father, the son and the sense of humor: The novels of John Fante

John Fante is a well-known novelist in Italy and Europe, but still very much unknown and unrecognized in the United States. Yet, John Fante is an American writer and, though his father came from Torricella Peligna---a small town in the middle of Italy---Fante did not speak Italian; he felt American and, most of all, he wanted to be considered an American writer. His novels are imbued with both "Italian Americanicity" as well as "Americanicity". In fact, throughout his eight novels, one of the main topics is the American motif par excellence, the American Dream. What are the reasons for such a strange literary destiny? My dissertation begins with this question and tries to find an answer by analyzing the father-son relationship, the omnipresent theme in Fante's production. This relationship also represents the dichotomy old word/new word. Indeed, this relationship is the source of the American Dream (the dream of conquering America, transmitted from the father to the son) and the son's discovery of literature (the son begins to write in order to rebel against his father and his roots, and, at the same time, he writes about his father, and through writing understands his father and his roots). Fante depicts this father-son relationship with irony and satire, and most of all with humor. Humor, as it was defined by Luigi Pirandello's On Humor and by Milan Kundera's Testaments Betrayed, is the narrative tool rendering any statement made in a novel ambiguous and double-sided. Humor doubts any truth, and leaves the readers free to choose their own interpretation of the text, allowing them to be the masters of the text. It is not by chance that Fante has been discovered in the eighties, in the heart of the Postmodern Era, that which rejected any absolute truth, and considered humor and irony as the necessary tropes to perceive reality in its relative nature. Fante's triumph has taken place in Italy, a country that is postmodern not by theory but by essence, a fragmented and disillusioned country constituted by disillusioned readers, and not in America, the land of "how-to" manuals handing down easy truths to the general public.