SUBLIMELY UGLY

pays Franz Biberkopf a visit at the novel’s end. “You lost the war, sunshine,” he tells Franz. “It’s all up with you. You can pack up. Put yourself in mothballs. I’ve had it with you.” Hofmann allows him to finish with the deadly, simple phrase, “I want your heart, mate.” We come away having tasted that heart, and all the strange, succulent marrow of Döblin’s epic.

ART TK

Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Laundry day, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 96 x 2 3/8 inches (182.9 x 243.8 x 6 centimeters). © Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

SUBLIMELY UGLY: ON ELENA FERRANTE’S “THE LYING LIFE OF ADULTS”

SARAH CHIHAYA

Elena Ferrante's new novel, The Lying Life of Adults (translated by Ann Goldstein), is an ugly book. I say this with admiration, as an open-armed compliment, not a backhanded one. The novel begins with a jarring slap — “Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly” — and could be most concisely summarized with the statement that “ugly is not bad.” Good and bad are empty terms, as subjective as ugly itself, but nowhere near as intriguing, or exciting. Ugliness, it turns out, can move in and out of a face, or a body, or a story; ugliness is fascinatingly unpredictable, an obscure sign you can neither decipher nor ignore. In this novel, to be declared ugly, or to declare oneself ugly, is often an indication of another thing

that can’t be ignored, that also sits outside the false binary of good and bad: honesty. “Ugly” appears so often in the novel that its form quickly ceases to hold, the way that any word repeated aloud (ugly — ugly — yugly — glyug?) almost immediately stops being a word. The effect of this repetition is not absurdity or confusion, but rather expansiveness. From the novel’s very first pages, it is clear that ugliness is not defined in terms of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure. Even the fighting words of the opening sentence, which seem so cruelly straightforward upon first reading, immediately shift and warp as our narrator, Giovanna, clarifies that her father didn’t simply claim that “Giovanna used to be pretty, now she’s turned ugly.” Rather, what he actually said is that Giovanna is “getting the face of Vittoria,” his long-estranged sister, in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.”

The intrigue of this phrase lies in its superlative degree: Vittoria is far more than just a homely woman, or just a mean one; she is perfectly ugly and spiteful, an awful ideal. In Giovanna’s imagination, she is accordingly granted mythic status — she appears as a creature who, like a demon or a deity, is somehow everywhere and nowhere, “a childhood bogeyman, a lean, demonic silhouette.” That the figure is only a silhouette is significant; even in photographs, Vittoria’s face has been cut out or inked over, leaving only a void. Seen this way, Giovanna’s fear of Vittoria, and of her own face morphing into that of her faceless aunt, is not the predictable teenage fear of becoming unattractive or unappealing. Rather, it is a fear laced with obscure desire, of being undefined, outside the social world of polite emotions that her bourgeois parents cultivate. This queasy anticipation is soon gratified. Upon meeting her aunt, Giovanna is shocked to find that “Vittoria seemed to me to have a beauty so unbearable that to consider her ugly became a necessity.” This beauty is as harsh and unmediated as truth. Only a word as powerfully elemental as “ugly” can contain it.

The dissolving margin between ugliness and real beauty, first articulated in this early meeting, quickly becomes more and more central to Giovanna’s journey of often bathetic discovery through her emerging sexuality, her family’s history, and the different social strata of Naples. The things she has been raised to believe beautiful — like her parents’ relationship and the institution of marriage, and ultimately, the romantic ideals of true love and passion — rapidly grow as brittle as flaking gold leaf. Instead, Giovanna is drawn to the lively mobility of that quality simply labeled “ugly,” which is, in its vitality and changeability, closer to beauty than any of the genteel prettiness of her childhood. It’s a thrilling ugliness that is first glimpsed in Vittoria, but spreads through the city as Giovanna learns to move through it: “Vittoria’s face, to my great surprise, had seemed so vividly insolent that it was very ugly and very beautiful at the same time, and so now I was hovering between the two superlatives, puzzled.” Giovanna is unable to process her suspension between these two violent aesthetic reactions, a state that recalls a dumbstruck response to the sublime. While Ferrante’s ugly/beautiful is in many ways dissimilar to Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject, these two categories share an intimate relationship to the sublime, which Kristeva describes so evocatively in Powers of Horror: “As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers — it has always already

triggered — a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly.” Like Kristeva’s abject, Ferrante’s ugly is “edged with the sublime,” a keen edge that slices open experience and allows it to bleed out “boundlessly.”

“Ugly” breaks down and diffuses through the novel, getting everywhere, unprettifying everything. Honesty creeps in along with this pervasive spread. By the end of the novel, the aestheticizing and anesthetizing stories told by the adults in Giovanna’s life — her parents, her older crush, even Vittoria — are revealed to be meager ornaments that are easily stripped away from the truths that they attempt to cover up. As ugliness and honesty dilate unpredictably, filling the hollows of the plot, the terms that oppose them contract and ultimately collapse in upon themselves. Readers of Ferrante are trained to recognize that conventional beauty — or its frequent companions, goodness, or purity, or fidelity — are the lies the adults of the novel tell themselves to stay dully serene atop the calm surface of life. This is where background reading in her short early novels or the Neapolitan Quartet can offer readers a strong foundation in the workings of this particular world: caught between the powerful torque of the ugly truth — that unruly force that twists with a kind of hideous grace — and the order-making yet fragile veneer of polite deceit. Yet nowhere else, as much as in The Lying Life of Adults, do we see Ferrante’s splendidly harsh laws of physics so clearly laid out. Ugliness may hurt, but it is a hurt that strikes clean and true; ugliness may not be pretty, but sometimes it is unbearably beautiful. The gorgeous ugliness of Naples is a major asset of a Ferrante novel. Many of the essays responding to The Lying Life of Adults so far emphasize its grounding in “Ferrante’s Naples,” an imaginary locale that’s already become as neatly packaged a tourist construct as “Joyce’s Dublin” or “Faulkner’s South.” I get it — it’s very tempting to place all of the books in an extended Ferrante universe. And indeed, there is critical value in constructing a multidimensional, intertextual sense of Ferrante’s Naples, both thematically, as a site of obsessive return, and sociopolitically, as a specific location loaded with real and mythological history. Ferrante herself clearly plays with and upon this repetition through the consistency of certain elements, even specific images, like the inevitability of inheritance — described as the aunt’s face emerging from the niece’s, or the body of the mother deforming that of the daughter — that can often make it difficult to tease these Neapolitan stories apart. All of them, and all of their finely nuanced visions of Naples, are united by a kind of feverish quality, at once sharply focused and blurrily nightmarish. This book has mothers, daughters, dolls, bracelets, insufferable intellectual men — all the things that Ferrante’s earlier works contain. These motifs encourage readers to connect all the dots all the time, and to blur the borders between these novelistic worlds, just as recurrent symbols (a bird, a rose, a mirror) and patterns of incremental repetition make it seem like all fairy tales might happen in the same dark wood, the same enchanted castle, to the same procession of nameless daughters.

But while the temptation to view Ferrante’s Naples as a single continuous space that absorbs all of her writing is compelling, its persuasiveness is a red flag.