On Lila's Traces: Bildung , Narration, and Ethics in Elena

Ferrante's L'amica geniale

Flora Ghezzo, Sara Teardo

MLN, Volume 134, Number 1, January 2019 (Italian Issue), pp. 172-192 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2019.0009

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/722572

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 On Lila’s Traces: Bildung,
Narration, and Ethics in Elena
Ferrante’s L’amica geniale
❦

Flora Ghezzo, Sara Teardo

In a compelling tetralogy that has captivated thousands of passion-

ate readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Elena Ferrante explores
the intricacies of female friendship and identity formation, of self-
actualization and self-annihilation, of bonding and loss. The story of
Lena and Lila, girls who become women in postwar Italy, charts the
wavering course of their profound yet fraught friendship, scrutinized
by Ferrante with an uncompassionate eye. This double process of
Bildung and self-searching is staged against the lively backdrop of
Naples, in the claustrophobic and coercive socio-cultural context of a
peripheral rione, marked by patriarchal and camorra violence. Riveting
and disconcerting, enthralling and unnerving, the four volumes of
L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend)—a literary tour de force—were pub-
lished in Italy between 2011 and 2014, gaining international attention,
prompting several translations, drawing accolades and recognitions,
and spreading a contagious addiction (a “Ferrante Fever”) among its
readership, both scholarly and lay.
Reading through the lenses of psychoanalysis, deconstruction,
and recent feminist philosophy, this essay sets out to provide some
theoretical coordinates for the analysis of the Neapolitan Novels,
focusing in particular on the tetralogy’s first, eponymous volume.1

1
For the most in-depth academic analysis of Ferrante’s oeuvre see the volume edited
by Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie Love, The Works of Elena Ferrante: Reconfiguring
the Margins and Tiziana De Rogatis’ Elena Ferrante: Parole chiave.

MLN 134 (2019): 172–192 © 2019 by Johns Hopkins University Press

 M LN 173

Employing at first the Derridean notion of the ‘trace,’ which questions

the clear-cut definition of present and past, of self and other (and
thus prompt us to ask whether narrating the other is an inescapable
step in the portrayal of the self), our reflections then look to Lacan’s
psychoanalytical account of the ‘mirror stage’ and its role in the con-
struction of subjectivity through specular relations. Building on this
theoretical frame, we read the relationship between the novels’ female
protagonists as a mutual and specular projection, which determines
the formation of their subjectivity. Yet we argue that this story is not
only a tale of Bildung and self-development in a Lacanian register, but
also an exemplary account of the nexus between identity, alterity, and
the practice of storytelling embedded in an intricate play of fictional
and meta-fictional layers. We explore this theoretical matrix using as a
reference point two seminal texts that shed light on the link between
the narration of the self and its ethical implications: Adriana Cavarero’s
Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti (1997) and Judith Butler’s Giving
an Account of Oneself (2005). The two philosophers’ original insights
on relational ethics allow us to finally consider an apparently minor
episode of the girls’ teenage years as a passionate attempt to envision
an alternative model of reciprocal exchange and ethical bonding,
which symbolically stands in stark contrast to the dystopian socio-
political context of oppression and violence that governs the life of
the Neapolitan outskirts.

Eliminating All the Traces: Greco, Derrida, and the Scene of Writing
In the first novel’s opening scene, which sets the stage for the Nea-
politan saga, two women, both in their sixties, engage in a sort of
‘encounter’ at a distance. One woman is evoked in absentia, while the
other, by contrast, is live and present in the flesh. A few days after
disappearing from her apartment in Naples, Raffaella Cerullo (Lila)
has finally succeeded in cancelling out her entire existence, eliminat-
ing all material, written, and digital traces of herself. Gone are all of
Lila’s clothes and books, shoes and videos, birth certificates and phone
bills, her old computer and photographs. Elena Greco (Lena), in her
house in Turin, learns from Lila’s worried son about her longtime
friend’s sudden disappearance, receiving this startling piece of news
without much surprise: “It’s been at least three decades since [Lila]
told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I
am the only one who knows what she means […] she wanted to van-
ish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her
ever to be found” (20).
174 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

Much to her dismay, however, Elena Greco becomes an unwilling

player in this disconcerting game of undoing identities and erasing
traces. For Lila has in fact managed to disappear from Elena’s own
chest of drawers as well: no tangible relics of their shared past can be
found; no mementos or keepsakes remain. Lila “was expanding the
concept of trace out of all proportion,” Elena reflects: “She wanted
not only to disappear herself, now, at the age of sixty-six, but also to
eliminate the entire life that she had left behind” (22–23). Thus, the
only thing left for Elena to do is dig in the archive of memory, unstable
and untrustworthy by its very nature, in an effort to recover the sixty
years of life and friendship that have bound her to Lila since their
childhood together in Naples. In a veritable ‘scene of writing,’ Elena
Greco opens her computer and begins to write the story that we will
go on to read, after we have finished the novel’s prologue, aptly titled
“Eliminating All the Traces”. Her whole writing project—and the scaf-
folding for all four volumes of My Brilliant Friend—thus originates in
a process of erasure or elimination, in an absence of sense or void
of meaning (“vuoto di senso”), in a series of existential traces that
are negated but that reappear in oblique and surreptitious ways, in
the form of mnemonic traces (La frantumaglia 82). From these traces
alone, Elena, moved by a subtle desire to get back at Lila for her dis-
appearance, builds her story—because she is left with nothing else,
nothing but “all the details of our story, everything that still remained
in my memory” (23; emphasis added).
From the first, as we have seen, Ferrante’s novel foregrounds the
notion of the ‘trace,’ drawing attention to its several valences and
various implications. What is a ‘trace,’ then? The word is typically
associated either with a path to be taken or explored (as in a footprint,
streak, trail, track, or suggestion), or with a vestige of some kind (a
relic, remnant, or remain), a “sign or evidence of some past thing,”
in one dictionary’s definition (“Trace”). Several contemporary critics
and philosophers, however, invite us to complicate this definition, to
broaden our sense of its semantic range. In his deconstructive work
on metaphysics and the philosophy of language, Jacques Derrida,
elaborating on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, contends that the
trace names an order of otherness that is not representable. The trace
refers, Derrida writes, to “a past that has never been present, and which
never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a
form of reproduction in the form of presence” (“Différance” 21). The
trace, closely related to the notion of différance, is “that which refers
to something else, without ever being present itself autonomously”
 M LN 175

(Odifreddi). From a Derridean perspective, the concept of the trace

is ambiguous, dilated, fluid, open to various potentialities of meaning;
more an “opaque energy” than a “transparent signification” (Derrida,
Of Grammatology 65). Thus, for the French philosopher, the traces of
‘absence’ are inscribed within ‘presence’; the present bears the traces
of other temporal dimensions; and identity carries within itself the
trace of what is not itself, the non-identical, the other.
If, as Derrida contends, the trace refers to a past that has never
been present then what past could Elena Greco possibly retrieve and
represent in her narrative of nearly two thousand pages? If the trace is
opaque and ambiguously polysemic—if, that is, it invokes at once pres-
ence and absence, identity and otherness—whose traces, mnemonic,
material, or otherwise, are recovered in Elena’s story? Is it simply Lila’s
past that she recounts? Or, as we would argue, does her account also
constitute the creation and total reinvention of the self through what
is other, the non-self? What if the initial cancellation of Lila’s traces,
far from being a mere narrative stratagem to get the novel started or
a fictional coup de théâtre, were instead a necessary lacuna, one that left
space for a whole recreation of the past, allowing for the production
of a palimpsestic text that, like an ancient manuscript, could conceal
a trace that has been deliberately erased?
Questions and interpretive doubts like these crowd the threshold
of Ferrante’s text. They preside over the very acts of writing and read-
ing the Neapolitan Novels; they determine the narrative pact that the
author establishes with her readers, making Elena Greco an unreliable
narrator; and, finally, they create the structural frame for a text that
ultimately can be read as an autobiography of the self (Lena’s), written
in the mode of a biography of the other (Lila’s). The intimate and
indispensable relation between selfhood and otherness, a relation
disclosed in the very heart of the notion of the ‘trace,’ leads us to the
core of a novel that is structured around the themes of self-fashioning
and specular formation.

A Specular Bildung: Lila, Lacan and the Waggish Knave

Set in Naples in the 1950s, in a peripheral, degraded, low-income
district, the rione Luzzatti, the first volume charts the story of the two
friends from the exciting adventures of their childhood to the bookish
explorations and amorous skirmishes of their teenage years. “Locked
in a lifelong embrace, sisters, rivals, doppelgängers, opposites,”2 the

2
William Deresiewicz, “Conditions of Emergence: On Elena Ferrante.” The Nation.
September 24, 2015.
176 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

two girls develop a strong bond, one that oscillates between admira-
tion and envy. As the first installment draws to a close, a dazzling,
brilliant sixteen-year-old Lila falls in the ‘trap’ of marriage with the
handsome but pompous grocery store owner, while disciplined and
studious Lena painfully realizes she no longer belongs in the petty,
violence-ridden neighborhood. Their destinies, we know, will project
them into two starkly different directions, but their path will cross
again and again in the years to come.
Although the Neapolitan novels exceed the boundaries of the Bil-
dungsroman, for their structural complexity, narrative breadth and wide
range of themes, the first volume, as this synopsis indicates, presents
some of the trademark characteristics of the genre—as James Wood
puts it, it is a “large, captivating, amiable peopled bildungsroman.”3
Charting Lila’s and Lena’s coming of age, My Brilliant Friend focuses
on a double process of self-formation and self-realization that unfolds
along a pair of intricately interconnected paths. A twofold trajectory
that follows from principles of both reciprocity and intermittency: each
friend constitutes a stimulus, a goad, for the other, prompting growth
in an alternating rhythm.4 This core theme is powerfully if somewhat
enigmatically evoked at the very threshold of the text, in the novel’s
epigraph, a citation from Goethe’s Faust.
THE LORD: Therein thou’rt free, according to thy merits;
The like of thee have never moved My hate.
Of all the bold, denying Spirits,

3
Ferrante’s tetralogy complicates and unsettles the category of the Bildungsroman, for
it is, formally, more than a coming-of-age, an aging story that spans more than sixty
years. After an initial shared and specular process of self-development, described in
the first volume, the destinies of the two girls will substantially diverge. While Lena’s
trajectory can be seen as that of a typical Bildung (she gets out of the rione, finds ful-
filling professional and personal paths, eventually becoming an academic and a suc-
cessful writer), Lila’s non-linear trajectory, marked by sudden, mysterious transitions
and turns that refuse clarifications, defies the expectations of the genre. Trapped in
the patriarchal structures of the rione and in the traditionally female paradigm of the
“marriage plot,” she will literally implode by the end of the novels. Hers, in a way, is a
“reverse” Bildung, an undoing of the self. In a ground-breaking text of feminist criticism
(The Voyage In: Fictions of female development, 1983), Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch,
and Elizabeth Langland have observed that the genre tends traditionally to exclude
female experience: “even the broadest definitions of the Bildungsroman presuppose
a range of social options available only to men” (7), while, in her Unbecoming Women,
Susan Fraiman claims that the heroine experiences a process of unbecoming, undoing,
that counteracts the hero’s process of finding his identity. For an overview on women’s
novel of formation see also Carol Lazzaro-Weis, “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling
It into Question,” while for an in-depth analysis of the European Bildungsroman, see
Franco Moretti’s seminal study The Way of the World.
4
As Ferrante notes, there is “an oscillation innate in the relationship between the
two characters and in the very structure of Elena’s story […] If this oscillation were not
there, the two friends would be doubles of each other” (Ferri and Ferri).
 M LN 177

The waggish knave least trouble doth create.

Man’s active nature, flagging, seeks too soon the level;
Unqualified repose he learns to crave;
Whence, willingly, the comrade him I gave,
Who works, excites, and must create, as Devil.5 (n. pag.)

When Mephistopheles proposes to lead the doctor-scholar Faust to

damnation, the Lord grants the “waggish knave” his permission to
tempt and incite Faust, so that he will neither “repose” nor cease his
search, sustained by his compulsive desire to go beyond the givens of
his own experience. Lila, likewise, is propelled forward by her own
Streben (striving) and, in so doing, never ceases to motivate Lena,
acting as her ‘demonic comrade’ and her inspiring spirito beffardo
(Goethe’s “waggish knave”). And yet the roles will soon be reversed,
according to a fluctuating rhythm of reciprocity that determines the
psychic development of the two girls and, as a result, the structural
framework of their story.
Through her poignant citation of the Goethean verses, Ferrante
seems to suggest that there is a Streben, a drive, a yearning at the core
of the self. Such irreducible tension, which both Goethe and Ferrante
locate at the very center of human experience, invite a psychoana-
lytic reading, prompting us, quite literally, to turn to the seminars of
Jacques Lacan and to his seminal theorization of ‘le stade du miroir,’
the ‘mirror stage.’ As is well known, between the late 1930s and the
1950s, the psychoanalyst repeatedly returned to his investigations of
the moment when the infant confronts his own mirror reflection for
the first time, whether literally, in a mirror, or symbolically, in the faces
of others. For Lacan, this confrontation marks a primal recognition
of oneself as “I.” The infant identifies with the image, which functions
as a model, a “figure” or “pattern” for his emerging perception of
selfhood. But, Lacan insists, the child’s reflected image is, in fact,
ambivalent: it produces both the illusion of a complete and unitary
“I,” one that can be controlled (the Ideal-I or Ideal Ego), and an
irresolvable tension, which derives from the infant’s sense of himself
and his own body as fragmentary and irreparably incomplete.6 Thus,
there is a paradoxical stage of méconnaisance, of misrecognition, at the
heart of the process of self-formation: the child puts an Ideal-I in the
5
The English translation of Goethe’s lines by Bayard Taylor elides the reference to
‘goading’ (pungolare) that appears in the Italian translation quoted by Ferrante.
6
“The mirror stage is based on the relation between tendencies which are experienced
…as disconnected, discordant, in pieces … and a unity with which it is merged and
paired. It is in this unity that the subject for the first time know himself as a unity, but
as an alienated, virtual unity” (Lacan 50).
178 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

place of a self and body that are still underdeveloped, physically weak,
and vulnerable. The inevitable split that results from this process is
not, according to Lacan, just a mere phase in the development of the
child, but a permanent structure of subjectivity, characterizing the “I” at
every turn and exerting its influence even after the subject enters the
domain of language, rules, and social dictates (the Lacanian Symbolic
Order). The perceived imago, then, not only provides an impetus for
the creation of narcissistic phantasies (and, for neuroses or other
psychic disturbances when the individual enters adulthood), it also
represents an idealized version of the self, one toward which the sub-
ject will strive throughout his or her life: a phantasy image that can
be “filled” or occupied by others, by “role models” that the subject
seeks to mirror and emulate, and with whom the subject competes.
In its extraordinary complexity, the Lacanian mirror stage sheds light
on what resides at the obscure foundation of the human psyche: a
Goethean Streben (craving, aspiring, pursuing), a desire for coherence,
completeness, and emulation, all continually threatened by a sense
of inadequacy and incoherence. Above all, however, Lacan’s theory,
resonating here with the logic underpinning Derrida’s notion of trace,
establishes the ineradicable fact of the self’s dependency: on external
objects and images, on others.
Interdependence, inadequacy, mirroring, emulation, competition,
desire: emerging from the discourse of psychoanalysis, these concepts
lead us back to Ferrante’s novel, and to the Lacanian, specular rela-
tion—given a Mephistophelean twist—that ties the destinies of the two
Neapolitan girls together in a complex knot. A fascinating figure, as
we shall see, a model toward whom Lena inclines and with whom she
competes, Lila represents the phantasmatic projection of an Ideal-I, a
phantasy image, an idealized version of the self; as in Lacan’s writings
on the ‘mirror stage,’ she is autonomous and complete in Lena’s eyes.
And so it is that six-year-old Lena begins literally to follow in Lila’s
footsteps. The act of following itself follows from a search for both
self and sense, a quest for meaning, just as, in the prologue, a sixty-
year-old Lena at once retrieves and reinvents Lila’s traces. Only Lila’s
‘magic’ touch is capable of conferring value on things; only her voice
can redeem an opaque reality: “what I did by myself couldn’t excite
me, only what Lila touched became important […] If she withdrew,
if her voice withdrew from things, the things got dirty, dusty” (100).
For the two inseparable friends, childhood is a time of adventure,
filled with tests of courage and rites of initiation and, later on, of
school competitions, readings and dreams of writing. Motivated,
 M LN 179

indeed “goaded,” by Lila, who acts as a Goethean “waggish knave”

at every turn, Lena devotes herself “to studying and to many things
that were difficult, alien to [her],” just to be able to “keep pace with
that terrible, dazzling girl” (47). In stark opposition to this idealized
role model, Lena feels impeded and insecure, painfully aware of her
own insufficiency and inadequacy, exactly like in the Lacanian ‘mirror
stage,’ where the infant subject perceives herself as incoherent and
incomplete: “I was no longer pleased with myself. Everything seemed
tarnished. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see what I would have
liked to see” (120); “[I] examined myself in the mirror. What was I
like, really?” (133). The threat looming in Lena’s mirror is the mater-
nal imago which acts, in opposition to Lila’s idealized projection, as a
dreadful counter- or alternative model, both enticing and repelling
at the same time.
The specular process of self-development between the two girls
implies, as we would like to suggest, a necessary and indispensable
psychological precondition, a sort of sine qua non: matrophobia,7 that
is the fear of becoming like one’s own mother. The repudiation of
the mother, together with the symbolic meaning that the maternal
relation encodes, is one of the fundamental themes in all of Ferrante’s
writing. While it is not the primary focus of the tetralogy, the maternal
motive operates at two different levels, comprising both the socio-
cultural and the psychic registers. The all-encompassing mother—one
of the pathological aspects of the maternal upon which psychoanalysis
reflects—can be a menacing agent, threatening the infant subject with
the loss of identity, with the pre-Oedipal chaos associated with the
indistinct and the undifferentiated, before separation between “I” and
“you,” self and other. The omnipotent, phallic, devouring, and cas-
trating mother who emerges in a variety of psychoanalytic discourses,
from Freud to Lacan and Kristeva, is a figure whose viscous embrace
cannot but impede the development of autonomous identity.8 She

7
Adrienne Rich in her seminal book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and
Institution, tackles the issue of ‘matrophobia’ claiming that “where a mother is hated
to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a
dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely” (235).
8
According to psychoanalysis, the infant develops a sense of individual self, the ego,
but still closely identifies with the mother. The bond (and identification) with one’s
own mother is broken only once the Oedipal complex has been resolved through a
metaphorical castration that separates the mother from the child through the interven-
tion of a third term, the father (Freud, Group psychology and the analysis of the ego;
Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre IV). Prior to the Lacanian Imaginary and the Oedipal phase,
Julia Kristeva individuates a ‘semiotic phase’ where the child is not distinguishable from
the maternal body. Any process of subject formation requires therefore the severance
of the mother-infant bond, the exit from an undifferentiated maternal space (the
semiotic chora), and the repression of the maternal body (Kristeva, Powers of Horror).
180 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

must then be rejected, as a source of absolute abjection and disgust.9

Yet, in the novel, the repudiation of the mother operates also on a
different, more historical and contingent level. In patriarchal Naples,
working-class mothers in their concrete, material, and social specific-
ity embody links in a heavily charged genealogical and cultural chain
that Lila and Lena, daughters of modernity, would prefer to break.
Deprived of agency and desire, of autonomy and self-awareness, these
mothers are condemned to lead surrogate lives, to play pre-established,
repetitive, and subordinate gender roles. Disenfranchised and inad-
equate, they cannot serve but as a defective, unappealing model for
their daughters, precluding and inhibiting any possible identification.
Within the context of the rione, marked by social determinism, Lena
becomes soon aware of this impending and inescapable pattern: “I
hated my mother, really hated her, profoundly” (69). Her primary
desire is, in fact, to recoil from her mother’s “repulsive” and limping
figure, “lame, with a crossed eye” (96), breaking the hated hereditary
chain: “Her body repulsed me, something she probably intuited” (44).
This agonizing, ‘matrophobic’ specter haunts the girl’s future with
the possibility that she will become “a fat pimply salesclerk […] an
old maid employee […] sooner or later cross-eyed and lame”(121).
Lena quickly comes to realize that her goals of self-determination
and self-realization can only be achieved by imitating Lila’s andatura,
her straight gait: “Something convinced me, then, that if I kept up
with her, at her pace, my mother’s limp, which had entered into my
brain and wouldn’t come out, would stop threatening me. I decided
that I had to model myself on that girl, never let her out of my sight,
even if she got annoyed and chased me away” (46). Thus, the vertical,
genealogical and culturally charged bond between a mother and her
daughter is overshadowed and replaced by a horizontal, sisterly yet
competing relationship between peers.
Lila’s appeal is in fact irresistible, as irresistible is the phantasmatic
projection of the Ideal-I—yet the character will reveal, in the end,
beneath her magnetic persona, an unresolvable tension. Spurred by
an “absolute determination” (34), gifted with singular skills, coura-
geous to the point of defying even the “masters of the neighborhood”
(usurers and camorristi), Lila escapes every cultural and social schema
and exceeds every available model of gender. Surrounded by an almost
demonic and mysterious aura, Lila is a magnet, capable of attracting

9
In her article “Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia
oscura,” Stiliana Milkova uses the concept of disgust, linking it to Kristeva’s notion of
the ‘abject’ as a critical framework for analyzing the novels that Ferrante published
before the Neapolitan tetralogy. For a discussion of the notion of the “abject,” see
Powers of Horror by Kristeva.
 M LN 181

and fascinating everyone around her, not least with her words. She
transforms the rione’s chaotic and violent reality through stories, seek-
ing and finding the connecting thread that makes the chaos logical.
And Lena lends support, follows Lila, so that together they engage,
like little amateur philosophers, in a struggle to make sense of the
real, to rationalize and categorize the threatening and formless magma
of existence—the neighborhood’s violence and nonsense, the void
of meaning, the disintegration of the confines of the self that might
unexpectedly tear down the structure of reality. Only words can coun-
ter “the pall that had weighed on the neighborhood forever” (106):
“There was something unbearable in the things [. . .] that, only if you
reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable” (106–107); “I, I and
Lila, we two with that capacity that together—only together—we had
to seize the mass of colors, sounds, things, and people, and express
it and give it power” (138).
The obsession with naming, categorizing, giving things shape and
form counters the threat of dissolution and disintegration, a threat
which becomes a tangible and harrowing experience during the 1958
New Year’s Eve. Amidst the joyous and exciting atmosphere of the cel-
ebration, while the boys incessantly set off fireworks and firecrackers,
Lila suddenly loses her rational grip on reality, unexpectedly caught
up in the sensation that “something absolutely material, which had
been present around her and around everyone and everything forever,
but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and
things and revealing itself” (89–90). This uncanny impression affects
her self-perception: “every margin collapsed and her own margins,
too, became softer and more yielding” (177). The Capodanno scene
marks an epiphanic moment, a frightening and eerie experience that
will haunt Lila in the course of her story. Smarginatura (removing the
margins, trimming the edges), as she eventually defines it, is a potent
phenomenon of boundary-breaking, of both explosion and implosion.
It is a sudden breach, a denouement of reality, exposing a noumenal
and horrific dimension, the raw, unfiltered matrix behind phenom-
enal reality: bodies, voices, objects, words deprived of any meaning.
For Lila, who has “the sensation of moving for a few fractions of a
second into a person or a thing or a number or a syllable, violating
its edges,” smarginatura is an extreme experience of dissolving the self,
of stepping out of her own ‘finite’ consciousness, lost in the core of
it all. Rupture and dissolution of borders, contrast between finite and
infinite, tension between containment and freedom, between subjec-
tion and rebellion: within these polarities Lila’s entire life is inscribed.
182 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

Confounding those around her with her protean ability to change

roles without ever being contained fully by any role, she is propelled
by an unrelenting Streben, a vital, restless energy: “no shape, however
beautifully drawn, could contain her conclusively” (260). With her
incessant and neurotic search, her creation of and experimentation
with ever new roles that defy the cultural codes of the rione (aspiring
writer, ingenious apprentice, glamorous modern woman), Lila will
make every form of identity implode, before finally, at the end of the
tetralogy, eliminating all traces of herself in a process of self-undoing.
An enigmatic, puzzling process that seems, paradoxically, to actualize
her own fear of smarginatura, of dissolution and rupture.
The Lacanian dynamic that has characterized the development of
both heroines in the crucial time of their childhood and adolescence
shifts, at a key point, triggering an unexpected role reversal, an inter-
mittent rhythm of reciprocity that will mark the unfolding of Ferrante’s
Neapolitan saga. Halfway into the first novel, brilliant Lila has quit
studying, entrapped in her family’s cobbler shop and completely
absorbed in the creation of her original designer shoes. Lena, instead,
has become a clever and dedicated student at the Liceo Garibaldi. Hav-
ing always emulated Lila (“What you do, I do,” the six-year-old Lena
“recited” [55]), Lena now finds that she is about to surpass her friend
unwittingly, as if she had ‘introjected’ or internalized the idealized
imago of Lila, thus playing the Goethean role of “goad” herself: “I
noticed […] a tension in her, the desire to prove that she was equal to
whatever I was studying” (160). Glamorous Lila thus feels left behind
and needs validation, “as if it were ultimately she who felt the need to
continuously prove that she could talk to me as an equal” (163–164).
Lena, for her part, slowly acquires a voice of her own, as the prospect
of publishing her first article in a local journal confirms. Inexorably,
then, she becomes progressively more empowered (“I no longer felt
she inhabited a marvelous land without me” [164]) and increasingly
aware of the world that surrounds her. Lila, on the other hand, bound
for marriage and a petit bourgeois life with the neighborhood grocer,
surprisingly finds herself trapped in a ‘maternal’ genealogical chain,
cast in a subordinate gender role defined by patriarchy. She then
struggles to “find, from inside the cage in which she was enclosed, a
way of being, all her own” (291). The heroines’ trajectories, the paths
of their growth, parallel until they reach this crossroads, seem now to
lead in two different directions. For Lena cannot help but take note
of this divergence in their destinies: “As a child I had looked to her,
to her progress [“la sua andatura,” her gait, in the original], to learn
 M LN 183

how to escape my mother. I had been mistaken. Lila had remained

there, chained in a glaring way to that world” (318).
Before the first volume of the Neapolitan Novels reaches its cliff-
hanger conclusion, the themes of specularity and the reciprocity of
intersubjective relations come to an unexpected climax during an
intense prenuptial scene. Lila’s white wedding dress is lying on the
bed, and Lena is washing her friend’s perfect, nude body, in a sort
of sacred rite of initiation that mixes desire and destiny. During the
course of this rite, Lila advises Lena to continue her studies, saying
unexpectedly: “You’re my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all,
boys and girls” (312). This stupefying, breathtaking sentence takes both
Lena and Ferrante’s readers by surprise. It registers the ambiguous
and disconcerting nature of the specular relation, suddenly overturn-
ing readers’ perspectives, forcing them retrospectively to recalibrate
their sense of the meaning of Ferrante’s novel and that of its very
title. Who, we wonder at this moment, is l’amica geniale, the brilliant
friend? Who is imitating whom? Who is the subject in the Lacanian
mirror? Who is the “I,” and who is the “you”?
At this juncture, the very notion of ‘genialità,’ or brilliance, on which
the novel rests, is put into question. No longer the attribute of a verti-
cal, non-inclusive relation that signals one person’s superiority over
another, brilliance instead becomes a fluid quality, one that emerges
in the horizontal, reciprocal relation between the two girls, in their
mutual incitement. Brilliance becomes specular, resides in specularity,
and it is specularity that renders both girls brilliant.

The Necessary Other: Notes toward a Theory of Narration and

Altruistic Ethics
The dizzying process of mutual mirroring that has unfolded before
our eyes is not only a coming of age story, the record of a quest for self-
formation and self-assertion. For the specular projection in which
Ferrante’s protagonists engage also calls into question the very acts
of writing and narrating and thus prompt us to reconsider the novel’s
opening “scene of writing,” when a sixty-year-old Lena sets out to recon-
struct Lila’s traces, while rethinking her own story. This scene renders
the act of narration and self-narration subtly intertwined, suggesting,
as we anticipated, that one can give an account of oneself only by
refracting one’s own story through that of the other. With this scene
and this suggestion in mind, this essay will venture into the domain
of philosophical discourse. Leaving momentarily aside the girls and
184 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

guappi of the Neapolitan rione, it will explore the intersection of iden-

tity, otherness, narration and ethics, a cluster of themes which prove
crucial for the interpretation of the whole saga. The theories of two
contemporary philosophers, Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler, shed
light on what connects these disparate discourses.10 Though trained
in different, if not opposed, philosophical contexts, one working on
the deconstruction of the subject of ontology, the other focusing on
the undoing of gender, sex, bodies and identities, these two thinkers
resonate in illuminating ways. Both have begun to work, in recent years,
at the intersection of political philosophy, theories of identity, and
postmodern ethics, taking theories of narrative as points of departure
for their inquiry into the relation between selfhood and narration.
In her 1998 Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti, published in English
as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood,11 Cavarero argues that
only narrative can capture the uniqueness and unrepeatability of
the embodied subject—narrative, that is, as opposed to traditional
philosophical discourse, which poses universal questions (“What is
a subject?”) and presupposes a subject that is both sovereign and
abstract. To the central ontological inquiry, “Who are you?,” one can
only respond by recounting a story, and the story that can capture the
sense of who one is can only be recounted by another. As a matter of
fact, for Cavarero, narrating the self is inherently inefficacious. It is a
sort of narcissistic vice based on the impossibility of being objective
about one’s own past: a flawed perspective of memory, “a mistake of
desire [abbaglio del desiderio]”12 (RN 84). As the ancient myths of Oedipus
and Ulysses as well as Gertrude Stein’s fictional Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas teach us, it is only from the outside, from the perspective of the other
that one can discern the unique design, the figure that one’s life has
traced, since the self is not a pre-given essence, but it is always exposed,
relational and contextual (RN 124). The self is what we leave behind
unknowingly; it is a set of signs, imprints, traces, located in—and only
in—relational and narrative practices. Cavarero’s insights shed a light
on the novel, supporting our initial claim: what is Elena Greco doing

10
In a recent interview with Elissa Schappell, published on the August 27, 2015 issue
of Vanity Fair, Elena Ferrante herself declares that among the works that have most
influenced her is “an old book by Adriana Cavarero (Italian title: Tu che mi guardi, tu che
mi racconti).” Later, in the same interview, the author claims to be “a passionate reader
of feminist thought” and names some women to whom she is greatly indebted, such as
“Firestone, Lonzi, Irigaray, Muraro, Cavarero, Gagliasso, Haraway, Butler, Braidotti” (ib.).
11
Hereafter, we cite Cavarero’s Relating Narratives parenthetically in the text, using
the abbreviation RN.
12
In Italian, the phrase “abbaglio del desiderio” means literally being blinded by desire’s
excessive light, or an erring as a result of its glare (Tu che mi guardi 109).
 M LN 185

if not restoring, despite Lila’s desire for obliteration and oblivion,

the “unrepeatable figure” drawn by her friend Lila (RN 3), and then
refracting her own story though the other’s tale? What is she doing
if not showing us that narrative requires the other by definition, that
autobiography is inseparably connected to biography? In braiding
together her own story and Lila’s, the (auto)biographer Elena Greco
composes a hybrid text, one that crosses and dissolves the boundaries
of genres (a sort of metafictional smarginatura), while complicating
the practice of self narration because, as Cavarero writes, “it puts into
writing the relational character of a self that the autobiographical
genre—as such—is prevented from putting in words” (RN 83). The
relational interdependence structures the narrative framework of
the text itself, so that Lena can explicitly affirm in The Story of the Lost
Child, the final volume of the saga: “the very nature of our relationship
dictates that I can reach her only by passing through myself” (17).
Lila, for her part, always unpredictable and elusive, only partially
satisfies, we might speculate, Lena’s desire for recognition (which is
central to Cavarero’s argument), her desire to be given an identity
through the other’s account. The narrative scaffolding is indeed asym-
metrical as it features Elena as the only storyteller, while Lila figures
just as a character embedded in the story, refraining and refusing to
narrate back to Lena. Totally enveloped in her own opacity, in her
nihilistic desire to vanish and dissolve, Lila also strongly refuses to give
any account of herself, implying she is not narratable: “I am a scribble
on a scribble, completely unsuitable for one of your books; forget it,
Lenù, one does not tell the story of an erasure” (SLC 17); “If I could
eliminate [“cancellarmi” in the original] myself now, while we’re speak-
ing, I’d be more than happy. Imagine if I’m going to start writing”
(SLC 454). With her usual brilliance and affinity for the unexpected,
the unpredictable, Lila manages to escape even the domain of phi-
losophy and critical theory, creating a rift in the theoretical framework
we have sketched thus far. Yet, a different metafictional (if not meta-
metafictional) logic operates at a deeper level of the text, suggesting
otherwise. Are we sure that a cancellatura is not narratable, that Lila
is not narrating back? That she is not participating in the relational,
interconnected process of storytelling? She does indeed participate in
the narrative practice in her own oblique way. Lila, first of all, writes
with her own body, with her existence, by fully embracing the chaos
and the “magma” from which Lena seeks refuge in the seclusion of
writing: “You wanted to write novels—says Lila—I created a novel with
real people, with real blood, in reality” (Those Who Leave and Those Who
186 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

Stay 285). This corporeal writing acts as the very origin, the necessary
matrix, of what Lena writes. Countering smarginatura, only the for-
mal composure of Lena’s writing can give shape and contours to the
formlessness that Lila personifies, turning her ineffable nihilism into
intelligible form. And so, contradicting her own desire for erasure, it
is Lila’s voice that emerges, “l’ombra malamente cancellata,”13 infus-
ing life and power into Lena’s writing. As Elena Greco dramatically
realizes at the end of the Neapolitan saga, it is Lila who has dictated
the rules in the game of the literary representation since the outset,
who has woven herself into the fabric of Lena’s sentences and words,
affecting their meaning, like a hypnotic ghost-writer. By the end of
the story, the dazzling woman has succeeded in expressing the inef-
fable (her self, her own erasure), not only through her ghost-writing
for Lena but also by shaping her friend’s life: “she had deceived me,
she had dragged me wherever she wanted, from the beginning of our
friendship. All our lives she had told a story of redemption that was
hers, using my living body and my existence” (SLC 473). As a “demi-
urge,” as a “creator of myth,” Lila has written and created Lena. As
critic Shulevitz nicely sums up, “[this] meta-metafictional twist only
deepens the puzzle already posed by their friendship. If Lila molded
Elena before Elena became her chronicler, then who invented whom?
Who deserves credit as the author?”
To return to our theoretical reflection on the practice of storytell-
ing and the idea of the ‘necessary other,’ there are some interesting
insights offered by Judith Butler that allow us to move our argument
further. Engaging with Cavarero, Butler, in her recent work, neatly
brings together discourses of self-formation and narration with issues
related to the subject’s moral accountability and ethical interpellation.
At the core of her theory, developed in Giving an Account of Oneself,14
lies the subject’s inability to give a coherent and final account of
herself, an inability filled with implications for the intersubjective
domain. Both concording with and complicating Cavarero’s rejection
of self-storytelling as a “mistake of desire,” Butler argues “opacity”—that
is, its inability to know the self fully—is constitutive of the self, given
that we do not have the ability to control our origins, or the irretriev-
able and unique context of our emergence as selves. Moreover, we
are ineluctably determined by social and linguistic norms, discursive
structures, narratives, and forms of address that we do not author

13
See Caterina Verbaro’s “Cancellature. Il caso Elena Ferrante.”
14
Hereafter, we cite Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself parenthetically in the text,
using the abbreviation GA.
 M LN 187

and that precede us, coming before and constituting our capacity for
self-reflection. The Butlerian “I,” then, is literally dispossessed, and
so is the account that this “I” gives of itself: “My account of myself is
partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definite story” (GA
40, emphasis added). Thus, for Butler, the crucial question, “Who are
you?”—which Cavarero has made central to her filosofia della narrazione,
where the other’s story turns out to be constitutive of the subject’s
identity—remains continually open, unanswered, in other words, an
“abbaglio del desiderio.” Does Elena Greco, too, commit such an
irresolvable error, succumb to such an “abbaglio del desiderio”? Does
her account, too, constitute an incomplete and incoherent attempt
to answer the question, “Who are you?” with a necessarily haunted
and partial account of both Lila and herself? In a crucial twist, Butler
weaves together filosofia della narrazione with the realms of relational
ontology and altruistic ethics, resonating once more with Cavarero.
Opacity is in fact for her at the basis of the ethical encounter with the
other. In a parallel argument, both philosophers envision a subject
that is relational, embodied, opaque, exposed to others, intertwined
with other lives, a subject that challenges the patriarchal idea of an
independent, abstract, and sovereign subject conceived by tradi-
tional political thought. As Cavarero claims “[a]ltruism is indeed the
foundational principle of a self that knows itself to be constituted by
another: the necessary other” (RN 84, emphasis in original). Butler’s sub-
ject, likewise, moves along the coordinates of relationality and ethical
responsibility, recognizing in its own innate opacity a dependency that
ties her to the other. It is precisely the mutual acceptance and reciprocal
acknowledgement of our limits and fallibility, our inescapable opacity,
our blindness to ourselves that, for Butler, has the potential to bind
us to one another, forming the basis of the post-Hegelian “scene of
recognition.” The Butlerian subject, in the end, offers herself up, in
all her vulnerability, to the other’s gaze:
To acknowledge one’s own opacity or that of another […] can […] constitute
a disposition of humility and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for
what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to
offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to
themselves. (Giving an Account 42)

All these final observations and inputs on the relational and altruistic
subject are rich with meaningful implications not only for the specu-
lar, interdependent relation of Lila and Lena, but also for exploring
the foundation, in the novel, of an alternative ethical system based
on empathy.
188 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

The Polis without Love: Napoli, Violence and Utopia

Rather than an ethics of altruism, the intersubjective dynamics of
Ferrante’s Naples are based on an ontology of individualism, ruth-
less competitiveness, and predominance. “I feel no nostalgia for our
childhood: it was full of violence,” Elena Greco notes (37). Social
exchanges between individuals and families in the rione are intensely
hierarchical, organized not only along the vertical lines of socio-
economic status and gender, but also along covert and inescapable
lines established through affiliations and connivance with organized
crime. Deeply ingrained in the social and material fabric of the city,
the violence of the rione Luzzatti is all pervasive, rooted as it is in the
very mindset of its inhabitants. It is, at the same time, physical and
psychic, linguistic and cultural, historical and quotidian, symbolic and
epistemic. Violence reaches its Spannung in the previously mentioned
1958 New Year’s Eve, when Lila firstly experiences the painful dissolu-
tion of confines and borders (smarginatura). On that same night, in
a Faustian and apocalyptic scene, replete with fireworks, rockets, and
smoke, the Solara brothers fire gunshots against the group of Lena’s
and Lila’s friends gathered for the occasion, unequivocally reaffirm-
ing their power over the rione and its inhabitants. The eruption of
violence, thus, becomes the material counterpart of Lila’s disquieting
smarginatura. There is, in other words, a dysphoric and disruptive force
at work in the girls’ lives, manifesting itself on both the historical and
the psychic, the collective and the individual levels. It is a haunting
force that threatens to swallow them up, to annihilate their fragile
identities and to shatter their profiles, a tangible fear of being wiped
out by the brutality that saturates the rione. History is a recursive cycle
of crime and violence, as Lila suddenly realizes, for the first time, in
this tragic night, and the evil of the neighborhood reflects, in the
end, “the blackest evil in the world” (256). Against this dystopian
backdrop, the two girls stand out. They fend off the brutality of the
city and the patriarchal verticality of its social relations not only with
the reciprocity and horizontality of their friendship, their “sisterhood,”
but also with a brilliant idea, a theoretical proposition that would not
be altogether out of place in a book by Cavarero or Butler. It is an
idea born out of Lila’s brilliant mind, during her endless reasoning
and speculations with her friend, and later put into words by Lena,
now a Liceo Classico student, in a school assignment on Virgil’s Aeneid
handed in to her literature teacher. “When there is no love, not only
the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities” (160), Lila
affirms one day, while developing her own personal interpretation of
 M LN 189

the classic poem and Dido’s story she has passionately read before
Lena. Bringing political philosophy and classical poetry together in
an original discourse, Lila seems to conceive of an alternative, utopian
city based on principles of love—where ‘love’ refers, as in classical
Greek political theory, to civic eros and friendship, the glue that binds
the members of a community to one another.15 Lila’s imaginary polis,
we would suggest, closely recalls the two contemporary philosophers’
writings on altruistic ethics and relational ontology and signals a
shift from a “vicinanza affettiva” with Lena to a “consonanza ideologica,”
whereby personal relations, friendship and love are recognized in
their political implications.16 For Lila—to lend her ideas expressed
by Ferrante herself in La frantumaglia—the Carthaginian queen is
the catalyst of new ways of envisioning and refashioning history, the
first woman to imagine and construct her own city: not just a female
furens, consumed by passion, who hampers the hero’s quest to found
his city, as in the traditional reading handed down by classicists to
generations of students. Organized according to principles of justice,
law, and empathy, the city under construction, Ferrante writes in La
frantumaglia, is built of living matter, of stones that absorb and are
nourished by the emotions and desires of its citizens:
Like Dido, the stones wait for their destiny to be decided. If the love between
her and Aeneas should be consummated happily, leading to joyous and
enduring understanding, then Carthage will receive power, construction will
resume, and the stone will take in the positive feelings of the human beings
who are giving shape to it. Instead Aeneas abandons the woman. (160)17
… and Carthage, potentially a city of love, becomes a city with a mission
of hatred. Individuals and cities without love are a danger to themselves
and others. (88)

Dido’s living polis of love, thus, becomes a counter-model against

which to measure the violent reality of Naples, a utopian projection
of the girls’ ethical desires. Soon thereafter, Lena elaborates on Lila’s

15
For a fascinating analysis of the role of passion and desire as binding forces that
forge communities in the ancient Greek polis, see Paul Ludwig’s Eros and Polis: Desire
and Community in Greek Political Theory.
16
In her interpretation of L’amica geniale, Laura Benedetti notes: “Mettere l’accento
sul valore politico dell’amicizia significa anche sviluppare nuovi modi di intendere la
polis, la città come spazio geografico ma anche come nodo di relazioni e di affetti”
(174). Benedetti, elaborating on Élaine Audet’s analysis on female friendship, empha-
sizes the idea that a political vision of friendship bears the potential of disintegrating
the structures of patriarchy.
17
Translator’s note: This passage does not appear in the abridged version of La fran-
tumaglia, translated by Ann Goldstein; the translation above is mine.
190 FLORA GHEZZO, SARA TEARDO

observations for her school assignment. Her essay (“The Various

Phases of the Tragedy of Dido”), highly praised by the entire faculty,
rewarded with the highest mark, fills Lena with pride and represents
the culmination of the two friends’ mutual “goading” and of their
symbiotic, relational writing process (“of course, what I wrote about
Dido belongs to me; but didn’t I work it out with [Lila], didn’t we
excite each other in turn, didn’t my passion grow in the warmth of
hers?” 188–89). In addition, marking a further step in Lena’s intel-
lectual development and awareness, the school assignment seals her
lucid realization, her coming to term with the reality of her milieu. In
a sort of epiphany, she recognizes the ‘city deserted by love’ in the
pervasive violence and dreariness of the rione, in “our dirty streets, the
dusty gardens, our countryside disfigured by new buildings” (160).
Like an amateur philosopher, she claims: “if love is exiled from cities,
their good nature becomes an evil nature” (188). And a city without
love means, for her, “a people deprived of happiness,” a people sub-
dued and controlled, divested of their freedom: “Italy under Fascism,
Germany under Nazism, all of us human beings in the world today”
(ibid.). The (nea)polis without love, thus, becomes an allegory of the
devastation and ravages brought about by history.
Like Cavarero and Butler, Lila and Lena, ‘founders of cities,’
aspire and yearn in their teenage years—if only in a speculative and
visionary effort—to refashion society along ethical lines, placing an
altruistic ethics at the root of their utopian city. The polis of love with
its political implications figure as an isolated episode in the lives of
Ferrante’s protagonists. It is destined to have no sequel—indeed,
to be tragically belied by the violence that besets the neighborhood
and the ever more diverging and conflicting trajectories of their very
friendship. Nevertheless, the allegorical image of the ‘polis (with)out
love’ remains indelibly interwoven into the fabric of the Neapolitan
saga. It visually crystallizes all the thematic and theoretical threads that
have been unraveled so far in this essay. It is the historical and mate-
rial counterpart of the various psychological processes and relational
patterns embodied in the exemplary friendship of Lila and Lena:
specularity, horizontality, reciprocal exchange, interdependence, rela-
tional ontology, ethical connection. It stands for a ‘herstory’ opposed
to history, for an imagined community or feminine utopia that refuses
the neatness of historical teleologies driven by violence. If, therefore,
Lena’s much-praised school assignment is soon forgotten by Ferrante’s
readers, who are again immersed in the breathtaking and suspenseful
unfolding of the Neapolitan saga, the broader process of self-formation
 M LN 191

that the novel stages, the complex and contradictory dynamics of

writing and narrating, is far from forgettable. Unforgettable, too, is
Ferrante’s staging of the encounter with the other in all its complexity,
and her account of a subject who is split and incoherent, haunted by
obsessions and by fears of dissolution and disintegration, spurred by
desires, surrounded by narcissistic projections, always poised between
self-actualization and self-effacement. Vulnerable, exposed, and open,
this subject, a would-be citizen of the polis with love, is ethical by
virtue of her very vulnerability. And, albeit often in an unpredictable
and elusive way, she entrusts the other—and the other’s story—with
the sense of her own life.
FLORA GHEZZO, La Scuola d’Italia, New York
SARA TEARDO, Princeton University
Translated by Ramsey McGlazer

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