In these paragraphs, I would like to present Matthew Elliott's argument that 'Ask the Dust is [...] the story of Arturo Bandini’s [...] racial refashioning' (531). Further, to undergird his argument, I give my interpretation of the Arturo’s ‘racial refashioning’ in the context of a Sartrean Other. I would also add the thesis that even if Arturo has ‘fashioned’ an identity for himself, it is an unstable identity. To found this claim, I point to another authority, Judith Butler, who says that ‘we are constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable’ and that ‘[this] exposes the constitutive sociality of the self’ (Undoing Gender 18). (See footnote 1)

Matthew Elliott argues against Ferraro’s claim that ‘Arturo comes to “feel Italian” at the end of the novel, which in [Arturo’s] case means identifying with those who suffer from ethnic or racial discrimination as he once did’ (531). Elliott, contesting this, says that ‘such sentiments do not always translate into antihegemonic ideology [...]. Contrary to [Arturo’s and critics’] claims, [...] Ask the Dust is less the story of Arturo Bandini’s ethnic rediscovery than of his racial refashioning [...]. Beyond the initial efforts to gain acceptance that others have noted, he begins to deeply internalize the idea of his racial whiteness. [...] His narrative exposes what he does not admit to himself. It reveals his development of a white consciousness; in the end his outpouring of affection for those on the margins serves as a form of self-deception, protecting him from the knowledge that he has indeed become “one of them.”’ (531).

Even though Arturo may express emotional connection, sympathy, and pity towards characters like Camilla Lopez and Vera Rivkin, ‘his narrative suggests that in fundamental ways he begins to define himself through racial terms that both enable his own assimilation into the mainstream and separate him from the very outsiders of whom he speaks and writes so eloquently’ (531). One way to think of him ‘defining himself’ is that the other colored ethnicities in the novel, especially Mexicans, are stand-ins for the Sartrean Other (See footnote 2). ‘Even as Arturo expresses his sense of emotional attachment to Camilla, he remains deeply invested in the idea of his own whiteness, an investment that continues to depend on his sense of Camilla’s difference from him [i.e., his sense of Camilla’s Otherness]’ (535). In other words, even if we see Arturo growing fond of Camilla, he still maintains a separate, ‘white’ identity.

Further, we might say that this attachment is not only in conflict with the idea of his own ‘whiteness;’ we might also say following Butler, that in attempting to rid himself of colored vulnerability, and, in bad faith, attempting to establish a ‘white identity,’ Arturo is only ridding himself of the self ‘constituted in our relations' with each other and the Other.’ ‘This attempt to foreclose that vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense every other human consideration, is surely also to eradicate one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way’ (Undoing Gender 23). It is because of this attempt at eradication of color that he has identified differences of color between himself and Camilla in order to ‘secure’ himself. By doing this, he adopts an untenable self-identity, the poor integrity of which is shown when we see his ‘schizophrenic’ self. Take this passage as example in which Arturo drives back from his trip to the beach with Camilla:

“I hated her then”

[...]

“Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?”

I kissed her.

“Not that way.”
  Her arms slipped around my neck. [...] I fought her until I was free. [...] As I closed the door all the desire that had not come a while before seized me. It pounded my skull and tingled my fingers. I threw myself on the bed and tore the pillow with my hands. (See footnote 3)

‘Fante critics understand [Arturo’s] change in perspective [at the end of the novel] as Arturo’s realization that his rightful place is on the margins. But in fact his longing for the margins itself reveals just how crucial whiteness has become to his sense of self by the end of the novel: he yearns for ethnic belonging because he imagines he has lost it, and implies that, though he would rid himself of his whiteness, he is fated to a life “white and ghostlike.”’ (538). By reifying a white identity for himself, he has reified the ‘differences’ between him and colored ethnics. This situation is made even worse for Arturo because the white identity has constructed turns back on himself when he realizes that he doesn’t want to be one of the ‘uprooted [... the] Smith and Parker and Jones,” who, like Nathanael West’s Angelinos in The Day of the Locust, came to Los Angeles “to die in the sun” (Fante 45-46).

Notes

1. Butler says that the fact that we go through grief and the processing of mourning means that “we are constituted politically and socially in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies; we are constituted as fields of desire and physical vulnerability, at once publicly assertive and vulnerable” (Undoing Gender 18). In other words, our social constitution is revealed by the fact that we become vulnerable and confused when we grieve. For example, if a friend moves away to another city, I would lose that part of that relationship and the part of my identity, a constituent of myself, which was shown to that person. If my proficiency at painting or music were shown to that person, (and for some reason, only that person) I would no longer, in a certain sense, be a painter or a pianist, as I would no longer be able to feel proud or ashamed of my skill in both. My grief over losing this relationship would reveal that I have lost a constitutive part of myself. So then, this vulnerability is what “exposes the constitutive sociality of the self, a basis for thinking a political community of a complex order” (18). Arturo, in his hate (and therefore, lack of grief), seeks to disclose this vulnerability to establish his white ego.

   “Grief displays the way in which we are in the thrall of our relations with others that we cannot always recount or explain, that often interrupts the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control” (19). In other words, grief, and the other emotions which leave us vulnerable show us not only that we constituted in our relations with each other and the Other, but that even if I tried to, I could not be able to control myself autonomously and I could not form an identity without the Other. Again, the emotions reveal that we are necessarily partially socially constituted. We are Aristophanes’s double bodies from the Symposium, composed and made whole by another, and when we are separated from our partner body, whether it be a close friend or lover, we lose that part of us which was revealed in our emotive moments. It would be in bad faith to assume that we can be in perpetual possession of ourselves, completely autonomous.
2. Sartre says, in Being and Nothingness, that “I need the Other in order to realize fully all the structures of my being. The for-itself refers to the for-others” (393). This means that our identity necessarily refers to, or is constituted by, our being-for-Others, meaning our being and identity is partially determined by the Other’s subjectivity. This conception of identity finds consonance in Ask the Dust. Arturo’s identity is partially determined by what the Other, in its subjectivity, posits him to be. Arturo seeks to avoid these experiences of vulnerability to the Other, often through acts of aggression and dominance. In these acts, the Other’s subjectivity, or Look (such as Camilla’s), is controlled so that he is seen in a certain way, a way which involves the assertion of himself as, in-himself, transcendent, unrestrained, and, rational. In this way, he asserts himself as free of emotions and irrationality, the causes of one’s vulnerability. For example, Elliott points out that in his arrival to the Bunker Hill hotel, mirrors an immigrants entry to Ellis Island: ‘Arturo’s admission to the Alta Loma depends upon his consent to the hotel’s policies of racial exclusion, and his newly formulated American self-represents an extension of this same racial logic [...] like many arriving European immigrants who were quick to define themselves in opposition to a black racial otherness, Arturo here responds to Mrs. Hargraves’s question, “Young man . . . are you a Mexican?” [...] “I’m an American,” he says, adding, “I’m not a Mexican”’ (Elliott 532). In this ‘scene, Arturo constructs his white American self specifically in opposition to the idea of Mexican otherness’ (534). In Ask the Dust, the Other is not limited to exclusively the Mexican ethnicity -- it is possible that we may make a similar argument for the Jewish ethnic group as well.​
3. Fante p. 69. ​Also see, ‘when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done’ (47), and ‘mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ (120).