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REVIEWS For Lenore Baeli Wang, Dorothy Bryant,Peter Carravetta and Paolo Valesio, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Stelio Cro, Joshua King, Frank Lentricchia, Anna Monardo, Anthony J. Parel, andSalvatore Salerno Lenore
Baeli Wang. Born
in the Year of the Pink Sink. San Francisco: malafemina press, 1993. In Born in the Year of the Pink Sink, Baeli
Wang affirms that life is, before anything, a sensual experience. And, like
the Buddha-to-be, walking, breathing, eating mindfully on the road to
enlightenment, which is essentially an awakening of the senses to our true
Buddha nature, we, also, will see life most clearly by being grounded in the
senses. Baeli Wang makes it clear that no life is not worth living. Indeed, blood is a
recurring image in these poems for good reason. Life can be found anywhere,
the poet admonishes us. We merely need open ourselves to the possibility. The
fact that “the lavender wallpaper does not / bleed for me . . .”
implies that it could, simply because
it is joyously felt and fully experienced. “Lavender alights on the branch of
a finger, / slips through our hands like spilt wings” (16). Beauty can be found even in death
since death is the foundation of all life: all I need is a
corner under your warm
brown quilt when I die, the designs of
olive branch and blossom,
exquisite. (14) Here
the olive tree grows out of what was returned to the earth in death. Earth, of
course, is the premiere nourisher, and in this poem, protector, beautifully
symbolized by the quilt. Drawing on her
Italian/American heritage, the characters in these poems are strong women or,
alternately, strong girls. The girls are at times naive (“Vision in the
Sauce”), appropriately so, given the way many girls in our culture are
socialized; at other times fiercely independent [“. . . they’d let
me climb / scratched and frightened I’d fall to my death . . .”
(10)] but always “fork eager” (3) to become “the outstretched arms, the
flying hair / of laughing women” (4). Unlike their mothers who wore
“. . . make-up / domesticity in war paint hides / brutal battles
that rage under skin” (1), these are women who will not be still, or seen and
not heard. They will not hesitate to tell you, if you get too close, to step
back. These are women who know “It takes garlic / to get a little respect”
(12), garlic being the apt symbol of strength, persistence, and bite. And if
they don’t get respect they will “. . . slice your words up
/. . . make a stew . . . / on a trail [she’s] not bound
to give up” (1). With this strength and knowledge, women’s sensuality is
increased: “beneath this dress of emblems . . . / wait fierce pink
moons, / hot with the glow of their own fire . . .” (2). At a time when men
and women are at odds with each other, so mired in change, and not always
able to make sense of it, there is still hope, symbolized in the “scraping
away of stains” (2). Only when men understand the “emblems,” which are the
social and psychological institutions that have kept women “in their place,”
will they reap the benefits of women’s, and eventually their own, sensuality. In “Vision in the
Sauce” sexism is firmly rooted in innocence—a father is unaware of the sexist
longings he is passing on to his daughter. She longs to grow up to be the
type of woman his father gawks at on the street, . . . to
grow up with high hair, a
cigarette that ribbons the air
with smoke like there was no tomorrow, black pants and have someone
call me a tomato walking. (3) Somehow,
sexism based in innocence seems more innocuous than that based in hate, since
innocence, one hopes, will readily give way with knowledge. Baeli Wang finds
humor in the absurdity of the everyday. Humor is the echo of the sensuality
and the desire that is the essence of these poems. In her “easter” poems, we
are delighted with such images as “Little girl legs / squirm / eels in
stockings . . .” (4) and our heads in
baskets bring to mind food for goats in my sleep they
take crisp bites. . . . (5) In
her collage poem (“Easter #4”), as the West contemplates “. . . the
possibility / of a fixed Easter” (8) (as if anything in life were ever “fixed”),
we see how absurd many of man’s ideas and goals in the name of “progress” are
in fact, and we can not help but laugh at the arrogance. In the end, we see
that hope for women, and thereby women and men together, will come from women
recognizing and reigning in their power and wisdom and not being afraid to
stand up and exercise these powers. We are not separate from our roots, as
the “grandmother” poems and the “easter” poems in this collection seem to
attest. Whether through the symbolic evolution of passing from girl-hood to
woman-hood, or in showing us the (sometimes absurd) evolution of past traditions
into current ones, we see that roots have much to do with who we are or
choose to be. Indeed, the coming together of the old and new may be painful,
but ultimately we can learn from the mistakes of the past. In each of our
pasts are people who have lived life beautifully, and there is much we can
learn in that. Like all Buddhas-to-be, we can forge new selves; “we, who eat
Sunday’s ravioli on Monday, / peel away before dropping / into the sauce”
(11). University
of Michigan Dorothy
Bryant. Anita,
Anita: Garibaldi of the New World. Berkeley, CA: Ata Books, 1993. In her article,
“Talking Back,” feminist critic bell hooks defines “back talk” as speaking as
an equal to an authority figure. To do this, a woman must show qualities of
defiance and courage, especially because she has been socialized to be
silent by the cultural assumptions of her society. Dorothy Bryant depicts
Anita Garibaldi, unquestionably, as a woman warrior, one who talks
back—resists inequality with the impassioned response of the oppressed and
marginalized. In her tenth novel, Anita,
Anita, Bryant affirms the centrality of her female protagonist’s position
as an equal to her husband, Giuseppe Garibaldi, who has been described by
historians as one of the foremost fighters for liberty in nineteenth-century
Italy. Bryant’s novel is a brilliant revisioning of Anita Garibaldi’s life
with her exile husband during the years 1835–1848. What makes Bryant’s work
a testimonial to the resiliency of the historical novel is her ability to
reconstruct imaginatively and innovatively such primary sources as Garibaldi’s
memoirs and other biographies. Both the structure of Anita, Anita and the depiction of Ana Ribiero de Duarte’s development
as a rebel and warrior make the novel an important addition to the American
novel and to women’s literature. The story is framed
by Garibaldi’s first-person confessional voice during his second exile from
Italy in Peru in 1851. There he stayed with Manuela Saenz, lover and defender
of Simon Bolivar, who has died. Though she remains silent throughout
Garibaldi’s narration, Manuela’s position vis-à-vis Bolivar is to be
interpreted doubly: she is like Anita in her devotion to a fighter for
liberty, but she is also like Garibaldi himself, because she, too, is
suffering banishment and exile. Thus her ubiquitous presence during Garibaldi’s
narrative reinforces the eternal bond between Anita and Garibaldi as by this
time Anita has died but Garibaldi’s memory of her lives on. As he grieves for
her throughout his narration, Garibaldi closes the book with a tribute to the
mutuality in their relationship and their dedication to the same goals: “Ten
years of love and hope. Fighting was our victory. Wandering was our home. She
was my youth, my hope, my life. My Anita, Anita.” That Bryant chooses
to have Garibaldi narrate his own story suggests her awareness of this
leader’s self-reflexivity. Having written his memoirs epitomizes Garibaldi’s
tendency toward self-revelation and an awareness that written expression of
his life legitimates his enterprise of seeking freedom for Italy and for himself
as a liberated voice. In this novel, Garibaldi controls the narration of his life with Anita and with the South
American and Italian revolutionaries. Although he suffers banishment and
exile, Garibaldi’s voice resonates with the confidence of the inspired
leader, one whose idealism embraces the Horatian belief Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Despite Garibaldi’s own
honesty and humility in his realization that the 1843 battle was a gross
caricature of the Homeric battles immortalized by Alexander Dumas, he
concludes that the ideal triumphs over the real: “Who can explain this
irresistible call to die for something?—this belief that on some higher
plane, our dirty little skirmishes exist in noble, operatic, even divine
forms.” In alternating chapters,
Bryant shifts to a third-person limited omniscient narrator, who introduces
the fourteen-year old, petulant, unlettered Ana Ribiero. In an early prophecy
by the black curandera, Yvanga,
Anita is told that she will marry a man with long red hair who will bring her
danger, pain, and an early death. Already non-traditional, impetuous, and
impassioned, Anita’s first marriage to the conservative local cobbler is only
a half-hearted attempt to meet her superstitious, fatalistic mother’s
expectations. Ultimately, Anita fulfills both her mother’s expectation that
she marry and Yvanga’s prophecy: in a loveless and significantly barren
marriage to Manoel, who joins the imperial army and leaves Anita head
shopkeeper, Anita soon joins the army with Garibaldi, who leads South
American and Italian revolutionaries in the fight for independence. Bryant
signifies the equality between Anita and Peppe by clarifying that each is
the object of the other’s fascination and reverence: Peppe admits to Anita
that he had watched her through his telescope at the top of the Barra, to
which Anita responds: “I know. . . . I watched you too.”
Realizing that leaving her husband is punishable by death for a woman in
Laguna, Anita’s leave-taking must be permanent. Equally aware, Garibaldi
promises to maintain a relationship of passion and equality with Anita
throughout their life together. Such ideals are challenged by the sexist and
misogynist standards of both South American and Italian society. Early in her career
as a warrior, Anita is described as “pure energy, focussed on the fight, only
the fight. . . . She is the fight.” Within this idealistic realm,
Anita functions as “the bravest man” of Gari-baldi’s crew. As a consequence
of learning that her friend, Captain John Grigg, was killed by Brazilian
gunboats, Anita cannot accept as a condolence that honor was gained in his
dying. Thereafter, Bryant suggests that Anita becomes a woman warrior—no less
courageous—but refusing to shoot a gun, nor draw a knife except to cut food.
By having Garibaldi himself narrate the change in Anita’s heroism, Bryant
reinforces this great warrior’s equally grand conception of his partner’s
bravery: “From then on she carried ammunition to others and she nursed the
wounded. If anything, she was more bold than ever, always in the thick of the
fight. . . . We were two soldiers riding side by side.”
Equally important is Garibaldi’s realization that Anita’s torturous first
childbirth exceeded anything he suffered in battle or captivity. Despite the strength
of their union, the conventions of the South American society (specifically
during their seven-year stay in Montevideo) pervert and oppress their
relationship. As if to reinforce both dramatically and insidiously how their
partnership begins to suffer, Bryant recalls how Anita is compelled by the
small-minded provincials of Montevideo to marry Garibaldi for the sake of
Menotti (their first-born) and a second child soon coming. Anita’s response
proves as prophetic as Yvanga’s when she proclaims with chagrin, “bring on
the priests and liars.” It is no coincidence that shortly after their
marriage, several occurrences reinforce that this couple’s ideal union is
besmirched by the very constraint (the institution of marriage) each sought
to avoid: Anita’s second child, Rosita, will die of scarlet fever; Garibaldi
will have an affair with another woman, thus fulfilling Bryant’s definition
of a wife, one who is “naturally, inevitably . . . betrayed”; Anita
will regretfully have to pick up the sewing scissors she left at Laguna, an
earlier sign of her freedom; finally, Anita will have to defend herself
alone against the disapproval of Garibaldi’s mother, who wants her
daughter-in-law to be married again when they return to Italy. Anita’s heroism once
more bursts forth when she dares to talk back to Garibaldi’s mother, her
ostensible superior. Choosing speech over silence—“You will never make me
into a proper Italian wife”—Anita moves from being the object of disapproval
to the subject of her own liberated voice, thus joining once again her
husband in equality. It is no wonder that when Anita later on meets Margaret
Fuller, another American
rebel and outcast, that Fuller’s words also ring true in describ-ing Anita’s integrity: “For better or worse, I lived out my character.” Bryant does for Anita
Garibaldi what poet Rachel Blau du Plessis does for the post-modern poet:
“makes otherness central” (Tabula Rasa,
84). In offering a narrative that focusses on the triumph and heroism of an
unlettered, undervalued, and virtually unknown wo-man, Bryant expands the
canon of American and women’s literature to celebrate the creative spirit of
one woman’s intense and important life. In structuring her narrative to
include both the voice of the historically famous leader Garibaldi and the
much lesser known Anita Garibaldi, Bryant beautifully conveys the spirit of
equality in their relationship. The alternating chapters, like the
relationship between Anita and Peppe, reinforce that neither hero has
hegemony. Thus Anita Garibaldi’s marginality is not a place of deprivation,
but rather, as bell hooks suggests, a site of radical possibility. Bryant’s
novel, Anita, Anita superbly
demonstrates the triumphs involved in living out one’s character with honesty
and formidable fortitude. Gonzaga
University Peter
Carravetta and Paolo Valesio, eds. Poesaggio: poeti italiani d’America.
Quinto di Treviso: Pagvs Edizioni, 1993. “Certe volte non so chi
sono” (“sometimes I do not know who I am”). Upon reading this opening line of
the collection, from Alessandro Carrera’s poem “Buongiorno. Sono il vostro
pilota,” echoes of Palazzeschi’s famous poem ruminated through my mind, but
as I read on, the phrase slowly began to acquire an interrogative tone—“who
am I?” A question complicated by the presence of not one lyrical “I,” but
twelve; twelve fine poets drawn together to explore the nature of their own
identity. Certainly not an easy task, especially when all twelve poets write
almost entirely in a language alien to the ears of their neighbours. Indeed,
all twelve poets represented in this work are Italians who, for one reason or
another, currently reside in the United States. This position of writing in
Italian within the English-speaking world has left the poets caught between
two cultures: Italian and American. This unique situation creates a whole
range of problems, not least of which is that of an audience. While some
poets, notably Peter Carravetta and Alessandro Carrera, have confronted this
problem by publishing at least some work in English, many others have looked
to publish almost exclusively in Italy. The diffi-culty, though, has become
one of acceptance, particularly in Italy, where many of these poets have been
viewed as outsiders. This hand-some volume is, therefore, of great
importance, since it is the first collection published in Italy to draw
together the work of Italian poets working in America. While its scope is
certainly not exhaustive, it does include a fairly representative selection:
Peter Carravet-ta, Alessandro Carrera, Giovanni Cecchetti, Luigi Fontanella,
Pier Massimo Forni, Maurizio Godorecci, Ernesto Livorni, Mario Moroni,
Eugenia Paulicelli, Antonella Pease, Emilio Speciale, and Paolo Valesio. The book is divided
into five sections: an introduction by Peter Car-ravetta, the poetic texts,
critical and aesthetic reflections by the po-ets, a concluding essay by Paolo
Valesio, and biobibliographies of the poets. Thus, in many ways, the book is
much more that a poetry col-lection; it is, a survey of the paesaggio of Italian poetry in
America. Paolo Valesio’s
fascinating essay “I fuochi della tribù” (“The Fires of the Tribe”) is a fine
attempt to contextualize the experience and practice of “il poeta fra i due
mondi” (“the poet between two worlds”). Early in his essay, Valesio notes the
increasingly transcul-tural nature of a lot of artistic production which, to
his mind, high-lights the need, especially in Italy, for “the development of
a non-nationalistic concept of literary history.” This principle provides the
perfect segue to the heart of the essay; that is, the exploration of both the
differences and the interrelations between four categories of poets:
American, Italian, Italian/American, and “poets between two worlds.” In many
ways, all these poetic traditions have produced poets who are “between two
worlds.” Indeed, Valesio argues, much of the richness of the British and
North American traditions has come through “a mental and spiritual
bilingualism.” The situation of the poesaggio
group, however, is, as Valesio continues, unique.
Unlike Italian Americans, who can choose whether or not to declare their
ethnic affiliations, Italians writing in America cannot escape from their tiny
and marginalized “tribù.” This “tribù” has a limited aesthetic history, its
only noteworthy historical predecessor being the little-known Emanuel
Carnevali (1897–1942). Thus, Valesio notes, the importance of this project
which “presents itself simulta-neously as a description (of a situation already in existence for some years)
and as an exhortation (to examine and enrich this situation).” No tribe can exist,
however, without some kind of underlying aesthetic or philosophical basis.
The exploration of just such topics comes most richly in Part Two of the work
entitled simply “Poetiche” (“Poetics”). All of the poets, with the exception
of Pier Massimo Forni, give their own aesthetic viewpoints. While all of
these beliefs are quite different from one another, obvious similarities can
be seen in their opinions vis-à-vis their unique position as “poets between
two worlds.” Poetry is a journey (Paulicelli) with the poet as a “wan-derer”
(Valesio) exploring, creating, and crossing borders (Moroni) both in the external
and internal paesaggio (Carravetta,
Carrera, Cecchetti, Pease, Paulicelli). This inner journey is a dialogic
process (Godorecci and Paulicelli) which occurs, as most of the poets acknowledge,
in the important foreground of time and memory. The journey of the poesaggio project itself is explained
most fully by one of its key architects, Peter Carravetta, in his
introductory essay. There Carravetta elucidates his rationale for initiating
inter-cultural poetry readings, the first of which took place in New York in
1984. The growth of this process lead to the first poesaggio of Italian poets in America at the first Purdue
Conference on Romance Lan-guages, Literatures, and Film in 1989, out of which
arose the first pub-lished poesaggio
in volume one of Romance Languages
Annual, and eventually to the poesaggio
at the annual American Association for Italian Studies conference at the
University of Virginia in 1990, whose result is this excellent volume. Like
other poetry readings, a poesaggio re-creates the ancient tradition of poetry
as performance. More novel, though, is the structure of this performance.
While at a typical poetry reading, several poets read portions of their work
for a set period of time, in a poesaggio
these individual blocks are broken down and the reading becomes a more
collective endeavor. Each poet reads no more than one poem at a time, each
poem following after its predecessor according to a predetermined order. In
this way, each poem is both a complete signifying unit and a participant in a
larger intersecting poetic and hermeneutic web. This group of poets
is certainly not the first to engage in such a collective enterprise. The
Japanese renga, for example, has been in existence for over a thousand years.
In more recent times, this rich tradition has been utilized by some Western
poets, most famously in 1969 when Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Eduardo
Sanguineti, and Charles Tomlinson engaged in a multi-lingual collaborative
work which was published under the title Renga:
a Chain of Poems (New York: George Braziller, 1971). In his introduction
to this work, Octa-vio Paz acknowledges that underpinning renga itself is an
awareness of cultural duality. While Poesaggio
is a very different project, like Renga,
it engages pluralistic notions of culture and self. Lying at the core of many
of these poems is an exploration of individual and cultural identity.
Journey, memory, language, the present, Italy and America, and what they
represent, as well as intensely personal themes, such as love, intertwine and
resonate in fascinating ways. Styles, ideas, and images vary, but at the
heart of the matter lies the interrogative “chi sono?” This is not to say
that each poem could not be read in isolation, but the collection becomes
much more fruitful when the poems are read in sequential order. Several mini
poetic cycles, such as Paolo Valesio’s nine part “Figlio dell’uomo a
Corco-vado” are dispersed throughout the work, lending still further
cohe-sion to the entire collection. Indeed, Poesaggio produces layer upon layer of themes, ideas, and images
which weave themselves into a fascinating hermeneutic web. This book represents
the third published poesaggio, the
first two coming in volumes one and two of Romance Languages Annual. Hope-fully, it will not be the last. In
crossing the boundaries of monocul-turalism, an outlook all too entrenched in
the Italian academy, and identifying a new arena of poetic discourse, the poesaggio group has opened up to
audiences in both North America and, more particularly, Italy, a new horizon
on the ever-enlarging map of multicultural diaspora. This book is, therefore,
of great importance. Yet, to have any substantive impact, the project must go
on, and thus we can only hope that, as Peter Carravetta states at the end of
his introduction, “the poesaggio
continues.” Purdue
University Lucia
Chiavola Birnbaum. Black Madonnas: feminism, religion, and politics in Italy.
Ithaca: Northeastern UP, 1993. It is no accident
that Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum’s 1988 article “Black and Other Madonnas”
appeared in the spirituality issue of the literary journal la bella figura. In her research trip
to Southern Italy, Birnbaum personally observed the popular traditions associated
with the Easter season, in particular the celebration of the giunta, the reunion between mother and
son that, in popular custom among peasants, takes place outside the church
and is of deep spiritual significance to the community. In her immensely
important new book, Black Madonnas:
feminism, religion, and politics in Italy, Birnbaum extends the analysis
of her previous book (liberazione della
donna, 1987) to offer an intriguing revisionary history of the origins
and meanings of black madonnas, who, according to Birnbaum, “may be
considered a metaphor for a memory of the time when the earth was believed to
be the body of a woman and all creatures were equal, a memory transmitted in
vernacular traditions of earth-bonded cultures.” Travelling to twenty-five of
the significant sanctuaries of black madonnas in Italy, Birnbaum concludes
that each was located on or near archeological evidence of the prechristian
woman divinity. The veneration of the indigenous goddess of Old Europe,
Birnbaum hypothesizes, merges with African, Middle Eastern, and Asian dark
goddesses and persists in the Christian era in vernacular beliefs and rituals
honoring black madonnas. Like the primordial woman divinity, black madonnas
are believed to nurture all life and may be regarded “as a metaphor for the
popular hope for liberation of the poor, the marginal, and the suppressed of
the earth.” Birnbaum correctly
places her study of black madonnas alongside the revisionary works of
feminist and other scholars (Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Elaine Pagels, and
Robert Graves, for example) equally dedicated to reconstructing the origins
of women’s history in order judiciously to interpret and reclaim that history
as one that involves both men and women. Applying the Italian theorist’s
Antonio Gramsci’s definition of subjugated peoples (what he calls the
“subaltern classes”) to women, who have been historically, politically, and
economically subordinated by the hegemonic church and state, Birnbaum makes a
connection between their vernacular ways of knowing and what is implied by
the metaphor of the black madonna: both bypass “established knowledge and
belief . . . [and participate in] what Michel Foucault calls the
‘insurrection of subjugated knowledges’, a revolt visible in accumulating
evidence . . . that the old divinity perceived by humans was a
woman.” Birnbaum’s study
moves beyond a mere piling up of evidence and instead interprets the metaphor
of the black madonna as a clarion call, not for bloody revolution, but for an
awareness of the women’s and students’ movements and the political party (the
Pds, the Partito democratico della sinistra), each valuing liberty, justice
and equality with difference. Because vernacular beliefs in justice and
equality are embodied in the black madonna and visible in Italy today in the
contemporary nonviolent women’s and students’ movements, Birnbaum’s study
offers hope for a less violent future. Birnbaum extends her analysis of
black madonnas by looking into other rituals stemming from the subaltern
classes: Italian pilgrimages to black madonnas of the poor; the carnevale,
and folklore. Though Sicilians and other Southerners have traditionally been
devalued for their “earth-rootedness,” says Birnbaum, they may very well be
the source of the political and cultural transformation becoming visible
today in Italy. Of the seven passages
that serve as a preface to Black
Madonnas and are thereafter developed in the chapters, two in particular
address the revolutionary nature of Birnbaum’s analysis: in the first, she
quotes from the Song of Songs,
persuasively suggesting a connection (initially traced by cultural
anthropologist, Leonard Moss) between black madonnas and the black woman of
the biblical passage: “Yes I am black! and radiant— / O city women watching
me— / As black as Kedar’s goathair tents / Or Solomon’s fine tapestries.”
Noting Moss’s early important essay on the black madonna, Birnbaum recalls
this Jewish/American soldier’s first encounter with the black madonna of
Lucera in Southern Italy at the end of World War II: asking a priest why the
madonna of Lucera was black, Moss received a stunning equivocation, one that
closed the subject, as far as the priest was concerned: “my son, she is
black because she is black.” What further piqued
Moss’s and now Birnbaum’s interest was “the Semitic element in the phenomenon
of black madonnas.” Birnbaum explains that in the prechristian era, there was
a regular interchange of Jews from the Middle East and Blacks from Africa.
Jews in diaspora founded their oldest European settlement at Rome. Birnbaum
goes on to explain that Christianity in Italy arose in Trastevere, the Jewish
quarter in Rome. It is therefore no coincidence, suggests Birnbaum, that in
the earliest Christian church of Rome, Santa Maria in Trastevere (whose
church and surrounding purlieu have always been poor) “the madonna is
depicted as the Black woman of Song of Songs.” Birnbaum then explains how,
after the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, Jews settled in Liguria, a
coast characterized by evidence of the culture of “the goddess, Jewish
communities, sanctuaries of black madonnas, and a politics of justice.” After
locating the black madonna of Lucera, whose sanctuary is built on the site of
the indigenous goddess Mefite, Birnbaum extends her analysis to include the
“mingled history of Jews and Muslims in Italy.” Birnbaum ends her section on
the suppressed history of Muslims in Italy with provocative questions, ones
that reiterate and make convincing Gramsci’s belief that denied cultures
challenge hegemonic culture through their own vernacular religious and
political beliefs: “Does the black madonna of Lucera connote deep beliefs in
the indigenous Samnite goddess Mefite, the Black woman of the Song of Songs
of Hebrew scripture, and suppressed woman-centered beliefs of Muslims who
ruled southern Italy for six-hundred and Sicily for four-hundred years?” An equally intriguing
precursor of the liberation theology embodied in black madonnas is the
meaning(s) hidden in fables; Birnbaum suggests the connection between black
madonnas and fables by quoting in the preface a definition of fables that
suggests that they, too, like the black madonna, are a metaphor for a
submerged, radically democratic belief: “[In fables] every voice has a right,
every subject can put her/himself at the periphery or at the center, every
knowledge has its possibilities” (Laura Marchetti, ed., Il femminile nella fiaba). If fables are considered an expression
of the collective unconscious, of stories that refer to “una fede antica e popolare (an ancient popular faith),” then it
is no wonder that Italian feminists, communists, and socialists are returning
to fables “to retrieve the vernacular wisdom lost in the modern age.”
Birnbaum accurately connects the definition of fables with the undertaking of
postmodernism: both subvert the foundations of accepted modes of thought and
experience. What is of ultimate importance here is not the subversive
activity underlying fables, but rather their power of transformation: for
example, nonna recounts the story
of Cinderella to remind the children that ashes are good for doing the
laundry; thus fables teach that “life is bonded with death, that all of us
are finite, that the point is not to win, but to transform.” The importance,
thus, of the postmodern implication of fiaba
is its capacity for transformation, for example, between men and women,
opening them up to more fluid possibilities: “anyone can take a pumpkin and
turn it into a carriage—anyone can take a familiar object and, looking at it
differently, turn it into a journey of discovery.” The vernacular
beliefs in justice and equality embodied in the reverence to the black
madonna, folk traditions, and fables are also implicit in celebrations of
carnivals, feste dei pazzi,
holidays of mad people. Using Bakhtin’s theories on the folk custom of carnevale, Birnbaum analyzes the
radical democracy associated with festivals della libertà. Because everybody participates, carnivals function
as “utopian projections of how people would like to live in a community of
freedom, equality, and abundance.” For example, the Neapolitan carnival is
symbolized by la vecchia o’carnevale,
“a homemade puppet of an old woman with a young body, large breasts, and a
widow’s hump, an evocation of the three ages of the woman divinity.” For
Bakhtin, carnivals suggest subversion because in celebrating freedom, the
deferential masks of the common people fall away, thus eroding the
pretensions of the patriarchal church and state. Arlecchino (Harlequin), the
mascot of carnival in Italy, symbolizes such subversion in his function as a
lower-class manservant with aspirations. Birnbaum suggests that this Italian
symbol of subversion may be at least nineteen centuries old and a descendant
of the Samnites, “indigenous peoples of the Naples area who were continually
invaded but never spiritually conquered, and whose passion is evident in
pilgrimages to the black madonna dell’Arco.” Because she is
connected to the subterranean deity, the black madonna has traditionally been
equated with the peasant desire for justice, or, as Carlo Levi notes, peasant
revolts surge from the “black lake of the heart.” Throughout her study of
black madonnas, Birn-baum provides ample evidence that the central value to
emerge from such a study is the value of justice. In her effort to reveal the
sub-versive nature of the submerged, marginalized, and often whitened, figure
of the madonna, Birnbaum offers a new way to interpret the portrait of the
Southern Italian woman; she is hardly the mater
dolorosa promulgated by the church. Rather, sharing characteristics of
the primordial woman divinity, the peasant mother has main-tained her role as
the center of the economic, social, and religious life of her family because
of her ability to build networks among other women of power: mammane (midwives); fattucchieri (healers); ri-putatrici (official mourners); streghe (witches); comari (godmothers); and, of course, madonne, women’s “special advocate.”
In this way, peasant women continue the work of the prechristian goddess in
their determination to nurture well, transmit vernacular beliefs, and
maintain the health of their families in the midst of conditions of miseria. Birnbaum proves well that
black madonnas celebrate equality and justice. Recalling the truth embodied
in the folk proverb recorded by Italian historian Giorgio Galli—“the future
has an ancient heart”—Birnbaum has persuasively and creatively demon-strated
that the vernacular beliefs implied in the metaphor of the black madonna
offer an ascendancy of values associated with women’s experience. Black Madonnas is an important
testimonial to the many dimensions of the prechristian woman divinity, her
continuity in the Christian era, and her representation of hope for a better
future. Gonzaga
University Stelio
Cro. Such Stuff as
Dreams are Made On: Pirandello and the Baroque. Hamilton, Ontario,
Canada: Symposium Press, 1993. 136pp. Pirandello,
Cervantes, Calderón, and Shakespeare may at first seem to be strange
bedfellows. Not so Stelio Cro argues in his short, but insightful, book.
Although rooted in different cultures, literary traditions, and, in the case
of Cervantes, generic conventions, and separated by temporal and linguistic
boundaries, these authors share many common philosophical and thematic
concerns which Cro neatly embeds within the term Baroque. Cro frees himself from the self-imposed limits of time,
geography, and artistic conventions common to many critical readings, and
instead persuasively argues that “the Baroque is not only a literary
movement, but a new way of perceiving reality, of seeing the world.” In this
way, Cro does for the Baroque what criticism of the last thirty years or so
has done for terms such as Realism,
Modernism, and Post-Modernism;
that is, he broadens its significance, seeing it not solely as a term which
signifies a set of aesthetic conventions enacted by a chronologically and geographically
circumscribed group of artists, as traditional criticism has often done, but
also as a term which reflects certain epistemological, ontological, and
philosophical outlooks and attitudes. Cro’s book is not,
however, a study of the Baroque, but
of Pirandello and the Baroque. For Cro, the Baroque has had
a strong impact on Pirandello’s thought. Fortunately, this does not lead Cro
into the blind alley of pedantic source criticism, but rather he views the
link as an interrelationship, and thus throughout his study he observes
Pirandello through the optic of the Baroque, as well as the Baroque through
the filter of Pirandello. In the brief first
section, Cro usefully highlights the common philosophical concerns of both
Baroque thought, especially Bruno, Pascal, and Spinoza, and Pirandello,
noting most particularly the strong similarities between their views on the
infinite and on Man’s position vis-à-vis the universe. In the midst of such
ideas lies the concept central to both Baroque and Pirandellian thought: the
paradox. Existence, for
Pirandello, depends on paradox. For Pirandello, “the eternal contradiction”
lies in the fact that “in order for the being to live it would be necessary
for each form to die incessantly; but without form the being does not live”
(5). This eternal battle between form and life, reality and illusion, and the
epistemological, ontological, and existential questions which it raises form
the thematic heart of the work of both Pirandello and his “Baroque”
predecessors: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Calderón. Indeed, such
“philosophical” notions lead to many of the literary conventions commonly
associated with Baroque theater: for example, the theme of the play within
the play, and the motif of dream (14). These “conventions,” thus, provide a
link between writers normally considered Baroque, such as Cal-derón, and
those traditionally viewed as residing outside its boun-daries, including, of
course, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Pirandello. Cro’s critical
enterprise, in fact, consists largely of a comparative elaboration of these
conventions. Cro very briefly and forthrightly dismisses the usefulness of
“ideological,” particularly Marxist and psychoanalytic, criticism in the
analysis of Pirandello and Shakes-peare (11–12). Moreover, he legitimizes
Northrop Frye’s view that “many critics . . . are less interested
in literature than in the relation of literature to some primary ideological
interest” (104). Just as the Baroque itself relies on polyphony, so to does
Cro’s critical approach. He refuses to be limited to any single modus operandi; instead he fuses
several critical strategies. These include source criticism, a kind of
structural (but not necessarily Structuralist) criticism, as well as the type
of genre criticism engaged in by Northrop Frye, particularly in his books on
Shakespeare. Cro’s method relies most fully, however, on close readings of
the texts in question. Indeed, over eighty percent of his study consists in
comparative textual readings of the works of Pirandello with those of
Cervantes, Shakespeare, and, ultimately, Calderón. The book maintains
narrative coherency by focusing most of its attention “on the symbolic
meaning of the structure . . . called the ‘Play within the Play’” (13).
In Cro’s capable hands, the polyvalent nature of this term is explored in
some detail. Indeed, it is not solely a dramatic device or structure, but a
sign which can be used for interesting excavations into other genres,
including, of course, the great novel Don
Quijote of Miguel Cervantes. Cro’s enquiries into the “play within the
play” structure lead him to interesting observations on the interrelationship,
particularly in theme, technique, and philosophy between Pirandello and the
Baroque. Such notions as character, the nature of reality and illusion, the
dichotomy between life and form, and the nature of Art and Theater are
explored in fine detail with a judicious use of quotation and annotation. Perhaps the only
disappointing thing about this study is its somewhat lean concluding section
which unfortunately misses the opportunity to provide a strong denouement to
an otherwise fine study of Pirandello’s work. Cro’s readings are perceptive
and offer the reader a new and interesting way to view the development of
Pirandellian-ism from the early novel Il
fu Mattia Pascal, through the great plays, to his final allegory I Giganti della montagna. Purdue
University Joshua
King. “The Last Enemy”
and Other Stories. Tallahassee: Desoto, 1991. In his first attempt
at fiction, Joshua King presents two novellas and a short story, in which the
protagonists, whether it be for themselves or another character, must all
psychologically come to grips with the timeless, universal last enemy—death.
Characters vacillate between real life affliction and tortuous nightmares: a
retired colonel dreams of his perilous jungle days in Vietnam; a college professor’s
sleep is plagued by images of his walking down long ominous university
corridors; a Roman centurion wakes from an unconscious state only to find
that he had been crucified. The first novella,
entitled The Last Enemy, places the
reader in the year 2029 just after the United States Congress has narrowly
passed a highly controversial law sanctioning euthanasia for patients who
have “lapsed into an irreversible process of deteriorating conditions leading
to certain medical death in the foreseeable future.” An ambitious Dr.
Douglas lobbies to recruit the consent of a prominent academic couple to have
the man’s father, the celebrated Vietnam war hero Colonel MacArthur, be one
of the first “euthees” in a bizarre procedure which drops drugged candidates,
wheelchair and all, into a deserted island off the coast of Cuba. The corpse
is there left to rapidly decompose with the aid of the sun, birds, and other
small predators, thus proving to be ecologically sounder than customary
burials. The wife wants to be rid of the old man and his furnishings so she
can convert his room into an office. Although the husband walks around
awestruck by this powerful coquette who is “so beauti-ful and so
intelligent,” he is still reluctant to put his consent in writ-ing. That is,
however, until another “incredibly beautiful” woman, the nurse who will take
part in the death procedure, enters the scene and her captivating beauty
strips him of all guilt and previous thoughts of his wife, enabling him to
readily sign the agreement papers. The glitch comes when
the only humane family member, the couple’s little deaf girl, attempts to
save the grandfather she adores by sewing a parachute out of numerous sheets
and concealing it behind the doomed man by tieing it to him with strips of
sheets that no one ever notices. Though the colonel does meet his demise, the
parachute causes the best laid plans to go awry. The social
ramifications of euthanasia are expressed in the subplot involving Tom
Medcalf, another academic and the grandson of the soldier whom the colonel
saved in Vietnam (who also happens to be the doctor’s grounds keeper), who
becomes ostracized by his colleagues for his negative stance on the issue. In The Lost Chapters of Sigmund Greaves,
yet another academic must contend with the hypocrisy of the ivory towers and
his desire to leave a legacy of significant standing. In this novella, King,
an admirer of Luis Borges, intermingles fact with fiction, to convince the
reader of the existence of Professor George Cain’s scholarly obsession
William Simpson Garland whose name is mentioned in the same breath as
Pirandello, D’Annunzio, Longfellow, and T.S. Elliot. In an effort to
publish something of consequence, Dr. Cain stretches the coincidences in the
lives of two deceased writers: the believed to be German born Sigmund Greaves
and the German-American Simpson Garland, insisting the two are one in the
same. On an adventure taking him from Venice to Germany, and with the aid of
a retired Italian professor of German literature, Benvenuto Donini, Cain
proves his hypothesis and achieves fame, even though, the premise of his argument
may be more a product of his intense wishes rather than fact. The short story, Land of Long Shadows, takes place in
ancient Rome upon the proclamation of the Edict of Milan. The subject of religion
and politics is argued through the discussion of two friends: Adrian, the
Christian school teacher, and Marcus, the Roman legionnaire. Though Marcus
returns from battle unscathed, converts to Christianity, and settles down
with a nice girl, he is called one last time to war. In the outcome of
Marcus’s final conflict, the author proves the point that hate, violence,
brutality and greed, whether in the name of religion or despite religion,
prevail. While King’s plots
are creative, his characters tend to be one dimensional and employ
inappropriate or inconsistent language. In The Last Enemy, twenty-first century Americans at times speak as
though they were turn ot the 19th-century British, having “spots” of liquor,
and using expressions like, “who the devil” and “my dear,” while grounds
keeper Ben talks like a cowboy out of the old west. In The Land of Long Shadows, ancient Romans converse like
contemporary buddies. The writing is also filled with repetitive adjectives
and cliches. In each tale, all of the women are “incredibly beautiful” and
“extraordinarily handsome”; Professor Cain is continually “shaking” or
“perspiring” with anxiety; and Marcus Lucullus is forever riding away “in a
cloud of dust.” The author’s
knowledge of history, literature, and Italy adds interest to this reading;
however, the unevenness of the writing limits it as a satisfying piece of
fiction. Northampton,
Massachusetts Frank
Lentricchia. The
Edge of Night: A Confession. New York: Random House, 1994. After nearly
twenty-five years of writing award-winning literary criticism that has earned
him a reputation as one of America’s best cultural critics (and the nickname
“The Dirty Harry of Literary Criticism”), Frank Lentricchia has aimed his pen
in new directions. In The Edge of
Night: A Confession, Lentricchia creates a book out of various pieces of
his life. Not autobiography, in the traditional sense, The Edge is as much imaginary as it is autobiographical. This
mixture has resulted in a number of incredible misreadings. One publisher, who
rejected the manuscript, said she wouldn’t want to run into the author in a
dark alley. In a New York Times review
(Feb. 6) British critic John Sutherland referred to The Edge as “Mr. Lentricchia’s Italian hoodlum act” (24).
Sutherland’s inappropriate comment along with his ridiculous review is
symptomatic of a society bent on interpreting Italian America through a
single stereotypical lens. By focusing on Lentricchia’s inventive and
imaginative play with mafiosi
figures, Sutherland falls into a trap set by a master narrativist. The problem with such
readers is that they went looking for a real Frank Lentricchia in the content
of this book. Accustomed as many of us might be to connecting a writer’s life
to his writing, especially when the writing is labeled as autobiographical,
Frank Lentricchia, a professor of English at Duke University, quite
ingeniously, connects memory to imagination to create a first-rate reading
experience. In true Italian fashion, he creates a variety of figures based on
his life. In the first chapter,
Lentricchia presents a version of his self that tells the reader the narrator
is unreliable. His mother “prone to ope-ra” tells his wife that: “He
exaggerates. He exaggerates everything. He gets it from his mother” (5). Yet
he is also like his grandfathers: Tomaso Iacovelli, the storyteller and
keeper of the oral tradition, and Augusto Lentricchia, the frustrated writer
who produced a 1,200 page manuscript that came into his grandson Frank’s
possession only after Augusto’s death. The Edge of Night
transcends any traditional definition of autobiography and is better read as
auto-fiction. Throughout the work, we witness a self constantly remaking the
self, so that there is no single identity that can be pinned down and
explained. By doing this, Lentricchia more accurately reflects the realities
of a postmodern world. Each chapter is the result of a shedding of a self
that continues to evolve. In this way, Lentricchia fashions a masterful
example of bella figura, the figure
that is there comes from a real world, but does not belong to the real world. Lentricchia admits
that his interest lies more in the process of writing than the resulting
product. “I never existed except in this doing,” he writes, but that “I”
cannot be pinned down. For once the process stops, the “I” stops being. Each
section of this auto-fiction finds a new “I” emerging to encounter
experiences that create different senses of a self. In “Part One, To the
Monastery (May 1991-September 1991)” one Frank Lentricchia goes off to Mepkin
Abbey, reads Thomas Merton, and gains a new sense of religion. In “Chapter
Two,” a different Frank Lentricchia takes off for Ireland, the homeland of
his literary self and one of his cultural grandfathers—Yeats. He goes in
search of the ghosts of the writers he has read and about whom he has written.
On this trip he transports a new self that he has begun creating through his
latest writing project which is unlike anything he has previously written; he
is paranoid about losing that self—an extremely fragile self that is newly
created on paper. These two selves—the newly literary and the critical
Franks—come together in a fanciful encounter between Don DeLillo and William
Yeats at Do-minick’s Restaurant in the Bronx. He returns to this trip toward
the end and learns that the name Frank does not exist in Irish. In the third chapter
we witness a transition from which the liter-ary critic becomes the self
critic; in essence, the end of literary criti-cism becomes the beginning of
self-criticism. Previously published in “Harper’s” as “My Kinsman, T.S.
Eliot,” this section explores the so-cial consequences of achieving literacy
through an intellectual ver-sion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “My
Kinsman, Major Molineaux.” Throughout the rest
of the work Lentricchia delves deep into both his historical past and his
imagination; he begins not only to fantasize, but also to criticize his past
as in this example in which the narrator imagines his daughter saying, “You
know, when it suits you, you come on like a wop right off the boat. You’re
proud of this, to put it mildly. It’s like a weapon, like a knife, your
ethnicity. Why did you take relish in teaching us those words when we were
young? Wop, greaseball, dago, guinea, spaghetti bender. You like those words,
but they just bore us. We don’t care” (142). But readers will care. Lentricchia knows
that the price of social mobility is the creation of alternative selves that
adapt to new situations arising when one encounters on the trip away from the
family and into society: “The word tour of an echo chamber containing a
number of subjects, each pointing to the other when a voice is heard. The Edge is proof that Lentricchia can
create literature as well as he can criticize it. Columbia
College, Chicago Frank
Lentricchia. The
Edge of Night: A Confession. Random House, 1994. Literary critic Frank
Lentricchia’s autobiographical fiction The
Edge of Night: A Confession details a middle-aged Italian/American
academic’s struggle to construct a coherent identity from the contradictory
positions that he inhabits. Lentricchia is an Italian American from a working
class background, currently teaching at Duke University, who has made his
career as a critic of the high modernist literary tradition—a tradition that
was often hostile to the “mass” culture of ethnic America into which
Lentricchia was born. His numerous published books include Ariel and the Police, Criticism and Social Change and his most famous After the New Criticism, a critical
evaluation of the development of literary theory from the height of American
New Criticism in the 1950s to poststructuralism in the early 1980s. Deeply
informed by the literature and theory that he has previously written about, The Edge of Night posits the self and
identity as social constructions open to question. The Edge of Night—which
is also the title of a popular television soap opera—bears the imprint of the
current cultural obsesssion with the self as representation and image.
Lentricchia narrates a life lived in the context of an American culture
saturated with representations of Italian Americans, which coalesce around a
number of easily recognizable stereotypes: some of these are “positive” such
as close, loving, family ties, and some more sinister such as Mafia
criminality and so forth. These images circulate freely, only tenuously
related to the lived experiences of Italian Americans, and eventually acquire
the status of truth. Lentricchia never explicitly challenges these stereotypes;
his deep engagement with them attests to their powerful influence in
Italian/American self-fashioning. In a powerful and
disturbing scene early in the book, Lentricchia voyeuristically describes a
man whom he suspects is a gangster standing outside of the critic’s favorite
pastry shop in Manhattan’s East Village. The encounter takes place during an
interview with a female, Italian/American editor of The Edge of Night. Lentricchia’s description of the elderly man
indicates a mixture of admiration, fear, and awe. The old man’s face, he
tells us, is the “best brutal face [he] had ever seen.” [He] would
occasionally walk outside to talk to youngish guys built like bulls, with
envelopes in their hands who kissed him on the cheek when they left. It was a
movie, post-Godfather. They knew
they were in a movie; they were enjoying themselves in the movie. Italian Americans,
like other marginalized groups, have appropriated the stereotypes used to
ridicule them and have transformed these images into empowering identity
constructs. Lentricchia’s deployment of the Mafia theme throughout the book
as a repertoire from which to draw images of resilient strength enacts the
Italian/American strategy of appropriating the pervasive myth of the ethnic
criminal as a way of deflecting slurs, often reclaiming the stereotype in the
form of humor and playfulness. Throughout the book, Lentricchia has a lot of
fun at his own expense by lampooning his use of the tough-guy gangster
stereotype. In this passage Lentricchia imagines his children deflating his
self-proclaimed title “Don”: At your age you
want us to believe you’re still carrying a grudge against your kindergarten teacher.
You just love Mafia talk, it turns you on. I’m going to put a contract out on
that old bitch. Just quoting “the Don,” that’s why we say
it. . . . You’re not the Don, Dad, you’re the nerd of Little
Italy. This quest for a
suitable identity, played out as a desire for a tough masculine exterior,
risks reproducing the negative stereotypes of Italian Americans as brutal and
patriarchal. The old man’s vicious countenance which fascinates Lentricchia
is invoked as a powerful cloak of masculinity that would defend him against
the female editor’s intrusive demands that he allow readers to “crawl inside
his head.” If Lentricchia were as tough and as brutal as the old man, would
this woman have the temerity to say such a thing to him? “If she could only
have coffee with this man everyday, if only she could, she would become more
sensitive in her relations with writers, she would become a good woman.” Later in the book, we
encounter another cinematic tough-guy with whom Lentricchia identifies:
Marlin Brando in On the Waterfront:
“a cliche I like to wrap tightly around me.” Cliché figures prominently in a
book so centrally concerned with hackneyed stereotypes of Italian Americans.
Given Lentricchia’s powerful literary imagination, the clichés that he
manipulates exist easily alongside the conventions that he has been trained
to recognize as literary norms. Lentricchia’s autobiography is informed by
the central generic convention of the autobiography form: the transformative
crisis experience. St. Augustine’s Confessions,
John Stuart Mill’s and Malcolm X’s autobiographies, for example, are
structured around pivotal crisis experiences that fundamentally alter each
writer’s relationship to the world. It seems that the central turning point
in Lentricchia’s life is his current desire to “mix up the personal and the
intellectual to the point where it would be impossible to separate them, not
as an exercise in high-wire theory (this I know how to do), but as an act of
homage to the real state of my affairs.” This signals a fundamental
re-evaluation of the public role of the critic. Lentricchia’s autobiography
marks an inward turn that finally takes him to a Trappist monastary in search
of a private space in which to think through the contradictions of his life. Much of The Edge of Night involves
Lentricchia’s (largely non-monastic) search for appropriate models of
Italian/American masculinity that would do justice to the differences that
he perceives between his own experience and the experiences of his academic colleagues.
The search for intellectual fathers underscores an unresolved an un resolved
tension in Lentricchia’s life: his nostalgic memories of the masculine
working-class world of his grandfather, and the effete, middle-class milieu
of his present academic career. Lentricchia’s “lyrical rage” paradoxically
records the anger of his alienation from the culture of his birth (which he
disingenuously claims no longer concerns him) and the cool and detached
analytical sensibilities required for an academic career. Among the best
passages in the book are those that explore the contradictions inherent in
Lentricchia’s position as an Italian/ American literary critic of working
class background obsessed, almost Oedipally, with the high modernist poet and
critic T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s elitism is well-known. In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture,
Eliot argues against mass education suggesting that “to be educated above the
level of those whose social habits and tastes one has inherited may cause a
division within a man which interferes with happiness.” This view rubs
against the grain of Lentricchia’s own experience; it is an opinion that, as
he phrases it, “no one should be able to stomach.” In working through his
troubling relation to Eliot, Lentricchia stages a dialogue that underlines
his ambivalent interest in Eliot; a dialogue between himself as a young boy
of working class ethnic background and Eliot, mandarin WASP poet of
expatriated American modernism. Lentricchia is thinking about his high school
teacher who taught Shakespeare to his mostly Italian/ American students in
Utica, New York, and imagines Eliot’s response to the “overeducation” of the
ethnics whom he despised: Eliot takes a
parting shot at young Frank: “But, clearly,” he says, “Shakespeare is no
expression of your culture.” (The emphasis is almost inaudible, but it’s
there, on “your.”) The young Frank fears the tall smart man, but he manages
this: “We know guys like Macbeth, we definitely heard of his wife.” Eliot is
merciless: “You attest to the power of the type to cross cultures, not to the
specificity of your own.” This fictive
encounter registers the pain of being the object of Eliot’s arrogant
assumptions of class and cultural superiority; assumptions that are complicated
by the adult Lentricchia’s love for the poet’s work. In a passage typical of
Lentricchia’s self-created tough-guy persona, and summarizing his attitude
toward the pretensions of the academic world to which he ambivalently
belongs, the young Frank rudely points out to Eliot that his confidence and
arrogance might really be masks hiding his own ambivalences and inadequacies:
“I heard you were from St. Louis, so how come you talk like that?” University
of California, Los Angeles Anna
Monardo. The
Courtyard of Dreams. Doubleday, 1993. $21.50. “The Italian part of
me has been at war with the American me for as long as I can remember,”
observes Giulia Di Cuore, the young, first-generation Italian-American
protagonist of this novel. The richly personal narrative that follows this
statement reveals both her conflict with and love of family and ethnic
heritage. The Courtyard of Dreams
tells the story of this struggle for identity that both complicates and
enriches a young woman’s coming of age. Giulia, born in 1956,
grows up between worlds in an old convent her psychiatrist father rents near
Cleveland, Ohio. She listens to her father’s stories of the Italy that he
had left in 1952 but which, in her view, still defines him and both invites
and excludes her: how, as a boy, he had left his peasant village in Calabria,
riding a donkey thirty miles to school, and how, later as a student during
the war, he had sought refuge from the bombings by sleeping in the sewers of
Naples. Giulia’s mother, who had been born on the boat to America and had
grown up as assimilated as tradition would allow, represents experiences with
which Giulia can more readily identify. Her mother, however, dies while
Giulia is quite young. Living on the same street are relatives who bring
food, advice, and the consolation of order and belonging as they know it. The
women take the young girl down to the pantry and show her what she must do: “That’s right,”
Cetta said, “it’s you who has to
know, Giulia, because your father, about these things, he knows nothing. Less
than nothing.” I tried to listen as, with great
satisfaction, they took me through their inventory. “Now here, on this low
shelf is your cheese. We wrap the cheeses in cloth, like this, to keep them
moist and nice, not too dry. This here, in these jars, is your vegetables,
picked fresh last summer from the garden. Then, your pastas . . .
your olives . . .” It went on. I was eye to eye with the old cans
of tomato paste, row after row of cheerful Contadina ladies, a small army
assembled by my aunt and my grandmother to protect my father and me—protect
us from the Russians, from hunger, from American food, from America itself. And Giulia grows up
protected, in an environment more strictly controlled than that of her
rebellious American peers, but she does not stay in the kitchen. She wants to
date and to leave home to study photography at Barnard. Her father consents
to her going away to a Catholic women’s college. She agrees to visit his
family in Italy for a summer. Little do they realize the changes and
challenges that this journey will bring. In Italy Giulia meets
her extended family and her first serious lover, a young Italian student
named Luca. Ultimately, she also comes to know both her father and herself.
As the story moves beyond its “girl meets boy” summer love scenario into the
complexities of personal growth, the young Americana becomes more fully aware of the dynamics of culture and
self. When her father meets her in his homeland, she sees him and her culture
differently: I
turned to look and in that first second’s glance at him sitting in that
Italian room, wearing a madras cotton shirt and whistling “Seventy-six Trombones,”
I saw that my father was not an Italian. To assimilate means to shed layers,
to stop being one thing, to become another. What had we become? What Giulia is to
become is her own decision, a resolution that is directed from southern
Italy, America, and the place she must establish for herself. In this deft
and evocative first novel, Anna Monardo displays a genuine gift for creating
images and scenes that allow her characters to reveal the subtleties of
perception and awareness. In recent years, novels such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
have explored the challenging psychological terrain of first-generation and
immigrant American daughters. Monardo enhances this consideration of cultural
and personal identity with her account of Italian-American experience, and
in her focus on a father-daughter relationship. The Courtyard of Dreams
is a gathering place of past and future, family and self, Italy and America,
and its intimacy and grace make this novel an inviting place to visit. St. Louis,
MO Anthony
J. Parel. The
Machiavellian Cosmos. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1992. Pp. 203. Anthony J. Parel sets
off on his journey through the Machiavellian
Cosmos by presenting an itinerary that promises the reader a detour off
the well-trodden terrain of Machiavelli scholarship. The author will here
explore “two themes generally neglected in Machiavelli scholarship,” the
first being that of “heaven/s (il
cielo, i cieli),” and the second, that of “humour/s (umor, umori).” Both “heaven/s” and “humour/s” belong to the world
of the “pre-modern,” and dwell within the realms of “ancient physics and
cosmology” and “the ancient science of medicine” respectively. Parel contends that
not only are there “theoretical connections” between these two sciences, but
that Machiavelli’s vision of the world vis-à-vis heaven/s and humour/s is
central to our understanding of the entire Machiavellian lexicon: virtù, fortuna, gloria, ambizione, ordini,
and stato. Reading the text in
terms of an “astrological world-view” on Machiavelli’s part, that is, in
terms of the occult forces that drive the actions of both men and the
heavens, challenges the established notion of Machiavelli as the “founder of
modern political philosophy,” Parel maintains. Discussion in the
book, divided among heavens (Chapters 1–5) and humours (Chapters 6–9), seeks
first to develop and historically contextualize each of the two major
themes, and then sets out to investigate and speculate on the place of
Machiavelli’s thought among them. The reader, in the
first chapter, is thus taken through the astrological debate furiously
stirring at the close of the fifteenth century, in which Pontano, Ficino,
Bellanti, and Pomponazzi count as several of the principal participants. He
then moves on, in Chapter Two, to inquire into Machiavelli’s conception of
politics and history within the context of astrological natural philosophy.
To what extent, and in what particular manner are human history and the
destiny of the state influenced by heavenly motions? Indeed, to what extent
can religion as well be considered in this question? Parel, in this
discussion in Chapter Three, seeks to break away from the problem of defining
Machiavelli as either “Christian,” “pagan,” or “atheist,” and moves instead
towards the problematizing of Machiavelli’s “concept of religion as such,”
and how that concept is born of his
cosmology. Fortune is the focal
point of the subsequent chapter, and here the treatment of Machiavelli’s
thought becomes richly complex. The unchanging heavens contrast with the
description of Fortune as caso, the
chance event against which men employ their “virtù.” Elsewhere in the
writings of the Florentine Secretary, clear distinctions between Fortune and
the heavens are not always drawn: a manifestation both of Niccolò’s
individual judgment and a reflection of “contemporary popular thought.” The
critic grapples with the problem of the ever-labile relationship between Fortuna and the stars. At the geographical
center of the book lies the discussion of virtù.
The prior treatment of Fortune and the heavens bears directly upon our
understanding of Machiavellian virtù
as well, inasmuch as human actions, initiative, and freedom assume a
different significance within the context of a “world subject o astral
necessity.” Parel takes leave of
the heavens in order to treat the humours in the remaining chapters of the
book. Of interest is the characterization of princedoms, republics, and licenzia in terms of the bodily humours.
Parel notes that the most innovative adaptation of umori in Machiavelli’s writings is the use that he makes of this
theme with respect to political regimes. “[P]olitical regimes are defined
according to the way in which they satisfy the humours of their constitutive
groups”: the degrees of success or failure to achieve a precise balance
between the political humours will result in one of the three forms of government
mentioned. It is indeed significant therefore, the critic adds, that the
Secretary’s three major works—The
Prince, the Discourses, and the
Florentine Histories, focus
respectively upon these three political configurations. The Machiavellian Cosmos provides the reader with a wealth of information on the two
“ancient sciences” of medicine and physics. The sheer number of texts and
thinkers referred to, for example, in the first chapter (“The Astrological
Debate”) is of great use to anyone interested in pursuing the subject
first-hand. Indeed this book, because of the questions it raises and the
perspective it presents, can be considered a vehicle with which to depart on
many other “paths yet untravelled.” The
University of Alabama Salvatore
Salerno. Red
November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of
the World. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989. In this book,
Salvatore Salerno critically reviews the immense literature produced on the
International Workers of the World, which is generally not available to the
public. His research covers material from private collections, much of which
is unpublished: doctoral theses, manuscripts, pamphlets, flyers, and posters.
Beyond this he presents new materials and first-hand interviews. The author
offers us, based on solid historical research, a new perspective on the
Industrial Workers of the World. Beyond the polemics and political
expressions generally associated with this organization’s militants, the
Wobblies created a sense of culture among its workers and organi-zers. This
comes through most clearly with the creation of local culture centers where
people could have access to books of philoso-phy, economics, poetry, and
international politics. These centers also fostered the strengthening of a
sense of solidarity and belonging which enabled the IWW to have a voice that
transcended ideo-logical differences. While these local
cultural centers were of vital importance to the development of a collective
identity in the movement, and alongside these strikers’ organizations,
demonstrations, and other forms of political activity, the IWW built
informal, unstructured areas throughout the country called “jungles.” These
areas, populated by some permanent inhabitants, others only over the course
of a year, welcomed everyone: area workers, migrant workers, proletarians in
search of work, and seasonal workers of every ethnic or national group. These
centers became intersections, in the south as on the west coast, where
information on “shark bosses,” employment conditions, and politics was
exchanged. Here the strategies of proletariat self defense found their first
expression. Only a few of these jungles limited access to IWW militants—those
who could present as a sign of recognition, the red membership card. The
majority of them were open to “nomad workers,” as they were called in an
article in Solidarity magazine:
“The nomadic worker of the West embodies the very spirit of the IWW. His
cheerful cynicism, his frank and outspoken contempt for most of the
conventions of bourgeois society . . . make him an admirable
example of the iconoclastic doctrine of revolutionary unionism” (9). This
element of the working class became the avant-garde of the labor army, the
“guerrillas of the revolution.” Salerno points out
that, in the West—the area that previous scholars point to as the birthplace
of the IWW—forty-two percent of the IWW members was foreign-born. Prior to
this study, few have bothered to analyze the radical materials that resulted
from the politics and the intentional sensibility of this worker’s
organization. Many historians do not take into account the influence of the
immigrants and their backgrounds as farm workers which helped to form the
experience of the IWW. Others overestimated the significance and the specific
impact of French syndicalism, or of other political hypotheses. Others, have
yet to open the door to the hypotheses of conspiracy directed by outsiders, in
the context of a perception of the European influence as a threat to a
national identity. Salerno introduces
the thesis that the IWW can not be considered as an experience that is
totally American born. Neither was it just a spontaneous response blossoming
in the development of class struggle. The IWW emerges as a product of fifty
years of struggle between capital and labor in the USA, but the conscience
of the workers who participated in the movement, as the author states, takes
that specific form, “not only in relation to the political and economic
conditions, but also in relation to the rich cultural milieu” from which it
could enjoy the community of workers. We cannot ignore the culture created by
the workers, nor the level of their abilities to do more than work, because,
the message of the Wobblies had the power to speak to everyone. The presence
of artists, poets, painters, cartoonists, and singers/composers surfaced in
corners throughout the country in a variety of expressions that sprung from the
movement. The use of metaphors,
images and slogans, (some in languages other than English) signal the
presence of European syndicalist traditions —they bring together the workers
of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The emphasis on direct action
through the tactics of sabotage and inefficient work and reference to unity
in diversity, are recurrent themes in the collection of posters and cartoons
that Salerno includes. An important element
that emerges from this excellent contribution is clear sense of the
development of the roots of the IWW. In a prime moment, synthesizing in a
schematic way, some members, the agitators joined together to create an
organic unity by looking for the elements on which they could build worker
discontent and create actions that would disrupt the workers until they
resigned. The task of the agitators, not having organizational
representatives, was to suffer the consequences. Following these agitators
came the “pioneer organizers,” those who began to build an IWW local and to
sensitize the workers to the need for organization. Sooner or later came
those who had been fired and after them came other organizers—of different
types—those who brought everything together which their predecessors had
dismissed as a hopeless situation determined by terms of class antagonism.
These militants worked specifically to organize the workers. They conducted
their activities covertly. The boss perhaps sniffing something, could only
prove their existence the moment the workers began forming precise demands. The author concludes
his analysis by explaining how the specific cultural objects that emerged
were the products of an “interaction between urban and rural experiences
which created a particular form of praxis.” Some practices enabled the IWW to
create “a dynamic synthesis” on the level of political ideology, giving the
IWW the ability to carry forth its message of worker solidarity beyond the
confines of the factory gates. Because of this, the IWW created a unique experience
that challenges the definition of “American life” diffused by the economic
and political elite. A challenge, Salerno concludes, that from its origins as
a new conception was revolutionary and dynamic in workers’ culture. University
of California, Santa Cruz |