Retrospective Narration
Detail, Context, and the Dimensions of Meaning
Note: This is a critical essay, submitted in July of 2021, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Masters in Fine Arts degree at Warren Wilson College. The work considers two texts: Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, and The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. While it’s not necessary to have read either novel, I recommend both, and this essay is full of spoilers. Also, FYI, it’s a 45-minute read.
I met a friend for coffee recently. He was in from out of town and we hadn’t seen each other or spoken for almost a year. We ordered cappuccinos and sat in a bright and airy café. The conversation lacked continuity for the couple of minutes before our drinks arrived, after which I asked how he was doing. He said that a big project had failed last year and he’d lost his job. It had been quite devastating. We talked all about it—unreliable coworkers, harsh deadlines, detached managers. He was a good storyteller and there were a lot of ins and outs, and then right when we seemed to be arriving at the climax—the final meeting in which he was fired—he paused as if catching himself, then looked at a spinning fan that was probably twenty feet above us. When he found my eyes again he said, “This is the part I’ll always remember—at the time it was like being punched in the stomach and I had to relive it for the next several months while feeling like a total failure—but now I wish I could go back and tell myself how important it was to hear.” I was on the edge of my seat.
This is the power of retrospection. My friend intruded into his own story about the past in order to take me back to the present moment. Doing so was justified by the way it added suspense, gave dimension to the story, as well as added characterization to the person speaking, which it did by creating a simultaneity; the detail of his past was contextualized with his current reality.
His boss told him the work was very mediocre and it didn’t seem like he really cared about it. Maybe he should try something new. My friend just got up and left, he said, but what he didn’t know at the time was that his boss had been right. It took him several months, but he found a new job and he was really enjoying it. At this point he paused and we both leaned back, which happened naturally because the retrospection had done its last job, that of creating meaning: he’d needed to experience something difficult to be where he was today. This meaning didn’t exist in the moment; it came to the fore only once he was able to look back.
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William Wordsworth famously declared that, “Poetry… takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (128). Poetry could be replaced here with any artform, and retrospective fiction certainly takes its richness from this notion. Recollection in tranquility is used, in part, as an antidote for the disorderly nature of momentary experience. The injection of order after the fact is one of the super-powers of retrospection; it’s not surprising then that retrospection is often the rhetorical method of choice when telling stories of personal transformation. From a perch of tranquility, the events that lead to change can be meaningfully organized. But a retrospective narrator isn’t impelled to focus only on the act of meaning-making through recollection; they can just as compellingly zoom-in to describe the immediacy of moment-to-moment action. In blending these two things—the context of hindsight, and the detail of sensory experience—retrospection brings action, characters, and time, into relief.
In his essay “The Autobiography of my Novel,” Alexander Chee, meditating on Aristotle’s Poetics, writes, “I still thrill to his descriptions of beginning, middle, and end, or his casual mention, in the section on scale, of ‘an animal a thousand miles long—the impossibility of taking it all in at a single glance,’ and understanding that, while he was speaking of scale in the story, this was, in a sense, what a novel was: a thought so long it could not be perceived all at once” (214). The fact that we can’t do the perceiving all at once is among the most salient motivations for the use of retrospection. The retrospective narrator can wind the long animal of story on itself, telling the story with pieces of context that were gleaned at the end, during any moments of beginning and middle, hence granting the story a unique dimensionality: more can be taken in in a single glance.
Retrospective stories contain distinct facets that should be defined here. First, there is a divide between what I will call the Character: the agent acting and being acted upon in the remembered events of the narrative, and the Narrator: the retrospective voice reporting on and interpreting the Character’s lived events. These are, of course, the same person, just in different temporalities; the Character is an experiencing self, while the Narrator is a remembering self. The Character exists in what I will call the dramatic present: the timeline of their own events, in the Narrator’s past. The Narrator exists in a narrative occasion: a place of finality, some distance, explicitly situated or not, in the future of the Character’s present. This specific divide does not exist in any type of third-person narration, nor does it in a present first-person narration. (By present I do not necessarily mean present-tense, but rather non-retrospective; a first person story told in the past-tense is not retrospective unless there’s a perceptible space, however gross or subtle, between the Narrator and the Character. Or: in both present- and past-tense, it’s possible to write a first-person story in which the Narrator never knows more than the Character, and hence the two exist as a rhetorically singular entity.)
Elena Ferrante and Ben Lerner employ a Character/Narrator divide in their respective novels, The Days of Abandonment, and Leaving the Atocha Station. Ferrante’s protagonist, Olga, narrates her own eventful upheaval through the dissolution of her marriage. Lerner’s protagonist, a poet, Adam, narrates the less-eventful stages of his post-collegiate fellowship in Madrid, and his concurrent personal, social, and artistic ruminations.
The Narrators of both works intrude into the Character’s dramatic present to add dimension as well as to draw attention to the act of narration, which has the effect of allowing the reader to exist in multiple time-frames simultaneously, and this ultimately lends itself to the extraction of a greater meaning from episodic experience. But even with all this rhetorical alignment, the novels use retrospection differently, and to different ends. While Ferrante oscillates with a wide dynamic range between the points of view of Character and Narrator in order to build her story into the concrete takeaways of personal transformation, Lerner remains closer to the editorialization of his Narrator, and comes to use retrospection to question the authenticity of personal transformation, as well as the ability to accurately translate subjective experience for others.
The Entrance of Retrospection
Among the first authorial decisions regarding the use of retrospection is when and how to identify the Character/Narrator divide. The manner in which the retrospective voice enters a novel sketches expectations in the reader for what is to follow, in terms of narrative modality. Our two novels open with opposing strategies, which prepare their differing trajectories.
Lerner chooses to introduce the retrospective nature of his Narrator in the opening sentence of his book: “The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid…” (7). That the research can be separated into phases gives the reader a sense that the narrative occasion exists after the completion of the research. Hence, we know straight away we’re reading a retrospective story, and because the Narrator has offered what is essentially taxonomical information, the reader is placed in a passive position at the outset. The novel continues with a summarizing quality typical of retrospection: “When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight… Then I’d find my bag… From my apartment I would walk down Calle de las Huertas…” (7). Here, the verb would indicates repetitive past actions, which situates the Character within what the Narrator deems to be important about, or indicative of, the remembered time. Lerner’s choice to begin the novel in this way has the effect of creating distance—distance between the Narrator and the action, and consequently between the reader and the action, but not necessarily between the reader and the Narrator. This strategy is salient for the manner in which it primes the reader to align more with the Narrator’s telling than the Character’s experiencing, which, with a handful of exceptions, continues as the driving force of Leaving the Atocha Station. The reader is more oriented towards the narrative occasion than the dramatic present.
Contrastingly, Ferrante begins her novel with a discrete action in the dramatic present, and the description of the action lacks any indication of retrospection: “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me” (9). Although the action is situated in time—both in April and after lunch—there’s nothing to indicate a temporal distance between the Narrator and the action. The effect here is proximity; the reader is injected at once into the drama. This is important for the way it sets up the reader with a different type of expectation for what’s to come in Ferrante’s book: it continues with action- and plot-driven immediacy, and contrasts with the way Lerner’s book resists traditional notions of action and plot.
Ferrante stays with this proximity, spending the next pages detailing the dramatic present of her narrator, Olga, and comes to add dimension first through backstory: “When I recalled that he hadn’t taken any of the things that were important to him… I felt certain that it wasn’t serious… After all, it had happened before: the time and the details came to mind as I tossed and turned in the bed. Many years earlier, when we had been together for only six months, he had said, just after a kiss, that he would rather not see me anymore” (10). There’s an important distinction to be made here between backstory and retrospection: when Olga remembers the time “many years earlier,” she is doing so from her own dramatic present, which we know because she mentions that the details came to mind as she “tossed and turned in the bed.” Because the novel has not yet defined a divide between Narrator and Character, we can say that Olga’s remembering is backstory, not retrospection.
The retrospective Narrator is introduced in an almost piecemeal way over the next many pages, but in the short term, the reader remains rooted in the dramatic present, which Ferrante accomplishes through the details of interiority, setting, and sensory information: “I was losing Mario, perhaps I had already lost him. I walked tensely behind Otto’s [the family dog] impatience, I felt the damp breath of the river, the cold of the asphalt through the soles of my shoes. I couldn’t calm down. Was it possible that Mario should leave me like this, without warning?” (21). But then, two pages later, the divide starts to open: “I don’t know how much time passed, I forgot about the dog, forgot where I was. Without realizing it, I slipped into memories of the love that I had shared with Mario, and I did it gently, slightly excited, resentful” (23). This passage poses a question: if the Character doesn’t know how much time has passed and does things without realizing it, who is it that can narrate such things, and from what temporal space are they narrating?
The divide between Narrator and Character continues to spread out, but isn’t made fully explicit until eleven pages later. Olga is driving with her daughter, Ilaria, when, distracted by her continued fixation on her marriage, she slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian. Ilaria’s forehead strikes the windshield, cracking the glass. After a passage of sentence fragments and sensory information, we suddenly zoom out. The Narrator is made all the way clear: “I remember that I had only one clear, insistent thought: someone will tell Mario that his daughter is injured and then he will appear” (34). The action is put on pause, and the reader’s attention focuses on the Narrator’s act of remembering. The effect of this is, like in the Lerner, an increase of distance between reader and action, and an increase in proximity between reader and Narrator. For a moment we are concerned not with the scene, but with the fact that it is being remembered. Through this access to the retrospective voice, we’re invited into the construction of the story; we can see behind the curtain: “The only nagging memory of that day remained my own thought, a proof of desperate malice, my instinctive desire to use the child to bring Mario home and say to him: Do you see what can happen if you’re not here?” (34). In this, Ferrante sketches for the reader the other boundary of the narrative voice that will continue; we began close-up in scene, and now we’re in the distance of recollection and editorialization. We can expect to move back and forth in this continuum.
The manner in which the Narrator admits to her “desperate malice” raises questions related to the reliability of the retrospective Narrator. That she admits an altogether unflattering series of events and thoughts could have the effect of making us trust in the recollection of her narration for the way it doesn’t appear to be self-serving, but I’m afraid reliability is a topic that deserves its own essay, and what I’ll point towards instead is a differently salient question: why pull the reader out of the action of “that day,” why bring attention to the Narrator instead of the Character? (This shift in attention being an example of what I will call narratorial intrusion). It’s risky to inject the distance of retrospection into a story; doing so removes the reader from the action, and there are no assurances that, once removed, the reader will be compelled to return.
Narratorial Intrusion
When speaking with others we often pull from episodes that already have an ending and are able to be layered into our stories and thoughts and overall descriptions of a current state. So the methods of retrospection are, I argue, both intuitive and ubiquitous, at least in speech. And while these digressions can sometimes fail to add anything of importance, we tend to find them natural in conversation. But on the other hand, we don’t give a novelist much latitude for narratorial intrusions that don’t serve a purpose. Perhaps our subconscious familiarity with retrospection sharpens our radar for written intrusions that are clunky or seemingly unnecessary; consequently, each instance that the Narrator calls attention to itself has to be justified for the way it brings something of value to the work that would otherwise go missing.
The addition of characterizing information is one way to justify the intrusion of the Narrator, and to add depth to a story. Retrospection has a unique ability to situate a Character within the detailed atmosphere of their larger routine. Notice here how Lerner uses habitual actions to fill in characteristics of Adam:
“From the Prado I would typically walk to a small café called El Rincón where I’d eat a sandwich, just hard bread and chorizo, and where I would be the only person eating, unless there were tourists, since it wasn’t close to lunchtime for the Spanish. Then I’d walk a few blocks more to El Retiro, the city’s Central Park, find a bench, take out my notebooks, the pocket dictionary, Lorca, and get high” (14-15).
The continued summary indicates its retrospective origin (again via the verb would), and creates a broad character stroke: Adam is solitary, doing things on his own time instead of that of the cultural tradition, and the type of artist to work in public and under the influence of cannabis. So small actions carry large import simply in the indication that they’re habitual, and this grants the Narrator a power of self-characterization. Because we can experience both the individual occurrences, as well as the way they layer together through the act of recollection, the protagonist is seen from multiple angles at once.
But characterization doesn’t have to come through sections of summary; the Narrator can appear in scene as well. One night Adam goes out with some people he meets through his Spanish tutor, and the Narrator intrudes into the action to contemplate his own characterization by others. “They called me El Poeta, whether with derision or affection I never really learned” (11). This characterizes him as someone who is concerned with how other people see him in a social situation, and, in another dimension, characterizes the Narrator as being aware of his own limitations in not knowing all the information of a story, which becomes a recurring theme of the novel. Later that night, Adam is unable to follow exactly the Spanish of the people around him and smiles at an apparently inappropriate time, and things escalate until he’s punched in the face. Notice how the passage that follows this altercation gives the reader access to narratorial language that did not exist for the Character, hence granting concreteness to something that was amorphous in the moment of action:
“It wasn’t a powerful blow, but I figured I should let it lay me out. Miguel was screaming at me and the noise brought Isabel and her friends back from the lake. Miguel allowed Jorge to pull him away and calm him down. I could taste the blood from my mildly cut lip and I bit hard to deepen the cut so that I would appear more injured and therefore solicit sufficient sympathy to offset the damage my smiling had done” (13).
The intrusion isn’t as clear as the previous example (“I never really learned”), but the retrospection exists alongside the dramatic present, and grants language to an interiority that was more reflexive than conscious. Consequently, the scene becomes about the interiority as much as the action itself. And with this, Adam is characterized as being deeply self-conscious, even in moments of physical intensity.
Ferrante also uses narratorial intrusion to characterize Olga in both summary and scene, but let us look instead to an instance where retrospection is used to characterize a secondary character, and add detail to the social environment of the story. The Narrator intrudes into a scene in which Olga notices her neighbor, Carrano, walking nearby. Notice how the switch to present-tense alerts us to the presence of the Narrator: “He was one of those timid men who are insecure in their relations with others. If they lose their composure they lose it uncontrollably; if they are nice they are nice to the point of becoming sticky, like honey” (23). These are broad, aphoristic generalizations applied from a distant perch. What’s unique here is the way the Narrator veers into an almost formulaic depiction: Carrano is only an example of those types of men. And even though the intrusion is used to characterize Carrano, in learning about how Olga sees him, her social self gains new dimension via her judgement. In this way, the Narrator shapes the reader’s perceptions of others, through the subjectivity of the retrospective point of view, which in this case is used almost to flatten the character of Carrano, while giving fullness to Olga.
Lerner puts narratorial intrusion to a similar use, here in detailing Teresa, a friend and complicated love interest, but now in a way that details idiosyncrasy instead of serving to generalize:
“Whenever I was with Teresa, whenever we were talking, I felt our faces engaged in a more substantial and sophisticated conversation than our voices. Her face was formidable; it seemed by turns very young and very old; when she opened her eyes wide, she looked like a child, and when she squinted in concentration, the tiny wrinkles at their outer corners made her seem worldly, wise. Because she could instantly look younger or older, more innocent or experienced than she was, she could parry whatever speech was addressed to her” (82).
The conclusions here have been gleaned over time from multiple interactions that are retrospectively compressed into clear takeaways, which then breathe life into the character’s physical body. Even though the intrusion comes in the midst of a largely summarizing section, when we return to scenes with Teresa shortly after, this information colors the reader’s experience of her, as well as Adam’s own orientation towards her. It’s also important to note here a degree of retrospective causality (“Because she could instantly look… she could parry…”). The Narrator has the power to tie pieces of information together, and even though the Character might be able to do the same in the dramatic present, it is through retrospection that the information finds its dimensionality: the characters are felt to exist in both scene-time, and compressed-time.
In addition to adding characterization, narratorial intrusion can be used to insert value judgements in the middle of a scene, hence allowing a certain type of description that wouldn’t be possible without the Narrator. For example, in the middle of a boozy dinner with another of Adam’s love interests, Isabel, he learns that she’s dating him on the side and also has a boyfriend who’s been out of town. Adam feigns composure, and then tells Isabel that he has to piss: “I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and looked in the mirror and let out a single ridiculous sob” (94). Here the retrospection is as simple as the value judgement of the word “ridiculous.” If this were a third-person novel, the appearance of the value judgement would be called free indirect style, as defined by James Wood in his book, How Fiction Works. Wood explains that, through free indirect style, “we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also through the author’s eyes and language” (9). But because we are operating in first-person here, “author” can be replaced with Narrator, and the blending of author and character in third-person becomes the blending of Narrator and Character in retrospective first-person. The effect gives the reader a sense that the Narrator is hedging against his own actions of the past by giving them value judgements in the process of recounting them, and this indeed becomes evident in the way that both the Character and the Narrator Adam tend to mock themselves with a distant irony throughout. It’s as if inserting the value judgement “ridiculous” protects him against anyone else (including, or maybe especially, the reader) trying to do the same. As a result, the Narrator is felt to be motivated to control his appearance to others.
Ferrante’s Narrator also intrudes with value judgements, but here in a way that provides an especially distinct weight to the Character’s dramatic present. After learning in what neighborhood her husband has taken up with his new young girlfriend, we find Olga in scene walking around in search of them. Notice how the Narrator provides description in the way the Character could not:
“I wandered for a long time through black-violet streets, with the stupid certainty (those certainties without foundation that we call premonitions, the fantastic outlet of our desires) that they were there somewhere, in a doorway, around a corner, behind a window, and perhaps they had even seen me and retreated, like criminals happy with their crimes” (47).
The Character knew why she was walking the streets, but it’s the Narrator that rounds out the felt impact. And the word “stupid” is certainly a value judgement of the Narrator (like the “ridiculous” in Lerner), but what follows is a new dimension of after-the-fact description. Within the parentheses is an aphoristic truth, stated plainly, in the present tense, and without room for dissent: premonitions are certainties without foundation and serve as outlets for desire. So narratorial intrusion is used to show a discrete action as one example of a purported universal truth. The present tense again makes clear to us that the language is coming from the Narrator, whose narrative occasion we momentarily inhabit, before returning to scene. And the insertion of this aphoristic sentence primes the reader to expect more of this type of language as the book continues.
Because the Narrator always knows what comes next (having already lived through it), they can intrude into the story to frame action to come, to strategically share information that creates suspense and dramatic irony, as well as flag certain things as important to the reader. Perhaps Ferrante’s most consequential usage of this device comes at the beginning of what turns out to be a long scene of intensity and immediacy that takes up a third of the novel, but only one day of the dramatic present. The import of this long scene is hard to overstate, and Ferrante’s Narrator clues us in on this by the way she introduces it: “When I opened my eyes again, five hours later, at seven o’clock on Saturday August 4th, I had trouble getting my bearings. The hardest day of the ordeal of my abandonment was about to begin, but I didn’t know it yet” (88). These two sentences come directly between urgent scenes in the dramatic present, hence interrupting what could be described as an engrossing experience of a fictional world. So the intrusion needs to justify itself for the way it brings attention away from that experience, and back onto the telling of the story. Pay attention to what comes next, the Narrator says. And it works; we perk up in anticipation of drama. The Narrator goes as far as to report that “I didn’t know it yet,” which adds dramatic irony between the reader and the Character, while also creating a camaraderie between the reader and the Narrator.
Lerner also uses narratorial intrusion to frame action to come, but here with less fanfare: “A turning point in my project: I arrived one morning at the Van de Weyden to find someone had taken my place” (8). This has the effect of flagging the reader’s attention, also using information the Character doesn’t have, but the Narrator does. How does this moment, we want to know, come to serve as a turning point in his project? And while the information here creates something I would call interest, Lerner, on his part, also makes use of this ability of retrospection to create that stronger feeling of suspense. After a dinner with Teresa, she and Adam walk around outside while he worries that she doesn’t have reciprocal feelings for him. The Narrator frames action to come: “I was probably aided in this representation of concealed suffering by the guilt that was beginning to spread through me, displacing nicotine and wine; it was not yet causing pain, but it was positioning itself everywhere in my body, lying in wait till evening” (86-87). Knowing the guilt was positioning itself and “lying in wait till evening” cues us to perk up in questioning what will happen next, when the guilt is no longer waiting, but fully present. Thanks to the moment of narratorial intrusion, there’s an urgency in which the subsequent scene becomes the answer to a question raised in the reader, by the Narrator.
This leads to another consideration of narratorial intrusion, which is the way that each instance of retrospection can become a transition within a work of fiction. Lerner often uses the retrospective voice in long passages that take up paragraphs or pages at a time. In these cases of thinking on the page, the Narrator can call attention to itself as a way to transition back to scene. In one such passage, Adam smokes hash on a bench and spends a lot of time thinking about the different ways the drug affects his experience of himself and the world. Then, suddenly, a transition pulls us in an altogether different direction: “… I didn’t think these things, but might have, as I walked back through the park and home, then lay on my bed, only several feet beneath the downward-sloping ceiling, after having ignited the butane heater and drawn it near me” (67). Here, most simply, the interruption has the power to switch trajectories, and get us back into the sensory world of scene and setting, which is especially heavy-lifting after such long passages of interiority. And in a more layered examination, the phrase “I didn’t think these things, but might have,” is an example not of the Narrator interrupting the Character or a scene, but of the Narrator’s ability to interrupt himself, and with a meta-awareness of his own narration, which becomes increasingly weighty in the novel. Because the Narrator highlights something he didn’t do, but might have, our attention focuses distinctly on the intricacies of memory; hence, retrospection is not only a rhetorical method here, but a subject of the novel.
Ferrante also uses narratorial intrusion as a means to transition, although in the following example, not after a long section of interiority, but as a moment amidst scene. Olga is again out walking the dog, Otto; notice how the Narrator is able to transition quickly between action, retrospection, and backstory: “I picked up a long, flexible branch and tried it in the air, first idly, then with decision. I liked the whistle, it was a game I had played as a child. Once, I had found a thin branch like that in the courtyard of our building, and I whipped the air, making it cry” (52). The first sentence is scene, the second is retrospection, which leads directly into the third sentence, backstory. The backstory goes on for several sentences longer, after which we are brought back into scene. “Now just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder…” (52). However disparate its characteristics with the above example of Lerner’s, the appearance of retrospection does the same work to pivot between different aspects of the narrative voice. Consequently, an author comes to recognize that any instance of narratorial intrusion can earn its keep not only by characterizing, adding depth to description, or by framing action to come, but also as a simple utilitarian method of moving from one narrative thread to another.
Simultaneity
So any instance of retrospection provides a pivot point, and this can be examined within the context of another of its momentous impacts, which is the ability to pivot between different timeframes, hence manipulating the reader’s experience of temporality. The Narrator has the power to collapse moments in time so that multiple things can exist at once, superimposing layers of the narrative occasion onto the dramatic present. This hearkens back to Aristotle’s long animal: we want, as both readers and human beings, the ability to take in as big a picture as possible, and when we’re afforded the opportunity to do so in literature, there is a felt sense of clarity, which is itself, I would argue, among the main gifts of fiction writ large. We want to see things clearly, and with a perspective that includes a multitude of subjectivities. If third-person omniscience gives access to subjectivities contained within different characters, first-person retrospection does so within a single character, across time frames and the various versions of self contained therein (something a close-third narrator is unable to do for its alignment with only one point of view). Retrospection is able, in other words, to give space to emotion in addition to its recollection in tranquility, with simultaneity, thereby broadening the scope of our context as readers, broadening the scope of what we’re able to understand, both within the fictional world of the book, and universally.
This simultaneity has been present in most of the examples examined thus far, but let us look deeper into the way each text uses a temporal manipulation to thread detail and context together within the narrative. Ferrante, for example, often uses simultaneity in order to add resolution to scene, zooming in and out of different realms. In one such moment, Carrano, Olga’s neighbor, becomes an object of her fantasy. Late one night, she finds herself considering whether to seduce him. Notice here the coexistence of the Character and the Narrator: “I was torn. I felt like going down the stairs, knocking on his door, using the license to enter his house at this late hour; but I was also frightened by the unknown, by the night, by the silence of the whole building, by the damp and suffocating smells that rose from the park, by the cries of the nocturnal birds” (75). In the moment, the Character knew she was torn, but it’s hard to imagine that she had a grasp on what exactly was going on inside of her in such a moment. So after the semicolon, we zoom out, entering the point of view of the Narrator. The detail about exactly what she was scared of has a resolution on the page for us that it certainly did not for the Olga of the moment. The Character and the Narrator are simultaneous within a single sentence, and as such, we have action, as well as the richness of language to describe things that, in the moment of action, were languageless.
She does eventually decide to visit Carrano and they have an intense sexual encounter, during which this simultaneity continues, starting with an overt mention of the power of retrospection, interspersed in the action:
“Today I know what I felt, but then I didn’t understand. At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred toward myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat” (80).
We are told what the Character felt, which has greater impact because the Narrator has subsequently made meaning of it. So retrospection creates dimensionality in granting space to both the detail of the Character, and context of the Narrator, at once. The large view is stated explicitly from inside the scene.
Another way Ferrante employs simultaneity is through juxtaposing dialog with commentary, the effect of which allows a different sort of dimension, one that comes from explanation of action after the fact. Olga finds herself, against what she knows is her better judgement, calling friends of the family to interrogate them about her husband. One friend glibly remarks that Mario is forty, and things like this are to be expected. Olga loses her composure in her response to him. Notice how the dialog of the Character is immediately contextualized by the Narrator:
“‘Yes? So did it happened to you too? Does it happen to all men of your age, without exception? Why are you still living with your wife? Let me talk to Lea, I want to tell her it’s happened to you, too!’
I didn’t want to react like that. Another rule was not to become hateful. But I couldn’t contain myself, I immediately felt a rush of blood that deafened me, burned my eyes. The reasonableness of others and my own desire for tranquility got on my nerves. The breath built up in my throat, ready to vibrate with words of rage. I felt the need to quarrel, and in fact I quarreled first with our male friends, then with their wives or girlfriends, and finally I went on to clash with anyone, male of female, who tried to help me accept what was happening to my life” (25-26).
The reader is granted access to both the wide-angle of the Narrator, who is calm in her reporting (and able to use summary to move us through multiple moments in time), and the close-view of the Character, who is anything but calm in the moment of dialog. The effect of this builds upon an intimacy between the reader and Olga, for the fact that we can observe her base instincts of the moment, in addition to the sphere of self-awareness that signals she felt helpless to overcome or avoid her instincts. Multiple layers exist at once, just as they do in all of us, and retrospection allows unique access to these multitudes.
Lerner employs simultaneity not only to exist in the perspective of different temporalities, but also of different states of mind. Let us return to the bench on which Adam smokes hash and digresses into a long section of thinking. While I skipped over it before to show his transition out of that stream, the essence of his language here, while more complicated than the Ferrante examples, shows again a simultaneity of Character and Narrator. Notice the dimension created by inter-weaving a momentary experience of getting high, with the contextualization of later sobriety:
“… the hash usually allowed me to maintain, or at least to believe I was maintaining, the semblance of lucidity, especially after months of habituation. I experienced it as a tuning of the world, not, as with strong weed, its total transformation or obliteration, and I could read or ‘work’ while smoking hash, or at least believed I could, whereas when smoking stronger stuff I could not follow, let alone form, whole sentences. But the alterations effected by the hash were somehow all the more profound for being understated, in part because one could forget or at least discount the role of the drug in one’s experience. If, say, a group of trees that had previously been mere background suddenly stood forth a little and their slender and strictly symmetrical forms became an elegant if unparaphrasable claim about form in general, you could write that observation down without dissolving it in the process, or without the strangeness of your hands distracting you from however you’d planned to use them. If a slight acoustic heightening allowed you to perceive for the first time consciously that the sound of the leaves in the wind was, as it were, in conversation with the similar but ultimately distinct sound of distant traffic on Calle de Alfonso XII, or that a hammering noise was in fact two noises, one issuing from a nearby tree and the other from a construction site beyond the park, and if these realizations inspired some meditation on the passing into one another of the natural and the cultural, the meditation, if not profound, could at least achieve coherence, could be formulated as it was experienced, not retrospectively, after coming down” (66).
Although the language of the section has strong indications of retrospection (through summarizing and editorializing experiences of the past), we can still sense Adam sitting there smoking, noticing the strangeness of his hands, paying close attention to his surroundings and his sensory experience, thinking in the moment of thinking, forming the beginnings of the realizations that later become crystalized by looking back on them, by telling a story about them. And we find here two mentions of a partial breakdown in what the Character believes is real, vis-à-vis the Narrator’s usage of the phrases “or at least to believe I was maintaining…” and “or at least to believe I could…” These phrases blur the boundary between the Narrator and the Character inasmuch as we are offered information from the realms of both; it’s not that the Narrator negates the Character’s in-the-moment experience, but that he contextualizes it with ambiguity. This allows the reader to exist as if in the middle of a riddle, which simulates the experience of smoking hash. So neither the detail (Character) nor the context (Narrator) take precedence here, which is because Lerner recounts the state change both momentarily and generally at once.
As a result of this simultaneity, the reader is again inundated with the telling of the story, as much as with the action of the story. There’s an understanding that the altered state explored has the effect of limiting clear explication of its very effect in the moment, and although the Narrator claims otherwise here, with an explicit mention that the insight he has is not reliant on retrospection, it is via retrospection that that very insight arrives. Or: Lerner uses retrospection to explain how, in certain states, he could figure things out in the moment, without retrospection. The meta-narrative starts to reflect even more dimension, as if entering a hall of mirrors. Adam’s interiority goes on for another page before (you remember) we transition out, via: “I didn’t think these things, but might have, as I walked back through the park…” (67). With this, the whole section comes to mimic the experience of having a stoned and seemingly profound thought, but then needing the later retrospection to contextualize it, which the Narrator does both for himself, as well as the sober reader.
It’s not always so complicated for Lerner though, and he also uses simultaneity to inject information out of linear time. For example, after a train station bombing in Madrid, Adam thinks about donating his blood, before the Narrator materializes with the wide-angle of the future:
“As I walked toward El Retiro I thought about how blood from my body might have been put into the body of someone injured by History. It was cloudy and cold. I didn’t see anyone, not even the hash dealers. I sat for a while and then walked to the gallery, where Arturo and Rafa were. Later I learned that, while I was in the park, the entire city had emptied into the streets for a moment of silence without me” (120).
We start with the detail of interiority, then setting, then action; it’s the final sentence, though, that imbues the simultaneity. It’s a sleek trick, and gives the Narrator a feeling of omniscience for a moment; we know what’s happening in a place other than where he is. The world of the novel spreads out. This could be used to any number of different effects on the reader, but here it creates the sense of the Character’s alienation, before he himself fully understands it. It’s an important moment for the reader to understand the essence of his state, and we do so because the context of the Narrator is layered in with the dramatic present.
If simultaneity can be used to straddle timeframes and states of being, it does so through the very act of narration; if there weren’t a retrospective Narrator, there would be no simultaneity. This is an obvious notion, but it unfolds an important dimension of retrospection, which is that simultaneity can be used to mimic the actual experience of recollection itself, to call forth the essence of retrospective storytelling within a story. For example, we can look to another moment in which Ferrante makes the momentary retrospection of Olga overt. It comes near the beginning of her abandonment—Olga has an interaction with her husband in which she asks him to read the pages she’s written about where their marriage has gone astray (pages, it’s worth noting, that the reader senses they’re reading themselves). He refuses, saying it’s too difficult for him. She responds, angrily. Then:
“I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, ‘a meter,’ he said—he used just that expression—‘a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.’ But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him, I hissed: ‘You mean that I brought you anguish?’” (40).
The Narrator admits she doesn’t know how Mario responded, then begins meditating on the episode, which becomes the very thing that leads her to remember his response; hence, we experience the act of recollection, as it happens. And it’s in the present tense, so this isn’t a story that’s already been put all the way together; in this instance, the products of retrospection seem to be coalescing in the moment of the Narrator’s telling (writing). The effect of this is an even closer proximity and intimacy, this time not with the dramatic present, but with the narrative occasion. But then we re-enter the Character, and the past-tense (“I had the impression that…”), in a way that defines the momentary thinking of Olga, only then to jump right back to the Narrator, who fills in the detail of those thoughts. The protagonist is manifold.
Sometimes, however, the space between the dramatic present and narrative occasion needs to shrink back; sometimes the most important aspect of retrospection is knowing when to leave it out, when to pause the Narrator’s mediation. This becomes especially crucial during the day in August that was flagged for us by Ferrante’s Narrator. It is this day, after months of a slow coming apart due to her abandonment, that Olga’s dramatic present becomes a crisis of disassociation and various domestic calamities. Her son, Gianni, is bedridden with a dangerously high fever; the dog, Otto, is also in the midst of a horrible sickness, unresponsive in a mess of his own excrement; the telephone isn’t working, which is a distinct problem because the new locks also aren’t working, and the family is trapped inside; but the overriding crisis is inside of Olga: she borders on a state of a total loss of sense. The scenes of that day take more than sixty pages and crescendo into a sense of internal and external breakdown. During these pages the Narrator rarely intrudes into the narrative, and, as a result, the reader enters all the way into the dramatic present: action and its consequence shine within the immediacy of the sensory world. But the retrospection doesn’t go entirely silent, and the times it shows up serve powerful purposes. Near the beginning of those pages, the Narrator calls attention to herself, in part to help describe the state of the Character, but more, notice, in order to indicate a transition out of the role of mediator:
“…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” (98).
Now the Narrator’s simultaneity with the Character is used to signal what’s to come, in terms of narrative strategy—a type of foreshadowing not to do with plot, but with rhetoric. It arrives most strongly in the mention of the magnifying lens. If we are, in retrospective narratives, oscillating between detail and context, then the Narrator here, before tucking back for dozens of pages, is letting us know that, rhetorically, the detail will now be taking precedent over the context. The magnifying glass is coming for our gaze as well; the distance is receding, everything will be right on top of everything else. Ferrante does this in order to preserve the experience of context-less-ness in the Character, who has no sense-making abilities in the moment of crisis. As a result, the reader exists with stunning closeness to the Character in the experience of her upheaval. And to get us there, Ferrante has the retrospective voice take something of a bow by acknowledging, like Lerner’s does, a meta-level awareness of her own narratorial conceits.
When the retrospective tone falls away, it’s supplanted with sensory information as well as momentary thinking, which is made evident by sentence fragments: “But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain. Remove the other dirty sheets. Put them in the washing machine. Start it. Stand and watch through the window, the clothes rotating, the water and soap” (101-102). Although there’s an understanding that a person couldn’t accurately narrate their own present loss of sense, the language of passages like this does not distract from the action of scene. Which is to say, technically it has to be the same Narrator telling the story, but because she isn’t drawing any attention to herself, we’re in full Character mode. Olga continues spiraling, gives herself a bloody nose by trying to slap herself into sense. Notice how even though the following passage contains the arrival at a sort of understanding—something usually reserved more for the Narrator—the understanding belongs to the Character here because it’s paired again with sensory information and sentence fragments, which serve to keep us grounded in the dramatic present:
“I was leaving on unknowable pathways, pathways leading me farther astray, not leading me out, the child had understood, and [Gianni] was worried not so much about his headache, his fever, as about me. About me. This hurt me. Remedy it, stay back from the edge. On the table I saw a metal clip for holding scattered papers together. I took it, I clipped it on the skin of my right arm, it might be useful. Something to hold me” (112).
Many pages of this viscerality compound. The Narrator’s absence makes the dimension flatten now, and the effect is like putting blinders on; all we can see is what’s directly in front of us. It’s engrossing and intense, and effectively makes the reader start to yearn for the Narrator’s return, especially as things get more and more dire in the home—we want the deliverance of context; we want some indication that it’s going to turn out okay. And Ferrante must know this, and exploit it to keep the urgency of the narrative building, which she does for another nine pages before, finally, our Narrator returns in full, but only for a brief spell:
“This was the reality I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game” (121).
That the realization is offered to the reader from the Narrator, out of step with its arising in the Character (“I was about to discover”), is the first instance in which we intuit that we’re headed somewhere meaningful on the other side of all the intensity. It feels like coming up for air to be reunited with the Narrator of the future, the version of Olga that has, in fact, made it through the desperation we’ve been experiencing alongside her. Part of the reason why we feel this moment so thoroughly is because the simultaneity contrasts the linear time of the past many pages. And not only do we experience the change in temporality because of the simultaneity, the retrospection effectively decelerates while everything else in the dramatic present is speeding up. We still have a ways to go before the sober revelations start to come to the fore, but this morsel is enough to satiate a momentary need for context, before diving back into the details under the magnifying lens.
This becomes one of the most significant differences between Lerner and Ferrante’s use of retrospection, because, contrastingly, Lerner’s Narrator very rarely steps fully outside of himself, rarely cedes the floor fully to the world of Character. The mediation of the retrospective voice lingers, filtering the dramatic present. Lerner’s novel is served by this technique because it isn’t intensity we find in Adam’s story, but instead a void of real feeling at all. This is due in part to all the hash, as well as the tranquilizers that make appearances at regular intervals, but also simply because of the temperament and circumstance of Adam. So Lerner’s choice to maintain the distance between reader and Character (vis-à-vis the Narrator) works for the way it mirrors the distance between Adam and his world. For example:
“These periods of rain or periods between rains in which I was smoking and reading Tolstoy would be, I knew, impossible to narrate, and that impossibility entered the experience: the particular texture of my loneliness derived in part from my sense that I could only share it, could only describe it, as pure transition, a slow dissolve between scenes, as boredom, my project’s uneventful third phase, possessed of no intrinsic content. But this account ascribed the period a sense of directionality, however slight or slow, made it a vector between events, when in fact the period was dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient, but that’s not really right” (63-64).
There’s a strange liminal feeling between the dramatic present and the retrospective here. These are thoughts that the Character had during this phase, generalizations of things that he lived through and considered with some depth, but once again we access those thoughts through the remove of the Narrator. And the passage provides an astonishingly accurate description of the act of retrospection itself, hence continuing the meta-awareness of the act of narration. The quality of Lerner’s Narrator is, just like this period of time, “dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient.” And as the Narrator here reports on his account of himself, he questions his ability to report properly (“but that’s not really right”). Here, he quite literally narrates about narrating about the difficulty of narrating, and this compounds to become an arc of his own dramatic present, that is: the challenge of translating personal experience for others, something that Ferrante doesn’t seem to grapple with at all. But all through his book, Lerner’s Narrator indicates awareness of his own blindspots: “I left the hotel and walked into the sun. Or was it cloudy?” (117), “I saw, I might have seen…” (118), “I watched a terrible video online of Atocha’s security footage, or was that many months later?” (120). He seems to be saying that retrospective stories aren’t as tidy as we think they are.
Even as we find Adam navigating this type of distance, we do get opportunities to see him in the linear time of scene, and without the totally overt mediation of the Narrator. In one such passage, Adam is out to dinner with Isabel when he learns her other boyfriend is due to return home soon from a long trip. While it’s not a section of intensity that could be compared in any way to the state of Olga where we last left her, this scene becomes one in which the present action does take a greater hold. Notice the prevalence of sensory experience, but with a different essence than Olga’s:
“I felt a wave of guilt and wanted to apologize and worried, having felt a wave of anything, that I was headed for a precipice. I could barely make myself eat. Isabel didn’t respond to my question, but I had the sense that, if she were embarrassed, it was only on my behalf. Plates were taken away and new ones arrived… I couldn’t taste anything. I was moving at inappropriate speed through the wine. I asked what [the other boyfriend] was doing in Barcelona and she said either that he was a mechanic or was being retrained for something mechanical or that he sold cars or worked for a car company; I didn’t care… I could not attempt a bite and my face felt hot and I could barely drink the wine, but did… I must’ve looked terrible; Isabel asked if I was all right… As I drank more I could eat more and as I grew drunker the money became increasingly unreal. This was accompanied by a wave of benevolence that I directed at Isabel…” (109-111).
Where both authors sometimes use language to mimic the state of a Character in scene or interiority, this passage is more simply recounting action—which is to say that we as readers are not made to feel drunk or confused etcetera; we are reading a report of said states—but be that as it may, the recounting is markedly different here from the previous passage, as well as from the sections of deep thoughtfulness. The reader is aligned with the Character’s moments, more than the Narrator’s memory of those moments, which we sense because the sentences tend to be shorter and more propulsive, focusing in on action and sensation rather than meandering cognition. But even the detail is still somewhat shrouded—a lack of taste, a confusion of conversation, waves of feeling, hearing yourself speak. Where the dynamic range of Ferrante’s retrospection can bring the reader right into the world of Character, this is as close as Lerner gets to shrinking that distance. And although it’s not as conspicuous as other times in his novel, the Narrator is still a felt presence, pointing out the experience of a wave of guilt, and then benevolence, and, in doing, interpreting things that, in the moment, were just passing sensations.
Furthermore, the moment in which Adam fails to properly translate Isabel’s Spanish (“she said either that he was a mechanic or was being retrained for something mechanical or that he sold cars or worked for a car company”) echoes a refrain found throughout the book regarding the imperfection of translation in general. I propose that this falls in line with Lerner’s examination of narration in the novel: no matter the language, to narrate a story in retrospection is to translate something foreign to someone else (a reader). Here we see the Character Adam in a breakdown of translation in the dramatic present, which compounds other instances of this and goes on to make the Narrator Adam interested in examining translation writ large, which he does by writing the novel that we’re reading.
So both authors manipulate dimension through the use of simultaneity, and both also veer into one or the other of Character/Narrator in accordance to their own needs in the narrative. Although they do so in different ways and to different ends, the overarching result is a layering of detail and context within their stories; we can feel the significance of events in the dramatic present, as well as a building fascination with the narrative occasion—the reason for telling the story at all. When this layering is successful, retrospective stories are able to exercise their most fundamental conceit, which comes from the ability to tie all the pieces together in the creation of a larger meaning.
Meaning-Making
The pattern seeking that electrifies cognitive and sensory experience is evidenced by the primordial habit we have of telling stories—to ourselves, to each other; about ourselves, about each other. Our lives are not actually narratives, but we shape them as such; we cull the minutia of quotidian experience, set aside data deemed irrelevant for any number of reasons, and assemble the rest, to create identity and continuity and structure, to process what was previously not understood, and to build a sense that we’re connected to a larger social landscape. Hindsight is 20/20, we agree, at least superficially, and as such we expect a retrospective story to lead towards something clear, something that makes the looking-back worth it. This is endemic to retrospection: when an author makes the decision to divide Narrator and Character, they create a necessity to eventually arrive at something—specifically, the narrative occasion. From that place comes the coherence of a retrospective story, but the act of meaning-making is not constrained only to that occasion; all along the way the Narrator can inject insight and meaning into the dramatic present.
The insight of Ferrante’s Narrator comes largely through her aphoristic language, which ramps up as the novel goes on, but to her credit, Ferrante is never felt to be soap-boxing from behind the scenes in the announcement of universal truths. This is because whatever meaning-making arises, does so in resonance with events of the dramatic present. For example, let us look to another passage from Olga’s harrowing day. After trying the broken front door and landline again and again, she gives up and tries to fix the cell phone, which has been previously thrown against the ground and broken in a fit of anger. But she tries to reassemble it. Notice: the Narrator intrudes, which creates temporal simultaneity, which leads to meaning-making:
“I put in the battery, which had come out, I tried to make the pieces fit together. I discovered that they slipped apart from each other because the central body was broken, the channel for the joint had splintered. We fabricate objects in a semblance of our bodies, one side joined to the other. Or we design them thinking they’re joined as we are joined to the desired body. Creatures born from a banal fantasy. Mario—it suddenly seemed to me—in spite of success in his work, in spite of his skills and his lively intelligence, was a man of banal fantasy” (130-131).
The aphorism appears only when the action bolsters its appearance, and the Narrator then uses the attempt to reassemble the phone as a metaphor for her attempt to reassemble herself. And the tone here is a major departure from much of the previous forty-plus pages. Up until this point, Olga has still very much idealized her husband, right alongside her fantastic anger towards him, but now he is just “a man of banal fantasy.” In other words, something important has changed, or more accurately, is in the process of changing. The Narrator highlights this by again switching to present tense; the aphoristic language indicates the Character’s arrival at a new understanding.
But Olga is still a ways from her own deliverance, which Ferrante signals by immediately collapsing the depth of the Narrator, and returning to scene. The cell phone fails and the disassociation continues. She tries to find new solutions and recruits Ilaria to poke her with a letter opener every time she, Olga, seems to black out. Ilaria obliges, and after several pokes, accidentally makes a deep cut. Dialog and the sensory world again draw the reader into the realm of Character:
“I saw her back off in fear with the paper cutter in her right hand.
‘Are you crazy?’ I said, turning on her fiercely.
‘You aren’t listening to me,’ Ilaria cried. ‘I’m calling you and you can’t hear me, you’re doing terrible things, your eyes are all twisted, I’m going to tell daddy’” (143).
But what starts to change is the interval of the Narrator’s return to the prose; she appears more and more frequently. The result is a sense that we are coming to something of a climax; each intrusion of the Narrator points us closer and closer to a precipice. Olga eventually leaves Ilaria with Gianni, who is still bedridden, and then returns to the dying dog, which spurs the return of the Narrator and the aphoristic, present-tense, speech: “How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, now to lose. I don’t know how long we remained like that” (145). Then we pop right back into scene, and the Narrator’s next appearance not only lends gravitas, but also declares the very arrival of the climax:
“Then an intense pain in his body obscured his pupils, he gnashed his teeth and barked at me without ferocity. Soon afterward he died in my lap, and I burst out crying in an uncontrollable lament, utterly unlike any other crying of those days, those months. When my eyes dried and the last sobs died in my breast, I realized that Mario had become again the good man he had perhaps always been, I no longer loved him” (146).
The Narrator tells us outright that we have arrived at the worst part of this long day of desperation: “the crying was unlike any other crying of those days, those months.” This is one of the most breathtaking moments in the novel, not only for the death of Otto, but for the revelation that is then arrived at. The retrospective voice returns in its full strength to glean significance from a terribly sad and dire situation—a narrative instinct as universal as any other. In looking back on her previously lived events, the Narrator can assemble the pieces in support of her sense that the moment Otto died was the moment she realized she no longer loved her husband. The passage also has the effect of informing the reader that things are now going to change direction. How, we wonder.
The dramatic present takes center stage again: Gianni’s fever goes down, and unexplainably the door’s lock becomes unstuck. Carrano arrives dutifully to take Otto’s body away and help Olga with the children. Then, finally, sixty-three pages after it began, the day comes to an end. As it does, there’s a drastic change in the narrative: after all those pages of play-by-play narration, time is again, finally, compressed: “I slept deeply. Starting the next morning I took good care of Ilaria and Gianni” (151). Then the Narrator uses a swifter summary, made possible by the compression, to chart change in the Character: “I read books of fairy tales, I played boring games for hours, I exaggerated the thread of lightheartedness with which I kept at bay the reflux of desperation” (151). Then the Narrator exercises the language of retrospective causality: “As a result, relationships with the external world improved” (154). So we have a movement from scene to compression to summary to causality. It is because of the day and all the things it brought that Olga is able to return to the maternal role that she vanquished at the very beginning of the novel. The reader has been guided through each step in the creation of meaning.
Olga’s story of transformation isn’t over, but before we see it through, let us contrast Ferrante’s retrospective meaning-making with that of Lerner. In order to do so we must remember that Adam’s journey through the novel is less directed or linear, with less investment in character transformation, and comes across as meandering and largely unconstrained by a clear plot. If there’s a conflict to be resolved, it’s in his growing confusion about whether he’ll stay in Madrid after the term of the fellowship, whether he and Teresa will ever consummate their confusingly liminal relationship, and in another sphere, whether he can bridge the distance between himself and the world. We see the difference in meaning-making rhetorically; Lerner’s Narrator isn’t finding anything up close like Ferrante’s, but searching from far away:
“In the final phase of my research, as the days continued to lengthen and warm, I evaluated every meal, conversation, and walk in terms of whether or not it justified or invalidated staying on. I was at once more distant and more proximal to my own experience than ever before; on the one hand, my attention was redoubled: every bite of food or phrase of overheard conversation or slant of light or corner of the museum was information for me to mull as I made my decision; on the other hand, whatever the object of my intensified attention, it was immediately abstracted into my ruminations about the future” (162).
We don’t get the immediacy of the Character’s mentioned meals and conversations and walks, but rather the sense that those episodes were being used as data in considering what he should do; hence we don’t witness Adam figuring anything out, and instead focus on the act of trying to figure things out—a key narratorial distinction. The reader is kept at a distance, and, as we’ve come to expect at this point, the distance itself is referenced, now as a contradictory object of confusion. The Character feels “at once more distant and more proximal,” and this information is arrived at through the abstraction of the Narrator.
But we do circle around a few moments of insight, and instead of using the Narrator to announce meaning like Ferrante does, notice how Lerner uses this longer passage to tease out the actual process of attempting to figure it out:
“But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance abuse problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality’s unavailability. But wasn’t my relationship with substances also fake? I never injected anything; if I started pissing blood, I’d go to a doctor, not a bar; I planned to quit everything except social drinking, the appropriate dosage of my pills, and an occasional, whimsical smoke; I was destined to reproduce the bourgeois family, no matter how much I dreaded the prospect or wanted it postponed. Or was that the lie, the claim that my excessive self-medication was simulated; was the lie that I was in fact bound for health and respectability and so should enjoy getting fucked up while I could; had I stepped into the identity I project, the identity of an addict; had the effort to prolong my adolescent experimentation indefinitely shaded imperceptibly into fearsome if mundane dependence, had mythomania become methomania? I less thought than felt these things on my skin as I wandered the city” (164).
Olga’s revelations are arriving on her doorstep passively, in line with the proximity of scene, but because of Adam’s distance from scene, we are invited into the actual activity of meaning-making. We get a long section of processing the remembered experiences of the Character, and examining the very act of giving them language (“felicitous phrase”). Adam is attempting to get to a conclusion, a larger meaning, but his effort only goes around in circles; whenever he arrives at something he becomes aware of its counter, through the negation of but, or indications of second guessing. So, as readers, we get questions that lead to thoughts that lead to positions that lead to new questions. Nothing is really arrived at. There’s a sense of reality in this; Lerner is using his craft to mimic the feeling of being inside a searching thought-stream—circuitous and contradictory and confusing. This is not to say that Ferrante’s version of arriving at meaning is less realistic, just that it arises from different circumstances, and resolves to different purposes.
Although it lacks clear moments of climax, Lerner’s novel does gain steam as it approaches its ending, in part because Narrator gives us a couple of moments, almost covertly, in which we sense Adam actually arriving at moments of transformation in the midst of all the thinking and thinking about thinking. In one scene, he and Teresa are discussing their mutual participation in a panel discussion about literature and politics, when Adam characteristically puts up an ironic layer of defense in claiming he is not a serious artist. Teresa calls him out: “‘When are you going to stop pretending that you’re only pretending to be a poet?’” (168). This pushes the Character back inside of himself, so the Narrator must do the work to move us forward, which happens by showing a new proximity to an abiding meaning:
“We sat in silence and I wondered if Teresa was right; was I in fact a conversationally fluent Spanish speaker and a real poet, whatever that meant?… Why didn’t I just suck it up, attend the panel, and share my thoughts in my second language without irony? They wanted the input of a young American poet writing and reading abroad and wasn’t that what I was, not just what I was pretending to be? Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent” (168).
But even still, the meaning he approaches is elusive and doesn’t becomes a revelation, which is because it comes as an ambiguation, a consideration (“maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent”). This is a much different effect than the one that would be associated with a distinct statement (i.e., my fraudulence was fraudulent). He is still circling.
What becomes clear in the development of the narrative is that Lerner is using retrospection to question its own most natural mode: stories of transformation. After the panel discussion, we find something new, a direct address, and with it, Adam seems to finally embrace his ability to make meaning: “I sat there and said to myself: You’ll be gone in six weeks. You will never see any of these people again” (178). The question is: who is addressing whom? And a few sentences later, it returns; again the first person becomes the second person. “To myself I was saying: You don’t love Teresa and she doesn’t love you. None of this is real. You don’t like Madrid… You are ready to quit smoking, to clean up, to return to friends and family. You have outgrown poetry” (178). It could be argued that the Character is addressing the Character, or that the Narrator is addressing the Character, but what’s really happening is a shrinking of the distance between the two. The Character is arriving at the narrative occasion of the Narrator, the place from which the story is being told. The two versions of Adam are becoming one here, and this helps to form the sense of coherence at the end of the novel. But there’s one more dimension to this of course, because Lerner won’t let us simply arrive, and this is how he calls the tidiness of personal transformation into question. The meaning he arrives at includes the notion that he has outgrown poetry, which we know, as readers who can see past the end of the book, is false (this being a work of admitted auto-fiction and Lerner being very much a poet). So even as he arrives, there’s an implicit arrow pointed past the moment of arrival. In this, Lerner uses the meta-narration of retrospection not so much to solidify a change in his Narrator, but to show change as lacking true solidity. He indicates that the narrative occasion will also crumble with the passing of time, and as it does, so too will whatever solid position formed there.
As we’ve already seen, for her part Ferrante’s Narrator is unafraid to arrive at specific constructions of meaning gleaned from her experience, and perhaps this is because her experience, unlike Adam’s, has been full of desperation. So, it’s the arrival at meaning that allows her to arrive at a new version of herself, transformed and moored on the other side of chaos. This is evidenced in the language of the Narrator: “The dog had fallen through a hole in the net of events. We leave so many of them, lacerations of negligence, when we put together cause and effect. The essential thing was that the string, the weave that now supported me, should hold” (177). The weave is the story that we are coming to the end of. In telling the story of what happened to the family, she has the power to create meaning out of disaster. And Ferrante is, like Lerner, still drawing attention to the act of narration, stating honestly and plainly that the act of storytelling leaves holes through which things that don’t conform to our creation of cause and effect disappear. But as she comes to tie the pieces of her novel together, Ferrante says: yes, there are holes in retrospection, but look instead at the weave of support.
She also collapses the distance between the Character and the Narrator in the final pages of the story, and this again creates a coherence that we look for in an ending, but her method and its effects are, of course, quite different from Lerner’s. To accentuate the merging of the Character and Narrator, Ferrante makes the internal external, though dialog. One night, months after what has by then turned into an amicable separation, Mario arrives at the house and asks Olga if she still loves him. She replies:
“‘I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.’
‘It was.’
‘No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body’” (185).
Her last line of dialog here resounds as strongly as any aphoristic truth offered up until this point. In a way, it’s exactly what the book is about: sometimes we must find the courage to get lost in the void, trusting that we can make it to the other side, from which we have the power of retrospection to learn about ourselves and the world. But the most important part of this passage, rhetorically, is that the revelation is now external; it is spoken, in dialog, in scene, in the dramatic present. What has been narrated as a part of the past is now being spoken in the moment, which signals to the reader that the meaning has been digested, metabolized, integrated. And consequently we feel the dramatic present has pressed all the way up against the narrative occasion. The Character is speaking with the type of language that has thus far been reserved for the writing of the Narrator. The two are one again, and bolstered in wholeness by the layers of dimension chiseled out along the way.
But it doesn’t end there, and Ferrante, like Lerner, leaves us with a nod to the future. One day, Olga finally decides to accept Carrano’s advances. She knocks on his door: “I imagined that he was trying to calm the pounding of his heart… Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell” (187). The Olga of the present is now able to think in the aphorisms of her own in-the-moment making. He opens the door and from there the Narrator finds deliverance not merely in the aphoristic present, but forward into the conditional future:
“He held me close to him for a while, without saying a word. He was trying to communicate silently that, through his mysterious gift, he knew how to make meaning stronger, to invent a feeling of fullness and joy. I pretended to believe him and so we loved each other for a long time, in the days and months to come, quietly” (188).
These are the last sentences of the book. Just as we approach the precipice of the narrative occasion, it telescopes outward. The effect of this is, was, profound. The past can stay in the past now, and the present leads into the future. There is hardly a more simple conjuring of hope. And what has gotten us here is retrospection, the ability to look back, investigate the past for patterns, harvest the patterns for meaning that can be shared with others, as art.
This is why, I propose, retrospective novels are so often stories about the act of storytelling. One of the hardest truths is that we ascribe the very meaning to things that we perceive them to have. Retrospection wrestles with this axiom, wrestles with the human ability to organize past experience to create meanings that prop up our ideas of ourselves and the world. The Days of Abandonment is a story about a woman who tells her story in order to glean universal truths from it, and then set it aside and move forward with those truths integrated. Leaving the Atocha Station is a story about a man reckoning with his ability to tell his own story, and how that ability creates different paradoxes in the understanding of his identity and his creativity. Lerner succeeds in his retrospection by embodying, and hence questioning, the distance required to narrate something with truth. Ferrante takes this truth as a given, and succeeds by using her story of storytelling as an example of the grace that lives on the other side of trauma.
The stories we tell ourselves move outwards, and the stories we are told color the way we tell our own. A retrospective narrator has a unique power in this collaboration, one that is defined by the ability to stand on a manufactured sense of stability to organize the past into a salient, and shareable, narrative. We read fiction in order to feel the immensity and diversity and resplendence of truth through subjectivities that make meaning through different lenses than we have, through different stories than we’ve lived. In this way literature is ultimately the great provider of context. When we feel ourselves immersed within that context, we are able to return to our lives, our very own intimate details, with the understanding that we have the power to frame our stories in a way that makes them also resplendent, or at least interesting, to other people.
Works Cited
Chee, Alexander. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Mariner Books, 2018.
Ferrante, Elena. The Days of Abandonment. Translated by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2005.
Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Coffee House Press, 2011.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Picador, 2018.
Wordsworth, William. “Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” Anglistica, edited by Torsten Dahl, et al., Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1957.
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