Elsa Morante 'Aracoeli"

Italian writer Elsa Morante's dazzling final novel Aracoeli has received far more than its fair share of uncomprehending critical rejection since its initial publication in 1983. Despite winning the Prix Medicis Etranger in 1985, its reception both at home and abroad has been mixed: critics have complained of its cynicism, fatalism, morbidity, and despair; Morante's only biographer Lily Tuck pronounced the novel almost pointlessly disturbing and shocking and even the introduction to the new edition currently available from Open Face Books questions the author's fatalistic philosophy, acceding that no doubt there are readers who will feel offended by the book's attitude. Offended! Americans are famously optimistic, but must our literature be morally uplifting, must there be always a development from darkness to light for our literary sensibilities to be satisfied? Let's hope not.

Aracoeli is a dark and troubling book, but its lyrical beauty and analytical precision make it compelling. Its thoroughly depressed gay narrator (43 year-old Manuele) embarks on a journey from his native Italy to his mother Aracoeli's birthplace in Andalusia in an attempt to unravel the knot of their tortured relationship. After what is admittedly a somewhat tedious first 100 pages, in which Manuele relates his present state of mind, his sexual failures, his aversion to company etc. (nothing out of the ordinary for a reader of, say, Fernando Pessoa) the book suddenly catches fire in mid-section as memories of childhood begin to flood his mind. From this point on the story is powerfully hypnotic and intense, a relentless exorcism of the demon of a ruined love, a Freudian romance in which one fragile identity is first nurtured and then twisted and crushed. After some blissful years alone with his mother the boy Manuele's world is plunged into darkness as Aracoeli first loses her second child and then succumbs to a sort of sexual mania, an obscure illness which drives her to express her inflamed desires in more and more perverse and flagrant ways. For the child whose identity is still fused to that of a devout, tender, and loving mother, the rapid and incomprehensible changes that take place in their shared locus of existence completely overwhelm his sense of security. Readers become witness to the emergence of what is easily one of the most searing existential crises this side of Dostoievsky, as Morante calmly analyzes the breach with surgical precision. We read of dark symptoms, the unnerving, ulcerated lament of Aracoeli's pleas, of her infected, convulsive movements, her strange cowardice and pathetic regression, her little, revolted moans of bizarre pain; she is variously obscene, befouled, virulent, sterile, perverse, degraded, aching and lacerated, febrile to the point of indecency.

As Manuele is slowly wrenched from his unconscious dream of being and forced to contemplate factors way beyond his understanding, he uses his imagination in fabulous ways, and the story becomes by extension a trenchant look at how and why human beings fantasize, dream, lie, and create, at the possibility that identity itself is humankind's greatest artistic product. Manuele's desperate visions are seen to be as real as anything occurring on the physical plane, perhaps more so, since they are the bedrock of his newly forming, newly warping identity. The effect is fascinating, thrilling. The scene in which he witnesses his mother respond sexually to a stranger on the beach is just flat-out brilliant, combining as it does the minutiae of perceived experience with the slightly hallucinatory qualities of concepts formed under stress. Physics and metaphysics bind together in the development of the narrative as of the child - the book becomes an object lesson in Nietzsche's epiphany that we have art so that we will not perish from the truth. I can't think of any other modern novel that so clearly maps the crossroads of truth and fiction and so directly evokes their mysterious interdependence. If this isn't a subject for great writing, I don't know what is. Morante's obtuse critics are sissies, afraid of the dark. If they must have hope, they might try recognizing it in the brilliance of this singular human voice, a writer capable of illuminating our deepest mysteries and our greatest pain.