In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

They were intended to indicate, by their color as well, that if your writing didn’t stay between those taut lines you would be punished. But I was easily distracted when I wrote, and while I almost always respected the margin on the left, I often ended up outside the one on the right, whether to finish the word or because I had reached a point where it was difficult to divide the word into syllables and start a new line without going outside the margin. I was punished so often that the sense of the boundary became part of me, and when I write by hand I feel the threat of the vertical red line even though I haven’t used paper like that for years.

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.

Here Svevo makes an observation that is important to me. 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.

the vision fled, and writing was destined to a frustrating approximation. It was too slow to capture the brain wave. The “so many letters” were slow, they strove to capture the past while they themselves became the past, and much was lost. When I reread myself, I had the impression that a voice flitting around my head was carrying more than what had actually become letters.

she expressed lovesickness and the written word in a continuous cycle, which led her, inevitably, to discover the disparity between the poem and the subject of the poem, or, in one of her formulas, between the living object that kindles the fire of love and “the mortal tongue encased in human flesh.”

I was afraid, as I said, that it was precisely my female nature that kept me from bringing the pen as close as possible to the pain I wanted to express. 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?

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

Time passed and things got complicated.

At that point, by chance—which is the case with almost everything, and so also with the books that are truly helpful—I happened to read Jacques the Fatalist and His Master. I’m not going to talk about what’s important in Jacques; I would have to begin with Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which precedes and influences it, and I would never end, but, if you haven’t read them, believe me, these are books that discuss how difficult it is to tell a story and yet intensify the desire to do it.

I had read a lot of books on these subjects, including pointlessly complex passages, and here, plainly expressed, I found some consolation. If every novel I wrote, hefty or slim, turned out to be far from my aspirations—I had boundless ambitions—maybe the reason was not only my incapacity. Telling the real, Jacques emphasized, is constitutionally difficult; you have to deal with the fact that the teller is always a distorting mirror. So? Better to give up? No, the master answers, you don’t have to throw everything away: it’s arduous to speak truthfully, but you do your best.

There was my urge to exaggerate defects, minimize virtues, and vice versa. Most important, I glimpsed, I think for the first time, the hazy area of what I could have written in that book but that would have hurt me to write, and so I hadn’t done it.

Fifth small discovery. Literary work couldn’t seriously force the whirlpool of debris that constituted the real into any grammatical or syntactical order.

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.

he couldn’t avoid the idea that encasing human experience in the alphabet is an art susceptible to searing disappointments.