Abstract
In John Fante's Ask the Dust, Arturo Bandini's ambition to become a great writer overrides his disadvantages as the son of Italian immigrants searching for his place in American society. With cocksure arrogance he cultivates the fantasy self-image of a confident womaniser to compensate for his lack of sexual experience. His inability to confront reality without distorting its features through his wild fantasies continually frustrates his attempts to write a novel as a follow-up to his short story The Little Dog Laughed. Criticism on the novel has traced his moral transformation from egotism to empathy without, however, taking into proper consideration Bandini's idea of himself as an author and the manner in which Fante constructs a series of narrative voices to create a self-dialogue within the text between the older Bandini as narrator and the younger Bandini as protagonist.
At the beginning of John Fante's Ask the Dust (1998), the main protagonist, Arturo Bandini, is faced with a ‘great problem’. He solves it ‘by turning out the light and going to bed’ (Fante, 1998: 1). That the ‘great problem’ is merely one of deciding whether to pay his hotel bills or to move out does not detract from the significance of his gesture, which is symptomatic of his propensity to evade any kind of painful confrontation with reality in spite of his dogged determination to make a name for himself as an author writing about real life against a mainstream literary world that he sees as contrived and insincere (Marroni, 2005: 6). 1
In terms of its representation of Arturo Bandini, Fante's novel has inevitably attracted criticism that focuses on questions of marginalisation, border-consciousness, racism, ethnicity, assimilation and cultural identification. In the case of Ask the Dust, which is the third volume of ‘The Bandini Quartet’, these intercultural readings set out to determine the extent to which the story of its main protagonist is one of ethnic rediscovery or racial refashioning. As a first-generation American child of Italian immigrants (who would have been classed as white), Bandini is acutely aware of his difference to the other immigrants with whom he finds himself compelled to associate. However, he does not experience the shame or humiliation of the immigrant in search of his place in American society so much as the frustration and injustice of not being recognised and acknowledged as a great writer. As Kordich (1995: 17) remarks: ‘Arturo does not seek out the embrace of Southern California's Italian community. Nor does he search for complete assimilation into the WASP mainstream’. Those critics who view Bandini's story from the perspective of a Künstlerroman generally detect a moral transformation in the character as a man and artist from his arrogant pursuit of egotistical ends to his ultimate empathy and understanding of others. Nevertheless, the sociological, aesthetic and moral orientations of these critical readings do not really take Bandini's literary activity into account in terms of his idea of himself as an author and the way in which this is rendered through the stylistic and rhetorical features of Fante's text. A close reading of his work reveals a writer very much conscious of his craft, however spontaneous and ‘natural’ his writing may seem. After all, it must be remembered that this is a novel about a young man attempting to write a novel. By extension, it is also the story of John Fante writing a novel.
In a very similar way to Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Arturo Bandini has to endure the torments and feelings of guilt of his strict Catholic upbringing, particularly in regard to his relations with the opposite sex.
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As with Stephen, Bandini's attempt to break away from his religion only leads to a refashioning of its principles. At the same time, however, it would be difficult to find a character more different to Joyce's creation. With his brazen arrogance, brash cocksureness, embarrassing naivety and loud boastfulness, Bandini appears to have none of the sensitivity, insight or linguistic skills expected of a writer. Not only this, but from the beginning the huge gap between the reality he intends to represent in his fictional world and his manner of apprehending it is made more than evident: Then a great deal of time passed as I stood in front of a pipe shop and looked, and the whole world faded except that window and I stood and smoked them all, and saw myself a great author with that natty Italian briar, and a cane, stepping out of a big black car, and she was there too, proud as hell of me, the lady in the silver fox fur. We registered and then we had cocktails and then we danced a while, and then we had another cocktail and I recited some lines from Sanskrit, and the world was so wonderful, because every two minutes some gorgeous one gazed at me, the great author […]. (Fante, 1998: 3)
Furthermore, although Ask the Dust is a first-person narration, Fante weaves a polyphony of voices representing different aspects of Bandini as narrator and Bandini as character. In addition to the homodiegetic narrator who represents the older Bandini, with respect to the young Bandini as the protagonist in the novel, there may be identified two other distinct but interrelated voices on a discourse level: Bandini the character (as opposed to the narrator), who addresses or converses with himself in free direct discourse; and Bandini the character who refers to himself in the third person within the diegesis through a sort of simulated extradiegetic narration. This expedient is intratextually derived from the scene in Fante's first novel, in which Arturo sacrilegiously reaccommodates his Catholicism in a secular form when he decides he will no longer pray to God but to himself: ‘Arturo, my man. My beloved Arturo. It seems you suffer so much, and so unjustly. But you are brave, Arturo. You remind me of a mighty warrior, with the scars of a million conquests. What courage is yours! What nobility! What beauty! Ah, Arturo, how beautiful you really are! I love you so, my Arturo, my great and mighty god. (Fante, 1985: 116) A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya, hya: there's a place for me, too, and it begins with B, in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett; not much that Arnold Bennett, but I’d be there to sort of bolster up the B's, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame. (Fante, 1998: 4)
The fact that Arturo's sole claim to literary fame at the beginning of the novel is a story published in a small magazine five months previously titled The Little Dog Laughed only renders his fantasies more humorously bombastic. He is happily oblivious to the absurdity of brandishing the magazine at his landlady while boasting ‘I wrote that’ (Fante, 1998: 50). Bandini fills his suitcase with copies of the magazine, one of which he uses as a business card or bargaining chip to gain access to the Alta Loma Hotel in which he is lodged in Los Angeles. Significantly, the reader is told nothing about the story itself (the older, omniscient Bandini is also silent on this point) beyond the fact that it is about a man and that there is no dog. The story obviously functions to reveal the variety of responses it elicits so as to give the reader an idea of the impact of his story on other people. The first of these is an Italian American in West Virginia: His name was Leonardo, a great Italian critic, only he was not known as a critic, he was just a man in West Virginia, but he was great and he was a critic, and he died. He was dead when my airmail letter got to West Virginia, and his sister sent my letter back. (Fante, 1998: 5)
The short clauses punctuated by the mimetic commas here convey the humorous alternation of Bandini's assertions and counter-assertions in which fantasy (he was a critic) vies with reality (he was not known as a critic). Bandini then boasts of the effect that his story has on the other residents of the hotel: ‘Everybody in the hotel read The Little Dog Laughed, everybody: a story to make you die holding the page, and it wasn’t about a dog, either: a clever story, screaming poetry’ (Fante, 1998: 5). The fact that the use of free indirect discourse appears more suspiciously as a summation of his own evaluations rather than those of his fellow guests is confirmed when he is eventually forced to admit: ‘Of them all only one read The Little Dog Laughed’ (Fante, 1998: 55). The implication that his tale does not cater to conventional or popular taste is evidenced by the reactions of the following two people who do read it. The first is a 14-year-old girl who visits Bandini in his hotel room with a request for a copy of the magazine: The name of the person who read my story was Judy, and her last name was Palmer. She knocked on my door that afternoon, and opening it, I saw her. She was holding a copy of the magazine in her hand. She was only fourteen, with curls of brown hair, and a red ribbon tied in a bow above her forehead. ‘Are you Mr Bandini?’ she said. I could tell from her eyes she had read The Little Dog Laughed. I could tell instantly. ‘You read my story, didn't you?’ I said. ‘How did you like it?’ She clutched it close to her chest and smiled. ‘I think it's wonderful,’ she said. ‘Oh, so wonderful! Mrs Hargraves told me you wrote it. She told me you might give me a copy.’ My heart fluttered in my throat. (Fante, 1998: 56) […] My eyes bulged. There in one corner was a huge stack of Hackmuth's magazine. I walked to it at once, and pulled out the issue containing The Little Dog Laughed. The priest had seated himself. ‘This is a great magazine,’ I said. ‘The greatest of them all.’ The priest crossed his legs, shifted his cigar. ‘It's rotten,’ he said. ‘Rotten to the core.’ ‘I disagree,’ I said. ‘I happen to be one of its leading contributors.’ ‘You?’ the priest asked. ‘And what did you contribute?’ I spread The Little Dog Laughed before him on the desk. He glanced at it, pushed it aside. ‘I read that story,’ he said. ‘It's a piece of hogwash. And your reference to the Blessed Sacrament was a vile and contemptible lie. You ought to be ashamed of yourself’. (Fante, 1998: 82)
It becomes increasingly clear as the novel progresses that The Little Dog Laughed represents a cul-de-sac for Baldini. A story for him to gloat over as a testimony to his hey-day. Moreover, the effect it has produced on him is one of stasis rather than encouragement and inspiration. It is a faux pas – a dead end – a story evidently not written in earnest, and therefore ultimately not to be classed as the artwork Bandini is initially convinced it is.
Clearly, from the first chapter, Fante's character is represented as someone who is suffering from writer's block. For against the dubious testimony of his writing talents, of which The Little Dog Laughed is the only illustration, there are also his failed attempts to write another story: The lean days of determination. That was the word for it, determination: Arturo Bandini in front of his typewriter two full days in succession, determined to succeed; but it didn’t work, the longest siege of hard and fast determination in his life, and not one line done, only two words written over and over across the page, up and down, the same words: palm tree, palm tree, palm tree, a battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won: see it out there swaying in the blue air, creaking sweetly in the blue air. The palm tree won after two fighting days, and I crawled out of the window and sat at the foot of the tree. (Fante, 1998: 9)
Here, Fante significantly interweaves the three different voices which form Bandini's self-addressed discourses. The comic effect of self-aggrandisement in the first segment of the passage above is melodramatically rendered by his referencing himself in the third person. However, the moment that he acknowledges his defeat, he reverts to first-person narration (‘a battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won’). The palm tree had initially ignited his imagination with thoughts of Palm Sunday and Egypt and Cleopatra. Yet, it is also a real palm tree, stained by carbon monoxide and its crusted trunk choked with dust and sand from the desert. Once again, the irreconcilable gap between Bandini's associations and actual reality is precisely what obstructs his creative imagination.
As a result of his initial failure, Bandini appears to turn on himself in self-denigration and self-hatred: So you walk along Bunker Hill, and you shake your fist at the sky, and I know what you’re thinking Bandini. The thoughts of your father before you, lash across your back, hot ire in your skull, that you are not to blame: this is your thought, that you were born poor, son of miseried peasants, driven because you were poor, fled from your Colorado town because you are poor, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died. (Fante, 1998: 12–13)
On an intradiegetic level, the passage may be read as free indirect discourse in which the young Bandini is talking to himself. However, there is also a sense in which the voice could be the older (and therefore wiser) Bandini addressing his past self and explaining, from his omniscient viewpoint, the reasons for his artistic impasse. In this respect, it makes more sense to see that only this older Bandini can know, in hindsight, what the younger Bandini is thinking. This discourse situation allows Bandini to expose the harsh reality behind his desire to write which is equated with his cowardice and treachery, not to mention his fear and lack of experience with women.
Shortly after this outburst, he conceives the idea for a story which he later discards: Here is an idea with money: these steps, the city below, the stars within throwing distance: boy meets girl idea, good setup, big money idea. Girl lives in that grey apartment house, boy is a wanderer. Boy – he's me. Girl's hungry. Rich Pasadena girl hates money. Deliberately left Pasadena millions ‘cause of ennui, weariness with money. Beautiful girl, gorgeous. Great story, pathological conflict. Girl with money phobia: Freudian setup. Another guy loves her, rich guy. I’m poor. I meet rival. Beat him to death with caustic wit and also lick him with fists. Girl impressed, falls for me. Offers millions. I marry her on condition she’ll stay poor. Agrees. But ending happy: girl tricks me with huge trust fund day we get married. I’m indignant but I forgive her ‘cause I love her. Good idea, but something missing: Collier's story. (Fante, 1998: 12–13)
Bandini's thoughts fluctuate from the external world (‘these steps, the city below, the stars within throwing distance […] that grey apartment house’) to the imaginative world of his story which he gives in a brief synopsis where plot elements alternate with evaluations and thematic considerations (‘Girl's hungry […] Great story, pathological conflict. Girl with money phobia: Freudian setup’). Bandini is keen not to omit the fact that his story is a self-fantasy (‘Boy – he's me’), just as Ask the Dust can be seen as a disguised autobiography. Yet it seems that his intrusion in the story as the boy is what stops him from continuing.
It is only after he meets Vera Rivken, the eccentric and mysterious Jewess with whom he has his first sexual relationship, that Bandini finds the inspiration to write a novel. Yet, it is interesting to note that, in this case also, he falsifies the reality of the experience by staging a pathetically tragi-comic sexual fantasy in which Vera is compelled to play the role of Camilla: ‘Camilla,’ I said. She sat up, touched my mouth. ‘I’m so lonely’ she said. ‘Pretend that I am she.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. That's it. That's your name. It's Camilla.’ I opened my arms and she sank into my chest. ‘You’re beautiful,’ I said. ‘You’re a Mayan princess.’ ‘I am princess Camilla’. (Fante, 1998: 108) And then, like a dream it came. Out of my desperation it came – an idea, my first sound idea, the first in my entire life, full-bodied and clean and strong, line after line, page after page. A story about Vera Rivken. I tried it and it moved easily. But it was not thinking, not cogitation. It simply moved of its own accord, spurted out like blood. This was it. I had it at last. Here I go, leave me be, oh boy do I love it, Oh God do I love you, and you Camilla and you and you. Here I go and it feels so good, so sweet and warm and soft, delicious, delirious. Up the river and over the sea, this is you and this is me, big fat words, little fat words, big thin words, whee whee whee. (Fante, 1998: 122)
Whilst the idea for his story may emerge from the depths of his despair, the unforced nature of the writing process releases him from the bonds of his egoistic preoccupations and wild fantasies. The passage shifts from the voice of the older first-person narrator (‘And then, like a dream it came […] spurted out like blood’) to the direct discourse of the younger Bandini revelling in his retrieved inspiration (‘This was it […] whee whee whee’) as if to underline the intensity of this moment of epiphany when Bandini has at last discovered his muse. Nevertheless, as he joyfully surrenders to the euphoria of the creative force that propels him onward, it cannot be ignored that the contents of his novel, as in the case with The Little Dog Laughed, are never revealed. The reader is only left to imagine what sort of story Bandini could have written about a woman whom he knew nothing about. The fact that Bandini expresses the heartening influence that writing produces in him through the hyperbolic and exclamative language that typifies his discourse throughout suggests a deliberate intention on Fante's part to leave any question of the merit of his novel unanswered.
