Agnes Callard: belief

Transcript context

…How much is aspiration the result of a kind of crude mimetic desire as evidenced, say, by Elena and Lila in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend? It seems to me, for instance, Lila marries Stefano as part of a somewhat misguided aspiration to be successful and accepted in mainstream. Pretty early on in the marriage, he’s basically beating her and raping her. Isn’t this something unhealthy about aspiration? It doesn’t seem there she had ambition. It seems it was aspiration, and she went down this unknown path and did something actually quite desperate. Yes. I think that aspirants don’t really know what they’re doing, and so they’re going to make a lot of mistakes, and she definitely makes a mistake with Stefano. I think she’s trying to get out of marrying — which one is it? Marcello or Michele? One of the Solara brothers, right? [laughter] She becomes very enamored with this thought, both her and Elena do, of becoming the kind of machinatrix behind her life, like she’s going to take control of her life. They think — her and Elena — that they have found a way to be real agents in this world that is pushing them around with respect to marriage. Now they’re totally wrong about that, and even there’s foreshadowing, even as that’s being told. It turned out only Stefano was the one who was really in charge. At some point Elena says this. So I think you’re right that this was a misstep for Lila, and I also think it was aspiration. I think that aspiration is mimetic, but I don’t think it’s crudely. I just think it is mimetic. [laughter] It’s imitative, and when we imitate, we often go wrong and make missteps, but I don’t think there’s any other way to learn. One of my favorite sayings is that all thinkers are regional thinkers. When you come to mind, one thing I know about you is you were born in Hungary. You come from Central European Jewish culture, which has this fantastic 20th century tradition. And there’s a kind of stereotype of Hungarian Central European/East European families as being pushing in a certain way, or encouraging their children to aspire, and this being much more central to that culture than it would be to a lot of other regions. How has your personal background in that regard fed into this book? And is this a regional book in that sense?…

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