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REVIEWS For Joe Amato, Stanley Appelbaum,Helen Barolini, Daniela Gioseffi, Robert A. Hall,Ben Morreale and Debra Di Blasi, and Thomas Erling Peterson Joe
Amato. Bookend:
Anatomies of a Virtual Self. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997. Pp. WX. That’s right, there
are WX pages in this so-called book. So what does that mean? You’ve got to
figure it out for yourself. And that’s the least of the challenges thrown
your way in Joe Amato’s latest work. Taking his cue from a John Dewey quote
about how new techniques are the result of “the need for new modes of experience,”
Amato’s book-to-end-all-books is really one made of many. Amato is hunting
for the difference between reality and representation in these days when
virtual experiences have taken over our pursuit of the actual. You will read
this book not to make sense of the world, but to see what can happen when
someone attempts to redesign the very act of reading. Amato accommodates a
variety of thoughts that are normally shuffled into different books such as
literary criticism, poetry, biography, autobiography, television viewing
guides, cook books, and more. You might want to
skip the “Introduction,” since it just tells you how you might try reading
the book. Entitled “The World’s Body as Information Network,” this section
examines the changing personality of literature as the literary agent shifts
from the typewriter to the writer type. The most traditional of all this
book’s pieces, it contains the central point of his experiment: “The
development of electronic media, as I see and feel it, prompts me to conclude
that it will simply no longer do to consider the articulation of such
feelings as disconnected either from the contents or the forms of
technology.” As I typed that sentence into my new Word 97 program it was
underlined, programmed as an aberration. This is the key to understanding
Amato’s work; we change the world and it changes us back. We don’t know what
will happen to us when we adapt to new technology. And if we keep doing the
same old things we have done forever, we will not control our own destiny. The remaining five
chapters, all different anatomies, make up the bulk of the book, and form
what I can only call an amusement park of the literary mind. Amato fashions a
bridge out of theory that brings us through poetry, prose, and traditional
forms of information gathering, and in doing so asks us to reengage our
senses with our selves. Much of the book must be read (said) aloud in order
to appreciate the new sounds he has composed. Amato uses language like two
mirrors facing each other; what is trapped in between is endlessly repeated,
giving the illusion that one is many. In “Anatomy of a
Mind: Writing the Life and Death of the Mind,” Amato tells us that a
wasteland is a terrible thing to mind. In synapses of sentences and through
juxtaposition of quotes, he wreaks havoc with the normal way we make sense of
other’s words. Smack in the middle of this chapter is the work’s bibliography
with sources listed as ingredients on a label. Read it and imagine how the
writing will taste, but it is the cooking that makes the taste, and the
container is the writer we get when we open a book. This section gives
way to “Anatomy of a Soul: For and Against Virtual Space: The Anxieties of
Writing in Real Times,” an argument about how “the world does not exist to
be put into a book. the book does not exist to be put into virtual reality.
the world does not exist to be put into virtual reality. the book and virtual
reality are aspects of the world’s body. we are aspects of the world’s body.
the world incorporates the book and virtual reality into the reality of the
body.” Be sure to turn off your AutoCorrect feature if you’re going to quote
from this section. In “Anatomy of a Heart: 1001 Onlines: 4 Anthems,” we get
some version of someone’s stories. Whosoever it is, it is sprinkled with
Italian signs and so might or might not be traceable (follow the money) to
the very Joe Amato, who as author must be getting the royalties. “Anatomy of
a Body,” dwells on the fuel that feeds the physical. Here’s where you find
the evidence of Amato’s Italianità; he gives us nothing less than the Amato
family recipe for spaghetti and meatballs. But he does not tell you why no
matter how you try, you will never make it taste like an Amato made it.
Guess. Books are static. No
matter what you do, the same words remain forever on the same pages. While
superficially that is true about this book—the book will change the next time
you read it; you can bet this book will not read twice the same to you and to
write a review now only marks one reading. Something tells me that two people
can have a conversation on this book and someone overhearing the
conversation would never be able to tell that they are talking about the same
book. I do not know about you, but I’m making an appointment to come back to
this book in five years, to see if it is still there. Reading Bookend was like going out on a wild
weekend and forgetting where the weekend started. Amato’s writing formula is
intellectual LSD, which defamiliarizes as it demystifies the complexity with
which we normally weave academic tomes. Because everything is so unfamiliar,
it requires an intense concentration that logically progressing, logocentric
writing does not. Bookend
is the latest contribution from the SUNY Series, Postmodern Culture, edited
by Joseph Natoli. Amato, a poet disguised as an Assistant Professor of
English in the Lewis Department of Humanities at the Illinois Institute of
Technology in Chicago, is author of Symptoms
of a Finer Age. When you are done
with the reading you have to do for work, when you are weaned off the last
drop of theory, turn your attention to Amato. Columbia
College, Chicago Stanley
Appelbaum, trans. and ed. Eleven Short Stories, Undici Novelle, Luigi Pirandello: A Dual Language Book. New York: Dover,
1994. Pp. 187. This new collection
of Pirandello stories reconstitutes the Italian text of the very first
publication of each, with new English translations and new introductions and
footnotes. The Introduction includes “The Man and His Work,” “The Short
Stories and the Plan of the Present Volume,” and “Remarks on the Individual
Stories Selected.” Luigi Pirandello
(1867–1936), an outstanding twentieth-century Italian writer of poems,
stories, essays, novels, and plays was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature
in 1934. His short stories, while valuable in and of themselves, are also
important because they provided the seeds for his later plays. As Appelbaum
points out, all of Pirandello’s works are linked to his own life and experiences,
starting with his native Sicily and later in Rome, where he began a career as
a literature professor, to his wife’s mental breakdown, leading to her
life-long institutionalization, so that truly, Pirandello himself was a “Pirandello
character.” Pirandello wrote over
230 short stories from his teens until his death. These were first published in
newspapers and magazines and prestigious literary journals. From time to time
Pirandello gathered his stories into collections, constantly revising them.
They would be mined and revised for his later writings, “an ongoing
documentation of human types and situations, a gallery of eccentrics who
might later reappear in different guises” (xii). This method is especially
evident in A Character’s Tragedy,
which sets up the thematic connections with Pirandello’s best-known play, Six Characters in Search of an Author.
We can follow Pirandello’s modus
operandi as he begins his story: “I persist in my old habit of giving
audience every Sunday morning to the characters of my future short stories”
(145). The characters literally take over the author’s mind and fight with
each other for his attention. The eleven short
stories in this volume are arranged chronologically. They range from the
earliest, Little Hut (1884), a
haunting, poetic Sicilian sketch, to the seemingly simple yet psychologically
complex Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law (1917), a story about
the relativity of truth and the impossibility of knowing it, and the “games
people play” as they create their own realities. It was the germ of the
three-act play, Right You Are, If You
Think You Are, also written in 1917, and which was credited with turning
Pirandello’s career around. The editor points out
linguistic problems in footnotes, such as the modes of address in Italian,
which are very important to the stories, especially in the case of Citrons from Sicily. We witness the status of the opera singer’s suitor
plummet as her servant switches from the formal “voi” to the superformal “lei”
to the informal “tu” in addressing the bewildered young man who, in a moment
of epiphany, realizes that the innocent young girl whose career he advanced
at the sake of his own obscure one is no longer his fiancèe. This is a very ably
translated representative collection of the master’s work, and a wonderful
introduction to a writer who labored hard to understand and interpret the
human condition. According to Appelbaum, by 1965, 75 of Pirandello’s short
stories had been translated into English. The eleven presented here will
undoubtedly prompt the reader to search for the rest. Columbia
College Chicago Helen
Barolini. Chiaroscuro:
Essays of Identity. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1997. Perhaps the subtitle
of Chiaroscuro should be “Essays of
Identities,” for Barolini
generously reveals several characteristics as an American writer of Italian
descent. An American who lived in Italy, a writer, translator, librarian,
mother, daughter, granddaughter, and grandmother, Barolini offers readers
autobiographical reminiscences about the insistent intersection between her
personal life and her professional work. The unifying strand connecting
these fifteen essays written over the span of twenty-five years is language
itself. Devoted to words, their origins, the weight of their history, their
relationship to the past and the present, Barolini pays homage to the beauty
and transformative power of language itself. Chiaroscuro
is a testimonial to a life lived deeply immersed in the magic of words.
Barolini’s seemingly fruitless search for a wick for the antique oil lamp she
purchases in Rome proves serendipitous nonetheless, for she discovers a
trade name on the base of the lamp that triggers memories of her own mother’s
devotion to “the finer things in life.” Just as her mother’s search for fine
articles in house sales of the elite in Syracuse, New York, revealed a
“passionate search for a past,” Barolini’s own travels abroad and at home, in
literature and in library stacks, have helped her reconstruct and recreate
the history that her “possessionless” immigrant grandparents tried to forget
after coming to America (“The Finer Things in Life”). Barolini’s
autobiographical essays pay tribute to the development of her life as a
writer, her educational experiences, and her analysis of Italian-American
literature and culture. While Barolini’s
essays are independent of each other, they nonetheless assume fuller
resonance when read in tandem. For example, “How I Learned to Speak Italian”
read alongside “Another Convent Story,” fleshes out the details of
Barolini’s ambivalence about her Italian-American identity, especially when
Italy was an enemy during the World War II years. Embarrassed in high school
by being required to pronounce Marconi’s first name, Helen dissociates
herself from anything Italian, especially the language, which in high school
she cannot as yet pronounce: “I was glad to abjure a heritage that was, at
that time and place, too painful for me to accept” (“Another Convent Story”).
Once in college, however, Barolini is awakened to the “unsuspected longings
for that Mediterranean world,” and will make one of her many trips to her
grandparents’ homeland. During her Italian lessons with Mr. de Mascoli,
Barolini weds her knowledge of Latin with her growing fascination with the
Italian language, especially the meanings of her mother’s maiden name—Cardamone—and
her father’s surname—Mollica. Recognizing the powerful signifying influence
of naming, Barolini believes that “from the start” she was marked by
“softness not cunning” (“How I Learned to Speak Italian”). Neither softness nor
cunning sent Barolini to Italy, where she learned the language fluently,
married the Italian poet, Antonio Barolini, and became a translator and
mother. Barolini’s childhood ambivalence toward Italy and things Italian gave
way to a fascination with her dual identities—as an Italian American living
in Italy and raising children, who are Italian-American and native Italian;
as a Sicilian-Calabrian American married to a Venetian Italian; as an
Italian-American woman, who also aspired to be a writer. For Barolini, the visible
symbol of her double consciousness is the view of Lake Como, its two arms
spreading east and west: “It was emblematic: a pattern of life and work was
made strikingly clear as I saw in the lakes both the main body of who I am,
American, on the one side, and the Italian tributary on the other. From these
two confluences am I and my writing formed. My straddling position could be
none other than that of the Italian American” (“The Case of the Missing
Italian American Writers”). Helen Barolini has
been a trailblazer in the field of Italian-American studies. Her 1979 novel, Umbertina, chronicled four generations
of women, from the immigration experience of the Calabrian goat girl,
Umbertina, to the journey of Tina, her great-granddaughter, who wends her way
back to Castagna to learn more of her ancestor. (See “Umbertina and the
Universe.”) While the novel did not make the New York Times bestseller list, neither did it pander to the
reductive tastes of the reading public: there is not a mafioso in sight, no
blood and gore, and no monkey-toting cafone.
Moved by the responses she received for her novel, Barolini wondered about
the writing lives of Italian-American women, which spurred her questioning
further about their seeming invisibility. Barolini’s endless interest in her
Italian heritage alongside her professional skills as a librarian ultimately
brought forth fruits in The Dream Book:
An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985). While Barolini
does not reprise her stupendously conceived introduction to The Dream Book in these essays, both
her frustration with the short-sighted, if not benighted, quality of reference
books (e.g., Fiction Catalog) and
her recognition of the negative stereotyping by editors and publishers, are
reiterated in “On Discovery and Recovery.” For critics who have
devoted time and talent to the analysis of Italian-American culture and
letters, Gay Talese’s front-page article on Italian-American writers in The New York Times Book Review (March
14, 1993) served more to disappoint than to enlighten. Barolini’s ongoing
frustration with the Times has to
do with its “unwritten and unverbalized” editorial bias toward Italian
Americans, which has a cumulative effect that is “pernicious” (“Writing to a
Brick Wall”). A putative spokesperson for Italian-American writers, Talese’s
article all but reinforced the spurious assumption that Italians do not read
or write because they are blocked by a mentality of miseria, reinforced by the code of omertà. Barolini’s essay on the Talese article is a corrective
without being defensive: “The question Talese leaves unasked is why the existing
body of work which does reflect the
Italian American experience has received so little attention and how the
books that do reflect that experience are buried by not being reviewed”
(“The Case of the Missing Italian American Writers”). Much of Barolini’s
analysis in The Dream Book and in
these essays attempts to ask and to answer such a question. Keenly aware of
publishing trends and tendencies and the necessity of critics and writers to
build a strong literary identity (which means “bulk,” Barolini writes, “the
weight of many voices”), Barolini includes in Chiaroscuro an essay called “After-Thoughts on Italian-American
Women Writers.” What I hoped to see written were thoughts after the publication The Dream Book, From the Margin, The Voices
We Carry; after the publication of dozens of first-rate articles on
Italian-American writers (in VIA, IA, and MELUS), after the publication of Fred Gardaphé’s superb critical
analysis, Italian Signs, American
Streets; after the republication of several Italian-American women’s
novels by The Feminist Press; after the creation of VIA Folios itself,
which published Barolini’s essays. The article tends toward a rehashing of
ideas promulgated in The Dream Book
rather than an extension of those ideas upon reconsideration of recent work
done in the areas of publication, reviews, and critical analysis. After-thoughts on the
Bensonhurst tragedy and Spike Lee’s film, Do
the Right Thing, return us to Barolini’s lucid understanding of the
power of language itself. Of the Americans of Italian descent who were
interviewed after the racial murder of Yusuf Hawkins, Barolini unblinkingly
writes: “They were people imprisoned by being closed off from education,
from wide social interaction, from knowledge of other values than those of
their old-world village. . . . they are buried alive in the
low language of insularity” (“Buried Alive by Language”). In her struggle to
honor the word, to speak the truth of the writer, Barolini realizes that
writing “does risk everything. Being an artist, a writer of novels, means
wrestling family or national loyalty to the ground to overcome restraints to
the truth” (“The Case of the Missing Italian American Writers”). Willing to
hold up a mirror to the beautiful and the damned, the light and the dark,
Barolini functions as a vital spokesperson of and for Italian-American
culture. The title and meaning of her book, Chiaroscuro, recalls a painting by Georges de La Tour, The Education of the Virgin (c. 1648),
in which two figures are shown against a dark backdrop, a woman holding a
book and a child reading the book with the aid of a candle. The child’s face
is lit up as though the source of her light is the word itself. Barolini’s
book of essays reveals a writer whose source of light remains firmly rooted
to the revelatory power of language itself. Gonzaga
University Daniela
Gioseffi. In Bed
with the Exotic Enemy. Greensboro, NJ: Avisson P, 1997. In a voice that
combines the all-encompassing embrace of a Whitman with the metaphysical wit
of John Donne, Daniela Gioseffi offers a collection of 16 stories and a
novella that, page after page, maps the gulf of loneliness and frustration between
individuals whose souls aspire to flight while their bodies remain firmly
planted on earth. In a story called “The Exotic Enemy” Gioseffi’s character
says, “Yes, I’m sixty-six, . . . and I know now that erotic ideas
are like flashy lights turning on in heads that echo from mouths and shine up
secret places, and people can be greedy in their groins and ugliness can come
even from the beauty of nubile bliss. Sex can be ripped from the blood as if
the body were not a house of green moss, a vase of kindness, a space for
greed set alight from the dark by the glow of hand on hand.” Time passes, the
flesh decays while hopes take flight, even as the human spirit continues to
desire. The exotic enemy of the title is someone wanted, yet someone
unattainable, primarily because of physical, social barriers that create
barren spaces between us. In the first story,
“Bleeding Mimosa,” a young journalist participates in the 1965 march on
Selma, only to be reviled, jailed, and raped by a local law officer with no
capacity for social or sexual love. In “A Yawn in the Life of Venus,” a young
woman rises from her bed, stretches in the morning light, and takes coffee
while reflecting the various ideals and frustrations of the men and women in
her life who think about her with love and desire but can neither possess
nor fully encompass her. Each has different ideas, memories, and images of
her, so their reflections, gathered in the narrative, form a modern, cubistic
portrait of a traditional mythic, as well as erotic, image. “Rosa in Television
Land” also presents a clash between tradition and modernity. A seventy-two
year old woman who works in a chocolate factory to support herself and her
ailing sister earns more money in one day performing for a television
commercial than she does in a month at the factory. But her earnings come at
a price. She recites her lines (“Uma always use Ultragrip ona my dentures to enjoy my family pic-a-nicks!”)
before a table full of meats and foods such as her family only dreamed of
when they sailed to America from Apulia. Then she watches, puzzled and
horrified to see the table of sumptuous food dumped into garbage bags
uneaten. These
divisions—between desire and satisfaction, tradition and modernity—recur
frequently throughout this book and may, I think, form the connecting
leitmotif of Daniela Gioseffi’s writing. Her wide range of interests—poetry,
short stories, the novel, anthologies, and music, as well as active
participation in ecological and social causes—animates almost all these stories,
but never at the expense of narrative art. Complexities and mysteries of
human character and behavior form the crux of every dramatic situation in the
book, and social issues such as racial hatred, sexist behavior, moral
intolerance, and bias concerning physical appearance serve as background and
context for, as Milan Kundera sees it, a fiction writer’s one true subject:
the investigation of human character and the possibilities of human
existence. In this book Daniela
Gioseffi conducts her investigations with insight, wit, and, above all,
compassion, always in clear, energetic prose. The final story in the
collection, a novella entitled “The Psychic Touch,” demonstrates these
qualities with special clarity. I recommend it for its strange pairing of
characters, its absolute believability, and for the pathos and humor that
make it one of the great pieces in the novella genre. A prostitute and a
three-armed man fall in love, largely out of convenience, but as they live together
and improve their lives, the love, physical at first (his third hand, after
all, provides added technical dexterity!), evolves into a deeply felt
affection and commitment. He takes up work as a bartender, his three limbs
making him famous as a quick, showy mixer of cocktails, and she attends
classes in literature and writing. But one night when she goes to the bar to
see him, they glance at each other as he performs and for the first time see
themselves and their love in a public, commercial context that illuminates
and degrades their affair. Embarrassed by a shared sense of freakishness,
they revert to self-loathing and an old despair that dooms their love. Moving
swiftly toward a wrenching denouement, Gioseffi raises the level of these two
characters’ lives to a high plain of passion and thought, where the conflicts
of soul and body, fate and personality intersect with cool, poetic beauty.
Then the final lines, a yin and yang of opposites: “Where the darkness
copulates with the light, the world is born again in the dawn of every
morning . . . as one body pours light into the darkness of another,
pours hard full lit meanings into the dark wet hollows of dreams.” For more than thirty
years this Italian-American writer has given uncompromising voice to the
individual spirit seeing, yearning, and deserving, yet unsatisfied. Her
poetry, non-fiction, and fiction have engaged readers with humor, sensuality,
and thought. Few, if any, American writers of the twentieth century combine
her sense of wonder in such a unique, poetic, and dramatic fashion with a
realism grounded in complex daily experience. In Bed with the Exotic Enemy gathers an important part of Daniela
Gioseffi’s lifelong work. It deserves the attention of all readers: Italian
Americans, feminists, social activists, and, most of all, artful, literary
thinkers. It is a first-rate collection, and I recommend it to VIA’s audience. After all, you and I
form the elusive exotic enemy of the title. East
Stroudsburg University Robert
A. Hall, Jr., ed. Italian
Stories, Novelle Italiane: A Dual
Language Book. New York: Dover, 1989. Pp. 311+. This anthology is a
reprint of a 1961 Bantam Book. Although the Italian short stories are
arranged chronologically, the editor suggests a reading order for the stories
for those who are using this book as a linguistic tool, beginning with
Moravia and proceeding to Alvaro, Fucini, Palazzeschi, Pirandello, Verga,
Fogazzaro, Bandello, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, and d’Annunzio. The Forward traces
the history of storytelling in Italy from the anecdote to collections of more
extended tales and the development of the novella as a literary genre,
through Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, whose Decameron (c.1350) “at one
stroke carried the medieval novella to its furthest development as a form of
art for insight into human character revealed through realistic dialog”
(viii). Hall provides a good
summary of the development of the genre, though not necessarily insisting on
including typical stories that would be usually representative of the author.
One of the more psychologically revealing stories is Aldo Palazzeschi’s Bistino and the Marquis, an insight
into the symbiotic relationship between a retired married couple, former
servants, and the male servant’s useless, helpless, penniless master whose
brutality and cruelty holds the couple in his grasp. This is a gem of a story
with three very well-developed characters and the paradoxical situations
Palazzeschi incorporated into his novels. It is interesting that at the
height of his fulminations the marquis speaks in French. This is not carried
over into the English translation. The complexity prize
goes to d’Annunzio, the “decadent” poet whose trademark in both prose and
poetry is an “exaltation of sensualism and sexuality presented in brilliantly
impressive language” (164). The Idolaters,
however, is once again not a typical story and does not reflect those
characteristics. It is about the effects of centuries-old primitivistic
religious beliefs that drive two fictional opposing villages in the Abruzzi
inhabited by poverty-striken, ignorant and superstitious peasants to vie for
candles for their respective patron saints, or “idols” to d’Annunzio. The use
of complex syntax and deliberately chosen polished words is an attempt to
theatricalize and heighten the truly terrible events in which religious
zealots drive the inhabitants into a murderous frenzy. Pirandello’s The Tight Frock-Coat is also an
atypical story, according to the editor, and reflects Pirandello’s concern
with student/teacher relationships. Professor Gori has watched his young
protegé Cèsera live through endless years of sacrifice. When Cèsera’s mother
dies on the eve of her marriage to a “good match,” the protagonist, a poor,
overweight and fumbling middle-school teacher summons up the anger that
allows him to take charge and guide the events to a happy ending for the
deserving bride. Each story is
introduced by a page-long sketch about the author, his literary style, and
mention of his other works. There are footnotes for each story at the end of
the collection, and a rather uninspiring “Questionnaire” designed for reading
comprehension rather than true analysis. The Vocabulary section claims that
it is not a complete vocabulary, but rather a listing of the more unusual or
more difficult words, which would probably not be known after one year of
Italian. This volume is suitable for several levels of students of Italian
language and literature. The beginning student may find the reading a bit
difficult and may have to wait for a second full year of instruction in the
language to read the Italian without having to resort to the opposite page.
The English translation is faithful and clear and readable. This, along with
the introduction to the genre and to its most famous authors and how both
reflect Italian culture makes it a valuable book for the English reader. Columbia
College Chicago Ben
Morreale. The
Loss of the Miraculous. Toronto: Guernica, 1997. Debra
Di Blasi. Drought & Say What You
Like. New York: New Directions, 1997. Ben Morreale is a
soulful writer of worldly intelligence. The Loss of the Miraculous basks the reader in poetic realizations,
philosophical conclusions and most of all the oddities of human character,
naturalistically portrayed with sardonic irony. “. . . It’s terrible
to be in love and have a premonition that you are dying but then the fear of
dying and the fear of loving are neighbors in the village of the mind.” There’s a
Fellini-like quality to Morreale’s scenes that flash by in numbered passages,
117 of them to be exact. When we put all the scenes together in our minds, we
have the narrative in screenplay structure. The story is that of a Sicilian
painter who sees all in his town by the River Dunbar in America. The narrator
compares life in his American town to that of his old village in Sicily as he
tells the tale of saving a young woman, Jeanne, from a mysterious killer who
murders whenever a certain comet appears in the sky—once every decade. The
narrative’s theme concerns how bereft our lives become without the spark of
love, the miraculous dimension of being that churns all into meaning.
Morreale understands the force of love, with a soft heart while his head
remains objective and witty. He is not a Pollyanna by any means, but the sort
of writer who sees folly and forgives it, expecting human imperfection. His
is an accepting spirit not expecting human beings to be perfect or better
than creatures in need of assurance, full of hubris, subject to selfishness,
afraid of death, monsters of aging bodies, dragged forward by unfilled and
vague longings, surrounded by sordidness, but also, observers in the midst of
unspeakable beauty. Jeanne, his heroine,
is a zany, wild, and free Bohemian female of the Anti-Viet Nam War generation
of “flower children.” She haunts the dreams of all the men she brings
together in their curiosity and adulation. As pivotal character, Jeanne is
as frank as Morreale is in describing the sexual drive in all its nuance,
that life force that moves us on our chosen journeys. Midway in the scenario,
exactly at scenes 65–66, the force of irony grips the reader squarely as the
painter tells about a sexual episode between himself and his lost love,
Jeanne. The discrepancy in the way Jeanne describes the same telephone scene
and the way her longing lover describes it are diametrically opposed, yet
each achieves an erotic fulfillment from the others’ drive and need, while we
and the narrator find irony and humor. True to the feminine psyche, Jeanne
is most aroused by being desired desperately by a man—in this case, two men
at the same time. But, then, her lovers, too, are driven by the need to be
desired by her, and so it goes around. It is the other’s need that provides
the chemistry of arousal and this is the miraculous nature of the sexual love
puzzle, a force that makes all of life, aging and death, bearable. Morreale’s
characters are forever in search of the miraculous, and lost from it, and we
love and pity their search as he writes with an old world wisdom and a sense
of irony. Born in Brooklyn of
immigrant Italian parents, Ben Morreale served in the US Air Force in the
Pacific, studied at Brooklyn College and Columbia University, and received
his doctoral degree doing a thesis on Thomas Paine and the French Revolution
at the Sorbonne in Paris where he lived for six years. He is the author of
three novels, The Seventh Saracen, A
Few Virtuous Men, and Monday
Tuesday, Never Come Sunday. He co-authored, with Jerre Mangione, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian
American Experience, from Harper Collins, 1993. In terms of Narrative
excitement and depth of human characterization, his strongest novel remains Monday, Tuesday, Never Come Sunday. As
fine a book as The Loss of the Miraculous
is, it does not reach the heights of narrative excitement and depth of human
characterization achieved in his prior novel. A book with greater emotional
appeal and power, it was the story of two boys, friends growing up together
in an immigrant ghetto, one Italian and the other Jewish. It is the tale of
how Iggy and his father help the Italian boy to survive and to be inspired to
receive an education, the only doorway leading out of their poverty and
bereavement as children of the ghetto. Woven of the rich social fabric of our
various immigrant histories, the struggle for survival in the strange and
wondrous, yet hypocritical, promise of the American dream, it is a work that
deserves reprinting and re-reading. Although all three of
Morreale’s previous novels have achieved excellent reviews from The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement
of London, Kirkus Reviews, or The
Observer—he was never given recognition by The New York Times Book Review and now in his seventies, one
wonders what attention he will receive with his latest good book—if any.
Morreale has yet to have his due in his homeland and is one of the fine
Italian-American authors neglected by the mainstream, yet as good as any of
them. It is the existence of authors like Morreale that made Gay Talese’s
front page article in The New York
Times Book Review a couple of years ago, asking if any Italian-American
novelists besides Talese, himself, existed, so infuriating to the
Italian-American literati.
(Talese’s article brought a record number of letters to The New York Times Book Review’s editors.) Morreale’s work proves
they indeed exist and are ignored by the establishment. They have been
particularly ignored when they do not produce the Mafiosi stereotype, that
slick, sensational, cliché full of black limos, blond gun molls, and machine
guns that belie the ordinary lives of the overwhelming majority of Italian
Americans—descended from hard working immigrants. Morreale is an absorbing
writer, of international charm and worldly demeanor, poetic craft and
disciplined accomplishment, who deserves to be better known by his American
public. The time is now! Hopefully, “the miraculous” can be regained for him. Debra Di Blasi’s
first book, on the other hand, is thoroughly contemporary American in its
violent portrayal. She is young, brash, hard-nosed, and talented. Like the
character she portrays, “She hits . . . with words because she can
curl them tighter than fists.” Her minimalist style, in Drought & Say What You Like, is brilliantly detailed, like
the eye of a camera looking outward at carefully chosen elements of the
landscape that make an impression of the whole. Her tone is relentless and
unforgiving. There is no soft heart here but a very hard-nosed and extreme
portrayal of harsh reality. Her structure, like Morreale’s, is influenced by
the screenplay genre, and is also told in numbered scenes, which strung
together in the reader’s mind, create the narrative. Each page of her
impressionistic prose, sparse paragraphs with plenty of white space between,
develops the story in a film-like sequence, but with less poetic detail and
warm humanizing than Morreale. Di Blasi’s narrative
is pieced together from a mere 68 short paragraphs, some pages only one
sentence long. It is a fascinating experiment with form and language, sharply
written, and nuanced. Hers is an interesting talent, but what a
disappointment one feels in her vision,
not just because the novella ends with typically American, Neo-Gothic
violence and revulsion, but because it uses the cheapest irony possible. The
reader marvels at Di Blasi’s talented display of technique, only to be
disappointed, even angered in the end. Not just because it is an ugly and
sad ending, but because it is a cheap choice akin to a Hollywood horror show. Finally, the rain for
which all has waited with dry bated breath, comes, but only after the
peoples’ lives on the Missouri cattle farm are utterly destroyed by the
drought, and the weakness of their own characters to withstand it. These are
not the immigrant survivors of Morreale’s America, but a disillusioned, “me”
generation of shallow lovers who cannot hold their own against the “slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune.” These people do not believe deeply in
love, or the miraculous, like those in Morreale’s novel. They do not even
know what love is or where to look for it, and they do not at all understand
its redemptive powers. They cannot lose the miraculous because hey have never
found it. Chiefly cynical, Di
Blasi, younger than Morreale, harbors a dark vision of a world made up of
vampirish psyches preying on each others’ weakness. They come together merely
to share Sado-masochistic exchange, as in Say
What You Like, where the love These characters
repulse us where Morreale’s invite us, even in their human folly and blind,
psychological drive. In Drought,
the husband must sell his herd of drought stricken cattle for $25,000, in
order to avoid bankruptcy, but surely that’s enough money for two people to
pack up and start a new life away from the midwestern farm that stultifies
them. We do not believe these minimalist characters or their violent
self-inflicted end, puked up from their shallow despair. If we did, all we
would feel is pity, not the transcendence that real art can bring. Di Blasi’s
talented prose does not produce art with lasting content. Mere technique is
not enough. Substance cannot be cheap, and the end all show, if art is to
last. The brother arrives just a moment too late, to save his suicidal and
murderous sister, like the rain that arrives a moment too late to save
anything. It feels like a melodramatic hoax meant to make us catch our breath
and think, but about what? About nothing but the happenstance of genetic
insanity and its consequences? About how love means nothing? About how weak,
sick and violent the Heartland of this nation has become? If only her
spineless characters were foils for stronger ones. If her Hamlet had a
Horatio, her Ophelia, a fuller dimension? Her conclusion is too easy and
makes us nothing but bugs under a microscope. Even though that may be organic
to her message and her very point, it is not worth wasting ink and paper
upon. Yet, Di Blasi’s is a talent that has a real human story to portray, to
flesh out, and if reviewers insist on telling her that she is wasting her
gift she may soon write a better work. If her heroine is
merely insane, like her mother, than the story leaves one cold with pity and
there is no uplifting vision, no empathy. That is what disturbs the reader.
Di Blasi’s prose is magical and yet she squanders her fine talent on
contrivance, and a morose vision of a bug-like humanity. She wants us to see
ourselves as crawling insects, devouring each other with mere instinct. “On
the gray trunk of a dead elm at the edge of a diminishing pond, / This is Di Blasi’s
metaphor for human sexual drive. The couples seem to manifest no desire to
pass love or life on from themselves, nothing beyond their psychological
obsessions. There vague dissatisfaction with themselves and their
relationships, their decadent ennui, offers us nothing beyond Di Blasi’s contempt
for her characters. Hers is the image of decay, death, and violence in the
fall of America and the demise of its heartland—post Viet Nam War. Di Blasi
portrays the moral bankruptcy that supports a huge military industrial
technocracy that neglects the needs of its own peoples as it pillages
abroad—for the sake of obscenely wealthy industrialists devoid of all moral
concerns beyond the almighty profit. Perhaps, we North
Americans deserve the in-your-face, Neo-Goth hopelessness that Di Blasi hands
us on her bloody platter of tightly wrought prose. Her stories lift us no
higher in spirit than the romance novels she satirizes as part of the
decadence she portrays. Her characters are not believeable. Young Kale, a man
schooled in the sensibilities of Chekhov and Tolstoy, would not give up so
easily as the young man in Drought.
He would not be so full of shallow erotic greed. I do not believe that the
young heroine, a painter capable of seeing beauty and sorrow, capable of
loving her brother, so full of art and imagination, would just pull the
trigger and shoot the young man she married. That is sensational—an ending to
suck in suckers. Morreale’s tune is
rich and deep: “To love people as abstractions with no need to touch them,
not to demand emotions from them is good as you grow old. I loved my friend
as a friend: Jeanne as life itself and the earth, for what it was.”
Ironically, Jeanne is of the idealistic, anti-Viet Nam War generation. “The
Jungle war gave Jeanne a store of love, as if she saw something she cherished
being destroyed and she had to find someone to give it to quickly. I often
thought in those days that the thing we call history had a greater effect on
all our lives than did any mindless toilet training of our childhood.” Ben Morreale
understand how America has been made morally bankrupt by its own appetites
and he explains, in The Loss of the
Miraculous, why Di Blasi’s Drought
exists. I hope Di Blasi comes to embrace what Jeanne’s generation of flower
children fought for. The old people in Morreale’s books are full of more hope
and desire than the young in Di Blasi’s. There is a bitter American lesson
to be learned in viewing these two author’s works side by side. Both are
talented at craft. But one is in love with life. The other is only posing for
death. Thomas
Erling Peterson. The
Paraphrase of an Imaginary Dialogue. Peter Lang, 1994. In a decade that has
been host to a plethora of scholarly work on Pasolini, Peterson’s book
reveals from yet another unique perspective the essence of the former’s
poetics. By justly recognizing that Pasolini was first and foremost a poet,
Peterson calls our attention to the inherently dialogic nature of his work. After a brief
biographical account, one reads about Pasolini’s early compositions, mostly
those in Italian, in which Peterson notes a simultaneous “appropriation and
refutation” of authorial sources such as classics Leopardi and Manzoni, or
his contemporaries Gozzano and Montale. This contemporaneous calling upon
while reasoning against other poets supports the notions of duality,
dialogue, and exchange. Hence Peterson’s thesis comes forth: imaginary
dialogue is a recurrent and effective structure in Pasolini’s work that
allows the expression of personal dilemmas as well as poignant commentary on
contemporary socio-political issues. His account of the poet’s transition
from a predominantly personal poetry to civic discourse in poetic language
marks a passage both in time and intellect toward consciousness and adulthood.
Peterson selects poems from the Fifties such as Il canto popolare and Récit
to explicate the notion of a personal and idyllic myth mixed with pressing
themes of social violence, poverty, and marginalization. Thus, “the tenets of
an integral and oneiric realism” issue forth in Peterson’s numerous and
insightful textual analyses. Particular attention is given, for example, to
the translation and treatment of Il
pianto della scavatrice. It recounts the coexistence of opposites—the
individual and the collective in their various manifestations—which form the
lyrical tension in Pasolini’s works. The poet’s mixture of styles and
contrasting themes are an integral part of the imaginary dialogue, discussed
at the heart of this book in reference to Pasolini’s personal rifacimento of La Divina Commedia. Therefore, the second half of this study
focuses on Pasolini’s works from the mid-Sixties, most notably La Divina Mimesis and the theater of
the “Word.” A well-researched and convincing linguistic approach guides
Peterson’s analysis of the plurilinguismo
and pluristilismo that Pasolini,
like Dante, employed in effort to achieve a “pure state” in language and in
images. Words were employed as weapons to fend off the evils of mass
consumerism and to safeguard the difference (diversità) that urged and encouraged his poetic voice. Despite its rather
dense alternation of citation with analysis and commentary, Peterson’s work
is held together by the reality of the dualism implicit in his thesis on
dialogue. Whereas the recognition of synechiosis (“the syntactic relation of
antinomy” [136]), as originally identified by Fortini, is pertinent to the
discussion of opposites in Pasolini’s work, the occasional addition of philosophical
notes on matter and mind seem superfluous to this poetics which emerges
primarily from the gut (le buie viscere).
Nonetheless, Peterson’s treatment of the linguistic and thematic dualities
at work demonstrates how an author’s words and images can speak aloud. Pasolini
attempted with his speech-images, whether on the page, stage, or screen,
“. . . to recover equilibrium, both public and private.” And
Peterson’s evaluation of this endeavor is not only detailed, but also
genuinely interesting. Purdue
University |