In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010
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In A Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010 By Christopher Burke Atwood A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair Professor Mia Fuller Professor Whitney Davis Fall 2014 ! Abstract In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010 By Christopher Burke Atwood Doctor of Philosophy in Italian Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Barbara Spackman, Chair ! In a Queer Place in Time: Fictions of Belonging in Italy 1890-2010 maps the “elsewheres”—spatial, temporal and intertextual— that authorize same-sex desire in modern Italy. Tracing a genealogy that spans from nineteenth century travel writing about Italy to contemporary Italian novels, I argue that texts exported from the Northern Europe and the U.S. function as vital site of affiliation and vexing points of discrepancy for Italy’s queers. Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Camere separate (1989), for instance, cites the British novelist Christopher Isherwood as proof that – somewhere else – silence did not yoke homosexuality. Rather than defining sexuality as a constant set of desires, I demonstrate it to be a retroactive fiction. It is the fleeting affinity that the reading of inherited texts can evoke. In examining the reception of transnational gay narratives in the national context of Italy, this dissertation argues that the concept of “Western” homosexuality is internally riven. Ultimately, In a Queer Place in Time illuminates how local histories – including affective differences like shame, estrangement and backwardness – continue to haunt gay culture’s global fictions. ! ! 1! !! Introduction In the opening pages of Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Camere separate, the book’s protagonist, Leo, mentions to a friend that he had just met someone at a party. His friend’s response is worth dwelling on: ‘E com’è questo nuovo?’ dice Rodolfo fra i singulti. ‘Un Chez Maxim’s? No, no… Spero non sia un wrong blond. [...] O forse è … non dirmi Leo che hai trovato…’ Leo tace, preferendo eccitare la sua curiosità. [...] ‘Voglio sperare che non si tratti di un Whitman. Sei a Parigi per riciclarti un poco e non trovi niente di meglio che cadere su un Whitman’ (15). All of the homoerotic types listed here allude to an Anglo-American writers or Northern European locales. A Chez Maxim’s comes from a remark made by the gay writer Christopher Isherwood, a “wrong blond” was coined by W.H Auden and a Whitman references both the author of Leaves of Grass and a comment made by Allen Ginsberg.1 Not a single Italian writer is cited. In discussing same-sex attraction, these men mention stories penned in another place.2 This scene is emblematic of one of the central queries of my dissertation: why do so many Italian writers look beyond Italy’s national horizon for literary models of same- sex desire? I address how “l’omosessualità […] giunge ad essere pensata” (Giartosio, Perché non possiamo non dirci, 50) in modern Italian literature. My dissertation asks, how is same-sex desire talked about in these texts? What are the stories and ellipses – a snarl of “teorie, racconti, ragionamenti, conversazioni, atti concreti e anche fantasie, sogni, incubi” – around which it has been told (Giartosio, 50). A principal way it has been told, I argue, is by pointing out what subjectivities seem easier to live elsewhere. Gianni Rossi Barilli sees an absence in Italy’s literary tradition of “spazi reali per affermare una positiva immagine della coppia omosessuale.”3 When Tondelli was composing Camere separate (1989), that “space” seemed to many gay and lesbian Italians to exist – chiefly – on other shores, in others’ words. Al di là dell’Italia (in US cities like San Francisco and in northern Europe) homosexuality is figured as less weighed down by finger-wagging disapproval. The narrator of Matteo B. Bianchi’s Generations of Love (1999), for example, represents his desire for other men in terms of a desire for some place else. He writes: “riconoscevo che a a me piacevano i ragazzi. […] Sapevo che al di fuori, nel mondo, da !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 A word about terminology: In the course of this dissertation, I will use a few key words to describe the historically contingent embodiments of same-sex desire. When appropriate, I will use the noun 2!Tondelli’s novel relates Leo’s struggle to deal with Thomas’ early death and his difficulty in imagining that two men could ever live happily together. In terms of plot and overriding themes, Camere separate can be read as an AIDS era rewriting of two earlier gay novels: Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). While Isherwood’s text centers on the protagonist’s effort to recover from his lover’s sudden death, Giovanni’s Room treats the tumultuous and tragic love affair between two young foreigners in Paris. Camere separate both explicitly thematizes allusions to other “queer” writers in its narration and, more subtly, reworks the plots of two widely read queer novels. 3 See, Gianni Rossi Barilli, Gianni, Il movimento gay in Italia (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999) 129.! ! i! !! qualche parte, dovevano pur esserci prosperose opportunità che mi attendevano, ma per il momento ero intrappolato lì.”4 Gay desire is altrove. Home is not where the homo is. My dissertation engages the ambivalent, fraught relationship many Italian writers have with “i testi chiave della letteratura omosessuale” (Bianchi, 97). Drawn to them for inspiration and aware that – written about someplace else – they can’t convey Italy’s peculiarities, these writers both allude to a foreign literary tradition and invent one that speaks to what is different about Italy. This project is, as a result, comparative. My dissertation looks at Italian writers’ reliance on queer novels written outside of Italy and show how in their works certain tales – i.e. the coming-out narrative – are revisited, problematized or outright discarded once imported. At the same time, I analyze the privileged place Italy holds in earlier generations’ homoerotic topographies. An understanding that Italy was once deemed a homosexual Promised Land inflects the stories contemporary gay writers tell about Italy.5 While for others Italy had seemed a land of sexual plenty, to many Italians an Italy more receptive of queer desires a still unreached horizon – a bygone past or future not yet arrived at. And yet, the very idea of this lack evidences some of the profound cultural shifts Italy underwent in the second half of the twentieth century. Pasolini, for example, rejected as too limiting schemas of sexuality in which “un omosessuale ama, o fa l’amore, con un altro omosessuale.”6 The “coppia omosessuale” was to him an oxymoron, because – he said – “homosexuals” long to sleep with straight men.7 Arbasino claimed that the silence garbing homosexuality in Italy – “si fa ma non si dice” – made it Europe’s most “bisexual” nation.8 Whereas Pasolini’s homosexuality was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Matteo B. Bianchi, Generations of Love (Milano: Baldini & Castaldi S.p.A., 1999) 47.! 5 While on vacation in Portugal, the narrator of Generations of Love encounters a young man named Ricardo. Their conversation is worth citing here: “‘Turista? ’ ‘Sì. ’ ‘Di dove? ’ ‘Italia. ’ ‘Aaaah, Itaaliaa! ’ sospirò lui, come se il pronunciarne il nome evocasse paradasi perduti’ (44). Italy is a land once famed a male-male paradise. The gay Italian tourist, traveling abroad, is aware of this fantasy, further accentuating his idea of ‘home’ as somehow ‘lacking.’ The Italy he left behind to realize his desire for other men is the same place that, in different era, others had invested with longing and desire. That ‘paradise’ is the home he experiences as wanting. ! 6 Qtd. in Barbagli, Marzio and Colombo, Asher. Omosessuali moderni: gay e lesbiche in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001) 246.! 7 Pasolini questioned the “discutible ideologia” of Italy’s emergent gay culture. He claimed that “l’omosessuale, in genere (nell’enorme maggioranza de, almeno nei paesi mediterranei) ama, e vuol fare l’amore con un eterosessuale disposto ad un’esperienza omosessuale, ma la cui eterosessualità non sia minimamente in discussione. Egli deve essere ‘maschio.’” Pasolini’s (questionable) words should be a reminder that analyses of gender should compliment studies of sexuality. Gender norms, after all, are one of the axes shaping/constraining desire. Qtd. in Barbagli, Marzio and Colombo, Asher. Omosessuali moderni: gay e lesbiche in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001) 247. ! 8 In his Epistola ai froci romani (1978), Arbasino wrote: Fate, fate gli spiritosi o gli sciocchini, compagni… Eravate come ‘pesci nell’acqua,’ integrati nella società più bisessuale d’Europa, perché qui il sesso era facile e diffuso, spontaneo e disponibile, allegro e sportivo, pagano e gentile, privo di colpe cattoliche di rimorsi puritani e di complessi borghesi, soprattutto perché finché una cosa non viene nominata dunque non esiste e rimane invisibile anche se la si fa … Non bastavano tre notti – ricordate? – per girare tutti i posti di incontro polimorfi molto facilie e molto ! ii! !! pederastic, non-minoritarian and eroticized Italy’s working class, Italians