Language, literature, and writing symbolize the complex connection that Lila and Lenù share throughout their friendship. From the time Lila and Lenù are young children, their relationship revolves around language. At first, the two barely speak—but soon, as both girls’ competitive natures become evident and as their connection deepens, their friendship becomes a way for them to test the boundaries of spoken and written communication. Throughout the novel, Lila and Lenù use spoken and written language, their love of literature, and alternating dialects in order to express themselves to one another and the world around them. When Lenù continues in school and Lila goes to work, Lila still tries to keep up with Lenù by checking books out from the library incessantly and eventually reading Lenù’s Greek, Latin, and Italian textbooks alongside her. Throughout their friendship, Lenù expresses fear that Lila will always be smarter, more articulate, and more expressive than she is—yet at the end of the novel, it is Lila who refers to Lenù as her “brilliant friend.” In this way, language represents the strain that living very different lives puts on Lila and Lenù’s friendship, as well as the mutual respect and admiration they hold for each other despite their differences.
Throughout the book, language, literature, and writing continue to serve as important symbols of instances in which the two girls are attempting to connect with one another across the vast distances their friendship weathers. As Lenù continues in school, Lila develops a chip on her shoulder about what Lenù’s access to education will mean for their friendship. When Lila begins communicating and having relationships with older boys, Lenù worries that she herself has chosen wrong in dedicating herself to her studies rather than striving to advance herself through social or romantic pathways instead. When the girls exchange written communication, each envies the other’s writing style: Lenù despairs when she realizes how easily and naturalistically Lila is able to communicate through letters, and Lila is upset and intimidated when she reads Lenù’s essay against religion and realizes how good her friend has become at developing strong written arguments all by herself. In this way, Ferrante uses language, literature, and writing as a symbol not only of connection, but of competition. The written and spoken word are external representations of the ways in which Lila and Lenù idolize each other while simultaneously seeking to prove themselves to and, ultimately, best each other.
Language, Literature, and Writing Quotes in My Brilliant Friend
I was really angry.
We’ll see who wins this time, I said to myself. I turned on the computer and began to write—all the details of our story, everything that still remained in my memory.
Anyway, however it had happened, the fact was this: Lila knew how to read and write, and what I remember of that gray morning when the teacher revealed it to us was, above all, the sense of weakness the news left me with.
Things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book.
"All they did was beat you?"
"What should they have done?"
"They're still sending you to study Latin?"
I looked at her in bewilderment.
Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid that punishment? Or—I wonder today—did she want at different moments both things?
I tried to remind her of the old plan of writing novels… […] I was stuck there, it was important to me. I was learning Latin just for that, and deep inside I was convinced that she took so many books from Maestro Ferraro's circulating library only because, even though she wasn't going to school anymore, even though she was now obsessed with shoes, she still wanted to write a novel with me and make a lot of money. Instead, she shrugged… […] "Now," she explained, "to become truly rich you need a business."
I told her in a rush that I was going to the high school. […] I did it because I wanted her to realize that I was special, and that, even if she became rich making shoes with Rino, she couldn't do without me, as I couldn't do without her.
She looked at me perplexed.
"What is high school?" she asked.
"An important school that comes after middle school."
"And what are you going there to do?"
"Study."
"What?"
"Latin,"
"That's all?"
"And Greek."
[…]
She had the expression of someone at a loss, finding nothing to say. Finally she murmured, irrelevantly, "Last week I got my period."
She had begun to study Greek even before I went to high school? She had done it on her own, while I hadn’t even thought about it, and during the summer, the vacation? Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me?
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren't aware of the artifice of the written word. I read and I saw her, I heard her.
Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.
She has Stefano, I said to myself after the episode of the glasses. She snaps her fingers and immediately has my glasses repaired. What do I have?
I answered that I had school, a privilege she had lost forever. That is my wealth, I tried to convince myself.
When she gave me back the notebook, she said, "You're very clever, of course they always give you ten."
I felt that there was no irony, it was a real compliment. Then she added with sudden harshness:
"I don't want to read anything else that you write."
"Why?"
She thought about it.
"Because it hurts me," and she struck her forehead with her hand and burst out laughing.
"Whatever happens, you'll go on studying."
"Two more years: then I'll get my diploma and I'm done."
"No, don't ever stop: I'll give you the money, you should keep studying."
I gave a nervous laugh, then said, "Thanks, but at a certain point school is over."
"Not for you: you're my brilliant friend, you have to be the best of all, boys and girls."
Nothing diminished the disappointment. […] I had considered the publication of those few lines […] as a sign that I really had a destiny, that the hard work of school would surely lead upward, somewhere, that Maestra Oliviero had been right to push me forward and to abandon Lila. "Do you know what the plebs are?" "Yes, Maestra." At that moment I knew what the plebs were… […] The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts.
Language, Literature, and Writing Symbol Timeline in My Brilliant Friend
