ABSTRACT
Elsa Morante's Aracoeli is a novel that disturbs on many different levels. Its narrator Manuele Gragnolati indicates at the beginning that he is engaged in a 'guerra disperata' against his mother Aracoeli, and that his journey to her Andalusian origins is 'un'ultima, sballata terapia per guarire di lei' by digging around her roots, 'frugare nelle sue radici'. What Manuele digs up is not only Aracoeli's past, but also his own, and from his account of the memories, fantasies, and dreams of his childhood and adolescence, mother and son emerge as equally troubled, torn, and disturbed figures. The account that the novel gives of Manuele's childhood resonates so well with psychoanalytic theories of infant development that it is hard to resist identifying the peculiar logic of hybrid tension with a pre-oedipal, imaginary, or semiotic phase preceding the entry to the symbolic order of language.
