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PARTISAN REVIEW
back to the self. As Emanuele moves toward his putative goal- his
mother's village - he is assailed by real and imagined memories that
reveal the mystery, unseizability, and futility of his past. Narrating,
he is capable of the most excruciating realism and the most mystify–
ing poetization. What becomes abundantly clear is that the hopes,
dreams, and sheer beauty of his youth have been battered almost
beyond recognition by his adult life. Emanuele is, in short, a loser.
At times he seems mad with pain and need, and his obsessiveness
and hypersensitivity identify him with some of the great madmen of
Western literature. The question for the reader, as in all such nar–
ratives, is what general significance to find in these howls from the
depths.
Elsa Morante's fictions are the fruit of intense sensitivity to inner
experience, as well as of a deep love for storytelling. From her first
novel,
Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars)
to
L'Isola di Arturo (Arthur's
Island),
to the much-debated monumental war novel
La Storia (His–
tory),
Morante consistently plumbed the depths of what she once
called, in an interview, "the first truth and most human reality of the
human drama: psychological reality." She never deviated from her
own, very personal, definition of realism: poetic invention that is , no
matter how fabulistic in tone, event, and style, true to human psy–
chology and to the portrayal of humankind's relationship to the ex–
ternal world. Her privileging of character over event is clear in her
own discussions of her art. She once elaborated a typology of charac–
ters that represents the three basic psychological orientations, and
the characters in her novels tend to adhere to this typology. There
are the "Achilles" type (passionate and vital involvement in life); the
"Don Quixote" type (solemn and epic evasion of real life through
fantasy); and the "Hamlet" type (funereal contemplation of life that
results in opting for real or figural non-being). Although Emanuele
is most strongly identifiable as a "Hamlet," he partakes of some as–
pects of the other two types as well.
Other constants in Morante's novels reappear in
Aracoeli:
con–
centration on the family as the archetypal human configuration;
emphasis on the interplay of memory and imagination as tools of
knowledge; preference for child protagonists. Although Emanuele is
an adult narrator, most of his memories center on childhood and the
paradise of innocence that becomes the hell of mature disillusion–
ment. In
Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved
by
Children),
a
collection of poetry, prose, and drama never translated into English,
Morante divides the world into the "Happy Few" and the "Unhappy
