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Language as “Resident Alien” in Justin Vitiello’s Texts “After all is said
and undone, I doubt I’ve been a native speaker” (Confessions 8). Vitiello’s caustic and involving work is a unique
specimen of the contemporary meditation on the relationship among
nationality, linguistic expression, and identity. Vitiello, being an
Italian American who writes fluently both in English and Italian, belongs to
a literary tradition that goes back to the Medieval and Renaissance questione della lingua. Italian
culture has always underscored the crucial connection between “saying” and
“being.” However, questioning this very connection has invariably entailed a
“crisis” of these two elements, one’s self and one’s language. Two direct
consequences are inevitable. The subject considering him/herself an
“outsider” acquires both a literary “style” and a life’s “style” that reflect
the self’s uprootedness. From a literary
standpoint, irony is the primary rhetorical device of such a “style.” Like
Mark Twain or Carlo Emilio Gadda, Vitiello knows that his writing/speaking
cannot help but result in an “incarnation” and thus in a “mis-incarnation.”
Through irony he manages to distance himself from himself: “I never swam in
the English mainstream anyhow. Where I grew up, we said scrog for dog, scomp
out for put down, wop for wallop . . . Piss-sàke instead of
Passaic” (Confessions 7). Vitiello
makes his two idioms, English and Italian, clash with humorous results: “Like
I said, Pep’hated everything about the Old Country. Except four letter
words—which actually, excluding fica
and culo, have five or more. His
favorite was porca maronna—which in
my Newark days got shortened to maroan.
However you cut the host, you’re calling the Holy Mother of God a hog” (Confessions 53). In Vitiello’s texts
the Italian culture/language is a set of family memories, the typical
Italian/American heritage, and personal, direct experiences. We may go so far
as to say that Vitiello is both an Italian American, an Italian, and an
American who observes the signs of his “Italianity” written in/on his body.
Let us read three excerpts from Subway
Home and Vanzetti’s Fish Cart
(published in Italian in 1989 with the title Il carro del pesce di Vanzetti). In Subway Home Vitiello includes a text that is a notary document:
“This indenture made the
thirtieth day of December, nineteen hundred and twenty-five, between Alfonso Vitiello, party of the first
part, of 822 Eagle Avenue . . . and Marie Vitiello, his wife, party of the second part
. . . witnesseth that
the party of the first part . . . assigns
forever all undivided right, title and interest in and to all those
certain lots . . . to have
and to hold the above granted premises unto the party of the second
part and her heirs” (10). Vitiello makes us perceive the melancholic poetry
present in a bureaucratic statement. In “Forever,”
the story of an entire Italian/American family is narrated implicitedly. In
a passage from Vanzetti’s Fish Cart
Vitiello recounts his stay in Italy and his encounter with a Sicilian: “‘ma, professore, favorite’ ‘prego, prego, grazie, buon appetito’:
A Sicilian is offering me the last feast of his honeymoon and his bride’s so
bold-eyed I guess she’s a northener” (47). Vitiello is a professore; his title/status erases any possible reference to his
non Italianity. Still in Italy, in another page of Vanzetti Vitiello is
addressed by a metal-worker: “‘really, you’re thirty-six? you look so much
younger’ (the wrinkles are in my guts, us children of Southern Italians learn
to swallow our pride and rage)” (46). Vitiello’s fine texts make us aware of
the fact that the subject’s identity and language are the outcome of a
compromise, of an implicit betrayal of the uncharted and unchartable
territory of the self. University of Pennsylvania Works Cited Vitiello, Justin. Confessions of a Joe Rock. Franklin
Lakes, NY: Lincoln Springs P, 1992. ___. Subway Home. Franklin Lakes, NY:
Lincoln Springs P, 1994. ___. Vanzetti’s Fish Cart. Lewiston, NY:
Mellen Poetry P, 1991. |