Ethnic outsiders: the hyper-ethnicized narrator in Langston Hughes and Fred L. Gardaphe

Paul Giaimo

   The very feeling of being outsiders, the estrangement from both
   old traditions and new ways, the clash of generations as the
   children of immigrants remade themselves outside the
   traditions--all this has been the very stuff of literature for
   Americans, Italians and otherwise.

   (Helen Barolini, Chiaroscuro 127)

How does a minority or "ethnic" author deal with this "very feeling of being an outsider" which Barolini discusses above? There are as many ways as there are genres of ethnic narrative. One of these ways is to compose an autobiography, to look back on one's own past as an "ethnic outsider" attempting to find a place in mainstream American society. But in a prior issue of MELUS, Petra Fachinger notes that such an ethnic autobiographer runs the danger of "creating an ethnic other," of deforming him or herself into some unattractive figure who cannot potentially take part in what she tells us that Bakhtinian scholar Jennifer Browdy De Hernandez called "a dialogue between collective ethnic memory and individual memory" (125). Certainly this critique of autobiography has validity; how many autobiographers are truly honest even with themselves, let alone with their readers, about themselves in narrative? Bearing in mind how difficult this honesty is, as well as how humorless much autobiography is, I would like to examine another way to characterize this ethnic otherness through the use of ethnic humor, an excellent means of coping with the individual experiencing such "otherness." An author can mitigate a sense of alienating otherness through the creation of a hyper-ethnicized narrator, a kind of "funkier-than-thou" wisdom or trickster figure who philosophizes about concerns relevant to all readers, not simply to those who are members of his or her own ethnic group.

Recently, Fred L. Gardaphe has published Moustache Pete is Dead!: Evivva Baffo Pietro!, a compilation of columns which appeared in Chicago's Fra Noi, during the 1980s when Gardaphe was Arts and Culture editor. Fra Noi is a monthly Italian American newspaper distributed mainly in the Chicago area, so one can assume that this character appealed primarily to an Italian American audience. "Moustache Pete" was a creation of the author, based upon a first generation Italian American immigrant man. Like other colorful social commentators, this "pasta-box" philosopher offers his heavily dialecticized view of the American "new world" in contrast to the Italian world he remembers. Clearly, this hyper-ethnicized narrator is not a traditional autobiographical figure.

Moustache Pete's origins can be generically traced to one of the greatest poet/authors of the twentieth century, Langston Hughes, and his own Harlem "juke-box" philosopher, the jazzy beer-drinking Jesse P. Simple. Like Moustache Pete, Jesse P. Simple is a hyper-ethnicized narrator, who appeared in a serialized column in both The New York Post and The Chicago Defender through the late 1950s and early 1960s. Jess Simple also presents a kind of folk wisdom about current events and fairly complex cultural realities. "Ace-boy Simple" appeared to a diverse audience via the mainstream Post as well as a primarily African American readership through the columns in the Defender. Through comparison and contrast of these two trickster figures, we will examine the purpose and function of the hyper-ethnicized narrator. (1)

Besides formal and thematic similarities, these two texts can be compared on the grounds of their use of humor. Writing about the use of humor in an ethnic context, John Lowe stated, "The post-modern ethnic writer ruthlessly exposes social ills, but deflects the pathetic in order to focus on the absurd" (110).

Furthermore, a relevant ground can be established for the comparison and contrast of Langston Hughes and Fred L. Gardaphe by examining the startling similarity between the critical receptions of each text. What happens when an author creates a narrator who is both a member of the author's own ethnic group but who also typifies the most extreme and visible forms of the stereotypes of that group?

This study has implications for further research into Bakhtinian theory as well as into the reception of humorous ethnic narrators. Bakhtin states that one of the "basic forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel" is a "comic playing with languages" (323). Bakhtin's heteroglossia simultaneously represents two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author (Bakhtin 324). Here, of course, one finds the old controversy about finalizing dialogue; though Bakhtin cites humor as a means of ordering tense and messy heteroglossia in narrative, I am not clear he promises resolution to any kind of dialogue formed in prose. Bakhtin adds that "the internal dialogism of authentic prose discourse ... cannot fundamentally be dramatized or dramatically resolved [brought to an authentic end]" (324).

Critical Reception

We will see how this interior Bakhtinian clash deepens and moves to the exterior upon comparing and contrasting the critical reception of Hughes's Jesse P. Simple to that of "Baffo Pietro" as Moustache Pete is called in Italian. Rather than the American self confronting an ethnic self, here residents of the site that the narrative portrays and in which it is created confront the author who dares to expose the "ethnic other" which the hyper-ethnic narrator comes to represent. John Lowe adds that ethnic writers who create trickster figures such as Simple and Pete "must deal with overt hostility from entrenched social arbiters" who represent the "discreet and often opposed cultural traditions" found within a biracial or multi-ethnic audience" (105).

In her important text on Jesse P. Simple, Not So Simple: Simple Stories by Langston Hughes, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper writes, "many who love Hughes' poetry find the Simple tales earthy, obvious or prone to perpetuate stereotypes with demeaning dialect and unattractive behavior" (16). Critics of Simple base their cavil upon his appearance because Simple talked and looked the part of the "shuckin' and jivin' Negro," and so perpetuates this stereotype. During the 50s and 60s, some readers of Hughes were openly hostile. Sullivan Harper relates the criticism of one anonymous enemy of Simple who called the ethnic narrator "stupid, ignorant and offensive" (194). The anonymous reader stated Simple was "not funny" and had "died with all the other Uncle Toms like him" (194). Significantly, the reader is claiming that Simple was part of Harlem's past, a shameful past which presents the ethnic group as weak; hence Simple is best characterized by the slur "Uncle Tom."

However, thousands of Simple's fans disagreed, as is seen by the popularity of the columns in Harlem and throughout the world, as well as their later re-publication in book form. Further, a defense for Simple can be seen in the writings of critic Calvin Hernton who claimed that "[Some have] trashed Langston Hughes as an 'Uncle Tom' because of his faithful renditions in the blues idiom of our people. The detractors labeled as 'reactionary' in Hughes's poems nothing less than that which has sustained the masses of African Americans through the centuries" (qtd. in Harper 195). Harper extends Hernton's defense of Hughes's faithful rendition of African American speech patterns by showing Hughes's use of folk humor in the characterization of Simple.

Even though some critics differ on Simple's value as a narrator, only the strident voices failed to realize Hughes's use of the ethnic narrator was not intended to mock Harlemites but rather to expose their repression and their insights. Harper refers to polemical attacks on Jesse Simple as a "second witch hunt" steeped in a "1960's brand of correctness" (196). Harper also calls our attention to the pro-Simple review written by J. Sunders Redding, who considers Simple to be "among those Negro heroes and Negro heroines--who may or may not always speak perfect English but who are courageous, straightforward, strong; ... whose words and thoughts gather up what is in our own hearts and say it clearly and plainly for all to hear" (196).

As in the case of Langston Hughes, critical reception of Gardaphe's "Moustache Pete" vacillated between extremes of warm affection and acerbic vilification. There were those opposed, especially in 1986 when the column appeared. In the Fra Noi, a reader fired off the following destructive salvos: "If the character was meant to come off as a humble man with a wealth of philosophical genius, he misses by a mile. His poorly written accent is boring, tedious to read and irritating in its lack of wisdom" (Gordon 14). She threatened to cancel her subscription if the paper refused to drop the column. Yet another complained that the column nauseated him and cancelled his subscription (Salerno 16). By September, another reader complained that the Moustache Pete columns were "derogatory and insulting" (Polvere 16).

But just as in the case of Simple, some supported Moustache Pete. One reader from La Salle, Illinois, wrote in to say, "My dad came here to this country in the early 1900s from Sicily. I was born in 1915. I was also called WOP and DAGO and a lot of other bad things that I can't write about or I will be called for defamation and discrimination also.... KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK PETE" (Sapienza 16). Later, in November of 1986, another subscriber rushed to the defense, not only of Moustache Pete, but also of the Fra Noi itself: "I am 78 years old--I had a stroke--but I'm happy to say I can still read the Fra Noi.... I read every word of it ... keep it up. And one more thing. LEAVE MOUSTACHE PETE ALONE--HE IS GREAT!! My father had a moustache--Pete is fine" (Meyers 14). Both Simple and Pete evoked inflamed critical reception. Thus, the exaggerated ethnic "otherness" provoked not resolution, but rather further conflict in the dialogic and heteroglossic linguistic context ethnic communities tend to form.

The Narrator in Langston Hughes and Fred L. Gardaphe

Hyper-ethnicized narrators like Simple and Moustache Pete are members of their authors' own ethnic groups. But because they are constructed in such a way as to be "blacker" or "more Italian" than the author himself, the hyper-ethnic narrator is still "other" to the self of the author both functionally (these narrators refract the authors' intentions) and also qualitatively (these narrators serve as a blank canvas on which the author projects the extreme form of society's stereotypes of African and Italian American males). Therefore, it is important not only to point out cultural differences, but also to see similarities between the ways in which dialogic texts such as those we might label "ethnic" might work. Do motifs emerge in similar ways especially when the "ethnic author" in question is appropriating or capitalizing upon motifs found within other "minority" texts?

The heteroglossic and dialogical sketches created by Langston Hughes are essentially dialogues. The jazz-loving, wisecracking Simple engages in repartee with the Harvard-educated, more conservative African American "Mr. Boyd." This foil character, Boyd, in the words of Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, "helps to voice the readers' doubts and concessions regarding Simple's narrations" (204). Boyd provides the voice and perspective of the more "assimilated" or conforming figure in contrast to the socially and linguistically diverse and rich dialogue Hughes presents. Simple's side of the dialogue is presented in the eye-dialect of an urban New York African American of the "hep cat" 1950s jazz era. For example, here is Simple's account of his return to his apartment to find a surprise visitor, his long-lost nephew:

   Well, when I got home high last night at one-two A.M.--having fell
   off my budget--and come creeping up the steps not to disturb my old
   landlady, I saw a light under the crack of my door. I thought maybe
   Zarita had got in my room by mistake, since she sometimes do
   inveigle my landlady. But when I opened the door I hollered out
   loud, also damn near turned pale.... I thought he were a robber.
   Every hair on my head turned to wire. But it were no robber.
   It were a boy. (134)

The use of slang, ("high" for drunk, "fell off my budget," etc.), the creative vocabulary ("inveigle my landlady"), and the singular/plural verb substitution ("it were a boy") are earmarks of Simple's eye-dialect. This eye-dialect exaggerates the ethnicity of this narrator and forms the language that Hughes's audience would have associated with the stereotypes of African Americans. Yet the "refracted intention" of the author in using this dialectized language is to present a positive image of the ethnic group. In the scene, Simple is at least attempting to show concern for his landlady. Further, the young intruder in question turns out to be a positive character as well. Simple's nephew FD, or "Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brown," is a good student who reads during his leisure time. He is ambitious, as evidenced by his finding work immediately in Harlem's garment district.

In this sequence, Mr. Boyd plays his skeptical role in the dialogue, raising questions which reflect a more intellectually sophisticated perspective on the relationship between Simple and his nephew. When Simple asks to borrow some of the Harvard-educated professional's books, Boyd remarks "The Lord must have sent that boy up North to bring a little culture into your life.... Thank God for Franklin D. Roosevelt Brown!" (140). Irony would have been created for Hughes's readers by this reference to Southern culture since readers would have associated the North with the intellectual life during the 1950s. The dialogic interplay of voices in this episode of Simple's life again casts African American men in a positive light: Boyd and the nephew appreciate the value of the life of the mind. So despite the fact that Hughes has sounded the voice of Simple in a hyper-ethnic register by characterizing him with a heavy dialect, the heteroglossia featured in Simple's exchanges with Boyd serves the "refracted intent" to redeem the audience's perception of Simple's ethnicity through the very stereotypes Simple's character evokes.

Another way to view the Simple stories as multi-voiced or "heteroglossic" in their dialogical form is to see Simple as a cantastoria, as defined by Gardaphe: "in Italian that means 'history singer;' he is what other cultures call a 'griot.' He remembers what we used to be.... So that we may never forget" (Gardaphe 1). In Hughes's portrayals of Simple, the narrator comments upon icons from American popular music and films of the 1920s and even earlier. He thus becomes a "history singer" relative to the 1950s, which is the temporal setting of these dialogues. Referring to such blues singers as "all three Smiths, Bessie, Clara and Mamie" and "Clara Bow ... the 'It' girl of the flapper age" (Hughes 167), Simple and his educated companion Boyd narrate the history of the Jazz Age of the 1920s, an era featuring media images that both Hughes's African American and white American audiences would appreciate.

This multi-voiced exchange thereby reveals the "refracted intent" to further integrate black and white by allowing readers to eavesdrop on Boyd and Simple's nostalgic banter. Simple sweetens this description of the past as a time when life was better and people's behavior more respectable: "a penny was worth a nickel.... Damn was a bad word then even without God in front of it. Ladies didn't smoke" (167). This nostalgia also appeals across ethnic lines in Hughes' readership. We can only conclude then that the refracted intent of this heteroglossic and multi-voiced dialogue is to further a positive interaction between African American and white through evoking a common past. Such "history singers," or cantastorie, are invaluable in parroting the Bakhtinian "dialogue between individual and collective memory" (De Hernandez 125).

Further, the narrator presents social commentary on issues specific to the ethnic group or race in question as does Hughes in strategically playing off of Jesse P. Simple's hyper-ethnicized character. On the subject of the Civil Rights struggle intensifying in his time, Simple states directly, "I just cannot learn to like white folks" (61). This attitude directly opposes the attitude of appeasement of the foil character Boyd who stresses in response that "there are a lot of nice white people in the world" (61). Simple's retort is a radical "modest proposal" for the racial violence of his time. Reacting to news of lynchings in Georgia and Klan beatings in Alabama, his retort is a suggestion that Congress set aside a "Game Preserve for Negroes--Congress ought to set aside some place where we can go and nobody can jump on us and beat us, neither lynch us nor Jim Crow us every day" (62). The "refracted intent" of the author emerging from this dialogic text is sophisticated; the "game preserve" can be seen as a metaphor for segregated America, dividing society as if the marginalized African Americans were not fully human. Yet in the ultraracist American South, the segregated man had less protection than the hunted game, and Simple's plea that "there ought to be some place in this American country where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed. There ought to be a law" (63) makes clear the refracted intent to protest the segregation of the 1950s. As with the use of eye-dialect and the portrayal of the narrator as "history-singer," this metaphor of the game preserve helps to convey the desire of Hughes to foster dialogue relevant to the ending of segregation and the furthering of integration. Boyd's silence in response to Simple's "dramatic proposal" reminds readers that the situation is beyond the calm rationalizing his character performs. This selection of multi-voiced text favors Simple's raw and emotive response to an issue very specific to Simple's people.

After establishing the jazz-loving narrator as a social critic relevant to issues related explicitly to race, Hughes expands the scope of Simple's critique to issues which encompass but go beyond race. For example, in one of the columns Boyd and Simple discuss "Military Integration." On this issue, Hughes capitalized on the bitter irony segregation presented to returning African American World War II veterans. Simple asserts, "To be shot down is bad for the body ... but to be Jim Crowed is worse for the spirit" (81). Discussing the lack of equality in the military, Simple wishes to see "Negro ... officers pinning medals on white men" (81), instead of the reverse. Simple also wants to command "a regiment of whites from Mississippi" (82). As our "first" black general, Simple reports that he'd "do like all the other generals do, and stand way back on a hill somewheres and look through my spyglasses and say, 'Charge on! Mens, charge on!' Then I would watch them Dixiecrat boys go--like true sons of the old South, mowing down the enemy" (82). In addition to racism, Simple mocks militarism by noting how generals pass the dirty work of combat onto enlisted men, black or white. Furthermore, his reference to the "Dixiecrat" troops and to "true sons of the old South" acknowledges that the racism and power differentials propagated by military segregation are perhaps too deeply ingrained to be wiped out simply by integration of races.

This dialogue also illustrates a concept first utilized by Don DeLillo in his best-selling novel Underworld: "There's a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something" (280). Simple's attack on racial arid class-based stratification in the military exposes the hidden underside of a significant concurrent political reality.

A central image emerges which seems to encapsulate the crucial issue about which the narrator and conceivably his audience are concerned. In "A Dog Named Trilby," a black dog "with white circles under her eyes" is owned by a "mean white lady" (203). This evocatively colored animal and her owner are deployed by Hughes to make a complex statement about relations between whites and African Americans. Mistreated by her mean owner, Trilby becomes a nasty creature herself; as Simple states, "Trilby never did gnaw on me, though, because I would have kicked that Mutt sky-high to a firecracker if she had" (203). Yet she finds a friend in the kind Mrs. Jenkins, a neighboring African American woman and her white dog (203). When Mrs. Jenkins' pet dies, Trilby deserts her unkind owner and goes to live with Mrs. Jenkins, abandoning "Miss White Lady" (204) who dies soon after, the anticipated fate of racism. "She taken so low sick she could not come to drag Trilby home no more. And the day she died all by herself, Trilby were laying on that other rug in that other house inside that other door (205).

This allegory lends itself to further interpretation: Trilby, the basic black dog under mean white ownership, represents the reality of chattel slavery. On the other side is the kindly Mrs. Jenkins who could correspond to the barely enfranchised African American populus, such as sharecroppers or other poverty-stricken, yet politically emancipated, figures. Then the white dog corresponds to a poor white class of individuals who lived in close proximity and even in cohabitation with African Americans. Even though meanness and bigotry can be intensified by poverty, the child Simple remembers Mrs. Jenkins and her dog as kind. This kindness represents some warm and friendly attitude of African Americans and whites living in the southern working and poorer classes during Simple's childhood, roughly the early 1920s and 1930s. Trilby becomes happy and softens at the kind hand of Mrs. Jenkins, and the mean white owner dies abandoned; this narrative action forecasts the fate of white bigotry and the African American populus in transition: better living conditions for the latter and extinction of the attitude of the former.

To summarize, Hughes establishes some primary conventions of the genre of hyper-ethnicized narrative: a) the narrator has exaggerated character traits which reflect stereotypes of the ethnic group represented but do so precisely to further a positive representation of the same ethnic or racial group; b) the narrator functions as "history singer" to the reader, thus furthering the Bakhtinian dialogue between individual and cultural memory; c) the narrator provides social commentary on issues immediately relevant to the narrator's own group and issues which encompass but go beyond racial or ethnic concerns.

First, Hughes's and Gardaphe's stereotypically portrayed ethnic narrators are strategically deployed to provide social commentary on issues specific to the ethnic group or race in question. The primary form of discrimination we encounter in the case of Baffo Pietro is the exploitation of labor. Though Italian American immigrants like Pietro did not face the brutality of segregation, they were forced into manual labor under extreme conditions and without any of the human rights won by the American Labor movement in later years. In his own words, "Was a good idea those unions, keep us from becomin' slaves" (3). When a slave-driving foreman threatens to cut their wages in half, Pietro and his fellow worker Pasquale take hammer and chisel to the shovel that they use and cut it in half: "Mista boss man, iffa you cut my wages in 'alf, I cutta the shovel in 'all" (3). Pietro and Pasquale's hostility and Luddite approach testify to the extreme severity of these conditions.

When Pietro arrives in the United States, he relies upon the "padrone, ... the man who meets us at the boats and promise us work and shelter" (20). Though the padrone is not featured in Gardaphe's text, his position is analogous to that of the Harvard-educated foil in Hughes's dialogues with Simple, bridging the gap between the outsider to the socio-linguistic community and proper English-speaking middle-class Americans. This is why Pietro arrives in Chicago with "joosta address of a border house" (49) into which the illiterate Italian American immigrant laborers are herded. In the wintertime the supply of work runs dry and the men suffer: "Wasa so bad that my paesani was joosta stay in the room and sleep all day and all night" (49). Yet through it all, like Simple, Baffo Pietro is able to crack jokes and lighten his burden. As Lowe puts it, "Humor is often the key element in this prescription [of the] therapeutic function" of contemporary ethnic narratives (114). Since the description of the "border house" takes place at Christmas time, the entire piece is cast in a rough imitation of Clement Moore:

   Well comea night before Christmas and through all the border
   house, The bed bugs wasa bitin even Louie the louse,
   Our trousers was hangin by the window sill,
   We had to clean them ourselves cause we couldn't pay the bill. (49)

This "game preserve for paesanos" segregates Pietro and his friends socially and economically, just as the Jim Crow lunch counters and ghettoes "preserved" social and economic segregation for Simple and his cronies. Here the trickster-narrator again addresses issues specific to his own community of origin.

Although Hughes's and Gardaphe's texts differ in significant ways, they share the functions and conventions of hyperethnic narrative. Our second point of comparison between the two hyperethnic 1narrators is Baffo Pietro's role as "cantastoria" or history singer. In Gardaphe's text, a major issue for the narrator is the treatment of Italian American immigrants as manual laborers. Narrating this dramatic episode in the cultural life of Italian Americans, Pete becomes a "cantastoria":

   Back in bell'Italia we work an get paid by the food we grow. In
   America, we work an have to buy the food with the little money we
   make. We went from work for food to work for money. I doan know
   which was worse.

   When we get over to La Merica they was just freein' the slaves, but
   you couldn't fool us. We knew that we had become the new slaves.
   Some of my paesani signed away the best years of they life for a
   chance to come over to the freedom and work that America was
   promising. And when we get over here, all we find is a lot of work
   for a little money. (20)

Baffo Pietro's approach to history encompasses two continents unlike the account delivered by Hughes's narrator. But, like Simple, the hyper-ethnic characterization of Moustache Pete displays a form of sociolinguistic diversity, an aspect of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Baffo Pietro's thick Italian American accent masks his homespun wisdom, which is as chock full of dietrological insight as Simple's improvised "playing the dozens" with Boyd is.

Similarly, Pietro's hyper-Italian persona serves the "refracted intent" to redeem the audience's perception of his ethnic group via evoking stereotypes of Italian Americans. He speaks in broken English and is uneducated. In the September 1986 Fra Noi column, Pete bemoans the fact that "I doan know if so many people make wine in they bashument these days likea we use to, but I doan think so" (40). The quality as well as the quantity of homemade Italian wine is also declining: "I been living here for a long time an I never taste a good wine like in Italy" (42). Here the old Italian custom of a small glass of wine at dinnertime or meals clashed with the regulations of American society during "Prohibish" or prohibition days: "Wasa big problem with wine when we come to this country. Wasa no place to get the grapes, then to stomp them, and store the mash" (42). Pete's reference to Italian winemaking and the drinking of the wine evokes the well-known ethnic stereotype of Italians stomping grapes as well as that of the "wino." As in the case of Jess Simple, the use of heavily ethnicized dialect is ultimately manipulated to create a more positive image of the ethnic group represented in the narrative. When discussing the use and abuse of alcohol, Pietro puts the issue in perspective for the reader comically: "when you young and you just testin out to see how much you can drink. Is good to get drunk then, you know, if you can remember, how much you can take" (41). Finally he proposes moderation, marking his ethnic "otherness" by his daily glass of wine and winemaking, but the reader can discern that he has used these experiences to develop a concept of responsible drinking.

A third topical similarity between Gardaphe's narrator and that of Hughes is that both offer an expanded critique of issues which encompass yet go beyond the narrow confines of the interest of the ethnic group each narrator represents. Writing in 1986, Gardaphe treated the issue of the automation of personal identity in a manner prefiguring our contemporary identity problems of credit cards and Social Security numbers stolen from the Internet:

   I have so many numbers in my life is no wonder they come up with
   computer. Soshsecurity, telephone, address, pension, identicaysh,
   is enough to drive an old time like me craze. Is easy to get in big
   trouble if you doan keep track of all you numbers. If you lose you
   number you don't get anywhere. (29)

Pietro here narrates the impact of technology on personal identity. He realizes the encroachment of the impersonal realm on the personal which the technological destruction of privacy entails: "when evertin' becomes a science I think maybe we got too much progress.... Prett soon maybe we goan lose names and take on numbers. What you wann be called? Joe or 1731, Julie or 1219?" (30). Clearly then, the issue in question goes beyond the confines of the Italian American neighborhood, but it also encompasses this community as well: Pietro has a problem with numbers when he is reprimanded for not moving when his is called on the line at a local bakery in Chicago's Little Italy: "Can't a man be friendly and make a little talk without having a number? Wasn't like this in the old days!" (29). Here numbers prove to be dangerous in their reduction of human identity and human interaction: "I'm joosta say that behind the number is someat'ing human, someat'ing real and if you forget about that maybe you goan someday hurt somebuddy" (30). This treatment again can be called dietrological in that it exposes the hidden realities beneath the surface as personal identity is increasingly automated.

Finally, like Langston Hughes's narrator Simple, Baffo Pietro evokes a central metaphor which in this case imparts to the reader a sense of the narrator's position and function. The Roman God Janus, "who has two heads: one that looks forward and one that looks back" (53), can be seen as a metaphor for Pietro's function in the narrative, reflecting back on the conditions which Italian Americans of his generation faced and looking forward in his discussion of current issues. His function for Italian Americans of the current generation is to "look back upon" the experiences of their elders so as to use the elder's wisdom in "looking forward" to their own ethical struggles living between two cultures. The "time of Janus" for Pietro is "a time to connect ourselves with where we come from and how we get to where we are today" (53).

As a further example of Pietro's function as a Janus figure, Gardaphe includes the story of the well-to-do "Fortunati" family, who, again like Hughes's Mr. Boyd, adopt the culture, language, and values of mainstream Americans. Irony is created as the Fortunati children complain about "icky orange Chef Boo-Jar-Dee," the artificial tomato sauce on the heavily advertised and unpalatably non-Italian pasta they have pestered Mrs. Fortunati to cook (54). The comic situation reflects how Americanized later generations, the children and grandchildren of the "Moustache Petes" of Little Italy, have become. Baffo Pietro later recounts that the voyage of the eldest child, Primo Fortunati, back to the old country to claim his inheritance demonstrates a recovery of old-world culture, family recipes, and old-world values. Primo, following Pietro's example of Janus, "looks back and looks forward," negotiating a recovery of the culture lost by a dispersed populus (54-55), an example, I would suggest, that can be pondered in many ethnic literatures.

In literary terms, the conventions of hyper-ethnicized narrative can be traced across other texts and genres. Unique and yet comparable in form, Langston Hughes's Jesse P. Simple and Fred Gardaphe's Moustache Pete offer readers a rich and amusing treasury of insight, representation, and fertile ground for the resolving of the tensions we feel as writers, critics, teachers, and ethnic outsiders.

Notes

(1.) Noting such links between Hughes and Gardaphe does not subtract at all from the brilliant originality of Moustache Pete, as it is frequently the case that writers of different ethnic backgrounds model their own work on another non-canonized text written by a prior marginalized author.

Works Cited

Akiba Sullivan Harper, Donna. Not So Simple: Simple Stories by Langston Hughes. Kansas City: U of Missouri P, 1995.

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U. of Texas P, 1981.

Barolini, Helen. Chiaroscuro: Essays of Identity. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1997.

De Hernandez, Jennifer Browdy. "The Plural Self: The Politicization of Memory and Form in Three American Ethnic Autobiographies." Memory and Cultural Politics: A New Approach to American Ethnic Literature. Ed. Robert Hogan, Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. 41-59

DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Fachinger, Petra. "Lost in Nostalgia: The Autobiographies of Eva Hoffman and Richard Rodriguez." MELUS 26.2 (2001): 111-28

Hughes, Langston. The Best of Simple. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.

Gardaphe, Fred. Moustache Pete is Dead!: Evivva Baffo Pietro! West Lafayette IN: Bordighera P, 1997.

Gordon, Terry Teece. Letter. Fra Noi Oct. 1986.

Lowe, John. "Humor and Ethnicity in the Postmodern Novel: Kingston, Reed and Vizenor." MELUS 21.4 (1996): 103-26.

Meyers, Rose L. Letter. Fra Noi Nov. 1986.

Polvere, Angelo. Letter. Fra Noi Sept. 1986.

Salerno, Frank. Letter. Fra Noi May 1986.

Sapienza, Joseph. Letter. Fra Noi May 1986.

Paul Giaimo teaches American literature and Ethics and Philosophy at Highland Community College in Freeport, IL. He holds a PhD in American literature from Bowling Green State University of Ohio and is the editor of the American Italian Historical Association newsletter. He is working on his first book; it will concern Italian American literature.

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