Entropy Mag

I have been reading / re-reading Elena Ferrante’s Frantumaglia, Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed, and Jane Lewty’s In One Form to Find Another / and hating myself / for lingering on what I repeat and repeat to myself / what I write down in a diary that is not a diary / that I keep as a poem / as writing. “No one understands narrative I drink champagne / and refuse help No one understands narrative / It offends me” It’s bitchy / floral and maybe petulant / wrong and not wrong. I am constantly interested in what such feeling is nipping at / at what it’s critiquing: the poem or the story or the body that ends / that ends safely / in sun and scenery. That “makes sense of it all” with satisfaction, recognition, and comfort.

What happens to the body or the poem that instead chooses refusal, fragmentation, and disappearance? “Her happiness costs her a lot,” remarks Hélène Cixous in Reading with Clarice Lispector about a girl, a narrator of Lispector’s who has no choice but to insist that her drink is delicious, though she feels in her body it is not. What happens to the body that does not or cannot write something that can be confirmed or denied? Do you believe it more or less? Does it matter? Rather, can you believe that, perhaps, this is how the body has lived? What is duration when it is also an event / a life. What if the poem cannot translate or does not want to translate an event / a life / reality in a way that makes you feel good / for having read the poem / for having perfectly (or violently) quoted the poem / its climatic moment / its climatic clarity amidst trauma and body and life?

In Frantumaglia, Ferrante fiercely describes how suffering and pain is relayed through the lives of two of her early narrators, Delia and Olga (featured in Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment), as well as by herself, by her mother, by the voices she creates and comes into chaotic contact with. Such emotions in the othered body, Ferrante says, bust apart expectations of linear experience and of the linear processing of experience. Ferrante insists her narrators speak / that there are beings who speak from a life in unfathomable motion. “Delia and Olga tell their stories from within that whirling,” says Ferrante. “Even when they slow down they don’t distance themselves, they don’t contemplate, they don’t carve out external spaces for reflection. They are women who tell their story from the middle of a dizzy spell.” Do we listen to the bodies thrashing and writing this way? Do we resent them for not making it clear to us / for not giving us the well-worn couplets wrapped in kind of viral awe we have come to expect? Do we listen to them if they don’t carry Elena Ferrante’s / Anne Carson’s name recognition / if they haven’t “earned” “strangeness”? Frantumaglia and Ferrante does the good work of troubling / developing a beautiful swamp of these questions and concerns with her existence and the “documentation” of it. Alexander Chee, in his review of Frantumaglia at New Republic, details the elaborate layers of Ferrante’s movements and writing, as well as how the potential unmasking of Ferrante’s “true identity” merely plays into increasing the texture of both fictional / true layers.

“[Anita] Raja was born in Naples, the daughter of a German immigrant, but her family moved to Rome when she was three. Her ancestors were not among the Neapolitan poor of postwar Italy, but rather experienced Polish pogroms and Nazi persecution. If Ferrante is Raja, and the Ferrante who spent the majority of her life in Naples—the city she has said she feels ‘in my gestures, my words, my voice, even when I put an ocean between us’—is also an invention, it would mean Frantumaglia is a metafiction, her most experimental text yet, a massive prank on criticism and the media: all of it done to show us how badly we read what we read, how badly women writers are treated, and how badly the press operates. It would mean her mother’s frantumaglia was not verifiably her mother’s; her childhood impressions the impressions of a fictitious child, not necessarily herself. That everything pointing us to some glimpse of her life was just a misdirection, so that the real woman behind Ferrante could remain hidden—and, one day, teach us that it never mattered who she was or where she was from.”

The prospect of this, that Ferrante could create a landscape in which she is completely herself to art and completely herself outside the reaches of art is so affirming, so filled with permission that is as artistic as it is challenging as it is radical as it is forceful. It almost makes me weep. It does. To be naked in the Earth / art / does not mean a body owes you anything / except itself as it is / as it moves through the Earth / art / flinching or free. Strong as violets / strong as life.

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