ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the three major moments of the letters' appearance in the public sphere— the letters as collected entities, several of the letters themselves, and some strange paradoxes that emerged along the way. Something orthodox upholds doxa, something paradoxical runs alongside the doxa, and something heterodox challenges received wisdom or opinion. Sciascia's heterodox reading of Aldo Moro's letters in L'affaire Moro is profoundly literary, rife with oxymorons and other rhetorical figures that are commonplace in literary analysis. The literary study of epistolarity often focuses on the intertext between the writer and the addressee, marking time and space in the intervals between the receipt and the reading of the letters. The complex layering characteristic of epistolary novels seems to provide a structural guarantee for the sort of misinformation, misinterpretation, and desire for closure that can be said to describe the letters and their role in the Moro kidnapping and its outcome.
