Narrative in the Poetic Mode

If the peoples were established by laws, and if among all these peoples the laws were given in verse, and if the first institutions of these peoples were likewise preserved in verse, it necessarily follows that all the first peoples were poets. Giambattista Vico, book 2, "Poetic Wisdom"

The poetic mode of narrative development, rooted in an oral tradition, represents the beginning of the growth of a distinct literary tradition that follows Vico's depiction of the movement from vero narratio, or the poetic stage of cultural development, into the mythic. Vico refers to this period as the Age of Gods, and thus the literature produced during this period reveals strong beliefs in the divine. Vico sees the poets as the "sense" of the human race (110) and the earliest "makers" of human stories or history. I use this meaning of poet-as-maker when I apply the phrase "poetic mode" to Rosa (1970), the as-told-to autobiography of Rosa Cavalleri; to Son of Italy (1924), by Pascal D'Angelo; and to The Soul of an Immigrant (1921), by Constantine Panunzio. These narratives are representative of texts created out of elements of the oral tradition, and they represent some of the earliest Italian American narrative contributions to American culture.

Immigrant Autobiography: From Oral Tradition to Written Word

Immigrant Autobiography, informed by a pre-metropolitan self, witnesses through its very own shock-ridden plot, the birth of the modern self and condition, the American condition par excellence. William Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography in the United States

Italian Americans are heirs to a rich oral culture, one that once was passed on from generation to generation not by diaries, lettters, short stories, or novels, but by word of mouth. In the villages and towns of Italy, the cantastorie, or "history singers," were (and in many cases still are) the custodians of local tradition. Within the family, children learned by listening, watching, and imitating. Books were not a part of peasant life in southern Italy, nor were they an integral part of Italians' adaptation to American life. In America, Italian oral culture collided with the literary traditions of Anglo-Saxon culture, and for a long time learning how to write (more often than not for the first time) in the language of the adopted country would be synonymous with becoming American. Creating texts through narrative contributed to the re-creation of selves forged out of the elements of Italian and American cultures. Rosa's voice, D'Angelo's text, and Panunzio's figura of the model American each represent key stages in the self-refashioning that occurred through the immigrant experience as it was (re)presented in writing.

Narratives in the poetic mode are strongly connected to the oral traditions of Italian preindustrial culture. Familiarity with distinctive characteristics of these narratives will help us to identify these texts as bridges between the primary oral culture and the newly literate culture. In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong identifies a number of elements found in oral and literate cultures. Of these, "the heroic tradition of primary oral culture and of early literate culture with massive oral residue, relates to the agonistic lifestyle. Oral memory works with heavy characters and the bizarre" (49). All three narratives under discussion in this chapter contain rich examples of such characters. From wizards and witches to bosses and "big brothers," these characters represent the powers that influence each narrator's world-view. The sentence structure of oral stories, Ong tells us, is characteristically simple. These simple sentences accumulate information rather than imbedding it in complex sentences filled with dependent clauses. Such a structure facilitates recall, a necessity in cultures that rely on human memory for information storage and transmission. This characteristic is more obvious in the as-told-to narrative of Rosa Cavalleri, but it is also found in a lesser degree in the more literary autobiographies of D'Angelo and Panunzio.

Other identifying characteristics of a primary oral culture recognizable in these texts are the use of repetition and the use of present tense—techniques that live storytellers often employ to create a sense of things happening right before the listeners' eyes. Ong also tells us that "oral cultures tend to use concepts in situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld" (Orality and Literacy, 49). This predominance of the concrete over the abstract is more obvious in Rosa's narrative, but again, it also appears to a lesser degree in the narratives of D'Angelo and Panunzio. All three narratives contain a rich sampling of these elements while they also provide the materials out of which we can begin to fashion the origins of an Italian American culture.

The Signifying Donkey: From Voice to Text to Figura

Signifyin(g), in other words, is synonymous with figuration. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey

Most of the Italians who immigrated to America between 1880 and 1920 came from a peasant culture based on oral traditions. Books were not among the possessions they carried along in the move to America. In Italy, literacy was a tool used by those in power to exercise and protect their power over others. The Italian institutions of church and state controlled access to this power by controlling access to literacy. It is no wonder, then, that the majority of Italians who immigrated to America were illiterate people who had had no power to control their lives in Italy. In essence, they were considered subhuman by those who held power over them. There are many references to the plight of the Italian peasant being the same as that of the donkey, the typical beast of burden in southern Italy. Ignazio Buttitta's poem from the early 1920s, "Lu sceccu," or "The Ass," is a prime example. In the poem, here translated from the Sicilian into English by Justin Vitiello, Buttitta uses the donkey as a metaphor for the peasant:

    The Donkey

    The wretch drags the chain
    and the dumb donkey bears it,
    harnessed from dusk till dawn
    to the mill, back and forth —
    a thrashing is the rule
    as the boss strides the rump.

    Bray, the bridle will slash,
    paw, the spurs will grind,
    tote wheat, but straw
    and chaff is what you eat.
    Such is the lot of the wretch
...