Dissolution as Literary Genius Mira Ward

DISSOLUTION AS LITERARY

DISSOLUTION AS LITERARY GENIUS

Within the literary universe, no one deals better in the interweaving of fiction and reality than Italian novelist and global sensation Elena Ferrante. Since her first author has maintained her anonymity through the refusal of public appearances, receiving awards, or even direct correspondence with her translators. When it comes to narrative style, Ferrante consistently writes from interior, first-person perspectives. Her deep knowledge of Neapolitan history and cultural dynamics is paralleled in her writing of womanhood, poverty, the Italian educational system, as well as cultural and linguistic dynamics within Italy. A duality therefore emerges: Ferrante’s literary narratives of identity are so intricate that only someone who has lived similar experiences could replicate them in writing, thus providing the reader a feeling of close proximity to the characters and the author herself. And yet, most details of Ferrante’s personal life––and even her name––remain unknown.

Ferrante has published eight works of fiction and two autobiographical works: La Frantumaglia cently, Incidental Inventions Arguably the most famous of these publications are the Neapolitan Novels quartet, the four installations written be “true” identity has occupied the public’s attention for years, and only amplified with the release of the quartet-inspired HBO series, My Brilliant Friend. In order to explore Ferrante’s personal connections to her writing, let us turn to a quote from the author herself regarding her relationship with pseudonymity. Within Incidental Inventions, a collection of weekly columns Ferrante wrote for touches on this relationship:

Ever since adolescence, I’ve liked the term 'unknown.’ It means that all I can know of the person who made this painting is the work I have before my eyes...I can devote myself to the pure result of a creative ges ture, without worrying about a big or small name.

dio Gatti seemed to have lost sight of this “creative gesture” and instead went to great lengths to uncover Ferrante, following money trails through forensic accounting and claiming that her true identity was translator and wife of writer Domenico Starnone, Anita Raja. Other recent speculations have included Stranone himself and critic Goffredo Fofi, yet all these claims are widely regarded as “mere speculations that bear no contextual support.” Central to the Neapolitan Novels––and Ferrante’s work more generally––is the concept of Smarginatura, translated as “dissolving margins” in English. To My Brilliant Friend “the sensation of moving for a few fractions of a second into a person or a

thing or a number of a syllable, violating its edges.” Smarginatura within the quartet. The Neapolitan Novels follow a lifelong friendship between two women, Lenu and of their poverty-stricken Neopolitan rione (neighborhood), yet simultaneously grapple with their connection to their place of origin. Lenu and Lila have an intense, competitive bond propelled by the desire to feed off each other’s success and dreams through both symbiotic love and determination, and parasitic manipulation. Lenu’s recounting of their friendship is ridden with personal biases, jealousies, and prevailing grudges. Yet, her presentation of Lila (and ostensibly their friendship) is ultimately underlined by the sustained desire to give shape to Lila, who so often escapes Lenu's preconceived perceptions.

According to writer and professor Tiziana Rogatis, within her book Elena Ferrante’s Key Words, Smarginatura is the “spilling through the established boundaries of conventional reality... the loss of edges that gives things shape, the slippage of sensory order.” The parallels between Rogatis’ conception of Smarginatura and the diately apparent. Even Rogatis’ diction highlights this connection; the idea that people can slip into a “syllable” and remove themselves from “conventional reality” emphasizes that this phenomenon has symbolic weight outside of Lila and Lenu’s story and in fact transcends the concept of Smarginatura very clearly manifests itself in Ferrante’s own identity and the nuances of life more broadly.

Throughout the novels, the experience of Smarginatura is most often associated with Lila. Within My Brilliant Friend, Lila first encounters Smarginatura on and his friends violently throw fireworks over their apartment’s rooftop to that of the wealthier, Camorra-affiliated Solara brothers. Lenu recounts her friend’s experience through writing:

[Lila] had perceived for the first time unknown entities that broke down the outline of the world and demonstrated its terrifying nature... She said that the outlines of things and people were delicate, that they broke like cotton thread...that the trails of the rockets were scraping [her] brother Rino like files, like rasps, and broke his flesh, caused another, disgusting brother to drip out of him, whom [she] had to put back inside right away––inside his usual form…

According to Rogatis, “Lila may christen this incredible experience, but [Lenu] lived through it first, and only lacked the courage to name it.” Upon her first encounter with Lila at the age of eight, Lenu copies Lila’s decision to drop her childhood doll into a cellar, writing that ever since that moment “I was overcome by a kind of tactile dysfunction; sometimes I had the impression that, while every animated being around me was speeding up to the rhythms of its life, solid surfaces turned soft under my fingers...It was an enduring malaise, lasting perhaps years, beyond early adolescence.” Thus, the entire Neapolitan series––and the friendship between Lila and Lenu––can be understood as Lenu’s attempt to combat Smarginatura, a sensation she first experienced when venturing into the forbidden cellar of Don Achille to retrieve her doll with Lila, therefore transgressing a childhood boundary and losing her sense of reality.

Lenu’s perception of Lila can also be understood as a manifestation of the Smarginatura Lenu experiences surrounding her understanding of herself and her friend. For example, after copying Lila’s decision to drop her doll into the cellar, Lenu states, “What you do, I do,” thus presenting a relationship of reciprocity from the initiation of their friendship. Later on, when in adolescence “receiving an education implies giving up beauty and passion (Elena’s fate)” and contrastingly “acquiring beauty and seductive power precludes receiving an education (Lila’s fate),” Lenu writes 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.” From the beginning of the series to its end, Lila and Lenu’s relationship is both a constructed mirror image and a disorderly snarl of ambiguities.

Rogatis notes that Ferrante herself describes the female friendship displayed in the Neapolitan Novels as embodying a “disorderliness” that differs from classical presentations of male friendships, contrasting the two gendered bonds as

“order versus chaos, rules versus entropy.” Rogatis then calls upon 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist conception of friendship as a bond between two like minded people who connect through their otherness, or marginalization in society. Within Lila and Lenu’s friendship, the “‘disorderly,’ [and] a profoundly intense experience unmediated by tradition, genealogy, or clearly-drawn boundaries between the public and private life.” Thus, according to Rogatis, the Smarginatura within their friendship is a symptom of womanhood as forbidden and othered from “the public space reserved for man as a political and social animal,” thus resulting in a more intimate and emotionally vulnerable bond between them.

Let us then pursue a deeper investigation of how the usage of written language within the series functions as a narrative tool of categorizing that which escapes conventional boundaries. Lenu’s everyday oscillation between Neopolitian dialect (used within the neighborhood) and Italian (spoken in educational or formal contexts) makes clear the painful distance Lila and Lenu feel between the rione and the outside world. Lenu’s intense desire to escape the poverty of the rione and gain an education is highlighted by the emphasis she places on these linguistic shifts, especially considering her aspiration to become a professional writer; the more formal Italian therefore becomes a symbol of opportunity, education, and success. The fact that the series itself is written in Italian by an adult Lenu who has succeeded in becoming an author incorporates the novels themselves as a physical element of the series’ plot. Thus, the audience feels as if they are a participant in the story as they are reading, further blurring the lines between

The work of 20th century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas sheds some light on the concept of blurring conventional boundaries of meaning and truth through the said and the unsaid, the public and the private. Within his work , Levinas details the differences between what he calls the “Saying” and the “Said:” while the “Saying” is the act of communicating and words chosen, the “Said” represents the “ethical surplus” of language, or which can never fully encapsulate what is plainly expressed orally. This concept of the “ethical surplus” works in tandem with Levinas’ concept of the “Other,” or that which exhibits alterity in social contexts and interactions. The “Saying” therefore rejects that which is “Other,” or below the surface of what is visually presented and sonically heard. The “Said” includes these unspoken realities and acknowledges the “Other” while escaping conventional structures of producing meaning. Levinas continues that contrastingly, written accounts are inherently a “testimony to [the writer’s] absence,” and lack the nuanced ethical writing recounts events retrospectively

and only exists through the medium of what is being plainly stated. The work of Derrida surrounding friendship and otherness certainly parallels that of Levinas’ discourse of “otherness” within spoken and written language because Derrida was a disciple of Levinas.

The blurred lines between the Levinasian Saying and the Said within Ferrante’s work is thus an example of Smarginatura. The entire locus of the Neopoltian Novels––Ferrante’s writing more broad escaping boundaries, labels, that which can and cannot be expressed in words, and the establishment of intimacy within private spheres as a mode of individual expression and power.

Ferrante herself speaks on her relationship with creative expression within public and private spheres. Within Incidental Inventions, Ferrante details her experiences with keeping a diary as a girl:

I didn’t have time to write every day. And as a result it seemed to me that the thread of causes and effects was writing pages that I later back-dated. And in doing so, I gave the facts, the always exist in the pages that I wrote daily. So it was probably the experi ence of the diary and its contradic tion writer. In the invented stories, I felt that I was––I and my truths––a little safer. If recounting events––as Lenu does within the Neapolitan Novels––grants a writer safety from the consequences of exposing oneself, does an underlying yet unsaid truth not present itself in written autobiographical work, especially when it is translated and further mediated by cultural and linguistic conversions? Written language is not a representation of reality but instead a malleable tool of appropriation. It is thus important to understand Lenu’s attempts at giving shape to Lila through words as futile; the only “reality” the reader can accept from Lenu’s account is the reality of her perception, rather than an accurate and total depiction of Lila.

rante’s international audience do not experience her novels in the original Italian, the role of translation is vital in transmitting complex and convoluted literary narratives across diverse global audiences. Within her article “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” author and gender studies researcher Lori Chamberlain claims that the task of translation is inherently gendered, claiming that “the opposition between productive and reproductive work... depicts originality or creativity in terms of paternity and authority, relegating secondary roles.” And yet, the ability of the translator to transmit language and messages across cultural and global boundaries points to a type of creation in itself: the mediation of experiences, the creation of relationships. Cultural nuance, tradition, and linguistic norms

pose unique challenges for the task of translation, as the syntactic and lexical customs of different languages are not in direct parallel with one another. Thus, the practice depends on individual creativity and personal interpretation to produce a viable translation. Examined alongside Levinas’ “Saying” and the “Said,” translated texts are perpetually rich with “unsaid” communications, as they can never fully transmit the authenticity of the original author’s work, yet require creativity and artistic input nonetheless.

Topically, within Incidental Inventions, Ferrante speaks on the concept of words and their ability to reveal that which is concealed as a tool as a powerful form of expression:

There’s nothing I wouldn’t write about. In fact, as soon as I realize that something has flashed through my mind that I would never put in writing, I insist on doing so. Some say you have to be vigilant, that writers shouldn’t necessarily put everything into words. And part of me is absolutely in agreement. I like writing that adopts a sort of aesthetics of reticence, writing that suggests, writing that alludes...Restraint is all wrong if the task of the writing is to sweep away the resistance of the extraordinary that is con cealed in it. What is not suitable to say should, within the limits of the possible, be said.

According to Ferrante, writing is able to allude, and therefore suggest something beyond what is explicitly written. This concept of words as tools of expression beyond the pages parallels Ferrante’s approach to identity, as she believes that her creative product has more power than her real name. Ferrante’s anonymity is quite possibly a huge contributor to her writing’s success, as the mystery surrounding the author is a source of intrigue to international audiences. It is therefore unclear to what extent the pure creative output of her writing remains independent from the frenzied obsession many fans and media outlets have developed in pursuit of her “true” identity. This is Smarginatura; the fictions and realities present inside and outside of Ferrante’s writing have congealed into a tangled mix of unspoken and spoken truths that endlessly draw readers in.

This essay has become in itself an ities, or Smarginatura. There are unsaid truths behind every communication, and the lack of clarity surrounding Ferrante’s “true” identity is yet another testimony to the limits of language and the complexity of identity; without knowledge of her “real” name, much is lost of our understanding of the writer’s origins and experiences. And yet, the impact of her narrative brilliance would arguably diminish if the distinctions work were revealed. As a work primarily based from real life events, the series and Ferrante’s work more generally Ferrante’s writing is an exhibit of unparalleled creative genius. If we consider Ferrante’s anonymity as both an act of publicity, ownership, and authorship, as well as a creative element that stands alongside the writing itself, it becomes clear that the act of differentiating between the Saying and the Said within Ferrante’s work is futile. Her creative product is the Smarginatura.