One thing I’ve repeated to my students over the years is that if you want to become a writer or an artist, you need to act on that desire and then continue despite the obstacles you’ll face. The world will probably dis you for your foolishness and some people will try to talk sense into your honey head, but don’t let anyone or anything stop you: in fact, use your challenges and obstacles and failures and shame to go on—as Guido does in Carnevale (My painting below is titled Storm Light. A detail from it is featured on the novel's cover.)
Guido's journey out of childhood, his coming of age story, is also a journey through a labyrinth of recollections. Reflective people reminisce about growing up, including the bitter-sweet memories of opportunities missed and the treasures lost along the way. Writers shape that material, sometimes beginning only with a single thread of a story-line and raveling that up into the fabric of an entire work. Take for example, the tale of The Lightning that Guido hears as a teenager at his grandmother’s birthday party: that’s something from my own history, a family story that I never heard recounted with as much detail as I ended up imagining for this important scene in the novel.
"The lightning had not come through one of the open windows," she says abruptly, looking around at everyone. "You remember? The windows were open, but it crashed through the wall. Like a shooting star it burst into our midst, with its blue and white fire like a bridal gown trailing. Yet it did not hurry: it made its stately way about the central pillars of this room illuminating everything. I sat completely still, expecting I knew not what from the hand of God.
"Incredibly, without so much as touching a candle wick, it finally flew out through the same opening by which it had come. There! Exactly there!" She points to the wall, and with x-ray vision, I see the ancient hole behind the plaster. "That extraordinary moment passed, and sitting stunned in the darkness, we could hear the rain falling outside, the storm rumbling distantly, like a battle far off. We stirred awake, and Ernesto, you leapt to your feet, ran to the window, and signaled all clear."
She takes a quick whiff of the air. "I can still smell the electricity, and perhaps there is something else. Fear, perhaps." Her voice whispers away into eerie silence.
I have been to this place before, where Nonna's eyes glitter with lightning and the condition of my soul seems bright and dark at once. And sometimes, when the big dining room is packed with a hundred guests, gazing into the ether above their heads I myself have seen the lightning in its orbit, or else alone in bed, staring at the ceiling of my room I can see it like a comet making its way back to us. Perhaps it was an angel, I have thought, but also I have told my friends it was like the ghastly thing hurled at Ichabod Crane by the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. When someone objects, "How can you know so much about this? You weren't even born!" I recollect my grandmother, all of time at her command, and I too become a breathing statue.
Not only did I want to preserve certain childhood memories, but in Carnevale I wanted to give voice to the difficulty and the necessity of leaving home: in one way or another we all have to do this if we’re going to claim our own lives. I’m not just talking about finding a profession or an income, but rather setting out to become ourselves. It’s not a straight line, as Guido learns; hence the novel’s allusions to labyrinths. But to do this fully—that is, in appreciation of our roots—even as we move forward, we have to find the right relationship to our family of origin and hometown. Although neither will continue to exist as we remember them, their influence on our lives does go on. Often, like Guido, we might feel the need to unearth bits of a past we’ve previously dismissed or neglected or actually repressed. Because I’m a hypnotherapist I have first hand experience helping others to find the value in their past histories. (To learn more about this area of my work, visit my website, peterfortunato.net )Writers often rely on this reservoir of material, sometimes obsessing over certain themes whose recurrence gives a signature voice to individual books or to an entire body of work: William Faulkner, for example.
Guido, as the novel’s narrator, is for me a mask through which to speak a little of what I know about myself as an artist, an Italian, a Buddhist practitioner, and a sexual being. In writing his story I was able to explore some of my own obsessions in a different way and at greater length than in my poetry. My hope is that the novel will transport readers through time to a very particular place that never quite existed, but which might have, in the Hudson Valley; a place that shares some magic with the “brave new world” Shakespeare’s young lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, feel they’ve discovered at the close of The Tempest. That’s one way I think about the 1960s and 1970s. (My painting below is titled Dance Mask.)
Carnevale tries to preserve a balance with the world of experience whereby innocence and hopefulness are not simply lost or brutalized or regarded cynically. In fact, Leo’s painting of Gwen and Guido, titled Goodly Creatures, is a direct reference to this theme of The Tempest—and as an object of art, that painting sustains the moment when innocence is about to be bid these characters goodbye so that another sphere of wonder, more difficult to encompass, is encountered.
Love what you had to say here. Wasn't expecting to learn so much. Thanks for that.
Posted by: Books | April 11, 2020 at 08:14 PM