I Break, Therefore I Am
Barbara Burns talks to Rebecca Walker, whose book The Sense of Fracture in Goliarda Sapienza and Elena Ferrante: Fragile Selves, Fragile Others has just been published in Legenda’s Italian Perspectives series.
BB. In your book you analyse novels by the Italian authors Goliarda Sapienza (1924–1996) and Elena Ferrante. For those of us who are unfamiliar with their work, what are the key things we need to know about their writing?
RW. Goliarda Sapienza was relatively unknown until quite recently. She never achieved consistent success as a writer during her lifetime because she was labelled as unorthodox and eccentric. Her autobiographical novels (which are the novels discussed in the book) present her life story as a fictional saga, where she is the protagonist. They’re concerned with identity, desire, and human relationships, and ask questions about what it might mean to live authentically. She is perhaps most famous, however, for L’arte della gioia [The Art of Joy, 1998], whose protagonist, Modesta, is noted for her violence, wilfulness, and unrepentant disposition. By presenting us with a central character who is almost entirely unsympathetic, Sapienza asks us what it is that we expect literature to do (do we expect repentance and redemption for fictional characters, for example) and what kind of lives we expect to see enshrined in our texts.
Elena Ferrante writes under a pseudonym and has been active since 1992, when her first novel, L’amore molesto [Troubling Love] was published. Her novels are all concerned primarily with female psychology and with the ways in which women respond to traumatic life events such as bereavement, relationship breakdown, and the societal pressures around motherhood. In the Neapolitan Novels (2011-2014), she zooms out from the breakdown of a single female protagonist to look at the life stories of two friends, Elena and Lila, as they navigate the changing society of Italy, from the 1950s to 2010. Through Elena’s and Lila’s successes and failures in friendship and love, set in an unforgiving cultural context, Ferrante condemns the societal structures which harm women and poses questions about what it means for human beings, and particularly women, to live together in a collapsing or crushing world.
BB. Your central theme is that of fracture. Can you unpack this term a bit for us, and explain why you feel it’s so important in the context of women’s writing?
RW. In their novels, Sapienza and Ferrante are concerned with the quality of women’s lives during a particular period in modern Italian history (roughly from the 1930s onwards), and they are also interested in the way that ideas of femininity have been framed and culturally reinforced throughout the twentieth century and, in Ferrante’s case, up to the present day. They write in order to expand our notions of what women can be and do, and this is why in the book I refer to the branch of philosophy called phenomenology: the study of consciousness and of our modes of perceiving and inhabiting the world as embodied human beings.
When I was beginning the research for this book, I noticed that in Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels and Sapienza’s autobiography very often the perception of femininity, or the experience of navigating the world as a woman from girlhood to womanhood, was accompanied by the idea of fracture or brokenness. This is because the patriarchal worlds depicted in the novels afford little space to women and girls for self-determination and self-articulation. Fracture is the language that I use throughout the book to discuss this problem: How is it that we are broken (by societal expectations, by those whom we love, by false notions of who and what we are), and how do we pick up the pieces?
BB. While Ferrante’s novels enjoy an international readership, Sapienza’s work has been less commercially successful because of her unorthodox approach that is heavily autobiographical and can be difficult to interpret. But there has been recent talk of her emerging as a ‘feminist icon’. Are opinions about Sapienza starting to shift, and has bringing these two writers together yielded important insights?
RW. One of the things I wanted to do with this book was to bring together one woman writer who has chosen absence – Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym and the person who writes books under that name has never appeared publicly – with another woman writer who felt an urgent need to be seen and heard via the written word, and so presents herself entirely without filters. Together, they suggest that questions about women’s presence in the world can be navigated both from the standpoint of visibility (Sapienza) and invisibility (Ferrante).
Sapienza, in particular, is concerned with what it means to be or to become visible and audible, which feminist theorist Sara Ahmed in her book Living a Feminist Life (2017) takes to be a significant question for feminism today. We have only to look at contemporary academic work in a feminist key to see how prescient Sapienza was in this regard, and it’s perhaps for this reason – namely, that she was ahead of rather than behind her time – that she appeals so much more consistently to a twenty-first-century audience. It’s important to point out that Sapienza had a conflictual relationship to the feminist political movement in her own time, disparaging it openly in some of her letters, but she consistently used her writing to problematise limiting ideas about women’s lives. It’s for this reason that I class her texts as feminist and hers as a ‘feminist life’ in the sense Ahmed intends.
BB. To what extent do the novels you’ve examined convey a universal human experience of pain and fragility and prompt an empathetic response from the reader?
RW. Though the fractures which I discuss in the books are primarily communicated through female experience, these are never limited only to female characters. Female characters are rather those who can see the brokenness of the world in its fullness, because they are more immediately affected by and subject to that brokenness. Sapienza and Ferrante are adamant that patriarchal societal and cultural structures harm men as much as they harm women, in that they produce dysfunctional forms of masculinity, just as they produce truncated understandings of femininity. Rather, they are interested in what it would mean for us to apprehend others as fully human, to see them as being every bit as real (and thus, every bit as vulnerable, contradictory, and in need of compassion) as ourselves. In this sense, all readers, irrespective of gender, are enveloped into the moral psychology of these texts, because they are invited – through the brokenness and fallibility of fictional characters and fictional worlds – to examine the brokenness and fallibility of ourselves and our own world.
BB. How did you become interested in Italian women’s writing, and especially in these two writers?
RW. I first encountered Elena Ferrante during an undergraduate course at the University of St Andrews on the twentieth-century Italian novel. Ferrante was thus a sort of gateway to a broader interest in women’s writing in modern Italy, and particularly to questions of female subjectivity (the female first-person perspective on the world), which are still among the questions which most interest me in literary analysis. Through this, I arrived at the broader interest that I now have in Italian women writers as ethical commentators on the quality of our lives and our world, and so Ferrante brought me to Goliarda Sapienza, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and many others. Sapienza attracted me, initially, because she was a challenge! Her texts are not easy to read and she herself, in her fictionalisation of her own life, is not an easy character to grasp. Nevertheless, the character Goliarda is hard not to love – entirely open to readers and even entreating them, at points, to help her tell her story, the narrator forms an extradiegetic bond with us and exhorts us to adopt more honest forms of self-communication in our own lives.
BB. The fact that your study focuses on the themes of vulnerability, breakdown and trauma must make it hard going in some respects. Is the content mitigated at all by glimmers of hope and recovery?
RW. Certainly. The book pursues a double trajectory with regard to the central theme of fracture: the ways in which female characters are fractured by those around them and fracture others in turn, and the ways in which they are able to transform their own fractured identities into a therapeutic and creative literary tool. At stake in both the series of novels I discuss is the possibility of living peaceably with the legacy of trauma by remaining connected to others, and loving them, where and as they are. This is a significant source of hope for both authors, and even where their protagonists are only partially able to realise this hope in their own lives, we as readers are implicitly invited to take it forward.
BB. Of all the novels you cover in this study, is there one that left a particular impression on you?
RW. There are two! Sapienza wrote two novels about her childhood, examining it from different perspectives. The first, Lettera aperta (1967), is essentially a trauma novel. It recounts a difficult upbringing in which the protagonist, Goliarda, felt unseen and unheard, and thus unable to grow up into a self-assured adult with a coherent sense of herself. The second, Io, Jean Gabin, was written in 1979 and published in 2010, and presents the same childhood as a playful adventure, through the lens of the child protagonist’s love for silver-screen actor Jean Gabin. By means of these two intersecting narratives of the same events, Sapienza suggests that a story can be rewritten, that there can be joy and laughter even in times of pain and disillusionment, and that who we are is never fixed. Unfortunately, these novels are not currently available in English translation, but I very much hope the recent growth of interest in Sapienza will lead to greater availability of her work in English.
BB. The process of re-working this material from a PhD thesis into a monograph was funded by a one-year Research Scholarship from the MHRA. What were the benefits of this postdoctoral year, where are you now in your early-career journey, and what lies ahead on the research front?
RW. I am very grateful to the MHRA for supporting the writing of this monograph through their postdoctoral scholarship. During my postdoctoral year, I was able both to dedicate time to turning my PhD thesis into this book, and to think in broader terms about the sort of research I would like to do going forward. I am presently undertaking a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, funded by the Irish Research Council. On the back of the increasingly ethical direction in which the book moved as I wrote it, I’m now looking at the treatment of religious notions about ethics and identity in works by twentieth- and twenty-first century Italian women writers. In particular, I’m interested in how theological ideas about who God is and what sort of world we are living in are reflected, challenged, or expanded by Italian women writers, who engage not only with female experience in their literature, but also with much larger questions about what it means to be human in the wake of the dramatic societal, political, and cultural shifts of the last hundred years.
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