Responses to Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy,1968

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Copyright: Luisa Passerini

As the title beautifully indicates, Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 is a personal tale, the author’s, narrated through the lens of a collective experience, the student movement of 1968 (in Turin). The notion of a Group Self-Portrait – such is the literal translation of the original title, Autoritratto di gruppo (1988) – is itself theoretically suggestive. It refers specifically to Passerini’s peculiar way of considering subjectivity in relation to history. Passerini has been a pioneer in the study of subjectivity, and more specifically, of the relation between history, subjectivity and memory. While Autobiography of a Generation is certainly grounded in the author’s scholarly work, it is utterly original in its mode and genre. It is not an academic piece, but a personal narrative, an autobiography: yet it is an autobiography based on theoretical and historical paradigms, borrowed from Passerini’s own work as an historian, reshaped for narrative reasons.

Autobiography of a Generation is a complex work based on a montage of different types of materials. It is composed of seven chapters alternating two registers. The odd-numbered chapters re-elaborate a diary kept by the author from 1983 to 1987. Mixing private events and feelings with work-related facts Passerini narrates her life month by month, from her psychoanalytic treatments to her love life, from conferences and papers to holidays with friends, etc. This tale is mixed with another layer of narration (set in italics), a sort of memoir where she recounts important events in her life, from her childhood to her teenage years, and then her adult years up to the late 1970s. Among the most exciting parts of this section are the years spent in Africa working with the liberation movements and collecting political and informational materials which Passerini would use in her book on Mozambique (pp. 57–60) (Passerini, 1970). Private memories and public facts intermingle when the author narrates her adult age. For my analysis this is an important part as it contains several telling comments on Passerini’s relation to feminism. The even-numbered chapters of the book are based on interviews made by the author in the same period (1983–7) with some 40 people who participated in the student rebellion of 1968. Here Passerini develops a political analysis of her (generation) experience of 1968 in relation to a whole set of issues – the role of the Resistance, the relation between students and professors, between students and parents, etc. – which she mixes with passages drawn from the interviews she is doing.

The book’s fascination rests equally on its subject matter and its mode of writing, an original mixture of two genres, essay and autobiography. Autobiography of a Generation is also a literary piece. As such Graziella Parati has rightly inserted it as the final chapter in her history of autobiography of Italian women from the 17th century to the late 20th century (Parati, 1996). The compositional texture of this work is particularly interesting in relation to time and to subjectivity. As the reader goes through Passerini’s different narratives – her relation to parents and family, her rebellious years, her involvement with feminism, her love affairs, her scholarly work, etc. – she realizes that her subjectivity is shaped as a puzzle, piece by piece. Passerini’s autobiography subverts the main codes of the genre since it is, after all, an experimental autobiography. The treatment of time is a major aspect of the book’s formal project. Linear and chronological time is the usual dimension of autobiography’s temporality. Linear time supports the belief that one’s life unfolds and develops in a sort of teleological fashion: in writing her autobiography the narrator usually presents a process of growth and self-consciousness. To this end, while many events are necessarily left out, traditional autobiographies always give the sense of completeness, of telling the ‘whole life’ of the protagonist: in one word, they belie the concept of a stable and coherent self. All these basic topoi are broken in Autobiography of a Generation. Using montage as a formal tool to connect different stories and different temporalities, Passerini shows the opposite: subjectivity is but the result of putting fragments together. More specifically, subjectivity doesn’t unfold in a cause-effect fashion. Luisa Passerini’s personality has many different facets. It is composed of several fragments, many of which fit well together while others are more difficult to place.

The temporal discrepancy between the different stories also give the sense that the process of writing itself has allowed Passerini to come up with a picture of herself and of her generation. While she often uses a very personal language and isn’t ashamed of expressing her feelings and emotions, the book is not a piece of confessional literature nor does it purport to express in a naive way the author’s internal dilemmas. To the contrary, Autobiography of a Generation is a fictional construction: it tries to interpret facts and feelings by establishing connections between events, people, ideas, struggles, etc. It is always clear to the reader that Passerini’s selection of what and how to narrate is a conscious choice. I would contend that the process of understanding her biography comes about precisely through the process of writing. In contrast to traditional autobiography, Passerini is not interested in narrating a whole life but in understanding the deep dynamics that fuelled her biography. In Autobiography of a Generation the purpose of narration is to produce interpretation. Finally, it is the present moment, the time of narration that allows the narrating subject to understand the past.

As an oral historian Passerini has contributed greatly to a paradigm shift in the discipline. Oral history usually documents aspects of historical experience that are rarely recorded: it provides access to the lives of people on the margins and offers evidence about their subjective experience of past events. Those who criticize oral history affirm that ‘memory [is] distorted by physical deterioration and nostalgia in old age, by the personal bias of both interviewer and interviewee, and by the influence of collective and retrospective versions of the past.’ On the other hand, in the late 1970s Passerini pioneered a new trend according to which the distortions or ‘the so-called unreliability of memory might be a resource, rather than a problem’ (Thomson, 1998: 584–585). Perhaps we could look at Passerini’s own selection of what to narrate in a similar way. Her choices are not proof of what really happened, but of how, retrospectively, Passerini makes sense of past events. In a piece on her historical method, published at the same time as Autobiography of a Generation, Passerini theorizes such an approach. In speaking of Ronald Fraser’s In Search of a Past (1982), an autobiography that seems a true model for her own autobiography, she argues that ‘historians’ usual preference for precise facts and contexts’ reveals ‘the persistence of a professional illusion that is specific to historiography: that the past exists somewhere, that it can be discovered – and changed if one is a socialist or a feminist’. Like Fraser, Passerini believes that ‘only the present can be transformed’ not the past (Passerini, 1988: 11–13).

The relevance of subjectivity and memory over the objective and history is of course a very powerful proposal in the discipline of history. For our purposes Passerini’s notion of subjectivity is particularly interesting in relation to other areas of enquiry. Her idea that the self is neither stable nor linear, but multiple and fragmented, contributes to what is perhaps the most important debate of the time, that of postmodernism and the postmodern subject. At the end of the 1980s such a debate enters forcefully in feminist theory (Nicholson, 1990). To some extent, Julia Kristeva’s idea that the subject is both divided and ‘in process’ (sujet-en-procès) is not far from Passerini’s constructed subjectivity. More generally, Passerini’s constant alternation between emotional and rational registers undermines the primacy of reason, a step also taken by all the thinkers of the postmodern. In Autobiography of a Generation body and mind, passion and reason are not separate but feed each other, in the same sense that the personal and the collective do. As Passerini tellingly states: ‘a breach between the ego and the identity has developed. I am no longer anything specific, I am a mix of full and empty, a slippery and uneven footbridge on the river. I am not my work, nor a love affair, nor a political project. In this inner theater there is not one who directs, but an entire unhinged company of performers, with their gaps and crass quips’ (pp. 55–56).

Passerini’s notion of subjectivity is at odds with the practice of ‘identity politics’ much in vogue in the Anglo-American context in the 1980s. Because the personal is inextricably intertwined but at the same time irreducible to the collective, Passerini’s feminism is far from the idea that identity is a totality made up of one’s own gender, race, class, age, nationality, etc. While the opening up of the category of woman to specificities of race, class, etc. was indeed a positive development in feminist thought, the new scenario often turned identity into a mechanical device whereby any woman became a sub-category of the category woman. As such, female identity was transformed into a series of formulae in which ‘the personal’ was already inscribed within ‘the collective’, or better, in a series of ‘group identities’. The problem with identities is that they ‘are treated as fixed, accessible, and determinative, conferring upon the subject’s speech an aura of predictability’ (Fuss, 1989: 116). Looking for a perfect correspondence between the individual and the collective is a theoretical paradox. As Passerini shows in Autobiography of a Generation, one needs to posit the psychic – which is always personal – as an intermediate wedge between the conscious self and the collective.

Towards the end of her memoir Passerini recalls that her involvement with feminism, around 1972–1973, was the result of a deep political and personal crisis – which led her to leave the student movement. She recalls that she experienced feminism as a set of practices: forms of communal living, consciousness-raising groups, writing groups, etc. These meetings ‘shook up the stereotypical ideas about women and the relationships among them: that we were orderly, motherly, undifferentiated and helpful sisters. They taught us the opposite of their collective and leveling appearance: that there are women, multiple and different subjects in search of themselves, not the woman, with obligatory stages and models’ (p. 120). Perhaps many would not agree, but for me this comment presents a very good definition of what it means to be a feminist: a feminist is a woman in search of herself. In following Passerini’s search throughout the book, I have often recognized my own trajectory. I particularly cherish the way she understands her formation as a constant struggle between masculine and feminine positions and modes. In contrast to the major feminist paradigms, Passerini states her difficulty in relating to femininity. Probably because she lost her mother when she was only six years old, she has had to deal with her absence: ‘in reaction to this abandonment and division I nurtured a rancor that would last for decades’ (p. 11). But the rejection of the mother is also common among student protesters of 1968, both males and females. In particular, while women had an ambivalent relation with the father, ‘not wanting to be like one’s mother is a recurrent reference in the women’s stories’ (pp. 33–34). The women interviewed by Passerini all ‘attribute an explosive emancipatory value to their participation in the student movement’. Yet in thinking about the images that could guide them they all wanted ‘to distance themselves from their mothers, to reject their model completely’ (p. 95–96). In relation to her own biography, Passerini starts ‘rediscovering’ her mother around the time she gets involved with the feminist movement (p. 117).

While the lack of identification with the mother and femininity certainly explains her refusal to have children – ‘I had never planned to have children, it was totally outside my horizon’ (p. 50) – her relation to the father and to masculinity is less problematic. On one hand fathers like hers (and mine) are ambiguous since they are ‘affectionate and absent, authoritarian and weak’. And yet ‘these fathers furnish the imagination with some sparks of a possible rebellion’ (p. 26). As a young woman Passerini feels very much like a tomboy. Describing her existential period she states that ‘youth belongs to the father; rebellion pursues the myth of the young hero, at times semi-adolescent, at times androgynous, but more boy than girl’ (p. 32). Later, when she starts being involved in the Women’s Liberation Collectives, she declares that she had always preferred relationships with men since her ‘personal history removed her from aspects referred to as feminine. . . . A “masculine” identity hovered about me, in the sense of not accepting the legacy of the mother and of many other women’ (p. 112).

Passerini’s identification with masculinity – ‘Haven’t I been a masculine woman for a long time?’ (p. 13) – and her troubled relation with femininity are in part the result of her personal biography. It couldn’t be otherwise. Yet this important process, which I have also experienced, can be theorized. Most feminist theories have equated the father with patriarchy and have thus been unable (or unwilling) to conceive the sheer possibility that he might embody a positive role for the daughter. To the contrary, I believe that women growing up in a patriarchal family – where the mother occupies a subordinate position – must identify with the father if they want to achieve agency, that is, if they wish to escape their mother’s destiny. Reading Passerini one realizes that this scenario is the dominant model for (Italian) women of her generation, namely, second-wave feminists. The information provided by her oral history research is quite stunning if we compare it with feminist theoretical work produced by women of the same generation. In other words, while feminists interviewed by Passerini, like the author-interviewer herself, state their refusal to identify with the mother, feminist theories of the time go into the opposite direction (Irigaray 1975/1985). While the wedge between 1970s and 1980s theory and practice deserve to be thoroughly investigated, on a broader scale it can be useful for contemporary feminist practice. In order to maintain, or regain, the political thrust of feminism, a convergence between theory and practice seems necessary. Indeed, Passerini’s oral history, and the relation between interviewer and interviewees are a model for, in her own words, ‘a new concept of the relation between the subject doing the research and the object studied’ (Passerini, 1991: 187). In order to redefine the relation between subject and object ‘one needs to pay attention to the different forms of women’s experience and consciousness, as they manifest historically in many diverse ways’ (1991: 187). Because women ‘have always been denied the status of the knowing subject’ any female researcher is always, ‘simultaneously immersed and estranged from her own discipline. . . . Such a dual state, inside/outside, fuels a tension which is both personal and academic’ (1991: 187). Because the global and transnational scenarios have increased enormously the forms of women’s experience and consciousness, such a tension seems a necessary condition for ‘good’ feminist work.