Disappearing Act
In which I revisit an old essay about Ferrante and struggle to finish it in the context of the Epstein emails.
I wrote the following essay about three years ago but couldn’t figure out how to end it. I still haven’t, but at least now I have a postscript. If you haven’t read the Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child), stop now and go read them. If that is not possible, most of what follows will not make a lot of sense and contains spoilers if you do want to read them someday.
Here goes.
I have read the four-volume Neapolitan novels three times. The novels recount the life histories of two women (Lila and Lenu), beginning from early childhood and extending into their 60s. They are born during WWII, grow up together in a poor neighborhood in Naples, leave the city and return. The novels are narrated by Lenu, who feels herself the shadow or lesser figure to her friend Lila. Both Lenu and Lila are romantically entangled, at various points, with their childhood friend Nino, who is arguably the most important secondary character (though every character falls distantly behind the central two friends).
On the first read, my favorite part was Book 2, and the account of an ill-fated summer vacation where Lila and Nino, who is already Lenu’s long-standing love interest, fall in love and run away together (despite each having partners of varying seriousness and commitment). I, too, had been the third party to a love triangle as a young adult and identified acutely with Lenu’s discovery that she stood outside of a dyad having thought herself part of a carefully counterpoised three-way friendship. Re-experiencing this emotional arc felt pleasantly painful, a means of excavating violent feeling and the almost physical sensation of longing – but, unlike at the time, with no stakes whatsoever. I was, in adolescent parlance, completely over the drama; I felt nothing but warmth for the other two involved, twinged with sadness that after maintaining cross-continental and trans-Atlantic friendships for more than a decade, we had lost touch. Reading the story of Lenu’s failed love triangle thus held the same satisfaction as picking off a scab to reveal tender but fully healed skin underneath.
On the second read it was Book 3 that prompted the strongest feeling. I was now a mother, and finding the claustrophobia (as well as joy, although Lenu’s joy never really comes through) of that experience echoed on the page was cathartic. At one point Lenu states she is a “slave” to her daughters. How offensive if one gives a moment’s thought to the nature of chattel slavery! Yes, and when you are standing at a stove attempting to prepare one of three meals your older child will actually eat while said child harangues, cajoles, and wheedles you for snacks or television or (if nature calls in the midst) to “wipe [her] butt!” and the other child is plaintively repeating “mama!” while clinging to your knees well, then, one might be forgiven for feeling entirely subject to the demands of unaccountable and totalitarian forces that invade one’s very home and seek to absorb the entirety of oneself into their needs and desires. The paradox of parenting is that both parents and children feel this total subjection to one another. While my ability to think, to write, to act publicly in the world, to get shit done feels dependent on my children’s cooperation (even if that cooperation consists of going to bed at the appointed time to allow me precious hours before I, too, get to sleep), they must (I assume) feel equally or more at my mercy due to physical incapacity and emotional siloing within the nuclear family: Will we go to the playground? What will I eat? Will I be loved?
Which brings me to the third and most recent reading. Professional circumstances had conspired to bring the other traumatizing romantic relationship of my early adulthood back into my life, if only glancingly. In the intervening decade and a half I had managed to largely forget about his existence as he became a fairly successful politician, a career he had just begun to contemplate during our entanglement. Nino, too, became a politician, after having revealed himself to be the masculine equivalent of a femme fatale (Is there such a term? How theoretically compelling that there isn’t), but also, as I argue below, a Macguffin. In the book, Nino’s political career is treated as an extension of his compulsive need to love and be loved by women. Here, in the real world, the fact of my former more-than-friend’s political success filled me with rage and resentment. Our relationship was characterized by power imbalances, initially of age and status and eventually of feeling; to see someone who once had both institutional and erotic power over me have actual power was too on the nose, too unfair. Again, the book offered catharsis, but this time it was not via nostalgia but a kind of transference: I could identify my awful ex with the narrator’s, revel in the villain cut given Nino in the fourth book.
This was also (not unrelatedly; I’ll explain) the reading when I decided I was a Lila. (What’s a book about multiple female protagonists without this game? Men who read The Brothers Karamazov never seem to say “I’m an Ivan,” or “I’m an Alyosha,” but women always find themselves on the menu.) When I first encountered the novels, my identification with Lenu was both total and almost excruciatingly intense: she was insecure, ambitious, conforming, and pretty-but-not-beautiful. Her identity was bound up in others’ opinion of her intelligence, she worked for any recognition or brilliance she might show. Lila on the other hand was a genius, possessing the quality I most envied in others: to be so smart, so compelling, so charismatic, that you did not have to be liked–you could simply be a force. Lila also sought self-annihilation. Not suicide, but disappearance; when the book begins she has abandoned her life without a trace. That impulse felt incomprehensible to me - why would you want to do anything other than maximize your experiences in this brief and precious life?
Throughout the novels, the central triad (Lila, Lenu, and Nino) are united by their shared passion for the craft of writing (which is a vocation, at various points, for two of the three), and skill with the written word provides the medium through which their various hierarchies and attachments are figured. Crucially, Lenu - despite becoming a semi-famous and financially successful author - remains convinced throughout that Lila is the better writer. Whether and to what extent Lila is still writing into middle age is not clear, but if she is she is not sharing it. She becomes an early computer programmer instead. There’s a reading of the books where Lila’s abandonment of authorship is a tragedy, a story of lost potential in the face of economic desperation and sexism. But there’s also a reading where Lila consciously gives up authorship in favor of work–initially with her hands, then with her analytical abilities. Lenu is visible, a minor celebrity (the subject of a magazine spread), her person the object of attention and public meaning. Lila disappears into her work. Lenu draws attention through various articles in leftist newspapers but–at least in her own, unreliable narration-it is Lila who is the more effective organizer, the one who can compel a room of communists with an impromptu speech.
Great writing, the implication seems to be, is also a way of disappearing. Elena Ferrante, of course, is a pseudonym; the novel’s author is also, in a way, as erased as her character. (Ferrante has not entirely disappeared–although her identity is a secret, “Ferrante” as the author of the Neapolitan novels and other texts has appeared as an interviewee and a collaborator on adaptations of her work. There is a “self” behind the texts, if a constructed one that cannot be tied to–blemished by–a biography) Lila’s impulse to dissolve into her work, Ferrante may be suggesting, is the same impulse that makes her such a brilliant writer–acting upon the wor(l)d but leaving no record, no clumsy footprints of an imperfect self to spoil the seamlessness of the imaginary world she’s created. (But also - Lenu speaks of the distinctiveness of Lila’s voice, of the way she recognizes Lila’s words and ideas even buried beneath Lenu’s own interpretation.) Think, conversely, of Woody Allen, who has become pathetic because of his compulsive need to enact his pathologies through his art. Having, at times, managed to sublimate his erotic fantasies and neurotic self-regard into something more universally felt, he can’t escape himself and so has fallen into mediocrity.
I am not a genius or a great writer, and when I say I am a Lila it is not because I have reassessed my abilities or overcome the many character flaws I share with the novels’ narrator. I am not a factory worker or a computer programmer (though I am married to the latter). But I have, given a choice, chosen work in which such disappearance is valued, over work where ultimately, it is the idea of yourself that you are selling as a means to professional success and status. Such is academia and such is politics. A job talk is not about convincing people of ideas, it is about convincing people you are the sort of person who can produce ideas, for decades to come (tenure!). It’s hardly worth saying how politics consists of selling oneself, maybe as a vehicle for certain ideas, but certainly as an investment (quite literally; much of politics is fundraising after all). Both fields are ones I have spent much of my adult life in or in proximity to by way of attending a law school overpopulated with extraordinarily privileged and ambitious individuals. And I spent much of my thirties profoundly ambivalent about whether I had chosen not to sell myself in this way out of principle or simply failed to do so successfully.
In contrast, I think, the ambition to be a great writer, to write great things that are remembered, can be a desire to be subsumed, to be understood in the future and known through something that exists as an object beyond your control, that is subject to (mis)interpretation, to act on the reader without being present or even to know what effect you have had. The act of writing is brave inasmuch as you leave something behind and trust that to act on the reader unmediated by you. And it is successful inasmuch as the writer has, through force of intellect and creativity and moral insight, compelled the reader to think, or see, or be in the world in a certain way. (Echoes here of Arendtian action, the concept of bringing forth something new into the world that outlasts one’s own physical presence, but only because that new thing is tied up in human interaction and creates relationships that can persist beyond the limits of individual bodies.)
This is also the ambition of being a great mother, to shape someone that enters into the world marked by you but with those markings invisible even to them. Bad parenting reverberates, leaves scars, is the subject of therapy sessions; good parenting is, from the standpoint of the adult child, seemingly invisible, easy to overlook. The terror and tragedy of motherhood, of course, is when this creation escapes your control or when you are subsumed into it, rather than acting on it. Frankenstein was authored by a woman who had lost a child shortly after birth. More mundanely, and as Ferrante herself conveys exquisitely, that invisibility can become pernicious, can become less the exercise of authority (authorship) and instead feel like servitude. There usually isn’t time for both writing and parenting: In the Neapolitan novels writing competes brutally with motherhood. (See: Arendt and the incompatibility of labor and action.) This is of course a practical competition, for time and space and thought, but it takes on a more existential tenor as well: one cannot put one’s self into one vocation if it has been tied up in another. Long before she has children, Lenu is deeply affected by the image of a young woman who is attending a political rally while holding a baby and who tries nursing that child while gesticulating in group discussions. Lenu, fool that she is, comes to interpret her own reaction as a kind of intuitive grasp that the child is, as she later learns, Nino’s. But of course not: Lenu is witnessing a kind of contemporary Madonna scene, a Jung-ian image that I’ve heard countless women of past generations who achieved professional success recapitulate. “I would lecture with my two-year old…” “I had the baby strapped to my front during the conference…” “I flew out to the trial with my six-month old so I could keep nursing…”
Ferrante has, I have finally come to understand, authored a feminist treatise about the power of disappearance. I say that with hesitation, because women are so often asked to disappear out of the public world, because women are disappeared (in every sense of the word). But Lila, at least for most of her life, disappears into the world. She does not eschew action, only the need to be seen. She acts on people and institutions in her life without leaving a signature, an identifiable mark. Attempting to disappear, too, means not seeking to be desired. Lenu ends up spending years of her adult life in thrall to Nino but he becomes entirely irrelevant to Lila after their brief affair in late adolescence. Except – for an ambiguous moment, in her late thirties or early forties, Lila may momentarily attend to him, subject her sense of self to him, and this moment precipitates a monumental tragedy that defines the rest of Lila’s life. She seeks to be seen, and all is lost.
What Ferrante is arguing, maybe, is that there is power in this disappearance. This is a dangerous argument to make. One danger is falling into a Lady Macbeth trope. At times, true, Lila is described in this way, as acting on people, moving them like chess pieces, enacting a design invisible to all but her until it comes to fruition. This is a kind of authorship, to write relationships and set events in motion in the real world as a novelist does on the page. Lila stops writing stories on the page, and instead writes them through the medium of others’ psychologies, desires, reactions. But I think many readers (myself included) would recoil at the suggestion that the apotheosis of womanly power is someone enacting personae in the service of a plot, acting through men, undone by their mistakes. If one can only act through others, ultimately they have control when they decide they no longer want to play. Add to that such a form of power invites inauthenticity. To manipulate and direct in this way, one often has to be the pen as well as the person holding it, the instrument as well as the artist.
Another danger in glorifying what is effectively self-defense. Lila must disappear because her visibility to men, her sexual desirability, brings her such suffering. Here is another trope: The girl who hides within baggy clothes, who seeks to disappear from the male gaze, whose invisibility is a form of escape but also a concession to power.
The far more appealing (at least to me) form of disappearance-of-power is solidarity as a form of action. Certainly this kind of power is consistent with socialist political work: the novels are almost Manichean in their opposition of the women’s communist attachments to the neighborhood bullies-cum-adult-antagonists’ Fascism. Solidarity, too, is a form of disappearance. I return again and again to Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use”:
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
Piercy is a radical feminist and activist, something that when I first learned somehow surprised me. Weren’t we as feminists supposed to push back at the notion that our gender should work diligently in the shadows, moving along the project while the men take the glory? But a decade and a half (and some years of union organizing) later, I recognize how incompatible individual visibility and political effectiveness can be. There is physical safety and power in solidarity of course–the line of protestors, linked arm in arm, against the police batons–but also psychological. Not groupthink (no one could ever accuse Lila of groupthink), but in making the fight not about me, the inevitable attacks, blowback, criticisms, feel less dire. I’m not the point–so there’s no use in telling me I’m ugly, I made a mistake, I’m a hypocrite. We’ve all seen movies or TV shows with the cliche of a charismatic leader of a collective movement picked off through bribery, flattery, or COINTELPRO. But what freedom to live with the hand pointing elsewhere, to be the one directing attention and thus to be unscrutinized by it. Getting the work done, yes, but also able to cause trouble, to create unease, to be unknowable and thus unstoppable. To be a problem without a name is perhaps, to be harder to solve.
What Ferrante suggests, in writing four volumes in the voice of an ambitious woman who seeks above all else to be a great writer and who feels, at the end, she has failed relative to her friend who has not published a single volume, is that writing, too, involves this kind of power. Novels were arguably the first European writing form where women were equal or even more identified with the form than men: this world-making and explicitly slipping into the voice of another was, from its origins, a feminine genre. Ferrante’s work also fits into a long line of novels in which the quintessentially feminine (feminist?) hero is an author. Readers of Little Women are supposed to identify with Jo, to long to see one’s work in print (but maybe not with one’s name attached). As a Lenu, I had always felt an affinity for Amy, the thwarted would-be genius, and the chapter in which Amy is humiliated at the art fair stuck with me most of all: What if you long for greatness and it never comes? What if you are invisible to the world? In the end Amy gets the boy and the money, and even grows up and out of her spoiled childhood temperament. But Jo is the hero. Ferrante, in presenting the reader with a character as compelling as Lila, who holds such emotional power over her neighborhood and the book’s narrator, but who (unlike Jo) is not particularly likable, suggests a subversive reason for this: We like Jo not because she is good but because she gets her way. Even little girls want power.
The conceit of the Neapolitan novels is Lenu’s efforts to excavate Lila, to undo her disappearance, to tell Lila’s story despite her, to regain power in that relationship. There is a heartbreaking irony in the twist that, after all those men tried to have Lila, it is her closest friend that comes closest to succeeding, and who finally drives her completely underground. But in beginning and ending with this frame (echoes of Frankenstein’s epistolary framework) Ferrante leaves the ultimate victory between the two girl-women undecided: Both have been the authors of the other’s life.
What Ferrante is not ambiguous about–indeed, almost simplistic in the novel’s denouement–is where the boys fit in. Both Lenu and Lila fall in love with Nino when he is still a writer, and Lenu’s obsession (which we see from the inside) is always both aspirational and objectifying: She wants to have him and be him, to publish like him, to be respected like him among the intelligentsia of 1960s Italy. I’m sure I speak for many former-adolescent-girls when I say a similar confusion was at the heart of most of my youthful romances, confusing a kind of ego ideal only available to men (the genius!) with a desire for those men. But crucially, rapturously, Ferrante casts the lives lived (and the disappearance of Lila) of the two women not as failure or a consolation prize relative to Nino’s election but as a triumph of femininity, as feminism, against the cretinous and ultimately pitiable self-propagation of masculine forms of political power. You can almost hear Lenu, Ferrante, or both, rolling their eyes when describing Nino’s political success, which only occurs after he’s become romantically irrelevant to both women. Late in life, it’s the confused desire to-control-and-to-become between the two women that has finally emerged as the driving force behind Lenu’s actions, surfaced above and outlasting earlier misplaced affections.
When I found myself a Lila after the third reading, what I mean is that I now understand, approaching forty, that a better life, a better world is made possible by simply letting the Ninos of the world be irrelevant, to exhaust themselves in their own self-involvement. To tend, not to one’s garden, but to one’s work. To leave a mark, but not be particularly concerned if anyone noticed you etching it and, in so disappearing, to gain some freedom. To be seen is dangerous for women, quite literally; to need to be seen is dangerous, too. To be sure, disappearance is a precarious ethos, one that risks falling into self-abnegation. Precisely because Lila has disappeared it is impossible to know whether she continues to act on and in the world, or whether that disappearance is in fact a form of social death. (Early motherhood in contemporary U.S. society is, too, a kind of social death, a form of invisibility, but one caused by turning inward to a black hole of infant needs, rather than an erasure, a making of one’s life into a postmodern work of art, as Lila does with the photo in the shoe shop.) Conversely, it is hard not to become a Lenu, not easy to hold this vision for one’s own life in a world that privileges masculine forms of action.
***
…and that’s where it stops.
I couldn’t figure out how to end it three years ago and I still don’t now. Even less because it seems such an artifact of the Trump interregnum, of a brief period in which the most proximate political enemies were merely preening narcissists with questionable sexual ethics. Now we have rule-as-rape and rule-by-rapists. The notion of embracing invisibility-as-power seems downright regressive when Congress is contemplating legislation seemingly designed to prevent women who changed their name upon marriage from voting. We should be screaming at the top of our lungs. (We are screaming at the top of our lungs, but the institutions who hold the megaphones have turned them off on us.)
Then there are the Epstein files, the slow trickle of realization that actually yes, there was a massive conspiracy – not (only) in sex trafficking, but in the kind of reputation-building-and-destroying and lawsuit funding women were accused of during the #metoo backlash. It was as literal and as blatant as you could possibly imagine: Advice about how to pressure a mentee into a romantic relationship, referrals to lawyers to shield powerful men from Title IX investigations and (it would seem), secretly funded lawsuits by sex criminal millionaires to intimidate and silence women who accused men of impropriety, and friendly exchanges with the reactionary centrist reporters who would wring their hands about the dangers of a “whisper network” destroying the reputations of falsely accused men. Right wing politicians have no politics beyond projection. Every accusation is a confession - private emails among disparate accused men becomes assertions that no, it is the women who are feeding each other accusation; Epstein’s funding of lawsuits in defense of those men becomes Soros paid protestors; Heather Heyer’s murder-by-car becomes a justification for Renee Good’s; Hegseth’s tattoos claims of gang membership to justify torturing Venezuelan migrants.
Of course everything in the emails pales in comparison to what Epstein was actually doing at the time. But the thing in the emails that really got to me was Larry Summers. Not because I’ve ever interacted with the man, or have any institutional affiliation with Harvard, or any interest in academic economics. (I did attend a wedding once where he was also a guest; my husband convinced me it would have been bad form to cause a scene by yelling at him then, and I’ve come to regret the missed opportunity.) But on January 14, 2005, Summers stated at an NBER conference that women’s lack of representation in, among other fields, mathematics, was due to the relative dearth of women at the high end of the bell curve for ability in those fields and not discrimination. He would be forced out at Harvard in part for these remarks, but continue to be an influential economist both inside and out of the Obama administration.
At the time he gave these remarks, which were widely covered in the national news media, I was a third-year mathematics major, and the only woman in my honors Abstract Algebra class. I was acutely, excruciatingly visible. Everyone knew my name, while I struggled to remember theirs. Every time I raised my hand I sensed, subconsciously, I was subjecting myself to a test: Would the girl get it right? Meanwhile, the professor-turned-politician had decided it maybe wasn’t such a great idea to date your undergraduate student after all but I lived in fear that my male peers would find out about that whole situation and any credibility I had built would be irrevocably lost.
Summers’ comments were the crystallization, the articulation of a belief I knew, I just knew, the men around me shared. For the intervening two decades, upon hearing his name in conversation I would more often than not involuntarily announce, “I hate Larry Summers” before engaging with whatever the other person actually said. It is, maybe, my longest-held continuous grudge.
And then the Epstein emails came out. And it became clear that his “heterodox” remarks were anything but a naive hypothesis about an unsettled question of cognitive science but the expression of an individual who systematically and persistently denigrated women and sought to leverage his status to convert an intellectual colleague into a sexual object. And he was not the only one: No, there was a conspiracy of funders and faculty to exclude women from professional opportunities borne of a mutually reinforcing belief in their intellectual inferiority.
So here we are in #metoo 2. Last time around, women were faced with a Faustian bargain: To assert power, to unseat their oppressors, women were required to cast themselves as the victim, to make the men the star of their life stories, to objectify themselves in recounting how they were objectified. Women were visible; the men, working behind the scenes to lawyer up and discredit them (as we have now learned), were not.
Maybe this time it will be different; maybe they’ll be done in by their emails (insert Hillary meme here). Maybe visibility, this time, will work in our favor.
Or maybe, as with Weinstein, the Epstein emails will set an impossibly high standard; anything less than openly conspiring with a known sex offender to deliberately exclude women or coerce a junior colleague into sex will become insufficient to merit dismissal. Maybe this will be the fodder for another two decades of impotent rage.
Maybe in Minnesota we are seeing a politics of invisible power, of anonymous action, of women’s orchestration of the world, building toward something bigger, something transformative. (That’s what I argued in my last post, anyhow.)
Maybe I don’t know how to end an essay about feminine power and invisibility because that power doesn’t exist yet, because it is a power for conditions that don’t exist yet.
Maybe the new world is struggling to be born.
Maybe we don’t get to see it, and won’t be seen in it, but have to trust we will have left our mark.