Our friendships are more disjoint, complicated and confusing than we all think. I have finished reading the excellent autofiction novels by Elena Ferrante, set in Naples and dealing with the odd friendship between the narrator, Elena Greco, and her best friend, Raffeala (Lila) Cerrullo.
What it does so well is to describe the papered over unfriendliness, or just disquiet, that exists in so many friendships, and to suggest its inseparability from friendship itself. The Ying and the Yang? Maybe. The intensity of Greco’s dependence on Lila, for creativity, more properly for creative energy, the sense of attraction and repulsion between them… it is unlike the simple Power of Positivity posts I sometimes get on Facebook, the kind which show two women holding hands under sunsets, with a big caption about true friends. That is static, unbelievable, and corresponds not a great deal to real life. There is certainly great trust and happiness and intellectual connection from friendship, and it my experience, that is actually more true the more people mature. But there is always stuff going on under the surface.
Ferrante’s skill is to lead the reader to understand that the relationship between Elena and Lila contains a lot that is not only true with respect to these characters, but true generally. The tugging, the intimacy, the complicatedness of friendship is what she captures. Half is flattering to pretensions made of friendship in the general culture, half isn’t as much.
I’m thinking of whether there is any comparison to Knausgaard to be made. But his friends are rocks of masculinity, men who lead him back into male spontaneity and energy when he feels in danger of being seen as a ‘jessie’ (sic) or being swallowed up by the demands of his wife Linda, of becoming a thoroughly domesticated man. This is referring chiefly to his friend Geir (others too, but I can’t remember their names now). That preoccupation means that there isn’t really too much about friendship itself in Knausgard (not necessarily a flaw, of course, it just isn’t his thing). Ferrante, despite writing women’s lives to the point where one might naively (or worse) assume that there is something particularly female about the themes she draws out, writes friendship universally. There is little in it that could not be applied to male friendship, with a lot of the surface detail changed (male friends may talk less on average, so that might be tweaked).
There are other things about Ferrante I want to talk about. Maybe in another blog post.
BAD ACCESS EXCEPTION 