Comp Theory

"Tongues and letters orginate together; but because philosophers and philogists separate them, past inquiry has been vexing."

~~Giambattista Vico, Nuova Scienza

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Cheese and Words

“The peasant who knows how to write, and who needs to write, applies to one who knows that art, choosing as far as he can one of his own station, for with others he hesitates and mistrusts. He informs him, with more or less clarity and orderliness, of who his ancestors were, and in the same manners tells him what to set down on paper. The literate person understands part and guesses the rest, gives a few pieces of advice, suggests a few changes, and says, ‘Leave it to me!’ He picks up his pen, puts the other’s thoughts as well as he can into literary form, corrects them, improves them, embellishes them, tones them down, or even omits them, according to what he thinks best, because—and there’s nothing to be done about it—someone who knows better than others has no wish to be a mere tool in their hands, and when he is concerned with the business of others, he wants it to go a little his way. All the same, the above-mentioned literate does not always succeed in saying everything he wants to: sometimes he ends up saying something else entirely. This happens even to us, who write for publishers.”

 ~~Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed

LOST IN TRANSLATION

“Traduttore, traditore,” warns one Italian proverb: every translator is a traitor. Like those professional letter writers, who plied their trade in Little Italies all over America at the turn of the last century, I find myself a dubious messenger between two worlds, struggling with the problems of audience and language. Raised in an oral ethnic subculture, how can I write about it in the words of the dominant literate society that has marginalized it? An old proverb warns: "Pensa molto, parla pocco, scrivi meno." (Think much, speak little, write less.) To be an Italian-American writer, then, one must embrace contradiction and court betrayal. What kind of a double agent am I, and to whom do I owe allegiance? The very hyphen between the two words symbolizes this dilemma and functions as a bridge, a plank, a checkpoint, and a toll gate.

As a writing teacher and composition scholar, I see-saw on that hyphen, practicing what Fred Gardaphé and Anthony Tambutti call ethnic semiotics. According to Giambattista Vico, reading and writing cannot be extracted from either the general cycle of history or a particular cultural matrix. After the Risorgimento, the Italian War of Unification, the liberal and progressive North imposed its ideas of progress and literacy on the supposedly hidebound South, permanently alienating my ancestors, who clung to traditional oral culture. They were the grunting Calibans, while the Northerners, armed with their books, were the lordly Prosperos: sorcerers and usurpers. Why should they learn their oppressor’s language, except to curse more fluently? This background explains my often vexing relationship with the written word.

Raised to see words as a political ploy, I first considered writing a means to an end, a clever way to survive in a hostile land. As I boy, I was obliged to write important legal and business correspondence for my immigrant parents. As a teen, economics compelled me to pursue a professional and technical writing degree at the Newhouse School of Public Communications. As a young man, I supported myself, and later subsidized my graduate education, by hacking as a radio and newspaper reporter, a political press agent, an advertising copywriter, and a medical writer. Thus, my understanding of and approach towards composition were formed in the public sphere long before private reflection in the academy.

From Praxis to Theory

Praxis always precedes theory, Marx states, but theory is necessary to understand praxis.  While pursuing my masters in 17th- and 18th-century English literature at Villanova University, I explored the historical relationship between the development of capitalism, the emergence of professional and technical writing and advertising, and the birth of English fiction and satire. This early scholarship would stimulate my future historical research in professional writing;  but my formal training in rhetoric and writing instruction began at Syracuse University’s English and Textual Studies Department, where, as a doctoral student, I learned composition theory and taught academic and professional writing classes. 

At Syracuse I was first exposed to the ideas that have most influenced my research and pedagogy: Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical theory of language; Michel Foucault’s analysis of discourse, power, and institutions; Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco’s semiotic social criticism; above all, Carlo Ginzburg’s radical historiography of writing and literacy. Like all practitioners of the New Historicism, Ginzburg emphasizes the material aspects of textual production and the ideological and political dimensions Reading him inspired me to investigate the role of writing and literacy in my own family history, and to the read the Italian classics as part of a continuing and self-reflective epic of writing. A major stream of Italian letters has been preoccupied with the act of writing itself: as an art, a technology, a trade, and an ethical and political dilemma. Consider Horace and Martial’s satires on the publishing racket; Guido Cavalcanti's sonnet to his writing implements, Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, an epic of literacy and power that gave modern Italy its formal language; Carlo Collodi’s whimsical but disturbing Pinocchio, a children’s book about education and passing; Dino Buzzati and Italo Calvino’s  metafictional allegories. I never forgot, however, that this literary and rhetorical tradition never meant to include my family and me.

Without Papers

Despite my education and training, then, I still consider myself the chronicler of a defeated and fading world, a notary public recording the deposition of ghost. My teaching and scholarship can be likened to an open coroner’s inquest in which an entire community agonizes over the overwhelming evidence of its own demise and asks if it was murder, suicide, or accidental death. Naturally, such business is ghastly, relieved only by the sardonic humor of its participants. But culturecide does that, turns ordinary people into self-mocking skeletons. Each time my fingers press against the keyboard, I hear the rattling of bones, as in this historical footnote.

One of the few recorded suicides at Ellis Island was a distant relative, Lorenzo Di Renzo, who could not be processed because he lacked the proper documentation. The intake clerk stamped his folder “W.O.P.” (Without Papers) and told him to wait. For weeks, poor Renzo languished in Judgment Hall, watching other unfortunates being treated like human blackboards. With chalk, the health inspectors in their braided blue uniforms marked immigrants for quarantine: “A” for asthma, “B” for back problems. “C” for conjunctivitis. Renzo’s prospects for employment faded with each passing day. Finally, a functionary named La Guardia regretfully informed he would be deported, to avoid becoming a public charge.

Having promised his paesani back in Chieti to make good in L’America, Renzo decided to kill himself. Accounts of his death differ. The most common, found in Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale’s La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience, states he blew out his brains just as the French liner schlepping him back to Italy pulled out of New York Harbor. A more operatic version, popular with the Syracuse branch of the family, claims Renzo snatched a fountain pen from a clerk and slit his carotid artery. I imagine his blood splattering the documents on the astonished clerk’s desk.

Se non é vero é ben trovato; but this apocryphal story shows what can happen in a literate culture to a man without papers. In other words, a Wop.