(Anti)Heroes and Imaginative Frontiers. John Fante’s Ask the Dust as a Post-Frontier Western

Despite not conforming to a traditional Western story, John Fante’s second novel Ask the Dust (1939) re-evokes and subverts traditional tropes and symbols associated with the history and mythology of the American West and its quintessential spatial dimension of the Frontier. Focusing on its anti-heroic characters and the imaginative frontiers they construct, the essay interprets Fante’s novel as a work that reconfigures the mythic foundations of the American conquest while laying bare the violent colonial mechanisms that sustain them. Moving from the grotesque portrayal of the sick, idle, and senescent Anglo characters represented in the novel as products of the failed myth of renewal promised by the Frontier, the analysis then turns to the Italian American protagonist and aspiring writer Arturo Bandini and his conflicted and obsessive relationship with the Mexican waitress Camilla Lopez. Interpreted as an imaginative re-enactment of the colonial process of continental conquest, Arturo’s obsessive and fetishized desire for Camilla becomes the key to reading Fante’s novel as a post-Frontier Western. The essay proposes a reading of Ask the Dust as a work that both draws upon and dismantles the mythical foundations of the American Frontier, anticipating the revisionist impulse that would begin to reshape the Western genre from the 1960s.