All’ombra di Anna. La coscienza arcaica di Elsa Morante

The essay, setting aside the clichés concerning the antinomy between ‘realism’ and ‘unrealism’ (the epicenter of the critical debate that takes place around Italian fiction in the years in which Lies and Sorcery is published), aims, instead, to interweave the two terms, interpreting them in the light of that ‘realism of unreality’ proposed by Bachelard as the privileged axis around which both the dream world and the various forms through which imagination unfolds revolve. In the furrow of such a perspective – corroborated by a systematic reference to contemporary psychoanalysis, especially of French matrix – the analysis is characterized by a capillary scouring of the ‘subsoil’ of dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations that crowd Morante’s text, aimed at extending the recurring modules of the ‘family novel’ toward a field of archetypal images that find in the circularity of an ‘interminable’ mourning – Freud would define it – their origin as well as their provisional end.