The Grammar of Abandonment in I giorni dell'abbandono
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The Grammar of Abandonment in I giorni dell'abbandono
Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar
MLN, Volume 135, Number 1, January 2020 (Italian Issue), pp. 327-344 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2020.0004
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754953
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]The Grammar of Abandonment in
I giorni dell’abbandono
❦
Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar
I giorni dell’abbandono tells a very simple story. Olga, a thirty-eight-year-
old Neapolitan woman living in Turin, has been abandoned by her
husband, Mario. Now, she must learn to live without him. The novel
begins in April, when Mario leaves, and it ends sometime around
November, after Olga has come out of a life-altering crisis, not tri-
umphant, but composed. It is divided into three nearly symmetrical
parts: the first describes Olga’s initial reaction to abandonment and
is concerned with the onset of grief. The second, and longest, takes
place on a Saturday in August, when Olga’s deteriorating state is aggra-
vated by a series of external events that seem to conspire against her
sanity: her son and her dog fall violently ill, a colony of ants invades
her apartment, her cell phone and landline stop working, and, amidst
her inner confusion, Olga is unable to open the armored door that
divides her from the outside world. By the end of the day, Olga will
have undergone the biggest ordeal of her life. The third part, lastly,
depicts her in a newfound equilibrium, attempting to reconfigure the
grammatical, spatial, and temporal structures that had shaped her
married life and were destabilized by crisis.
It is precisely this reconstructive process that I would like to trace out
in the following pages, paying careful attention to how it is grounded
in a form of exegesis, that is, how Olga’s recovery from the ravages
of abandonment (and the void of meaning it entails) is enabled by a
process of linguistic and narrative reconstruction (and the restitution
of meaning that this, in turn, entails). Before doing so, however, we’d
do well to take a look at the deconstructive forces that beset her in the
MLN 135 (2020): 327–344 © 2020 by Johns Hopkins University Press328 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR face of abandonment. In this endeavor, it is perhaps better to begin at the middle, contrary to the King’s famous orders to the White Rabbit. Exactly at the halfway point of the novel, Olga takes her dog out- side to relieve himself. Having freed Otto from his leash, she pulls up her nightgown and, discombobulated by exhaustion, squats behind a tree trunk to urinate and defecate. In a way, this is expected. For over a hundred pages now, readers have witnessed her descent into the downward spiral of grief, a process of disintegration that, emanat- ing from Olga’s body, seems to extend to both living and non-living things around her. This scatological act occupies a peculiar place in the novel. Its centrality, both literal and thematic, makes the passage worth quoting in its entirety, for in it the most important themes of I giorni are addressed: Ferinità delle femmine, me la sentivo addosso fin dal risveglio, nella carne. Provai all’improvviso l’ansia di sciogliermi in liquame, un’angoscia che mi prese al ventre, dovetti sedermi a una panchina, trattenere il respiro. Otto era sparito, forse non aveva intenzione di tornare più, fischiai mala- mente, se ne stava nel fitto di alberi senza nome, mi sembravano più un acquerello che una realtà. Ce li avevo a lato, alle spalle. Pioppi? Cedri? Acacie? Robinie? Nomi a vanvera, che ne sapevo, ignoravo tutto, anche i nomi degli alberi sotto casa mia. Se avessi dovuto scriverne, non ne sarei stata capace. I tronchi mi parevano tutti sotto una lente potente di ingran- dimento. Non c’era distanza tra me e loro, e invece la regola vuole che per raccontare bisogna innanzitutto prendere un metro, un calendario, calcolare quanto tempo è passato, quanto spazio si è interposto tra noi e i fatti, le emozioni da narrare. Io invece mi sentivo sempre tutto addosso, fiato contro fiato. Anche in quell’occasione mi sembrò per un attimo di indossare non la camicia da notte ma un lungo manto su cui era dipinta la vegetazione del Valentino, i viali, il ponte Principessa Isabella, il fiume, l’edificio dove abitavo, anche il lupo. Perciò ero così pesante e gonfia. Mi alzai mugolando di imbarazzo e mal di pancia, la vescica piena, non ce la facevo più. Camminai a zigzag, stringendo le chiavi di casa, colpendo la terra col guinzaglio. No, non sapevo niente di alberi. Un pioppo? Un cedro del Libano? Un pino d’Aleppo? Dov’è la differenza tra un’acacia e una robinia? Gli inganni delle parole, tutto un imbroglio, forse la terra promessa è senza più vocaboli per abbellire i fatti. Sorridendo di scherno – un disprezzo di me – tirai su la camicia da notte, mi accovacciai, pisciai e cacai dietro un tronco. Mi ero stancata stancata stancata. (108–09) The ferocity of women, I had felt it in me since waking, in my flesh. Sud- denly I was afraid I would dissolve into liquid, a fear that gripped my stom- ach, I had to sit down on a bench, hold my breath. Otto had disappeared, perhaps he had no intention of ever returning, I whistled weakly, he was
M LN 329 in the thick of nameless trees, which seemed to me more like a watercolor than like reality. The ones beside me, behind me. Poplars? Cedars? Aca- cias? Locusts? Names at random, what did I know, I didn’t know anything, even the names of the trees outside my house. If I had had to write about them, I would have been unable to. The trunks all seemed to be under a powerful magnifying lens. There was no distance between me and them, whereas the rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed, how much space has been interposed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated. But I felt everything right on top of me, breath against breath. And then it seemed to me that I was wearing not my nightgown but a long mantle on which was painted the vegetation of the Valentino, the paths, the Princess Isabella bridge, the river, the building where I lived, even the dog. That was why I was so heavy and swollen. I got up groaning with embarrassment and stomachache, my bladder full, I couldn’t hold it any longer. I stumbled in a zigzag, clutching the house keys, hitting the ground with the leash. No, I knew nothing of trees. A poplar? A cedar of Lebanon? A pine of Aleppo? What’s the difference between an acacia and a locust? Tricks of words, a swindle, maybe the promised land has no more words to embellish the facts. Smiling scornfully—with scorn for myself—I pulled up my nightgown, I peed and shit behind a trunk. I was tired, tired, tired. (The Days of Abandonment 97–98) Four aspects of the scene stand out. On the one hand, the ferinità delle femmine, linked to the act of defecation; on the other, Olga’s arbitrary attempt to name the trees around her, which arises from the hypothetical scenario of having to write about them. Given that Olga is a writer, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that she frames her regressive state in linguistic terms, more specifically through the lens of narrative description. As I will attempt to explain, it is primarily by way of linguistic reconstruction that she will be able to overcome the crisis of abandonment. But of what exactly does this crisis consist? To better elucidate the connection between the onto- logical and the narrative, between Olga’s malaise and the sense of defamiliarization attached to it, I’d like to turn to Kristeva’s concept of the abject. Critics before have done this, perhaps most prominently among whom Stiliana Milkova, who, in “Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura,” posits disgust as a frame- work with which to understand Ferrante’s novels.1 Disgust, needless to 1 Milkova writes that “in Ferrante’s novels, disgust reveals another aesthetics at play — that of the female body perceived by the female subject herself” and contends that “disgust constitutes the key trope of Ferrante’s figurations of femininity, motherhood, daughterhood, and the (pregnant) female body” (92, 93–94). Milkova convincingly argues that disgust facilitates transgression and the creation of a sense of feminine
330 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR
say, is inseparable from the abject. Kristeva describes the latter as the
reaction, in the shape of horror or disgust, to whatever destabilizes
meaning by blurring established boundaries—put differently, in violat-
ing the subject/object divide and laying bare the precariousness of a
demarcated self, non-objects like feces (or, ultimately, the corpse) are
unbearable reminders of our own materiality, irruptions of the stage
in our lives prior to the entry into the symbolic order. Kristeva sees it
as a double sword in the process of ego-formation, both necessary to it
(the abjection of the maternal body and the consequent emergence of
a separate identity) and a threat to its stability (when confronted with
non-objects that confuse the distinction between “self” and “other”).2
Abjection, thus, makes us recoil in horror and disgust from the pure
carnality of our bodies and has the potential of stripping things from
the layer of culture that envelops them.
Ferrante has never made explicit reference to the abject (and only
mentions Kristeva once in La frantumaglia), yet she has written at length
about and around a similar concept, a neologism she calls frantumaglia.3
Milkova, in fact, writes that “the frantumaglia uncannily approximates
Kristeva’s formulation of the cause of abjection” (“Mothers, Daughters,
Dolls” 97). The notion of frantumaglia—a Neapolitan word derived
from the Italian frantumazione, or “breaking up into pieces”—refers to
a feeling of disintegration that results from the recognition of life’s
meaninglessness, from coming face to face with the tangle (garbuglio)
underlying our existence. Frantumaglia is the chaos that originates,
literally through the dismemberment of the maternal body, but also
metaphorically, through the moments of crisis that it brings about
and that in turn result in an equilibrium, no less precarious than the
identity, however slippery. While I do not disagree with this interpretation, and in fact
consider disgust (or the encounter with the abject or the frantumaglia) as symptomatic
of Olga’s process of disintegration, I see the act of narrativizing as also being integral
to Olga’s process of reconstruction. Therefore, the role that Milkova assigns to disgust
in Leda’s process of negotiating her identity, I assign in Olga’s case to plotting.
2
Roberta Mazzanti finds that the issue of maternal abjection is inseparable from
Ferrante’s oeuvre: “La domanda che ritrovo modulata nelle scritture di Elena Ferrante
è sempre questa: come possono le donne uscire dal corpo materno senza rinnegarlo,
come riescono ad andare avanti senza dimenticare, come – d’altra parte – sono e saranno
capaci di tagliare qualcosa, di eliminare per compiere delle scelte? I suoi romanzi sono
strutturati su queste domande, ne esibiscono tutte le tesiture e le lacerazioni” (95).
3
Ferrante’s relationship to her literary forebears has been questioned at length.
Stefania Lucamante argues that Ferrante “disowns the direct line that binds her work
to that of other female writers” (“Undoing Feminism” 31). Elizabeth Alsop, in a very
illuminating article on L’amore molesto and I giorni dell’abbandono, explores “Ferrante’s
reimagining of certain plights, and plots, that have long plagued Western literary
heroines” (482).M LN 331
pre-critical state, but that at least provides the self with a more acute
awareness of its condition. Like the abject and abjection, frantumaglia
is both the unnamable landscape and the reaction to it—it is both
the raw material for artistic creation and the feeling of unease that
renders the creation necessary. Both frantumaglia and the abject, too,
find their origin in the maternal body.
It is no coincidence, then, that the long passage quoted above
comes after a reflection on the idea of beauty passed down to Olga
by her mother. Beauty, we learn, has always been for Olga “uno sforzo
costante di cancellazione della corporalità” (“a constant effort to
eliminate corporeality”; I giorni 107; The Days 97). This is a gendered
conception of beauty—one whereby women are asked to suppress any
unpleasant signs of their corporeality. Yet a life of bodily suppression
comes to a sudden halt as Olga grieves for her absent husband and
starts to become aware of the injunctions that she has been living
under. As Milkova points out, disgust becomes operative when Fer-
rante’s women “exit the symbolic order and enter a liminal space
where they exist at once as normative categories imposed by language
and as something resisting definitive norms and borders” (“Mothers,
Daughters, Dolls” 97). Noticeably, the locus of Olga’s anxiety is the
stomach, suggesting that her malaise is neither intellectual nor purely
affective, but, primarily, physical: “sentii in ogni angolo del corpo i
graffi dell’abbandono sessuale” (“I felt over every inch of my body the
scratches of sexual abandonment”; I giorni 23; The Days 23). Ferrante’s
notoriety for being a writer of the gut is foregrounded in this novel,
where sexual and romantic abandonment, as the strongest possible
forces of disintegration or frantumazione, violate the self’s integrity and
set off a process of inselvatichimento4 that bears the stamp of the body’s
rough materiality.5 That the malaise is situated in the gut, moreover,
hints not only at Olga’s supposed maternal or feminine instincts, or at
the fact that the essential aspects of her interior life have been gutted,
but also at the need for her to, as it were, digest and excrete her grief.
4
To grow wild, to become unsociable, inselvatichire can refer to plants, animals, and
less often to people and plots of land that have been abandoned. About this last in-
stance, it is interesting to note the ways in which the plot of Olga’s life, abandoned by
its driving force, is now open to the intrusion of wild presences, and how the narration
we read, too, undergoes this gradual process of regression. Perviousness is ubiquitous,
both narrativized through the intrusion of obscene language, as well thematized in all
the ways in which Olga’s apartment is broken into (by the ants, the lizard, and Mario).
5
Ferrante’s emphasis on physiological functions has led Katrin Wehling-Giorgi to
compare her with Irigaray: “In fact, one might contend that the strong tactile, olfactory,
and visual dimension of her texts also evoke parallels with Irigaray’s notion of écriture
feminine” (“Playing with the Maternal Body” 4).332 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR We thus find that certain evacuations are a manifestation of the unraveling that needs to happen in order for Olga’s life to be restruc- tured after abandonment. They are thematized in moments such as the one quoted above, as well as in other ways that are not strictly scatological; more specifically, in Olga’s turn to obscene language during her aggressive exchanges with Mario. They extend to the nar- ration itself, for, as the novel progresses, it is decomposed, processed, excreted (suffice it to think of the gradual change of the narrative register, from the novel’s composed opening to the urgent tone of its most pressing scenes). These narrative “runs” characteristic of I giorni are also present in L’amore molesto (Troubling Love) and La figlia oscura (The Lost Daughter) (the case will be the opposite towards the end of the Quartet, where constipation is both thematized and for- malized). Discharge abounds in these three novels; its role is, on the one hand, to signal to the metabolism of grief, and, on the other, to drive home the realization of the body’s materiality and, therefore, its penetrability. If abjection connotes the permeability of physical—and, by extension, cultural—boundaries, then the displaced and, as such, emphasized instance of defecation quoted above is symptomatic of an active threat to the stability and unity of Olga’s identity. Her “ansia di sciogliermi in liquame” is an example of the Kristevan dissolution of the ego, as well as an instance of the process of liquification that all of Ferrante’s protagonists undergo during their crises. Just as the abject precedes language or the symbolic order, and as such precedes the very establishment of identity, so, too, is Olga’s excretory act coupled with an inability to name the trees around her and a recognition of the arbitrary nature of language. The abject here is expressing the tenu- ous division of the subject/object divide, as Olga feels no separation from her surroundings: “Io invece mi sentivo sempre tutto addosso, fiato contro fiato” (“I felt everything right on top of me, breath against breath”; I giorni 108; The Days 98). If she registers this inability as an artistic failure—saying that if she had to write about these trees, she wouldn’t know what to call them—it is because, at this point in the novel, she has yet to begin plotting her crisis. Plotting binds, it confers meaning, whereas, at this moment in the novel, Olga is unbound. The descent into the dark recesses of grief is, then, marked by a crisis not only of identity but of language itself. Along with the realiza- tion of the fragility of affective ties comes an unsettling confrontation with semantic voids. In narrative terms, this is first exhibited in the transition from the highly curated Italian that opens Olga’s account into the ungrammatical and obscene language that she adopts later.
M LN 333 Standard Italian, we learn, has been Olga’s way of grappling with the instability of life, of which she always had a hint but never a full glimpse. Reflecting on her childhood, she writes: mi sentivo dentro una vita clamorosa e l’impressione che ogni cosa si dovesse di colpo squadernare a causa di una frase troppo lancinante, di un movimento poco sereno del corpo. . . . Anche per tenere sotto controllo l’angoscia dei mutamenti mi ero definitivamente abituata ad aspettare con pazienza che ogni emozione implodesse e prendesse la via della voce pacata. (I giorni 10–11) I felt that I was inside a clamorous life and that everything might come apart because of a too piercing sentence, an ungentle movement of the body. . . . And to keep under control the anxieties of change I had, finally, taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm. (The Days 12) It is telling that she refers to the fear that “everything might come apart because of a too piercing sentence.” After all, a breakdown of the linguistic cannot be divorced from a disruption of the “everything” to which the passage refers. Ferrante uses the word squadernare, which Ann Goldstein renders as “to come apart,” a well-meaning transla- tion, doubtless, but one that foregoes the several layers of meaning present in the original. In common parlance, squadernare denotes the action of flipping through a book or opening it on a certain page to make something evident. In this sense, it is the revelation of the “true essence” of things, or the lack thereof, that Olga fears; in other words, she fears that too piercing a sentence (lacerante) might tear down the carapace of meaning bestowed by language, thus showing the unbearable meaninglessness of things. Squadernare, in a second and somewhat antiquated meaning, denotes the process whereby the leaves of a book are unstitched, the unbind- ing of a book. This, ultimately, will constitute the driving metaphor of the novel: Olga’s coming apart at the seams, her status as an unbound book in search of a thread or a unifying plot. In this sense, Goldstein’s “come apart” is more appropriate, but still loses the imagery of the Italian, which, in connoting the dissolution of a book, implies the fear of disrupting networks of meaning. Of course, sewing is a known metaphor for the process of semantic creation (it is, after all, thanks to her mother and her fellow seamstresses that Olga first establishes a connection between sewing and storytelling). Faced with the threat of squadernatura, Olga’s curated Italian becomes a way to keep chains of signification intact; it is reminiscent of the concept of suture, used by film theorists to refer to whatever makes audiences forget that the
334 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR camera is doing the viewing for them. Gaps in meaning—the space between islets of signification—are filled through a process of willful, and necessary, deception. Squadernare ultimately poses a threat to sanity. After all, a synonym for it is squinternare, which denotes the process of losing one’s mind, of coming undone. Lastly, and in line with Fer- rante’s penchant for intertextuality, squadernare is a direct reference to the thirty-third (and last) canto of Dante’s Commedia, particularly to a passage in which the poet remarks that in the profundity of the divine essence, all things are bound up together in love, which in the universe are spread like separate leaves of a book. By invoking Dante’s Commedia¸ Ferrante foreshadows Olga’s descent into the hell of meaninglessness, while hinting at her eventual recovery (the refer- ence is to the Paradiso, after all). Still, Ferrante parts ways with Dante in a crucial way. For the Flo- rentine poet, divine love (that is, the divine plot) unites things and, in doing so, confers meaning. Because there is no temporality and no language in the divine essence, things there are intrinsically mean- ingful. By contrast, Olga’s world is, as Lukács would have it, one that has lost its closed totality and is now characterized by “transcendental homelessness,” ultimately in charge of producing meaning out of itself. While this is Lukács’s diagnosis of the novelistic form in general, I giorni dell’abbandono specifically thematizes how, lacking a divine masterplot, and the romantic masterplot now demystified, Olga must undergo a process of disintegration or frantumazione to consequently create some sort of meaning, even if patchwork, out of her own experience. This drive to confer meaning is poignantly illustrated after Olga has had a humiliating sexual encounter with Carrano. Utterly defeated, on her way back home, she finds peace by uttering these words: “Amo mio marito e perciò tutto questo ha un senso” (“I love my husband and so all this has meaning”; I giorni 97; The Days 88). That Olga can only imbue her suffering with meaning (namely, plot it) in terms of her love for her husband, and with the prospect of an eventual reconcili- ation, shows that she has yet to extricate herself from the romantic masterplot. In undergoing this process of extrication, Olga’s body will be crucial: “L’unico segno esterno della mia agitazione,” she writes, “diventò la disposizione al disordine e la fiacchezza delle dita che, più cresceva l’angoscia, meno si chiudevano solidamente intorno alle cose” (“The only external sign of my agitation was an inclination to disorder and a weakness in my fingers, and, the more the anguish increased, the harder they found it to close solidly around things”; I
M LN 335
giorni 16; The Days 17). There is a tendency in Ferrante’s writing to resist
the pure metaphorization of grief. No easy feat, when considering the
“porous” nature of grief, its status as “a heated psychic condition in
which everything becomes metaphor” (Doty 25). This porosity finds an
analogue in the perviousness which leaves Olga subject to penetration.
It is linguistic when it allows Olga’s curated Italian to be perforated by
dialect and obscenities; it is also, in what is truly one of Ferrante’s big-
gest feats, literalized: Olga’s crisis comes when her literal, physical grasp
on things weakens. This state of discombobulation will only become
more acute as the narrative advances: Olga will forget whether she’s
left the stove on; she will forget to pick up her kids after school; she
will fail to notice a splinter of glass in the meatballs that she cooked;
she will somehow recklessly spray insecticide around the apartment,
all in a slow and slippery descent into the perils of letting go. And all
of this is the consequence of abandonment precisely because Olga’s
married life was structured around Mario; without him, she has lost
all sense of direction.6
Olga’s trajectory seems, at first, to replicate that of a host of female
literary figures who, before her, could not help but disintegrate (fran-
tumarsi) in the face of abandonment. These women’s stories will serve
simultaneously as example and cautionary tale, a point of identification
for Olga and a warning of what awaits her if she passively submits to
the plot of abandonment commonly prescribed to women. Olga must
confront these women, her spiritual and literary mothers, their pres-
ence surrounding her, the echo of their voices bouncing off the walls
of her Turinese apartment. Among them, of course, are Dido, Medea,
Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Simone de Beauvoir’s Monique, and
6
Olga’s disorientation is aggravated to the extent that she becomes estranged from
the most mundane tasks, most notably the ability to open the armored door to her
apartment. At the end of Chapter 31, overwhelmed by her repeated failures, she at-
tempts to open the door with her mouth. Arguably, this is a reference to Kafka’s Gregor
Samsa, and a felicitous one at that, when considering that the kind of alienation that
“The Metamorphosis” deals with, and the defamiliarization that besets Gregor upon
his transformation, are more than comparable to the crisis at the center of I giorni and
Olga’s necessity to, as it were, relearn reality.
Similarly, the scene in which Olga reflects on her three different sides as reflected by
the panels of her mirror (123) bears a strong resemblance to the opening of Lispector’s
“Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady,” in which the protagonist combs her
hair before a three-sided vanity mirror. Like Olga, Lispector’s Young Lady is assailed
by a host of male ascriptions and descriptions and prescriptions. Even their reaction
to their situation is similar: the tactile disfunctions (both numbness and inflammation)
that Ferrante attributes to Olga upon waking up on August 4th find a striking parallel
in the affects that the Young Lady undergoes toward the end of Lispector’s story. This
would of course necessitate a full-fledged literary examination of its own, but the con-
nections in this case do not appear to be coincidental.336 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR la poverella, a figure from Olga’s childhood. Olga not only knows about these women and tries to learn from them, but also consciously situates herself at the end of this female genealogy, even sees herself subject to, while simultaneously resisting, the plot of abandonment that has dictated their lives.7 Epochs, one might say, become interconnected. Christa Wolf writes, in the epigraph to Medea, that anachronism is “not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter- penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures.” In this sense, anachronism can be understood as another form of porosity. In fact, the dissolution of semantic and linguistic networks carries with it an inextricable dissolution of time structures. During the onset of grief, Olga will begin to see apparitions of la poverella. This first happens when she is going back to her apartment after having sex with Carrano: “In un angolo, accanto alla ringhiera, vidi accosciata la poverella di tanto tempo prima che mi disse con tono spento, ma molto serio: «Io sono pulita sono vera gioco a carte scoperte»” (“Crouching in a corner, beside the banister, I saw the pover- ella of so long ago, who said to me in a weary but very serious tone: ‘I am clean I am true I play with my cards on the table’”; I giorni 96; The Days 87). It is significant that this first apparition occurs “accanto alla ringhiera,” beside the banister, that most liminal of places that, along with the pianerottolo, or the landing, occupies a special place in the Ferrantean spatial imaginary. Of course, a banister separates, is a boundary, which the poverella has by this point violated. In ways less explicit, the other abandoned women in this genealogy will also cross that threshold, reinforcing their structural role both as bearers of a tradition and as cautionary tales, providing a yardstick against which Olga can measure her own reaction to abandonment. One could say, then, that the pressing question behind I giorni dell’abbandono is: As a donna d’oggi, a woman of today, how can Olga react to inherited plots of abandonment? Or, since the epochal inter- penetration characteristic of anachronism allows for the spirits of her predecessors to live in, around, and through her, where can Olga find the resources to resist the impulse, on the one hand, to give in 7 Crucial to Olga’s enterprise will be the line between reference and reproduction, that is, between learning from this genealogy of abandoned women and seeing herself inevitably subjected to the same plot. Wehling-Giorgi makes the important point that “Ferrante’s narrative of dissolution does not simply reproduce the formlessness or sub- sumption that has dominated male-centered representations of the female body,” but rather “reframe[s] and renegotiate[s] the position of the feminine subject in patriarchal society from the perspective of a newly gained agency and creative power that resist patriarchal appropriations of the female body” (“Playing with the Maternal Body” 13).
M LN 337
to the grand gestures of homicidal tragic heroines, or, on the other,
to disintegrate, like heroines in the vein of Anna Karenina or Emma
Bovary?8 Many, in fact, are the parallels between Olga’s state of confu-
sion and Flaubert’s constant references to the fog in Emma’s head.
About the latter, Tony Tanner writes: “Much of the fog in her head
may be traced to this: her situation and the language dominated by
a confusion of male ascriptions and descriptions and prescriptions”
(312). The poverella, too, becomes a victim of these ascriptions and
descriptions and prescriptions.9 Perhaps her name was Emilia, and
yet, to everyone, she was simply known as “that poor woman,” her
identity dependent on the fact that her husband has left her. And
while la poverella is ascribed the role of helpless victim by others, she
very comfortably wraps this shawl around her shoulders. “Si era persa
la grossezza delle mammelle,” writes Olga, “dei fianchi, delle cosce, si
era persa il viso largo e gioviale, il sorriso chiaro” (“She lost the full-
ness of her bosom, of her hips, of her thighs, she lost her broad jovial
face, her bright smile”; I giorni 15; The Days 16). To the eight-year-old
Olga, such an obvious form of grief is repellent.
Later in life, after reading de Beauvoir’s La femme rompue, Olga will
have a similar reaction: she recalls arrogantly saying to her French
teacher, “queste donne sono stupide. Signore colte, di condizione
agiata, si rompevano come ninnoli nelle mani dei loro uomini
distratti” (“these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfort-
able circumstances, they broke like knickknacks in the hands of their
straying men”; I giorni 20; The Days 21). The only lines that she can
remember from the book are important: “io sono pulita sono vera
gioco a carte scoperte” (“I am clean I am true I am playing with my
cards on the table”; I giorni 22; The Days 22). Note the use of parataxis
and the lack of commas between the three clauses. While in certain
cases, as Erich Auerbach has observed, parataxis works to place dis-
8
Tiziana de Rogatis underlines the power of anachronism, and relates it to the
precarious situation in which Ferrante’s protagonists live: “l’acronia di un mondo
simultaneamente arcaico e contemporaneo illumina un versante esistenziale della
soggettività femminile, che si rappresenta da una parte come del tutto aggiornata,
sicura, autonoma, e, dall’altra, come esposta al rischio costante di una «smarginatura»
dell’io” (“Elena Ferrante e il Made in Italy” 290–91)
9
The process of disintegration and subsequent reconstruction that Olga undergoes
can be understood as a form of emancipation from these ascriptions and descriptions
and prescriptions, or, as Katrin Wehling-Giorgi calls it, a “decolonization”: “One of
[Ferrante’s] major achievements in my view is precisely her ruthless portrayal of an
inherently conflictual process of ‘decolonization’ from the subaltern state that afflicts
her female protagonists, who are marginalized not only by their social standing and
gender but also by a profound existential preoccupation” (“Writing Liminality” 206).338 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR tinct actions on equal footing, here it signals to the dissolution of margins (a phenomenon which will come up as smarginatura later in Ferrante’s oeuvre). The form delineating things dissolves, and, with it, all grammatical structures. “Mettere sempre le virgole,” Olga reflects, “tanto per cominciare, dovevo ricordarmene” (“I had better remember always put in the commas”; I giorni 22; The Days 22). In this manner of speaking, or of writing, Olga identifies the state of confusion that she is slowly sinking into; she identifies, in other words, the grammar of abandonment. The parataxis in de Beauvoir, moreover, recalls the parataxis of the defecation passage: “Mi ero stancata stancata stancata.” Goldstein, inexplicably, adds the commas, and in doing so ignores the suspension of grammatical structures that is fundamental to Olga’s crisis. If grammar, like plot, binds, confers meaning, and controls a sequence, then parataxis is one instance of the narrative runs mentioned before—words, obscene words, flow freely, unimpeded by punctuation or connecting conjunctions whose role is to structure meaning. Olga, then, must reconstruct her language out of the rubble, as she will have to recreate, on a different narrative plane, the story of her abandonment out of incomplete pieces. In the fight against paratactic forces of disintegration, pain becomes a way for Olga to stay anchored to her surroundings. The first instance of this is a subtle yet masterful literalization of the book’s driving meta- phor, one that foregrounds the narrative dimension of Olga’s crisis. As discussed previously, Olga’s fear of disintegration is encapsulated in the word squadernare, which connotes the unstitching of a book. The first item that she uses to inflict pain on herself is, tellingly, a metal clip for holding loose sheets together: “La presi, vi strinsi den- tro la pelle del braccio destro, forse poteva servire. Qualcosa che mi tenesse” (“I took it, I clipped it on the skin of my right arm, it might be useful. Something to hold me”; I giorni 124; The Days 112). This not only implies that the pain caused by the pressure of the clipper on Olga’s skin will allow her to stay focused, but that, in using an item whose purpose is to keep papers together, Olga is coming up with a makeshift (and literal) solution to the unbinding of semantic networks (metaphorically) signaled by the word squadernare at the beginning of the novel. This stands as a crucial moment in the novel, in that the narration makes it evident that what is needed for Olga to survive is the kind of binding that only plotting can provide. The problem, of course, is that Olga is stuck in a sort of liminality between the literalness of the clipper as a binder and the metaphorical nature of plotting’s unifying potentialities.
M LN 339
The other form of pain infliction comes from Ilaria, tasked with
poking her mother with a metal paper cutter every time she gets dis-
tracted. Consequently, the narrative buildup of Olga’s most critical
interior monologues is time and again interrupted by the very real
intrusion of the point of the paper cutter piercing her skin. But grief
is seductive, and the constant reimagining of her husband’s sex life,
as a way of giving in to grief, continually draws Olga into a stream of
consciousness, which becomes her biggest threat, for in it she risks,
and excuse the pun, drowning; she risks liquefying into a torrent of
grief. Stream of consciousness, on the narrative level, is the entryway
of the irrational; it is the locus of jumbled sentences and confused
meanings. We must not forget, and Olga certainly does not, that it is
in the midst of Anna Karenina’s final moments, as she has given free
rein to her most irrational thoughts, that the idea of suicide suddenly
comes to her. Olga can draw from this example, and, by situating
herself in the genealogy of abandoned women, she can be cognizant
of the absolute need to stay aware in order to keep at bay the desire
to give in to grief.10 But will awareness this be enough?
As I have been suggesting, Olga must realize plot’s potential to
become a barricade to the intrusion of the irrational. As Peter Brooks
remarks, “plot, then, is conceived to be the outline or armature of the
story, that which supports and organizes the rest” (11). Having failed
at the literal attempt to “bind the leaves of her book” with the metal
clip, Olga must turn to the metaphorical act of plotting as a powerful
binding force. While plot plays a pivotal role in all of Ferrante’s novels,
it is I giorni that most urgently depicts the need for it, specifically in
the sense of a plot that sticks to the materiality and causality of things,
even if the latter is fictional. There is evidence of this in Chapter 24
of the novel, when Olga inexplicably begins to narrate herself in the
third person: “Olga marcia per il corridoio, per il soggiorno. È decisa,
adesso, rimedierà, anche se la bambina che ha nella testa le parla
zuccherosa, le dice: Ilaria t’ha preso i trucchi, chissà cosa combina
nel bagno, non ci sono più cose tue che siano davvero tue, lei ti tocca
tutto, va’ e prendila a schiaffi” (“Olga marches down the hall, through
the living room. She is decisive now, she will remedy things, even if
10
In A Multitude of Women, Stefania Lucamante explores the ways in which Ferrante
relates to de Beauvoir and Olga to Monique, as well as the possibility of departing from
prescribed endings. She writes: “In other words, with her powerful rereading Ferrante
challenges the literary mother and her authority, showing how Sandra Gilbert’s theories
about a difficult literary daughteronomy can be reread when the texts of daughters do
question the outcomes of the mother’s texts” (81). In the same manner, we can trace
Olga’s debt to Anna Karenina.340 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR
the girl she has in her head is speaking to her in sugary tones, says
to her: Ilaria has taken your makeup, who knows what she’s up to in
the bathroom, your things are no longer really yours, she’s touching
everything, go and slap her”; I giorni 128–29; The Days 115). This abrupt
change into the third person and the present tense is noteworthy; in
it, Olga steps outside herself to narrate herself. Once again, we return
to the defecation passage, in which she discusses the writing rule that
“vuole che per raccontare bisogna innanzitutto prendere un metro.”
Because she cannot distance herself in time, Olga attempts to distance
herself spatially through a shift in narration. This is, ultimately, a form
of ecstasy, which Milan Kundera defines as
être hors de soi, comme le dit l’étymologie du mot grec : action de sortir
de sa position (stasis). Être hors de soi ne signifie pas qu’on est hors du
moment présent à la manière d’un rêveur qui s’évade vers le passé ou
vers l’avenir. Exactement le contraire : l’extase est l’identification absolue
à l’instant présent, oubli total du passé et de l’avenir. Si on efface l’avenir
ainsi que le passé, la seconde présente se trouve dans l’espace vide, en
dehors de la vie et de sa chronologie, en dehors du temps et indépendante
de lui. (Les Testaments trahis 105)
being “outside oneself,” as indicated by the etymology of the Greek word:
the act of leaving one’s position (stasis). To be “outside oneself” does not
mean outside the present moment, like a dreamer escaping into the past
or the future. Just the opposite: ecstasy is absolute identity with the present
instant, total forgetting of past and future. If we obliterate the future and
the past, the present moment stands in empty space, outside life and its
chronology, outside time and independent of it (this is why it can be lik-
ened to eternity, which too is the negation of time). (Testaments Betrayed 85)
This form of plotting-as-ecstasy is Olga’s way of combatting, on the
one hand, the dissolution of grammatical structures, and, on the other,
the porosity of anachronism. If she is to be saved, Olga must learn
from the past, but she must absolutely be in the present.
And while the act of plotting the self in this way is helpful, it is also
registered as a form of disassociation, still revolving around the “I” that
threatens to consume everything in its way. Instead, what is needed is
an allocentric type of plotting that will allow Olga to distance herself
from her own grief. This occurs when she turns her attention to Otto:
“Allentare la tensione, rimettere ordine, turare le falle del senso.11
11
In “Performative Realism and Post-Humanism in The Days of Abandonment,” Enrica
Maria Ferrara reflects on a post-human vision of a world in which “matter is alive and
provided with its own finality” and “all elements of reality, even inanimate beings, as
long as they are part of the incessant flow of “doing” which matter inherently is, can beM LN 341 Anche il cane, per esempio: perché doveva per forza aver ingurgitato veleno? Cancellare ‘veleno’” (“Relax the tension, re-establish order, plug up the leaks in meaning. The dog, too, for example: why should he have swallowed poison? Eliminate ‘poison’”; I giorni 131; The Days 118). In this moment, we witness Olga in the process of explicitly molding reality through an act of plotting-cum-editing, and all of this not as a means to record, but as a means to regain her composure and fend off the forces that threaten her sense of order. The passage further emphasizes the centrality of Otto’s role. Not by chance will his eventual death be the event that, in forcing her to step out of herself and readjust her perspective, will finally secure Olga’s return from the dangerous waters of grief, leading us back to Kristeva’s discussion of the abject corpse: Quella prossimità di morte reale, quella ferita sanguinante della sua soffe- renza, di colpo, insperatamente, mi fece vergognare del mio dolore degli ultimi mesi, di quella giornata sovratono di irrealtà. Sentii la stanza che tornava in ordine, la casa che saldava insieme i suoi spazi, . . . una colla trasparente. (I giorni 163) That proximity of real death, that bleeding wound of his suffering, of guilt, unexpectedly made me ashamed of my grief of the previous months, of that day with its overtones of unreality. I felt the room return to order, the house weld together its spaces, . . . a transparent glue. (The Days 118) After she has, as it were, glued herself together, Olga is able to open the door to the apartment with no difficulty. Slowly, life returns to normal. The register of the narration becomes noticeably calmer, the writing returns to its grammaticality, obscene language gives way, and the narration’s pace ceases to be rushed. Otto, in the end, becomes a necessary sacrifice, a metonymic tragedy whereby Olga can elude the abandonment plot and write her own. His death by poisoning, paral- leling Emma Bovary’s, suggests a displaced tragedy, as if whatever was in store for Olga that she managed to avoid had, in the end, to fall on seen as carrying agency” (142, 145). In this way, the cognitive subject must go beyond Carthesian dualism to change their vision of the world. Otto becomes particularly im- portant in her analysis, for he enables Olga’s connection with the non-human other: “Otto’s agony, described as the dog lies hopelessly in his owner’s arms waiting for his death, brings about the new reconstituted subject, the post-human Olga emerging from the ruins of her old dualistic self, by virtue of his mere bodily presence, his materiality that has wounds akin to his owner” (149). Though intriguing, Ferrara’s argument is ultimately an ontological one, whereas mine is resolutely narrative, and thus conceives of Otto as a scapegoat, a metonymic substitution whereby the tragic ending allotted to Olga by dint of her role in the abandonment plot becomes displaced and allows for her salvation.
342 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR someone else—as if, as Mephistopheles has taught us, the Devil must always have his due. Yet it also inevitably raises the question whether perhaps the deaths of these abandoned women, too, have been in some sense collateral damage. Olga ponders on the likelihood that Otto was poisoned by an angry neighbor who resented her husband’s rude ways. This allows for the possibility of the existence of a Mario that Olga never knew—a realization which aids the process of detach- ment. It’s noteworthy that the narrative never clarifies Otto’s death, for this only highlights the necessity of having Olga choose to believe that Mario’s bad ways killed the dog, choose to structure meaning around that assumption. Not only that, but by the end of the novel, Otto’s death will consti- tute the mystery on which the entire text hinges, becoming a floating signifier of sorts. Olga imbues it with the meaning necessary to unify the entire story of her abandonment, thus exposing it as the novel’s central figure of plot. The “vuoto di senso” that Olga continually refers to is embodied in the white nozzle of the spray can that Car- rano leaves outside her door: Pensai con gratitudine che in quei mesi, con discrezione, si era adoperato per ricucirmi intorno un mondo affidabile. Era arrivato adesso al suo atto più cortese. Voleva darmi a intendere che non avevo più da sgomentarmi, che ogni movimento era narrabile in tutte le sue ragioni buone e cattive, che insomma era tempo di tornare alla robustezza dei nessi che annodano insieme gli spazi e i tempi. Con quel dono stava provando a scagionare sé stesso, mi scagionava, attribuiva la morte di Otto alla casualità dei giochi del lupo durante la notte. Decisi di assecondarlo. (I giorni 210–11) I thought with gratitude that in those months, discreetly, he had worked to sew up around me a world that could be trusted. He had now arrived at his kindest act. He wanted me to understand that I no longer had to be frightened, that every movement could be narrated with all its reasons good and bad, that, in short, it was time to return to the solidity of the links that bind together spaces and times. With that gift he was trying to exonerate himself, he was exonerating me, he was attributing the death of Otto to the chance of the games of a dog at night. I decided to go along with him. (The Days 187) It is unsettling that Olga learns of the potentialities of plotting from a man. Still, it is important to note that the word “ricucirmi” ties back and remedies the process initiated by squadernatura. Moreover, she learns from Carrano that everything is narratable, and fictitious as this narration might be, it serves to return to the “robustezza dei nessi che annodano insieme gli spazi e i tempi,” thus ending the paratactic
M LN 343
disintegration of her crisis.12 This seeming reiteration of yet another
dependency on a man is, I would argue, discarded at the very end of
the novel: “Finsi di credergli e perciò ci amammo a lungo, nei giorni
e nei mesi a venire, quietamente” (“I pretended to believe him and so
we loved each other for a long time, in the days and months to come,
quietly”; I giorni 211; The Days 188). It’s in the word “finsi,” from the
infinitive fingere, to pretend, that it is made evident that Olga’s crisis
has given her a new awareness of the precariousness of life and the
patchwork nature of meaning.13 It is also, tellingly, a deliberate act.
From the Latin fingere, “to form, shape,” the word once again rein-
forces the notion that only through giving form to (and subsequently
plotting) her crisis can Olga leave it behind her.
WORKS CITED
Alsop, Elizabeth. “Femmes Fatales: ‘La Fascinazione Di Morte’ in Elena Ferrante’s
L’amore molesto and I giorni dell’abbandono.” Italica, vol. 91, no. 3, 2014, pp. 466–485.
De Rogatis, Tiziana. “Elena Ferrante e il Made in Italy. La costruzione di un immagi-
nario femminile e napoletano.” Made in Italy e cultura. Indagine sull’identità italiana
contemporanea, edited by Daniele Balicco, Palumbo, 2016, pp. 288–317.
———. Elena Ferrante: Parole chiave. Edizioni e/o, 2018.
Dickinson, Emily. “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes – (372).” Poetry Foundation:
The Online Home of the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation. Web. 2 March. 2017.
Doty, Mark. Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir. Harper Perennial, 1997.
12
We could say that Olga’s narrativization is a form of arriving at a new subjectivity.
But it must be clear that whatever equilibrium is achieved post-critically will be marked
by the previous knowledge of disintegration. De Rogatis points to this when she writes
that “soggettivarsi significa quindi attraversare una destrutturazione del proprio io,
smantellato dal dolore, ma significa anche conoscere, nella parabola finale della propria
formazione, un riassestamento nella forma destrutturata: una metamorfosi dolorosa e
vitale al tempo stesso” (“Elena Ferrante e il Made in Italy” 291).
13
An interesting moment in which subjectivity is transposed into artistic creation oc-
curs when, out of body parts from her and her family taken from photographs, Olga
creates “un unico corpo di mostruosa indecifrabilità futurista” (“a single body of mon-
strous futurist indecipherability”; I giorni 184; The Days 164). The scene will later find a
parallel in Lila’s alteration of her wedding photograph in the Neapolitan Novels. Both
moments bring to mind Frankenstein and what a Lacanian reading might term as its
commentary on the fragmented nature of human experience, our patchwork identity.
Lila, like Frankenstein, in many ways attributes to herself the signifiers imposed on her.
But she does it with a vengeance. In fact, we could interpret this moment as a direct
defiance of the male gaze. Even though it does not directly discuss I giorni, Milkova’s
illuminating essay on ekphrasis in Ferrante provides an invaluable aid in my understand-
ing of this process. Milkova’s assertion about Delia could very well be applied to Olga:
“ekphrasis allows Delia to revoke the male gaze and gain autonomy over her own and
her mother’s visual representation. Manipulating official photographs is tantamount
to invalidating official patriarchal discourse” (“Elena Ferrante’s Visual Poetics” 174).344 VICTOR XAVIER ZAROUR ZARZAR
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez,
Columbia University Press, 1982.
———. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Éditions du Seuil, 1980.
Kundera, Milan. Les Testaments trahis: Essai. Gallimard, 1993.
———. Testaments Betrayed. Translated by Linda Asher, HarperCollins Publishers, 1995.
Ferrante, Elena. I giorni dell’abbandono. Edizioni e/o, 2002.
———. Frantumaglia. Translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2016.
———. La Frantumaglia. Edizioni e/o, 2016.
———. The Days of Abandonment. Translated Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2015.
Ferrara, Enrica Maria. “Performative Realism and Post-Humanism in The Days of Aban-
donment.” The Works of Elena Ferrante Reconfiguring the Margins, edited by Grace Russo
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Lucamante, Stefania. A Multitude of Women: The Challenges of the Contemporary Italian
Novel. University of Toronto Press, 2008.
———. “Undoing Feminism: The Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante.” Italica, vol.
95, no. 1, Spring 2018, pp. 31–47.
Mazzanti, Roberta. “Madri e figlie in Elena Ferrante.” Dell’ambivalenza. Dinamiche della
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Crispino and Marina Vitale, Iacobelli, 2016, pp. 88–104.
Milkova, Stiliana. “Elena Ferrante’s Visual Poetics: Ekphrasis in Troubling Love, My
Brilliant Friend, and The Story of a New Name.” The Works of Elena Ferrante Reconfigur-
ing the Margins, edited by Grace Russo Bullaro and Stephanie V. Love, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016, pp. 159–82.
———. “Mothers, Daughters, Dolls: On Disgust in Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura.”
Italian Culture, vol. 31, no. 2, 2013, pp. 91–109.
Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression. Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
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———. “Playing with the Maternal Body: Violence, Mutilation, and the Emergence
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