The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
“You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“I used to think this was the beginning of your story. Memory is a strange thing, it doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.” – Amy Adams, speaking to her daughter at her birth, in Arrival
Apparently it is not only Walter Benjamin who sees time as porous, though he speaks specifically of Naples, and he confines the porosity to days within a week, not to a mix of past and present: “…[T]he festival penetrates each and every working day….A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday, and how much weekday in this Sunday!” However, implied throughout “Naples” is the sense of the Neapolitans’ way of life as being from the past. Ferrante/Elena (F/E) feels the past so keenly that she says to herself, in My Brilliant Friend‘s prologue, “We’ll see who wins this time” (23), as she begins to write her and Lila’s history. On a personal note, as someone who has been around for a while, I can testify that Faulkner’s words ring true. And as for Austen…well, chin up, old girl, it ain’t happening here.
As she does in the first volume, F/E disrupts the chronology when she begins the second volume, Story of a New Name. After the prologue of My Brilliant Friend, F/E disrupts the chronology a few more times around key events. The chronology is so complex (to me) that I don’t want to attempt it in this blog. I’ll limit the discussion to a couple disruptions: immediately after the brief account of the doll-throwing incident the narration switches, to go back in time to give the reader context and come back to that day. Later, the author(s) fast forwards to the stone throwing incident and jumps back again.
The Story of a New Name, unlike My Brilliant Friend, is not divided into a prologue and several chronological books. Rather, the author(s) dives right in; the story simply resumes. The way the chapters are only signaled by modest little numbers that do not even begin on a new page adds to the feeling that we are simply and immediately being plunged into the action in New Name. And while volume I is divided into two chronological sections- “Childhood” and “Adolescence,” in New Name one chapter simply follows another.
Chapter 1 takes place in 1966 in the framework of Elena again looking back from the present, to when Lila gave her a box of notebooks. The notebooks record events from before 1966, so again the narration takes a step backward as Elena describes some of their contents. The last episode in the notebooks that Elena refers to, before she pushes the box into the river, is Marcello Solara’s showing up at the wedding wearing the shoes – which the first volume closed with.
Then chapter 2 begins, immediately jumping back to that same moment/sequence, Elena continuing the story with only the information she had that day, not adding what the notebooks tell her. We do not return to 1966; and she does not use information from the notebooks till much later in this volume — with the notable exception, in chapters 6-8, of Stefano’s brutal rape of Lila on their wedding night and their return to Naples. In chapter 9, Elena’s eyewitness account resumes.
Time is fluid, not just porous; F/E is omniscient, and that omniscience is slowly revealing itself; she knows the story so well that she can easily disrupt the chronology at key points. In Arrival, Amy Adams’ character actually begins to experience time as the visiting aliens do: not as linear, but as looping in on itself, taking you with it so that one moment is “now” and the next is “then,” and so “now” becomes the future.
