“与死者生活”以对抗死亡——弗雷德·L·加尔达菲教授访谈录

王祖友

(河南理工大学,焦作,454003)

Fred Gardaphe is Distinguished Professor of English and Italian American Studies at Queens College, CUNY. For 10 years he directed the American Studies and Italian American Studies Programs at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is Associate Editor ofFraNoi, an Italian American monthly newspaper, editor of the Series in Italian American Studies at State University of New York Press, and co-founding-co-editor ofVoicesinItalianAmericana, a literary journal and cultural review. He is the former president of MELUS (2003-2006) and the American Italian Historical Association (1996-2000), Books edited by him include:NewChicagoStories,ItalianAmericanWays, andFromtheMargin:WritingsinItalianAmericana. He has written two one-act plays: “Vinegar and Oil,” produced by the Italian/American Theatre Company in 1987, and “Imported from Italy,” produced by Zebra Crossing Theater in 1991. His study,ItalianSigns,AmericanStreets:TheEvolutionofItalianAmericanNarrative, is based on his dissertation which won the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli (Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs award for 1993 dissertations) and was published by Duke University Press in 1996; it was entitled Outstanding Academic Book for 1996 by choice. He has also publishedDagoesRead:TraditionandtheItalian/AmericanWriterandMoustachePeteisDead!:Italian/AmericanOralTraditionPreservedinPrint,LeavingLittleItaly:EssayingItalianAmericanStudies, andFromWiseguystoWiseMen:MasculinitiesandtheItalianAmericanGangster.Importatodall’italiaedaltriraccontidallavecchiaquartiere(Imported from Italy and other stories of from the old neighborhood), an Italian translation of a collection of short fiction. His most recent book isTheArtofReadingItalianAmericana. He is currently at work on a book concerning irony and humor in Italian American culture and on a novelTheGoodProfessor.

WangZuyou: You bring a lot of fun to your class when you offer your students the course named “Funniest Fiction.” How do your conduct that course?

FredGardaphe: If there’s one thing I have developed over my sixty years of life, it’s a grand sense of humor. I had to, to deal with all the trouble I encountered at an early age.

If I could be anything besides a professor, it would be a stand-up comedian, but since I don’t have the gift for that profession, I use my training as a professor to teach students how humor has affected and can affect their lives. The course varies from semester to semester as I get bored easily by using the same materials twice.

I like to give the students a sense of how American literary humor has developed over time, so the course usually moves chronologically from the colonial humor of writers such as Benjamin Franklin through the great sarcasm of Mark Twain into the black humor of Kurt Vonnegut and other contemporary writers. I also try to cover as many ethnic groups as possible in this survey course, from Native American to African American to Asian American; in this way we can better learn the similarities and differences among the cultures of the world as they interact to form U.S. American culture.

Students read novels, short fiction, and when possible, we view films and television clips. We examine how humor can serve to support or disrupt the status quo of any society. Students write their own humor, short papers on various themes, and a final researched essay in which they examine how humor affects the interpretation of a work of their own choosing.

Wang: You grew up in Melrose Park, a gritty Italian-American suburb of Chicago. You entered academe as a refuge from the violence that took the lives of three of the most important men in your life. Your godfather was shot as he tried to hold up a local golf course. Your father was murdered in your family pawnshop. Your grandfather was killed during a hold-up of the same store. All these family tragedies must leave you an indelible horrid imprint in your mind. How did you manage to live through them?

Gardaphe: I am the oldest son, and one of four children of a mother who was widowed when she was very young. When I was ten I became “the man” for my family, and while I didn’t think much of it back then, when I look back, I realize it was a major obstacle to my emotional development. I worked and paid my own way through all my education, which while it taught me much about the value of hard work, kept me from devoting full concentration on my studies. I also grew up in an environment that did not put much value on classroom education. I used to work in place where the older men used to mock my education by calling me “professor” even when I was in high school. I suppose you could also say that the streets where I grew up challenged my attempts to educate myself out of there.

I have always found reading to be a refuge from the streets where I grew up. I loved the streets, it’s just that the stress it places on kids can be devastating, especially if you live in a place where violence is common, expected, and sanctioned by the authorities and the criminals. Reading became a way to leave the crazy world for a while and escape into the world of others, even if they were sometimes more violent than mine.

As for living through those tragedies, I have to say first of all, I couldn’t have done it without the strength of my family. They succeeded where all the public institutions failed in terms of providing support and a structure for dealing with the tragedies that befell our family. After that, I would say it was reading and writing, only sometimes in the formal classroom, but always in my own personal life. I read the way some people breathe air, constantly and rarely consciously, and that, along with being put to work at the age of ten and working throughout my whole life, has helped me to avoid tsunamis of emotion and self- (and even other-) destruction that can sweep over one’s life from time to time. And of course there’s that sense of humor, without it I would have probably have become a hermit or be dead by now.

Wang: You are also revisiting the killings of his male relatives in a memoir, “Living with the Dead.” Does the writing of the memoir help you to get over it?

Gardaphe: I have been working on this story since I was 17 years old. That was 44 years ago. There still is no book, though I think now I am getting closer to put it into print. I have written hundreds, maybe even thousands, of pages over the years and was never happy with what I produced. It’s now time to put it out there or leave it alone. I don’t think the writing has helped me get over it, as it is such a chaotic pastiche of emotions, memories, dreams, fantasies, histories and so much more that it has become a part of who I am forever. Writing has helped me to understand what happened and sometimes even why it happened. That’s been good. Every time I put words onto the page, I learn something new.

Wang: You compiledItalianAmericanLiterature:ASelectCriticalBibliography. Will you share with me some experience on that?

Gardaphe: I have learned that to bring attention to a neglected aspect of a culture, you need not only to produce creative work in that area, you need to also produce critical work, and so in order to prove to the world that Italian American literature existed I had to produce criticism worthy of attention by the kind-hearted scholars as well as the hard-hearted snobs. The volume you refer to is one of many of my projects designed to provide an apparatus for the dissemination and study of Italian American literature. I used to say that I had read every book by an Italian American writer, and though no one ever called me on that, I always dared them to. Fortunately, it has become impossible to sustain that claim, as the writers have grown in numbers impossible to keep track of in any consistent way. That book represents only a selection of the books that I thought were worthy of others’ attentions. It includes a defining essay and annotations of each work. It was a project I had hoped to update from time to time, but I have never been able to do that. I still read everything I can find by or about Italian Americans, but the kind of work I do now demands more attention than I was able to give it in the past, so this important, basic work has been left for others with the hope that someone will pick up the task.

Wang: Italian immigrants have left an indelible mark on American culture—from their cuisine to the stereotyped Italian gangster that fascinates American moviegoers. Yet little attention has been paid to the experiences of immigrants and their American-born children. It is a gap you have helped fill with a prolific stream of writing, includingFromWiseguystoWiseMen:MasculinitiesandtheItalianAmericanGangster(2006). This book studies the figure of the gangster and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States. By looking at the cultural icon of the gangster through the lens of gender, this book presents new insights into material that has been part of American culture for close to 100 years. How do you conceive of writing it?

Gardaphe: I have a lot to say on this. This topic has intrigued me since I was a child because I grew up in a Little Italy outside Chicago from where came many of Chicago’s gangsters. I’ve have had my share of encounters with real and fictional gangsters and the world of violence that surrounds them. Many of the men in my life had been violently killed: my godfather shot by a security guard in a robbery, my father brutally stabbed in a crime that was never solved, and my grandfather shot dead in a robbery. By traditional expectations of masculinity in southern Italian culture, I should have avenged at least one or two of those killings, after all for centuries, where my family came from, a man’s honor was measured in terms of his ability to deal with violence. From time to time at crucial stages in my childhood and adolescence, I found myself actually faced with a decision whether or not take the path that promised more violence. Since I had learned to live with violence in my life, it became a way of life that was familiar, and like those who move into a home alongside railroad tracks, you eventually learn to not hear the noise the train makes. Violence was not only common, it’s expected.

In some way, I like to think of this of my research, writing, and public speaking as exacting a more refined version of revenge and an attempt to redefine masculinity. It wasn’t until I was a few years into this study that I began to understand why, in spite of the horror this figure has caused in my life, I continue to be attracted to the gangster. For Italian Americans, the gangster is a figure to either be ignored or emulated; there was never any attempt to explain it to me as I was growing up, so I began my own exploration which lead from the streets to the academy, from oral tradition to the written word, and that search began the moment I learned to read and write.

If it were not for reading, I would have become a gangster. This I know for a fact. I grew up in the 1950s, when the only Italians you saw on television were either crooning love songs or singing like canaries in front of televised government investigations. In my Chicago neighborhood, we never played cowboys and Indians. Inspired by television programs likeTheUntouchables, we played cops and robbers, and none of us ever wanted to be the cops. While there might have been Italian/American cops in our town, there were none on television. It is no wonder then that many of us young Italian/American boys became so infatuated with the attention given to the Italian American criminals that we found our own ways of gaining that notoriety and power.

Once, while I was being chased by the police for disturbing local merchants so my partners could shoplift, I ran into the public library. I found myself in the juvenile section and grabbed a book to hide my face. Safe from the streets, I spent the rest of the afternoon reading, believing that nobody would ever find me there. And I was right. So whenever I was being chased, I would head straight for the library, which became my asylum.

It wasn’t long before my reading habit outgrew the dimensions of the library. I had developed a chronic reading problem that identified me as the “’merican” or rebel. My reading betrayed my willingness to enter mainstream American culture, and while my family tolerated this, they did little to make that move an easy one. Sometimes at night I would bring a flashlight to bed and read, but sharing a bed with my two brothers, this often ended up in a fight, as well as a reprimand from my father telling me I was not only keeping my brothers from sleeping, but that I was also teaching my brothers bad habits. In spite of all these obstacles I managed to become quite the bookworm. I read to escape both my home and the streets and in the process entered places in my mind I had never before seen.

While my father encouraged my studies, he wanted me to know what real work was like. So whenever he’d see me reading something that was obviously not homework, he’d put me to work in the family business—a pawn shop as well as the building we owned. Only after I’d clean floors, put away stock and run errands, would I be given some time for myself. There wasn’t much to read in the store; the constant flow of customers would not allow for anything longer than a news article at one stretch, but I always managed to get through a newspaper and theGreenSheet, a daily horse racing newsletter. I’d return home and reenter the imaginary worlds others created through words, never thinking there could be a bridge between the two. For a long time it never occurred to me that literature was something that could or even should speak to me of my experience, especially not of my ethnicity. The worlds I entered through reading were never confused with the world in which I lived. Reading was a vacation. The books I read were written by others about experiences that were not mine; they took me places I had never been. This naive notion of reading was shattered the day my father was murdered.

When I read the news accounts, it seemed for the first time, that my life had become a subject for writing. Since we share the same name, to see his name in print was to see my own. It was especially haunting to see that name on his tombstone. I knew that a part of me had been buried with him. From that day on, I began to read in a new way. For many reasons I began to feel that my life was no longer in control; I began to think that the only way I could regain control of it was to be the one who wrote the stories. So shocked by reality was I that I began to search for a way out, and that way, I thought, would come through reading. Because my father was murdered in the pawnshop, my family wanted me to have nothing to do with the business, but my grandfather needed me more than ever. I returned to the store, now in my father’s place, in spite of the fact that I was just a kid.

Since books were non-negotiable items in my community, the giving of them was considered not only impractical but taboo. Sometime, shortly after my father’s death, my uncle Pasquale gave me a copy of Luigi Barzini’sTheItalians; he just handed it to me, without even a word, assuming through his glance, that I would know what to do with it. Back then I thought I knew too much about being Italian. But all I really knew was that being Italian meant being different from the ones I wanted to be like. The last thing in the world that I wanted at that age was to read about a group with which I no longer wished to be associated. I put the book on a shelf connected to my bed, the only shelf outside our kitchen; there it would lie unread for seven years. From then on I read nothing beyond my school assignments. One day—a day of no special occasion—one of my aunts again broke this book-as-gift taboo by giving my mother a copy of Mario Puzo’sTheGodfather; she told my mother that if her nephew was so intent on reading he might as well read a book about Italians (neither of them had read it of course). The title of the book was quite appropriate since, due to my father’s early death, I, at the age of ten, had been made godfather to one of my cousins. Perhaps that aunt thought it would make an appropriate handbook for my new role in the extended family.

In that book I encountered men like Amerigo Bonasera, the undertaker, Luca Brasi, the street thug, and Johnny Fontaine, who were like the regulars I knew in the pawnshop. Some would come in with guns, jewelry and golf clubs to pawn. Men like these formed alliances in order to get things done. Because of its stock of familiar characters,TheGodfatherwas the first novel with which I could completely identify.

The only problem I had was that this thing called mafia was something of which I had never heard. I was familiar with the word mafioso, which the people in my neighborhood used to refer to poor troublemakers who dressed as though they were rich. But that these guys could have belonged to a master crime organization calledTheMafia, was something I had never fathomed. They couldn’t even organize a good game of baseball. In spite of this, the world that Puzo created, taught me how to read the world I was living in, not only the world of the streets, but the world within my family, for in spite of the emphasis on crime, Puzo’s use of Italian sensibilities made me realize that literature could be made out of my own experiences.TheGodfatherinspired my choice of the Mafia as a topic for the dreaded senior-year, semester-long thesis paper that my Irish-Catholic prep school required. One way or another I had been connected to the Mafia since I left my Italian neighborhood to attend high school, so I decided it was time to find out what this thing called Mafia was.

This was the first writing project to excite me, the first time I ever took the time to do serious research and had pride in what I wrote. The more research I did, the more I learned about the men I thought I had known. Whenever I saw familiar names I would be amazed that they had done something so important that someone had taken the time to write about them. People never talked, in public at least, about these men.

One night I was in the back room of a restaurant for a private party given by my employers. I was the youngest employee, and as we were being served my boss turned the group’s attention to me by proudly asking what I had been doing in school. I told them, quite loudly, that I was doing a research paper on the Mafia. When he asked what I was reading, I blurted out,TheValachiPapers. Everyone stopped talking and turned to me. I was shocked by the sudden silence; my eyes went around the table and I realized that there were men in that room who had their names in that book. Someone changed the subject and nobody said another word about my project.

When I completed that paper I was certain of an excellent grade. The grading committee decided that the essay, although well written, depended too much on Italian sources, and because I was of Italian descent, my writing never achieved the necessary objectivity that was essential to all serious scholarship. I read the “C” grade as punishment for my cultural transgression, and decided to stay away from anything but English and American literature in my future formal studies.

I did, however, continue to search for and read books about organized crime. The way a convict becomes a better criminal by going to prison, I became an expert in the history of Italians in organized crime by reading. I would read the books and then tell the guys about what I had read. Kids would come up to me and ask them what I had read about their fathers or uncles. I was christened with the nickname, “Professore,” and many were the times when local gang leaders would use my stories to help them organize their gang activities. My knowledge of Roman history and Caesar’s war stories, gained through my prep school studies, helped them create organizational structures that were as sophisticated as any the FBI could imagine. I soon found myself taking in money without having to do much. Younger kids, anxious to be a part of our gang took over the leg work at our direction. The older guys had their eyes on me, but when the Army draft became a threat, I disappointed them by going to college.

I made it through my undergraduate degree, but I couldn’t stay away from the pull of the gangster. As I began working on my graduate degree I returned to the figure of the gangster, and this time began looking into Italian and American culture for an understanding of the context for this figure. I abandoned a proposed dissertation on Walt Whitman for the chance to do something that would help me understand the violence in my past.

I soon learned that Italian American culture is much more diverse than mass media suggests. For many, the gangster image has overshadowed this diversity, and for others, it has become a cancer that threatens to overcome all other possible representations. So being the good cultural advocate and doctor of sorts, I thought someone ought to examine the impact the gangster image has had on the U.S. imaginary and how this has affected the perception and reception of Americans of Italian descent. Also it became a way for me to use the expertise created by my experiences growing up in the world of gangsters to bring a new eye to this pop-culture icon. It was a way for me to project a critical eye, protected by the distance of scholarship, onto how the media has presented my world to others.

Wang: Currently you are working on a book about the role of humor in Italian American communities, including what you see as a notable lack of irony among second-generation Italian Americans, aren’t you?

Gardaphe: Yes, I believe that the best response to reading is writing, and that this writing can and should be fiction as well as non-fiction. I’ve been working on this humor book longer than any other, and it will be a good while before it is finished. I am looking for an understanding of how different cultures develop and use humor, and haven chosen to focus on the culture I know best; it also happens to be a culture that has an arrested development in terms of a sense of humor. I coined the term, “irony-deficiency” to explain why Italian American culture has been slow in developing cultural specific humor. I think the reasons for this lie vaguely in a number of aspects of assimilation into American culture, and these are the psychic trauma of immigration, the loss of the original language, and attempts to preserve a culture so that it doesn’t change. I’m hoping to finish this book within the next five years.

Wang: What is the “irony deficiency”? How is it expressed? Why does it appear among second-generation Italian Americans?

Gardaphe: I hope this answers your question. In earlier work I have identified what I have called an irony deficiency in Italian American culture that most often occurs in the generation of children of immigrants. This deficiency contributes to the lack of development of a tradition of humor in Italian American culture that is observable in most other American ethnic groups. Irony deficiency comes from ignorance, fear, and or the inability to detach oneself from what it is that can be ironized. Irony deficiency leads to the disease of literalism evidenced by the inability to figure out, or outfigure, attempts to be humorous. A recent site for observing this disease is in many of the responses of individuals and organizations to such programs asTheSopranos. More unified acts by Italian Americans have been launched against fictional portrayal of the mafia than were ever mounted against the real mafiosi in the United States. The complete opposite is true in Italy where people have risked and lost their lives in pursuit of reality. So what is about irony deficiency that leads to such behavior? Now I must be clear that I am not saying that children of Italian immigrants lack irony altogether. Certainly there is a great deal of irony in the writings of the likes of Jerre Mangione, Pietro di Donato, John Fante and Rita Ciresi; what I am interested is where in their writings the irony is located, where it isn’t, and why there is a lack of it in certain situations.

Major Books of Fred Gardaphe:

2012.SegniItaliani,StradeAmericane:L’evoluzioneDellaLetteraturaItalianaAmericana(Alessandra Senzani trans.). Firenze: Franco Cesati Editore.

2011.TheArtofReadingItalianAmericana. New York: Bordighera Press.

2006.FromWiseguystoWiseMen:MasculinitiesandtheItalianAmericanGangster. New York: Routledge.

2003.LeavingLittleItaly:EssayingItalianAmericanCulture. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

1997.MoustachePeteisDead:EvvivaBaffoPietro! (ItalianAmericanOralTraditionPreservedinPrint). W. Lafayette, IN: Bordighera.

1996.ItalianSigns,AmericanStreets:TheEvolutionofItalian/AmericanNarrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

1996.DagoesRead:TraditionandtheItalian/AmericanWriter. Toronto: Guernica Editions.

1995.TheItalianAmericanWriter:AnEssayandAnnotatedChecklist. Spencertown, NY: Forkroads.