In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

More generally, I believe that the sense I have of writing—and all the struggles it involves—has to do with the satisfaction of staying beautifully within the margins and, at the same time, with the impression of loss, of waste, because of that success.

The struggle is due to the fact that the present—the entire present, even that of the “I” who writes, letter by letter—can’t maintain with clarity the thought-vision, which always comes before, is always the past, and therefore tends to be blotted out.

For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?

When I finished a story, I was pleased, having the impression that it had come out perfectly; and yet I felt that it wasn’t I who had written it—that is, not the excited I, ready for anything, who was called to write, and who during the entire draft had seemed to be hidden in the words—but another I, who, tightly disciplined, had found convenient pathways solely in order to say: look, see what fine sentences I’ve written, what beautiful images, the story is finished, praise me.

My work, in fact, is founded on patience.

For me true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.

Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up. Thus the novel of love begins to satisfy me when it becomes the novel of being out of love. The mystery begins to absorb me when I know that no one will find out who the murderer is. The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built. Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly. And characters? I feel they are false when they exhibit clear coherence and I become passionate about them when they say one thing and do the opposite. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” say those extraordinary narrators who are the witches in Macbeth as they prepare to hover through the fog and filthy air. But we’ll talk about this and other things next time.

Say nothing, hear nothing, believe nothing! Just tell the thing as you will, I will listen as I can and believe as I am able.”

Second small discovery. I noticed that in literary work reality tended inevitably to be reduced to a rich repertory of tricks that, if skillfully used, gave the impression that the facts had arrived on the page just as they had happened, with all their sociological, political, psychological, ethical, etc., connotations. The opposite, therefore, of the thing as it is. Reality was a game of illusion that to succeed had to pretend that no one had told it, no one had written it, and the real was there, reproduced so well that it made you forget even the marks of the alphabet.

The challenge, I thought and think, is to learn to use with freedom the cage we’re shut up in.