The Godfather and American Culture: How the Corleones Became "Our Gang"

Chapter Three: Bakhtin and Puzo: Authority as the Family Business

chapter three Bakhtin and Puzo: Authority as the Family Business The authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. —Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination Sonny grinned at him and said slyly, “I want to enter the family business.” When he saw that the Don’s face remained impassive, that he did not laugh at the joke, he added hastily, “I can learn to sell olive oil.” —Puzo, The Godfather After The Godfather nominally changed everything in his writing life, Puzo considered his elite failure and his popular multiethnic blockbuster success with bemused resignation. In his essays, he played the unassimilated ethnic son and the unassimilated unsuccessful novelist, as he moved rhetorically from margin to margin. But in the character of the godfather, in Don Corleone, Puzo finally found the true “comfort he could find in no other place.” He came to believe in the Don as he had believed in art, finding in him the protection he had previously found in fiction. The Don’s autonomy is Puzo’s extension of the dream of the power of art, the realm where he can’t be threatened. Art for art’s sake mutates into the family for the family’s sake. The family business comes to be the making of authority itself. How does Puzo establish and maintain the enormous power of Don Corleone? My aim is to answer that question through Bakhtinian analysis. The fit between Bakhtin and Puzo is adversarial. Bakhtin is the champion of dialogue, growth, and learning from the answering voice. Puzo’s novel is a text about power and its necessary monologues, stasis, secretiveness, and denial of the answering voice. I look at strategies of control in The Godfather and, by way of Bakhtin, at the forces that bid to break this control apart, both on the plane of Don Corleone’s imperatives 87 88 Chapter 3 and Puzo’s strategies. I conclude by speculating on the ways in which these authorial choices in dialogue are those of any novelist who must shape both novelistic design and characters’ destiny. My view is that the “family business” in both mob rule and fiction is precisely that of making authority. I will examine three key scenes in detail: the deathbed exchange between the dying Genco Abbandando and Don Corleone, teenage Sonny Corleone’s interview with his father after he commits a minor hold-up, and Kay Adams Corleone’s exchange with her mother-in-law after her marriage. In each case, Don Corleone’s edifice of belief and meaning is briefly exposed through questions about truth, morality, and the legitimacy of the Corleone family and enterprise. Genco as dying confederate, Sonny as the son who has witnessed his father kill a man, and Kay as the wife who knows her husband, Michael, is a murderer all threaten to speak politically. M. M. Bakhtin’s exhaustive attempts to describe the dynamics of language production have become central to much important contemporary theorizing on the novel and what Bakhtin calls the “novelistic.”1 Dialogics, heteroglossia, and carnivalization are now familiar signposts in critical debate where Bakhtin appears as a man for all current critical seasons. Derridean in his insistence on the play of language, he appears to have operated in the Lacanian certainty that language is most severely transacted in the language of another or the “other.” Bakhtin reminds one of Foucault when he posits a teeming discourse full of accents without specific subjects. Yet he suggests that all language reflects and is the mediation of the social structures producing the speakers, a view closer to Marxist critical theory. His version of reader-response theory would place the response of the reader, listener, or dialogue participant as occurring almost before language production and dictated by the transaction in communication. Such a transaction belongs neither to writer nor reader nor to either participant but rather is a boundary event. Finally, Bakhtin’s work is not limited to literary study; he is claimed by other disciplines as a linguist, philosopher, and sociohistorian of knowledge. Bakhtin’s central categories of Authoritative Discourse and Internally Persuasive Discourse in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) are expert tools to describe shifts and priorities in Puzo’s structure of dialogue in The Godfather . Bakhtin defines the “authoritative word” as one that “demands we acknowledge it,” “that we make it...