BOOKS
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Many." In the former category she places all those who retained a
childlike exuberance into adulthood (Mozart, Rimbaud), and in the
latter are all those who sold out to the "realities" of adult life.
Children are, of course, marginal to the centralized institutions of
power that organize and rule our adult world, and it is with the
emarginated - youths, illiterates, the poor, the mad - that Morante's
sympathies always lay. It is in this sense that she can be read as a
political writer. In
Aracoeli,
both the naive peasant girl who becomes
Emanuele's mother and her young partisan brother, an anarchist
who dies in the Spanish Civil War, are placed in sharp, if implicit,
contrast to the bourgeois repressiveness of Aracoeli's husband's fam–
ily, all of whom unthinkingly adhere to the values of fascism .
If
we read
Aracoeli
as a political allegory, we might understand
Emanuele's preference for fantasy , as well as Aracoeli's extreme sex–
ual rebellion (she becomes insatiable and eventually leaves the fam–
ily home to live as a whore), as desperate attempts to escape the
"mature," stifling environment of Italian society under the fascist
regime . But the novel is too complex to be read in a monotonal key.
Aracoeli's decline from a beautiful girlish mother to a crazed whore
is also the result of bodily decay . She is ruined by disease (we can
assume cancer) that diminishes her corporeally and spiritually as bru–
tally as does the more abstract force of repressive politics. The same
is true of her husband, who descends into the hell of alcoholism after
her death and dies a ruined man. Emanuele becomes physically re–
pulsive as he ages; many passages recount his intense self-hatred as
an overweight, sagging, middle-aged man. This emphasis on the
horror of the body - a stark
memento mori
-
distinguishes this novel
from Morante's earlier books.
In vivid contrast to the negative details of "real life" are those
passages in which Emanuele reveals his native temperament that, in
his own words, is "more inclined to visions than to inquiries ." Like
his creator, he is not interested in documentable fact and readily ad–
mits that much of what he recounts is "apocryphal memory," the
fruit of fantasy. Thus, in movingly lyrical prose, he describes his
birth, his suckling, the magical garden outside his childhood apart–
ment. It is difficult to reconcile this delicate sensitivity with the ugly ,
awkward, maladjusted man whose life consists of violent encounters
with homosexual gigolos , solitary nights in impersonal third-class
hotel rooms, and equally lonely days in a two-room publishing firm
where he translates worthless pamphlets . There is no doubt that most
of us would avoid contact with such a person were we to come upon
