Documentation of the Project

  1. Project Introduction
  2. Methodologies
    1. Digital Edition
    2. Timeline
    3. Network Analysis
      1. Introduction
      2. Research Questions
      3. Connection Definition
      4. Graph Building
  3. Results and Final Remarks
  4. Bibliography

1. Project introduction

My Brilliant Friend was first published in 2011, and it immediately proved to be one of the most interesting novels of the latest years, with various translations across the world and a mystery behind its anonymous author, Elena Ferrante.

Still, it is the friendship between the two main characters – Lila and Lenù – that had oftentimes fascinated readers and viewers of the TV series across the whole world:

“Too often we focus our discussions on romance, however, friendship is maybe the most underestimated of all human connections, and female friendship probably the most difficult one” (Lazy Women, 2021).

It’s difficult to find a positive and accurate representation of female friendships in the most recent medias, since it either borders on a positive and superficial view or it pushes girls to be competitors for the attention of the other sex. Still, Elena Ferrante creates a complex relationship and unlikeable characters: it seems almost impossible for Lila and Lenù to be each other’s best friend and most terrible rival, at the same time, but it is the closest description we can give to their situation, since both the characters hold bad feelings and resentment for the other, creating a deeper layer to the relationships between them:

“We tend to project in our friends what we would like to be but if we don’t succeed like them, we start feeling frustrated and competitive” (Lazy Women, 2021).

So, when Lila isn’t allowed to finish school, she becomes disinterested in Lenù, while, for example, Lenù feels jealousy at her friend’s picture-perfect wedding. But this obviously doesn’t mean the one between the two friends is a façade, since it is quite obvious that they don’t only hate the other, but instead they rely on each other, almost fully, as they do with nobody else:

“Though Lila and Lenù often fail to communicate the ways in which they look to each other for guidance or admit how profoundly they depend on each other, they nonetheless circle each other, emulate each other, and compete with each other as their friendship proves itself to be the driving force behind the major decisions of their lives” (Litcharts, 2022).

They might be constantly envious of each other’s success, but they also are the first one to support the other, when needed: it is Lila who gives Lenù the money to buy her scholastic books when she can’t, and it is also her who helps her study when the other girl struggles with the new subjects, upon starting middlegrade, while Lenù returns the favor helping Lila when she feels at her worst and keeping the secret of her relationship between her friend and Nino.

The friendship between Lila and Lenù is an intricate and complex thing, bordering on words such as obsession obsession and hate:

“Their rivalry magnetizes them: each is the one the other trusts, and so fears” (Reel Honey, 2019).

Both characters are constantly wary of each other because they represent to them, what they could never be. Each of the girls is embedded in the other’s body and mind, impossible to know anything but each other, even as they part, change cities and the years pass.

It is a proof this the fact that when Lenù starts recounting the past at the start of the novel, she doesn’t do it for any other reason than the hope to have Lila, who has disappeared from the world, haunt her through memory and physically, since the girl had always been against the idea of her friend writing about her.

2. Methodologies

The complexity of such a relationship brought me to try to analyze the sources of it, through some digital tools and environments, combining a quantitative approach to a qualitative one. For this reason, I started working on this project, selecting the first part (Infanzia: Storia di Don Achille) of the first novel (My Brilliant Friend) where the bond between Lila and Lenù is first formed. The possibility of working through a quotative methodology allowed to actually create a cooperative environment, creating a collective system (Moretti, 2005, 4-5).

To do so, I employed a from the bottom approach, which entailed that I first chose the documents I was interested in (in this case as said above the first part of the first novel), observe their behavior and then derive a schema empirically, or in my case some conclusions regarding the friendship between the two characters; I also didn’t start this work without my own imaginative narratives (Flanders-Jannidis, 2019, 17-18), which I then turned into questions to help me, refine and structure my research:

How is Lila’s and Lenù’s relationship portrayed in the novel?
What are the main events that bring to such a thing happening?
What are the characters that influence such a relationship?

For this I first started my work of editorialization through the creation of a digital edition, a starting point to further develop the digital environment that would be used for this project:

“Bachimont employs editorialization to explain an important shift: that of a non-digital document to a digital document. This shift consists of a transfer of information, which is restructured to be adapted to a digital environment” (Vitali-Rosati, 2018 61-62).

Obviously, the transformation and transportation of the analogue text I chose in the digital reality wasn’t done without the important step of recontextualization and visualization of the results for the reader done through the two different tools (a timeline and a network analysis) to allow them to understand the information contained in the book and represented on their screens.

This brought A Friendship to be shaped into a tool that allows the readers the consultation of the text and different types of analysis to visualize on screen the results of the research through the specific tools employed and to further contextualize it.

2.1 Digital Edition

To do so, I obtained the supervised OCR-D text of the novel and then imported it in XML. I then used TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines, which have the advantage to be a recognized principle for the representation of digital texts and heightens the interoperability of the text, accordingly to the schema I chose to better represent the text. Both the original text used and the TEI documents are available below, but to further understand, here are the tags that had a particular relevance for my own research:

  1. ‹particDesc› with the use of ‹persName› in the section ‹body›, referred through it the attribute @href, which describes the identifiable speakers, voices, or other participants in any kind of text or other persons named or otherwise referred to in a text, edition, or metadata (Text Encoding Initiative, 2005).
  2. ‹date›contains a date in any format and was used to refer to the various events happening throughout the books; it was paired with its attributes @when, @notBefore, @notAfter, @from, @to (Text Encoding Initiative, 2005).

Through XSLT I transformed my XML document in an HTML. Then following to a further analysis described below (3.1), I divided the obtained text in three parts to allow the reader to have an easier consultation and to have a first visual idea of the network of characters in the text. In fact, two tools have been created to allow the reader to further explore the text:

These tools were employed to further emphasize on the point that “the digital medium with its inherent variability presents itself as the ideal environment to deal with text variation in ways that go beyond the possibilities offered by the print medium” (Patrick Sahle, 2016 52), hence this section brings more features to the simple text, allowing a first level of analysis and the possibility to also visualize the text from other point of views than simply by reading, already mapping out the relationships within (Vitali-Rosati, 2018 19-21). Patrick Sahle’s principles for scholarly digital editions were also applied when working on creating the digital edition, first applying a digital paradigm – which differentiates a digitized edition from a digital one – and then the scholar nature of this text is referenced through the original edition, linked below (Sahle, 2016, 28).

The project also aimed to create an easily findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable resource that will be helpful in bring further understanding in those who are also interested in researching on this field; in the future, it’d be good to maybe offer a complete digital edition of the entire book and to bring a more semantic dimension to it (Wilkinson et al. 2016).

Disclaimer:

The purpose of this website is to perform a multilevel digital analysis of Ferrante's novel, as an end-of-course project for the "Digital Text in the Humanities: Theories, Methodologies and Applications" course of the Master Degree in Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge of the University of Bologna, under prof. Tiziana Mancinelli. The displayed publication of the aforementioned book is not intended to be an alternative or replace its original location, i.e. the edition by E/O Edition published in 2011. All copyrights and related rights on the content remain with their original owners. All copyright on the typographic and layout choices, as well as the methodologies and results of the performed analysis are 2022 © A Friendship.

2.2 Timeline

Ferrante’s own perception of time, inside the novels, is quite confusing: many times, the plots that are being recounted are interrupted midway through to start another story, although the two tales are somehow linked in the narrator’s mind.

This is due to the fact that:

“Ferrante deploys the run-on to create a momentum that is headlong and occasionally breathless but still intimate—here you are, inside the operation of Elena’s head, everything she thinks coming out in the order it occurs to her" (Arcade, n.d.)
.

The employment of this artistic device, which entails the use of two sentence together, without the use of a coordinating conjunctions or proper conjunctions is due to the author’s need to convey the illogical intensity of somebody recounting things right after they happened, expressing the urgency of knowing more and of looking back at the time with spite and harshness in an almost vindictive way as the truth is searched and never found.

Still, through this structure, it is almost impossible to recount in a linear way the events happening in the books, as it is read, which doesn’t help contextualizing in time the various events that are happening to the two girls and to their own relationships. To solve this, I created a timeline of the events through TimelineJS, an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines; the tool doesn’t only create the timeline but also each slide is accompanied by the date, a title, and a small description of the selected event.

This timeline doesn’t offer only the possibility to actually ‘put in order’ what happens during the book, but also it allows to contextualize it in time the text. “My Brilliant Friend” is set in post-WWII Naples and this has a huge impact on the characterization of the district as a whole and a few interesting – and negative – characters, such as Don Achille and the Solaras, who brought grew to be rich through illicit affairs during the war. Similarly, the war influences the characters’ view on violence, which is seen by them as necessary, ordinary, and generational (Blue Ink Notes, 2022).

Disclaimer:

Elena Ferrante doesn’t often state the dates for the events happening in her books, aside from a few selected ones, hence my work was mostly a reconstruction based on the context, the character’s ages, and their birthdates, which might entail a few inaccuracies.

2.3 Network Analysis

Since I wanted to investigate a relationship, I thought the analysis most fit to work on would be network analysis, since it allows to “make visible specific ‘regions’ within the plot”: sub-systems which share the same significant property”(Moretti, 2103, 217), basically allowing to actually divide the main plot in different categories and to analyze it further through the use of characters as nodes of the graph and their interactions as edges.

Here are the steps that I employed to do this.

2.3.1 Introduction

Before diving in with the network analysis, I wanted to have a general idea of the dispersion of the various characters through the chapters of this part and for this I employed a XQuery function to obtain the frequency per chapter of Lila, Lenù and the entirety of the cast of characters. The results I obtained were quite similar, as presented by the graphs below, which proved that both Lila and Lenù seemed to be the most present in the chapters 8 and 15, and those were the same chapters in which the various characters were more present.

After such a discovery, I divided the main text in three parts and corpora, respectively:

  • Part 1 (chapter 1-7).
  • Part 2 (chapter 8-14).
  • Part 3 (chapter 15-18).

This allowed me to actually examine more in depth the specific appearances and dispositions of the characters through the book, when creating the network analysis graph; I actually thought that this division would fit be better both from a graphical point of view, allowing me to actual represent in a more ordered and clear way the results, but also since it’d allow me to actually give the readers an almost chronological depiction of such relationships (Moretti, 2013, 215-217).

Disclaimer:

Naturally it is important to say that since the tagging of the document was done manually, so there might be some inaccuracies.

2.3.2 Research Questions

Once I was able to extract this information through the XQuery and visualize it through the graphs, I started further refining and adapt my own research around this step, coming up with two main questions:

  1. How is Lila’s and Lenù’s friendship characterized?
  2. What are the characters and events that have the most influence on their relationship?

My original research questions were in fact to discover more about the friendship between Lila and Lenù and then work onto expanding the area to the entire cast of characters other than the primary ones, to find those who most influenced or had a part on their relationship, both in a positive and negative way.

2.3.3 Connection Definition

Due to the ambiguous nature of connections between characters, it was important to first determine how such a thing came to be in my research and in the book selected.

ended up applying a similar technique, which entailed considering the coexistence of characters in the same paragraph, as the one used by another project (Changing Lenses) although I refined it to adapt it to my own needs and to my own model.

Something that I also would like to point out due to the nature of the text and my research is the fact that I considered as separate instances the various names, nicknames and pronouns associated to the same character to analyze each singularly. This was done to understand also by a linguistical point of view the connections.

2.3.3 Graph Building

The Python function which I employed to extract the data about the characters from the text, allowed me to create two file CSV for each corpus, one containing the nodes and another the edges of the network. The data was extracted through the employment of Regular Expressions which recognized the specific words and then associated them in tuples, in this case the value pers-name and the specific type assigned to the class, according to their family in the text (e.g.: Cerullo, Greco, Carracci).

I divided such a value accordingly to the main families of the book, since this organizational method is also employed by the author, herself, to determine a first division in the book. In fact, the index of characters is a constant in each book of the series, and it’s our first approach to the characters; the only exception are characters which don’t belong to any families, but to the context of school. Hence, I just thought it fit to take on this classification for my own purposes.

After having obtained the data, I then visualized the network through Gephi:

  1. This first graph (chapters 1-7) is mainly formed by the main characters’ familial relationships, with the only exception being teacher Oliviero. She is the first character that belongs to a world outside of Lila’s and Lenù’s homes and at the end of this part, she is injured by accident by Lila; the teacher still doesn’t reprimand the girl but instead she is overjoyed as she discovers the girl’s wonderful capabilities, since Lila - at her first year of elementary school - already knows how to write and read, having taught herself.

    Lila’s extraordinary knowledge will be further explored in the following part, but what we can gain from this graph is the impact that both families have on the two main characters and the guiding role that teacher Oliviero has for Lila, as they result to have almost the same importance in the graph.

    Also, Lila appears as the center of the graph, a situation that wonchange for the other two representations.

  2. In the following part (chapters 8-14) we are introduced to the school life of the two girls, which mirrors strictly the one in the district, since not only new characters – Lila’s and Lenù’s schoolmates – are introduced, but also their parents and their own actions. In fact, what characterizes this chapter is a cycle of revenges that starts with none other than Lila, again at the center of the graph, and moves onto from Alfonso, to Stefano, to Rino, to Enzo, the latter becoming the one who ends the violent cycle.

    Enzo and Nino are two of the characters that have the most importance, linked to Lila and Lenù, and on this I can’t help but bring up again the fact that it feels almost as a prophecy, since both characters will be, in the future, the love interests of the girls, and in this part, Nino even tries to already propose to Lenù, but is rejected by the girl. In this case, it isn’t impossible not to bring up the fact that we are talking about facts that have already happened as Lenù recounts them, so, it is probable that almost subconsciously the narrator let them shine through to emphasize the importance they’ll have in the future and to already get the readers acquainted with them, since they’ll be recurring characters in the following books.

    Another character that is very important both in the graph and in the novel is Don Achille; he is the closest thing to a villain for the characters. He is portrayed in a fable-like ways with magical powers that stems from the little comprehension the two girls have of reality. He is said to have a black bag which is nothing other than a reference to the fact that this man became rich through the black market, during the war. For his wealth and strength, he is respected across the whole district. He is a cardinal figure for both Lila and Lenù, both in the matter of the friendship since it is through his act of stealing the dolls that the two friends come together the first time, both in the fact that it is thanks to his money, a retribution for dolls, that Lila and Lenù are first able to buy a book, Little Women.

    This will inspire mostly Lila to think about writing a book to end up as rich as the author of the book, herself. This part ends up giving us an insight on what is to come on the next one, since at the end of this chapter we are brought to one of the central points of this part: whether Lila and Lenù will be allowed to continue their scholastic path. The book gave them what they have lost with the dolls and not only a simple pastime for children, but also a way to look outside of the district, to leave it behind once they became rich.

    As for Lila and Lenu’s friendship, in this part, it is important to point out that they are often linked together in the graph, and even often through pronouns and nicknames, not just their own, for example: la figlia dello scarparo and la figlia grande di Greco.

    Also in this graph, Lila is at the center of the graph and the character with the most importance.

  3. The third and last graph (chapters 15-18) goes back to representing the importance of the familial relationships for Lila, who is held back from purchasing a scholastic career by her own parents, although her brother, Rino, stands out since the girl heavily relies on him to fight for her own right to education. Her relationship with Lenù weakens, since the girl starts private lessons with the teacher Oliviero to pass the exam to enter middle grade. This allows the two girls to chase after new friendships (Lila with Carmen, while Lenù with Gigliola, who will also attend middle grade with her).

    The friendship that gave them the strength to fight back don Achille in the previous part can’t resist, on one side due to Lila’s bitterness for not being able to follow her friend, and on the other because of Lenù’s distaste for the person her friend is turning to.

    Another relationship which weakens is the one between Lila and teacher Oliviero, her first supporter becomes the first one to further shove down Lila, when she most needs it, making it clear that she thinks the choice not to continue school foolish and senseless.

    Don Achille, still, is a presence that still borders and appears in this part, although it ends with his death, truly showing his power and the effect that this man had on the main characters, but also the way his death impacts the whole district and Lila and Lenù as well. One of the closest links of this characters is with Alfredo Peluso, the presupposed murderer of the man, who is arrested in front of his family and none other than Lenù and Lila, endings this chapter of the book and effectively completing Don Achille’s arc and the girl’s childhood.

From all of this, it is obvious that a few points are to be made about our research questions:

  1. First, Lila is at the center of the friendship, quite physically as shown in the graph.

    One thing that surprised me is how little Lenù, the narrator, is referred through the chapters as shown by the graphs. It is obvious that it is Lila who holds the spotlight in Lenù’s story, but it is also obvious how much the friendship weights towards the other girl, which isn’t always a good thing since Lenù can be quite harsh and bitter in her recount of the events, certainly not impartial and objective.

    It's surprising how much a story that is meant to portray a friendship between supposedly-equals isn’t shown as such. Instead it feels like it’s Lenù, more than anybody, who is attributing that bigger role to Lila in their relationship, further distorting her vision from the reality.

  2. A turning point in the friendship happens in the second part that I analyzed, since although both children already know each other and have seen each other at school, it isn’t till they decide to rescue their dolls from don Achille that they first became the inseparable pair that characterizes the novel.

    They need each other to actually succeed in such a mission, and although it is obvious that Lenù describes Lila almost as fearless and a leader in these moments, the latter relies heavily on the former; this entire arc has various symbolic scenes about the perception of the roles in the relationship, on one side having the girls doing what the other does (“Quello che fai tu, faccio io”), and then having Lila once again in front of Lenù, who stands behind her, as they go up the stairs to visit Don Achille.

  3. Their friendship might have survived an orc of the fairy tales that they are told before going to sleep, but it doesn’t survive the injustices of life, when Lila and Lenù are separated by two different roads that will forever change their lives.

    As said in (1) it is here that Lila’s envy first is born and she tries to make up for it, distancing herself from Elena and forming a new friendship with Carmen, who is more at her own level. Suddenly when it isn’t possible anymore to keep up the principle of “Quello che fai tu, faccio io”, their friendship starts to become weaker and weaker.

These are the events that have characterized their friendship, but he characters that have most impacted on it are teacher Oliviero and don Achille, both positively and negatively, Nino, Enzo, and Rino. It is through them that the two children come close and form a relationship which borders both on friendship and resentment, planting the seed of what is to come in the next books.

3. Results and Final Remarks

When Lenù, the main narrator behind My Brilliant Friend, writes one last book to regain her former glory, she titles it Un’Amicizia (A Friendship); this book isn’t inherently about her friendship with Lila, but instead is it about what happens in the fourth book to the latter’s daughter. It is this book that brings the friends farther apart through the years, and it is through My Brilliant Friend that Lenù hopes to regain a small part of her friend, recalling the story of how they came to be the person they now are, from friends to strangers.

I have started my own work with my own view of this friendship, a superficial one based on mostly qualitative approaches to the book, but the possibility to adapt onto the text a new quantitative research and tools has been truly helpful to further dig and question the authority, also signaling the reorganization of it that comes with converting an analogue text into a digital edition (Vitali-Rosati, 2018 12-14).

This has ended up creating a digital edition with various levels of analysis that can help the reader through a journey in a deepening their knowledge of these two characters and the bond between them, giving them a representation and a contextualization through the employment of a whole new digital environment.

4. Bibliography