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CHAPTER 10 The Imperial Sopranos “Our souls were in our names.”1 One fragment of Italian stubbornly attaches itself to even the most assimilated Italian American body: the family name. Many no longer use that name itself, of course. Peter Lazzara’s daughter Bernadette took her father’s first name instead of his last and went into show business as Peters.2 Sandra Mottola married Eliot Gilbert after graduating from Cornell in 1957, and became a major feminist critic as Sandra M. Gilbert (coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic).3 Salvatore A. Lombino obtained his father’s permission to adopt an American pen name and signed dozens of books Ed McBain and Evan Hunter, as well as Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hanson and Richard Marston.4 But the ancient mark remains legible. People still tell these stories on themselves , even when the name change has proved itself effective. The old names reappear in personal and family narrative long after they have disappeared from birth certificates and title pages. The creator of The Sopranos likes to say that he is the grandson of a man who changed the family name from DeCesare to Chase.5 The family Caesar continually returns in this series, like an embodied ghost or a hysterical symptom. The Sopranos ripples with imperial Latins. When Paulie Walnuts and Silvio Dante are trying to coerce a Hasidic Jew to give up his share in a motel, they beat him mercilessly , but the man refuses to yield. They are amazed by his willingness to suffer. He explains his behavior by citing the nine hundred Israelites who resisted the legions at Masada, how they died rather than submit. “Where are the Romans now?” he asks, scornfully. Tony Soprano replies, “You’re looking at them, asshole”6 (I, 3). When Tony Soprano admits to his crew that he has been visiting a psychiatrist because he has been passing out from anxiety attacks, one of them immediately points out, by way of defense, “Julius Caesar was 189 an epileptic” (III, 3), thus elevating Tony’s weakness to a proof of Julian stature. This theme in The Sopranos is neither minor nor merely decorative ; rather it runs directly to the heart of the process that frames the entire series. David Chase invites viewers to read the series as a fable of his personal psychoanalysis, an invitation that many have taken up enthusiastically .7 Fragments of his own history appear in every episode. Livia Soprano, Tony’s mother, resembles Chase’s mother in many details, as he has been at pains to make explicit in interviews. Chase’s own teenage daughter plays Hunter Cacciatore, best friend of Tony’s teenage daughter Meadow Soprano. When Tony Soprano’s Uncle Junior appears in the first episode, Chase’s own uncle, also known as Uncle Junior, plays another gangster in the same scene. Tony and Carmela live in a house in North Caldwell, not far from where David Chase grew up. Chase has, of course, not led the career of a mob boss nor of a waste management consultant, as Tony calls himself. But Chase has carried the mark of a Buried Caesar. This is the connection that makes the psychoanalysis work, not so much as an autobiography, but as a rhetorical device. The audience of The Sopranos has its own Buried Caesars, a vast field of embodied histories, some of them American , some of them Italian—and all of them, it would seem, able to find themselves in this remarkable fable. Much of the appeal is straightforwardly psychoanalytic. Chase’s personal investment can be said to play on what head doctors used to call an onomatomania, an unconscious obsession with a name and all that it means. In this case, two names: Cesare and Soprano. To identify with the hero of this series means to recognize in oneself both a Caesar and a castrato or male soprano. A Caesar here is a sign of the overcompensating ambition of the man who feels himself secretly a castrato. A Caesar is the sign of aggressive italianità, whereas the castrato is a sign of a singer who has lost his tongue, an Italian who has lost his language . And Tony is both of these. Sitting at a sidewalk table dispensing justice in front of Satriale’s Pork Store, Tony’s is a Caesar, a worthy descendant of Salvatore Marranzano or Michael Corleone. But sitting in Dr. Melfi’s office, Tony is a man who recounts dreams of his...

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