Under Arturo's Star: The Cultural Legacies of Elsa Morante

The Maternal Boy: Manuele, or The Last Portrait of Morante’s Androgyny

157 Hanna Serkowska The Maternal Boy Manuele, or The Last Portrait of Morante’s Androgyny Elsa Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli,1 has received the least amount of critical attention of all her works.2 Frequently regarded as a parody or palinode, particularly of La Storia but also in more general terms of her entire production prior to Aracoeli, the novel has been defined by Franco Fortini as “definitive,” the ultimate and final work, while Cesare Garboli sees in it a parody of the preceding novels, “sotto le apparenze di un viaggio immaginario e insieme reale di un figlio alla ricerca della madre” (Il gioco segreto 199; “under the guise of a voyage, at once imaginary and real, of a son looking for his mother”). In Garboli’s view, the parody inherent in Aracoeli signifies a gesture of extreme masochism by which the writer destroys all that she loved most, ripping the veil off her own fables. If the mother-son system can no longer constitute and legitimate the world, only nothingness is left, for nothing else can take its place. For this novel of “corruption and anguish” one could argue, instead, for a reading that goes beyond the idea of palinode generally suggested by Morante’s critics; a reading that elicits a remarkable continuity between Menzogna e sortilegio and the later book, through an operation of exquisitely Morantian intertextuality. Morante consistently revisits previous writings in her works; novels subsequent to Menzogna e sortilegio repeatedly pick up on names, characters, motifs, and entire stories previously sketched out. This last novel suggests less nihilism than a spiritual search whose inevitable end is death. I would argue for an interpretation of the novel as dealing primarily with the myth of androgyny as fulcrum and ideological center of Aracoeli, but also as a fundamental ontological position of Morante’s thought. She has a strong predilection for 158 Hanna Serkowska figures marked by marginalization and alterity. Pier Paolo Pasolini is one of her dearest friends, and her revered models include Arthur Rimbaud, Umberto Saba, and Sandro Penna, while the broad category of novelistic outcasts embraces women, Jews, adolescents, and animals. I would also argue that the presumed homosexuality of Morante’s characters should be revisited, to see whether this has indeed been the “syndrome” that the previous works have dealt with. One of Morante’s masters is Plato, one of the “Happy Few” listed in the Mondo salvato dai ragazzini. As creator of the original myth of androgyny that was later to be picked up and developed by Ovid and Diodorus of Sicily, Plato tells that humans were originally men, women, and androgynes, all with two-faced heads. Having challenged the gods, they were divided into two, and from this point onwards the two divided halves have continued to seek each other out. In Aracoeli we witness a case of androgyny in its original Platonic, purely spiritual, form; the goal of Manuele’s voyage-quest, which structures the novel, is to regain that primary androgynous unity and completeness, prior to the binary system that holds gender as its goal. My aim in analyzing this voyage is to identify the paths taken by the protagonist, who continues throughout the entire length of the narrative to search in vain for a remedy to his own alterity. The Other is seen here as lack, that which is lacking in the questing “I,” and which it is impossible to assimilate. Reconsidering these paths in the light of the androgynous motif or “syndrome,” one can see the use that Morante makes of psychoanalysis, as well as her adherence to oriental mysticisms and to her cabalistic and gnostic-platonic sources of inspiration. Itinerary to Aracoeli: The Voyage toward Absence Aracoeli is, then, structured as a voyage-quest. The goal of the voyage is the absent mother, the mother no longer there. The novel is thus a votive offering to the mother: the “internal” mother who resides in the Es, in psychic reality, and also, in the absence of the real mother, the “imaginary” mother, constructed by calling into play fantasy and imagination, by the intersection of desire with the figure of the real mother. Such a 159 The Maternal Boy: Manuele dichotomy, produced by the split between psychic reality and the reality principle, constitutes the fundamental motivation of the voyage-quest on which the novel is structured, a perennial voyage in search of the maternal...