Warning: Some medium-spicy Neapolitan novel spoilers ahead! Mainly from The Story of a New Name.
I’m almost done with Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, which I LOVE and am very late to. In case you’ve been living under a rock (like me), it’s about two friends, Elena and Lila, growing up in Naples. The series starts in the 1950s, when they’re kids, and runs through to 2010, when Lila disappears.
Typical Lila! She’s a chaos agent. Elena is the narrator, a blonde, self-effacing try-hard who does well in school and (mostly) plays by the rules. She’s mystified by Lila’s ability to express and act on her feelings, amass power, succeed in contexts outside the classroom, and not explain herself all the time. Lila is a brunette, obviously. They complement each other and love each other and kind of hate each other. There’s a long stretch of the book where Elena doesn’t want to kill Lila exactly but does passively wish she would die — a symptom, I think, of how the rewards of being loved do not always outweigh the mortifying ordeal of being known!
Lila is not exactly written as “relatable” — Ferrante depicts her as a mysterious genius, a sort of J.D. Salinger-meets-Italian-data-center-proprietor — but in one particular moment, I related very strongly to her: when she gets mad that her husband wants to turn a photo of her on their wedding day into a shoe ad in The Story of a New Name, the second book in the series.
Lila’s still a teenager at this point, and she has just married a rich business bro, Stefano Carracci. It’s a complicated decision that’s sort of earnest but not coincidentally helpful to Lila’s dad’s floundering shoe shop. Then on her wedding day, Lila finds out that her husband (and her brother) are in business with her sworn enemies, the gangster-ish Solara brothers. She’s low-key marrying Stefano in the hopes he’ll protect her from them, so this sucks.
To make things worse, the Solaras open a shoe store together in downtown Naples, and they want to use a photo of Lila on her wedding day as a poster in the store, to draw in foot traffic. They’ll be selling Lila’s family’s shoes there, and Lila’s husband and brother are both down. The photo goes up (I’m pretty sure — I might be getting this sequencing slightly wrong) but Lila hates it.
“They used me — to them I’m not a person, I’m a thing,” she tells Elena in confidence. “Let’s give [Michele Solara] Lina, let’s stick her on a wall, since she’s a zero, an absolute zero.”
The disrespect she’s attributing to the photo/ad issue isn’t, I think, all about the photo — it’s also about the fact that Stefano, who she perceived as a gentle dude when they were dating, beat the shit out of her immediately after their wedding ceremony. He continues this throughout their marriage, but it starts around the same time as the photo controversy, and it feels like the two issues merge for Lila. But she doesn’t fixate on the beatings the way she does on the rights to her photo.
That’s probably in part because domestic violence is very widespread in Lila and Elena’s neighborhood in this period; it’s normalized, culturally, and people (possibly including Lila?) perceive Stefano’s beatings as “her fault” because she’s “rebellious.” (Hhhhh.) The photo issue is more immediately within Lila’s power to change than the power dynamic in her marriage — though she also changes that, in the end.
But I think people also often dwell on things that don’t have names, and the feeling of betrayal when your intimate or personal life becomes marketing fodder doesn’t really have a name. But I’ve felt it! And I don’t think I’m alone. Anyone who’s found their photo in a diversity brochure for their school, or had a friend join a MLM, or felt pressured to promote a friend’s not-that-great startup, could very reasonably feel a little shadow of this feeling. Like, “Oh, you’re monetizing me now?”
I think of it as The Lila Feeling, because Lila reacts to it so strongly. Her case, to be fair, is extreme: No one asked her permission, and the ad, or promotional decor, features a wedding photo — very intimate.
Still, even less extreme cases, where you do get asked to participate in a loved ones’ marketing machinery, can feel a little weird. This comes up more mildly later in the Neapolitan novels, when a deadbeat dad who never sees his daughter (I won’t spoil) asks her to pose with him in a political ad. It also comes up IRL all the time. It’s a basic marketing tactic: get your network involved! Ask your loved ones for help — they won’t mind!
They might mind. I sometimes mind. Marketing is everywhere; faux-urgent product pitches are everywhere (“Buy now! Only 5 left in stock!”); my relationships with people I know and love and trust are special in part because we’re not working for each other or pitching each other. Not that the line between business closeness and regular closeness is always clear; I have co-worker friends, etc. But friends are much harder to replicate and replace than business contacts, so it’s surreal to feel like a friend (or family member or, in Lila’s case, husband!) wants to shunt you down into the gray zone between the categories.
Lila negotiates with her husband and the Solaras about the wedding photo. Ultimately, they all strike a deal: It can stay in the shoe store, but only if Lila can modify it. Then Lila and Elena spend a couple weeks doing a kind of erasure project, where they cover most of the photo in black strips of paper and colorful accents.
“There remained an eye, the hand on which the chin rested, the brilliant stain of the mouth, the diagonal stripe of the bust, the line of the crossed legs, the shoes,” Elena says — but it’s a partially redacted portrait.
Is it freaking weird, or avant garde in a way that will attract a good kind of attention? It’s sort of unclear, but one of the Solara brothers has a life-ruining crush on Lila, so the redaction stays in the shop, and Lila is appeased. Sort of. But there’s an underlying rage in the redaction process and the finished image.
While she and Elena work on it, Lila talks about feeling “increasingly oppressed by an unbearable sensation, a force pushing down harder and harder, crushing her.”
And, looking at the modified photo, Elena observes that Lila “completed her own self-destruction in an image” (italics hers!) and while they work involves “green and purple circles” — bruise-like — “and blood-red lines” “slicing” through her figure.
This is an early foreshadowing of Lila’s disappearance, which begins the series: she’s erasing herself from the photo, just like she’ll eventually erase her real self. But it’s also like — “You have done symbolic and literal violence to me, husband and Solaras, so I will also do symbolic violence to your favorite image of me.” It’s a weird, abstracted tit-for-tat.
Or maybe it’s just Lila’s way of saying, There’s no refuge for me. She’s not even safe in her wedding portrait, which seems to freeze her in a safe moment in the past, but has actually just created a vulnerable copy of her that can get violated in its own weird ways: turned into an ad against her will, and artistically dismembered.
There’s no refuge for me is how I feel, too, a little, when someone I trust tries to rope me into a marketing scheme. I’m obviously not as hemmed in by violence and rigid Italian patriarchy as Lila— I don’t feel unsafe, or violated, exactly — but it does feel disorienting. It’s like I thought I left the mall and went home, but I’m still at the mall. It’s all the mall.
Have you ever felt this feeling? Do you think this feeling is a horseshit made up thing? Reply to this email and tell me! I’m very curious.