An interview with Walter Siti
Brian Robert Moore | Tolka, Web Only, June 2023
In Italy, no author is as commonly associated with auto-fiction – or with the murky limbo that exists between fiction and non-fiction – as Walter Siti. Through his first three novels, which formed a ‘fake autobiography’ culminating with Paradise Overload (Troppi paradisi) in 2006, Siti proved that the self can be as effective a means as any for probing the obsessions, ills and ecstasies that characterise contemporary Western society. Even as the figure of Walter Siti has moved into a secondary role in much of his writing, his novels have continued to meld an almost investigative rigor with emotional depth and a uniquely propulsive style. By portraying and deconstructing contemporary Italy from the inside, Siti’s writing has captured how no facet of modern life – even, or especially, love and sex – can exist detached from macro systems of money, media and power.
Paradise Overload, in particular, is often cited by Italian authors and critics as an epoch-defining work, one that supplied new expressive modes for the twenty-first century. This is due in part to the multiplicity of forms that the novel contains and cohesively fits together, as it veers between the analytical and the deeply confessional. For instance, an extract that appeared in Tolka Issue Five, titled ‘The Second Rate’, reads as a piece of travel writing – albeit an unconventional one – in which the writer and university professor Walter Siti visits the cities of San Francisco and Miami, where he has his first would-be encounters with male escorts. In just a few pages, we face two of the key questions animating Siti’s novel, which come up again and again in his explorations of the parallel worlds of the television industry and the sex industry: when does the fiction we are paying for become a reality, and when does that very question cease to matter?
Brian Robert Moore (BRM): You started writing autofictional work before the literary label of ‘autofiction’ existed in Italy. Quite simply, I’d like to know why you began to write about a fictional character named Walter Siti.
Walter Siti (WS): I started because, at first, I was ashamed to write from my own point of view. I knew that mine would be very personal novels, in which I’d have to tell a lot about myself, but at the time – we’re talking about the early 1980s – such flagrant confessions about homosexuality, and also a somewhat cynical use of real-life people in one’s writing, weren’t seen the way they are today. I was therefore embarrassed to present everything as though it were a memoir. At the same time, I didn’t want to distance myself too much, because I was afraid that in transferring everything into a fictional character who had a different name – like Roth’s Zuckerman – I’d lose a sense of intimacy. At that point I said, well, let’s try using my name but narrating things that never actually took place. In this way I independently invented what I called an ‘autobiography of what never happened’ – I still didn’t know the name for ‘autofiction’.
I immediately realized that it was necessary for me to change things. For instance, if I wrote ‘My name is Walter Siti, I was born in Modena in 1947’, that person was always and inevitably me, and so he couldn’t become a character. I felt that, in reality, he was lying, because I’m the one who was born in Modena in 1947, not him. And so it actually seemed more truthful if I wrote ‘My name is Walter Siti, I was born in Modena in 1950.’ He could say this because, being a character, he can say he was born whenever he feels like it. Paradoxically, it seemed to me that he was lying less if he said 1950 instead of 1947, because otherwise he was copying me, making it untrue.
BRM: At the beginning of ‘The Second Rate’ – a piece published in Tolka Issue Five taken from Paradise Overload – you reference the effects of the AIDS crisis during a trip to San Francisco. To your last point, I remember reading in an interview that you started writing such personal work because you thought you’d die of AIDS before the book was ever published, and you therefore wouldn’t be around to experience the consequences. Was that really the case?
WS: Yes, it’s true. The AIDS crisis arrived in Italy, I believe, in 1982. I, in the years immediately preceding it, had been to San Francisco – there, in the Castro – and to New York, and I had gone to all the, let’s say, most extreme gay clubs at the time. For example, I remember in New York there was one called Mineshaft, which was a kind of Dantesque inferno: you’d enter and there’d be a whole series of options depending on your sexual preferences – for example, fucking, or only a blowjob, or S&M, etcetera. There were also variously coloured handkerchiefs which indicated different specialties; and putting the handkerchief in the right or the left pocket of your jeans meant ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ (so if you accidentally used the wrong pocket, you were in trouble). One would enter at, say, ten in the evening, and come out at six in the morning. There you might have sexual relations with even ten, twelve, fifteen different people, whose names you didn’t even know. So, having had two or three of these experiences, I was almost sure that I had contracted it.
When the news exploded about this disease, I didn’t dare get tested, because it was supposed to be incurable; I thought, ‘If they tell me I have it, what will I do then?’ At a certain point it became so distressing for me that I decided to take the test, and I was particularly unlucky, because I went to get the results on a Friday, and the nurse said to me, ‘In cases like yours, it’s better if you talk to the doctor. I can’t give you the results myself.’ I thought that in cases like mine meant I was positive. I asked to speak to the doctor right away, but she said that the doctor would only be back on Monday. I therefore spent Saturday and Sunday convinced that I was going to die; I ate everything I could, stuffing myself with food, tried to sleep with loads of sleeping pills. When I went on Monday, the doctor simply said to me that – seeing as it was rather well-known in Pisa, where I was a university professor, that I was gay – they were trying to speak to people like me directly in order to know how many homosexuals were getting tested and how many were not. It was a matter of statistics; it didn’t have to do with the result, which, instead, was negative. When I went back to that idiot nurse and explained what had happened, she said, ‘Oh, how scary!’ It was in that period of time that I’d started planning my first novel, Scuola di nudo [School of the Nude]. At that point, I said, OK, maybe I won’t die, but in any event I thought it would be my only book, because I thought I’d put everything into it.
BRM: Since what you were writing was fairly unprecedented at the time, were there any points of reference that you could look to? Any pre-existing literary models or tools?
WS: When I started to think of writing a novel that had the form of an autobiography but which recounted things that weren’t true, the book that helped me the most was one by Philippe Lejeune, called Le pacte autobiographique, in which he explains what the narrative tics are through which a reader recognizes an autobiography. For example, first you pretend to use a fake name for someone, and then later you say, ‘Now I’ll tell you the person’s real name.’ I learned these tricks from Lejeune, and used all the techniques of an autobiography but to recount things that I hadn’t done. The curious thing is that a lot of people believed it, at the beginning. For instance, when Scuola di nudo was published, a lot of people thought that everything in it concerned the real me, especially in Pisa, where everyone knew me. There’s a scene in the book where the protagonist is staying in someone’s apartment, which is empty except for a cat that won’t leave him alone, and he ends up strangling the cat. I, obviously, have never strangled a cat in my life, but when I went for the first time to see the writer Domenico Starnone – who would become a good friend – he locked his cat in the bathroom, as an extra precaution. He confessed this to me years later.
Then, as I started to consider writing a whole series of pseudo-autobiographical books, I began to live certain experiences in order to write about them. Take for example the sections focusing on television in Paradise Overload: I had asked my friend who worked in TV if he could get me a job as a writer for a show precisely so that I could get to know these people from up close, since I knew I’d use them in the book.
BRM: With the entrance of these TV personalities, who sell an artificial identity on-screen, you play more explicitly with the idea of fictive selves in Paradise Overload. At the same time, the novel explores the sex industry, where escorts seem to sell the body as if it were an artificial or artistic product detached from the self. Was it by chance that you came to know these two realities in roughly the same period of time?
WS: Yes, I discovered these two parallel worlds during the same few years, but this was partly due to a practical element, too: the money I made working in television I’d then spend on escorts, so one was necessary for the other. From a formal point of you, I always thought of the worlds explored in the book as a kind of yin and yang, where you have the white part with a black circle in it and the black part with a white circle in it. It seemed to me that it was essentially the same thing: there’s television with sex in it, and there’s sex with television in it.
BRM: Some of the relationships depicted in the book – especially the one with a sex worker and former bodybuilder named Marcello – are very explicit, and in that regard it’s once again difficult to find much of a precedent in Italian literature. In an article last year, you wrote that ‘autofiction can be as political as science fiction or the social novel’; on a fairly obvious level, do you think your writing has achieved something political by making space for taboo topics in Italian literature, starting with gay or queer subject matter?
WS: At the time of Scuola di nudo, effectively it was pretty much a novelty. Before there was essentially only Aldo Busi with Seminar on Youth (Seminario sulla gioventù). By the time Paradise Overload came out it wasn’t as rare. If anything, rather than gay subject matter in and of itself, it was the idea of being different among the different. For instance, something that happened to me many times, when telling gay friends of mine about my obsession with muscles and bodybuilders, was that they’d say to me, ‘You’re crazy, you should go get help from a psychoanalyst and find out why you have this problem. What, if someone gets old you can’t find them attractive anymore? You sound like a Nazi.’ And so what was unacceptable was a certain form of homosexuality, rather than homosexuality itself. Even now, if someone says, ‘I’m gay, my partner and I are married, we’re trying to have a child with a surrogate mother, our parents know each other and we all go on vacation together’ and so on, then that’s generally all right; if someone says, ‘I’m gay but I only like bodybuilders who weigh more than 100 kilos’, people look at you a bit suspiciously.
BRM: Personally, I find that in many books that are categorized as works of autofiction there is a kind of passivity, almost apathy, as if the person narrating were an extraneous eye. Your books are the opposite for me; there is the complete involvement of the self – body, mind and soul. Where does this intense personal engagement come from?
WS: Well, take Paradise Overload: in that case it went so far as drugs, which in general I don’t do. But at a certain point I wanted to try cocaine because, if I didn’t, I couldn’t describe it in an autofictional manner. If that Walter has to do cocaine with Marcello, then this Walter has to try it; otherwise, I wouldn’t have known how to write about it. In this sense, you could say I’m lacking in imagination. I can’t imagine things out of thin air if I haven’t experienced them at least a little.
BRM: Speaking of your lived experiences, I’m curious to know how much truth there is in ‘The Second Rate’. Did you take those trips to San Francisco and Miami?
WS: In reality, I went to San Francisco a couple of times. The first time was simply for myself because I wanted to visit the city. The second time I was invited by Franco Moretti to speak at Stanford about something I’d written on the novel – about the various times the novel had been put on trial throughout history. Franco lived right next to Castro, as I write in the book. From there I could take walks around the neighbourhood. The first time I had gone it was truly that famous gay Mecca, where you could kiss each other on the street, which for us Italians was a novelty; whereas when I went the second time, I remember seeing written on a wall ‘Gays, you murdered my husband.’ By that point, we’d been seen as plague-spreaders. I went to the old clubs and bars and they were all empty, and it felt like the end of an era. One thing I fabricated in that part of the book concerned the escort named Yuri, whom the character Walter meets online when he’s already back in Rome, without ever meeting him in person; I actually met Yuri, and the scene Walter fantasizes about, in which they’re in Miami and the escort puts a plexiglass pendant around his neck, actually happened.
BRM: Your novels often explore various external realities in great detail, such as the world of mass media or the sex industry, as we’ve been discussing; they are almost systems novels. And yet, even after you stopped writing autofictional books, Walter Siti – both as writer and character – has continued to pop up again and again in unexpected ways in your work. Do you think that no matter what, writers always write about themselves?
WS: I think an author always inevitably ends up writing the same book – he has a series of obsessions in his head, whether he wants them there or not. I’m talking about real authors, not more commercial ones who try to follow what the market wants. But if you write in one way or another to discover something – not just about yourself, but about the world, too – you write things that unavoidably relate to your obsessions. I’m reminded, for example, of what Benjamin said about Balzac, an author who would seem the complete opposite of what I’m saying – that is, someone who writes novels that are always set in different environments: Paris, high finance, the poor, prostitutes, the provincial world, etcetera. But Benjamin says that, really, when you read Balzac, there’s a figure who always returns, and it’s the envious figure of someone who walks along the streets of Paris, sees lit-up windows, where people seem to be living the good life, and who would like to be inside. There’s this idea of taking possession of world that didn’t let you in.
Brian Robert Moore’s translations from the Italian include A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano and You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari. For his translation of Walter Siti’s Paradise Overload, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. He is Translator-in-Residence at Tolka.
Walter Siti is one of Italy’s most celebrated writers and the recipient of awards such as the Strega Prize, the Mondello Prize and the Bridge Book Award. His novel Paradise Overload (Troppi paradisi) was voted the greatest Italian narrative work of the twenty-first century, in a survey published by the magazine L’Indiscreto. English translations of his work have appeared or are forthcoming in 3:AM Magazine, n+1, Tolka and other publications.
Tolka Issue Five is available to purchase here. You can also subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
