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This is massively unhelpful, of course. Since even if there is a universe for each possible version of your life — the one in which you make a singular marriage, the one in which you’re restless and wild and free, and all the others — you’re trapped in this one; knowing they’re happening, right now, might even make it worse. In this world, the moment you commit yourself to someone or something you change everything that comes afterward, and live inside it, or so it feels. You also reject or ignore the people who might have been better off if you’d chosen differently. Life feels less like a multiverse and more like the kind of endless sacrificial negotiation Jacques Derrida describes in his little book The Gift of Death:
Let us not look for the examples, there would be too many of them, at every step we took. By preferring my work, simply by giving it my time and attention . . . I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelity or my obligations to other citizens, to those who don’t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of those who listen or read [and so on] . . . thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my sons, each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.
While some of what you ask is native to bisexuality and polyamory — to sex and the working out of what you desire — the problem is so deep and so familiar to us all that Derrida calls it “our habitat.” In every moment we want it both ways, even when we decide how to divide our time among family and friends. We feel it tragic to choose among competing and equally valid beliefs in order to live our one singular life. This problem of desire and commitment is, for Derrida, also an ethical question, perhaps the ethical question. The moment we pledge fidelity to another person or people, we make an unethical choice with regard to others.
There is a world in which the story is this: you commit yourself to one person after another, a man and then a woman, a woman and then a man, for balance, and when you are with a man, you cheat with a woman, and when you are with a woman, you cheat with a man. And then you find this woman, and something about her stops you. You get to know each other in the way one can only do with another person when there’s no one else for you. You see the world through her eyes, and it is like you live in two worlds, yours and hers, rather than one. You learn what it is like to be with her when she is bored, restless, just trying to exist on a Sunday afternoon when she doesn’t know what to do, and neither of you has anyone else to run away to, and your own long restlessness helps you to understand and quiet her. In this story, you realize that the cheating, for you, was not so much about bisexuality or ambivalence about monogamy but a way of escaping how embarrassing it is to be seen this way — just trying to exist, yourself. Because you’ve stopped enough to know her and be known, this ends some loneliness in you. You have the girl-girl true-love story.
What better represents Berlant’s archaic “good life” fantasy than homeownership? At the core of the 2008 financial crisis we find this contradictory arrangement: American society is unwilling to pay enough to significant numbers of its citizens for them to buy houses, yet also unwilling to live with the idea of itself as anything other than an “ownership society,” as George W. Bush’s 2004 slogan put it. Individuals and households, for their part, cannot bear to break with their aspirations to participate in this version of the good life. The problem, then, is that we are too straight — too bound to failing norms — to attack the forces disfiguring our lives. Desire for the kinds of stability and comfort neoliberalism has dissolved is precisely what makes the neoliberal advance possible.
Sixteen years ago, the theorist Wendy Brown diagnosed this malaise. In her essay “Resisting Left Melancholy,” she described “a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness, a Left that is most at home dwelling not in hopefulness but in its own marginality and failure, a Left that is thus caught in a structure of melancholic attachment to a certain strain of its own dead past, whose spirit is ghostly, whose structure of desire is backward-looking and punishing.” Today’s leftists, as anyone who’s done some organizing will know, are still attached to the experience of defeat, since it gives structure to their sense of their own marginal, heroic, and sad position.
Such a political practice ought to terrify its participants as they embark on it, and discomfit those with whom they seek to engage. Like all stigmatized relationships, political engagements adequate to this moment are as likely to feel confusing or frightening as ecstatic or liberating. Affective struggle has to entail becoming connected to the people who can’t see past their confusion or fear, and building solidarity where there is none by insisting on a form of relationship to which few are accustomed and that the mainstream neoliberal subject sees as genuinely queer: camaraderie. What’s more, the willingness to generate discomfort will require insistence on connection even through multiple rounds of rejection. To lose heart at the first refusal — whether to join a union, attend a protest, or just talk about politics — is one of the indulgences of left melancholy, with its grim satisfaction in defeat. I’ve been sent scurrying from the slammed doors of many people whom I’ve tried to recruit to join my union, including countless people who are today members and leaders of the organization. I doubt this process is nearly as painful or costly as coming out of the closet. (Though being queer in America and being a trade unionist may not be so far apart in stigma as they once were.) Still, it does seem to me that the affective kernel at its core — attempting to form new relationships that violate and undermine the collective norm — is essentially the same.
That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, “Just know that those thoughts aren’t you. That’s the OCD, it’s not you.” It was a kind gesture — she was offering me the illness narrative that reigns now, the one that constructs very, very firm boundaries between brain and self, illness and consciousness, self and other. I clung to that for a while, the notion that the maelstrom happening in my brain was not of me but outside me, happening to me. That there was a tidy line dividing “me” from “disease,” and the disease was classifiable as “other.” But then it became difficult to tell whether certain thoughts should go in the me box or the disease box — where did “I want to throw a rock through the kitchen window” belong? Eventually I could no longer avoid the fact that mental illness is not like infection; there’s no outside invader. And if a disease is produced in your body, in your mind, then what is it if not you?
One answer ends in o: the first name of a man. Whether to goad Ferrante out of privacy or because they think it’s true, the Italian newspaper L’Unità has accused the novelist Domenico Starnone of penning her books. If Starnone is behind Ferrante’s work, I would like to meet him. No man I know would write so well and not take credit for it.
Olga’s youth, like that of many intelligent women, was marked by contempt for her sex. In the early days of her abandonment she recalls a figure from her childhood in Naples, a neighbor who lost her mind with grief after her husband left her. Every night the neighbor sobbed loudly. Olga’s mother and her friends whispered in pity, calling her “the poverella” — the poor thing. “The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man.” As a child Olga was disturbed, disgusted, by this woman. “A grief so gaudy began to repel me. I was eight, but I was ashamed for her.” Girls — imperious, unforgiving, not yet women — still believe in the choice to be otherwise. In high school, Olga reacts similarly to a novel assigned by her French teacher:
I made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed to me sentimental fools: I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts. I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. I said it breathlessly, all in one gulp, which was something I never did, and my teacher smiled ironically, a little bitterly. She, too, must have lost someone, something. And now, more than twenty years later, the same thing was happening to me.
Becoming the poverella was Olga’s greatest childhood fear. That she should become this woman who despite her character, her intelligence, her work, constricts her existence to the shallow contentment of marriage — this is the betrayal. “What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life,” Olga thinks. The novel she hated in high school is the one she now begins to write in her head, though it contains touches of the “vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” she admired. For a moment she narrates her movements in the third person — then stops, fearing madness. “Don’t regress, don’t lose yourself, keep a tight grip,” she reproaches herself. “Above all, don’t give in to distracted or malicious or angry monologues. Eliminate the exclamation points. He’s gone, you’re still here.”
The Days of Abandonment takes part of a long tradition of feminist writing about “crazy” women — one that runs from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, from Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper to Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, all the way to Kate Zambreno’s Heroines. Often these works reimagine tragic figures of classic myth, and find in female madness an ecstatic dissolution or transcendence. Hysteria is reclaimed as an affirmation of woman unbound. These stories are fine, but not always for me; like Olga, I have too much pride to embrace the type. In The Days of Abandonment, Ferrante offers an alternative — one that doesn’t minimize the symbolic power of female malady but captures the double consciousness of a destroyed woman who doesn’t want to be “a woman destroyed.” Olga is, without doubt, a hysteric: she’s nervous, emotionally excessive, and prone to dissociation. But she resists this hysteria with a pride and tenacity I recognize. Becoming the poverella doesn’t mean breaking like a knick-knack in the hands of a man, as Olga once thought — it means seeking triumph in spectacular self-destruction, like Dido on the pyre. To resist the poverella is not to resist her fate, but to pass through it like a crucible: become the poverella, then become Olga again. A person with a name, not a martyr.