Chapter Five - Growing Women, Shrinking Men? Gender, Scale, Materiality

Summary

So far, I have outlined certain strategies and effects of representation in big books— database aesthetics, a sublime of textual overload, serial self-representations, the anaphoric singulative, and lists. Together, these amount to the extraordinary volume of the works I discuss here. Yet, as announced in chapter one, the size of literary works is not a neutral, value-free aspect: it is loaded with connotations, among these about gender. Investigating how big books are “gendered,” the present chapter compares two of today's most popular literary series.

Knausgard is not the only European author who in recent years has achieved worldwide fame with a large-scale series of books with an autobiographical slant. Recently a “female” counterpart to his project has emerged with Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels (2011–‘14). This tetralogy amounts to approximately 1700 pages—admittedly far fewer than My Struggle's 21000, yet it is hard to deny the sweeping panoramic scope and maximalist qualities of these novels which are often described as an “epos” or “saga” (Marmion 2017). In many other respects, it seems they could not be further apart. They embody total disclosure versus total secrecy; hyper-visibility versus invisibility; masculinity versus femininity; fatherhood versus motherhood; the protestant welfare state of the Norwegian province versus a Catholic workers’ district in the outskirts of Naples; Scandinavian middle class versus South-Italian proletariat… The list of antitheses goes on.

Yet in this chapter we will see that in their own way both series render visible certain gender identities and behavior that for different reasons have long remained unseen. Knausgard and Ferrante each in their own way exploit the scope and volumetric dimensions of their work in order to destabilize categories of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, and feminine and masculine. Both their narrators model themselves after a masculine model of authorship that they do not fit, and use bigness as a strategy to problematize the gendered expectations that their respective sociocultural contexts impose on them.

As I have detailed the particularities about My Struggle, at length, I will give a short synopsis of the Neapolitan novels here. The four texts are set in Naples from the 1950s to the present and tell the story of the lives of Elena Greco (Lenu) and her friend Raffaella Cerullo (Lila).