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Article Excerpt
The study of food practices and patterns as well as the exploration of the regional and generational differences of preparation and consumption in Italian American culture has been a source of much discussion among scholars in the fields of history, sociology, literature, and psychology. (1) Indeed, Italian Americans are known for and deeply proud of their connection to food, and this identification remains one of the most prominent aspects associated with their culture. Food, in its capacity to nourish and to appease physical and spiritual hunger, sustains life and faith, and becomes a compelling topic for Italian American artists to explore. In literature, as Gian-Paolo Biasin points out in The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel, "culinary signs in gastronomy ... constitute an integral part of the technique used for representation, narration, and characterization" (11). Food becomes an essential part of understanding narratives as it helps to identify how authors use various elements of fiction such as tone, setting, and conflict to create the world of the novel. For instance, traditional Italian dishes such as spaghetti covered in a thick, red sauce, dandelion salad, homemade wine, barley soup, and fried zucchini can be found in John Fante's Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Mari Tomasi's Like Lesser Gods (1949), Don DeLillo's "Take the 'A' Train" (1962), Tina DeRosa's Paper Fish (1980), and Carole Maso's Ghost Dance (1986). These few examples show Italian American writers using food to illustrate socio-economic ties, cultural identity, group affiliation, and emotional expressions such as nostalgia, grief, and desire; eating these ethnic specific foods helps the characters diminish the geographical and temporal distance caused by immigration and assimilation.
In his autobiographical novel Christ in Concrete (1939), proletarian writer Pietro di Donato uses food to depict the ethnic and class identity of his characters, but he also underscores the conflicted and conflicting effects cooking and consumption have on the life of Italian immigrants in 1920s America. (2) By employing the image of food as a metaphor for self-expression, di Donato creates a discourse of food that links the physical to the spiritual and critiques social forces that simultaneously deprive and poison the working poor. America denies the Immigrant a nourishing environment in which to grow, so they must learn to struggle against oppression or suffer through it. Di Donato explores this absence of nourishment by inventing a working-class aesthetic out of the vile, vulgar image of vomit. As Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction, "Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes" (56). Di Donato, in writing about class structure, questions the legitimacy of tastes by challenging bourgeois culture through his use of distaste, or what Bourdieu might classify as a "disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance ('sick-making') of the tastes of others" (56). (3) Vomiting is itself a violent act--the body rejects what it has eaten; furthermore it can be either self-induced or provoked by harmful factors, which prevents the absorption of nutrients vital for the body's survival. Vomiting stops the necessary process of ingestion and stimulates purging, the body ridding itself of what it refuses to consume. This "dysfunctional consumption" works against the more traditional, middle class aesthetic of beauty and taste by focusing instead on the ghastly (Gigante 36). In Christ in Concrete when the word vomit or actual vomiting appears, di Donato purposively shocks the reader and associates this distasteful image with the survival of the Italian immigrant.
Vomit as a culinary sign also moves the discussion of food from simply celebrating cultural identity to showing the volatility of the immigrants' working and living conditions. Using vomit as a metaphor for "oral performance ... a form of anti-rhetoric," as Seth Lerer argues, enables di Donato to demonstrate the inability of Italian immigrants to digest capitalism and other harmful forms of institutional violence such as Catholicism and consumerism (qtd. in Gigante 36). In di Donato's novel, eating becomes a distasteful act in which gorging and vomiting signify resistance to the ethnic discrimination and prejudice Italian immigrants faced because of their working-class and non-citizen status. While di Donato does supply positive images of appetizing foods, the realistic descriptions of hunger as well as the portrayal of immigrants being consumed as food by society's dominant forces points to the radical politicization of class identity and worker's rights the novel so clearly espouses. As "the most pronounced 'text' of ethnicity," the image of food in Christ in Concrete also points to class conflict (Magliocco 108). Di Donato imaginatively explores and critically reflects upon the asymmetrical power relations between subject and object, creating a dialectic between consumer and that which is consumed in the name of American progress.
Unnatural Consumption: Cannibalism and the Violence of Labor
Readers of Christ in Concrete will not soon forget the opening chapter's graphic and violent image of Geremio's death in a construction accident on Good Friday. The company's desire to cut costs weakens the building's underpinning and causes a floor to give way; Geremio is hurled six floors downward and impaled between the steel and wooden beams of the building's foundation. Arms outstretched, he is crucified: an immigrant Christ figure. Di Donato also devotes an entire paragraph to others who die in the accident and refers to them by name, describing the horrific results of the men's bodies splintering apart as easily as the building's support beams. The details of the accident fuse body parts with wood, steel, and concrete, inextricably binding the workers to their job, even in death. Whether it is Giacomo's "writhing" body, Nick the Lean's "green foam bubbling from his mouth," or Snoutnose's suffocating "gelatinizing" blood, "warm, thick, and sickening as hot wine," these repulsive descriptions flavor the narrative, painting a portrait of death "wormingly alive with cries, screams, moans, and dust" (di Donato 15). Though not food itself, the crude, grisly images used to describe the workers are emblematic of food and edible commodities and, like freshly killed meat, are sacrificed for capitalist consumption and profit. The men lie gutted and spread out, becoming the building's entrails. Di Donato's language "strip[s] off the skin of society and reveals the corruption underneath" (Gowers 183). The contrasting colors of green and red emanating from the injured and dying workers reinforce their ill-treatment by the corporation and effectively become a living embodiment of corporate greed (money) and social injustice (blood) to suggest the extreme devastation and waste of life the accident leaves behind.
The focus on orality in this scene stops the process of ingestion and silences the voices of the disenfranchised workers. As the origin of speech and ingestion, the mouth becomes another metaphor to signal an imbalance of power. In his theory of the grotesque body Mikhail Bakhtin claims the "gaping mouth" is the foremost cavity in the body that connects it to the "world outside" (317), and this idea encourages a critical reading of di Donato's depiction of mutilated bodies. The bilious "foam" being expelled by Nick the Lean's mouth severs his ability to speak lucidly, if at all, and signifies the body's final action before dying. The sickening comparison of blood to "hot wine" nauseates rather than entices the appetite; consequently, the mouth is shown here as a cavity that reverses the order of consumption. Rather than intaking food to provide life, the mouth becomes a space that hemorrhages the essential parts of the men's bodies. The symbolic image of blood as wine also alludes to the moment of transubstantiation in Catholic mass when wine changes into Christ's blood. In recreating the sacred in the secular, this episode suggests a comparison between the immigrants' sacrificial deaths and Christ's, but rather than purely evoking faith, di Donato exploits the blood/wine relationship to underscore capitalism's corrupt nature.
In contrast with the quick succession of snapshots of the dead and dying that establishes urgency as rescue seems near to impossible, di Donato's sentence style and revolting imagery slow down the narrative to repulse and to horrify the reader. When Julio, for instance, finds the decapitated head of Tomas, "His fingers slithered about grisly sharp bones and in a gluey, stringy, hollow mass, yielding as wet macaroni" (16). In this passage the many adjectives force readers to focus on the brutal carnage di Donato describes so vividly and violently. The perverse analogy of Tomas' brains to macaroni--a gruesomely repugnant pairing--points to a lack of fulfillment in which the "hollow" cavities of the body (whether stomach or head) are left empty. That Tomas' head is "yielding," offering no resistance, symbolizes the inescapability of immigrants becoming victims of corporate greed. Geremio's earlier attempt to plead with his boss, Mr. Murdin, about making the building safer fails, revealing his powerlessness to advocate for workers' rights. Angry, Murdin replies, "Lissenyawopbastard! if you don't like it, you know what you can do!" (9). The ethnic slur and fear of losing his job render Geremio silent. Di Donato repeatedly focuses on the area of the mouth, especially on the blood that chokes Geremio, to symbolize the obstruction of justice and to foreshadow his eventual death by asphyxiation. The corporation's ravenous appetite for profit chokes the workers' humanity and preserves the expendability of the working class by consuming its members one by one.
Geremio's first-person account of the construction accident is fragmented and...
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