Ask The Dust

One of the major themes of Ask the Dust is the way in which race and ethnicity shape one’s identity, especially in the context of 1930s American society.

Arturo’s dark skin and Italian last name cause other Americans to discriminate against him and treat him differently. Growing up, he was mocked for being the son of poor immigrants and taunted with racial slurs. In Los Angeles, people like Mrs. Hargraves assume that he is Mexican. Above all, Arturo wants to be recognized as an American.

Arturo’s treatment of Camilla connects to his anxieties about his identity. Because of his low self-esteem and insecurities about his masculinity and immigrant background, Arturo often disparages Camilla for her Mexican ancestry. At the same time,he admits that he is particularly attracted to Mexican women and is clearly fascinated by her ethnicity. He often refers to Camilla as a “Mayan princess” and imagines himself as a European conqueror who will one day triumph over her. This recurring fantasy calls attention to the racialized terms in which Arturo sees their relationship.

Camilla is also insecure about her status as an American. Whenever Arturo brings up her Mexican heritage, she indignantly proclaims that she is just as American as he is. The novel implies that Arturo and Camilla understand each other because they have both experienced forms of racial discrimination. Nevertheless, the self-hatred and insecurity that stems from their marginalized place in American society causes them to behave cruelly toward each other and often pick on each other for their failure to conform to expectations of Americanness. While Arturo is both attracted to and repulsed by Camilla’s race and ancestry, Camilla ultimately finds herself unable to love Arturo because he does not conform to the model of white American masculinity that Sammy epitomizes.

Much of Ask the Dust centers on Arturo’s struggles with writing and the development that he undergoes as a writer. In this sense, the novel can be described as aKünstlerroman, a type of novel that chronicles an artist’s growth into maturity. At the beginning of the novel, Arturo has only published one short story, “The Little Dog Laughed,” which he brags about constantly. He is also suffering from financial and creative difficulties as he has not been able to produce any new work. He idolizes his editor, the distinguished J. C. Hackmuth, and constantly writes him letters instead of working on his own writing. He does not even realize when he has written another good short story, which becomes “The Long Lost Hills,” in the form of one of his letters to Hackmuth. The fact that Arturo does not realize that his letters contain good fiction demonstrates Arturo’s continuing immaturity as a writer and suggests that he is not yet fully in control of his art.

Over the course of the novel, however, Arturo develops as a writer. He recognizes the literary potential in Vera Rivken’s lonely, eccentric existence and uses his real-life experiences to write his first novel. The novel is also full of scenes and passages that explore the experience of writing, being a writer, and struggling against writer’s block. This emphasis on writing is significant, as the novel is largely read as exploring Fante’s own experiences as a writer through the perspective of Arturo, his literary alter-ego.

While Arturo clearly possesses literary talent and has a true passion for literature, the character of Sammy Wiggins lacks all ability as a writer and is only interested in the money-making side of writing. Unlike Sammy, Arturo possesses an artist’s ability to see beauty and artistic potential in troubled people like Camilla and Vera, and in gritty, 1930s Los Angeles.

The novel is also full of allusions to famous writers and literary works. Reading the philosopher Nietzsche inspires Arturo to become an atheist, and Vera Rivken recites poems by the popular early-twentieth-century American poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Above all, Arturo longs to be a great American writer like the poet Walt Whitman, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, and the satirist and critic H. L. Mencken. The novel also engages closely with the fin-de-siècle writer Ernest Dowson’s poem, “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.” Arturo copies a verse from Dowson’s poem and changes the addressee’s name to Camilla instead of Cyanara. Although Arturo sends the poem to Camilla as a romantic gesture, the poem actually explores the way that love can become obsessive and destructive, an issue that the novel examines through Arturo’s love for Camilla and Camilla’s love for Sammy. Furthermore, the fact that Arturo copies the work of another writer, instead of writing his own message, underlines his continuing immaturity as a writer at this stage in the novel.