[DOWNLOAD] "Bassani's the Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Italian "Queers" (Critical Essay)" by John Champagne " Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Bassani's the Garden of the Finzi-Continis and Italian "Queers" (Critical Essay)
- Author : John Champagne
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 97 KB
Description
There is, in Giorgio Bassani's novel The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a passage where the unnamed Jewish narrator contrasts his non-Jewish friend Giampiero Malnate's view of homosexuals as "'poor bastards'" and "'obsessed' creatures" with his own insistence that "love justifies and sanctifies everything, even homosexuality; and more: that love, when it is pure, completely without material interest, is always abnormal, anti-social, et cetera, just like art ... useless" (179). According to the narrator, about homosexuality, his friend Malnate "had very simple ideas: like a true goy" (179). Bassani's narrator thus queerly asserts that Jewish identity is primarily a relation of affiliation to and with the homosexual Other. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not Basani's only novel in which homosexuality and Judaism are linked sympathetically. Sergio Parussa reminds us that Bassani's earlier (1958) novel Gli occhiali d'oro (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles) "recounts the parallel lives of two outsiders: Dr. Athos Fadigati, a well-respected homosexual doctor, and a young Jew," who narrates the novel (Writing as Freedom 104). According to Parussa, the Jewish narrator and Dr. Fadigati "are not antagonists but deuteragonists" (104). In support of this reading, Parussa quotes Bassani himself, who argues that these two characters "'sense that they are the same precisely because they are persecuted differently'" (104). And, in the introduction to his Queer Italia, one of the first collections of essays in English on same-sex desire in Italian literature and film, Gary P. Cestaro writes that The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles "offers an exceptionally nuanced portrait of the lethal effects of middle-class conformity on Italian 'queers' of the 1930s and 1940s, Jews and homosexuals" (8). Taking my cue from Cestaro and recent work in sexuality studies, I argue for a reading of the unnamed narrator of Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis as not gay, but queer. Here is a provisional definition of my use of the term queer in this study: "queer theory is, among other things, an interrogation of the way modern culture depends upon processes of normalization to produce and regulate the social in general and the sexual in particular" (see Warner, "Introduction," xxvi-xxvii). A series of institutions--the military, education, religion, law, medicine, for example--use various techniques to insure our subjugation. Michel Foucault famously called these techniques disciplines (see Discipline and Punish). Rather than relying chiefly on violence, disciplines pursue our subjection through the idea of the normal and its regulatory function. Queer theory interrupts in particular the ways in which the normal depends upon a categorizing of individuals into rigid, fixed, and hierarchical oppositions: not only heterosexual / homosexual, but also male / female, white / black, and so forth. In fact, queer theory attempts to undermine any understanding of identity as either / or, us / them. It is thus opposed to the positing of a "gay" identity no less rigid and fixed than its "straight" counterpart.