View all notes
But I don’t think that these superficial delights, redolent though they are of the standard practices and conventions of what some critics might brush off as mere pleasure reading, are at all the things that generate the most intense pleasure in reading Ferrante—at least, not for me. No, the strange, disturbing, confusing, magnetic, compulsive, and often horribly ecstatic pleasure of reading Ferrante’s fiction is in fact situated in the ungraspable nature of its perturbations. The clearly defined aspects of structural convergences, descriptive writing, character work—these small formal satisfactions drift limply atop the vast, seething unknowability of the real real that strains to break through these artificial constraints, the irrepressible and irresistible disorder that Ferrante calls frantumaglia that churns under the shaky scaffolding of the knowable or sayable. To me, it becomes increasingly clear that the dangerous height of my pleasure in reading Ferrante is the feeling that she, and we with her, are on the cusp of disintegration of the safely contained forms of fiction and of life. To give yourself over to the Neapolitan novels is to feel at once like you are wholly enclosed within the world of the books (both within their surprising unities of place, action, and time, and within their luxuriant, multivolume bulk) and like that entire, encompassing world is always on the brink of utter rupture and dissolution.
The pleasure one finds in the supposed perfection of novelistic form, in the precise and proportional lineaments of a world made by, say, Henry James, is the very opposite of the visceral pleasure-unpleasure I find in Ferrante’s writing, where “everything take[s] shape and then loses its shape.” Like the relationships and the disorderly city it depicts, the Neapolitan Quartet is caught up in an endless struggle between the desire to inhabit a singular, stable form and the impartially cruel impossibility of that desire—the undeniable multidirectional tide of the frantumaglia, the hectic but irresistible activity of unforming and being unformed that undoes any progress that the busy work of form might accomplish.
[...] In Frantumaglia, Ferrante writes that, “We are heterogeneous fragments that, thanks to impressions of unity—elegant figures, beautiful form— stay together despite their arbitrary and contradictory nature” (FR, 368). The truly marvelous unpleasure of reading Ferrante has to do with the fact that she forcibly reveals those fragments that always hide under the mask of beautiful form in a text (or in a person) whether we want to see them or not. In so doing, we might look inwards and see our own rough, unfinished seams, not completely stitched together, perhaps already in the midst of falling apart. Through reading the stories of Lila and Lent and how they read each other over the years, I am given a strange and agonizing lesson in how to read myself—not in the way that one might initially read a formative text (as a kind of knitting pattern, a design for the garment of personality) but as its opposite, a text that demands that you brutally rip away the garment of beautiful form and reveal the raw-edged fragments beneath. Not in the manner of Roland Barthes’s coy textual striptease (texte de plaisir) or in his evocative but rather bloodless “cut” or “gape” (texte de jouissance), but rather, with a bodily urgency and violence. Reading Ferrante fills me with a dangerous abandon and wild disregard for disciplined self-containment. More than anything, she makes me want to write as she writes—viscerally, bloodily, “like butchering eels”—and in so doing to somehow know, like Lila rework- ing the portrait, that ecstasy and clarity of vision that comes with making-by-unmaking one’s own form, to be both Orpheus and the frenzied Maenads.