not only of her past, but especially of her present—even while it raises the larger question about her future, identity, and the even more intricate web of emotional attachments that she must come to terms with. Simultaneously created and creator, her book turns into a transformational force that lends a new aesthetic perspective to Elena’s understanding of the world, circumstances, and people around her. And as Foucault suggests, by way of the self-analysis that its writing required, the book frees her from the prison of memories, giving her a new sense of purpose that is underpinned by self-awareness.9 Her belief that, as its author, the book is an extension of herself becomes another way of recognizing who she is and of restoring her sense of self in terms of spirit, memory, and language. Yet her forward-looking assessment, resulting from a narrative bound to the past but seeking to devise a future, evokes once again the image of the self in the labyrinth. Although an affirmed and recognized author, Elena must still make sense of the ordinariness of everyday signs, continue to grapple with their meanings, and mine deeper into herself to untangle the knot of who she is as a writer and as a friend. Much like Elena’s labyrinthine wandering through Naples that corresponds to a totalizing, if subconscious, summary of a past she rejects, her book follows the twisty path of her memories. Written in Pisa in the arc of a few days, when the prospect of returning to Naples after graduation torments her because it means leaving behind the intellectual stimulation that, in her view, Pisa affords, Elena’s novel, as she describes in Book Two of the tetralogy, results from a painfully, if life-altering, 10 Forum Italicum 0(0) self-reflexive moment (Ferrante, 2013: 433).10 In bursts that make clear her difficulty in reconciling her perceived aesthetic, as well as emotional, dissonance between Naples and Pisa, Elena recounts the events that marked her summer in Ischia: a newlywed and unfaithful Lila, her (Elena’s) unrequited love for Nino, her rape by Nino’s father, and the tormented year that preceded her departure for Pisa. This initial dabbling with authorship, filtered through the prism of desires, regrets, and yearnings, shows Elena confronting her past and struggling with the realization that a return to Naples stands for failure. Her search for answers in the folds of her memory provides her with a sense of empowerment. By promoting an insider/ outsider dynamic analysis (author and character reading and understanding each other), her writing, which is a coherent narrative for processing events—especially those in which truth was regarded as relative—becomes her guide through her world, helps her make sense of it, and legitimizes her choices and actions within it. Through this, Elena realizes that answers are found neither in the abstract nor through a failure to master the labyrinth of the self. Rather, they are found in the awareness, and restoration—in terms of memory, language, and knowledge—of self (Benjamin, 1979: 296). Clinging to a new image of herself that is shaped by her experience as a university student who can lay claim to a set of norms based on mutual respect and accountability (norms conveniently disregarded by people in her old neighborhood) that hinges on balancing skepticism with open-mindedness, politics with idealism, and resolve with meaningfulness, Elena understands that the freedom she yearns for and the answers she searches for are found in the exploration of the self and its irreducible transformations—in their ugliness and beauty. They are found, in spite of the author’s fragile position, in her pouring herself into her writing—because the written word safeguards memory and meanings. They are found in the hard questions she poses about herself and in her role in the events that have shaped her life. They are found in the realization that the memory of the past pulses with the same intensity as the present, because, while the past challenges and influences the definition that she has constructed of herself, the present affords her a more encompassing perspective. Unsurprisingly, this pivots on hard eyed clarity and difficult choices. Simultaneously seductive and destructive, like Parthenope’s songs, authorship demands not only the exploration and wrestling of one’s place in the world, but especially one’s ability to face head-on, and perhaps toy with, the flaws that cause missing the ‘‘signs’’ that impede, or just postpone, reaching the labyrinth’s ‘‘center.’’ That Elena’s novel turns into a highly-acclaimed success after many personal vicissitudes parallels her farewell journey through Naples and is a reminder that, like the urban space, writing is a welter, a swirl, a maelstrom of phenomena and events that in a Borgeson sense at times defy logic and reason. Like Elena’s (disappointing) penetration of Naples and her failed decoding of the signs it presents, writing (the creative process) is a challenging and liberating experience that traverses time and space. The intrinsic connectedness between these two elements that converge in the figure of Narrator evokes Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, according to which time thickens and space becomes ‘‘charged and Palma 11 responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 85). As points of encounter among people across social and cultural boundaries, for Bakhtin roads take on an especially important chronotopic value because, by typifying the confluence of time, space, and cultures, roads—the places of people’s wanderings—implicitly acquire the rich metaphoric meaning of ‘‘path(s) of life.’’ Although it hinges on the flow of time, this metaphor encapsulates the conflicts, competitions, mastery, disappointments, and successes that shape humanity’s understanding of selfhood. In view of this, Elena’s wandering through Naples’s streets is telling, first, because it sets her on the same path—the educational journey—with literary antecedents such as Ulysses, Dante’s Pilgrim, Sir Gawain, Lancelot, Percival, Don Quixote, and Orlando among others. Second, because it foregrounds her ultimately fulfilling, if complicated, future as a woman, author, wife, mother, and lover. Still, the distance in time and space from the point in which the events she narrates occur—a constituent element in Ferrante’s nuanced plot—more than just reinforcing Elena’s original sense as an outsider to Naples allows her to grapple with and reject the notion that she is a bystander in rather than the architect of her life. The threads of meanings that she will extract from the past through her writing lay bear for her the relationship between lack of self-knowledge, displacement, and passivity. Thus, the incipit to her vita nova unfurls with a self-exploration buoyed by self-determination both of which enable her to swim free from the undertow of the past. At the same time, it is worth noting that, as the author who narrates her experience in a ‘‘novel’’ interpolated in another novel (Ferrante’s), like the unsystematic way she journeys through Naples, Elena embodies the author’s (Ferrante’s) fragmentation: anonymous and yet famous; an outsider in the publishing world who prevails (by way of her success) over the insiders; a woman in a man’s world. Not surprisingly, these types of fragmentation also frame other types of labyrinths that Ferrante creates within the tetralogy of her Neapolitan Novels and through which she holds the reader until the last page. Rooted in her social and economic background, and strengthened by her grasp of the great chasm between her education and social milieu, lack of self-confidence affects deeply her emotional and educational spheres. She believes that Nino is too bright to notice her and worries about her social awkwardness, and, for this reason, questions her intellectual abilities to earn a degree from the Normale. Cut off from the city’s center, she has explored, first with her friends and later alone, what lies beyond the limits of her working-class neighborhood. But in spite of those occasional jaunts, she has remained a voiceless and powerless stranger to the stimulating center both because the city reinforces her difference as an outsider and because of the inner chain of passivity that lack of self-knowledge brings on. Thus, as she winds her way through the streets of Naples in a last farewell and spirals down, literally, from the city’s northern end to the southern one in one last attempt to defy the sense of violation, exclusion, and anguish that accompanies her in her quest to become an insider, Elena shows that she has yet to overcome the ensnarement of the labyrinth of the self, master the exploration of her desires, and come to terms with who she is. 12 Forum Italicum 0(0) These flaws make her a passive outsider, a silent observer incapable of effecting and experiencing meaningful changes. In Greek mythology, after slaying the Minotaur, Theseus relies on Ariadne’s thread to escape the labyrinth. Like Theseus, Elena enters it willingly; unlike him, she lacks the master plan to exit. The itinerant walking mode she adopts to cross the city not only mirrors the absence of self-exploration, but also reveals her unpreparedness. Piazza dei Martiri, the center she reaches on an impulse after a convoluted navigation of Naples, believing that it will provide a life-line to the uncertainties that lie ahead, turns out to be a heartbreaking discovery—as the center often is: Nino and Lila are still together. In the face of her discovery—the minotaur she must slay—Elena’s desire for change exposes her vulnerability: she is alone, a stranger, and displaced in the center she yearned to reach and which turns out to be more problematic than she envisioned. Displacement, disruption, and surprise mark her arrival in Piazza dei Martiri. These emotions could also describe Elena’s future as a writer. According to Benjamin, these elements sustain the individual’s consciousness of any experience (Benjamin, 1968: 163). Elena’s discovery of Lila and Nino sets her off on a gradually more sustained self-analysis that will usher in the self-confidence needed to succeed. And although the emotional happy ending with Nino that she originally dreamed about turns out to be an impossibility—she will be his long-term lover while he remains married to the woman who replaces Lila—the hard decisions she makes as a mother and author attest to her gained self-knowledge. As a starting point for the exploration of the self with its labyrinthine detours, the journey to Naples’s center lends itself quite naturally as a shaping force in both Elena’s and Ferrante’s writing. Thus through a crisp, parenthetical, and circuitous prose, one that often doubles back on itself to offer a different perspective, Ferrante shows Elena’s difficult journey to and through self-knowledge. From this perspective, Elena’s journey is highly reminiscent of Dante’s. Like Dante through the Pilgrim, Ferrante through Elena demonstrates that the uncertainties one experiences along the way to self-knowledge are universal, inevitable, and all too human because any story about people is replete with hesitancies, ambivalences, indecisions, and chanciness grounded in the fact that no human is ever completely knowable. Awe of change and desire for self-fulfillment spur Elena away from the periphery and toward Naples’s center; anguish accompanies her aspiration; intricate paths, fierce and familiar, uncover the suffering and urgency that mark her journey. Isn’t this how self-analysis begins? Notes 1. ‘‘For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he [sic] experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work, of recollection’’ (Benjamin, 1968: 202), and ‘‘Memory . . . is not an instrument for exploring the past, but its theater. It is the medium of past experience . . . He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging . . . He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what Palma 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 13 constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth . . . and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding itself’’ (Benjamin, 1979: 314). Elena knows how to navigate the city in a logical fashion. During the two weeks she skipped school and visited different sections of the city, she followed carefully chosen itineraries and traveled them in a coherent progression: ‘‘I rummaged through used books in the stalls of Port’Alba (Piazza Dante) . . . and continued toward Toledo and the sea. Or I climbed the Vomero on Via Salvator Rosa, went up to San Martino, came back down by the Petraio. Or I explored the Doganella . . .’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 28). In ‘‘A Berlin chronicle’’, Benjamin (1979: 293–294) speaks of his city as a labyrinth. Ferrante refers to this theme: ‘‘C’e’ un brano di W. Benjamin a cui tengo molto. Ci trovo da anni tutto quello che mi serve . . . Mi riferisco al capitolo d’apertura di Infanzia berlinese . . . Imparare a perdersi in una città . . .’’ (Ferrante, 2003: 151). ‘‘I loved Nino . . . I never had any doubt about that . . . [his] girlfriend was in every way better than me, I already knew’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 156); ‘‘I hadn’t been equal to Nino’s brilliance . . .’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 29); and ‘‘I had thoroughly understood my inadequacy . . . So . . . stop striving’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 47). Elena’s reaction to Professor Galiani’s invitation to attend a party at her house evidences this: ‘‘for me it was as if I were to present myself at the royal palace’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 149). According to Augustine (1991: 74): ‘‘The city as a character in the novel is present when the human characters are confused, unformed or weak, out of touch with their prescribed set of values, thus shaky and uncertain in personal identity and consciousness – that is, they are in mental flux.’’ ‘‘[O]gni città esiste solo quando bruscamente entra nel sangue che muove le gambe e acceca gli occhi . . . per me il modello vero di coinvolgimento metropolitano è Napoli’’ (Ferrante, 2003: 151). ‘‘The private life of an individual . . . and his work are interrelated . . . because the work includes the whole life as well as the text’’; and ‘‘My relationship to my book on Roussel . . . is my secret affair’’ (Foucault, 1986: 184–185). ‘‘To write, to write with purpose . . . To study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts’’ (Foucault, 1986: 184–185). ‘‘One morning . . . I began to write, in the third person, about what had happened to me . . . I spent twenty days writing this story . . . Finally I reread some pages, I didn’t like them, and I forgot about them. But I found that I was calmer, as if shame had passed from me to the notebook’’ (Ferrante, 2013: 433). References Anderson S (ed.) (1978) On Streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Augustine J (1991) From topos to anthropoid: The city as character in twentieth-century texts. In: Caws MA (ed.) City Images. New York: Gordon and Breach, pp. 73–96. Bakhtin MM (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Translated by C Emerson and M Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Benjamin W (1968) Illuminations. Edited by H Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 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