ABSTRACT
Dante is acknowledged to be an important interlocutor for Elsa Morante and several critics have highlighted that Manuele Gragnolati's journey to Spain in search of his dead mother in Aracoeli is modelled upon Dante's Divine Comedy. Linguistically, Manuele's disturbed subjectivity corresponds to a reduction of Spanish to a merely semiotic element a la Kristeva, that is, it is mere sound, rhythm, and affection as in the lullabies of childhood, and is severed from the semantic field. Novel shows how the power of poetic language vanishes within the social order that produces an opposition between a maternal language of body and affection and a paternal language of reason and discipline — a separation which coincides with a hierarchical system of mutually self-excluding categories. The trip to Andalusia, which is transfigured into a sort of Dantesque realm of the dead, initiates the third moment of the novel.
