The “i” counterfeiting the “I”: Inside or Outside the Canon? The debate about
ethnicity has recently revolved around the dichotomy
essentialism/constructionism, two contrasting positions concerning
authenticity and fabrication in identity definition. A project aimed at
giving visibility to ethnic subjects and to their writings focuses on a
description and depiction of a specific hyphenated culture by assuming its
genuineness. In the process of gathering material concerning that cultural
area, of compiling anthologies, and of making information available, the
project contributes to the formation of a canon. Once this hyphenated label
is validated by wide circulation, its existence cannot be ignored by those
who engage themselves in writing. Even when the label is refused, it is taken
into consideration for the mere purpose of rejection. The ongoing
definition of Italian American[1] literature fosters a debate in which all
writers of Italian origin are invited to participate: no matter whether they
write inside the canon[2] or outside of it, they inevitably face
the issue of belonging. I believe that this issue should not be presented as
an “either-or” question since it would stifle the intellectual debate. On the
contrary, a problematic articulation of the topic explores the dynamics of
acceptance or refusal of a cultural background, of stereotyped contribution
to its heritage or radical questioning of its very existence. The interplay
between authenticity and artificiality is at the core of Frank Lentricchia’s
latest book, The Edge of Night: A
Confession, an engaging illustration of the subject’s struggle in his
self-definition as a quasi-hyphenated subject. The sense of
uneasiness generated by the ethnic label is partly explainable as a problem
that writers face for the very reason that they choose to devote their life
to literature. In his article “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?,”
writer and journalist Gay Talese shows how Italian environments lacked an
appreciation of literature both as a source of knowledge and entertainment,
and as a professional field. He notes that “the Mediterranean region’s
ancient exhortations regarding prudence, family honor and the safeguarding of
secrets” (1), coupled with the traditional belief in steady well-paid jobs,
are responsible for a lack of interest toward the production and the fruition
of literature among Italian Americans. Being a writer is then a doubly
condemnable choice, especially when the writer addresses issues concerning
his/her own family and community in a critical perspective. S/he is perceived
as a traitor for revealing the family secrets,[3] and at the same time for embracing a
career that not only alienates her/him from the surrounding environment, but
also does not provide her/him, and, as a consequence, her/his family, with a
reliable source of income. In the above-quoted article, Talese mentions Frank
Lentricchia, among other writers and professors of Italian origins. In the light of the
topic of this essay, it is interesting that Lentricchia is included in the
article as a mouthpiece of the “renegades,” in other words those Italian
Americans who decided to undertake the literary career to the astonishment of
their parents, and of themselves, considering their experience of “growing
up in homes without books” (Talese 29). A professor at Duke University,
well-established critic, and author of several books, Lentricchia, unlike
other Italian Americans, lives the conflict of the ethnic subject, and
perceives the subtleties of this unsolved riddle (belonging/quitting;
loyalty/betrayal; assimilation/assertiveness). It is then significant that
after a substantial contribution to the literary world in the form of
critical books, he has decided to turn to an introspective and intimate type
of writing. The Conflict between Confession and Drama The painful search
for one’s selfhood is central to Frank Lentricchia’s recently published The Edge of Night: A Confession. The
book is a prolonged meditation on the crucial issues of ancestral origins and
their role in the definition of one’s identity. Lentricchia addresses them
within the confines of a multi-faceted text that skillfully interweaves a
scattered set of basic thematic threads. These topics can be summarized as
the attempt to pin down his identity as an ethnic subject, a teacher, a
writer, a father, a son, and all the other roles that, as a man living in the
late twentieth-century US, he is invested with. The literary strategies
adopted by Lentricchia mirror this plurality, and give the book a complexity
that, I argue, is the textual rendition of the subject’s complexity. The use
of autobiography as a tool to travel the meanders of one’s personality is not
new to the history of literature. Yet, its adoption on the part of ethnic
subjects has produced a whole critical discussion about its specific
function as a genre to retrace one’s past, and, as a result, one’s place in
the present. The adoption of
autobiography is traditionally associated with, among others,
psychoanalytical practices, and regarded as a source of information towards
the definition of a problem’s cause, and the delineation of a relative
therapy. Lentricchia, in line with several ethnic writers, utilizes this
medium with a substantial dose of suspicion. As a literary critic, he is
clearly aware of the limits of this approach, and in adopting this genre he
somehow subverts its fundamental tenets. Again, in this operation, he is not
creating a precedent, but rather re-stating the need for a more flexible use
of such a tool. Many ethnic writers, not necessarily Italian American, have
shown a sort of rejection of the respect for literary guidelines that are
supposed to define not only what is considered to be literature, but also
what good literature is. The attack against the literary canon has been, and
still is, one of the hottest debates both within academic and non-academic
circles. It is undeniable that one of the harshest and most durable critiques
of the literary establishment generates from ethnic writers. The outcome of
this re-vision of literary underpinnings results in the creation of works
that defy the consolidated forms of literary expression, and rejoice in
either adopting what the mainstream regards as non-literature (for example,
“low” cultural forms) or in blending the already existing forms. The coalescence of
multiple solutions represents the basic technique that Lentricchia chooses
in his book. Although the subtitle works as a self-labeling device, it proves
to be misleading. The book is a confession, yet a well-orchestrated one, in
which the author does not abandon his masks: he just acknowledges their
existence. I deliberately apply the word “mask” here since it is appropriate
in order to examine one of the several genres of which Lentricchia makes use
in his book: drama. The very first page of the book is set up as a stage
scene. The specifics of the situation are synthetically provided as in a
script note: “Christmas season 1987 . . . Hillsborough, North
Carolina. A kitchen” (3). Yet, what stands out in this first paragraph is the
narrator’s definition of the people in the scene: “Three real people, who must
not be called characters, though that’s what they, along with all the other
real people, must become” (3). References to stages of all sorts are present
throughout the book, and in various forms. Frequent mentions of Italian
American movies (6, 8), identifications of talks as opera arias (5), adoption
of theatrical frameworks (on pp.121–22 the narration abruptly switches to an
enigmatic dialogue between two undefined voices, thus taking up the form of a
script) are examples of an obsession with representation and masking on the
part of the author. The ideas of
impersonation and identity split run throughout the text, and speak of the
author’s search for a role, or a series of roles. This excruciating quest
becomes central to the narration and develops from a supposedly unified
center (the author’s self) and breaks into pieces in the act of recognition
of the multiplicity it represents—the self as the intersection of notions
such as ethnicity, job, social status, gender, etc. The confession therefore
is not a “truthful” account of the intradiegetic narrator’s experience, but a
staging, or the textual rendition of the staging of his self: You love the
mirrored barriers which confessional writing erects about you, the pleasures
of solitude, scribbling notes on yourself. Admit it. Are you confessing or are you acting? Say you do not know the
difference: make your true confession. (130; emphasis added) This relentless
self-exploration is the trans-location of a literary investigation.
Lentricchia the critic plays the part of Lentricchia the “self-analyst,” yet
the method adopted to carry out the examination is the same. The obsession
with annotations is the symptom of an addiction to reading, meticulous
perusal, and interpretation: I could call myself
an annotator, but prefer a usage the dictionary gives as rare:
annotationist, one who practices, or is preoccupied with, or (I can’t resist
this extension) is a believer in annotations. To believe in annotations, hug
it close, day and night. Annotationist as in contortionist. To practice and
believe in contortions. To become what you believe (“I am a contortion”). As
in exhibitionist (“I am an exhibition, on exhibition”). (151) The habit of reading
texts as a student first and professor/critic later affects his ways of
seeing, perceiving, reacting, and elaborating. Annotations and explanatory
notes: this is the material Lentricchia is using to piece together his
supposedly confessional book, made up of dreams, life sketches, past
snapshots, visions, along with literary quotations, excerpts from essays of
criticism, and anecdotes. The conscious interplay of such heterogeneous
materials questions the very nature of confessional writing, and turns it
into a farce: When does
annotation become confession, confession carefully staged exhibitionism,
unindicted co-conspirators in the autobiographical crimes of self-annotation?
Memory and other crimes. Writing glosses on the self, laying on a glowing
finish, enameling the dull surface of the abyss I am. (151) The Random House College Dictionary says
that “gloss” also means “an artfully misleading operation,” a definition that
explains the crafted performance Lentricchia is acting out through his
chameleon-like narrator. The habit of reading, of functioning as “the sifter”
(106), somehow erases the “I,” the self whose identity is lost in the maze
of poetic lines. It is not surprising then that the whole text is interwoven
with a lexical inventory based on the concept of sight. The recurrence of
verbs such as “to gaze,” “to stare,” “to see” is constant. It is an iteration
of allotropes that intersects the unrelenting repetition of “I.” The lucid
treatment of the speaking voice in the text is indicative of a cognizant
eye/I that knows the double-edged character of writing, and of writing in the
first person in particular. The writing represents a tool for both keeping
track of the self and paradoxically losing track of it: “. . .
walking the streets I lose the “I” easily, in two seconds, and sentences and
phrases come into me, shape themselves as forms of sensation . . .”
(87). The adoption of autobiography is thus a deceiving device, that ends up
in creating a metatext. This self-reflexivity
operates on different levels. On one level, the narrator identifies himself
as a critic of T. S. Eliot. Yet, this role is conducive to the obliteration
of the “I,” due to the inevitable semi-identification with the poet: I admit I can see a
fragile connection. We both wanted to sound like somebody
else. . . . And we were both drawn to acting. Theater as the
medium of our kinship. . . . Maybe the connection isn’t so
fragile. Maybe we’d prefer not to remember, because maybe we’d prefer not to
know what we know. (88) The
Spaltung produced in the self is
therefore prompted by the contact with another “I,” the poet’s one. The
subsequent mirror-game engenders a latent anxiety, the reproduction of the
modernist quest for the unattainable. This chess game
played with the unknown, yet not the one beyond, but the one inside (inside
oneself) makes the subject yield to annihilation: I shall have no
manuscript to protect, because no self. . . . I shall have
nothing. I shall be nothing. . . . The extinguishment of all
the conditions of selfhood. . . . The blood relations, the
friends, and the spouse . . . gone. (80) This
last passage, and its final sentence in particular, are indicative of an
existential anguish that produces a craving for death in the midst of
problematic ties, unsolved conflicts, and burdensome relationships, both to
people and to books. The Döppelgänger theme
(Lentricchia/Eliot or Lentricchia/Yeats) thus unmasks the author’s fractured
self, a fracture that lies on the border between the above-mentioned
modernist dilemma, and the postmodernist recognition of the multiple self.
This transition from the former to the latter (a phenomenon that takes place
in fluctuations, so that it is impossible to identify the book as modernist
or postmodernist) occurs when the frustrated “I” not only struggles with his
role as reader/critic (“Yeats as me. Who do I become? Is it necessary that I
have an ‘I’?,” 79), but also, if not primarily, with his origins. A Troubled Ethnicity T. S. Eliot’s words
from Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture constitute a meaningful reminder in Lentricchia’s search for
clues: “. . . to be educated above the level of those whose social
habits and tastes one has inherited, [sic]
may cause a division within a man which interferes with happiness” (102). In
pronouncing these words, Eliot turns from the topic of another book, which
Lentricchia is supposed to finish soon (Lentricchia 87), into the interlocutor
of an intimate conversation (Lentricchia 105), in which Eliot harshly indicts
Lentricchia for appropriating a knowledge that clashes with his own. In so
doing, Lentricchia fails to “attest to the specificity of [his] own
[culture]” (Lentricchia 105). Eliot’s remark
represents a crucial point in The Edge
of Night since it gives voice to an unsolved conflict in Lentricchia’s
experience. The problematic definition of his self is already a central
topic right at the beginning of the text, when he recounts the presentation
of his last book. What he lingers on is the pressure exerted by a New York
editor pushing him into revealing his own self. As Lentricchia explains in
his ironic tone, “the editor, who is an Italian-American, thinks it important
to tell you that I’m an Italian-American” (9). Lentricchia dismisses the
problem by asserting his indifference to the whole issue. Yet, the reader
cannot help developing a sneaking suspicion when he states: I am an
Italian-American, one of whose favorite words bears his grandparents, his
parents, his neighborhood, his favorite movie director, but not his children,
not his colleagues, not where he lives now. . . . I’m not
telling you that I’m alienated from my ethnic background. I’m not alienated
from it, and I’m not unalienated from it. It’s an issue that doesn’t
preoccupy me anymore. (8–9) In
front of such a definitive assertion, Lentricchia’s credibility falls apart: The Edge of Night attests of his not
merely preoccupation but obsession with the question of one’s ethnic origins,
and the difficult reconciliation with one’s acculturation outside the
confines of the family culture. The split between
these two worlds is extensively discussed through the re-enactment of a
childhood experience in school, i.e. the discovery of Shakespeare thanks to
Senatro D. LaBella, a teacher raised in Lentricchia’s neighborhood in Utica.
LaBella introduces the pupils to a classic by reading it with “[n]o imposed
tone” (101), meaning with no Italian accent. Lentricchia celebrates this man
for his ability to expose the pupils to an author that was a “secret” (102)
to them, children who did not know Verdi or Dante, because their parents
never went to high school, although they never thought of themselves as
“underprivileged” (102). The depiction of
LaBella’s character is particularly meaningful in the light of Lentricchia’s
self-definition as a teacher. Utica’s Shakespearean mouthpiece, is aptly
described as a border-man: “The man moves swiftly. . . . His
body is an edge, space is resistant stuff which he slices through as if his
freedom, whose basis we would never guess, were in the balance” (101). Later
on in the same section, the narrator will refer to him as a man who is part
of their community, and yet is not (102), a paradox that I find particularly
striking for the obvious resonance with a sentence in Chicana writer Sandra
Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.
Similar to Lentricchia, Esperanza, the young protagonist of the
novel/collection of short stories, is enamored with books, and decides to
leave her Chicano neighborhood and “the house that [she] belong[s] but do[es]
not belong to” (110). The sense of Spaltung
that these two characters experience is analogous, yet I detect a basic
difference. Whereas Cisneros celebrates this duplicity and recognizes it as
the source of her inspiration by recuperating its potential for growth both
inside and outside her community, Lentricchia shapes his alter ego, addresses
the issue of the bifurcation of the self in terms of his (the alter ego’s)
problem, and discards it once he has to face it as his own. What Lentricchia
fails to acknowledge is the possibility of giving voice to one’s ethnic
heritage beyond the constraints of what defines minority literature. It is
worth noting that among the circles of Italian American intellectuals at
large, the major concern regards the pinning down of the very term italianità [Italianness], “a polysemic
term [that] evades a precise definition,” as Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo
A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphé interpret the term in the Introduction to
their collection of Italian American writings, From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (6). In the same
introduction, the editors analyze the different ways in which the writers
experience their mixed cultural legacy. In particular, the new generations,
whose assimilation into the system is more evident, show a shift in the
focus of their work [not a representation of life in America anymore], a tilt
in their angle of reflection, so that their fiction becomes less a vehicle
for presenting what it means to be Italian in America and more of what it
means to carry the cultural trappings of italianità
into their everyday American lives. (9) The Edge of Night is an eloquent example of this trap, a
work that struggles to represent this sense of “deterritorialization,”[4] according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s definition. The sense of displacement is further enhanced in
Lentricchia’s rendition of this conflict since it somehow goes unrecognized.
Foreign Nomenclatures In his essay “A
Literature Considering Itself: The Allegory of Italian America,” Robert
Viscusi discusses the problem of the absence of the intellectual among
Italian Americans. As he specifies, the Italian American author is not “an
interpreter of the minority culture to which he belongs by birth,” but a
“well-known [intellectual] of Italian descent” (278n10). It is telling that in
exposing this state of things, he mentions Frank Lentricchia as an example
of this irreconcilableness. At the time of this analysis, The Edge of Night had not been
published yet. Nonetheless, the question is still unanswered: is Lentricchia
attempting to represent the Italian American experience, or to deny the
possibility of this representation due to the volatile character of writing
as a tool for ethnic recovery? The arduous task of
retracing one’s origins is epitomized in Lentricchia’s obsession with Italian
words whose meaning escapes him as well as his parents. In other words, even
the familiarity with his ancestors’ language becomes an academic operation,
an annotation, to use his terminology. The wearisome quest for meaning is
transformed into a philological investigation ironically conducted on a bad
word whose entire spelling is initially left unsaid. The word’s phonetic
aspect and orthography are discussed along with its meaning. Yet, the
confusion generated by the fact that the word is feminine although it
indicates the male genitalia somehow blurs the distinction, and the reader is
not told whether the word (still unmentioned in the passage) refers to the
penis or the vagina. No matter what its meaning is, the analysis of the word
prompts a family conflict within which two separate alignments are
distinguishable: the mother (who is right) against the father, with Frank
undecided between the two, yet more prone to side with his father (8). The philological
research is taken up again later in the text in order to investigate further
issues of pronunciation and orthography. This time the word is revealed (“mincchia,” 94) and used in comparison
with English words.[5] The fluctuation between the English and
the Italian idiom is not very common in the text, which is nevertheless
interspersed with many Italian words. This episode, presented in two
installments, is the only occasion in which Lentricchia addresses issues of
bi/monolinguism, along with those of high/pop culture. He has to admit, “I’ve
lost most of [my Italian] but retain the valuable words” (93). Nonetheless,
compared to those who use the word properly—although they give “contradictory
responses” (94) about its meaning and written form—he can examine it as a
poetic word, and detect the “trochaic
rhythm of the two-syllabled Italian slang term” (94; emphasis added). The meticulous
analysis of the word provides the opportunity to compare it with his own
family name. The coincidental rhyming similarity is exploited by
Lentricchia, whose interest with names represents a popular praxis among
ethnic subjects. The attention paid to names’ origins and meanings
constitute the beacon of a process of ethnic recovery. The realization of
one’s name’s unpronounceability is the sign of a difference that can be
either ignored and toned down through various channels of assimilation, or
it can be questioned and become a resourceful channel towards re-invention. In Lentricchia’s
experience, the interest for personal names concerns both his last and his first
name, a long harsh-sounding name that evidently caused him embarrassment and
shame when he was a child. “How do you pronounce your name? What kind of name
is that? Are you Polish?” (120) are the questions that Lentricchia was asked
due to his lengthy r-charged surname. As a reaction, he identifies himself
with Rumpelstilskin, the protagonist of a traditional German fairy tale in
which a dwarf spins flax into gold for a maiden on the condition that she
give him a child or guess his name. Lentricchia adapts the fairy tale’s
content to his own needs and performs a metaphorical transition. The two
themes of giving birth to a child and naming are utilized as tropes for the
artist’s creation, and the artist’s self. What Lentricchia argues in this
passage is that there is a part of the “I” that has a name, yet another one
that is nameless and creates art. Here again,
Lentricchia sets out to question the displacement caused by his family name,
yet he ends up in an aesthetic theorization that claims art’s transcendence
from any material specific encumbrance. When he concludes, “But the name does
not explain” (121), he re-states his belief in art for art’s sake (no wonder
that earlier in the book, he mentions Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater, 89),
although in a somewhat revised form. His aestheticism is sui generis in the sense that he seeks to apply his high concept
of art to his own reality: “art is the only place I know where to find
deliverance of the specific from the habits of abstraction” (89). In the same
passage, he finally spells out his motto: “Art for life’s sake” (89), i.e.,
the ability to find art in life. Madness as a Reaction to External
Expectations The torturing issue
of the supremacy of art over life or vice versa seems to be crucial to many
Italian American artists (see, for example, Helen Barolini’s protagonist in
her novel Umbertina), probably as
the residue of a culture that echoes from the booted country with the power
of its antiquity. And yet, at the same time, the choice between the two is
wearisome, because life, as offered to ethnic young generations, is one
deprived of any affiliation with that old culture that, once known, steals
their happiness, as Eliot reminds Lentricchia. The Edge of Night addresses the question in modernist terms, a
stance that I find extremely limiting for a subject whose self is under
scrutiny. In other words, I do not deny the possibility for a hyphenated
writer to be torn between two pulling forces. The forms that art can take are
infinite, and no strict definition of what art—and specifically what “ethnic”
art is—should prevent the writer from articulating his own experience. Yet,
Lentricchia’s verbalization of this experience is overloaded with strata of
knowledge that, malgré lui, blinds
his sight, and, instead of easing the elaboration of a syncretism, a
co-existence of two clashing elements, it hinders the re-invention of his
self. Among the numerous
instances that exemplify this self-inflicted torture are the scenes in which
Lentricchia, unable to adopt a double vision (one of the advantages of living
on the border between two cultures), decides to end up in madness. Fascinated
by the Shakespearean tragic heroes, he invests himself with the role of the
mad. Repeatedly in the text, especially towards the end, he makes references
to his madness in the form of licanthropy, vampirism, and dual personality.
He iterates the word “maniac” (118) several times to shape the monster that
looks for “[r]age” (18) in order to create. This inability to
cope with life situations (conflicts with his mother, resentment for his
father, lack of dialogue with his wife, sense of inadequacy as a father,
doubts about his credibility as a teacher) exasperates his desired isolation,
and leads him to the celebration of madness as the only way out for his
tortured self. Madness is embodied in the act of writing, in the endless and
burdensome process of creation, which, at this point, cannot be identified
with confession. Lentricchia’s failure to syncretize the different parts of
his self is, among others, the result of his complex definition as a man. Although his
speculations are heavily embedded in modernist aesthetic questions, he
perceives himself at times as a gendered subject. Yet, he often shows
uneasiness about this notion. In his claim to be a generating being (“Who
said men can’t give birth?,” 121) and his uncomfortableness with his name
Francis (he soon changed it to Frank in order to avoid possible doubts about
his gender, 98), Lentricchia keeps on providing examples of his desire for
omnipotence. The “gulf” that he finds between him and his family (148) is one
of the innumerable gulfs that he observes around him, and that he delights in
after all. The reference to Kafka’s short story “The Hunger Artist” is very à propos in the light of Lentricchia’s
ideal of art. The artist, eaten up by the desire to reach the unreachable,
starves himself to death in front of people’s stupor first, and indifference
later. It is this physical
and moral detachment from one’s environments and places that enhances
Lentricchia’s sense of isolation: his ethnic community is a scattered
collection of random words, funky characters (“an elegantly dressed elderly
man,” 6), diet habits (“three cannoli,” 10), and vague memories. The “I,”
carefully staged, never searches for syncretic solutions. All his self-investigations
end up in existential cul-de-sacs where craziness is the only alternative
left. In contrast, other Italian American writers, and in particular women
writers,[6] have developed strategies of
co-existence, literary and life devices to benefit from their mixed selfhood.
It is interesting to
notice that another autobiography (a re-interpreted version of it) by an
Italian American was published shortly before Lentricchia’s volume: Marianna
De Marco Torgovnick’s Crossing Ocean
Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Her articulation of
the ethnic experience mingles the personal and the professional with the
intention to posit the composite nature of her identity outside the crazies
for all-inclusiveness, which after all results in malady. That De Marco’s
take on the issue looks more conventional is undeniable, yet one might wonder
why Lentricchia would adopt such an alternative set of values and images (the
monastery confinement, the vision of infanticide) in consideration of his
own privileged status as a university professor. Whereas De Marco and other
women writers reconcile, Lentricchia severs; while they create “third
spaces,” he wanders in spacelessness; whereas they proceed outwards by
looking inwards, he looses himself in the darkness of his ambiguous ethnic
self and drowns in it. The Fascination with Metatextuality Lentricchia’s
self-conscious writing is marked by the constant reflection on the writing
itself, on the role of the author, and of that of the critic as a writer of
the writer. Yet, when a critic turns into a conscious writer, the
stratification of this process thickens, and the text becomes a refracting
mirror. Lentricchia succeeds in re-interpreting both tradition and
avant-garde in a sense: by adopting a “traditionally ethnic” tool
(autobiography), he rejects it in a way, and reveals its deceiving nature.
Intratextual references along with extratextual quotations render the book a
lucid text pondering about texts, and, consequently about itself. Lentricchia’s
self-justification is not enough to avoid the blame for being a literary
“cheater”: “I practice interpretation on the principle of suspicion, not
because I am necessarily paranoid, but because I am a reader and lead a
textual life, because I swim in textual seas of written tongues” (65). No
wonder then that at the end of the book, Lentricchia is even able to include
a sort of self-review of the book. Before the reader is finished with the
reading, he offers his own interpretation, whose credibility is, of course,
questionable. By borrowing Kafka’s
words from one of his letters (179), Lentricchia pretends to have been open
in his confession. All the recurring metaphors of melting ice become playful,
and their very inclusion in the text reveals their tricky nature.
Lentricchia, as a true Lentricchia man, according to his mother’s critical
definition in the first scene, embodies the Stevensian “emperor of
ice-cream,” the cold, imperturbable man who barely talks. He defies her
mother’s belief in the need to talk in order to communicate, and creates a
fragmentary work where the borders between reality and representation blur. In The Edge of Night Lentricchia clearly
questions the concept of memory, one of the crucial notions for ethnic
writers, along with the ethical responsibility to write in order to preserve
a past that will otherwise be lost. His memories are always vague (“I can’t
remember exactly,” 3), his statements always prone to be reversed since he
insistently professes his mocking style on a regular basis. Too ironic that a
confession (theoretically at least!) ends with the word “fakery” and that its
author, obsessed with his own “I,” while claiming no name, bears the name of
Frank! San Diego
State University References Barolini, Helen,
ed. The Dream Book: An Anthology of
Writings by Italian American Women. New York: Schocken, 1985. Barolini, Helen. Umbertina. Salem, NH: Ayer, 1979. Basile Green, Rose.
The Italian-American Novel: A Document
of the Interaction of Two Cultures. Rutheford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP,
1974. Boelhower, William.
Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis
in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Bona, Mary Jo, ed. The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian/American
Women’s Fiction. New York: Guernica, 1994. Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York:
Random House, 1989. De Marco
Torgovnick, Marianna. Crossing Ocean
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[1]Aware of the debate on orthographic renditions of this qualifier, I have deliberately decided not to apply hyphens or slashes (in his To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate, Tamburri discusses these two options, and concludes that the former is a divider while the latter is a connective). Personally, I have developed the habit of using the two terms separately, not because I want to reinstate a distance between the Italian and the American heritage, but because I prefer to leave a void between the two, a void that any individual, and artist in particular, can fill, as a personalized form to experience that condition of multiple cultural belonging.
[2]Here I am using the term “canon” loosely in the awareness that canon formation is a very delicate issue. I do not intend to assume the existence of an Italian American literary canon, yet I implicity refer to that process of boundary questioning that is instrinsic to literary studies. Consequently, I argue that the label “Italian American” is not a trademark for easy identification but a reference point for intellectual discourse concerning issues of ethnic belonging.
[3]One of the best analysis of these internal and external dynamics at work in the decision to become a writer for an Italian American is included in the introduction to The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women edited by Helen Barolini. Barolini’s approach to the issue of family, social, religious and personal barriers against the choice of being a writer is rooted in feminist thought. Yet, the analysis of the intricate mixture of Catholic and community pressures on the individuals offers some valuable insights to the question of omertà (imposed silence) at large (Barolini 3–56).
[4]The notion of “deterritorialization,” as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in their essay “What is a Minor Literature?,” is central to the history of minority literatures since it represents the sense of dis-location of the writer as noticeable in the use of language, in his/her political commitment, and the collective character of his/her work’s enunciation. The two French philosophers validate the deterritorialized condition as a marginal place that allows for the re-use and re-interpretation of materials that belong to the main culture. The moment of “reterritorialization” (169) coincides with this operation of re-vision. It is at this point that Lentricchia’s work somehow fails to consciously give voice to his minority heritage. The attempt to address the issue of bilingualism (or rather inaccessibility to the ancestors’ language) becomes the occasion to heighten the intensity of the conflict without resolving it (I mean not in the sense of definitive resolution, but of frontal approach to the question of mixed legacy as a hybrid space).
[5]The way in which Lentricchia probes the word is peculiar. In the South of Italy, the term “minchia” is very common, especially among men, although it is a bad word. It literally refers to the “dick,” and is used as an exclamation as well, in the way Lentricchia describes it. Yet, what appears to be surprising is the fact that he translates it as “cunt,” a use that, as I recently discovered, is common only in some areas of the North (Piemonte). The other striking particular is the constant repetition of a spelling error: “minchia” has just one “c” although it is so much emphasized in the pronunciation that it sounds like two “c’s.” I wonder whether Lentricchia validates this misspelling for his own purpose. The coincidental similarity between this misspelt word and his last name allows him to draw a comparison based on the alliterative effect (94).
[6]As the compilers of From the Margin admit in the Preface to their volume, they were engaged in a discussion with Italian American writers still trapped in “ethnic denial” (Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphé xiv), while women writers had already collected their material in a trail-blazing anthology in the field of Italian American literature (Barolini). The ability to recognize the complexity of the self and accept it as such is more common among women writers (feminists in particular) than men. Mary Jo Bona’s collection The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian/American Women’s Fiction gathers writings where sexual orientation and age represent the organizing principles for the compilation of the anthology, along with gender.