“The Ferrante Letters,” a book of “collective criticism” from the authors and academics Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, began in the spring of 2015, at a bar in Brooklyn. “It was that moment when spring flirts with summer,” they write in their introduction, “the wind antagonizing the cherry trees in bloom.” The word “flirt” feels deliberate. Here are letters that the four women sent one another while reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet: letters that themselves court a new mode of textual engagement. “Each letter would build on the arguments of previous letters by agreeing, disagreeing, extending, and reframing,” the authors continue. “The boundaries between our readings would stay permeable. . . . we believed that this would make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all acts of criticism.”
There’s something uncanny about a group of bookish women using Ferrante’s tetralogy—which follows the lives of Lila and Lenù, two friends growing up in Naples during the nineteen-fifties—to impel a collective inquiry. Lenù is a novelist. Lila, who experiences surreal episodes in which “the outlines of things and people . . . broke like cotton thread,” is Lenù’s muse. The books themselves, framed by Lila’s disappearance and penned by an anonymous author (Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym), represent identity as a thing that vanishes, or that never existed at all. Maybe, in this context, killing off the individual critic is only logical.
Still, the book offers many of the pleasures of traditional criticism. Part One consists of short, exploratory letters, which touch on everything from friendship to motherhood to political solidarity. In Part Two, each writer presents a longer essay that develops an idea from the first half. The project mostly caters to initiates, who can test its observations against their prior knowledge of Ferrante, but the authors themselves seem attracted to the role of the amateur. Their introduction underscores that none of them specialize in Italian literature; nor had any of them written about Ferrante before embarking on the experiment. Frequently they adopt a tentative posture, dancing around ideas and one other. “I’m not going to make any particularly responsible or rigorous claims here about Sebald and Ferrante,” Chihaya warns at one point. “It’s just some confused thoughts and feelings, stemming in some ways from Katherine’s provocation to think about place over/with/under character.”
Informality provides a cover for daring. (What follows Chihaya’s hedge is a rich meditation on the elusiveness of both neighborhoods and people.) It also “makes visible,” as the authors point out, the fractured, cumulative nature of literary analysis itself. Paging through these letters is like streaming a time-lapse video: in one example, Emre’s perceptive gloss on an exploding pot (the scene converts “social entropy” into “material destruction”) seeps into Chihaya’s notion of phantasmagorical realism, a mode in which physical objects are overcharged with meaning. Elsewhere, the writers chase will-o’-the-wisps through unexpectedly intimate terrain. Emre considers her pregnancy. Chihaya discusses depression and the pull of self-erasure. Richards notes, “There are shadow narratives, about me. . . . underneath the stories that I tell about Lenù and Lila, so that the Neapolitan cycle blurs a bit into the background, as a merely enabling fiction.”
The personal has been wending its way into criticism for some time, usually to stress the discipline’s subjectivity: recalling the “web of lived relations” in which scholarship occurs is thought, reasonably, to yield greater understanding. (There are “selves behind these projects,” the authors insist, quoting Jack Halberstam.) But the disclosures in “The Ferrante Letters” aren’t disclaimers, meant to contextualize—they’re ankle flashes, meant to seduce. The intimate tone lends a beguiling humanity to the book, inducing a pleasure more often associated with novels: the pleasure of character. For Chihaya, Emre, and Richards (Hill reveals less), select confessions promise not the key to one story—Ferrante’s—but the existence of a second, more enchanting story, which the first story only “enables.”
This is one of several ways in which the essays aspire to the condition of fiction. Specifically, they aspire to the condition of Ferrante’s fiction, which bristles with “shadow narratives”: Lenù’s novels, for example, paraphrase Lila’s apparently superior diaries. The wished-for ideal appears to be ambiguity and aesthetic unknowability. This means that, even as “The Ferrante Letters” showcases what is good about criticism (keen noticing, ingenious arguments, elegant and forceful expression), it can seem, at times, to disdain its own genre. It’s hard to object to ambition, the flourishes that make this book read like art. And yet it’s worth distinguishing between literary effects that charm or move a reader and those that increase her comprehension of a text. Book reviews aren’t here to make friends, even brilliant ones.
What, exactly, are they here to do? The most provocative claim in “The Ferrante Letters” is that criticism might not only illuminate a text; it might also mimic a work, inhabit its form. This makes for mesmerically reflexive reading, in which the authors, characters in a plot of their own making, gradually become subject to Ferrante’s themes. Consider the essays in the back of the book. Richards, an expert in gender and sexuality studies, explores elisions—the way Lenù overwrites Lila’s dialogue, for instance—in order to think about queer alternatives to the Neapolitan narrative. Chihaya, meanwhile, argues that the sense of flux and turbulence suffusing Ferrante’s work produces a not-quite-enjoyable excitation, which she calls “unpleasure,” and which she connects to our twinned drives for self-assertion and self-effacement, familiar from her own life.
Throughout, there’s a sense that Ferrante’s novels and the letters are composed of the same thematic strata. The outermost layer has something to do with competition and affiliation. Lila and Lenù comprise, as Richards puts it, “an economy of two.” A reader feels the impulse to identify, to pick one at the other’s expense. “Amongst friends,” Richards writes, “what makes you you has to bounce off everyone else in a claustrophobic pool game of limited personalities.” Are you a Lenù or a Lila? Similarly, are you a Sarah, a Merve, a Katherine, or a Jill? I caught myself projecting different aspects of a single critical mind onto the authors: Chihaya as dream logic, Emre as judgment, Richards as counterfactual imagination, Hill as warmth. Obviously, this type of sorting is reductive, and, one layer down, the novels seem to critique it. Ferrante blurs the line between Lila and Lenù. She takes up the fluidity of the self, and the letters implicitly make the same point, offering a vision of the critic’s brain as bustling, porous, crammed with other people.
Recently, I went to see Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards speak at a local bookstore. I arrived late; the room was so full that I could only hear the authors’ voices, mingling but distinct. One of them pointed out that letters assume an audience aside from the specific addressee—the form involves both communication and performance, speaking not only to but through. This feeling, of women using one another’s stories as occasions for self-making, is central to the Neapolitan quartet. What distinguishes the professors from Lila and Lenù is the spirit in which the material is offered. Ferrante’s protagonists are territorial; Chihaya, Emre, Hill, and Richards circulate their words generously. One might chalk this up to civic-mindedness. But it could also reflect the fact that, for these authors, readings are not complete, polished products. Self-dissent can be transcribed, rather than quieted; every sentence is an invitation to press harder. The never-ending-ness of such a practice—of all critical practice, done right—is occasionally paralyzing. Even working on this review, I at times felt myself losing shape and multiplying, as if there were too many of me to start the job and too few of me to finish it. I wandered to my editor’s desk. I wandered back. I bothered my colleague, who was closing a Profile. I wanted feedback on my efforts, which were crawling out of an indeterminate, personal place, but then, I think, I also wanted something simpler: company.
