While I was in Durham early in the week for a medical appointment, I visited my current favorite nearby bookstore, Regulator Books, where I bought, among other things, Elena Ferrante’s new collection of essays, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. I love Ferrante, so I almost immediately read the first essay (originally a lecture), “Pain and Pen,” where she writes about writing, and thinks about her own situation through some other writers’ work, including some quotations from Woolf. She describes her difficulty as a woman writer writing within the male tradition, and how that complicates her sense of herself writing:
I began to think explicitly of having two kinds of writing: ones that had been mine since my school years, and which had always assured me praise from the teachers (Brava, you’ll be a writer someday); and another that peeped out by surprise and then vanished, leaving me unhappy. Over the years that unhappiness took different forms, but in essence it’s still there. (28-29)
She plays around with that division and the way it extends into her being:
For much of my life I’ve written careful pages in the hope that they would be preliminary pages, and that the irrepressible burst [of the real writing] would arrive, when the I writing from its fragment of the body abruptly seizes all the possible I’s, the entire head, the entire body, and, so empowered, begins to run, drawing into the net the world it needs. (29)
There is this division between her body and her writing, and that division is what keeps her from breaking out of that male tradition and into something that feels more real, authentic, female.
She turns to two passages from Woolf (A Writer’s Diary, but with no dates or page numbers, and I don’t have the volume, only the sequence of Diaries volumes), and I think it will get clearer why I’m writing about Ferrante in my Waves response. First, a shred of conversation with Lytton Strachey:
“And your novel?”
“Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”
“That’s what’s so wonderful. And
it’s all different.”
“Yes, I’m 20 people.”
Ferrante reads the bran pie image as a suggestion that “the act of writing is a pure tempting of fate,” and then seizes on this rejection of the singular writing I: “what writing captures doesn’t pass through the sieve of a singular I, solidly planted in everyday life, but is twenty people, that is a number thrown out there to say: when I write, not even I know who I am” (30-31).
From there Ferrante gets to the second passage from Woolf’s diary:
It’s a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life—yes, that’s why I disliked so much the irruption of Sydney—one must become externalized; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain. Sydney comes and I’m Virginia; when I write I’m merely a sensibility. Sometimes I like being Virginia, but only when I’m scattered and various and gregarious. Now . . . I’d like to be only a sensibility. (qtd. 31)
Ferrante comments: “Woolf’s idea seems clear: writing is camping out in her own brain, without getting lost in the very numerous, varied, inferior modalities with which every day, as Virginia, she lives a raw life” (31).
All that was in my memory when I started chapter 3, and encountered Bernard’s early remark, “Every hour something new is unburied in the great bran pie” (56). That weird image of a food I still need to Google, immediately resonated back to Ferrante’s essay, and it got me thinking about the writing self—something very much on Bernard’s mind too. He says:
“I am not one and simple, but complex and many.” (56)
“They [other people] do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard.” (56)
“But you understand, you my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make the midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs—they have given up calling for a self who does not come), you understand that I am only superficially represented, by what I was saying to-night.” (57)
“Very few of you who are now discussing me have the double capacity to feel, to reason.” (57)
Re the letter he is writing: “I must give her the impression that though he—for this is not myself—is writing in such an off-hand, such a slap-dash way, there is some subtle suggestion of intimacy and respect.” (58)
“But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over this grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am I?” (60)
“Again, from some slight twitch I guess your feeling; I have escaped you; I have gone buzzing like a swarm of bees, endlessly vagrant, with none of your power of fixing remorselessly upon a single object. But I will return.” (64)
And some of Bernard’s search to find what I suppose people today might call “his own voice” is by reading Byron and then hoping his own writing will achieve the cadence, the rhythm, of Byron’s. There is that tradition that brings Ferrante dis-ease.
It unsettles Neville, too. He says of/to Bernard: “You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character” (64). And then he says of himself, by contrast: “I am one person—myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore” (65). Is this a difference between the lyric sensibility and that of a novelist? That in writing lyric one must (according to Neville) remain very much oneself (one self), although writing a novel cannot allow that?
Aside: I paused at the white space between the section of the boys and the section of the girls, and took a nap, because my morning walk had tired me out. And I dreamed of these swirling voices and sensibilities. I’m going to stop here, because this is already so long.
No comments:
Post a Comment