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PLATE I Mt Etna Dreaming Billy Doolan Contents Acknowledgements v Abbreviations vi Introduction 1 1. The uncanny mirror of Whiteness 1.1. Almost Australian, but not quite 7 1.2. Uncanny W(hole)ness 22 1.3. The migrancy of the uncanny and the uncanny of migrancy 29 1.4. There is no ethnic relationship 38 1.5. (In)visible blackness 47 1.6. Hoaxing jokes or the ‘truth’ of hoaks: John O’Grady and Helen Demidenko 61 2. The cracked mirror or the phantom of ‘authenticity’ 2.1. Abject texts 74 2.2. The phantom of authenticity: the nostalgia for ‘orality’ 81 2.3. The phantom of authenticity: “an identikit of markers” 89 2.4. Ethnic minority writing: ‘defining’ boundaries 94 2.5. Acquiring visibility: the literature of the arrivant 98 2.6. Re(orient)ing the Gothic: monstrosities and intertextuality 103 2.7. Postmodern nostalgic ‘creatures’ 112 2.8. Uncanny intertextualities: dreams, memories and metaphors 119 3. The sublime experience of living “on leased land” 3.1. The comic/Gothic rituals of ‘polyphonic’ identities 132 3.2. Realised absences: silences and darkness 145 3.3. “On the sharp edge of…[metaphor]” 147 3.4. A paraxial text 160 3.5. Sicilyan textual ‘spaces’ 164 3.6. Polluting memories of colonial ‘roses’ 170 3.7. Unsettling ‘Whiteness’: homosexuality and miscegenation 178 3.8. A polyphonic jouissance 187 4. Searching for home or the uncomfortable halfway 4.1 A weird melancholy 195 4.2 “This is my explanation” 201 4.3 Framing metaphors: “a patruni” 207 4.4 Framing metaphors: the ‘Cloudland Ballroom’ and the ‘mousetrap’ 215 4.5 De-realising (‘white’) dreams 221 4.6 Remembering semiotic spaces: demise and sense of belonging 231 4.7 De-realising presences: ‘ghosting’ identity 242 4.8 Lycanthropy and vampirism: hungering for hybridity 248 4.9 Hybrid texts 262 Conclusions: the unhomely reader 269 Appendix A – Antonio Casella’s biography 272 Appendix B – Venero Armanno’s biography 276 Appendix C – Character charts 280 List of plates 283 Bibliography 288 Acknowledgements In acknowledging my gratitude to all those who have intellectually, emotionally and economically supported my project, I would like to thank Professor Gemma Persico who has patiently acted as a mentor, rigorously supervised my work and offered me her knowledge of Italian-Canadian literature which has proved a valuable sphere of comparison. I would also like to thank Professor Vittoria Maria D’Amico as coordinator of the PhD course ‘Studi Inglesi ed Anglo-Americani’ and the Department of Filologia Moderna for being financially supportive of my attendance to conferences in Italy and abroad and my research. Fulbright professors Etta Madden and Patricia Schroeder have been very helpful in suggesting ideas and indicating bibliographical references. To them I express my gratitude. As for my research abroad, I would like to thank the staff of the Senate House Library, the British Library, the School of Oriental and African Studies Library (London) and the National Australian Library (Canberra). Also, deep gratitude goes to both the Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library (London) and the Fryer Library (Brisbane) where, thanks to their staff’s professionalism and wonderful hospitality, ‘research is made easier’ and particularly to Senior Librarian Catherine Leutenegger for all her precious assistance. I would also like to thank Professor Gillian Whitlock, doctors Anne Gilligan, Venero Armanno, whom I met in Australia, and Antonio Casella for giving me enlightening suggestions. My gratitude also goes to all those friends who patiently listened to my ruminations and to my university colleagues whose enthusiasm has always inspired me to make the most of this experience. Dulcis in fundo, my deepest ‘inexpressible’ gratitude goes to my family… ~ v ~ Abbreviations TS A. Casella, The Sensualist, Sydney, Hodder & Stoughton, 1991. R V. Armanno, Romeo of the Underworld, Milsons Point (NSW), Vintage [1994] 2001. F V. Armanno, Firehead, Milsons Point (NSW), Random House Australia, 1999. TV V. Armanno, The Volcano. A Sicilian Novel of Emotion, Passion and Fire, Milsons Point (NSW), Knopf, 2001. OED Oxford English Dictionary online ~ vi ~ Introduction Apart from some scholars, very little has been written on Italian ethnic minority literature in Australia and, specifically, no investigation has been carried out about the presence of its Gothic aspects in relation to their diasporic and postcolonial meanings. As for these elements in postcolonial literature, Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” has been of paramount importance in understanding the reality of the colonised subjects in social, psychological and political terms rather than in exotic ones. Mapping the clash between the unheimlich and heimlich on the reality of ‘migrant’ subjects means blurring hierarchical oppositions, particularly in Australia marked by a ‘complicit postcolonialism’. In this light, it is significant to contextualise migrants’ reality – even the cultural and social presence of those Italians ‘and’ Sicilians arriving in the aftermath of WWII who are in part perceived as doomed to ‘invisibility’ – in line with S.M. Gunew’s situated multiculturalisms and in relation to colonialism. All this leading to a post-multicultural discourse, mirroring the ‘post’ of postcolonialism, not as something that follows multiculturalism but as its counter- discourse. The aim of this study is, thus, to highlight the function of such Gothic elements. On the one hand, they underline the dehumanizing discourse from a narcissistic hegemonic standpoint and, on the other hand, they represent an uncanny return of the past which unsettles the present in both what it means to be an immigrant in Australia – specifically a Sicilian one – and an Anglo-Australian in a multicultural context. In order to demonstrate the above, this research is informed by several critics and has as starting points the two authors’ own words. Casella refers to The Sensualist as a sort of ‘hit-back-at’ novel and Armanno sees the world from a perspective embedded in the term ‘apartness’ – whose implications are evident in The Volcano and Romeo of the Underworld. Far from being associated with homesickness, their ‘third space’ represents an intertextual form of ‘postmodern nostalgia’. This ‘cultural resistance’ is elucidated by drawing on postcolonial, postmodernist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic and diasporic studies. In this framework a plethora of theories will ~ 1 ~ help to unfold the cultural, social and political texture of the novels here analysed: Kristeva’s semiotic, melancholia and intertextuality, Freud’s unheimlich, comic, joke-work and dream-work, Bhabha’s hybridity, Lacan’s Real, Derrida’s deconstruction, hospitality and hauntology, Said’s theories, Bakhtin’s intertextuality, grotesque and carnivalesque, and Burke’s sublime. Freud’s unheimlich ontological and epistemological approach intertwines with the theories aforementioned. In brief, the semiotic elements in the novels here analysed convey the ‘Real’ where hybrid subjectivity has its locus. Such inexpressible experience is also perceivable through its ‘objectification’ in the form of the intertextual sublime and through uncanny Gothic elements such as memory, dreams and metaphors. The sublime functions as a paramount manifestation of semiotic drives associated to the marginalised ethnic writer which energises mainstream culture, though only after having ‘cracked’ the narcissistic mirror of the ‘white’ subject. In this conceptual cartography, the deconstruction of concepts such as ‘white’, ‘ethnicity’, and ‘identity’ – the latter in favour of ‘subjectivity’ – entails that the subject has to be interpreted as socially constructed and, thus, located in Lacan’s ‘Real’ where the idea of a totalising harmonious ethnic relationship does not exist. It is at the core of this experience that absence, the unrepresentable ‘encounter’ in the sublime, is located. Focusing on the latter, this study tries to avoid hierarchical and discriminatory forms of essentialism. Moreover, in approaching the uncanny from a postmodern perspective, this study discusses its functionality not only in expressing forms of displacement but also its polyvalence of recurrent concepts in diasporic studies. For example, ‘diaspora’ and ‘nostalgia’ can express both feelings of sorrow and fluidity and cultural exchange. Consequently, this disrupts the perspective of a fixed and homogenised diasporic subject in a one-to-one relationship supporting, also through official ‘multicultural’ policies, paths in line with colonial assimilation. In this post-colonial perspective, this study is informed by theories concerning ghosts, werewolves and vampires as discussed and mentioned by several critics. ~ 2 ~ As for intertextuality, and its postmodern parody, this is analysed through its aesthetic expressions such as those found in historiographic metafiction (The Volcano), in the pastiche (The Sensualist), and in the dialogical novel (Romeo of the Underworld). Their intertextuality underpins the sublime process of subjectivity shattering the ‘white’ reader’s ontological and epistemological certainties. These theories, as far as Sicilians in Australia are concerned, have been used very little to understand the social experience and literary production of these writers whether defined as migrant, ethnic or multicultural. The latter calls into question the (in)visibility given to these literary works, their authors and their ethnic community. This study is divided into four chapters. In CHAPTER ONE, ‘The uncanny mirror of Whiteness’, the starting