Response

Reading the three comments on Autobiography of a Generation I had a mixed feeling of surprise and gratefulness. I was surprised and grateful first of all because the comments have reminded me of aspects I had never really thought of, such as the choice of the title, which imposed itself spontaneously, although the publisher was doubtful about it. The title came to me from a novel I had read years earlier, in 1972, Group-Portrait with a Lady by Heinrich Böll, who in that same year was assigned the Nobel prize for literature. I cannot remember any detail of the plot, except that it was a historical novel centred around the figure of a woman, Leni, and her life in Germany in the 20th century. I do remember that, although the style of the novel is apparently objective, using the third person and adopting a tone of historical narration, the presence of the author is frequently inserted in a ‘massive’ (Böll’s term) way. This procedure results in a strong irony pervading the whole book and showing with great subtlety the conventional nature of so-called objectivity. The title of the novel had impressed me, because it expressed beautifully the close link between the life story of a woman and the collective history around her. A woman and a group, that was suggestive, and it was the same topic that I tried to tackle in Autobiography of a Generation. But I never mentioned to anybody these circumstances, which came back to my mind only on reading Veronica Pravadelli’s piece. She rightly connects the notion of a group self-portrait – which has got lost in the English title – with the relationship between subjectivity and history.

I believe that what is most important in this relationship is the notion of collective subjectivity. It had been accepted for a long time, even by historians, that the individual subject could be present in history books, either in the introductions or as an object of biographical narration. Of course, ‘subjective’ had a negative meaning as long as history was supposed to reconstruct the past as it had ‘really’ been. The critique to this attitude has by now been the focus of a long debate, although perhaps an unfinished one. However, I do not intend to rediscuss this point in my response. I believe that it might be more interesting, for this Forum, to briefly reconsider what collective subjectivity can be. By this term I do not refer so much to the most obvious meaning of the phrase, the implication of which is that the popular classes share complex forms of subjectivity and that these may be researched and interpreted. I rather refer to the aspects that Andrea Pető quotes in her piece, such as the intersectional way of approaching the history of women and of feminism, i.e. stressing the links between social relationships and subject formations. This intent necessarily brings the public and the private into close contact, or better it evidences the interlacing and sometimes the osmosis of the two spheres, so that the boundaries between them move all the time thanks to individual and collective activities. But not only activities: also thought, imagination and affect. No doubt, as Pető indicates – on the basis of a comparison with her own work concerning the collective biography of Hungarian women who emancipated themselves economically and moved to the right and the far right – this approach has deep political implications and repercussions for both the interpretation of the past and the understanding of the present. These implications, as Pető shows, must be drawn in a situational way so as to be historically grounded.

Second, my reaction of surprise and gratefulness is due to the intergenerational bridge that the comments establish, a bridge which allows new perspectives for me as an author as well as a person. Lisa Baraitser starts her comment writing that she was born in 1967, the year I went to East Africa to work with the liberation movements. From this she goes on to make the crucial point that the history of feminism cannot be reduced to a series of chronologically ordered waves. I could not agree more. The old interpretation of the ‘many beginnings’ of feminism is still suggestive, since it contributes to envisage the combination of cyclical and linear that characterizes many historical processes as well as human life. The process of subjectivization, in the sense of becoming a subject and becoming oneself, can be understood only as a movement that includes not simply progression and regression, but return, not of the identical, but of a mixture of old and new, of déjà vu and yet never seen under a certain point of view. It is the same dialectic of the newborn ones, who according to Hannah Arendt innovate incessantly the public sphere in spite of repeating the birth of a human being. It is always a case of innovative circularity rather than repetition: Pravadelli writes that she has often been able, in following my search through Autobiography, to recognize her own trajectory. At the same time, it was her own experience that allowed her to recognize in the history of my subjectivity an identification with the father as a way of circumnavigating the issue of subordination.

Thus, the intergenerational link, in particular between feminists, cannot be understood as a linear transmission from a previous generation to the next one, but must be seen as the formation of a tradition based on an uneven exchange. Uneven because, as I experience it, it consists of acts of listening which inform one’s own self-representation and Selbstverständigung (self-understanding). It is not at all the repetition or the echo of my message that I find most useful in these comments on my life story. Rather, it is the novelty which appears in the comments that reveals something of myself to me. For instance, I had never thought of what Baraitser calls Nachtraglichkeit in my text, and generally of time lags in my autobiography and in my own life experience. Now that somebody else has noticed it, I recognize the value of this interpretation, which might be stretched to redefine the question of intergenerational relationships: not only can we say that a structure of delay is activated between one generation and the other, but, more significantly, that a long-term process like the legacy of feminism (or of 1968, for that matter) may necessarily require a structure of delay for its completion.

I would like to add that Autobiography of a Generation must be considered as one step of an itinerary, because it has a sequel. This Forum has made me feel this book suddenly close again, although it has moved very far from me as time went on, having gone its own way while I have been struggling with other problems of life and style. I remember that in 1993 a theatre play based on Autobiography of a Generation was staged in Prato, Tuscany, directed by Mario Rellini on the basis of a script written by Gianni Cascone (20 Scene da Autoritratto di Gruppo – Twenty Scenes from Autobiography of a Generation). At the time, this externalization was a difficult experience for me, one reason probably being that I was not yet enough detached from my text, which I could hardly recognize in the play. It took another book to establish a distance, by giving expression to my new problems. My main existential question in the decades following the late 1980s – when I wrote Autobiography, being 46 – has been ageing and its implications. In Autobiography, old women are spied on by the narrating I in order to learn how to age in a dignified way, but old age is not really experienced or described. On the topic of ageing, I wrote La Fontana della giovinezza (The Fountain of Youth), which I envisaged as the second volume of a series initiated by Autobiography. La Fontana was written a bit later than 10 years after the first book, in 1999, when I was almost 60, and it was written in the third person. It is the story of a woman – of more or less my age at the time – left by her husband for a younger woman who is going to have a child from him, an event that I have witnessed many times, while not living through this experience myself. This story, narrated in four parts in the order: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, is alternated with the images of four paintings and the respective myths illustrating old age:

The temporal structure of La Fontana is cyclical or better spiral-like, like the seasons of the year and like the life of the myths, which come back innumerable times. The four paintings and legends provide a strong contrast with the story of the woman who has been abandoned. They offer examples of energetic and clever old women, who do not seem to think that their physical decay is the end of the world or who are able to regenerate themselves. And yet the protagonists of the myths are not presented as immortal. All the five stories – the ‘real’ one and the four legendary ones – are, to some extent, sad in comparison with Autobiography. The chief protagonist is often desperate or hopeless about her ageing, while realizing that her ‘old age attack’ is only the anticipation of the decline and loss to be experienced fully at a later stage of life. The narration in the third person did not disguise the fact that, although the events of the plot did not concern myself, the feelings of decay and loneliness portrayed in the story were my own. The reception confirmed this. Many women – my contemporaries – were disturbed by it and asked me how I could write such a sad book after having written of a heroic self in Autobiography, as if they could not accept the tiredness and crisis of middle age, which were very far from the hopes and elatedness of youth and early maturity of the earlier book.

I have introduced this other book in my Response not only because it is a counterpoint and a successor of Autobiography, but more specifically because I think that the change from the first to the third person taking place in the passage from one book to the other is relevant to the issue of gender identity treated in this Forum. The switch reflects a new positionality within the field of subjectivity, a double effort to take the place of the other and of reviving a long gone past, not historical but mythical and belonging to many different peoples in the world. This allows the subject to situate herself in a longer and wider perspective, ‘a vaster humankind’ in the words used by Rita Cavigioli in Women of a Certain Age (2005). Cavigioli notes that the protagonist of La Fontana experiences an estrangement from the masculine, in that her gender identity is undergoing a redefinition, while the whole text shows the necessity of a disinvestment in relation to collective identities, because ageing is a substantially individual experience.

Reflecting on the three comments of this Forum has helped me to put all this in perspective. I have the feeling that it is not a closed chapter and that the story is not settled once and for all. But in which sense I cannot guess. At the moment, I have no way of knowing whether there will ever be a third volume, as I had originally imagined.