Buried Caesars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing (review)

According to Robert Viscusi, "Italian America looks like Pizzaland. But it thinks with the mind of a lost empire." In Buried Caeasars, and Other Secrets of Italian American Writing, Viscusi unpacks this intriguing paradox, combining incisive literary criticism with wide-ranging cultural analysis to construct an illuminating exploration of the complex relationships that exist among Italian, American, and Italian American literatures, languages, histories, and ideologies. Situating Italian American literature in a cultural context deftly woven out of the interplay among all of these elements, the book examines in detail the profound shaping force that Italy exerts on Italian America and its writing. The Italy that Viscusi presents in Buried Caesars is a fully elaborated historical, political, linguistic, literary, and semiotic entity whose influence on Italian America, he argues, often goes unrecognized or misunderstood, especially by Italian Americans themselves.

Carefully laying the conceptual groundwork for the book in his Preface and Introduction, Viscusi uses the key metaphor of the "buried Caesar" to encompass the various Italian influences that come into view when we dig beyond the ubiquitous mafia stereotypes and compensatory ethnic boosterism that loom so large in Italian Americana. Adapting an idea from Gramsci to the Italian American context, Viscusi explains that a "Caesar" is an idea or belief, often unconscious, which "aris[es] out of impossible conflicts between one set of interests and another" and which "can seem necessary to social and civil survival" (6). He then identifies as "buried Caesars" the many elements of Italian nationalist and imperialist ideology that immigrants brought with them to America or absorbed as part of the Italian national vision "beamed at them" in the Little Italys they inhabited. Forced underground after Mussolini's Italy declared war on the United States in 1941, these nationalist and imperialist beliefs (in such things as the nobility of Rome, the sacredness of the Family, the Italian discovery of America, Dante's invention of the Italian language, and Italy as a culture "admired and envied by the whole world") nevertheless "survive in a half-light […] and function as an unconscious imperialist faith" (x), forming part of a "visionary habit of mind" that helped the immigrants negotiate the harsh conditions of life in America.

Viscusi locates these "buried Caesars" at the center of Italian American culture and literature, where they stand as signs of the many contradictions inherent in Italian American experience. According to Viscusi, such contradictions (e.g., between Italian nationalist/imperialist aspirations and Italian peasant abjection; immigrant hopes and post-immigration disillusionment; Italian dialects and American English; the lost, mythologized Italy and the actual, historical Italy) not only "made Italian America" (xi), but continue to "shape the tormented mixture of pride and humiliation that gives [Italian American] literature its emotional texture and appeal" (xii). In the book's ten chapters, Viscusi examines these contradictions as they are explored, elaborated, resisted, and transformed in the writing of various Italian American authors who engage in what he deems the "necessary work" of expressing and reflecting on the "ideological double bind that constitutes" the Italian American condition.

Viscusi convincingly shows that much of this work takes place at the level of language itself, demonstrating how many Italian American writers (Pietro Di Donato, Garibaldi La Polla, Robert Canzoneri, Mario Puzo, Jerre Mangione) use what he calls liturgical, patriarchal, heroic, and diplomatic modes of language to invoke an absent, mythical Italy; to knit up lines of filiation broken by immigration; to "give stature and dignity to those whom no nation exists to ennoble" (50); and to "mediate between two languages" (Chapter 2, "De vulgari eloquentia: Ordinary Eloquence in Italian America").

Viscusi's analysis of the early Italian American writer Pascal D'Angelo (Chapter 4, "Immigrant Ambitions and American Literature") reveals the crucial role that Italy played in D'Angelo's transformation from illiterate "pick and shovel" laborer to published poet and autobiographer. Like many Italian immigrants, D'Angelo needed to consolidate a firm Italian identity before he could become an...