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From Back Alley to Main Street More than a decade
ago, before English and other Language and Literature departments had begun
to open their doors to cultural studies, multiculturalism, and
ethnically-oriented approaches to texts, Fred Gardaphé already knew his
mind. I first came to know Fred when he was pursuing an MA in English at the
University of Chicago and where his deep interest in Italian-American
literature was not strongly encouraged. Fred was a forerunner, a kind of
prophet of what has now become one of the dominant trends in literary studies
today, although it is still true that Italian-American studies specifically
have not yet found the academic space and respect allotted to other minority
voices such as Native American, Jewish, and Black studies. Moreover, those
scholars dedicated to analyses of Italian-American literature and culture are
scattered, some in English departments, some in History, some few others in
Italian or Cinema studies. This dispersion has made concentrated and evolved
critical and theoretical work more difficult, and it has also meant that the
study of Italian-American texts and films has not received the valorization as
a serious field of inquiry that it deserves. Fred’s book will certainly serve
to forward this valorization, for it is a major critical work that goes
beyond a purely descriptive or taxonomical approach. Before discussing the
book’s contents, I want to recall Fred Gardaphé’s journey toward this
accomplishment. I remember well when several years back he called me to say
that he had decided once and for all to pursue a doctorate. We had already
talked about his desire to do a PhD when he was an MA student at Chicago. I
was of little help then, because I simply did not see a site suitable for his
work, either in English or Italian departments. Nor was I much more help when
he called years later to tell me of his firm resolution to go forward with
his advanced studies. All I could do was to encourage him and to write an
enthusiastic letter of recommendation, hoping that some far-seeing program
would welcome his talents. The University of Illinois at Chicago was in fact
that program, and Fred plunged in in spite of his already heavy professional
and creative commitments as a professor of English at Columbia College and as
an active writer, journalist, and public speaker. He subsequently asked me to
be a member of his dissertation committee, a duty I happily took on. Again, I
contributed little to what was already a mature and completely researched
project. I shall not soon forget the wonderful thesis defense that took
place in a terrific Italian restaurant over a feast and in a spirit of joyful
conviviality. That thesis has now been revised and turned into the book Italian Signs, American Streets. This study surveys
the trajectory of Italian-American fiction from early in this century to the
present day, arguing that the dominant critical orientation to canonical
American fiction, which tends to categorize mainstream narrative according to
its modernist or postmodernist qualities, is not adequate to analyses of the
production of ethnically marginalized works. In this culture-specific
reading, Fred brings to bear a model drawn in great part from Vico’s concept
of history whereby he argues that fictions, like historical cycles, can be
seen as belonging to poetic, mythic, and philosophic modes. Adapting Vico’s
thought to the study of narrative, Fred argues that the poetic mode, that of
vero narratio, applies to writings
that are primarily narrative autobiography; the mythic mode, that of mimesis,
applies to representational, realist writing; and the philosophic mode,
self-conscious and self-referential, applies to ironic and autocritical
texts, which are similar to what is now standardly thought of as a form of
postmodernism. By using modes rather than traditional periodization, it is
shown that some Italian-American writers partake of all three modes at
various times in their careers, thus a rigidly “progressive” view of
Italian-American narrative is avoided. Gramsci also serves
to provide a model for this study, particularly in his idea of the organic
intellectual whose relation to culture is based in a local and intimate
knowledge of its specific roots. This type of intellectual-critic-theorist
does not impose externally-generated high-culture models and evaluations of
culture upon production, but instead takes a more “grass-roots” approach
while fostering a truly critical and self-critical methodology. Fred himself
has worked for many years as an organic intellectual; he comes to his study
of Italian-American literature both from within and without, and the result
is a critical discourse that straddles successfully the difficult line
between ethnic belonging and pride, and objective evaluation of both the
negative and positive aspects of Italian-American production. Rather than
simply countering the stereotyping of Italian-American narrative as “mafia”
literature with assertions of ethnic pride, Fred shows, through serious and
rigorous analyses, that there are a complexity and richness in this body of
work on a par with more mainstream traditions. The sensitivity to
both the Italian and the American sides of the tradition here analyzed is
another important and innovative aspect of Fred’s study. As a professor of
Italian literature and culture, I am particularly pleased to have in Fred a
colleague who has seriously studied the Italian tradition, and who can speak
authoritatively of the “Italian signs” that have migrated to “American
streets.” He looks for linguistic signs as well as cultural codes that evoke
Italianness, at the same time as he recognizes the shaping influences of
American literature and cultural practices on these authors. Two of the most
salient signs of Italianness are omertà
or the code of silence regarding what is suitable to public discourse, and bella figura, the code of social
behavior in Italy that determines a person’s self-presentation. These Italian
signs are shown to be deeply imbricated into the fabric of many of the texts
under consideration. The use of Vico and Gramsci is, of course, another attempt
to bring Italian-American texts into a critical space conditioned by Italian
as well as Anglo-American critical paradigms. It is gratifying as
well to note that this study brings women writers squarely into the mix.
Unlike long-standing dominant and canonically-conditioned critical styles of
taxonimizing literature, which have tended to exclude or strongly marginalize
women and other “minorities within minorities,” Fred’s approach integrates
women writers at virtually every step, revealing the specific problems
attaching to their “double difference” as Italians in America and as women within
a patriarchal system both in Italy and in the United States. This volume also
analyzes the work of those writers, like Sorrentino and De Lillo, who are
not “overtly” ethnic. Their relation to ethnicity is very complicated in that
they both internalized and yet sought to reject Italian-American identity. In
spite of the fact that De Lillo especially seems very far from an Italian-American
mode in his work (particularly after his earliest writing, which instead
shows clear ties to Italian and Italian-American signs), Fred proposed with
great originality and insight that De Lillo’s tight-lipped avoidance of
self-revelation may in fact hark back to the code of omertà, ingrained in the writer by means of his personal and
cultural roots. I find this section of Fred’s study the most far-reaching in
critical and theoretical implications, for in it he takes on the absolutely
fundamental and extraordinarily complex issue of “hidden” and/or displaced
ethnicity as it has been and continues to be played out in our American
cultural context. There are many
Italian-American writers and other cultural figures who have sought to one
degree or another to “go beyond” or at least to modulate their ethnicity for
what is not doubt a wide spectrum of reasons and motives. I think of John
Ciardi, for example, a poet and translator of Dante who, in forging his
public image, identified heavily with the high canon of Italian literature
rather than with Italian-American or even mainstream American traditions. I
recently discovered that crime-fiction writer Ed McBain is in fact Italian
American, his real name being Salvatore Lombino. I came upon this fact
indirectly; reading a novel by one Evan Hunter, entitled Criminal Conversation, I noticed in the blurbs that Hunter is an alter ago, another pen name of McBain.
I then was struck by a passage in the novel in which a clearly heartfelt view
of Italian-American identity is propounded: Georgie’s
grandfather had been born in Italy, and lived in America for five years
before he got his citizenship papers, at which time he could rightfully be
called an Italian-American. In Georgie’s eyes, this was the only time the
hyphenate could be used properly. His parents had been born here of
Italian-American parents, but this did not make them similarly Italian-Americans, it made them simply
Americans. The two men meeting in
the restaurant today had also been born in America, and despite their
Italian-sounding names, they too were American. In fact, neither Frankie
Palumbo nor Jimmy Angelli felt the slightest allegiance to a country that was
as foreign to them as Saudi Arabia. (31) A little research led
me to McBain’s Italian name, and the autobiographical intensity of the
passage above was at least partially explained. Salvatore Lombino uses the
Irish name Ed McBain and the fairly American (Anglo-Saxon) name Evan Hunter
perhaps because, like his characters with “Italian-sounding names,” he feels
himself to be simply “American.” Or maybe the reasons are much more
complicated, having to do with the author’s conflictual feelings or merely
with marketability. Although Fred’s study
does not take on the realm of Italian-American cinematic production, this is
another area rich with ethnic complexities. It is clear that directors like
Cimino, the later Scorsese, Abel Ferrara, and Quentin Tarantino all create
films that, while using certain Italian signs, for the most part seek to
inhabit American streets. In popular culture, icons such as Camille Paglia,
Madonna, and John Travolta in his comeback roles play with their ethnicity in
highly self-conscious and ironic ways. A figure like Jewish actor Harvey
Keitel is a fascinating example of a non-Italian American who often “passes”
as such in many of his movie roles, thus creating another sort of layering of
ethnic identification. I myself have proposed in an essay of a few years back
that I feel myself to be in an identity position that is difficult to define.
Given my many years’ involvement in Italian studies and, more recently, in
Italian-American film studies, I identify strongly with Italianness in all
of its manifestations from the personal and interpersonal to the linguistic,
cultural, and ideological. In short, I know more about Italianness than about
Americanness in terms of cultural constructs and history, yet I am not
either Italian or Italian American. Could I call myself “American Italian”?
Is this another kind of “passing”? A sort of ethnic identity by elective
affinity? When Harvey Keitel’s character, the cop Rocco Klein, is asked in
the film Clockers: “What are you
anyway?” he responds: “A member of the lost Black tribe of Israel.” Humorous
in intent, this answer is actually an acutely perceptive expression of the
complexities of ethnicity both as lived and as portrayed in books, films,
and other forms of cultural production. The “melting-pot” portrait of the
United States that has always been held up before us is decidedly not the
only lived or perhaps even livable reality of a country where people still
ask one another: “What are you anyway?” The critical metaphor of culture as
text (understood in its etymological sense of “weave”), made of many separate
but interwoven strands, is a more accurate way of positing the issue. Fred
Gardaphé’s study looks at the weave of fiction made in America, untangles
one of its brightest strands, and shows us how it contributes to the
richness and beauty of the overall pattern. We come away from this book with
a deeper comprehension of how serious critical and theoretical attention to
Italian-American ethnicity and culture has implications for future creative
and critical work alike. I congratulate the author of this fine volume on his
important accomplishment and look forward to his future work, which along
with that of other scholars of Italian-American culture such as Anthony
Tamburri, Paul Giordano, Robert Viscusi, and many many others, is
transforming Italian-American Studies from a “back-alley” operation into an
open exploration, squarely on “Main Street,” of a strand of the woven text
known as American culture and letters. The University of Chicago Works Cited Gardaphé, Fred L. Italian Signs, American Streets: The
Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Hunter, Evan. Criminal Conversation. New York:
Warner Books, 1994. |