Cold war
I’ve been in a rut for a long time. It started before the pandemic, but the last two years have only worsened it. I have been extremely self critical, castigating myself for “seeking attention” online, telling myself any creative work I could make would be useless and boring, that I’m not capable of making anything worthwhile. I quit Twitter and tried to post as little as possible. I have tried to turn off my desire to express myself.
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Last night I watched the most recent episode of the HBO show My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I read all four of the novels around 2015 and found them entrancing and terrifying. I always thought that characterizing the books as a story about “female friendship” is like calling Twin Peaks a story about high school. The friendship between the two main characters, Elena and Lila, is the staging ground for the book’s true subject: the psychological horror of living as a woman in mid-century Italy.
This week’s episode, entitled “Cold War", explores the pain and self-doubt that Elena experiences in relation to her writing. She publishes her first novel as a young woman who hasn’t experienced much of the world. The book is instinctual and honest, lacking self-awareness, which is a blessing and a curse. It receives polarized reviews—a lot of people think it’s lurid trash (it contains explicit references to sex, something that’s unacceptable coming from a woman in repressed ‘60s Italian culture), while others appreciate its forthrightness. But even this praise sometimes feels empty, like critics are using the book as a signifier of their own sophistication, to show they “get it”.
Elena often suspects that even those who say they like the book are lying. But Ferrante’s audience never knows whose perception of the novel is accurate—we never see any of its contents. We only have Elena’s unreliable narration of her experience, the hall of mirrors of anxiety and self-criticism that the pretentious literary world instills in her psyche.
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The Neapolitan novels are highly autobiographical. Elena is, of course, also Ferrante’s pen name. Both her and her character grew up in a poor neighborhood, speaking the Neapolitan dialect, before escaping to a world of academia and literature where they never felt fully at home. Beyond their exploration of politics and patriarchy, the books are brutal and masterful excavations of Ferrante’s own insecurities.
It’s painful to admit how much I relate to Elena: her desire for admiration from those in positions of power and prestige, her constant doubting of her own self-worth, her projection of her insecurities onto others. She isn’t a sympathetic character, but that’s one of the reasons the books are so brilliant and cutting. We always see our own worst qualities most clearly.
The central relationship in the Neapolitan novels is between Elena and her childhood friend Lila. It’s probably more accurate to describe them as frenemies, as for much of the four books Elena is either consumed with jealousy or pity for Lila. Elena’s deepest belief and fear is that Lila is far superior to her and more deserving of the success that she has achieved. Elena frequently expresses her certainty that Lila would have achieved better things given the same opportunities, and that any talent she has is only due to Lila’s influence and inspiration. But this description of Lila’s genius is subjective and impossible to confirm. In fact, there is hardly any evidence to back it up. We never see Lila actually create anything, other than a picture book she writes as a child. Elena is constantly projecting onto her a talent that may or may not be there, while denigrating her own work even as it becomes well respected.
While Elena narrates the novels, we rarely hear Lila’s voice, and she is physically absent for much of the books. More than a character, Lila is a ghost, a manifestation of Elena’s worst fears about herself. The constant comparison to her is deeply toxic. It makes both of them less than fully human.
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My inner critic, the same voice that tells Elena she’ll never be as creative or bold as Lila, tells me that this writing is garbage, that it’s not worth publishing, that it’s trying too hard, too cliched. This is the voice that tries to get me to give up any creative ambition, to stay safe, never facing failure.
I don’t know if I will ever make anything very good, or whether it matters if I try. But I don’t want to spend my life hiding. I want to be liberated to make mediocre art, to embrace the cringe as much as I can. I don’t want to end up like Elena does, bitter and suspicious, never believing that she has earned her success, haunted by comparison to others.
The truth is none of us earns anything. We are in a universe ruled by chance, with so much beyond our control. The best we can do is learn to accept it.