Walter Siti
Against commitment. Reflections on the good in literature
Rizzoli, 266 pages, 14 euros
What is literature for? To make us improve by denouncing the evil of the world and triggering conversion and perhaps proselytism in us? Or to put ourselves in front of the contradictions and make us reflect more deeply, in a different way from what we do every day? According to Walter Siti, today, especially in Italy, the first idea tends to dominate: that is, the focus is on the message and the effectiveness of the story, less importance is given to the form; in the name of a consensual good, one avoids shaking the reader’s certainties. In this way, according to Siti, two perverse effects are produced. On the one hand, one of the most important aspects of literature is renounced: “the possibility that two contrasting ideas are incarnated together”, making dark, unpublished and human aspects emerge. On the other hand, there is implicit support for the idea that it is words and not political and economic power relations that change the world.
Siti illustrates his reasoning with examples – negative, but not only – taken from the fiction of recent years, he questions the relationship between novels and reportage and the voice of the victims. Thus he broadens the perspective to argue that “the real good that literature can do to men is to inseminate the heads of writers with what they did not know they knew and allow the ghosts thus created to fertilize society without its knowledge.”
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