Reading About Elena Ferrante

 I had the opportunity in prison to read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet while in prison. It was time well spent, and they are books I recommend to all of you. What I write in Women Writers, Books By Women also applies to Ferrante.

What I could not do was read much about Ferreante. I think there was a New Yorker review, or maybe it was in The New York Review of Books. This morning, I was killing time looking through bookmarks, Arcade, and saw one I had visited in a long time and dived in a little way into Colloquies, and found a series of essays on Ferrante. Of these, Elena Ferrante's Run-ons
by Christopher Warley caught my fancy. I have been bedeviling my grammar checker with run-on sentences (not Jose Saramago sentences; not even William Faulkner length sentences; just sentences of 40 words or more.). I wanted to see what the article made of Ferrante's sentences.

And when I read these paragraphs I felt quite at home:

But how does Ferrante stick to illogical logic? How does her style create the irresistible? Here is a working hypothesis: Ferrante’s signature tic is the run-on sentence, a style more obvious in English translation than in Italian, run-ons are grammatically suspicious in English but normal in Italian. But even in Italian, Ferrante’s habit of running independent clauses together is distinctive. Here is a small example taken from the first page I flip to, from the last of the Neapolitan novels, Storia della bambina perduta: “Ma non mi convinceva, non gli credevo, esprimeva pareri entusiastici sul lavoro di troppe donne” (219). “But he didn’t convince me, I didn’t believe him, he expressed enthusiastic opinions about the work of too many women” (Ann Goldstein’s translation, which I’m quoting throughout). 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, she is a subtle thinker because she sees that someone praising the work of too many women, paradoxically, does not take women seriously, maybe even denigrates them, and suddenly there is not only personal introspection but also a history, a storia.

And as a storia, the momentum is also manipulative. At least, it is the effect of a stylistic technique: this sentence is not Elena Greco speaking in a rush, slightly out of control, a real person thinking through something logically illogically. This is Elena Greco, or Elena Ferrante (who is the narrator here?), retrospectively recounting events and recreating the rush of the moment as part of her affectionate and yet also vindictive urge to represent Lila (the novels begin with Lila’s disappearance). Even as you are caught up in the momentum of Elena’s thoughts, you are also aware—this is one of the real pleasures of the books—that Elena the narrator is, usually, making fun of the naiveté or stupidity of Elena the character, or the silly slogan’s of an era (“we used such language” is a common refrain), or the ridiculous historical narratives that people regularly trot out. Ferrante, or Elena, pities, savors, or demolishes the intensity of the reactions by situating them in a much broader history. The four so-called Neapolitan novels depict an intense relationship between two women, but they also create an arc that amounts to a history of postwar Italy. The coordination of interior life and social life has been one of the oldest problems of the genre of the novel, and the run-on sentence is Ferrante’s technique for reworking it.....

Yes! My idea was that these overlong sentences caught the character's emotional tenor – where ideas and actions met. I will not say that I got the idea from Ferrante, but it is nice to read some vindication of my own ideas. (Only some, as I cannot say the content is as effective as Ferrante's.)

Mr. Warley closes with an unsettling thought about literature, its neatness not quite being real life, while pointing out another use of run-on sentences:

Real life has no clear trajectory or boundaries, and the great weakness of stories is their urge toward making clear and sharp what is not. “Devo rassegnarmi” means, among other things, I must resign myself to the impossibility of literary presentation, the impossibility of manifesting a life in such a way that is not clarifying and simplifying: a journey to personal development, the unfolding of a thesis, some other stupid cliché. My novel, declares Ferrante, is at some level, as all literature is, a futile, misleading, failure. I do not think she is kidding.

But the obligation to resignation only happens in a non run-on sentence (“Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity”). Grammatical perfection, so to speak, is the source of the despair. The last lines offer the moral the run-ons deny. There is no doubt about subject, verb, and object, and the result is a mini dissertation about the meaning of history in our time, a summing up of what Ferrante’s vision of an epic sweep through modern Italy amounts to: history no longer progresses, the idea of modernity as progress is foolish, the stories we have been telling ourselves are absurd, literature itself is absurd. The vitality of Lila and Elena and everything they embody, plainly seen for a moment, will not be seen again. You are closer to real life when you tend to obscurity, when, you are, quite literally, not in art or representation of any sort. All of which means: the final sentences, neatly grammatical, do the opposite of what they say. They clarify, and lose the life they say will be lost. They lose it by saying it will be lost.

sch 8/17