Global Perspectives, Trauma, and the Global Novel: Ferrante's Poetics between Storytelling, Uncanny Realism, and Dissolving Margins

My article is divided into four sections. In the first section, I will identify the link between globalization and trauma by examining various aspects of the coronavirus crisis—the event set to become the trauma of this new millennium—and its repercussions on the very concept of globalization. In the second section, I will briefly introduce the salient features of the globalized imaginary that emerge in relation to the global novel and other genres of writing. In the third, I will outline several characteristic features of the global novel and its "traumatic realism" (Foster 130) and "planetary realism" (Ganguly, Catastrophic 422). Finally, in the fourth section, I will identify the global features of Ferrante's poetics, discussing these in relation to the ideas presented in the preceding secti ons.

Section One: Writing Within the Trauma

This article was written at the intersection between two different phases of globalization: before and after the coronavirus crisis. I first presented an early version of this paper as a keynote speaker at the Elena Ferrante in a Global Context conference held in Durham on 7 June 2019, and I have since reworked it for publication between April and May 2020, during the long worldwide lockdown period imposed to contain the spread of the virus. In short, this reworking has taken place in the midst of a tragedy that has scarred both Italy, where I was living, and the rest of the world. In the process of reworking the paper, I was struck by just how many of the contemporary novels that I reference—Ferrante's tetralogy included—captured the age of trauma that has been so acutely exposed to us by the pandemic. In particular, the global novel has brought into central focus the relationship between individual histories, collective histories, and "traumatic realism" (Foster 130), which materializes as a "tendency to redefine experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma" (168). Indeed, so coherent and so intense are the fictional protagonists of the global novel that the reader immediately discerns the critical nature of the contemporary crises (concerning, for example, the environment, terrorism, gender violence, and inequality) that infiltrate their lives and shape their destinies.

And yet, despite the critical and prophetic capacity of the works with which I was engaging, the lockdown period has also been for me a time filled with disillusion with regard to literature. During this period, an obscure sense of betrayal has often led me to perceive a certain weakness in the power of storytelling, which I discuss at length in this article. However, I gradually came to realize that this sense of betrayal was concealing a more complex emotional response. Like many other people during the lockdown, I was afraid of distancing myself from reality, of freeing myself from it, of surrendering myself in search of a fictional world that was perhaps no less arduous or horrific than the real one, merely different. Reflecting on this anxiety, I realized—like many other insomniacs in that long period of isolation—that I could not afford to lose sight of the world around me. Overwhelmed by a looming, widespread sense of danger, I firmly grounded myself in reality out of the fear of losing touch with it, of losing my ability to decode it. This was a particularly frightening prospect when, all of a sudden, one cold Sunday morning at the end of February (following the announcement on the news of an irrefutable transmission of the virus in Italy), reality had become so unpredictable, unfathomable, incomprehensible. My anxiety was the trauma—or rather, one of its many symptoms.

As Laplanche points out, psychic trauma (etymologically derived from the Greek word for "wound" or "injury") consists of two different moments: the first is the "implantation of something coming from outside," and only after this can "the internal reviviscence of this memory" occur (Caruth, Interview 1). The traumatic event, Caruth emphasizes, "is its future" (Introduction 8): psychic trauma occurs when the traumatic event cannot be processed or integrated into the pre-existing functioning of the...