The “i” counterfeiting the “I”:
frank lentricchia’s faked
confessional ethnic writing

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!

 

Teresa Fiore

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 Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “What is a Minority Litera­ture?” Falling into Theory: Conflict Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, St. Martin’s P, 1994. 166–71.

Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949.

Kafka, Franz. “A Hunger Artist” (1924). The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charter. Boston: Bed­ford Books, St. Martin’s P, 1995. 727–33.

Lentricchia, Frank. The Edge of Night: A Confession. New York: Random House, 1994.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

___, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Talese, Gay. “Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?” New York Times Literary Review 14 Mar. 1993: 1–29.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gar­daphé, eds. From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1991.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate. The Italian/American Writer: An Other America. Montreal, Canada: Guernica, 1991.

Viscusi, Roberto. “A Literature Considering Itself: The Allegory of Italian America.” Tamburri, Giordano, and Gardaphé 265–81.

 

 

 

 

 


[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.