Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing

8. A Literature Considering Itself: The Allegory of Italian America

CHAPTER 8 A Literature Considering Itself The Allegory of Italian America “E la poesia si costituisce come esercizio di fronte alla morte.” —Luigi Ballerini A literature may be defined as a combination of what it is and what it thinks it is. Persons interested in Italian American writing have largely concerned themselves with the first half of this definition. Bibliographers , archivists, linguists, chroniclers, and anthologists have been successfully at work, often against very formidable obstacles, for two generations and have at least laid down the secure foundations of a literary history.1 But we have had very little contribution to the theoretical debate implied by the second half of my definition. What does Italian American literature think that it is? A Few Preliminary Problems Readers experienced in this kind of inquiry will recognize the difficulties in the question as I have posed it here. “Can a literature think?” is the first problem, and “Can this one think?” is the second. A literature can think. The way a literature thinks is its intertext, its weaving, from generation to generation, new fabrics that contain what everyone will recognize to be bits of old familiar patterns. The number of tales in the Decameron calls delicately to mind the number of cantos in the Comedia . The conversation of Virgil in the Comedia is a reminiscence of prophecies long since superseded. This weaving, despite its random appearance, actually does constitute real thinking about real situations. 139 Dante’s appropriation of Virgilian voices has notoriously served purposes of authority and of political vision, or, to put it differently, has given to the Italian foreground a shape we can still recognize. This revising of the past points to the particular value of the ways that a literature can think. A literature can harmonize sharp historical dissonances —in the manner, for example, that the long baptism of Virgil and Statius in Italian literature recuperates the heritage of paganism for the purposes of Christianity. In a similar fashion, we have seen how U.S. literature , constantly reviving the contractual metaphors of the Old Testament , finds new means to think of the North American continent as a Promised Land, and this tightly woven intertext serves to repress the old familiar doubts about whether the white European has any right to appropriate these territories at all. Not only can a literature think, but also it can think to considerable purpose. But can Italian American literature think? Some critics, to be sure, have argued that what it can do is think its way into the U.S. tradition, so that an open question certainly exists about whether this literature possesses a distinct and effective intertext of its own.2 Then one might pause for a long time over the relations between Italian and American literary traditions within the Italian American intertext. Experts have forcefully argued, for example, that Italian American writing is a document of the interaction between two cultures.3 Indeed, we have no reason to stop at just two. Deciding precisely how many ethnic, regional, prenational, and national encyclopedias contribute to the stock of motives and figures available to a literature that could call itself both Italian and American might be difficult. Cataloging these would be interesting. Following the predictable confrontations among cultures so diverse and even antipathetic as these might be painted could be endlessly amusing. Nonetheless, although I would be the last to deny the possibilities of enlightenment in a contrapuntal ethnography, such an approach would evade the burden of literary work, which is precisely to discover how to answer those needs that only literature can meet by providing both ontological orientation and historical authority. These are needs, although only a cultural cataclysm such as a mass migration can allow them to be felt as such by a whole people. We may often forget, but great literatures do flourish in answering actual social appetites. Perhaps a lingering heritage of the Arcadians, but we still tend to separate the intertextuality of a piece of writing from its direct social utility. Doing so, however, is always a mistake. No area of literary history more suffers from such separation than does that large intersection of scripture and interpretation, which goes by the name allegoresis. 140 BURIED CAESARS Even to pronounce the word is to call up the names of schoolroom divinities such as Macrobius and Origen, or pedagogical gems such as the famous distich of Nicholas of Lyra: Littera...