As a result of the gradual rise of Italian American studies in academic circles, rereading Pietro di Donato's forgotten works—those after Christ in Concrete ([1939] 1993)—not only as reflective of the Italian American milieu but also as mirroring a different point of view on US society, culture, and literature, proves essential to reassess critical consideration of this author. Often overlooked by critics and scholars, his later fiction was characterized as suffering from “a qualitative drop after the overwhelming success of Christ in Concrete in 1939” (Esposito 1980a, 188).1 In contrast with this commonly shared point of view, this article scrutinizes his third novel, Three Circles of Light (1960), as being a highly experimental piece in the writer's artistic continuum and an interesting example of deconstruction of the most widespread stereotypes about Italian Americans. I argue, indeed, that the unforgettable gallery of characters in Three Circles of Light—most of whom come from his first novel—far from consisting of stereotyped representations of Italian Americans, attests to di Donato's perception of Italian American identity as something fluid and shifting, constantly suspended between the two opposite poles of Italianità and Americanness. Even though di Donato himself defined his third novel as an “introduction” to Christ in Concrete—“We can do without Three Circles of Light, but we can't do without Christ in Concrete” (Huene-Green 1987, 34)—a close analysis of the text reveals how this work subtly continues the subversion of the literary canon—begun in his best-selling book—that is, in Anthony Julian Tamburri's words, the subversion of the dominant culture (Tamburri 1998, 3–20).2Going well beyond stereotypes and autobiography, the episodic structure of Three Circles of Light confronts the reader with the same “dynamics of the conglomeration and agglutination of different voices and reading strategies . . . contrary to the hegemony of the dominant culture” that characterized Christ in Concrete (Tamburri 2014, 38).3 Often considered a writer who “never completely free[d] himself from the Italian/American milieu of his early years or the autobiographical incidents coloring much of his fiction” (Esposito 1980a, 190), di Donato ended up, indeed, pioneering a new kind of transnational fiction bearing remarkable resemblances to the Italian literary movement of verismo and, in particular, to Giovanni Verga's novel I Malavoglia (1881) and Luigi Capuana's Il Marchese di Roccaverdina (1901). Suggesting a different way of looking at the Italian American enclave of West Hoboken, New Jersey, and associating America “with godlessness and evil” (Huene-Green 1987, 37), di Donato gives life to many extraordinary characters. Eighty-year-old Captain Vadi, whose “passion was to talk of the past” (Di Donato 1960, 101), for example, is an “old fish peddler, st[anding] by his seascape-painted cart with his tattered sea-captain's cap, apron, and leather cuffs,” while “bowlegged Zio Camilli” is described as “basking before his grocery which displayed dried cod, an open cask of floating lupino beans, cylinders of lemon ice, cold watermelon and wicker baskets of snails” (11). Such figures soon evoke in the reader familiar with Italian literature the Sicilian setting of I Malavoglia, where a family, hardly surviving on their fishing business, is fatefully destroyed by the ambition to reach a better life by trading in lupino beans, a detail highly significant as a symbol of Italianità connecting the small village of Acitrezza (and Sicily) to West Hoboken (and New Jersey). Similarly, Capuana's Il Marchese di Roccaverdina portrays a passionate drama of love and death, vaguely reminiscent of the unfortunate destiny of di Donato's Sebastiano, the old sacristan of the church of S. Rocco in Hoboken, who kills his adoptive son out of jealousy for his beautiful wife, Stella L'Africana.4 Taking advantage of a more mature, detached, and lucid point of view on the Italian American enclave he grew up in, di Donato revisits the scene of his first novel to “‘re-construct’ or ‘re-imagine’ or ‘reclaim’ what the lives . . . of the first generations of immigrants were like” (Carravetta 2017, 137). Capturing the existential essence of their lives, he does not merely reiterate the theme of the immigrant laborer frustrated by overwhelming odds but also “crystallize[s] the moment when the immigrant realizes that he is confronting the challenge of the new world” (Basile Green 1974, 156).5 Therefore, Three Circles of Light proves essential to understanding di Donato's corpus, besides showing how its author felt that love could shame death and life can occur in a “mystery” or in sacredness (Diomede 1995, 104–105, 113–114).Born in 1911, in West Hoboken, in the so-called New Jersey operaio (Durante 2002, 11), to Abruzzese parents, Pietro di Donato was the son of an immigrant, whose death, like that of Geremio in Christ in Concrete, sent him to work at age twelve as a bricklayer.6 His best-selling novel, chosen over Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as the main selection of the 1939 Book of the Month Club (Gardaphé 1993, x), is born out of the elaboration of di Donato's first short story, where he recounts his father's death.7 His difficult childhood inevitably influenced his writing, whose “imagery vibrates with the earthy sensuality that Italian immigrants brought to their American lives” and through which “we gain an unprecedented insight into the mysteries of Italian immigrant life” (Gardaphé 1993, xi).Dismissed for his prose's supposedly low quality (Garside 1939), but also praised for his imagination and poetic language (Adamic 1939), di Donato, absent from historical and critical American literature studies, was included in the epilogue “Beginner's Luck” of Warren French's The Social Novel at the End of an Era (1966), in good company with Richard Wright. Even though French highlights di Donato's “freshness” and “vigor” as a writer, he still points at him as an example of the kind of “irresponsibility” that destroyed an age.8 Only in recent decades has di Donato's first novel received more critical attention after having long been “relegated to the margins of mainstream American culture, where it lay dormant as a minor classic” (Gardaphé 1993, ix). Together with John Ciardi and John Fante, he is a pioneer of early Italian American writing (Carravetta 2017, 87), while his masterpiece is considered a prototypical Italian American, “non-canonical,” unique novel (Tamburri 2014, 38). Like Three Circles of Light, Christ in Concrete arose, in fact, from “an unorthodox creative act . . . [that] may initially problematize and frustrate a reader's interpretive act,” as Tamburri makes clear: Namely the act of semiosis involved in di Donato's Christ in Concrete is a restructured and redefined act of sign interpretation dependent on a sign repertoire no longer consonant with that of the literary canon—that is, the dominant culture. . . . Specifically, along the lines of sign functions, one sees that the two functives of expression and content are no longer in mutual correlation. The content, at this point in time with regard to a non-canonical literature, is different from that of the canon. The sign function realized in this new process of semiosis is now in disaccord with the dominant culture's expectation of the coding correlation. (Tamburri 2014, 38)Highly challenging and sometimes frustrating for the reader, as it is intimately involved in the “co-production of textual signification,” Three Circles of Light (like Christ in Concrete) allows “the possibility of different readers”: a more “traditional (i.e., modernist) reader . . . rooted in the search for existing absolutes,” to whom di Donato's sign system—“consisting of manipulated sign functions that ultimately (re)define the sign”—appears “inadequate”; and a “non-traditionalist (postmodernist)” reader, in search of “new coding correlations,” who may find this novel “intriguing” (Tamburri 2014, 38).9 Di Donato, John Fante, and Jerre Mangione10 were the earliest Americans of Italian descent who used the stories of immigrants who remained in America—“their voyages, their troubles, their failures and successes”—“to create histories of mythic proportion” (Gardaphé 1996, 55).11 “During the 1930s, a new American-born generation would come of age to write the stories their parents could barely recount in English, to document the injustices faced by the immigrants, and to describe their own experiences as new Americans. Through their writing they would create new myths; by recording reality, they would explain the differences between Italians and Americans and bridge Italian and American cultures, creating a synthesis that can be called Italian Americana” (Gardaphé 1996, 56–57). “Simply recall[ing] in allegorical poetic form, the histories of [his] people” (Bidney 1969, 274), di Donato helped the creation of an important piece of Italian Americana, far from the rules of the proletarian novel—even though his works focus mainly on laborers in the construction field—and founded on the prevalent cultural myths, as his contemporary modernist writers were doing.Robert Viscusi stated, moreover, that “the allegorical destiny of Italian American heroes [is] to endure ritual death and processional reidentification in their process of becoming divinities” (Viscusi 1991, 272). The word processional refers here to “a habit that produces a visible event in which the contradictions of the communal life become the materials of a public ritual” (Viscusi 1991, 271), which is exactly what happens in the prologue of Three Circles of Light.The prologue consists, in fact, of a spectacular and dramatic mise-en-scène of the Italian neighborhood's reaction to the announcement of Geremio's tragic death in a construction accident. This section—in italics to mark its difference from the rest of the book—is probably the most experimental part of the novel, meant to connect it with Christ in Concrete on a thematic and stylistic level. Its overture—with the voices of the paesani announcing in a rhythmical sequence Geremio's death along the streets as if they were acting in a circus show12—displays influences of the cadence of liturgical litanies: “The newly elected widow, the Annunziata, is pent, . . . with disarranged mind she knows not this reality. But as Geremio's corpse is borne to her, now, finally, will she use tongue” (Di Donato 1960, 1). In a sudden but predictable identification of Annunziata with the Virgin Mary, people implore her to shout out her pain and accept her new condition of solitude and loss: “Curse your loss!”; “Spill this death's bitters!”; “Clamor your bereft thighs”; “Vomit! Retch your passional!”; “Knead your grief!” Loudly remarking on the woman's loss of (sexual) intimacy with her husband—“Whose beard will grate your breasts?”; “Whose? Whose iron legs yours will lock?”; “Whose hard teeth will bite your ears? What calloused hand will wrench back on pillow your head by your tresses?” (1)—the disquieting and disembodied voices are reminiscent indeed of the chorus in Greek tragedy and its cathartic function. Weaving together the most significant fragments of Annunziata's story as a young wife, the chorus metaphorically brings her back to a preconjugal status of chastity and purity, therefore facilitating her identification with the Madonna.The prologue's style, criticized as excessive and praised as innovative, borrows from the long tradition of Italian Catholicism's ritual and spectacle of sacraments. Di Donato's characters perform their Christian faith through cultural practices, eliciting the role of lived religion in the everyday lives of men, women, and children. Their “ancient religious heritage” and “Mediterranean spirituality spilling onto the streets and into the awareness of America” served, therefore, as the sacred theater of the Italian American community (Orsi 1985, 230).The prologue also bears some resemblances to the medieval genre of the lauda, a religious devotional song, whose illustrious antecedent is to be found in Jacopone da Todi's Il pianto della Madonna (thirteenth century), where Christ's mother contemplates her son on the cross, crying out all her pain. At the core of the prologue is a mourning ritual, particularly helpful to understand subjectivity in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. Human life, Victor W. Turner maintains, is necessarily performative through active processes rather than static structures, and the scene acted in the prologue marks a rite of passage (Turner 1969). Annunziata is placed in a liminal position, almost on the threshold of a new life—she's within her house with her children as she hears the paesani coming to announce Geremio's death—waiting to be stripped of her identity as a wife and on the verge of putting on that of a widow. If identity is formed by gestures and movements, then enunciation and repetition, in terms of both language and acts, are essential functions in role-playing and putting on an identity (Butler 1999). It happens when Annunziata metaphorically wears her new role of a widow in charge of the family. If we consider identity as articulation, we inevitably enter the realm of narrative, as Annunziata does with her enunciation/narration of Geremio's death. Thus, di Donato demonstrates that ethnic and religious personhood is to be found in the interstices of a text. Cultural Catholicism, therefore, constructs, deconstructs, and reconstructs the ethnic identities of those participating in its ritual through diverse performances.Annunziata's empowerment contrasts with the traditional women's silent role in the patriarchal Italian American family, thus revealing “the sophistication and the incisiveness” di Donato observed in some women in West Hoboken who could not read or write but who “sounded like people out of Greek dramas, [going] right to the heart of the matter . . . with their alleged trivia . . . loaded with innuendoes” (Huene-Green 1987, 37). Through Annunziata's effective enunciation of Geremio's death to her children, the man gains the stature and the features of a heroic Greek god more than that of a saint, since she cannot help remarking on his sinful nature—“You have lost an erring father on earth, but have gained an angel in Heaven”—and God's merciful absolution; “his sins were cleansed from him on the way” (Di Donato 1960, 2). Resorting to the pattern of social climbing that stigmatizes any immigrant's life, she states that Geremio “was not killed by the falling walls, nor did he die. He was transferred to a better job” because he was the “best of the bricklayers,” not only on earth but also in heaven, “selected by God, the Master Builder” “to construct the foundation of [their] very own true home” (2). With a compelling story of glorification and success, Annunziata pushes her husband up to the last step of the social ladder that her neighbors and friends struggled with on earth while merging hers and her children's fate with that of Geremio. Annunziata is also a key figure in the revision di Donato makes to the Christian myth, something already implicit in his best-selling book and more explicit in his subsequent work. Such a revision implies a return to paganism in reaction to a Christianity that does not shield the immigrants from capitalism's perverse mechanisms. In his socialist vision of the world, the solution to the problems created by capitalism needs to be found in a spiritual quest for truth leading back to pagan sensualism.13 Di Donato believes that “salvation for the world lies in man's ability to become his own god, to take responsibility and control of the world he's created and to act for the good of all” (Gardaphé 1993, xviii).In this complex mechanism, Annunziata's apparent acceptance of her husband's affair with an American mistress, Delia, makes her “the symbol of the problem of a whole culture that tolerates the corruption of a dream” (Basile Green 1974, 156). Throughout the novel, she embodies the character of a mother torn between love, anger, and hate for Geremio, with all her emotions originating from his betrayal (Diomede 1995, 76). Because Annunziata also serves in the novel as a Madonna, a symbol of the immigrants’ faith in God, her features blur in Paolino's imagination with those of the mater dolorosa when he comes across a copy of Michelangelo's Pietà in Sebastiano's workshop. An inverted image of the Pietà had already appeared in the final scene of Christ in Concrete—where the “son is holding a mother who is crooning a death-song/lullaby which hails her son as a new Christ, one that her children should follow” (Gardaphé 1993, xv). In Three Circles of Light, a disquieting image of Annunziata figuratively cradling Geremio in her arms as she holds her husband's newborn illegitimate son dominates one of the last scenes of the novel: “The baby was the image of Father. It was as though Mother were holding Father, a few days old, in her arms” (Di Donato 1960, 196). If in Christ in Concrete, Annunziata had been transfigured into a mater dolorosa (Gardaphé 1993, xv–xvi), in Three Circles of Light, she becomes a mater gaudiosa, who, visiting her antagonist Delia in the hospital, turns out to be the moral winner. The scene with the two women can also be read as an allegory of the final victory of Italianità over Americanness. However, it is also reminiscent of the famous biblical scene of the Virgin Mary visiting her cousin Elizabeth, already pregnant with St. John the Baptist. The two women in the Bible—different in social status and age, as Annunziata and Delia are—will both participate in humanity's salvation process. Similarly, in Three Circles of Light, Geremio's wife and his lover will help him win over death, perpetuating his race through their children. Delia, moreover, opens the way to a possible reincarnation of Geremio as an American tout court.14 At the same time Annunziata perpetuates his Italianità on earth and saves his soul for heaven, triggering his repentance and penance just before his death. Geremio's Italianità, hidden but present in Jerry's genes, seems likely to burst out like a bomb in the future of his American son. Explosion—a clear metaphor for the possible sudden outburst of the unmeltable Italianità in any American of Italian origins—is a frequently recurring topic in the novel, and Annunziata's brother, Uncle Barbarosso, embodies it. This fascinating figure of a rebellious dynamiter, “anarchist and . . . uproarious advocate of Satan” (Di Donato 1960, 39), with his mule “Mazzini” and his “black-brown-white beagle, Garibaldi” (15), is also a symbol of the syncretism between the Italian and the American culture occurring in the immigrant's mind. He acts, in fact, as a mediator in the scene in which he eventually agrees to disguise himself as “Sondy Gloss” to give his nieces and nephews “a real ‘American’ Christmas” (81). When Uncle Barbarosso uses “the American Fourth of July . . . for his own personal celebration of Garibaldi's Italian liberation” (15–16), he makes clear how Italian history ends up overlapping American history in the creative representation of the New World by the immigrants, anchored to a distant, glorious, and almost mythical time they all feel that they come from.If di Donato's relationship with the literary genre of autobiography seems already problematic in Christ in Concrete—a novel “transcend[ing] the self-congratulatory autobiographical portrayals produced by many immigrant writers of the period” (Gardaphé 1993, xii)—it becomes even more complicated in Three Circles of Light.15 In this book, he goes on to “present the Italian American experience through literary snapshots” (Gardaphé 1993, xii), documenting the lives of some Italian American families in a moment of profound social and existential crisis. Di Donato, not limiting himself to the recollection of his childhood and adolescence in West Hoboken, “create[s] not so much mere representations of that which is traditionally conceived to be a priori reality, but presentation (the offering for viewing, or notice or for consideration)” of the harsh reality of Italian immigrants (Tamburri 2014, 29). The reader therefore is called in the text to witness “the various trials and tribulations of the characters” and “is made to feel part and parcel of their experience” (Tamburri 2014, 29). Three Circles of Light, like Christ in Concrete, is therefore another “Italian/American novel not set in stone,” in Tamburri's words, but in the faces, acts, and enunciations of the characters, in a way utterly different from that of the numerous retrospective novels produced during and after World War II, all structured around a rigid plot. The novel's episodes do not follow a storyline in the traditional sense of the word and seem almost suspended outside of history, in a dimension where “time mean[s] nothing” (Di Donato 1960, 9). Lacking a perspective in the future (if there is any), each story's ending is almost impossible not only to predict, but even to imagine (Gardaphé 1993, xi–xii). History with a capital “H” remains at the margins of the novel as something nobody wants to openly discuss. A sign, appearing over the toilet at Tony's saloon after the barber is informed of his son Carmine's death on the French front, reads: “OF WAR WE DO NOT TALK!” (Di Donato 1960, 92). History, therefore, is evoked only in some characters’ names or nicknames (Count Andrini, Annibale, Bartolommeo the “Kaiser,” Garibaldo Panettiero, Uncle Barbarosso) or glancingly mentioned when it upset people's lives, as happened in the case of Prohibition, or just hinted at, as in the “mysterious Society of the White Button” or the “high class group” of “Il Cenacolo” (93). As a result, all the characters gravitating around West Hoboken seem to live in a crystal ball, suspended and isolated in time and space, in a world supposedly eternal and unchangeable (9).Three Circles of Light has also been labeled as “unable to project and sustain the stylistic energies of his first novel, primarily because [di Donato's later] works are cut off from the local, immigrant condition, a condition of terrible but actual suffering” (Esposito 1980b, 58). I would instead argue that this book—published more than twenty years after Christ in Concrete—shows di Donato, having moved away from West Hoboken, as distant—more geographically than psychologically—from his Italian American milieu, but not actually cut off from it.16 Spatio-temporal distance from the stories he narrates enables him indeed to sublimate them in more absolute and universal terms as the narratives of the many “have-nots”—men, women, and children in any time. In his perspective, in fact, “any portrayal of Christianity must always portray the ‘have-nots,’ the workers, the poor who have nothing to lose but their honor and their lives” (Huene-Green 1987, 36). At the same time, Three Circles of Light points at sexuality and literature as viable ways out of the personal tragedies of life and the most potent means of contrasting America's debasement of values, which deeply affects American literature as well.17A closer analysis of di Donato's characters will also prove how any critical reading of his works as a mere literary elaboration of biographical incidents proves, at least, inconsistent. Stella L'Africana, for example, the “young beautiful wife of elderly Sebastiano Mezzanotte, the statue maker and sacristan of the church of San Rocco,” is a woman who “remains indelibly in [Paolino's] memory” as “a shining figure of precious substance” (Di Donato 1960, 13). Once a prostitute in Vasto along with her mother Luna Ciucanera—“the whore of the black ass” (36)—the girl is presented as the quintessence of sensuality, with her skin of “a deep tint of greenish-brown hue” that seems “of smooth lava or lignum vitae” (13). Transfigured into a mythical creature, this “full-blossomed nymph” with “radiant light purple” eyes and “bluest-blackest of black” heavy hair “draping about her shoulders,” has a strong link with her earthy nature and will be the catalyst of Paolino's sexual emancipation. Similarly, the character of Grazia La Cafone, a “tall lean woman [who] arrived from Vasto stockingless” (43) to help Annunziata in the house, is a creature “of the very earth, primitive and Latin,” with her “amoral clear black eyes” and her “utterly feminine” voice speaking “the raw poetry of survival” (44).18 The woman, who “slept on the floor . . . went barefoot, bore heat well and shed cold,” (44) nourishes an insane sexual desire toward her host, something strong that she will openly declare during his funeral wake at the tenement—“Ah Geremio, beautiful despite distorting death, forgive, forgive this woman who had always wanted you” (232). Because of their sensuality, Stella and Grazia seem to have sprung from the earth like powerful roots crossing the ocean under the soil of the sea to start a new life in America.19Stella lives with her mother and her blind mother-in-law in Sebastiano's house on Dubois Street, a detail not to be neglected, since it emphasizes—through an apparently casual reference to W. E. B. DuBois—the topic of the chapter, focused almost entirely on race, together with sex and gender. The offspring of her mother's perverse relationship with a “blackamoor, the olive grower” from Tripoli who “would come by in his cart lugged by the little black ass and take her to his hut for his pleasure” (36), Stella is presented as a dynamic character, whose body is a living junction of different races and cultures. She will gradually gain consciousness of her strength and identity up to the final scene where she manifests in harsh, cutting words her determination to stay in America against Sebastiano's decision to go back to Vasto. “Wouldst cage me like a bitch dog in Vasto? Go I back to the Vasto of peasants, now? Not so! Never! Go yourself, old man, with your true imbecile son and blind mother! I shall not move a hair's width in flight before the stink-filled mouths of the stink-footed primitives who arrogantly laud themselves as Vastese! I laugh to their faces and spit upon them! I, proudly Stella L'Africana, shall stay nested in the West Hoboken of the free America!” (160). Uncle Charlie Chaplin, whose nickname may also come from his swinging way of walking, attests to the growing contamination of Italian popular culture with the American one, besides reaffirming the fundamental role sex plays in perpetuating the Italian race worldwide. Unreliable, often drunk, and talkative, he is a natural for storytelling as he recounts the tale of his five years in Ethiopia, under the “wily . . . King Menelik,” who forced him “to reseed the wombs of Wah-Wah, and make life.” Recalling the long time he spent “fornicat[ing] coal-black women from the ages of ten to sixty, under the broiling sun night and day!” (36), the man casually mentions his “countless toasted little bastards” and his body “tattooed . . . from the neck down, even to the dragon on my thing,” in a passage allusive of Italian (even sexual) colonialism in Africa. Charlie Chaplin lives alone, however, deprived of a family and in conflict with his only legitimate son, Pasqualino, whose destiny he somehow anticipates during one of his hangovers: “Like mother, like daughter, like father, like son. My Pasqualino, my colt, is becoming a stallion. He will plant the horns on old Sebastian, and gallop back to me. Blood of the real father is stronger than the milk of adoption!” (37). This dualistic opposition of blood and adoption alludes here to the condition of the immigrants in the US, neglected by their mother country and adopted by their host nation, therefore condemned to never feel at home.20 This funny yet grotesque character will also undergo a radical change; he will stop drinking, laughing, and telling stories after Sebastiano kills his son, who had an affair with Stella. Pasqualino's death activates a change in Uncle Charlie Chaplin, who switches to the Italian way of mourning and acts out his pain, resorting to silence until the end of his life.Portraying his characters with a kind of robust humor that makes them wholly alive and far from the most abused (primarily ethnic) stereotypes, di Donato also introduces the character of Maddalena La Smorfia, “the high priestess of healing to the ‘paesanos,’” thus drawing attention to what Rose Basile Green calls “folk religion” (Basile Green 1974, 155). Breathing “life back into a baby [already turned stiff and blue] with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” delivering a ten-pound baby—originally believed to have been a tumor—from a paesano's daughter, or “offering her primitive Mass to break the summer heat in 1918,” the old woman reaffirms her power “as great as a saint's” in the neighborhood (Basile Green 1974, 156). Together with the other empowered women in the novel—Annunziata, Stella L'Africana, Grazia La Cafone—she attests to di Donato's belief that redemption can be achieved through women. Moreover, the reference in the narrative to the Armenian American novelist William Saroyan, in the character of “Mr. Saroyan, the owner of the coffee and nut store” (Di Donato 1960, 56), may be interpreted as a meta-reflection on American mainstream literature, whose corpus was also being shaped during those first decades of the twentieth century with the significant contribution of many ethnic writers.21 Conscious of being uneducated and unsophisticated, and almost ignored by the Italian community in the US, di Donato resorts in this third novel to a more abstract, nonspecific, and most importantly less painful style that, without ever diminishing the novel's impact on the reader, amplifies it as the text becomes readable at a universal level. With a novel that qualifies as “serious literature” despite “lack[ing] the linguistic power and rhetorical intens