“Frantumaglia” by Elena Ferrante (post 8): Title refers to her fragments—alternate personalities—which she has, and uses to write, like Dostoevsky.

“My mother left me a word in her dialect that she used to describe how she felt when she was racked by contradictory sensations that were tearing her apart. She said that inside her she had a frantumaglia, a jumble of fragments” (1, p. 99).

Interviewer: In the Neapolitan novels, can Elena and Lila be interpreted as a single character? As two sides of a single person? Does every writer consist of two halves?

Ferrante: “If we were made of only two halves, individual life would be simple, but the “I” is a crowd, with a large quantity of heterogeneous fragments tossing about inside. And the female “I”, in particular, with its long history of oppression and repression, tends to shatter as it’s tossed around, and to reappear and shatter again, always in an unpredictable way. Stories feed on the fragments, which are concealed under an appearance of unity and constitute a sort of chaos to depart from, an obscurity to illuminate. Stories, characters come from there. Reading Dostoyevsky when I was young, I thought that all the characters, the pure and the abominable, were actually his secret voices, hidden, cunningly wrought fragments. Everything was poured, unfiltered, and with extreme audacity, into his works” (1, p. 322).

Comment

She says that the author’s “I” is a crowd of fragments—i.e., alternate personalities—which she uses to write her novels.

Even though the above interview took place in 2015 (two years after this blog was started), and even though it propounds the very thesis of this blog—that writers have and use multiple personality—I don’t accuse Ferrante of plagiarism (I’m joking). After all, she had this insight in her youth, in regard to herself, people in general (especially women), and Dostoevsky.

Nevertheless, since Ferrante does not explicitly state that her fragments of “I” are alternate personalities, and does not refer to multiple personality by name, it is possible that she has not made the connection. She may agree with this blog’s thesis, but not think about it in the same terms, which is probably true of many novelists.

1. Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia. New York, Europa editions, 2016.