The Naples Quartet: Unused Intelligence

Throughout the quartet, Lenu often lamented the waste of Lila's intelligence. Lila did not receive any education beyond the fifth grade, a fact she often brought up in adulthood. Lila read voraciously god-knows-what without telling anyone, including Lenu. At various times, Lenu felt as if Lila was speaking through her (Lenu's) writing by inspiring ideas and firing imagination. As the highest praise of Lila's intelligence and creativity, Lenu constantly worried about being proven an inferior writer, should Lila's own writing be discovered by the world. 

Well, Lila never shared her writing with the world and very little with Lenu. Consequently, her intelligence was considered wasted and discarded in Lenu's eyes. This argument invites a fundamental question: How do we live with unused (i.e., wasted) talent?

Sure, we all immediately agree that it is a bad thing, a sad thing, proof of the oppression and erasure of women. It is all true and correct, which does not preclude one to think about the flip side: Can it also be a natural and honest choice to throw away one's intelligence or not make use of it? 

For someone like Lenu, who represents many of us, it is unthinkable. It is largely because she herself attained nearly all of her life goals through rigorously using every bit of her intelligence, tenacity, strength of will, and people skills. Being smart and hardworking led to good grades; good grades were the currency to win professors' approval and assistance, which in turn sent her to high school and college. Using her talent and mind, she made a living as a novelist and journalist. Everything can be made use of in service of her advancement. Most of all, she had thoroughly mined the history and events of the neighborhood in her novels, which brought her money, fame, and access.

Lila held the opposite view and repeatedly begged Lenu not to write about the neighborhood, its people, and especially Lila herself and Tina. Lenu did not understand this attitude at all and repeatedly agreed and then violated her agreement. One exception to Lila's aversion to publicity is the Solaras. The only time Lila collaborated with Lenu was the articles they wrote to expose the Solara criminal organization, with the hope of sending the Solara brothers to jail. Beyond this, Lila had no interest whatsoever in making use of her story and turn it into accolades, admiration, or profit. 

So, then, what is intelligence for, if one does not convert it to tangible benefits? I must admit I had never thought about it until I read the novels. 

Of course, Lila did not throw her talent away completely. Initially, she used her shoe designs to win investment in a shoe factory for her father and brother. Then she used her interior design of the shoe store to facilitate her affair with Nino. Later, she used her intelligence to help Enzo begin a new career in computers. Subsequently, she made plenty of money from her computer programming skills, not to mention becoming Michele's chief computer engineer. But Lenu still did not understand, because Lila did not want to write, to share herself, with the world. After the enormous loss of Tina, she stopped working, and her insatiable energy and curiosity turned toward understanding the context of her personal tragedy, i.e., the tragedy of Napoli itself, but still she was not interested in sharing any of this with anyone, nor did she want to exchange it for anything, nor did she want to contribute to the progress of society. 

I cannot help but recall my twenties and thirties, when I struggled with the motive and purpose of writing stories and stuff outside of work (where I was and still am paid to write), none of which were published. If I had zero desire to be seen by other people, I would have written nothing. No matter how conflicted I was about being read and understood and liked, the secret desire was always there. As I grew more cynical about human capacity to understand each other and lost some of the need to be understood, the urge diminished and dissipated. But still I don't think I could reach the self-contained satisfaction of using my mind for my own satisfaction alone, with absolutely no intention to be seen and validated --- or just reflected back --- by another person.

Lenu's pride and urge to write and be published and be read are easy to understand. She wanted to leave something behind, proof of her existence and a temporary escape from mortality. In other people's eyes we confirm our own solid existence. Lila represents the opposite, which I have to admit is rare to see in this world but not entirely incomprehensible. Nearly everything in this world is wasted in reality. People's talent and abilities come to nothing all the time. Even the corporations and individuals who earn millions and billions of dollars every year, can we really say they have contributed to human progress at all? How many of their products end up on landfills eventually? How many of them make life worse rather than better? 

Indeed, what if intelligence is wasted? What if it does not produce anything? Not money, not fame, not status, not admiration, not even showing off. It stands alone, all by itself, comes and goes, breathes and lives and dies. So what? So the fuck what?

The Story of the Lost Child

 

The large majority of this novel, minus the final third, has a very clear arc. With a series of unfolding events, we watch Lenu gradually drawn back to the neighborhood, as if led by irresistible fate, or was it her own unconscious desire? 

Nino appeared once again out of the blue and triggered the destruction of the already-wobbly marriage between Lenu and Pietro. Lenu resisted going to Napoli to be near Nino for as long as she could, finding refuge with Mariarosa Airota and her current boyfriend (Lenu's old one) Franco. Things fell apart with Franco's death. The invisible hand pushed Lenu to Napoli. But still she resisted the call of the neighborhood for more than two years, living in an apartment in the affluent area, rented by Nino, and continuing her journalistic work. Thus, she could pretend that she was not circling closer and closer to ... home. 

As sure as gravity, her orbit crossed with old friends and familiar faces. Alfonso, Carmen, then Lila ... Once Lila appeared in her life, Lenu's homecoming was inevitable. She held out for a little longer, until Nino's double life was revealed, and then his multiple lives surfaced. Meanwhile, Lenu's mother was dying. The journey home was so long and meandering that we hardly realized how insistent and inescapable it always was, but every change in her life pulled her closer to Lila and the neighborhood. Finally, she ended up in the apartment right above Lila's. Welcome home.

Throughout the slow and unconscious journey, Lenu continued her lifelong pattern of projecting her own unconscious motivations onto Lila. She constantly suspected that Lila was plotting to drag her back into the neighborhood and use her in Lila's own struggle against the Solaras, even when it was transparent to the reader that she was fighting with her own desire to go home. Such psychological insight is almost unexpected in an otherwise brutally candid first-person narrative, but we all know how everyone deceives herself all the time. We are all unreliable narrators, first and foremost to ourselves. 

For the final third of the novel, however, we are shown the flip side of homecoming. Lenu would never completely belong to the neighborhood like Lila did, because she had left and built half of her identity in Pisa and Florence, with Adele and Pietro and the editors and publishers and academics. The non-Napoli part of herself was as deep and authentic as her Napoli part. In other words, one could go back, but one could never truly be back. The irreversible force is, of course, time.  

Lenu stayed in the neighborhood for more than ten years, in part to protect and comfort Lila in her grief after the loss of Tina, and in part to further her own literary career. Eventually, she left again. Perhaps she finally accepted the reality that she could not entirely fit in Napoli or the neighborhood. No amount of physical attachment can change the mixture in her identity. In the new era, she was as much a stranger in Napoli as she was in Milan or Turin.

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After reading about Elena Ferrante's essays mentioning her admiration for Stanislaw Lem, I can't help but wonder how much Lem influenced her. One of the themes in Solaris is the unknowability of an alien entity, which lately I often compare to the unknowability of other people's mind. Humans do talked to each other and can know a little about each other, but the vast majority of our hearts and minds remain outside of each other's understanding.

In the last book of the quartet, more than any of the previous novels, we are reminded how little we know each other, even our best friends. Lila's actions as well as thoughts and intentions were always just outside of the edges of Lenu's view (one should note that it is by design). From the bits of clues and hints dropped here and there, the reader can piece together a thread of events with a heavy dose of conjecture. Lila's shocking decision to go work for Michele Solara in the previous novel was not some kind of capitulation to money or prestige. She gathered a massive amount of evidence and data on the Solara criminal enterprise, hoping to send them to jail one day. That effort failed because the criminals were rich, powerful, and deeply connected with other powerful networks throughout the political and economic landscape, above and under ground (or as the Chinese say, 黑道白道).  (Sidenote: What a surprisingly relevant observation in current events in a totally different country!) The law could not touch them. For a while, Lila led a peaceful (on the surface at least) but fierce battle with the Solaras and gained an upper hand in the neighborhood. At some point, Pasquale assassinated the matriarch of the Solara family and caused massive chaos. Then the Solara brothers fought back and killed Alfonso, one of Lila's foot soldiers, and regained the upper hand. They were likely responsible for the abduction of Tina, for which Pasquale exacted revenge by killing them. Lila and Pasquale were tragic heroes that fought with the Solara family for years, perhaps decades, and paid a heavy price. 

But that's an entirely different story, one that the author chose not to tell directly. Everything explicit in that story is left out of this one, leaving the reader with nothing but hearsay and innuendo. Perhaps such a story could not be told without a feeling of sensationalism, or perhaps the author does not want to erase the fantastical impression by giving it the full treatment. Either way, it does not belong in this novel.

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The disappearance of a child, in particular, a daughter, is obviously of great symbolic meaning to Ferrante, who wrote another novel, The Lost Daughter. There are many possible interpretations of this cataclysmic event in the quartet. In some ways, this is the beginning of Lila's disintegration. If we view Tina as a part of Lila (in a way all children are or used to be a part of their mothers), then her disappearance is a concrete loss of her body and self. In her enormous grief, she discarded her work and connections to the community and her battle for its soul. I see her subsequent wandering in time and space around Napoli as her way of scattering herself around the city, melting and dissolving into the city from which she was never able to leave, perhaps taking possession of it. 

Once could also interpret Tina's kidnapping and probable murder as the patriarchy's violence to erase women, especially on those who refuse to erase themselves. Perhaps the loss of a child is the loss of hope and possibilities. In a city that is old and tired, typified by but not limited to Napoli, the loss of children or youthfulness reflects the calcification of culture and mind, leaving only an ever-shrinking path toward change and progress. The old order would rather go down the road of decay and death than loosing its grip on power for a terrifying new order. This fits with a general sense of lost opportunities since the social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, as the entire world reverted to its relentless conservativism and capitalism for the next half century. For a moment there was a glimmer of hope (or illusion?) of real historical change, but it was quickly snuffed out by the power that be.