The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Literature Now)

by Sarah Chihaya

In contrast, affidamento imagined that women could build relations independent of men, modeled on the ties between mothers and daughters. These relations did not always entail alignment. Nonalignment was key to figuring the idea of the political as an assortment of individuals rather than a falsely single voice.

The friends we truly love are at once the most real people in the world to us and the least real.

“What decides the success of a character is often half a sentence, a noun, an adjective that jams the psychological machine like a wrench thrown into the works and produces an effect that is no longer that of a well-regulated device, but of flesh and blood, of genuine life, and therefore incoherent and unpredictable,” Ferrante writes to me. “It’s the moment when the psychological framework breaks and the character acquires density.”

“The thing she really told me was, ‘I care about the density,’ ” he explains in our interview. “We worked on that word a lot with the kids, also with the girls.” He illustrates the concept with a metaphor he has borrowed from Ferrante. Imagine that the lines an actress reads are a river that runs calmly along the surface of the earth. Then imagine that the actresses are the earth, and that under the earth is another river, a wilder one whose current leaps in the opposite direction, whose roar is muted. Every time the actress speaks her lines, she must offer a glimpse of the river that runs beneath: the mysterious churn of her consciousness, the lawlessness of a person’s doubts or desires.

Elsewhere Ferrante has referred to these hidden depths as frantumaglia, “an unstable landscape, an infinite aerial or aquatic mass of debris that appears to the I, brutally, as its true and unique inner self.”12 In the novels, Lila has brief spells of terror when she perceives the margins of the people around her dissolving, exposing their greed, their ferocity, their meanness; spells of chaos and destruction when—to borrow Ferrante’s metaphor—the river rises and floods the earth with “excruciating anguish … a vortex like-fracturing of material living and dead.”

The senselessness of our inner lives, and the impossibility of representing that senselessness through language, is what density registers and conceals.