DeLillo’s “Underworld”: No Patria Meridionale History – No southern-Italian American Culture

 Preface Literature and Reality

A hardcore empiricist who virtually never reads fiction, with the exception of a pop detective story when down with the flu; it never occurred to me to read anything like the “post-modern” novels of Don DeLillo.  Not only literature challenged; but also, after concerted efforts, I gave up trying to understand what “post-modern” means.

However, when I came across a magazine excerpt from “Underworld”, an absolutely brilliant rendition of 1951 Bronx 'Little Italy', I gave pause.  I’ve read the two great cultural-anthropology studies of Boston’s North End and West End ‘Little Italy’ neighborhoods; respectively, W. F. Whyte’s “Street Corner Society, and H. J. Gans’ “Urban Villagers”.   Yet, there seemed to be more ‘reality’ in DeLillo’s fictional representation than these meticulous highly and rightfully acclaimed empirical studies.

DeLillo is just the opposite. Idiom and nuance pour out of every sentence.  For example, I count at least 45 Italian slang expressions in DeLillo’s section on ‘Little Italy’, used in perfect context: Malavita, Madonn, Mannaggia l’America, Cafone, stunat, finalmente, u’gazz, tizzoons, etc.  The characters in the book did not speak Italian, nor did my street corner companions and I.  Nevertheless, I recognized and remembered every one of the words and how they were used on my street corner, in my Little Italy neighborhood.

Little Italy idiom was laced with Italian words, expressions, intonations and gestures. Unlike many social scientist, fiction writers are highly sensitized too the nuances of language and their cultural implications.  Ultimately, culture is the reality of an ethnic group.  To know an ethnic group, is to know its culture, is to know its language.

Accordingly, DeLillo’s reality is not simply a sociological study in fictionalized form. DeLillo’s Little Italy is not just the Bronx; his is virtually all Little Italies – Aristotle’s “poetic universal”. Anyone who has known a Little Italy, anywhere in the country (Boston, Chicago, Rochester, etc.), will find themselves in DeLillo’s rendering.   He does not simply describe; he recreates. The reader can vicariously experience people and events.  Reading the dialogues in the novel is like ‘listening-in’; it’s like standing off to the side listening to real people talking.

Further, his southern-Italian American culture is not limit the to historic Little Italy.  He takes the readers beyond Little Italy.  He follows the southern-Italian American through the destruction of their ‘urban villages’ and the demise of their culture.  Cultural demise is implied by the phrase DeLillo inserts at an incongruent narrative point that seems meaningless in the context: “No history, no future.”

Southern-Italian Americans have no knowledge of their Patria Meridionale history before “Little Italy”, and it’s increasingly obvious there is no future for their culture beyond ‘nostalgic illusions’, ‘media cartoons’, ‘Renaissance fantasies’ and, of course FOOD.

Introduction

The main plot of the book is essentially a ‘coming of age’ story line following the protagonist (half Italian/half Irish) Nick Shay from a seventeen year old youth in 1951 Bronx until he is sixty-ish in 1990s Phoenix Arizona. But, this is an 827-page (post-modern) novel with a very complicated backwards in time plot involving many characters, subplots, nuances, etc.  No summary could possible do justice this book.  For purposes of this presentation, I will consider an aspect of the Nick Shay and Bronzini characters as extended metaphors representing the essence of Little Italy culture, its demise and the consequences for southern-Italian American culture.

Bronzini, to my mind, is the personification of the pre-1960s Little Italy culture, the essence of southern-Italian American culture and its demise subsequent to the suburban migration.  Nick Shay becomes the personification of the culturally empty southern-Italian American in post-1960s suburbia.  Both men suffer from the lost southern-Italian American culture after the Little Italy decades - once vibrant personalities in their natural physical and cultural milieu, and then psychologically emptied in post-Little Italy assimilated America.

In 1951 Bronx:

In 1990s Phoenix suburb, Nick thinks about 1951 Bronx:

The pre-Ellis Island south-of-Rome Italian culture was a village culture.  The southern-Italian American culture was an urban village culture, a culture of city streets.  When southern-Italian Americans left their urban villages, left their city streets, they left their culture behind.

1951 - Little Italy the Bronx

Nothing differentiates the pre-1960s from the post more than the car.  The car made the move to the spread out suburbs possible. Bronzini’s 1951 world is the un-spread out world of:

Bronzini is a “happy man”; a second generation Italian American high school science teacher married with a two-year old daughter. Through Bronzini’s eyes we see the “compact neighborhood” of southern-Italian American urban village street life: children at play, barbers, butchers, waiters, priest, the old, the young, men, women, wives, mothers, etc.  Just like the southern Italian and Sicilian villages, from which the immigrants came, every facet of life is present in the compact -urban village-neighborhoods they created.

Bronzini’s Walk

Nick is a 17-year old, third generation grandchild of an Italian immigrant. He is also part of the ‘streets’; but as a youth, Nick’s Little Italy world is a slightly different variation of Bronzini’s:

1990 Little Italy the Bronx

Bronzini doesn’t walk the streets anymore:

Bronzini on change and not change:

1990 Phoenix

Nick:

Just as the southern-Italian immigrants left their villages in Italy behind and moved to American cities, their southern-Italian American grandchildren left the urban villages behind and moved out of the cities to the suburbs.  But, whereas the Italian immigrants brought their culture with them, recreated it in the American cities, the grandchildren left the culture of Little Italy behind – they assimilated.  But, not completely!  They could not completely forget their primordial Patrai Meridionale – they could not forget their Being.

Nick - “there’s an Italian word for it...”

Language is culture.  Nick could not forget his urban village language – the only thing left of his urban village culture.  The words kept coming to mind – a haunting refrain reminding him that he is, in his Being, a Terroni (southern Italian).

Conclusion 
No Patria Meridionale History – No Southern-Italian American Culture

With the two characters Bronzini and Nick, DeLillo captures the post WW II twentieth century southern-Italian American experience in poetry – not history.

Bronzini embodies the bygone robust urban Little Italy cultural past.  Nick, the present culturally empty southern-Italian American in suburbia, left with only “the words” - linguistic shards, the remnants of a once mighty culture.  Southern-Italian American culture is lontanaza (distant and remote), and how that came to be is dietrologica (something behind the event).