Italian Culture

ISSN: 0161-4622 (Print) 1559-0909 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yitc20

Elena Ferrante: Parole Chiave

Adalgisa Giorgio

To cite this article: Adalgisa Giorgio (2019): Elena Ferrante: Parole Chiave, Italian Culture, DOI:
10.1080/01614622.2019.1683276

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01614622.2019.1683276

Published online: 14 Nov 2019.

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ITALIAN CULTURE, 000–000

Book Review

Elena Ferrante: Parole Chiave. By TIZIANA DE ROGATIS. Pp. 295. Rome: Edizioni e/o, 2018.
Tiziana de Rogatis has written the perfect monograph to illuminate the myriad facets of
the quadrilogy L’amica geniale (2011–2014) within the context of Elena Ferrante’s com-
plete works. Her parole chiave approach is entirely appropriate to a first, comprehensive
interpretation, guiding us through the intricacies of a sixty-year friendship between two
women from a poor Neapolitan neighbourhood set against the dramatic changes that
have affected Italian politics and society since the 1950s. The monograph consists of
seven compelling chapters, each on a theme/aspect or set of themes/aspects which emerge
from a mosaic of key words (sometimes derived from feminist theory) that de Rogatis
examines with the support of the copious scholarship on Ferrante and Ferrante’s own
reflections, as expressed, mostly, in Frantumaglia. A Writer’s Journey (Rome: Edizioni e/o,
2015). De Rogatis’s reading is both sophisticated and captivating, fit for a cycle of novels
which is simultaneously demanding and mesmerizing and has appealed to a vast yet dis-
cerning culturally-diverse readership. The monograph accounts for this appeal by disclos-
ing Ferrante’s skilful construction of a formally composite and conceptually complex
narrative that deploys a variety of materials and devices, including those characteristic of
letteratura di consumo, and engages, by way of Naples, with issues of postmodernity that
concern different peoples around the globe. It is impossible to do justice to the richness
of this monograph and the numerous aspects of Ferrante’s work that it brings to light.
Here I will outline the core concepts of each chapter, also highlighting how de Rogatis
extends Ferrante’s notion of smarginatura─ a loss of physical, mental, and emotional
boundaries which affects the characters─ to other elements of the quadrilogy, making it
the kernel of Ferrante’s poetics.
Chapter 1, “Una narrazione geniale e popolare,” focuses on the formal aspects and
their thematic implications, thus preparing the ground for the following chapters. The
incorporation into the form of the realist novel of features of such other genres and sub-
genres as the female K€ unstlerroman, the historical novel, the sentimental novel, the 19th
Century feuilleton, the thriller, the Neapolitan sceneggiata, and the fotoromanzo, makes
the quadrilogy a “hypergenre,” a hotbed of experimentation with generic conventions
and expectations. The “low” genres serve as channels for the magmatic material of the
characters’ inner lives. The story unfolds on the double track of the “racconto nel
racconto” (pp. 46, 51): Elena’s attempts to capture Lila’s life together with her own in a
detached, organizing metanarrative continually capsize under the emotions and traumas
that rage underneath, resulting in a smarginatura of narrative structure and plot.
Chapter 2, “L’amicizia femminile,” examines the bond between Lila and Elena as a
“practice of difference.” Following Ferrante’s views, de Rogatis proposes that the quadril-
ogy challenges the widespread belief that women are incapable of establishing loyal and
transparent relations with one another, which results in female friendships being ruled by
jealousy and envy. Women writers, Ferrante has also suggested, should not succumb to
the temptation of writing edifying stories of women friends, but should depict the
“imperfezione” of female friendships alongside their oftentimes unrecognized value as
strong foundational bonds for women in real life (p. 59). De Rogatis fruitfully analyses
Elena’s and Lila’s friendship according to Ferrante’s suggested poetics, uncovering the

© 2019 American Association for Italian Studies DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2019.1683276

2 BOOK REVIEW

process of subtraction and addition underpinning it, whereby one friend loses when the
other gains. It is a mechanism of reciprocal support and desire for each other’s recogni-
tion, which also requires ransacking each other’s energies, abilities, affections, and inner
life. De Rogatis’ phrase “complementarita asimmetrica” (p. 74) conveys perfectly the
alternation of symbiosis and alterity between the protagonists, which makes it impossible
to resolve their emotional entanglement and the attendant indeterminacies of the plot. It
is in the intricate amalgam of envy and recognition, in de Rogatis’s views, that lies the
novelty and originality of Ferrante’s story, which has sanctioned its success among
women globally.
Chapters 3 and 4, “Smarginatura frantumaglia sorveglianza: tra figlie e madri” and
“Napoli, la «citta-labirinto»,” delve into Ferrante’s treatment of female subjectivity by
means of the intersecting themes of love/desire and place/space. De Rogatis dissects the
protagonists’ changing relationships with each other, men, mothers, neighbourhood, and
city through Ferrante’s spatial notions of smarginatura and frantumaglia─the fragmenta-
tion of life. In Chapter 3, she equates smarginatura with the fall into the dark cave of the
maternal, represented through a number of literal and metaphorical spaces. The threat of
the fall is constant, directing the plot and affecting the lives of the protagonists, who try
to ward it off through sorveglianza, acts of self-restraint and self-control which include
writing. Chapter 4 identifies a sharply divided Naples─ plebs versus bourgeoisie; poor,
primitive suburbs versus affluent, sophisticated, and modern inner city areas─that grad-
ually evolves into a hybrid city through loss of internal borders: a labyrinth of postmod-
ern, violent peripheries as can be found today around the world. This is yet another
aspect that, according to de Rogatis, makes the quadrilogy a global novel.
Naples is further explored in Chapter 5, “Le due lingue, l’emigrazione e lo studio,”
through the Italian-dialect antithesis. Since dialect is “raccontato” and only rarely
quoted, it remains a constant phantasmatic presence that smargina, invades, Elena’s
Italian (and Ferrante’s seemingly neutral Italian): “una marea dialettale” of hatred and
violence (p. 171) that reminds her of her origins and keeps her in a position of oppression
and subalternity. Space is once again fundamental: Elena subjects herself to a
“sorveglianza espressiva” (p. 175), when she migrates to the elite environments of high
school in Naples and university in Pisa, training herself in a language that alienates her
from Lila, family, and neighbourhood. De Rogatis proposes that Ferrante’s language and
Naples as embodied and narrated by Elena constitute a Bhabhian “third space” that
speaks to the imaginary of the emerging peripheries of the globalized world.
Dialect as a language of violence leads to Chapter 6, “Violenza immagini sparizioni,”
an analysis of Ferrante’s oeuvre as a “phenomenology of [the] violence” (p. 211) perpe-
trated on women equally by the uneducated men of the neighbourhood and the educated
men of the higher classes. Intellectual domination by the latter, be they fascists, left-wing
progressives or extremists, goes hand in hand with sexual humiliation and domination.
Drawing on Bourdieu, De Rogatis also examines psychic abuse and other symbolic,
subtler forms of violence which colonize women’s minds and naturalize male superiority.
Here smarginatura signifies the disorientation that follows abuse and violence or the tres-
passing of the subaltern spaces to which women are relegated, as well as “un processo
affermativo e creativo” (p. 210) which enables them to break free from their bodies and
organize acts of resistance: visual representations of women that the characters take back
from the males who have usurped them; acts of female collaborative creativity; suicide or
planned disappearances. De Rogatis stresses the significance, in times of #MeToo, of
Ferrante’s adoption of a female viewpoint that avoids pathetic tones and facile victim-
perpetrator polarizations.
Chapter 7, “La Storia e le storie,” looks at Ferrante’s antiepic and antiheroic treatment
of time, focusing on microhistories that display few explicit dates and contravene chron-
ology, while leaving unnamed the Italian and European historical events against which
 BOOK REVIEW 3

these microhistories unfold. This chapter is a tour de force that superbly extends Chapter
2 and rounds up the monograph. Respecting Ferrante’s commitment to a narrative that,
proceeding from a subject who never stops looking for stability, continually smargina
into new strands, De Rogatis harnesses time and plot into “lives.” The last four sections
of this final chapter investigate the converging and diverging of the protagonists’ lives
through changing ideologies and new orders: life at the time of the (student and worker)
revolution, feminism, information technology and terrorism, and dissolving rationality.
This monograph will be an indispensable tool for scholars and students of Ferrante. It
provides a thorough analysis of the quadrilogy while also providing a clear basis from
which to dig deep into some of de Rogatis’s suggestions or to unearth new aspects: voice
and life writing, the symbolism of certain objects, family relations, mothers and the
maternal, stereotypes, women’s creativity, Ferrante’s brand of feminism, Naples as
the quintessence of postmodernity, the quadrilogy as a global novel. One of the merits of
the monograph is to have demonstrated the literary worth of L’amica geniale: we must
now assess its place in the Italian and international canons of women’s writing as well as
in the Neapolitan narrative tradition and particularly a female one. Taking the cue from
de Rogatis, who points out resonances and similarities between Ferrante and Ortese,
Morante, Ramondino, Lessing, Wolf, and Sebold, we are now in a position to start to
identify Ferrante’s precursors and antecedents through in-depth comparisons on specific
themes. This will help us gauge more accurately Ferrante’s originality (Maraini comes to
mind in relation to violence against women).
Academics teaching Ferrante outside Italy and Ferrante’s international readership will
welcome an English translation of this outstanding study. In future editions, in both lan-
guages, the publisher may wish to revise the referencing system, to make the scholarly
works and Ferrante’s titles more immediately recognizable.

ADALGISA GIORGIO
University of Bath