Elena Ferrante on the Sublime Experience of Freedom

This paper offers a reading of the contemporary Italian author Elena Ferrante’s writings in conversation with Kant’s account of aesthetic experiences of the sublime and human freedom in the Critique of Judgement. It argues that the two main characters of Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan Novels, Lenù and Lila, respectively represent what Ferrante theorizes as “compliant” and “impetuous” writing in her nonfictional work. Whereas the character Lenù is a writer whose style of writing complies to social norms and pre-established aesthetic expectations, Lila is depicted in Ferrante’s novel as a genius whose impetuous writing expresses a creative freedom that reflects the rebellious personality of the character of Lila herself. This paper suggests that Ferrante’s portrayal of the “compliant” and “impetuous” characters of Lenù and Lila in the Neapolitan Novels bears a strong resemblance to Kant’s account of the beautiful and the sublime in the third Critique. Identifying this resemblance between Ferrante and Kant can not only help us better appreciate Ferrante’s aesthetic theorization of “compliant” and “impetuous” writing, but also recognize how key moments of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels can be understood as portrayals of quasi-spiritual experiences of radical freedom, which in turn fosters a new reading of Ferrante’s novels as a “spiritual but not religious” phenomenological exploration of how experiences of freedom may relate to theological conceptions of the divine.

In the Italian author Elena Ferrante’s bestselling Neapolitan Novels, which the New York Times declared as “the best book” of the 21st century, one of the main characters Lila often experiences a phenomenon called “dissolving margins” (smarginatura). When Lila experiences this odd phenomenon, often at key moments in Ferrante’s novel series, the clear and distinct boundaries of everything around Lila collapse and things no longer have any fixed meaning (e.g., Ferrante 2012: 176–7; Ferrante 2015: 175–6). This paper explores how the experience of “dissolving margins” depicted by Ferrante may be regarded as a quasi-spiritual experience of radical freedom. Connecting Ferrante’s (2022) own account of “compliant” and “impetuous” writing as two different modes of writing with the notions of the “beautiful” and the “sublime” in Enlightenment aesthetics, this paper argues that the two main characters of the Neapolitan Novels—the aforementioned Lila and series’ main narrator Lenù—not only respectively represent the “impetuous” and the “compliant” as two modes of writing, but also symbolize the “sublime” and the “beautiful” as two kinds of aesthetic experience.

Drawing on Kant’s account of how subjective human freedom is “supersensibly” experienced in one’s encounter with the sublime, as well as some recent theological construals of the Kantian sublime as a secularized notion of the divine, this paper suggests that Lila’s experiences of “dissolving margins” in Ferrante’s novels are not experiences reducible to psychological stress, but are instead quasi- if not outright spiritual experiences of the sublimity of human freedom. Just as objects lose their distinct structures and collapse into one another in Lila’s perception of the world in her experiences of “dissolving margins”, for Kant, in aesthetic experiences of the sublime one’s sense-perception “feels itself to be unbounded because of an elimination of the limits of sensibility”, but this discomforting experience “nevertheless expands the soul” (Critique of Judgment, 5: 274; Kant 2000: 156).

This paper contends that Ferrante’s account of “dissolving margins” can not only illuminate or illustrate what Kant means by “supersensible” freedom, but further goes beyond Kant and his theological interpreters by showing how glimpses of human freedom can be experienced not just through moments of aesthetic ponder but amidst lived experiences of oppression and trauma. Recognizing the “dissolving margins” as a spiritual experience of freedom and sublimity can not only open new ways of interpreting Ferrante’s influential depiction of women’s experiences of oppression and liberation, but also can further illuminate the relation between freedom, aesthetics, and the religious imagination of the divine.

References

Ferrante, Elena. 2012. My Brilliant Friend. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions.

Ferrante, Elena. 2015. The Story of the Lost Child. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions.

Ferrante, Elena. 2022. In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing. Translated by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa Editions.

Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.