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chapter six The Godfather and Melodrama: Authorizing the Corleones as American Heroes Let me say that we must always look to our own interests. We are men who have refused to be puppets dancing on a string pulled by the men on high. We have been fortunate here in this country. —Don Corleone, The Godfather Tom. Don’t let anyone kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. —Michael Corleone to Tom Hagen, The Godfather I believe that it can accurately be said that the entire history of the novel as a popular form is critically tied to its sentimental texture and to its melodramatic scheme of action. The two are nearly inseparable. —Philip Fisher, Hard Facts To read sympathetically becomes synonomous with reading like an American. —Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy Chapters 3 through 5 were centered on ways to read The Godfather critically according to tenets extant in contemporary theory. By reading key scenes and characters through dialogics, the ethnic ensemble, and the politics of signification, I attempted to show how Puzo worked through issues in his fiction, not always toward greater clarification and deepening meaning but rather by performing the conflicts in his own nature as an Italian American son, an aspiring elite author, and a writer in the marketplace. I 173 174 Chapter 6 stressed how Puzo’s treatment of writers, women, the family, male power, and authority were managed and contained in his sensibility and portrayed in his fiction. A case could be made that The Godfather’s climate of reception in 1969 was in part dictated by that historical moment (patriarchy under severe stress because of the Vietnam War, collapsing American families, and generational conflict, a craving for law and order beyond compromised American institutions), but such hypotheses do not account for the kind of alternative Don Corleone and his family provide. The largest fiction that The Godfather allows its readers to inhabit is that of enormous and unqualified American security and success: the fantasy of a selfreliant , upward mobility within a total identity in family. The full power of the Corleone family and its victories is affirmed through the most compelling melodrama. John Cawelti has called melodrama “one of the basic archetypes of moral fantasy” in which “poetic justice” is its essential shape, and the movement is from disorder and chaos toward a “benevolent moral order” (262).1 Melodrama is not a genre in and of itself, but it can cut across all the popular genres and, in fact, is the driving engine of most of them. The Godfather is a text that always tries to have it all ways. The ultimate end of this inclusive family fantasy is suggested by Michael’s speech to Kay just before he orders the murders of the heads of the Five Families: “[He’d] like to make [his] children as secure as possible before they join that general destiny” of America (365). Vito Corleone’s death in Michael’s arms comes right after he whispers to his son, “[L]ife is so beautiful” (409), and one must conclude it certainly is if the force of his life and victories has implemented the Corleone empire. The historical legacy of Sicilian oppression that the immigrant carries to the New World is that society is oppressive and hierarchical . The mythic formulation of the American melodrama is that man must strive for individual self-expression. These two major strands—the historical and the mythic—feed into one another as dispensation for their dual identity: the Corleones may go outside of society because of both their prior history and America’s a-historical call for individual freedom. The “freedom from” servitude in Sicily is matched by the “freedom to” pursue an American individualism through extraordinary claims of character, exceptionalism, and the sheer force of the personal. The Godfather decrees that, in America, one can achieve anything through force without denying origins or becoming legally or morally culpable. An immigrant can retain ethnic identity and yet succeed in America beyond belief in an open society without becoming “open” himor herself. Indeed, Ferraro comments that within this Mafia clan occurs a merging of social and business functions into kin-centered enterprise and that the cost of employing blood in the...

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