Sunday, September 14, 2003		Books

Notes from the underground
Shelley Walia

The Music of the Inferno
by Frank Lentricchia. Albany: State University of New York Press, NY. Pages 219. $24.50

THE Music of the Inferno is a brilliant historical novel, an adroit and an incisive reflection on storytelling, ethnicity and the Italian-American way of life told with profound sensitivity by one of the foremost professors of literature in the English-speaking world. Like his other two novels, Johnny Critelli and The Knifemen, Frank Lentricchia has written this one with a ruthless insistence on the complexity of life and the mystery of our souls, catching the turmoil of racism with immediacy, wit and tragic power. The book, through honest writing about grief and disenchantment, brings compassion to a world in which we were afraid it did not exist.

Robert Tagliaferro, the hero of The Music of the Inferno, comes across as a man of words, as a teller of tales about the past of his city, a m`E9lange of styles and rhetoric. In the basement of a restaurant, he tells his stories to six other men; stories of Utica, of New York and eventually of America itself. With these little stories, out comes the great story of America. Central to these narratives is the relevance and relationship of the Italian immigrant to the various ‘little stories’ of the land. The other characters respond in there own way creating a polyphony of history, a multiple perspective of various themes, genealogy, race, lost children, the presentness of the past and, most of all, of communal living, of ceremony, ritual and custom. And finally it comes down to storytelling itself that informs one’s place in history and implicitly one’s identity. Storytelling is therefore an inspired attempt towards selfhood, a sense of life and one’s place in it. Is it not that the narrative defines the self more than the self the narrative? We are indeed fashioned by the stories we tell.

The novel is an intimate glimpse into the world of an orphan growing up in Utica. But it is not merely about this small piece of territory; it is an account of the general American experience. At 18, Robert leaves his guardian’s awful tenement in an ethnically confused section of the city. He believes he is a fake, having no idea of his origins. He was just carried here by Melvina and Morris Reed, a black couple who have brought him up. Possessing the looks of a ‘bronze-toned Neapolitan waif’ and with an ambition of having a house on St. Mary’s Street, he pays little heed to the warning that "someday somebody is going to mess up (his) pretty face: In our coloured skin? Honey, not even you could fool these people up there."

And, as he leaves his home moving over Albany Hill, he remembers his teachers talking about this ‘virgin land’ which was what this country was before "our forefathers came." What has intrigued him over the years is: "Whose forefathers? And who were the foremothers they came into?’ His friend Gregorio had answered: "Must I tell you what a virgin is for? Why do you think we came to this country, if not for that? In the old country we had no chance. Here, in America, we must spread ourselves wide open, but here we have the opportunity to become fuckers. America is very beautiful."

In 1954, Robert, an orphan of ambiguous racial and ethnic identity had disappeared after his graduation. And in lower Manhattan he had found a job in a bookshop, day in and day out keeping a vigil on book lifters and rats. In the basement of the shop, he had noticed a small windowless room with a sink and a single faucet running cold. The owner is all too pleased to allow him to live here; he was equal to three men for the price of one. Twenty-four hours on duty, seven days a week, he would be working here for the next 42 years. Taking nightly spartan sponge baths at his cold-water sink, he would spend his spare time taking a ‘voyage in American history.’

He now is 60-year-old, sitting at his dinning table wandering who is still alive from his past in Utica City—Gregorio and Caterina or Morris Reed and his wife? Only Morris is still listed after 1986. To keep his voice going, he speaks to himself and reads aloud six nights a week, three hours per night, from Shakespeare’s late tragedies and Washington Irving’s History of New York. For 42 year, Sunday evenings are kept exclusively for dramatic renderings of Webster’s Unabridged.

For all these years he has hardly left the store. Like the extra virgin oil he eats his garlic in, he is still a virgin with no friends. And after these long and winding years, buried in his readings, he will leave Manhattan just as he had left Utica. At that time he had 12 dollars in his pocket. Now he has all his savings of ‘fabulous magnitude.’ He had left no forwarding address then, and he will leave none now. And he will carry with him 90 thick notebooks containing "in a minute script illegible to all but himself the fruits of forty-two years of research in the history of Utica and New York State, from the coming of the Dutch to the present."

Robert returns to his hometown forgotten by all, and it is here that he enters into the discovery of his self, a search of his memory to salvage what may have been his antecedents. Already within the bookstore where he has lived all these years, his rummaging around for identity has taken him into the world of literature and history of his land. The Italian-American experience becomes the ‘music of this inferno,’ a land where everything is in a state of degradation and where the subcultures feed upon each other and themselves: "We become whiners, and eat self-pity`85. A subculture is a self-consuming cancer. To survive inside the ethnic group you must become like the excrement itself, toward which alone the group feels no jealousy. Smear thyself with shit and live! Because it is recorded in histories that not even subculture will eat shit." And thus, like the Dutch or the Germans or the Irish, or the Italians, a germ of humanity is born in the subcultures. Lentricchia’s achievement here is a brave novel of not only pain and isolation, but hope for the future in simplicity and goodness.