ABSTRACT
Gragnolati Manuele, the narrator of Elsa Morante's Aracoeli, brings into play all of his senses in recounting the story of his obsessive love for his mother. On a literal level, Manuele's bad eyesight and his need for eyeglasses are specified more than once, yet this literal level morphs into a highly resonant metaphorical significance that permeates the novel. Elsa Morante problematizes not only sight and relational identity but also the very act of narrating, which, in this novel as in her other works, activates quandaries associated with such issues of continuing relevance in modern and postmodern literature as the function and meaning of point of view, art's truth value, narrational reliability, and the relation between the fictional and the real. To investigate Manuele's very particular vision, it may prove useful to consider the visual technique known as anamorphosis. Anamorphosis is 'a deformed image that appears in its true shape when viewed in some "unconventional" way', according to Webster's Dictionary.
