Figuras of Cultural Recognition: A Reading of Robert Viscusi’s Astoria

Judging by the quantity and quality of reviews it received, a second reprint a year after its publication, and the innumerable readings its author gave over the past three years in New York and elsewhere, Robert Viscusi's Astoria has become a text that Italian-American literature has to reckon with. To begin with, the novel adds formidable ammunition to the battery of responses fired against Gay Talese's provocative yet timely article: "Where Are the Italian American Novelists?"(1) The mere implication that there might not be any such novelist requires that we consider whether it is indeed true, and if so why. Immediately we go back over critical terrain. We read various hypotheses that may help us approach the text of Astoria, "get an idea" or "feel" for the history and context, before we try to navigate it. Scholars have argued that, on the basis of sociological and historical reconstructions of an alleged Italian-American literature, it typically takes three generations for a writer of immigrant origins to "emerge" and finally initiate the creative/political labor of construing a past, a tradition, a language, and ultimately recognition by the Establishment or the avatars of the National Literature or a Mainstream (whatever these may mean at any point in time). Moreover, Richard Gambino, Gay Talese and Fred Gardaphe, among others, have given personal accounts of the complex processes of assimilation, self-negation, invisibility, which "ethnic" writers go through before they can gain access to the language of the tribe, or the Canon. Or the Department of English. Of course, a cogent argument can be made that "ethnicity" in literature is not necessarily bad, containing elements that transcend regionalisms and ideological constructions of what's the "right" cultural identity and what is not (D'Alfonso 1996). It will always remain, in the background, precisely because it is literature, a question of language: Any new language entails, if I may put it so, its set of burdens on the minority writer. Obviously this weight is rarely felt in a conscious manner; it is present, nonetheless, and no writer can ever exempt of carrying that weight. Every word an ethnic writer positions on a piece of paper is therefore laden with ideology, whether he or she likes it or not. Art for art's sake is as poor an excuse as is the one which propagates the superiority of one culture over another. (D'Alfonso 1996: 59) As we shall see, this argument is also central to Astoria's cultural unconscious, its sub-text, or subtle allegorizing. Moreover, it is now widely accepted that a contemporary critical approach to Italian-American texts or "topics" can reveal how this literature, these implicitly or explicitly "Italian-American Writers," can disclose imaginary and critical loci from which to re-view our very traditions, relying on the "positioning" at the margin to exercise a cultural/political critique through a novel. Some exemplary readings by Boelhower, Loriggio, Cavaioli and Gardaphe, among others, attest to the rich critical and semiological terrains that "ethnic" writers can pinpoint and depict. Elsewhere, I have argued that "being at the margin," on a "borderline" situation, may be a fantastic locus from which to scan and analyze our shiftless contemporary society (Carravetta). Moreover, in what we might call the "high circles" of critical and philosophical reflection, of a "Continental" flavor, many writings by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Franco Rella, Giorgio Agamben and Julia Kristeva deal precisely with the ontological status of being/living "in-between," or of "belonging-to-no one," and with the perplexities ushered by having to construct such belonging through literature, with language.(2) And this even before we reach the very issue of what is or might be an ethnically or nationality marked literature. Nevertheless, a sort of underlying actual social dynamics has been identified. …