Abstract
Within the Italian Canadian literary corpus, fiction written in Italian has occupied a special spot. Because Italian Canadian authors have written primarily in English or, secondarily, in French, works by italophone writers have had an even more meagre circulation than that, already itself quite reduced, enjoyed by their anglophone or francophone counterparts. Yet, despite this limitation or perhaps also because of it, Italian Canadian italophone is nonetheless literature which does raise important issues. Focusing on the short stories and novels of Nino Famà, this article traces those issues in order to show not only how they summarize the main thematic and stylistic gist of Italian Canadian italophone fiction but also, most importantly, how they relate to some of the concerns which have always been associated with the Western modern novel.
One of the distinctive features of the literatures of the Italian emigration is that they appear in more than one language: in Italian, in the national language (or languages) of the country of arrival and, occasionally, in the very local patois migrants that have forged in those countries. This is also the case with Italian Canadian literature, except that in Canada things are more entangled. We can bracket out italiese, the precipitate of the contact between Italian and (mainly) English, in which sometimes texts (mostly plays) have been written, just as we do, elsewhere, with Argentinian cocoliche, Brazilian portaliano, Italian-American broccolino and Italian-Australian, speech forms that have resulted from the contact between Italian and Spanish or Italian and Portuguese or Italian and American or Australian English. Yet unlike those countries which have attracted substantial Italian migration and which have seen some literary production by Italian migrants, in Canada the main languages available to Italian Canadians have been not two but three: English, French and Italian. As well, and not to be neglected, although in its official charters the country has defined itself as bilingual since the early 1970s, in daily practice French and English, the two national languages, are far from equal, with one predominant in Quebec and the other in the rest of the provinces. Hostility to the federal implementation of the legislation has been unending. It gurgles unremittingly in the public's mind, always on the point of gushing forth with a vengeance. This has meant that, despite the lip service and the many official reassurances regarding the multicultural composition of the country, effective incentives for third-language speakers have been impalpable. Add to this the declined statistics about the new immigrants from Italy, lower than might have been presumed for the last 20-odd years, when Italians have once again started leaving their homes in large numbers, and it becomes quite clear why it is that in Canada italophone authors have been few and far between and why those who do persevere receive much less attention than their Italian Canadian anglophone or francophone colleagues – even from within their own community or from sources benevolently disposed towards writers from minorities.
Needless to say, it also doesn’t help that the works of italophone authors are often published in Italy or, if in Canada, by small presses with lackadaisical, inoperative distribution policies and therefore circulate primarily among highly reduced audiences. But it is unfortunate, for their existence does alert us to considerations of some consequence. If here in Canada the corpus of texts by Italian migrants and their heirs has a less long and/or less varied history than it has in the United States or perhaps Australia, it has now – and precisely because it is more compact – contours more visibly marked. Italian Canadian literature emerged as a collective, generational enterprise in the mid-1970s. The efforts before had been few, sporadic and by isolated individuals. Hardly the sort that are indelibly engraved in literary memory. Of the authors mentioned by the early historians of the Italian Canadian enclaves, only Ville sans femmes by Mario Duliani, an autobiographical account of life in a Canadian internment camp for alleged fascist sympathizers which dates back to 1945, has resurfaced. And it did, during the early 1990s, translated into English as The City Without Women, when the treatment of Italian Canadians by Canadian authorities during the Second World War had suddenly transmuted into a topic of some political relevance. At the stage we are at now – the end of this second decade of the 21st century– the short, limited span of its inventory makes Italian Canadian literature still quite amenable to the gaze of the single scholar. It lends itself to critical scanning more easily and more exhaustively than its counterparts – and therefore to clearer overviews.
Within literary Italian Canadiana, italophone authors and their works occupy a somewhat circumscribed slot. As in the other countries that in the post-Second World War years hosted Italian migrants, the men and women who in the past have made the trek and then written in the language of Dante haven’t been among those who have most faithfully squared with the profile we discern in close-up pictures of the huddled masses disembarking at their final destination. The faces to which those images have accustomed us were mostly those of proletarians with little or no education. The others, the future novelists, poets or dramatists, were, rather, preponderantly men or women of middle-class background or, at any rate, men and women old enough, when they unmoored themselves from their native environment, to have enjoyed the kind of training that would have endowed them with the command of Italian necessary to express themselves with some measure of the craftsmanship and finesse that creative writing demands. Be it in Canada or in other places, within the peculiar rhythm of time and space which separates the history of migrants from the history of other groups of people, italophone authors remain irrevocably first generation. In other words, they are perennial newcomers. For the Italians who settled in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and such other cities before them or who are now enwrapped in the process leading to acculturation and integration, they act, through the medium of one of the most forceful markers of ethnic identity, as the link back to the home left behind.
Socially, italophone authors fulfill a function similar to that of the late 20th-century or early 21st-century Italian migrants, who are both fresh arrivals and educationally better equipped than the majority of their late 19th-century, early 20th-century or post-Second World War predecessors. As happens with every new influx, those who landed in Canada before them with similar levels of literacy became the shadow elite of the community. Like other fellow nationals with their competence did in the USA or in Australia, or anywhere else where Italian migration has a longstanding history, they could aspire to jobs other than those, more often than not in the unskilled labour category, attainable by most of their earlier compatriots, who had had only elementary grade instruction or were outright illiterates. In the Italian migrant milieu, proficiency in the written mode of the tongue of the old country has gone hand in hand with sit-down white-collar positions, hence positions of prestige. Those who have held such positions – newspaper owners, journalists, translators, immigration, embassy or consulate personnel, teachers, bank managers, directors of travel agencies or of cultural associations with direct ties to Italy, and so forth – have been entrusted with much of the responsibility for the guardianship of the group. Together with its beneficial contributions towards the maintenance of identity – its mediation between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, the ‘now’ and the ‘then’ of migration – that cohort of professionals, through the expertise it wielded as a category, has had its complicities with the dark phases of the history of Italian migration. Just to recall the most glaring episode, during the 1920s and 1930s in Canadian cities the Italian government bureaucrats and their civil society affiliates were instrumental relays in the diffusion of pro-Mussolini propaganda among Italian Canadians (on this, see Principe, 1999).
The upshot has been that works in Italian continue to be the least developed and least visible portion of the Italian Canadian corpus. In the main, Italian Canadian writers have been either brought to Canada by their parents at an early age or were born there. Being mostly Canadian-educated, in their texts they have more frequently employed one of the statutory languages of the country, with English the usual choice. Not surprisingly, the last two comprehensive anthologies of Italian Canadian literature list, one, six italophone plus three bilingual entries out of a total of 52 (Pivato, 1998), and the other five and three out of 24 (Morgan Di Giovanni, 2006). In more recent years, new names would have to be added to the roster but percentage-wise the statistics haven’t changed much; and neither have the data about circulation or about which offshoots of the literary industry might have tried – or have fancied trying – to cater to Italian Canadian italophone literature and its readerships.
Why should such statistics and such data, then, be of interest to criticism? In the current juncture the author who within Italian-language Italian Canadiana most cogently helps us to canvass questions of that kind and to suggest possible, useful answers is the novelist and short story writer Nino Famà. Biographically his data aligns well with the two poles of the italophone identikit. Sicilian by birth and of typically low-class derivation, he moved to Canada when he was 18, with behind him the years of school attendance in Italy which would allow him, in the mid-1990s, after a long, honourable academic career in the Canadian university system as a professor of Hispanic Studies, to reappropriate himself of the language of his birth. Differently from most of the other Italian Canadian italophone prose writers, who stop at one book, usually a personal memoir or memoir-based narrative, Famà has now a budding oeuvre, an interlocked set of works to his credit. Thus far he has published four books, all with small Italian presses: Don Gaudenzio e altre storie (1996), a short-story collection, with Bastogi Editrice, and the novels La stanza segreta (Sciascia Editore, 2004), L’oceano nel pozzo and Il sogno di Toloma (Pellegrini Editore, 2013, 2017). Only La stanza segreta has been translated (in 2008, as The Secret Room, by way of the Ottawa-based Legas Publishing), although a version of L’oceano nel pozzo, again in English, is forthcoming at Guernica Editions of Toronto. Worth noting, too, is that Il sogno di Toloma is an extensively redacted re-writing of La stanza segreta and that a refurbished Don Gaudenzio e altre storie, with two more short stories and various changes in some of the others, is soon to be released in Italy. In Famà's bibliography to date we can, in short, perceive the care that presupposes a project, the self-reflection, the temptation to mull over one's previous writings that we often see in authors of more pervasive and more incontestable reputation.
As do his Italian Canadian italophone confreres, Famà maintains a deep attachment to Italy. All of the short stories in the edition of Don Gaudenzio e altre storie now in print are set against the Sicilian hinterland backdrop in which he was raised. Against that backdrop also transpire significant chunks of the plot of his two novels. Only another italophone Italian Canadian writer, Maria Ardizzi, has been as unfalteringly loyal in her fiction towards a similarly regionally centred old-country space. Issued in Toronto between 1980 and 1987, her novels on the ‘ciclo degli emigranti’, the migrant cycle, Made in Italy, Il sapore agro della mia terra, La buona America, a series devoted to the vicissitudes of Italian post-Second World War migrants to the Toronto area and vicinity, linger repeatedly on the Abruzzi topography which is home-base for her main characters. Famà shares with Ardizzi and other italophone writers of fiction (for example those in Pivato and Di Giovanni) a second fundamental trait, not unrelated to the first: the tendency to never stray from a middle-of-the-road lexicon and syntactical structures. It is a precaution that enhances the transparency of the text. Readers will concentrate on the events narrated rather than on any stylistic flair, on the vagaries of the medium as such. Not to be undervalued, with italophone writers of fiction that diligence does bolster identity, almost as if holding on to a correct usage of ‘proper’ Italian demonstrated – to themselves no less than to their audience – their faithfulness to their ethnic provenance, their resistance to the wear and tear of time and space, the still unscathed temper of their Italianness.
What divides Famà from Ardizzi or other Italophone novelists are the tensions to which he often submits the plotline and, of necessity, that linguistic propriety. This is most evident in Don Gaudenzio e altre storie, where a strangeness, never explained and never construed as being extraordinary, constantly envelops characters, their endeavours and simply life as such. In the tale that gives the collection its title, an almond tree one day begins to sprout out of the neck of the protagonist, who lives in a tiny backwater village. It keeps growing until it becomes full-sized and is carried around by him, accompanying him in his daily chores as he transmogrifies into the village's main tourist attraction. When he dies, his body is absorbed by the tree, which now thrusts deep into the earth, while the rest – the trunk, the branches, the leaves – perdures as it was, without forfeiting any of its flourish, near the house of its human carrier, almost as if the story were a parable about rootedness. In another story, ‘La strada’, a man who is harking back to his earlier haunts after a long absence and is now searching for the house in which he grew up, where he believes he will still find his mother, runs into a white-haired elderly woman who lets him sleep in her abode for the night. When he resumes his quest, in territory more and more familiar, and thinks he has finally stumbled upon the site of his original departure, the person who greets him is another elderly woman looking exactly like the one he had stumbled across the night before. In still another story, ‘Stefano’, a man in hospital after a serious motorcycle accident and now under sedation re-experiences transience as if in fast reverse, from the present to his youth, to his infancy and beyond. The incidents and circumstances he rehearses end with him regressing from an adult body into a foetus and then into the womb and the ensuing darkness, which signals his death. In still other stories, we have characters who have no present and no future, who carry on only in retrospect, almost as if it is memory that speaks through them (‘La breccia’), or characters that seem almost out of a fairy tale (in ‘Il tesoro’, various, improbable aggregates of the citizenry seem to be after the treasure that in the local lore an aristocrat family is purported to have left hidden somewhere nearby). In all these texts, language, by its compliance with grammatical and syntactical standards, with rules and norms, by not monopolizing the appreciation or the critical inquisitiveness of the reader, lets the fantastic components graft themselves onto the basic, realistic temper of the narration.
The Italian of the novels is, if anything, still more unostentatious. It obeys the more traditional tenets of mimetic fiction but, as already indicated, with discretion. Sicilian variations of it or contaminations arising from the contiguity with the idiom of the country to which some of the characters migrate (the United States) do crop up here and there in L’oceano nel pozzo but are not frequent enough to yield even an approximation of the multifarious assemblage of rare, learned, refined lexicon and everyday speech plus dialect vernaculars that has been the earmark of some of the most highly regarded Italian novelists (Carlo Emilio Gadda is the touchstone gauge here). The narrative logic too stays, by and large, within the bounds of honest, unpretentious realism, even if in two of the novels, La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma, important stretches of the setting and the action may, within the logical, possible-world context of the two books, be of debatable existence (it is never undeniably clear whether the Toloma to which the title of one of the novels alludes – and which is key to the geography of the plot of both it and its preceding version – ever was as their protagonist or we may have assumed it would be). The task of the written Italian here is, again, to allow the action to stand for itself, to limit the interferences that may hinder its resolution. If the short stories testify to some of the narratological torsions that migration may inspire when it or some of the segments of the itinerary it involves have streaks of the fantastic steeped into them, the novels revisit that itinerary as it is, homing in on the kind of aspects still beckoning for unreserved critical corroboration.
We might rephrase this by saying that in some instances the short stories abide quite openly by one of the principles of modern literary criticism, according to which texts must render opaque and implausible everyday verisimilitude for it to catch our attention. They do so generally by pitting the unobtrusiveness of the vocabulary and the equally normal cadence of the syntax against the eccentricities of the content. And they do, too, in two other fashions. With a work such as ‘Don Gaudenzio’, in which characters never break their ties to their home, the unembroidered quality of the writing allows the growth of the tree on the protagonist's neck to seem to be a common, unremarkable occurrence, almost as if with the concomitance, the proximity of plants and humans in rural venues some crossover, some intrusion of one realm on the other were to be, if not inevitable, not beyond the sphere of hypothesis or conjecture. In the texts whose plot entails some displacement it is the opposite. There is a twist awaiting us, prepared now, as it were, by the equally straightforward sequencing of the events, just as the full cycle reaches its completion. Harkening back to the hearth and its extensions – which should have been the part of the protagonist's travels where past panoramas, previously trodden grounds sneak again unperturbedly into the picture – reveals itself, instead, to be an historical, implicitly generalized avatar of the phenomenon of dejà vu that Freud expounds on: in Famà's short story too the well-known, the customary appears ‘estranged’ (Freud, 1958: 148). Defamiliarizations of this kind will be undertaken, with always freshly minted swerves built into the plot, by the other short stories.
Conversely, as might be surmised in light of their length, the novels count on the power of analysis rather than on any unpredicted bewilderment the ending may have at hand. To construct their effect, they rely on more in-depth, more drawn-out overviews of some of the peculiarities that migration narratives exhibit and of whatever spins and disjunctures may be wedged into the usual unfolding of departure, arrival, socio-cultural-adjustment and return (when the latter is included). In La stanza segreta, Il sogno di Toloma and L’oceano nel pozzo it is the final drift of it all, the impact of time – or, more correctly, history – on the more run-of-the-mill portraitures of characters and the trajectory allotted to them that supplies the newness, the estrangement.
For the tenacity with which it upholds this arrangement, L’oceano nel pozzo offers, here, the more pertinent illustration. Its plot reconvenes leaving and coming back, the two classic nodes of migration, and combines them in a syntax that allocates to each of them a significantly different semantic weight. A giveaway sign of the imbalance are already the pages on the protagonist's encounter with the new reality. They comprise the bulk of the book, almost as if the gulf between the experiences he had sought and the presumptions about the country he and the people he has severed ties with – or the book's prospective audiences – might have had were themselves a major goal of the author. Upon disembarking in New York, his destination, Stefano, a young seminarian of peasant extraction who has lost his vocation, at first wanders about with the ease of someone for whom the new surroundings aren’t unfamiliar, finding temporary lodging. He is soon hired at a food distribution centre run by an older, third-generation Italian American who rents him a room on the second floor of the building. When his boss is murdered, he moves in with a young co-worker of Sicilian descent at the house of his parents, who allow him to stay there free of charge, thinking that he will be a good influence on their son. Overall, though, while he does get around effortlessly (in the temporal-historical frame of the action of the novel, postcard shots of New York and its major streets and buildings had saturated the imagination of people the world over), the human face of those spaces doesn’t quite jibe with the expectations he and his compatriots back in Italy might have had. The young men and women with whom he spends most of his spare moments are Puerto Ricans. Thanks to conversations he has with them he soon learns that in the boroughs – Brooklyn, the Bronx – with which Italians often linked the most notorious, recognizable metropolitan New York backdrops, Italian Americans now cohabit with other ethnic groups. And the frictions that did, off and on, flare up between them and the African Americans don’t fail to come up in the discussions. Moreover, if some of the elderly Italian Americans confirm the images that Italians in Italy might have had of them, for the better (the family with whom Stefano rents, older migrants themselves) and for the worse (the apparently avuncular Sicilian who hires him has connections with organized crime), the younger, second- or third-generation crop doesn’t follow in their footsteps. Among them, it is the female characters who no longer adhere to the images of them that tradition had passed on: the daughters of both Stefano's employer at the food distribution centre and of the owner of the house in which he after resides will apply for entrance at universities of prestige, and it is the youngish wife of the latter of the two men who initiates Stefano to sex and makes the first moves in doing so. By contrast, her son, an inveterate marijuana user, is unable to make decisions and just lets himself be carried by the current.
As for the other leg of the storyline, the reversed direction, towards the origins, in L’oceano nel pozzo it veers away from the routine telos with, if anything, greater emphasis. Famà dispatches with it in five pages, out of the novel's total of 208. In this, his recipe recalls that of some of the short stories, where the ending's curtness aids and abets the strangeness, the undecidability that hovers over the plot. Save that now, in the longer text, it is only the protagonist, not him and the readers, that is caught off guard. To begin with, Stefano doesn’t head back to the origins of his own will. He had actually planned to stay in New York and to convince the young woman with whom he had had an affair in Sicily to join him. He is obliged to cut his ties to the United States due to an unjust deportation ruling by the court (he is mistakenly accused of participating in the illegal activities of the owner of the food centre in which he worked and has to face a jail sentence of four years). Upon setting foot in Sicily, he understands immediately that the society he has left has entered a new phase, that it is now obeying an ‘economic order’ (Famà, 2013: 204)1 whose primary injunctions are ‘produce always more, consume always more’(Famà, 2013: 205). Stefano's homecoming reasserts the adage that you really can’t go back, and that if you do so you won’t be left unscathed. With travel, space may provide the impression that some reversibility does obtain, that the starting point of the itinerary can be regained at will. With time no prevarications are permitted. It is unquestionably irreversible. Not by chance, Famà's character is able to sidestep the brunt of that irreversibility only thanks to a ‘new awareness’ (Famà, 2013: 207). In the last pages of the book, we will find him embracing a sort of lay, committed philanthropic outsidership. He rekindles the love affair with the young woman he was engaged to before he left for the US (he now lives with her and the child she has had with another man) and collaborates with his old mentor of the seminary days in running a small centre which distributes food to the derelict and helps them with advice. Contrary to the outcome of some of the short stories, the discordances that the re-attaining of the old neighbourhoods forces upon him distinguish him from the readers, who aren’t as flagrantly confronted with the mysteriousness of time as are the characters of those texts. For us, who may brood over the plight of Stefano as he sets foot once more in the Sicilian neighbourhood from which he had sundered himself, the disparity he has to cope with isn’t abstractly or subjectively temporal as much as it is historical. The changes the community he grew up in was undergoing are at one with the island's late 20th-century imbrication with the post-postmodernistic resurgence of the grand récits that all Italy and indeed all the West and the world as such were then witnessing. They are changes which document the provisional stop to outgoing fluxes that Sicily, as all of Italy, was to go through for a couple of decades starting in the early 1970s. And they are changes which let seep through the first inklings of the social recasting that the repercussions of the post-Second World War reconstruction, the ‘economic boom’ of the 1960s and, most of all, the long arm of globalization and the market economy would bring about during the same period.
La stanza segreta and its revised version, Il sogno di Toloma, achieve their denouement – and the lessons they have contrived for their protagonists and for us, their readers – by way of markedly different strategies. The earlier of the two novels has a prologue and an epilogue, with in-between chapters clustered into a part one, a part two, a part three, all identified as such. This by itself lends the story it narrates an underscored outlook, the aura of the parable, of the exemplary tale. The more so given that the largest section of the book, numbering almost 100 pages of the total 190, all in part two, goes to the transcription of the handwritten memoir left by the grandfather, which triggers the core event of the plot, the younger character's travel from Canada to the Sicily the inherited dossier describes. Il sogno di Toloma does away with the prologue and the epilogue, upholds the division in chapters, and adds one not in La stanza segreta. At the same time, it alternates the chapters pertaining to the ‘here-and-now’ life of the protagonist and the chapters on the episodes of the life of the Sicilian relatives the grandfather had left behind. In doing so it dilutes the forceful, parable- or theorem-like sequencing of the earlier work and sets up a kind of implicit continuous, consecutive parallel between the narration's ‘here’ and its ‘there’, its ‘now’ and its ‘then’, Canada and Sicily. It is a choice which both delays the full, final resonance of the comparison and prepares it anecdote by anecdote. But save for the retuning of the inflections now and then the plot itself proceeds along quite similar lines, so that content-wise the two novels can be treated as if they were one and the same.
Approached from this angle, the story of the protagonist of La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma can be said to either cap off or to anticipate that of his analogue in L’oceano nel pozzo. If Stefano is a young Italian ingenu, who would stick out among his more recent compatriot migrants in as much as he never breaks his ties with religion, Nick Nicoterra is a lay Italian-Canadian university student in philosophy whose mentor – the psychiatrist he consults – is modernity's equivalent of the confessor. Notwithstanding the inbred naiveté (his last name is ‘Colombella’, ‘Littledove’; when he is promoted to a new job it doesn’t puzzle him that he is instructed to pack a gun), the former is well rooted in the town of his birth and manages to blend into the New York landscape. The latter is a third-generation working-class Italian Canadian dysfunctional on all levels, one whose secular education doesn’t shield him from the travails the times have in store for his contemporaries. Society is in the thrall of changes which further keep him and the members of his family on the outside and without any grip on their predicament. Much of the ethnic neighbourhood they inhabited, which once cushioned the shock of the first contact with their destination, has been torn down to build shopping malls or warehouses. Factory workers are losing their jobs, and personal relations are strained or inconspicuous: the parents are separated, with the wife now with someone else and in another province, and the offspring also now in different cities and rarely seeing each other. Nick, the ‘I’ of the book and narrator of most of the Canadian sequence of the events, hardly exchanges any words with his father, who lives in the same house as he does. When he is prodded by the manuscript his grandfather had left to him and by the psychiatrist he has been consulting, he pursues to the end the migratory cycle and does venture on the traversal back to the Sicily that the other living members of his family seem to have banished from their thoughts. There he learns that the hamlet in which his ancestors had grown up no longer exists, that the young descendant of the individuals he had read about in his grandfather's chronicle had dispersed throughout the world. The realization, rather than cure him of his psychic fragility, throws him in a deeper disarray. Back in Canada, he attempts to regain some form of normality (he re-enrols at the local university, focusing now on the thought of Leopardi) but flounders miserably: the last chapter finds him in a hospital bed overwhelmed by depression.
Il sogno di Toloma and La stanza segreta, then, don’t just cover greater slices of history than does L’oceano nel pozzo. Their plot monitors the major happenings of the last 100 years, from the two world wars to the rise and fall of fascism to the post-war migration but, most of all, it registers some of the more wide-ranging processes, those usually acknowledged after they have elapsed. If the socio-cultural climate prevalent today, the climate of rampant digitalization, is still ahead of the timeframe of the story the two novels deploy and is never broached, we get, along with the other macro-events, the passing away of the agrarian-based Italian peasantry, intimations of the backslide, the downgrading of the Canadian blue-collar, factory-based worker and portrayals of first-, second- and third-generation Italian Canadians. More specifically, we get underlying causes and underlying effects, not a narrative whose climax is some sort of social and economic rebirth, as sagas of migration often are, but one which ends in utter failure. At both sides of the geography, be it that of the departure or that of the arrival. The grandfather stops his account at what for him is a pivotal detour, the day he is driven to forsake the Toloma he and his predecessors had toiled so hard for and to try his luck somewhere else. It is a foreboding conclusion, with its unforeseen and unforeseeable kickbacks. Nick's difficulties in finding vestiges of the community he had read about when he goes back merely prove the novel's quite explicit views on the corroding legacy of the migratory cycle, of the interlacings between leaving, returning and staying again (in the ‘there’ and ‘here’ of each generation). It is a failure that heralds and amplifies the failure he is already exposed to, that of the urbanized third generation to which he belongs and which has no other continent up the sleeve, no distant origin to invoke and leverage.
In La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma the way the protagonist relates to societal ambience – or the breach between his appreciation of it and the reader's – couldn’t therefore but be much more pronounced than in L’oceano nel pozzo. In many ways the three books indirectly complete each other. The hopefulness and optimism that mark first-generation newcomers never leave the young men and women – Puerto Rican and Italian – that Famà puts at the core of his New York novel. As he is about to be freed from the jail in which he has served four years of unjust imprisonment, Stefano is still able to declare that he ‘will go out in the world as [he] was when [he] came out of his mother's womb and will swarm on these unknown streets in search of a destiny’ (Famà, 2013: 198). The third-generation Italian Canadians of La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma have lost the innocence, the self- confidence and the trust in society that would warrant and enable that resolve. Diverging here from Stefano, Nick is mired in a position whereby he has to still seek an identity, and when the effort to retrace the route that would re-establish some semblance of order to it fizzles, he is left with nothing to hold on to, as if his biography had stretched to its full expanse and what was left was silence, or more of the same. As in L’oceano nel pozzo, it is a limitation that extends to those who should have shown better judgment, to the protagonist's mentor. Nick's psychiatrist, the non-religious, scientific specialist of the soul, recommends the trip to Sicily on the basis of a correspondence between personal memory and cultural memory which is untenable. Not just for the reason he alludes to, in so far as for human beings childhood and the birthplace are ‘forever unreachable’ (Famà, 2017: 224). We can quarrel with his explanation for other reasons. Nick's birthplace is, after all, Canada, not Italy, and his yearning is a yearning for a reconfiguration of only part of his personal narrative, the part which tallies with the family narrative that his grandfather's manuscript lets discern. As elsewhere, here the history the characters envisage and the history readers have had to grapple with don’t quite match. For, being outside the time and historical frame of Famà's novels, readers know that migration is simultaneously one of the causes and one of the results of the changes that Italy and Italian society were undergoing in the 19th and 20th centuries.
We are now at the first of the critical crossroads towards which La stanza segreta, L’oceano nel pozzo and Il sogno di Toloma have been nudging us. Yes, the content of Famà's plots has as its underside the eagerness to be in line with locutionary normality which, prevalent though it might be with italophone Italian Canadian novelists, is at odds with the dictates of literary modernity on the strictly verbal ingredients of creative writing. There can be no doubt that on this, as in other genres and on other aspects, the most peremptory and influential imperative of narrative fiction during the last century has been to make it new, to deviate from inherited rules of thumb. In Italy the very novelists who stayed away from the socio-cultural core of the nation – located, as always, in the cityscapes, the bourgeois environment or the attendant ideologies – or who anguished over the same rural, small-town background from which sallied forth Famà's characters had found it necessary to tinker with linguistic protocols. Verga, Pavese, Vittorini, three of the writers evoked in La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma, all forged their own styles and their own speech patterns, the substratum of which was, with the first two, palpably regional based. The correctness, the tonal uniformity of Famà's Italian, it bears repeating, ties back to the susceptibilities of biography, to one of the situations of enunciation instigated by the identitarian impetus that migration enkindles. That state of affairs hasn’t been among the ones that criticism has lionized. The literary heroes of the last 100 years or so have been authors close to the condition of the exiled, rather than to that of the migrant, authors who have written now in the language of the country they have adopted (Conrad), now in both the language of that country and in the language of the country of their birth (Nabokov, Beckett). In the most extreme of their experimentations, they created an invented parlance, an amalgam of several languages (Joyce). But while on these criteria alone Famà's fiction doesn’t satisfy the precepts and self-images that modernity has countenanced for itself, its plots, the vicissitudes of its characters as they face up to time, space and history, do stay within some of modernity's guidelines.
However unpretentiously they may go about their way, the protagonists of the short stories and of L’oceano nel pozzo, La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma after all contend with the everyday Zeitgeist via either one or the other of the two disciplines of human interiority and, as some of their better known and more refined or more esteemed 20th-century counterparts, end up with the short end of the stick. They too fail due to some basic hermeneutic fallacy, to their inability to mingle and to the unforgivingness of chance and society towards anyone who doesn’t move with the flow, who doesn’t adjust to the formulas for success that fate has concocted for him or her. That in L’oceano nel pozzo Stefano finally rejoins the fold, that he chooses the response which allows him to keep one foot outside the melee, ratifies – and simultaneously obscures – his inadequacy and his defeat. Here, again, the silhouette that La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma furnish of their protagonist is more clear-cut. Much of the view we have of the main figures of the two novels has to do with their interpretation of texts. The grandfather's perusal of the books in his basement library (such works as Verga's I Malavoglia or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il gattopardo), Nick's transcription of the notes he finds in that basement or his studies in philosophy are all obviously text-centred pursuits. And exegesis based, even if not directly the exegesis of texts or a useful, correct exegesis, is the advice Nick's analyst dispenses to him. After some wavering, he initially approves his patient's intention to travel back to Sicily but when the voyage ends in a fiasco he can only drum up bland statements about the inevitability of everyday reality, not with strategies through which to accede to modes of active forbearance towards the quirks, the swirls of fate. In acquiescing to Nick's decision he had first claimed that ‘discovering the land of one's ancestors is like salvaging a bit of oneself’ (Famà, 2017: 17). Later, when his patient is back in Canada with the revelations on the encampment that his grandfather and his companions had shepherded into a small burg, he rounds off his earlier remarks with the inescapable, more accurate provisos: in every human being rests the desire to relive the flavour of childhood. The nostalgia, the hankering for a native land forever untraceable remains a mystery of the human soul, something quite complicated whose conscious and unconscious layers discharge messages often contradictory, messages which create only further confusion. (Famà, 2017: 224)
Once more the disparity is telling between our perception, as readers, and the perception of history which underlies the self-narrative that the novel's protagonist parlays. The past whose existence Nick hopes to substantiate – the past of non-urban Southern Italy – was superseded by the phase which saw the unravelling of Stefano's strivings in L’oceano nel pozzo. Put together, these three novels touch on all the Italian migratory streaks and their backdrops up to the mid-1970s, as well as the interactions between the new arrivals and their compatriots now firmly lodged in the new locations or the interaction between them and their younger North American kin. Socioculturally, today, along with the disappearance of the villages which are the models for Toloma and which once exemplified and vouched for the agrarian propensities of the Italian South, we would have to draw attention to the historical weight of the crisis that in La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma strikes the Canadian manufacturing sector and the waning of the Italian Canadian neighbourhoods, the old Little Italies. Moving beyond the timeframe that Famà's three novels marshal and tend to, we can today fill in the aftermath they leave blank, which also helps to pinpoint the chronology beyond the characters and their tales. That aftermath has to do, among other matters, with the changes in the routing of Italian migration (in the 1990s and new millennium the preferred targets have been those within the European Union, Britain, France and Germany) and the changes in its personnel (the individuals who now sally forth are not only better educated than their forerunners, but they also come in greater percentages than before from the industrialized areas of the country).
But above and beyond the historical metanarrative that goes with them what is most suggestive about Famà's short stories and novels is the premium they attach to the return module of travel and the temporal ruptures it foments. To be sure, it is not a peripheral, negligible detail that the voyage back of the Stefano of L’oceano nel pozzo wasn’t decided by him and that it didn’t transpire as he would have wanted, nor that in La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma the home to be retrieved was the home of the grandfather, not the home of the ‘I’ of the two books. In the three narratives the time-space of the departure can either be retrieved disjointedly, allowing the character who has made it back to recover only shreds of his Italian biography, thence condemning him to a kind of final, unredeemable outsidership, or has dissolved altogether, which annuls the whole purpose of the voyage back. Nonetheless, in making Italy or discrete portions of it the ‘there’ to repossess, to re-annex to the biography of the self, even if it is now only an ancestral ‘there’ to fleetingly revert back to, by which to clarify a life, Famà's novels show their hand in an important way. More structurally orthodox than some of the short stories, they do demonstrate a self-reflexivity not to be underestimated.
Surprisingly, on all of this modernity has shown greater optimism. Its two most emblematic, summarizing masterpieces, Proust's Recherche and Joyce's Ulysses, posit the redemption of time and space. In the first of the two, involuntary memory resuscitates shards of the past long forgotten, ensuring that some recomposition of the sequentiality of life's narrative and the geography that goes with it can ensue. In the second, the author's recourse to traditional sources restores order to the swarming, pulsating stream of consciousness and the unplanned encounters that accompany the protagonist's miniature replication of the Homeric epic as he leaves his home and then later in the day slowly ambles towards it and his wife in the streets of a chaotic metropolis. With both authors time and space aren’t objective, independent dimensions: through some sort of mental regimentation – be it that of Bergsonian psychology or that of the proper application of cultural heritage – their consequences can at least be deflected or mitigated. The characters never fully clash with them, as do Famà's protagonists or, by and large, without demurring, the protagonists of Verga's and Pavese's novels or those of other writers like them, who always fall short, for whom those dimensions have always some irreparable disappointment or discrepancy in the offing. And the same can be said of Famà's protagonists. Even Stefano and Nick, who are educated and not unfamiliar with religious studies or philosophy, feel no compulsion to probe, reassess or recuperate the West's origins, as lay clerics and theologians or authoritative continental philosophers and psychoanalysts (from Buber to Tillich, from Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida, from Freud to Jung) have done.
True, in La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma the role of Nick does invite analogies with that of Telemachus. And in the grandfather and his manuscript we could even spot vague resemblances with the Odysseus who recounts his story to the Phaecians. But many – too many – other inconsistencies would block those associations, which, just the same, are never activated. It is not simply the psycho-anthropological unevenness (Odysseus and Telemachus are of aristocrat, warrior stock, the characters of La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma, low-class peasants or descendants of peasants who lack the spunk, the ingenuity and rhetorical dexterity of the two Greek heroes). Most of all, unlike the modernists who have tapped into the epics of Western antiquity Famà's intent isn’t to encrust his plots with levels of irony or other indirect forms of commentary. In La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma the ‘other’ text is cited in full, and it is an in-family one, being, as it is, composed of private, unstructured jottings, the notes that the grandfather bequeaths to Nick. A testimonial never in the public domain, it carries no collective weight and is therefore not quotable except as it is, in its entirety, rather than in excerpts or indirectly, obliquely, by implication, as it might have been had it circulated among outside, more general audiences. Vice versa, in line with the fiction they most often bring to mind, the main aim of Famà's novels is to make proper use of one of the basic features of written language. Which has to do with its capacity to inscribe, to remain, so to speak, after the fact. Or, to formulate it slightly differently, to put on paper, through the auspices of print and narrative inventiveness, the peregrinations and ordeals of such lower-class individuals as Italian 19th- and 20th-century migrants have been.
Along with the various social types that populate his novels, what Famà has been most keen to record are the mental maps his protagonists act by and upon which they trace their round-trip schedules. America has been a beacon of the Italian lower classes since the early 19th century and the repairing back to the birthplace, with its load of unexpressed disillusionment, more often than not proclaims its loss of shine. Famà's plots are centripetal plots, plots where the origins are always overdetermined and to whose settings his protagonists can’t but go back. Just as in some of the short stories from Don Gaudenzio e altre storie, in La stanza segreta, Il sogno di Toloma and L’oceano nel pozzo the protagonists carry out their everyday business under the sign of the nostos, whether or not they are prone to the algos of nostalgia. Even characters who have made for themselves a complementary biography away from that initial location and are firmly established in the other land which is now their home may have doubts about their choices. In L’oceano nel pozzo the elderly ex-migrant who, now well ensconced in New York, seems most at peace with Italian-Americanhood does wonder if he would not have been better off in the Sicilian town of his birth and youth now that economically conditions there have improved (‘Ah, if only he had never left! … He would have never died of hunger … He might have been confined to a hut made of hardened mud and furze branches, but he would have survived. Besides, he had heard that in his village things had changed, so much that no one lived in poverty any longer’; Famà, 2013: 151).
In the same novel Stefano, the lead of the narration and a migrant himself, never has a chance to test the advice he received from the one non-Italian American, non-Puerto Rican character he has purposeful exchanges with, advice on how to reconcile himself with America after he has tussled with it, because the conversation occurs in prison and because the authorities expel him from the country as soon as he is out. But the most blatant adumbration of the scepticism towards cultural metamorphosis comes from the two novels’ handling of second- or third-generation characters: they are either left stranded in the margins of the plot, as are the daughter of the owner of the food centre and the daughter and youngest son of don Peppino, or are inept potheads with no personality of their own, as the latter's older son. When they are elevated to the rank of protagonist, they muddle through in the shadow of other characters, as the Nick of La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma, whose story can never be dissevered from that of his grandfather and his Sicilian progenitors. Neither of the two works contemplates any genuine, in-depth pondering of what it means to be the positive offspring of migrants, or of how migrants might mesh with the society in which they find themselves. Nick, the third-generation character who benefits of ample exposure to the acculturation the society into which he was born requests from and dispenses to its citizens, is bestowed no feelings of full-fledged, perduring empathy. He can bond unfalteringly with neither his second-generation father, nor his siblings, and the young Canadian woman he sees off and on or the psychanalyst he consults are perfunctory presences with whom he has no real in-depth exchange: they are just part of the same everyday picture, unserviceable for him.
It would be wrong to penalize too harshly this view – Nick's alienated loneliness, his hospitalization after his return from Italy, or Stefano's final, post-America assent to transcendence, to the refuge that religious philanthropy promises against the evils of capitalism and history – as proof of some of the limits of Italian Canadian italophone fiction. Just as they serve to set Famà apart from those writers of high modernism who also homed in on questions of space and time, the lack of closure of the plots to which are consigned his protagonists and the diminished, ambivalent, centrifugal role of the non-migrant generations also separate his novels from other late 19th-century or early 20th-century fiction centred on migration. These works too foreground the spatial dimension. But in doing so they by-pass the return, dwelling instead on the novelty of mass migrations, on the ‘going to’, the ‘getting there’ segment of the enterprise, on the decision to cut loose from some ‘here and now’ to seek fortune abroad. And, predictably and inevitably, on some conscious or unconscious predisposition for adventure.
Long the very hallmark of serious, heroic travel, ocean crossings could by themselves, in the late 19th or early 20th century, elicit more than sufficient material for a book. The then bedazzling epitome of technology and early mass transportation that the big steamships were opened the door to migration, made the jump into the unknown tantalizingly accessible to all and sundry, to the lower classes as much as to the middle or upper classes. Edmondo De Amicis’ Sull’oceano or Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant, which describe this ‘in-transit’ stage, the social mixture and the time at sea or the reaction after the first brushes with the new continent, are here good illustrations. For the passengers for whom the voyage is primarily a break from routine, being on board in close contact with strangers, with a sampling of social types, sharpened their curiosity and their anticipation of what lurked ahead. For those who were revoking their ties with the safe terrains of home as they strove for a better life, the lengthy interlude on the high seas was now a liminal period, a period beyond time and space and, in different degrees, a wellspring of trepidation. A time in which to ruminate on, reappraise the hurry to leave the past behind and to perhaps begin to compare and contrast the now-growing anxiety with the hopefulness that prevailed during the waiting before their departure and that had driven them on. As a preamble of what was to follow – a face-to-face rendezvous with scenery and things unimaginable and unimagined before – it turned migration into a jump into the unknown, i.e. for better or for worse, into a voyage socio-culturally only slightly dissimilar, for the mental and psychic accoutrements to be garnered through it, from that of professional seafarers, fortune hunters, merchants, soldiers. From the letting go of the personnel of exploration and colonization, who surrendered more fully to chance, to the venturousness, the unforeseen and unforeseeable in travel.
The short sequel to The Amateur Migrant, published as Across the Plains, attests to the mixture of attractiveness and unpredictability emanating from the topographies towards which migrants channelled their aspirations. For Stevenson, the very names of the states and territories strewn beyond New York – ‘Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota and the two Carolines’ – are ‘a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables’ (Stevenson, 1892: 14). The other side of the coin is the muted, more quotidian and more sombre expectancy, always bordering on the enigmatic, always on the verge of becoming unaccountable, that pervades Kafka's Amerika, his first novel, written between 1911 and 1914, during the heyday of 20th-century European migration. Doing the crossing is a recalcitrant, irresolute, apprehensive youth, only just less ambiguously hurtled towards the capriciousness of the new American life than are the protagonists of the author's later The Trial and The Castle in facing the mysterious, ominous mores of Central European bureaucracy.
But the text which at once captures the lures, the interdictions underlying migration, which foreshadows the caution of 20th-century literature vis-a-vis that theme and lets condense some of the motivations of the journey back, is ‘Eveline’, one of the short stories of Dubliners, Joyce's pre-Ulysses collection of 1914. Among its characters is an unnamed Irish sailor, a temporary returnee from Argentina with whom the female protagonist has a short dalliance. His inability or unwillingness to break from that country, in which he planned to transplant himself and whose surface abutted onto a region then still shrouded in mystery – its residents were, we are told, ‘the terrible Patagonians’ (Joyce, 1962 [1914]: 37) – prevents the woman, who loses her courage right as she is about to board the ship, from eloping to South America with him. Coupled with the sailor's penchant for travel and his acquaintance with lands beyond the pale, beyond the longitude and the latitude of everyday stomping grounds, Eveline's allegiance to home and its extensions fits well with how Joyce was later to distribute the roles of the dramatis personae in his Ulysses (the heroine stays back, the heroes, old and young, meander in the streets of Dublin, his miniaturized symbolic replication of the geography of the Homeric narrative). If the city has been the major, overarching locus of high modernism, then with respect to travel the ex-pat experience, real or pre-emptively exorcised, as with Eveline, must be considered to be its primary collateral effect. Much more so than migration. And no less than, in 20th-century fiction and poetry, has been the reliance on the parallels with myth and the division of labour among the characters (Pound's Cantos, arguably the poetic summa of Anglo-American 20th-century literature, are replete with throwbacks to the Odyssey as they apply to male and female figures or the author's stance towards and ministering of cultural space and cultural heritage).
Some glossings, clearly, have to be appended here. While in the last 100 years or so Italian literature has undertaken its own excogitations on urban space and urban living, it has been reluctant to transfer narratives of travel and migration, with their preludes and epilogues, exclusively within those precincts, as does Joyce with Dublin. Nor has it sought to bring to bear the parallels with Homeric epic that the narratological structure of the plot of Ulysses, with its thematics of departure, stayover in some elsewhere and return, in order to make sense of either its characters or the actions in the space, the ‘there’ and ‘here’, carved out for them. The Verga, the Pavese, the Vittorini whose shadow impinges most directly on La stanza segreta, Il sogno di Toloma and L’oceano nel pozzo are, among those Famà cites, authors whose geography has as its antipodes the backwater, small-town milieu and the metropole, in addition to Italy and some foreign elsewhere. Their fiction and their poetry rebuff without dithering any remaining residues of the sentimentality that may still cling to the notion of migration, to the kind of voyaging that it is. Hence they don’t need to inject whatever tales they propose with any countervailing vaccine, to reduce to prosaic size the heroic past that the apparatus of evocations and allusions novels as Joyce's Ulysses in one stroke summon and withdraw. The disclaimer with which Pavese ends ‘I mari del sud’, a narrative poem, is here, paradigmatically unequivocal. To the young narrator who idealizes and idolizes him for having seen the sunrise in the South Seas, the sailor cousin who has doubled back to the community he had left as a young man replies that when the light broke on the boats they were on he and his companions had already been labouring for some hours (Pavese, 1962: 8). Debunkings of that sort highlight the plots of that same author's La luna e I falò, Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia and Verga's I Malavoglia, whose protagonists do go back to some non-metropolitan ambiance to replenish some areas of their psyche but do so only for brief layovers that never wholly untangle or mitigate their predicament. It is the criterion at the basis of all the other distinctions which keep the fiction they wrote this side of literary modernism. As a form of travel, migration, in its initial phase, the exodus, has the job as its primary goal: it can’t be unbound from the longing for employment.
It could be objected that on these grounds for writers migration has been a ‘found’ content, a content about one of the less violent means by which, precisely through the willingness to submit themselves to the laws of the market, historical subjects have lifted themselves a few rungs up the social ladder and improved their status. On these terms novels such as those by Famà do what realism in literature always does – pick up on those daily-life phenomena or conditions that distinguish a certain period and have somehow not yet been appraised as they might have been. What must, nevertheless, also be remembered is that, as all good fiction which puts its money on the cogency, the efficacy of mimesis, novels such as those of Famà don’t simply recap the phenomena they zoom in on: they interpret them. The migration that La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma or some of the short stories of Don Gaudenzio e altre storie talk about doesn’t end with the usual positive social metamorphosis across the ocean or elsewhere nearer by. In their plots the possibility of socio-economic improvement that motivates the exodus has a cost. That cost is above and beyond the unforeseen practical hardships that achieving a new status implies. Quite aside from the travails of fitting into the new environment, Famà's characters have to cope with the psychological, existential in-betweenness they carry with them, along with its collateral effects (nostalgia, it is worthwhile recalling, in the original, scientific diagnosis was the malady of soldiers away from home). Nor, as we have seen, does the return to the origins fully reset their lives: rather it transforms them into irrefutable proofs of the unrepairable slippages between space and time or between personal, physical time and historical time. This is why, among other things, some of the short stories end as they do and why, for all their linguistic anonymity or the simplicity of their plots, novels such as L’oceano nel pozzo, La stanza segreta and Il sogno di Toloma do merit serious critical consideration. By deposing their protagonists in international space, and not in the restricted circumference of the city, in proposing characters that can never complete the journey home, the itinerary they had devised for themselves, they do acquire a thematic and critical edge that can’t be overlooked. Like many other novels about migration, they are, in modern literature, the works which counter some of the more sophisticated and more influential novels. Both those with plots whose two-way, departure–return trips end Homeric style, with the origins regained, as well as those in which characters leave home to see the world, to satisfy their proclivities for adventure.
Read with this in mind, the final questions towards which Don Gaudenzio e altre storie, La stanza segreta, Il sogno di Toloma and L’oceano nel pozzo have been spurring us will seem more justified. The truth is that whatever norms of taste we may wish to resurrect and espouse, Italian Canadian italophone fiction, as all the literature produced by migrants or their successors, does raise other, still more general quandaries. Is it really of no relevance who it is that writes? Are there no other lives that deserve attention, beyond those fiction has most adamantly acclaimed during the last two centuries or thereabouts? The intertextual thread that Famà's novels bid us weave at some level deposits us in some of the most well-known precincts of 20th-century culture. So where, in terms of literary history, are we to classify those novels or the fiction of writers like him?
This is one of the supplementary queries those novels impress on us. Others arise from them, and they are just as alluring. Don Gaudenzio e altre storie, La stanza segreta, L’oceano nel pozzo and Il sogno di Toloma are written in Italian and published in Italy by a writer who has spent most of his life in Canada and whose protagonists, whether Italian born or Canadian born, never repudiate their bonds with a ‘here’ and a ‘there’, be these the US and Italy or Canada and Italy. As works of literature, where do those of them that wrangle with some of these matters ultimately belong? To Italian literature? To Canadian literature? To US literature, in the case of the second of the three novels? To say that they are transnational works, a most tempting à la page answer, is an ‘easy’ answer. It, anyway, would contradict the characters’ story, who, as migrants, move about in spaces they can’t contest, which can reject them officially via their laws (as they do with Stefano). The trajectories allotted to these characters cut across bordered, topographically marked circuits, not abstract sites or abstract histories.
Are multilingual canons and the instruments that would encourage the emergence of such literature – multilingual anthologies, anthologies with texts in English, French, Italian and the languages of the other immigrants, along with indigenous languages – possible, nowadays, in Canada or the US? And in Italy, could anthologies of Italian literature with texts written by emigrant authors who write in the language of their adopted countries or, to think of it, by immigrants in the language they speak as they come to Italy, along with texts in standard Italian and in the major Italian dialects by Italian authors, be conceivable? Whatever the value we may wish to confer to the individual texts, through them we are afforded a glimpse at another facet of the literariness of the future, the future towards which the movement of peoples, more and more on the rise and more and more among the defining characteristics of our age, is daily steering us. And it is works such as the ones written by Famà and authors with a similar literary pedigree, by authors who write from some other place and who are outside the circuit of both vanguard and bestsellerdom, that force us to ask these questions.