Performing and Embodying AuthorshipCase Studies from Italian Women’s Autobiographical WritingsUrsula Fanning

Introduction

The stated aim of the symposium in which this chapter has its origins has real resonance for the literary texts and authors whose work I will discuss here. The symposium set out to explore the concept of reduction as a movement towards the cornerstones of lived experience, as an attempt to grasp the primary encounter between self and world (which takes place through the senses), and as an articulation of the link between embodied experience and knowledge. When we turn our attention to autobiographical writing, we might think of it first and foremost as a form of writing of and about the self — and it is certainly that, but it is also and inevitably about that encounter between Beginning of page[p. 76] the self and the world, and is, in part, an attempt to grasp and give voice to that encounter. It is a movement towards some articulation of the experience and consciousness of the self (performative, then, in and of itself), and it is also a movement towards an expression of the self in the world. For the authors I focus on here (Sibilla Aleramo, Natalia Ginzburg, Dacia Maraini, and Lidia Ravera, whose works span the twentieth century), the experience articulated is always constructed as relational; their focus is all at once on the self, the self in the world, and the self in relation to the Other and others. These writers repeatedly evidence, through their writings, that lived experience is itself relational, that the self only has the sense of being a self and can only begin to understand itself precisely in relation to the Other, to others, and to the world.

I choose in the subtitle of this chapter, as well as in my volume on Italian women writers of the twentieth century,11Ursula Fanning, Italian Women’s Autobiographical Writings of the Twentieth Century: Constructing Subjects (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017). to privilege the term autobiographical writings because of my view that the term autobiography, as it has frequently been used in critical discourse, is reductive. There is certainly a sense in foundational discussions of autobiography that it equates to an almost photographic representation of a life, underscored by Philippe Lejeune’s (much-disputed) original formulation of the autobiographical pact, with its implicit guarantee of veracity.22Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Éditions du Seuil, 1975). Leigh Gilmore references this tendency in her observation that ‘autobiography has been interpreted as the arena in which the self speaks itself without the artifice of fiction, where language is in some mysterious way a pure mirror of the Beginning of page[p. 77] writer’s life’.33Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 35. In fact, what is termed autobiography, along with autobiographical fiction and the autobiographical essay, draws on the same structural devices as fiction (as critics have increasingly recognized).44See, for example, Paul Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes (Cornell University Press, 1984); and Franco D’Intino, L’autobiografia moderna: storia, forme, problemi (Bulzoni, 1998). Both are narratives that purport to tell us something of the real (while invariably drawing attention to the impossibility of representing reality and to the inadequacies of language as a vehicle for meaning); hence, I deliberately choose not to distinguish between the terms autobiography and autobiographical fiction, and I use the term autobiographical writings instead to consider these different forms of expression as kindred narratives, with an eye to their inherent fictionality and to their reaching into the imaginative realm, and as a strategy to draw them together under a more capacious umbrella.

The description of the self, and of the self as ineliminably in the world, in these kinds of narratives, constitutes a grasping towards knowledge about the self, the self in relationship, and the Other. That grasping, and its representation, often turns out to take the form of an ‘embodied approach to the construction of meaning’, to borrow Susan Kozel’s words,55Susan Kozel and Adam Eeuwens, Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (MIT Press, 2008), p. xxv. See also Susan Kozel's chapter ‘Affective Choreographies’ in the present volume, pp. 97–129. and this embodied approach is frequently foregrounded thematically in the writings I focus on here. Their authors attempt to describe the process of integrating the intellect (specifically drawing the reader’s attention, at times, to the act of cerebral authorship in which they are engaged, signposting and highlighting it) with a sensory Beginning of page[p. 78] experience — surprising us, perhaps; how can what we typically think of as the intellectual act of authorship be reconfigured as a physical, sensory experience? They appear to tease out what they are doing as they are doing it, and their writing is thus essentially performative in its effort to convey and to foreground an experience at once cerebral and embodied. Their autobiographical enterprise is an attempt to understand phenomena as these are lived through and thus, from within, by definition — it is a phenomenological enterprise.

The authors I will discuss attempt to return us to the life of the living human subject in their engagement with the world, the subject trying to grasp the world, and hence to grasp the dynamic and unfinished character of their existence. To utilize Jean-Paul Sartre’s views for my purposes here, these writers attempt to delineate carefully the affective, emotional, and imaginative life of the self in the manner in which it is meaningfully lived.66See Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], trans. by Philip Mairet (Methuen, 1971). See also Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (Routledge, 2000), especially p. 5 and pp. 354–90 for a detailed discussion of Sartre’s philosophies and, in particular, his conception of consciousness. And for these women writers, taking on the role of author in this process of delineation (which actually turns out to be particularly difficult because of specific cultural connotations of authorship as male that persist throughout the twentieth century in the Italian context, and not only in that context)77See, for example, Carol Lazzaro-Weis, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), especially p. 34, for a discussion of the tendency to ‘devalorize’ women’s writing in Italian literary criticism. is a performative exercise in which both mind and body are thoroughly engaged. Their work fits well, viewed through Beginning of page[p. 79] a philosophical lens, with that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, insofar as they are engaged in a rethinking of traditional dualisms of mind and body, consciousness and body.88See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans. by Donald A. Landes (Routledge, 2012), especially p. 113, for his discussion of Bewegungsentwurf. These writers’ conceptions of the self (or selves) appear as embodied, embedded in the world, and interrelated with others.

In the first section of this chapter I will focus on some elements of the autobiographical writings of Natalia Ginzburg that illustrate certain of the performative dimensions of the autobiographical, through a consideration of one of her paratexts — these being highly performative of the function of authorship by definition.99Genette discusses the ‘paratextual performance’ repeatedly, and at some length, in Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation [1987], trans. by Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge University Press, 1997); see especially p. 408. I will then turn, in the second section, specifically to the question of embodiment and to how it is thematized and constructed as integral to authorship by these writers.

Paratextual Performance

Paratext is the term used by Gérard Genette to define the framing devices that authors (and publishers) employ to contextualize and situate the main text (in this case, the autobiographical work). It references the matter that surrounds or relates to a text, which can take several forms — for instance, prefaces, epigraphs, essays, interviews, sometimes even footnotes. Paratexts may be peritextual (that is, located within the covers of the material object — the book — itself) or epitextual (external to the book, as in the case of essays, interviews, comments in letters, diaries, or in the Beginning of page[p. 80] form of intertextual reference in other works). The paratext may be authorial (and prefaces and epigraphs very often are) or allographic; that is, it may be written by an editor or, more typically, by a critic or another author who has been specifically chosen by the author of the autobiographical work for the light in which they will cast the work on which they comment. By extension, in the case of autobiographical writings in particular, they are chosen to cast a light in which the author herself will be reflected. Whatever form or forms paratexts take, Genette holds (rightly) that the ‘entire functioning [of the paratext] is based […] on the simple postulate that the author “knows best” what we should think about [the] work’.1010Ibid. As he says, ‘one cannot travel far within the paratext without encountering this belief’,1111Ibid. and this is borne out by the following analysis. In sum, the paratext constitutes a space in which the author most often sets out to control the reception of the work and, in autobiographical writing, it is yet another attempt at representing a self. It is a space in which there is an effort to exert control in highly stylized fashion and, as such, is essentially performative. It is the place in which the author appears most fully clothed in the guise of author; it is that space in which authorship is most thoroughly and consciously performed.

I have chosen to focus in this section primarily on Natalia Ginzburg as my representative of paratextual performance because she provides an excellent and very obvious example of a writer who is constantly negotiating her sense of subjectivity, of being-in-the-world. Her being, as it is represented in the work I will focus on here, Lessico famigliare of 1963 (which has been translated into English Beginning of page[p. 81] with several different titles),1212Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare [1963] (Einaudi, 1996). The translations of the title always focus, albeit in differing ways, on the central position of language in the work. D. M. Low chose to entitle his 1963 translation Family Sayings, while Judith Woolf preferred The Things We Used to Say (1977). Most recently, Jenny McPhee opts for the more faithful Family Lexicon (2017). All translations from the Italian here and elsewhere, except in the case of Maraini’s 1987 essay ‘Reflections’, are my own. is precisely a ‘being-with’, to draw on Martin Heidegger;1313Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1927], trans. by Joan Stambaugh (SUNY Press, 1996). Lessico famigliare is all about the presentness of others and various modes of ‘being-with’ them, even when they are not present and where the author is reconstructing them in this cultural enunciation. It is an autobiographical novel which frequently challenges what we think of as the autobiographical mode, precisely because its focus is almost entirely on others or, better, on the ways in which the first-person narrator (who shares the author’s name) defines herself in relation to others, and on how she co-exists with them. Indeed, the narrator even has to intervene to remind us, as she describes childhood family holidays in some detail: ‘I was there too’ (C’ero anch’io).1414Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare [1963] (Mondadori, 1972), p. 122. The Italian critic Cesare Garboli, in his 1972 allographic preface to the novel,1515Ibid., pp. v–xv. even contends: ‘The situation is that, while always saying “I”, Ginzburg can only speak of others’ (È che dicendo continuamente ‘io’, la Ginzburg sa parlare solo degli altri).1616Ibid., p. ix. The self constructed by Ginzburg is very much in the world and is highly attuned to others, to the extent that that self can at times (at least in this text) be effaced. In her own preface to the first edition of the novel, Ginzburg addresses this issue head-on. She admits to having left a lot out of her autobiographical Beginning of page[p. 82] narrative; there are, she tells us, ‘endless gaps’ (infinite lacune).1717Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (1996), p. v. More particularly, Ginzburg acknowledges that much of what she has left out of the work directly concerns herself: ‘I didn’t really want to talk about myself’ (Non avevo molta voglia di parlare di me),1818Ibid. she says of this text, which is often still referred to in reductive fashion as an autobiography. Ginzburg’s perspective is broader than what is traditionally conceived of as the strictly autobiographical. She insists that she had always wanted to write ‘a book that would tell the story of the people who lived around me at that time’ (un libro che raccontasse delle persone che vivevano, allora, intorno a me).1919Ibid. This is (in part) that story, she concludes. The ducking and diving around self-representation in this example of that supposedly most self-representative of genres is notable.

What we meet with here is, I suggest, ‘a doubleness of performative constitution’, as Lisa Folkmarson Käll defines it in her discussion of those elements drawn from phenomenology in Judith Butler’s concept of performativity.2020Lisa Folkmarson Käll, ‘A Path Between Voluntarism and Determinism’, Lambda Nordica, 20.2–3 (2015), pp. 23–48 (p. 41) <https://www.lambdanordica.org/index.php/lambdanordica/article/view/447> [accessed 18 November 2025]. The purpose of Käll’s article is to identify elements of a phenomenological heritage in Butler’s work, particularly in relation to her articulation of that notion of performativity. She sets out ‘to draw attention to a doubleness of the performativity of identity and of the subject as on the one hand culturally and institutionally formed and reiterated, and on the other hand intentional’.2121Ibid., p. 24. Käll’s undertaking in relation to Butler, in fact, maps nicely onto what Ginzburg Beginning of page[p. 83] is doing here, as the latter teases out the position of her narrator as subjected to particular social structures (in which, as the youngest female member of the family, she frequently simply does not have a voice, and functions often as an observer of others), but within those social structures, the narrator intentionally enacts different identities. The observing consciousness which she strives to construct in her narrative is at once aware of familial and social hierarchy and pressures, and also genuinely interested in telling the story of ‘the others’ (le persone intorno a me), and of her relationship with them. Moreover, it is precisely in her own preface (which Genette would certainly define as an assumptive authorial preface) that Ginzburg can perform the identity of author most fully. Genette notes that the assumptive authorial preface is ‘monitory’.2222Genette, Paratexts, p. 239. Indeed, there could not be a better definition for Ginzburg’s preface here, which she entitles, quite consciously, an ‘avvertenza’; the word does double duty in Italian, since it means both ‘foreword’ and ‘warning’, and Ginzburg absolutely intends her preface to be both. She takes on fully the role of the author who knows best, who sets out to control the reception of the work, and who thus represents her self in another way (the voice of the author in the preface is not the self-effacing voice of the narrator in the body of the text). The ‘avvertenza’ is full of instructions to the reader, and yet it also slyly subverts itself. It begins with the strong assertion: ‘Places, facts and people in this book are real. I have invented nothing’ (Luoghi, fatti e persone sono, in questo libro, reali. Non ho inventato niente).2323Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (1996), p. v. The verb ‘to invent’ is employed four times in the first two paragraphs of the preface, and on each occasion it is surrounded with Beginning of page[p. 84] negative connotations. The author is here telling her readers categorically that this work is, in some sense, real — not fictive — and that it should be read as such. So ‘real’ is the work, she insists, that she feels unable to give her characters names other than those they possess in real life. This is an instance of something akin to Lejeune’s earliest notions of the autobiographical pact, where not only does the main character/narrator bear the name of the author but other characters also bear their real-life names. Later objections to Lejeune, of course, point out that any such claim ‘depends on taking representations of identity and the real as identity and the real themselves’.2424Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 65.

Ginzburg proves to be well aware of the problems with her own claims, as she progresses through the short preface to Lessico famigliare oscillating between attempts to stabilize truth and the real, and simultaneously admitting to gaps (and to the precise nature of those gaps around her representation of herself). Her consciousness of these gaps, and of the difficulties in the process of representation itself, ultimately lead Ginzburg to an instruction to the reader which sits entirely at odds with her claim to truth-telling: ‘Although this is taken from reality, I think it should be read as though it were a novel’ (Benché tratto della realtà, penso che si debba leggere come se fosse un romanzo).2525Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare (1996), p. v. It is here that Lessico famigliare undergoes, in effect, a generic reclassification by its own author. The ‘taken from reality’ that we meet here on line thirteen of the preface undoes the ‘real’ of its opening line. The author, in the end, has written a destabilizing prologue: she insists that a story that is ‘real’ and ‘not invented’ should be read as if it were unreal and wholly invented. In her questioning of the possibilities Beginning of page[p. 85] of representation of the real, Ginzburg has taken on a shape-shifting authorial self. In the preface, she repeatedly performs authorship for us, at once categorically telling us how to read the work while, at the same time, calling into question the possibility of representing reality and of representing consciousness through writing. In a sense, she is showing us the author in the process of becoming.

Embodying Authorship

I turn now to the arguably more complex issue of embodying authorship to pose the question of how this might be done through the process of writing and, moreover, through the lens of the performance of authorship. One of the features of the writings of several of the authors on whom I have worked in the context of autobiographical expression by which I have been most struck while considering their attempts to define both themselves as authors and the characteristics of their authorial enterprise is precisely their constant, recurring recourse to and evocation of the body. The body is frequently brought front and centre by these authors; we are regularly reminded of its presence, indeed of its ineluctability. This is especially evident in those moments where the authors are conceiving (and I use that term advisedly, since this conception of the self as author is surprisingly often linked to themes of physical gestation) of themselves as authors, where they are consciously constructing the self as author, where they are most fully performing authorship. This construction of self is therefore, again, frequently (though not exclusively) located in the paratext, often in the epitext (in essays about the writing process, for instance). In phenomenological terms, this notion of embodying authorship through its performance, in the act of writing (and in the moment Beginning of page[p. 86] of writing about writing), is tricky. It can really only be approximated through literary representation and through thematization, but I would argue that its very representation and thematization is challenging in itself (for both author and reader), and that it is challenging in a very positive sense. It confronts us with what we do not tend to think of immediately when we think of authorship and of writing; our view of these undertakings is all too often hived off into the intellectual and cerebral dimensions, and we rarely automatically reflect on the body that is writing (in spite of much interesting work on the topic in feminist criticism),2626Certainly from Cixous onwards, the body and its relationship to writing has been a topic of some significance in French feminist criticism and has been enthusiastically taken up and debated in the Anglosphere. See Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc, 61 (1975), pp. 39–54. Cixous’s essay was rapidly translated into English by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen as ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Signs, 1.4 (1976), pp. 875–93. It has been reprinted several times since in both languages. An essay by Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of “L’Écriture Féminine”’, Feminist Studies, 7.2 (1981), pp. 247–63, was one of the first to deepen the debate around écriture feminine and writing the body. on the fact that writing quite literally cannot be done without the body.

In that sense, I would argue that the foregrounding of the body that is writing in the works of these authors constitutes a kind of reduction in itself; it challenges what we think of, paradoxically, as the received image of writing and of the writer, and causes us to modify (maybe even radically change) our views. Cartesian dualism, so foundational for much of Western thought, notoriously separates body and mind.2727See Jonathan Westphal, The Mind–Body Problem (MIT Press, 2016), for an engaging account of the mind–body issue in Descartes and in monist theory. These writers, however, absolutely do not subscribe to this division. Rather, they seem to set out to undo that mind–body dualism in and through their writing,Beginning of page[p. 87] to rethink and reconceptualize it in a way that would be immediately understandable to a phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty. He asks us to break with our ‘familiar acceptance of the world’ in order to ‘grasp it as paradoxical’,2828Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. xiv. and these writers certainly break with familiar concepts of the literary world and of writers, presenting us with the paradox of the body as determining the writing which we often tend to hive off as purely intellectual. There is, for these authors, no clash between the intellect and the body (or, where there is one, it is ultimately faced and worked through); rather, intellect and body turn out to be intertwined and thus these writers illustrate an integration of intellect with sensory experience.

How does this look in practice? My first example comes from Dacia Maraini and her conceptualization of writing. In a 1987 essay that immediately homes in on the centrality of the body, ‘Reflections on the Logical and Illogical Bodies of my Sexual Compatriots’ (Riflessioni sui corpi logici e illogici delle mie compagne di sesso), Maraini insists: ‘In the end, one writes with the body.’2929Dacia Maraini, ‘Reflections on the Logical and Illogical Bodies of my Sexual Compatriots’, trans. by Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, in The Pleasure of Writing, ed. by Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri (Purdue University Press, 2000), pp. 21–38 (p. 27). She repeatedly draws attention precisely to the body that writes, before describing the undertaking of writing in distinctly embodied terms.3030‘Writing is tongue, and the tongue is not limited to moving in the mouth’ (ibid.). It is, she claims, ‘profoundly feminine and maternal […] tied as it is to the sense of becoming’.3131Ibid., p. 29. She uses strongly corporeal maternal images,3232‘The body of the mother means the flesh and milk of every spoken language’ (ibid., p. 30). deliberately Beginning of page[p. 88] and provocatively, as a poetic for writing, and especially for writing by women. This is, of course, a decidedly risky undertaking because of the way in which, in terms of Cartesian dualities, women are repeatedly associated with the body and with nature, while men are associated with the mind and with culture. Maraini is all too aware of this and yet still takes it on; she wants to collapse these boundaries. Her formulation would not be ‘Je pense, donc je suis’, à la Descartes;3333René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode [1637] (Nouveaux Classiques Larousse, 1972), p. 65. it would be closer to Gabriel Marcel’s ‘Je suis mon corps’,3434Gabriel Marcel, Journal métaphysique (Gallimard, 1927), pp. 236–37. which was so inspirational for Merleau-Ponty, but it would be most fully captured in a notion of thinking with and through the body.

This thinking with and through the body involves a collapsing of other boundaries too. Critics have noted how, for Maraini, writing is connected to an intense relationality. Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, for instance, notes how ‘for Maraini, writing is […] connected to the loss of boundary between self and other, a work of empathy’;3535Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, ‘Body as Will: Incarnate Voice in Dacia Maraini’, in The Pleasure of Writing, ed. by Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Testaferri, pp. 195–214 (p. 198). she also notes that the experience of blurring boundaries in Maraini is ‘often characterized by a sense of queasiness’.3636Ibid., p. 200. Not coincidentally, I would argue, that queasiness-inducing loss of boundaries is also intimately connected to Maraini’s conception of writing, pregnancy, and the maternal. Indeed, Maraini has described writing as a gestational process.3737Dacia Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo. Le donne: la maternità negata, il corpo sognato (Rizzoli, 1996). In her collection of essays Un clandestino a bordo (‘The Stowaway’), which focuses on maternity, abortion, miscarriage,Beginning of page[p. 89] and literature, she conflates writing and pregnancy. Here, discussing Conrad’s The Secret Sharer,3838Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer [1912] (Penguin, 1995). which lends its title to her work (most appropriately for the figure of the pregnant woman whom she evokes), she considers the relationship between captain and stowaway as one of ‘relating the other to himself […]. The stowaway is another, but […] he is a part of him, an […] unknown part’ (adeguare l’altro a sé […] il clandestino è un altro, ma […] è una parte di lui, una parte […] sconosciuta).3939Maraini, Un clandestino a bordo, p. 13. This mother–foetus/captain–stowaway analogy is even more clearly spelled out just two pages later, where an overt comparison is made between the captain’s establishment of an emotional bond with the stowaway and that which grows between mother and child.4040Ginzburg, too, addresses this stowaway relationship — and in striking terms — in her essay on abortion, ‘Dell’aborto’ (1975). She depicts the pregnant body as engaged in a very particular kind of relationship: ‘the most closed, the most enchained and dark relationship that exists in the world […] the least free of relationships’ (il rapporto piú chiuso e piú incatenato e piú nero che esista al mondo, è il meno libero fra tutti i rapporti). Natalia Ginzburg, Opere, 2 vols, ed. by Cesare Garboli (Milan: Mondadori, 1987), ii, pp. 1299–303 (p. 1302). There is ‘an intense relationship of knowledge, comprehension, tenderness. Just like a mother has with her child’ (un rapporto intenso di conoscenza, di comprensione, di tenerezza. Proprio come fa una madre col proprio figlio).4141Ibid., p. 15. Susan Stanford Friedman, in an article on the usage of maternal metaphors for writing in English-language literature, notes that ‘women writers have […] risked’ what she calls ‘the metaphor’s dangerous biologism in order to challenge fundamental binary oppositions of patriarchal ideology between word Beginning of page[p. 90] and flesh, creativity and procreativity, mind and body’.4242Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse’, Feminist Studies 13.1 (1987), pp. 49–82 (p. 51) <https://doi.org/10.2307/3177835>. I would contend that this is exactly what Maraini does in her work.

She is not, however, an isolated voice; she has, to use her own term, ‘sexual compatriots’ at either end of the century who have form in this regard. I will briefly draw here on one early twentieth-century example, Sibilla Aleramo, and a late twentieth-century case, Lidia Ravera, to illustrate this point.

Aleramo’s 1906 autobiographical novel Una donna (A Woman) is hugely important for Italian feminism, and for Italian women’s writing, and is far too complex to do justice to here.4343Sibilla Aleramo, Una donna [1906] (Feltrinelli, 1982). I will touch on just one aspect of the text which is highly relevant for the question of embodying authorship, and that is Aleramo’s knitting-together of intellectual and bodily experience and the fusing of these in the process of artistic creation. Here, indeed, the maternal is more than a metaphor. In chapter seven, the novel’s first-person protagonist describes the birth of her son. This is figured, fascinatingly, as a sort of rupture in the self. The protagonist says: ‘at the moment in which my son was entering the world, I cried out in revolt at […] my shattered consciousness’ (nel punto in cui mio figlio entrava nel mondo, avevo gettato un urlo di rivolta in nome della […] mia coscienza naufragante).4444Ibid., pp. 70–71. One paragraph later she is describing ‘a coming-together of two distinct elements: one centred on my son […], the other the first invincible impulse towards the artistic expression of everything that now moved me; it was filling me with clear, quick, new and Beginning of page[p. 91] ineffable feelings’ (un avvicendarsi di due distinti progetti: l’uno che riguardava mio figlio […]; l’altro, che costituiva il primo invincibile impulso verso l’estrinsecazione artistica di quanto mi commuoveva ora, mi riempiva di sensazioni distinte, rapide, nuove ed ineffabili).4545Ibid., p. 71. The protagonist is trying, she says, to do the impossible: to express through writing the sensations which she is feeling through the written word, to bring together the two apparently separate domains of bodily experience and literary expression. She is shining a light on this task, but also precisely on the link between the body and the artistic impulse.

That coming-together of two elements is, I suggest, Aleramo’s attempt at an integration of the intellectual and the sensory and relational. It turns out to be an ongoing process for her. In her later essay ‘La pensierosa’ (The Thoughtful Woman), of 1913,4646Sibilla Aleramo, ‘La pensierosa’ [1913], in Aleramo, Andando e stando [1921] (Feltrinelli, 1997), pp. 113–22. Aleramo still focuses on the (maternal) body and also insists there specifically that writing bears the marks of the gendered body, long before Hélène Cixous will construct a similar argument. This essay is addressed to Aleramo’s male colleagues, and she is at pains to stress that she has had to be untrue to herself in order to be understood by them: ‘understanding men, learning their language, has meant moving away from myself’ (capire l’uomo, imparare il suo linguaggio, è stato allontanarmi da me stessa).4747Ibid., p. 113. She expands on her wish to write in a way that is true to herself, linking her writing ineluctably with her physical body, pointing to ‘the physical spasm and the rush in every fibre of my being in the struggle to […] recreate the world’ (spasimo e voluttà delle fibre Beginning of page[p. 92] bramose struggendosi […] di ricreare il mondo).4848Ibid., p. 115. For Aleramo, then, writing is not a purely intellectual exercise; it is one in which her body is inevitably involved (and it is specifically the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth that have inspired her to write, and to integrate her body into her writing).

Lidia Ravera begins her writerly journey later in the century with a strong sense that the act of writing is both intellectual and masculine; in her 1979 autobiographical novel Bambino mio (My Child),4949Lidia Ravera, Bambino mio (Bompiani, 1979). her protagonist states (interestingly, precisely as she fights against the desire to have a child): ‘I have a jacket with padded shoulders. I write. I have to think like this’ (Io ho una giacca con le spalle imbottite. Io scrivo. Così devo pensare).5050Ibid., p. 15. When she eventually finds herself pregnant, the narrator dryly ironizes on the creative possibilities: she decides to keep a notebook ‘just in case the whole experience reveals itself to be particularly “creative”’ (caso mai l’intera esperienza si fosse rivelata particolarmente ‘creativa’).5151Ibid., p. 85. In a manner reminiscent of patterns in Ravera’s predecessors’ work, her narrator finds (to her surprise) that life, and specifically the experience of giving birth, overturns her view of writing as a purely intellectual undertaking and pushes her to the startling recognition that ‘the body writes’ (il corpo scrive).5252Ibid., p. 139. Again, this writing through the body turns out to be profoundly relational from Ravera’s perspective, as we see in her 1993 novel In quale nascondiglio del cuore Beginning of page[p. 93](In Which Hideout of the Heart),5353Lidia Ravera, In quale nascondiglio del cuore. Lettera a un figlio adolescente (Mondadori, 1993). where the protagonist’s advice for her adolescent son is, crucially: ‘Travel. Even if you don’t go far […] the baggage is what’s important. Carry yourself lightly. Open your eyes’ (Viaggia. Anche senza andare lontano […] l’importante è il bagaglio: alleggerire l’Io, aprire gli occhi).5454Ibid., p. 127. This is an injunction to move beyond the self, to be alert to others, and to possibilities of being-in-the-world. The focus is outward, not inward. This brings us back to Ginzburg’s other-centred narratives, and again subverts what we think of as the autobiographical enterprise of focusing on the self.

Conclusion

In essence, I am suggesting here that these writers upset norms and dissolve boundaries. They challenge our thinking around what autobiographical writing consists in; they insist on drawing attention to the body in writing and the body as writing/in the act of writing. Indeed, perhaps the most arresting elements of their representations of the self lie in their recurring recourse to the physical. They bring body and book into mutually illuminating play. The book turns up as metaphor, and the self turns up as book. Their autobiographical selves are never unitary, or entirely self-focused. Rather, they are multiple and relational, focused on the Other and on others. They strive to grasp the primary encounter between self and world, which takes place through the senses, and to articulate the link between embodied experience and knowledge (to draw again on the concepts underlying the original workshop which gave rise to this volume of essays). In their autobiographical writings,Beginning of page[p. 94] they integrate the intellect with sensory experience in performative fashion. Their aim is, at least in part, to convey writing as an embodied experience.