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.

 

Before I go on, let me return to Gertrude Stein and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I’d like to take from it a few more things that are important to me on the theme of writing that’s inspired by other writing and, if it goes well, finds its truth.

The “genuine ‘real life,’” as Dostoyevsky called it, is an obsession, a torment for the writer. With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction. In that book Gertrude Stein called Hemingway a coward: “yellow,” she said. And she said it because in her opinion Ernest, rather than telling the story of the true Hemingway, about whom he would certainly have written a great work, confined himself to “confessions”—so she called them—comfortable confessions, confessions that, she insisted, were good for advancing his career.

Let’s leave aside the art of saying mean things in a good-humored tone, which is also plentiful in the Autobiography. In substance Stein’s charge is not: Hemingway tries to tell the truth but presents false confessions. The charge is: Hemingway, who could use his talent to write about his real self, offers us a literary product that is well made, successful, but false for opportunistic reasons. At this point the next question has to be: if Hemingway, who could effectively write the story of the real Ernest, fabricates only “confessions” that are useful for his career, what does Stein do in order not to tar herself with the same brush and to write about the real Gertrude?

I’ll tell you my idea. Stein doesn’t confine herself to writing about her own existence in the world, keeping within an easily manageable literary form, which she calls, a little brusquely, “confession.” Nor does she confine herself, as she knows very well how to do, to establishing a style; that is, imposing her own tonality on words and phrases. But she takes a highly structured genre like autobiography and deforms it. That is her differentness, and maybe Dickinson would say: that is her skill as a witch. She introduces the personal information of Alice and herself and others, the biographical material of Alice and herself and others, not into an easily manageable literary form but into the fiction of an easily manageable literary form, and therefore a form that, precisely because it’s false, can and must be deformed.

Just think about what you find on the cover of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. There, apparently, is an ironic reference to the effects of truth that the book originally intended, pretending to offer readers not made-up stories but true accounts of journeys to the underworld, true rediscovered manuscripts, true letters, true diaries. That is, if Gertrude Stein were continuing to apply the old form, she would have to present as true the invented autobiography of some character of her creation. Instead the form receives a blow that deforms it. Gertrude Stein, a real person, calls herself the author—author—of an autobiography written by Alice Toklas, a person not invented but real, in which the autobiographical “I” talks largely not about herself but about someone else, that is, Gertrude Stein, a brilliant real person.

Some will say that it is, therefore, merely a “bizarre subterfuge.” But that’s an ungenerous reductivism. Stein is, rather, demonstrating that writing about the true Gertrude isn’t simply a matter of writing truthfully but involves applying force to the great containers of literary writing, to the forms that at the moment seem most comfortable, most beautiful, and instead are a death trap for our intention to write “truthfully.” To do this, she treats the “I” that is writing about itself—Alice B. Toklas, the source of the biographical truth—as a fiction, as a woman whose “life and opinions” must be written about in the form of autobiography, as a Huckleberry Finn is written by the pen of Mark Twain. But, having done that, she inserts a dizzying, disruptive element of fiction, which comes from the true Alice. Toklas is the real typist of Stein’s texts, she helps correct the proofs. She is therefore—as she says in the text—the reader who knows Stein’s writing most thoroughly. And, indeed, in the fiction she continuously gives the impression that she’s correcting, adding, clarifying, annotating, to the point where the fake autobiography seems like a text that the two women have in fact written, one beside the other, one dictating, the other at the typewriter, pausing, remembering, reflecting.

This is what upends the traditional relations between invented story, autobiographical truth, and biographical truth, making Stein’s book a great lesson for the “I” who wants to write, surely a more stimulating lesson, today, than what we might get from Hemingway’s books. Ernest’s mistake is to succeed by prudently respecting the rules of an old, well-known game; Gertrude’s virtue is to succeed by sticking to the old, well-known game but in order to disrupt it and bend it to her purposes.

 

Naturally the Stein-Hemingway question has within it a substantial problem: cowardice or not, career or not, writing with truth is really difficult, perhaps impossible. In Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky has his terrible protagonist say:

 

We’ve become so estranged that at times we feel some kind of revulsion for genuine “real life,” and therefore we can’t bear to be reminded of it. Why, we’ve reached a point where we almost regard “real life” as hard work, as a job, and we’ve all agreed in private that it’s really better in books.

(Translated by Michael Katz)

 

Anyone who has literary ambitions knows that the motivations, both great and small, that impel the hand to write come from “real life”: the yearning to describe the pain of love, the pain of living, the anguish of death; the need to straighten the world that is all crooked; the search for a new morality that will reshape us; the urgency to give voice to the humble, to strip away power and its atrocities; the need to prophesy disasters but also to design happy worlds to come from there. One morning something may shift inside me, maybe just a wrong that was done to my mother, and the “I” looks out, dying to write, and I start putting down the first lines of a story. Immediately a long tradition made up of others’ stories crowds around, stories that have moved or angered me, that resemble mine, not to mention the language of books, newspapers, films, television, songs, or a pile of tricks good for pushing “real life” into writing—all things that I learned almost without noticing. It’s natural for me to insert my confused experience into that collection of formulas. And it’s a great moment. If I’m lucky, if I have some talent, sentences arrive that seem to say what I want to say just as it should be said. Then I can tell myself proudly: that’s my voice, with my voice I am describing my real life. And others will say it to me, too, and I’ll look for that cadence of mine every time, and if it doesn’t appear I’ll be afraid I’ve lost it, and if it does appear I’ll be afraid of using it up.

You hear? My, my, my. How often we repeat that possessive adjective. In fact, a first big step forward, in the matter of writing, is to discover exactly the opposite: that what we triumphantly consider ours belongs to others. Dealings with the world, yes, at any time they are entirely ours. But the words—the written form in which we enclose them, attentive to the red margins of our notebooks—are not. We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing. Writing is, rather, entering an immense cemetery where every tomb is waiting to be profaned. Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. We mustn’t let ourselves be flattered by those who say: here’s someone who has a tonality of her own. Everything, in writing, has a long history behind it. Even my uprising, my spilling over the margins, my yearning is part of an eruption that came before me and goes beyond me. Thus when I talk about my “I” who writes, I should immediately add that I’m talking about my “I” who has read (even when it’s a question of distracted reading, the trickiest kind of reading). And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I’ve taken in. That is, writing about our own joys and wounds and sense of the world means writing in every way, always, knowing that we are the product, good or bad, of encounters and clashes, sought out and accidental, with the stuff of others. The most serious error of the “I” who writes, the most serious naiveté, is the Robinsonian: imagining oneself, that is, as a Robinson who is smug about his life on the desert island, pretending that all the odds and ends he carried off the ship haven’t contributed to his success; or like a Homer who doesn’t confess to himself that he’s working on materials that have been elaborated and transmitted orally. We don’t do that, but we remake “real life.” And as soon as we realize it, then, if we’re not cowards, we search desperately for a way to tell the genuine “real life.”

 

Thus writing is a cage and we enter it right away, with our first line. It’s a problem that has been confronted with suffering, I would say with anguish, precisely by those who have worked with the most dedication and engagement. Ingeborg Bachmann, for example, insisted all her life on the effort to “speak truly.” In her Frankfurt lectures, 1959-60, she speaks of the plurality of the “I” who writes—the fourth lecture is entitled just that: The I Who Writes—and of the permanent risk of falsehood, in a way that for those who love literature is still needed today. A rule that was important for me figures in her fifth lecture:

 

We have to work hard with the bad language that we have inherited to arrive at that language which has never yet ruled, but which rules our intuition, and which we imitate.

 

I would place the emphasis there: we have to work hard with the bad language. I would emphasize it before offering another citation, from a 1955 interview, that struck me and that I’ve often found useful, adapting it, as I have many passages of Bachmann’s. The interviewer is asking her about the complicated, abstract language of contemporary poetry, and she says:

 

I believe that old images, like Mörike’s or Goethe’s, can no longer be used, that they shouldn’t be used anymore, because in our mouths they would sound false. We have to find true sentences, which correspond to the condition of our conscience and to this changed world.

 

You see: there’s the pressure of the changed world; there’s the conscience that records its sins; there’s a language that asks for power; there’s the “I” who writes, who intuits the language and tries to change that intuition into true sentences. But the fact is that we can’t set aside the old images, the bad language. They’re right in front of us, they exist. Where will we get new images, good language? Our writing has to work on the writing that exists—false in our mouths even if it’s Mörike’s, Goethe’s—if it wants to get what’s not there yet. Work how, though? Let’s look at one last passage from Bachmann’s first Frankfurt lecture:

 

Moreover quality can now and then be found in an average person’s poem, in a good short story, in an attractive, clever novel; it is not in short supply; there is certainly no lack of experts, even today, and there are flukes, or oddities, or deviant productions on the fringes that can become personal favorites of ours. And yet only a trajectory, a continuous manifestation, a mathematical constant, an unmistakable world of words, a world of characters, and a world of conflicts, can prompt us to see a writer as inevitable.

 

It’s true, tragically true. Any of us can do something good, in writing, when the world gives us a shove, but a true writer is inevitable only when we recognize in the work a unique and unmistakable universe of words, figures, conflicts. Yet where and how that well-made true universe has been established and developed, using the bad language and the inherited false words, well, it remains difficult to say. Over the years, I’ve often changed my idea. But I’ve never stopped believing in the importance of the writing we’ve inherited, which the “I” who writes, like it or not, is made of. Nor have I ever underestimated the chance occurrence that sets off the hand that writes, when it goes fishing for gifts in the “bad language.” Like Bachmann, I think it’s right to make a distinction between a beautiful poem, a good story, an attractive, clever novel by an average person and the work of one who is inevitably an author. It’s a distinction that’s fundamental for the fate of literature. But I tend to imagine, first, that the ordinary person and the extraordinary person set off from the same terrain: literary writing with its cathedrals, its country parishes, its tabernacles in dark alleys; and, second, that chance—the hand that rummages in the bran pie and pulls out words—plays the same role in both the minor work and the great work. True sentences, good or epochal, always seek a path of their own within clichés. And clichés were once true sentences that dug a way out among clichés. In this chain of works great and small, in every link large or small, there is hard work and accidental illuminations, effort and luck. The road to Damascus isn’t as well marked as the road dedicated to revelation. It’s a road like any other on which, slogging and sweating, we may by chance become aware of another possible way.

Thus in order to devote ourselves to literary work must we subscribe to the great scroll of writing? Yes. Writing inevitably has to reckon with other writing, and it’s from the terrain of the already written that the sentence might jump out that sets in motion a small admirable book or the great book that displays a trajectory and constructs a unique world of words, characters, and conflicts.

 

If that’s true for the male “I” who writes, it’s even more so for the female. A woman who wants to write has unavoidably to deal not only with the entire literary patrimony she’s been brought up on and in virtue of which she wants to and can express herself but with the fact that that patrimony is essentially male and by its nature doesn’t provide true female sentences. Since I was six my “I” made of writing has consumed writing mostly by men, considering it universal, and my own scribbling comes from it. Not only that. This female “I” brought up on male writing also has had to incorporate a kind of writing by women for women that belonged to it, was appropriate to it—writing in itself minor precisely because it was barely known by men, and considered by them something for women, that is, inessential. I’ve known in my life very cultured men who not only had never read Elsa Morante or Natalia Ginzburg or Anna Maria Ortese but had never read Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf. And I myself, as a girl, wished to avoid as far as possible writing by women: I felt I had different ambitions.

I mean that our “I”—the female “I” who writes—has had an arduous journey; she is still finding her way and will go on doing so indefinitely. As soon as we try to write something, one more problem regarding the inadequacy of the writing is added to those I’ve tried to list: that not a single page, whether polished or rough, speaks our truth as women completely, in fact often doesn’t speak it at all. We notice an excess leaking out, for which a special container is needed, but if it goes well we manage to find only one that is compatible. Here is a poem by the Mexican poet María Guerra:

 

I lost a poem.

Already written

And ready on the page

To put in the form of a book

I looked in vain.

It was a poem

With a vocation for wind.

 

This is precisely what happens to our efforts to write: the words are ready para formar el libro, says María Guerra, and yet they won’t stay in the form, they overflow the margins, get lost in the wind.

As a child it seemed to me that that’s how things were. As a child I felt excessive, I went too far. It wasn’t only a question of writing. Speech, too, was obliged to stay shut up in women’s conversations; or in the sentences considered speakable, with the proper female tonality, in dialogue with males; or in the words that were obscenely theirs and that we said laughing but also disgusted. The rest was silent, we could never express ourselves fully. We drew on spoken Italian in the false speech of radio and television, but that was no good. Dialect didn’t help, either. There was always something that didn’t work, that made us uneasy.

I’ve had problems with dialect; I’ve never managed to convince myself that it allowed more truth than written Italian. Italo Svevo, who through Zeno Cosini considered every confession written in Tuscan Italian a lie, believed that things turned out better for him in the Triestine dialect. For a long time I, too, believed that about Neapolitan, and worked on it a lot. I love my city, and it seemed to me that Naples couldn’t be written about without its language. Significant passages of Troubling Love and even of the Neapolitan Novels were written in dialect, but in the end I either eliminated them or transformed them into an Italian with a Neapolitan cadence. This is because dialectal vocabulary and syntax, as soon as they’re written, seem even more false than Italian. The transcription should give an effective imitation of speech; and instead, to my ear, it seems a betrayal. Once written, besides, Neapolitan seems sterilized. It loses passion, loses affect, loses the sense of danger it often communicated to me. In my childhood and adolescence it was the language of coarse male vulgarity, the language of the violence of men calling to you on the street, or, contrarily, the sugary-sweet language with which women were taken in. My emotion, naturally, part of my personal experiences. Gradually, I began to find it could be effective in a literary work, not used as it typically is in the realist tale but as a subterranean stream, a cadence within the language, a caption, a disturbance in the writing that suddenly erupts with a few, usually obscene words.

The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in. It’s a painful contradiction: how can one use a cage with freedom, whether it’s a solid literary genre or established expressive habits or even the language itself, dialect? A possible answer seemed to me Stein’s: adapting and at the same time deforming. Maintain distance: yes, but only to then get as close as possible. Avoid the pure outburst? Yes, but then burst out. Aim at consistency? Yes, but then be inconsistent. Make a polished, highly polished, draft, until the words no longer encounter friction with the meanings? Yes, but then leave it rough. Overload the genres with conventional expectations? Yes, but in order to disappoint them. That is, inhabit the forms and then deform everything that doesn’t contain us entirely, that can’t in any way contain us. It seemed to me effective for the ornate lies of the great literary catalogue to show lumps and cracks, to bang against one another. I hoped that an unexpected truth would emerge, surprising me above all.

 

That is how I worked, especially with the most recent books I’ve published, the Neapolitan Novels and The Lying Life of Adults. I don’t know if they’re successful or not, I don’t know that about any of my books. But I do know that, much more than the first three, they have at their center the act of telling the story and telling the story of women’s lives. In the other books the protagonists were writing for themselves; they were writing autobiographies, diaries, confessions, driven by hidden wounds. Now that the first-person narrator has friends, the work is not to write for herself about dealings with the world but to write about the others, to be written about by them, in a complex interplay of identification and estrangement.

In the Neapolitan Novels, I intended the story of the writing—of Elena’s writing, of Lila’s writing, and in fact that of the author herself—to be the thread that holds together the entire encounter-clash between the two friends and, with it, the fiction of the world, of the epoch within which they act. I took that trajectory because I’d become convinced in recent years that every narrative should include, within itself, the adventure of its writing, what gives it form. As a result I tried to tell a story structurally based on the fact that ever since they were children the two protagonists have tried to subjugate the hostile world around them through reading and writing. They buy the first book in their lives with the dirty money of a camorrist. They read it together and plan to write a book together to become rich and powerful. But Lila breaks the pact and writes a child’s book by herself, whose writing so impresses Lenù that for the rest of her life she is driven to try to contain it in her own.

I’ve already spoken about the two kinds of writing I know—diligent writing and writing that goes beyond boundaries—and still have no control over. I’ve talked about suggestions derived from Cavarero, from Emilia and Amalia, from Toklas and Stein, from Dickinson, from Bachmann. All this—and other things that I don’t have time to discuss—contributed to the creation of Lenù, who wants to contain Lila’s convulsive talent in her diligence, and Lila, who prods her friend, molds her existence, claims from her more and more.

The “I” who writes and publishes is Lenù’s. Throughout the Neapolitan Novels, we never know anything of Lila’s extraordinary writing except what Lenù summarizes for us, or the little that emerges in Lenù’s writing. I said to myself at a certain point: you should make up some passages from Lila’s letters or notebooks. But it seemed to me inconsistent with Lenù’s rebellious inferiority, with her deluded autonomy that aims, in a process as complex as it is contradictory, at absorbing Lila by taking away her power, and empowering Lila by absorbing her. And, besides—I confessed when the book was going well—would I who write along with Lenù, I, the author, even be able to create Lila’s writing? Am I not inventing that extraordinary writing just to describe the inadequacy of my own?

During one phase of drafting the story, I developed the idea that Lila entered Lenù’s computer and improved the text, mixing her way of writing with her friend’s. I wrote many pages in which Elena’s diligent writing changed, was fused, confused with Lila’s uncontrollable writing. But those attempts seemed artificial and in essence incongruous: I left only a few traces of that possible development. Especially since, if I had taken that direction, it would have meant that, progressively changing Lenù’s writing into collaborative writing with Lila’s, I would have had to decisively change the overall design of the narrative. It would have meant that, once Lila had broken the pact of writing a book together with Lenù, Lenù, when it came to writing, would have been unable to write anything but a randomly successful novel, like Hemingway’s books for Stein, like the books by the average people Bachmann cites, those, that is, who make a career but no more. Lenù, on the level of writing, had to be fulfilled but without true satisfaction. She knows that Lila doesn’t like her books. She knows that, writing, she puts her friend’s writing in the margins. She knows that by herself she will never get past the bad language, the old images that ring false, while her friend probably has. Inserting into this structure a fusion of the two kinds of writing, a confusion, meant reaching a happy ending in which what the two girls hadn’t done—write a book together—they did now as adults in a sort of final book that is the story of their lives. Impossible, for me. While I was writing the Neapolitan Novels, an ending like that was inconceivable.

 

Something changed recently. While I was planning The Lying Life of Adults I thought again of the Dickinson poem that I cited at the beginning of today’s talk, and only then, after all this time, became aware of an important moment. Let’s hear it again:

 

Witchcraft was hung, in History,

But History and I

Find all the Witchcraft that we need

Around us, every Day—

 

What had I not paid attention to? I hadn’t paid attention to how “History and I” generated an “us” and a space “around us.” Although the Neapolitan quartet had been motivated by those lines, it wasn’t successful. In the tumult of History, in the crowd of female characters with their stories, the narrative thread, so as not to risk breaking, held on to the you and I. Of course, in relation to the sealed “I” of the three preceding books, the reciprocal inleiarsi, or entering into each other (a Dantesque word), of Lila and Lenù was a giant step.

But now, in my view, a new limit emerged. The original sin of the two friends was to believe they could do it on their own, the former as a child, the latter as an adult. They are encapsulated in the distinction between those who from the bad language create only small books and those who instead are able to write inevitable books: Lenù who ends up with the meagerness and perishability of her own works, recognized by her daughters among others, and Lila who avoids any publication, giving herself a permanent escape.

With The Lying Life I tried to do something else. I conceived a story in which you don’t know who the woman-character writing is. It could be any of those who appear in the story, and could pretend to be the “I” of Giovanna, starting, of course, with Giovanna herself. The story was to be very long, to oscillate perpetually between lie and truth, with a comprehensive title that summed up the condition of a majority of the female characters: widowhood. I myself, in my function as author, was to enter the scene, describing my difficulties in writing and the effort of holding together different sources, incoherent narrative segments, sensibilities that were similar yet in conflict, very different qualities of writing. But already with the first endless draft my strength failed. The undertaking seemed to me fated to remain incomplete, more a tangle than a story. I rule out, at the moment, going beyond the volume-preamble I’ve published, and, besides, it seems to me that that book can manage on its own.

 

I now think that if literature written by women wants to have its own writing of truth, the work of each of us is needed. For a long span of time we’ll have to give up the distinction between those who make only average books and those who create inevitable verbal universes. Against the bad language that historically doesn’t provide a welcome for our truth, we have to confuse, fuse our talents, not a line should be lost in the wind. We can do it. And in connection with this, I’d like to reflect yet again on the Dickinson poem that so far today has guided us:

 

Witchcraft was hung, in History,

But History and I

Find all the Witchcraft that we need

Around us, every Day—

 

I believe that the pure and simple joining of the female “I” to History changes History. The History of the first line, the one that hangs the witch’s work on the gallows—note, something important has happened—is not, can no longer be, the History of the second, the one with which we find, around us, all the witchcraft we need.