The Unfortunate Pilgrim: Mario Puzo’s Deconstruction of the American Myths of Migration

Starting with the comparison of the different strategies adopted by two of the most representative authors of 20th-century American “ethnic” fiction (the Jewish American Henry Roth in Call It Sleep and the Italian American Mario Puzo in The Fortunate Pilgrim) to deconstruct the dominant myths of migration in American culture, the essay aims at pointing out how – contrary to Roth, who somehow eventually manages to reinforce the idea of America as a “heterotopia” (to borrow Michel Foucault’s word) if not a utopia as such – Puzo paradoxically dismantles those myths by telling the story of their fulfilment, at least from the point of view of the Italian American community. If Roth translates the myth of the “Golden Land” into non-materialistic terms, substituting the metaphorical dream of wealth into a “real” dream that fantasizes the harmonization of the various hyphenated identities of the Manhattan Lower East Side without making them lose their individual distinctiveness, Puzo painstakingly describes the ascent of an average, lower-class immigrant Italian family from poverty and precariousness to affluence and stability. But in the very last scene of the novel, echoing a number of analogous commentaries by both narrator and characters disseminated throughout the text, the protagonist, the matriarch Lucia Santa, meditates on the fate of her family, laying bare what for her is the ultimate truth about that dream, the fact that it creates a series of self-generating desires never to be satisfied by their actual fulfillment, and often paid at too dear a price. What America gives with apparent generosity is only money, and turning upside down the ordinary relationship between money and value it requires the immigrant to pay for the money s/he receives by renouncing to some of those same dreams it has awakened. In order to gain money, one has to sell what money should buy – the future. Besides, the American dream is bought through the renunciation to cultural authority and to whatever we mean when we talk about ethnic identity – it means accepting to be “melted” away. The (obviously ironical) title that links the Italian American experience to the mythological founders of American civilization instead sets the stage for a brutal deconstruction of the American Dream, all the more treacherous when the Italian immigrants manage to make it true. They are unfortunate not because they are Italian and immigrants (coming from a Catholic, and not a Protestant environment, and therefore implicitly unable to comply with the imperatives of capitalist ethics), but precisely because their experience repeats and redoubles that of the original Pilgrims, revealing the self-defeating, Sysyphus-like logic of a myth of individual and collective progress through the deferral of the fulfillment of desire that actually hides (and strengthens) the de-humanizing machinery of exploitation.