« Un gouffre d’où il était illusoire d’essayer de sortir » Sociopoétique de la ville de Naples dans L’Amie prodigieuse d’Elena Ferrante

Abstract

This article is a sociopoetic analysis of My Brilliant Friend (2011), a novel by anonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante. By examining Ferrante’s representation of the city of Naples, this article will look at how the perspective of the narrator, Elena Greco, enables us to understand her neighbourhood (the Italian "rione"). The rione is represented as "an abyss from which it was impossible to escape". To illustrate this concept of the rione as an "abyss", this article will first highlight the literary and intellectual evolution of Elena Greco by exploring the novel’s references to Virgilian literature. These intertexts in fact reveal certain aspects of Neapolitan history and, more particularly, the idea that rione represents all the negative aspects of Naples, a city that exists in mythology as a doomed city. Second, the article will investigate the symbolic division of Elena’s identity: on the one hand, she comes from a violent, vulgar environment governed by the mafia and, on the other hand, she is an educated young woman inspired by literature and history. This dual identity mirrors her perception that the city is also divided in two: the rione in which she lives is impoverished and laden with violence, which contradicts the “miraculous” progress that exists outside of the neighbourhood. This “miraculous beyond” is associated with the beach, education, the Italian language and the nation’s socio-economic progress in the middle of the 20th century. The city that flourishes beyond the rione predicts the fact that, in later novels, Elena escapes from the “abyss”.