Nino Ricci’s Mythopoiesis: Where Has He gone?

Maria Giuseppina Cesari

THE HEADING “NINO RICCI’S MYTHOPOIESIS: Where Has He Gone?” is a clear allusion to Ricci’s book title Where She Has Gone as well as a question on the novelist’s authorial and critical position. Where She Has Gone is the third novel of Ricci’s Trilogy about Italian immigration, the previous two being the acclaimed Lives of the Saints and In a Glass House. Many critics consider Lives of the Saints and Where She Has Gone novels with an Italian flavour, as opposed to In a Glass House, a novel with an Italian Canadian ambiance. However, between the two Italian-based novels, Where She Has Gone often ranks second after the most celebrated Lives of the Saints. Although it is less well-known, Where She Has Gone is central to the concept of homecoming for three reasons. First of all, the main character, Viktor/Vittorio goes back to his native village in Valle del Sole (Sun Valley) in Molise after twenty years in Toronto. Then the novel ends the epic of the Innocente family and the entire Trilogy. Finally, the book shows a mythical Italy where Viktor tries to reconstruct his family history and his Italian roots. The geography of the author’s mind permeates real descriptions and facts: consequently, although Ricci is likely to recall some family experiences and historical data of his Molise, he paints an imaginary homeland of ancient traditions and cruel fate.

My paper interrogates whether an immigrant like Viktor may succeed in going back home to Italy and whether this journey back may be a catharsis for the main character and the author himself. The “she” in the Where She Has Gone title refers to Rita, Vittorio Innocente’s stepsister, who goes back to Europe flying from Ontario and her incestuous love with her half brother Viktor. However, she is manifestly Vittorio’s double and he cannot but follow her to Italy and to England. Viktor/Vittorio’s journey traces her steps back to Italy. His trip becomes for him an interior journey back to his roots and the land of his ancestors.

In Where She Has Gone, Viktor’s going back to Italy can be interpreted by reading myth as its central focus. The Italian Canadian Viktor goes back to a mythic Italy where every detail stays fixed in a timeless space. When Viktor tries to compare memory with actual facts, they clash. Like his own memory, his mother’s remembrance fades away. Viktor finds an old picture showing him and his mother Cristina the day of their departure. His mother has “such a look of the mountain peasant” (Where 190) and she does not look like the fighter who has defied society and customs in Lives of the Saints.

Ricci reads myth in its wider meaning, as an archetype of the human condition, as a symbolic interpretation and as a narrative device. As an “archetype” he applies Joseph Campbell’s framework of the monomyth to Viktor’s journey: although the hero is forced to cross the ocean, he does not choose to go. He looks for the magic gift (boon), but he has not found it in Canada so far. He finally goes back to Italy looking for it in the third book of the Trilogy. However, Viktor’s journey back to Italy to find his way home does not lead to a definite solution. Italy represents his roots, his heritage but there is no catharsis, no salvation at the end of the Trilogy. Viktor admits:

My second departure from Valle del Sole, twenty years after the first, becomes more final and more fatal. (Where 302)

In Ricci’s “going back” novel, the mythical image of an ancient Italy, full of ruins and magic stories, goes hand in hand with other myths. First of all, the writer expands on the myth of Oedipus, i.e. Viktor’s love for his unconventional mother (Lives of the Saints), with the myth of incest, the forbidden love for his stepsister Rita. The case of incest with Viktor’s stepsister is another example of how the writer uses myth as an archetype and a symbolic interpretation. Incest is part of the universal myth of Oedipus, and it also recalls Aristophanes’ myth of the two halves in Plato’s Symposium. ¹ The original division of human beings in two halves and their subsequent quest to be reunited in love are clearly explained by Rita. When Viktor is not there, she misses him in a “crazy” way, she feels that he is part of her own body. Rita says:

[...] it’s like you were inside me somehow, like you were a lung or a heart, something I couldn’t do without. I never thought it was love or anything like that. It was more – crazy than that. Like not knowing where my own body ended. Just crazy (Where 256).

When Viktor and Rita cannot be reunited, Viktor loses the other half of his own self. He attempts suicide and then he flies to a far away island, off the Kenyan coast. There he finally starts writing his own story. In conclusion, going back to Italy is not a final catharsis for Viktor. The journey back treats his inner wounds but it does not completely heal them. In order to be healed he has to write his way out of distress and displacement. As a narrative device, Plato’s myth is replaced by the myth of journey or nostos² and by the artist’s trust in his own creation. Like Ulysses, Viktor is forever journeying and forever searching but there is hope at the end of the tunnel when he states: “The path I was on was neither gentle nor steep [...].”(Where 321)

If there is no final catharsis in “going back to Italy” and creative writing is the ultimate answer for the main character of the novel, can the author appease his soul and his past? Also, can Ricci reconcile his ethnic and global identity by creative writing? In fact, the other allusion in my title “Where Has He Gone?” refers to my meeting with Ricci at the Leacock Summer Festival in July 2009. He was introduced as a Canadian writer of Italian descent. Instead, when I directly asked him how he wanted to be defined, he answered: “As a global writer.” His answer brings me back to the question “Where has he gone?” As I am persuaded that he can be both an ethnic writer and a global writer, I would like to suggest that he must have found a coherent and comprehensive theoretical framework to keep the two sides of his ethnic and global identity together.

This coherent and comprehensive theoretical framework is represented by myth. In many interviews Ricci explained how Italian culture had been a burden to him, almost a frightening heritage. He often felt that it did not belong to him completely.³ Nevertheless, in his youth he spent a year studying in Florence and trying to come to terms with his Italian roots. Like his double Viktor, Ricci travelled to Nigeria and worked there as an English teacher. The myth of journey and the myth of salvation through artistic imagination are relevant for the character, for the writer and for the man. Besides, myth remains a threading line in his more recent works. In his novel Testament, Ricci moves on to the universal myth of Jesus, then in The Origin of Species he deals with the myth of Darwin. In his Pierre Elliott Trudeau biography he describes the P.M. as a mythic figure. In the novel The Origin of Species the two final myths of Where She Has Gone, the journey and the creative imagination, appear again together. In this novel he deals with evolutionary theory and its influence on narrative structures. There is another initiation journey too, this time to the Galapagos Islands, where Alex, the main character, has a revelation.

Myth is central to all his works and it represents his solution to be global and stay ethnic. Ricci is global when he confronts himself with universal figures like Jesus, Darwin, and Canadian relevant figures, like Pierre Elliott Trudeau, or when he writes about universal myths. The myth of journey, the myth of Oedipus, the myth of ancient Italy, the myth of creative imagination are all part of his world vision. They have all been explored since his early works. As a consequence, there is not such a division between his Trilogy about the immigrant experience and his later works about global figures, the former being regarded as “ethnic” and the latter as “universal.” Ricci has shifted from being Italian Canadian to being Canadian Italian or – as he prefers it – being a global writer of Italian descent.

Yet, the ethnic writer is still there in the background. In The Origin of Species the main character’s name is Alex Fratarcangeli. He is an Italian Canadian PhD student living in Montreal and he has an Italian last name. Fratarcangeli is an ironic reference to religious matters, “frate” meaning friar and “arcangeli” meaning “archangels.” He comes from Ontario, like Ricci himself, and he has a mother with an “italianese”⁴ vocabulary. Even in his latest work, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau biography,⁵ when he speaks of the mythical images of his youth, he remembers the pictures of John F. Kennedy and Pope John XXIII on his mother’s kitchen wall. President Kennedy is the real American myth and Pope John XXIII is the real Catholic myth.

References to his and his family’s Italian Canadian roots are still present. If Ricci does not write about immigration anymore, his form, his content, his references are still ethnic and above all his thought is still ethnic. He has shifted from writing about the immigrant experience to writing from the point of view of the immigrant experience. In conclusion, he is still “going back” to Italy, but in a different way. From this perspective he is a forerunner. Maybe this is the reason why President Barrack was supposedly reading Ricci’s The Origin of Species.⁶

Works Cited

Alfano, Michele. “Saints and the Hereafter: an Interview with Nino Ricci” in VIA, Vol. 6, n. 2: 11-31.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, USA: Princeton U.P. (1949) 1973.

_____. (Italian translation) L’eroe dai mille volti. Parma: Guanda, 2000. Cesari, Maria Giuseppina. Personal Conversation with Nino Ricci. Leacock >Summer Festival, Ontario, July 2009.

De Franceschi, Marisa. “A Theory of Everything” in ACCENTI, n. 15, Montréal: Winter 2009: 34.

Di Michele, Mary. “Un piccolo rinascimento” in Writers in Transition, The Proceedings of the First National Conference of Italian-Canadian Writers, ed. by C. Dino Minni and Anna Foschi Ciampolini, Toronto: Guernica Editions, 1990: 16-17.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, USA: Princeton U.P., 1957.

_____. Anatomia della critica. Quattro saggi. Italian translation by Paola RosaClot and Sandro Stratta, 2nd. ed. Torino: Einaudi, 1969.

Gorlier, Claudio. “La letteratura nella seconda lingua della diaspora” in Itinera, ed. by Maddalena Tirabassi, Torino: ed. Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 2005:173-183.

Guzzo McParland, Connie. “Nino Ricci. Getting to the origin of things” in PanoramItalia, Vol. 4 n. 2, Montréal: Summer 2009: 27.

Ricci, Nino. Lives of the Saints. Dunvegan: Cormorant Books, 1990.

_____. In A Glass House. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.

_____. Where She Has Gone. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997. 

_____. Testament. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2002.

_____. The Origin of Species. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2008.

_____. Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Extraordinary Canadians Coll., Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2009.