The Creativity of Error
On Elena Ferrante's Comma Splices
Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. The internet at large usually attributes this maxim to Pablo Picasso, who studied art in Barcelona and Madrid before breaking with the academy to create striking works in neoclassical, cubist, and surreal styles across all visual media from sculpture to printmaking, painting to ceramics. Whether the quote comes from him or not (variations of this quote have also been attributed to the Dalai Lama and the comedienne Lea DeLaria), it points to an essential truth about mastering convention before breaking it. As an English teacher, especially early in my career, I often passed along this advice to my students, too. It was usually a preamble to any discussion of grammar. And here’s an insider secret: many English teachers absolutely love teaching grammar (I did for a time!) because it is solid ground, one of the only places where there are clearly understood right and wrong answers. So much else of the discipline—literary analysis, essay composition, reader’s response—is challenging to grade because “good” is subjective. I could go on and on—I have many thoughts on this subject—but will admit that, prior to teaching English, grammar was a piano I played by ear (to quote Joan Didion). I didn’t really learn the rules until I had to teach them.
All this has been on my mind because I’ve rediscovered the works of Elena Ferrante this week, and am now almost done with the "Neapolitan Quartet.” In my last post, I wrote about the curative properties of good books, and so prescribed myself some fiction. In my working life, I read a lot of nonfiction and often feel guilty when I “indulge” in novels (still working to unlearn the millennial myth that leisure should also be productive!) And it was a lovely respite from the day-to-day to open a book and find a fully formed world to inhabit for hours.
The books that comprise the “Quartet”—My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those who Leave and those who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child—center the friendship of co-protagonists, Lila and Lenù, who grow up in a largely impoverished, tight-knit Neapolitan neighborhood, as preternaturally brilliant girls, and whose lives intersect and diverge multiple times over the ensuing decades. Lenù eventually becomes an acclaimed novelist and, from her perspective, readers come to understand the complex relationship of the two women who variously admire, resent and adore one another. The books explore themes of class, gender and power, and are underscored by the arc of social unrest in Italy’s postwar decades. But all this with a light touch, an expert meeting of the personal and political. Above all, these 1,700 pages explore the dichotomies of human relationship through the examination of a single friendship—what it means to both love and envy, to retreat and seek, to present and represent, the struggles over who is brilliant, who is successful, who is up front and who is left behind. I don’t think there is much to add to the praise of these books which have been called works of “hypnotic genius.” Ferrante is often mentioned alongside Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as preeminent “global authors” who center the interior lives of women in their stories.
By extension, Ann Goldstein, in rendering Ferrante’s works in English, has become one of the world’s most celebrated literary translators. She began her career taking night classes of Italian in order to read Dante in the original; in 2004, after several years of translating short stories, she was invited to submit an excerpted translation from Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment with a handful of others and won the gig. Goldstein’s translations of Ferrante have been called “dexterous” “elegant” and possessing of “a certain creativity.” Annalisa Merelli, among others, have gone so far as to argue that Ferrante’s prose benefitted immensely from Goldstein’s gifts, claiming the original Italian of My Brilliant Friend (L’Amica Geniale) was encumbered by “poor lexical choices…odd constructions…inconsistent tone.” This is echoed by some tepid reviews in Italy. It’s worth noting that Goldstein characterizes herself as a “highly literal translator” and I still believe the English version of Ferrante is worth studying for the lessons we can learn about breaking the rules of English with style.
As a writer, I’m interested in what is happening at the sentence-level. Why do I feel so compelled to read on? Ferrante’s style—multiple clauses running together, dense with analogy and allusion, and yet precise as a razor’s edge—is truly fascinating because she manages to achieve both plot velocity and emotional depth. A rare feat in literary fiction. As Roxana Robinson, for The New York Times puts it: “Reading her is like getting into a fast car with Tony Soprano: At once you are caught up and silenced, rendered breathless, respectful.” I felt compelled to wrestle with this, to note the breaking of English grammatical convention that evoke Ferrante’s literary spirit. These “writerly moves” are a masterclass in how to achieve narrative ferocity while maintaining an eminently readable style.
Sentences that Run
The most obvious feature of Ferrante’s writing style—because there is scarcely a paragraph that doesn’t contain at least one—is the deft use of the run-on sentence. As one critic stated: “…anyone who thinks innovation in prose is at an end should look at the use of the comma splice in Elena Ferrante.” Here’s an example from The Story of a New Name when the narrator finds out her first book will be published:
In a few months there would be printed paper sewn, pasted, all covered with my words, and on the cover the name, Elena Greco, me, breaking the long chain of illiterates and semi-literates, an obscure surname that would be charged with light for eternity.
One of the challenges of capturing the rhythm of Romance languages in English is crafting multiple clauses that layer interconnected imagery and ideas without losing sight of the subject, verb, or object. English is a language that is famously brisk, its fullest power found in the curt vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons and Norse. That’s not to say there are not florid English-language writers, there are, but longer sentences almost always require multiple forms of punctuation to function (including colons, long dashes, semicolons, parentheses). Not so in Romance languages which can more easily embrace the run-on. To illustrate this, one way of representing the above passage in mechanically correct English would be:
In a few months, there would be printed paper sewn and pasted; all covered with my words, and on the cover the name: Elena Greco. Me; breaking the long chain of illiterates and semi-literates: an obscure surname that would be charged with light for all eternity.
Here, I have to use a coordinating conjunction (and), two semicolons, and two colons while Ferrante has used six commas. This points to the real purpose of punctuation: to create space for the reader to pause, take in, and then move to the next idea or image. But when commas are used to separate independent clauses (as opposed to semicolons or periods), they are called comma splices. Technically, a comma cannot separate two sentences, two fully-formed ideas. This is an error English students most often discover when drafts of their essays are returned with the notation “cs”. But English students are not the only ones who use commas this way; in fact, many lauded authors do too, especially when composing personal essays and fiction to lend momentum to their writing, to approximate real-world dialogue, and to indicate stream-of-consciousness narration.
Ferrante’s particular use-case is interesting. Mostly, she combines her run-on sentences with the rhetorical and literary device known as anaphora, repeating the same words at the beginning of multiple clauses so that readers are propelled through the clauses at a clipped pace. Here is an excerpt from Those who Leave and Those who Stay describing the experience of riding in an airplane for the first time:
How exciting it was to lift off from the ground with a jerk and see the houses that became parallelopipeds and the streets that changed into strips and the countryside that was reduced to a green patch, and the sea that inclined like a compact paving stone, and the clouds that fell below in a landslide of soft rocks, and the anguish, the pain, the very happiness that became a part of the unique, luminous motion.
This single sentence repeats “and the” followed by a noun (streets, countryside, sea, clouds, anguish) multiple times to create a breathless effect, and the feeling that we are in the narrator’s head, experiencing thoughts just as she has them—sometimes logical, and sometimes disparate, a jumble of concrete observations and the feelings they produce. Add to this something of the content itself: while highly descriptive, the prose is not ornate. Ferrante’s style has been called “remarkable, lucid, austere”; “muscular, never orotund” and, my personal favorite, “emotional chiaroscuro.” Ferrante herself describes her process in La frantumaglia: “…quando scrivo è come se macellassi anguille” (when I write, it’s as if I were butchering eels). As Christopher Warley noted, we progress through these books but usually “have very little idea what the apartments look like (rich with a view; poor with no bathroom), and very little idea what Elena and Lila look like (blond and plump; brunette and skinny)” which creates a sense of realism while leaving room for the reader to burnish characters and settings with their own imagined details. Above all, these techniques—run-on sentences, repetition, and direct prose—create an effect that is disorienting but also feels true to life. Warley goes on to assert that the use of run-on sentences are meant to highlight what is arguably the major premise of these novels: there is no neat narrative arc. In politics, friendship, history, or life. And that the two dominant stories of any age—the story of “progress” and the story of “catastrophe”—are really just societal mythos.
Ferrante’s rule-breaking creates a propulsive energy. Ideas, images and emotions run together on the page, representing the blurred boundaries between characters, between worlds. As Isaac Babel once said, “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” Punctuation is important. And the signature run-on/comma splices of Ferrante deny us, as readers, full resolution. Knowing when to break the rules, and how, can allow for authentic voice to emerge. That is to say, for truth to emerge. And isn’t this the forever-always purpose of art?
3 Things Newly Noted
As an “appendix” of sorts to the above: I cut a paragraph on Ferrante’s pseudonymous persona (it felt beyond the scope of the subject at hand). But if you’re curious, the “unmasking” of her true identity proved to be a genuine literary scandal that many have opined on over the past eight years. Also, I cannot vouch for the film adaptations of her works but am looking forward to diving into the HBO series as soon as I can.
You may have noticed from this post that I’m ambivalent about grammar but a true punctuation nerd. I couldn’t fit this in, but Lewis Thomas’ Notes On Punctuation (from his book, The Medusa and the Snail) is a 1-pager that describes how to use punctuation in English (it’ll make you chuckle, at the very least :)
Highly recommend Marlee Grace’s Monday Monday newsletter; her Skillshare class helped me shape this newsletter and is definitely worth the watch if you’re interested in starting a Substack of your own. This week, she had a particularly strong line in her writing that resonated with me: “My desires overflow in the winter, I have just enough and yet want expansion.”
See you next Friday!
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