What is “autofiction?”
I don’t know. I really don’t. “Autofiction” belongs to the category of words I’ll habitually skim over in lieu of context clues. (Also in this category: “antifiction,” “matron literature,” “ergodic literature”—any ideas?). Critics toss around categories such as these so flippantly, practically taunting their readers to look them up on Wikipedia, but unless I get the sense that the term is particularly operative, I am likely to continue reading.
I came across “autofiction” more recently: after reading the incredible excerpt from Walter Siti’s Resistance is Futile from our latest issue (translated from the Italian by longtime blog contributor/superstar translator Antony Shugaar). In his translator’s note, Shugaar says that Siti’s “approach is called autofiction” and that “Siti seems to swing it over his head recklessly like a heavy gold chain.”
I’m intrigued. But first and foremost, I’m intrigued by the excerpt itself, because Resistence is Futile is incredible. Written in increasingly circular retrospect, the story’s more a taut deferral of linearly cruel memory than anything resembling realist fiction, but that’s not to say it isn’t visceral, gutting, utterly material, and wrenching, as it recounts the youth of an unfortunately corpulent young boy, Tommaso.
The boy’s fat—that’s because he was a slow eater as an infant—and worse still, even that’s because the mother may or may not have “somehow been jinxed, conceived under a bad star” after she “got it stuck in her head that the child had been generated the very night that her husband came home drunk (and as far as that went, nothing out of the ordinary), cursing and washing the blood off himself.”
It gets worse. It’s futile to explain-away bad luck because it only begets itself, it seems. This is a story of how bad things don’t happen progressively, but memory and history are more rubber than we think. This is a story about shame and how it’s iterated in elementary school, in habits and micro-aggressions, in memories that accrue to the point to bitterness or are cajoled into fondness.
It’s almost trite to talk about memory in fiction, but the sensory memory in this piece is so vivid it’s worth insisting upon. The sensory memory counteracts the way we tend to intellectualize it. The despair we, the readers, feel at reading about Tommaso’s unluckiness is heightened with the litany of foodstuffs (snack cakes, chocolate wafers, bananas, pre-made risotto, puddings) goading us just as they do Tommaso, goading Tommaso’s elders to feed him, not realizing that “precisely because people always gave him so much food to eat that he’d become so huge.” It may be true that “childhood memories are riddled with holes” but the memories in Resistance is Futile feel so taut, so tangible, that they demand the present tense (and acquire it). Both readers and voyeurs touch—and are touched—by good intentions gone awry. Resistance is futile.
I looked up “autofiction.” Just as it is appears a movement among contemporary writers, it seems that Siti, too, does not distinguish his subjective reality with our subjective fictive experience. Siti’s Tommaso inhabits a space Siti himself might, or may not inhabit. Tommaso’s a little boy who Siti thinks about, incants into being. And yet, it’s a whole lot more fun than that. Walter Siti’s presence is a heavy chain in this piece, and we’re cowering, in awe.