Picking Up the Pieces: Elena Ferrante's Global Poetics of Fracture

Introduction: Ferrante and Fragmentation

Early in Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale (2011) the narrator Elena recalls a shocking incident which took place during her childhood. On a hot summer's day in her working-class Neapolitan neighborhood, another little girl, following a particularly intense argument with her father, is catapulted from the window of an upper-story apartment. She breaks her arm, but is lucky not to break more. In the first of the four-volume Neapolitan Novels, Elena Greco (Lenù or Lenuccia), now in her sixties, begins narrating her memories of this strange little girl, Raffaella Cerullo (Lina or Lila), following the latter's mysterious disappearance. Elena and Lila's is a fractious upbringing in Southern Italy in the 1950s and '60s. As the bodies of the two friends grow and change, so does the space around them—a notion of the self is gradually fleshed out within Elena's narrative. The developing notion of a speaking self in the tetralogy is, however, fundamentally fragmented. The girls of the rione, the unnamed suburb of Naples in which much of the action takes place, find themselves confronted with unruly bodies which must be subjected and contained. They also come up against the pervasive patriarchal mores of an insular world which offers restrictive trajectories for women's lives and self-understanding.

Brokenness is a spectacle of feminine disintegration which emerges repeatedly in Ferrante's literary production, standing not just for the difficulty of women's subjective formation in a patriarchal paradigm, but for the world itself, understood as a sum of fragile and incohesive parts. In Ferrante, fragmentation pervades everything, and so analyses of this defining phenomenon in her oeuvre dwell on how "this incipient destruction of form is itself a distinctly formal pleasure, ripe for exegesis" (Chihaya 125). The novels are "affollati da donne spezzate" ("crowded with shattered women"; Falotico 101; my trans.), informed by deeply held convictions about femininity, subjectivity, and the power of narrative to interrogate both in a cultural context in which, as Stiliana Milkova writes, "women are objectified, their bodies fragmented and exposed by and for the lurid male gaze" ("Elena Ferrante's Visual Poetics" 159). In view of the impact of fracture on all aspects of Ferrante's poetics, but most especially on her depiction of female bodies, Katrin Wehling-Giorgi argues for "an ontological sense of fragmentation" ("Playing with the Maternal Body" 13). For Ferrante's literary women, the lived experience of body and world is a process of being stretched, literally and figuratively, to breaking point—a violent rending of hearts, minds, and flesh.

When reading Elena Ferrante for the signs of this rending, breaks are to be found everywhere. Her first three novels, known collectively as the Cronache del mal d'amore and published between 1992 and 2006, confront the breaking down and building up of the female subject. It is only by enduring the intense emotional fractures associated with embodied womanhood under patriarchy (the lack of opportunities; the fraught mother-daughter entanglement; the fickleness of men) that Delia, Olga, and Leda can resist their own annihilation.¹ Each comes perilously close to the brink. The trend is continued in the often-shattering dyadic bond at the heart of the Neapolitan Quartet (2011–14). It extends also to La vita bugiarda degli adulti (2019), where the brittleness of things is located in the fragile tension between appearance and reality. Breakage of the kind Ferrante consistently addresses, where repeated instances of physical, mental, or social violence push her characters to the brink of destruction, is intrinsic not only to the image of female social and sexual experience reproduced in her fiction, but to the pseudonymous identity she has adopted—a conscious break with the cult of celebrity authorship. Milkova points out that the glimpses of herself Ferrante offers to readers are also brittle, a "self-invention through fragmentation" ("Framing by Fragmentation"). In other words, between novelistic production and personal writing, in Elena Ferrante there emerges a totalizing poetics of fracture. I shall argue for this poetics and seek to demonstrate its relevance...