PASOLINI Forms of Subjectivity
ROBERT
s.
C. GORDON
CLARENDONPRESS OXFORD 1996
)
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Preface
I write this preface just days before the twentieth anniversary of Pasolini's death on 2 Novemher IIn 5, and as onc would expect of a figure already so persecuted and I ionized in the course of his lifetime, let alonc since, his prescnce is still an uncannily vivid one in Italy's currcnt and secmingly permanent state of crisis. To give only two examples, Marco Tullio Giordana's book and film Paso/ini. Un tldilto ilaliallo (Giordana, 1<)()4) has reopened the m,lIly unanswered questions surrounding his murder, whilst the 'statesman' Giulio Andreotti, hcf()re standing' tri,t! for collusion with the mafia, has reiterated as if in expiation of an unnamed guilt that' Pasolini aveva ragione', Pasolini was right in his analysis or thc dccline or the Christian Dcmocr.ltic (DC) party in the mid-I<nos. Andreoui's claim is all the more remarkable since Pasolini was almost certainly not right: indeed he very rarely was, in the convent ional sense at least, and thercinlies a great deal orhis f~lscination. Striking and highly c1urged responses to Pasolini or this kind have heen an important catalyst to my work on this book, which has in a sense been measured out in public at('empts at appropriation of his name: since J<)XX he has been touted as a Ilco-f;lscist by thc MS] (Movimento sociale iLdiano), a scparatist hy the I ,ega Non.l, and a privileged posthumous authority on cverything ti'om the 'strateg'ia dello! tensione' to 'Gladio' and "1~lIlgentopoli'. It struck me early Oil, however, that these apparcntly appropriative responses were in tact deeply conditioncd and distortcd by his own rhetoric. Some quality of his presence infiltrated and modulated their idiom and their impact. I beg'an to realize that even the most soher and scrious critical work on Pasolini was g'uilty to some degrce of thcse distortions, anu, what is more, that it could not he otherwise sinee his work refused to become a vessel or innoccnt or authentic sets of meaning·s. J-ittlc surprisc that the most incisivc and rewarding account of his written work at least remains the raw, cumulative dialogue with Franco Fortini (now collected in Fortini, 1993). Pasolini's actions and texts impingc upon, conuition and circumscribe the hermencutic potential thcy creatc. They emanate a sort of centripetal force of gravity which draws in and distorts dependent discourses,
VIII
PREFACE
including criticism. Behind this autocratic and ambiguous force, and behind the vitality of his work in general, lie the processes of selfconstruction, of subjectivity that are the focus of interest ofthis book. I cannot nor would wish to claim that it is free from the pull of that gravity, but I hope that it manages to watch itself being pulled along. To use a Pasolinian metaphor, as one studies the workings of a mirror, onc cannot but be distracted from the mirror and begin to study oneself. I would like to thank the Pasolini Estate, Garzanti Editore and Giulio Einaudi Editore for permission to reproduce a range of extracts from Pasolini's work, in particular those from: Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1972); Lettere, vols. i-ii, (Turin: Einaudi, 1986, 1988);Petrolio (Turin: Einaudi, 1992); and Bestemmia. Tulle le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1993 (copyright held by Einaudi in part». Parts of chapters 2, 4 and 6 and 11 exist in earlier versions in my article 'Strategies of SelfConstruction in Pasolini' (Gordon, 1996b) and a version of chapter 13 has appeared as 'Being and Film-time in PasoIini's Cinema' (GonIon, 1996a ). I am grateful to the following institutions and their staff for their support at various stages of my work on the hook: StJohn's College and the University Library, Cambridge; the British Academy; Collegio Ghislieri and the 'Fondo manoscritti di autori contemporanei', Pavia; Pembroke College, the Taylor Institution Library and the Modern Languages Faculty, Oxford. In Italy, my research was helped immensely by the generosity of Laura Betti and Giuseppe bfrate of the 'Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini' in Rome. I would particularly like to express my thanks to them and their jury f
R. S. C. G.
Contents
List ofPlates Abbreviations and References
Xl
Xli
Introduction: The Work of Subjectivity PART I PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK I.
The Contours of a Career
2. Projects in Journalism 2. I. 'fheJournals of Fascist Youth Organizations, 1942-3 2.2. The Cultural and Regional Politics ofFriuli, 1943-<)
2·3· q/Jicilla, H)SS-I) 2·4· Vie lluove, T<)60-S 2. S. NU(Jvi argomenli, 1 1)6h-7 5 2.6. Tempo illu.I"lrato, (1)6X-70 2.7. Corriere del/a sera (and others), 1973-S
I)
12 23 23 33 40
47 54 61 67
3. Vocations
75
PART 11 POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
85
4. 'Who is me': The Impulse to Autobiography 5. 'Pura luce': A Vision of History 6. 'Un folIc idcntificarsi': Figuring the Self 7. 'Mio corpo insepolto': The Body and the Father 8. Poetry into Cinema
114
x
CONTENTS
PART III CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
9. Authority and Inscription
187 19 1
10.
Style and Technique
20 5
11.
Genesis and Intertextuality
21<)
12.
Metaphor
228
13. Being and Film-Time
24 0
14. Spectatorship
25 1
PART IV UNFINISJlED ENDINGS
26 5
15. Pe/m!io: Sclfand Form
2(n
Bibliography
293
Index
31]
List ofPlates I he/lIJeen pp. I.
2.
3. 4.
5. 6. 7.
8.
/64 ami J6S /
La rimlla. Orson Welles plays the Director of the Gospel film-within-thefilm, here isolated in morbid g;randeur AUllllone. Acc;Htone (Franco Cini) is ti'amed in portrait, set against the deep perspective and oppressive sunlight of Ihe 'borgata' lantlscape. Echoes of Masaccio Uacl/aai e urallini. TOl(> and Ninetlo (I hvoli), Pasolini's pseutlo-couple, wander through the urban nO-ll1an's-hmd Vat/gc/o. The scene o/" Ihe B"ptism in the River Jordan, filmed fi'om above and at a distance, shattered the fi'ontal icollograpy ol"Pasolini's film-style Mdca. The Centaur Chiron (I ,ament Terzieff) educates the young Jasoll into ,1 pre-eivilized affinity with nature and t he gods LIl riml/II (in colour in Ihc original). l'asolini/Orson Welles' Mannerist reconstruct ion of Rosso (iiorcntino's Mannerist /)epoIilion Salt). One of the diseuses and the pianist per/iJl"lll their grotesque cabaret in a luxuriant, if anomalollsly day lit auditorium, watehetl hy their terrified audience La ricotlll. The diva (I .aura Bet! i) relaxes, cardully framed by the extras, the props and the Roman landscape
Abbreviations and References
I. Works by Pasolini are referred to by title only, with the following abbreviations: Br,B2 Beslemmia. Tutle le poesie (2 vols.)
Ceneri Edipo EE LL L'usign% Meglio Nuova Religiolle Rosa Sa";
se
1'rasumanar Vallge/o
Le ceneri di Grams.-i Edipore Empirismo cretico Lettere lu/erane L 'usigllolo del/a l'hiesa (Illto/iw La meglio gioventu La nuova gioventtl [,a religionc de/mio tempo Poesia injimna di row Sal,; ole (en/ovenli giornate di Sodoma Saitti wnar; 1'rasumallar e orgallizzar 11 Vangelll secondo Mal/ell Ifilm and screenplay I
References to Pasolini's works are to first editions, as cited in Part I of the Bibliography, with the following exceptions: AIi daKli oahi azzurri (1<)65), Milan: Garzanti, 1<)8<) Leltere luteranc (1<)76), Turin: Einaudi, 1980 Passione e idcoloKia (1960), Milan: Garzanti, 1977 Scriui corsari (1975), Milan: Garzanti, 19<)0 Page references for poetry refer to BI, B2, and for the six verse-dramas to Tealro (Milan: Garzanti, 1(88). References to secondary sources are given using the author-date system. Books of multiple authorship are referred to using the abbreviation AA. Vv. Sce Bibliography 2 for full details. All translations into English are my own. When quoting secondary material I have most often only given an English version. 2.
Introduction: The Work of Subjectivity When we attempt to tracc the history of the sell~ we of course know wc arc dealing with shadows in a dark land. (Trilling, 1974,52)
Pasolini was a relentlessly introspective ami rcstlessly experimental artist. These two poles, of introspection amI expcrimcntation, mark out the field of his work, conditioning and delimiting· thc scopc and focus of everything he docs. Their interaction throws up a whole spectrum of positions and pr;lcticcs of suhjectivity in languagc, action and form. What is morc, thcse qualities condition a hody of work that is in constant, stark confi·ontation with ideological, social and sexual realities, from thc standpoint (at least rhetorically) of an exeluded othcr, so that the potential for complex, surprising and at times radically eccentric incisions into those realities is remarkahly rich. To understand Pasolini's significance in thc panorama of post-war Italian and European culture, and indeed to understand the exploitation and mythologization of his figure during his life and since, requircs us to look upon and through the refracting filter ofsclf-exploration that covers his every act, in person or in language. This study scts out to reread Pasolini in such a light, to reclaim the rhetoric of an a:uvre that, for all else it attempts to achieve, never lets up in its contemplation and practicc of the potentially overwhelming expressivity of the self and its desires: 'l'esprimersi t... 1c semprc meraviglioso' (to express yourself[ ... 1is always wonderful, I dialoghi, (84). To give a taste ofPasolini's penchant for experimentation, one only has to contemplate the vertiginous formal variety of his a:uvre: his poetry, novels, plays, screenplays, films, essays in criticism, journalism, and even songs; his work in Friulan and Roman dialects, and a number of hybrid dialects of his own creation, as well as standard Italian; his voracious, if always flawed, imbibing of philology, Marxism, theology, semiology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines;
INTRODUCTION
2
and his constant fascination with mixtures of all of these, perhaps epitomized in his much-used formula 'x in forma di y' (e.g. 'poesia in forma di rosa', 'romanzo in forma di sceneggiatura', etc.). To attempt to give a taste of the scale of introspection in his work, by contrast, would be otiose, since self-expression-more or less overt, strategically deployed or agonistically suffered, whether cast as pure impulse or pure rhetoric-is everywhere in his work. Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, writing only of his poetry and moreover in somewhat damning terms, captures nicely the self's relentless ubiquity: In the history of twentieth-century poetry, there is no other poet besides Pasolini who has more tenaciously interrogated his own'!, [or 'ego'], more persistently contemplated it, admired it, examined it, analyzed it and dissected it in order then to show its suffering entrails to the world, as they beg lill· understanding, affection, and pity. [... J Without the'!' there is no possibility of[his I creating poetry. (Translated from Barberi Squaroni, 1<)1\),206,214)
Were it simply a question of quantity, however, were Pasolini's art no more than the indulgence of an unrepressed narcissist, there would be scant interest in a study of this kind. Instead, his work offers an extraordinarily fertile and dense example of how subjectivities arc built on something other and something far more complex than merely saying '1'. Indeed, onc might say that his work offers an illustration of the ultimate incompatibility of saying 'I' and being '1', in ;my cohesive sense these phrases might have (Benveniste, [()66, 259-(0). For Pasolini does indeed, as Barberi Squarolli implies, constantly ofler himself up for display in his work, but to such a degree of intensity that conventional mediation is cast aside: he is personally, bodily present within language, as he explains in Petmlio, 'in queste pagine io mi sono rivolto allettore direttamente [ ... 1in came e ossa' (in these pages I have addressed the reader directly [... ] in flesh and blood, 544). In other words, he uses the textuality of his work or the semiosis oflYis multiform interventions in order to embody himself~ to project himself into, rather than onto /()rms of expression. The project is, of course, deeply flawed and unrealizablc, but also strangely utopian. It is an almost mystical aspiration to being-in-thetext, to textual transubstantiation [ which can be related to his homosexuality. It represents a recourse to the essential signifier of an 'authentic' body as a public locus of discourse, in response to the I
On transubstatiation as an autobiographical operation, see Flcishman, [983,33.
THE WORK OF SUBJECTIVITY
3
exclusion from discourse and from normative sexual ideologies. But the recourse is a subversive and not a naturalizing one, since the irreducible aura of presence surrounding the body disavows coded norms (Casi, 1990a; Dollimore, 1991,14-17,39-48; and Ch. 1I bclow).1t radicalizes the relations between sclfhood, signification and the real by projecting irreducible markers of the latter into the first two. It brings selfhood and form into uneasy synthesis, in a dynamic akin to that seen by Dc J ,auretis, 1984, in Pasolini's essays in film semiology: a deployment and experience of forms of discourse as active and subjective signifying practices, rather than as enclosed, objective systems. In other words, meaning in Pasolini is the movement of/between self and form. The theoretical and methodological parameters that underpin this book can be outlined by way ofa gloss on the phrase 'active and subjective signifying practices'. In particular, the signiiicance of the phrase becomes clearer if it is read as roundly tautologous, in Pasolini but also perhaps in its general application. In other words, signifying practices of whatever kind-and there is always a plurality of them at work in any meaningful text, act or form-arc necessarily active and nacssariljl subjective. Since they arc rooted in the continp;ency and determining impact oftheir semiot ic, socio-political, and 'real' contexts, they always constitute an 'action'-what i'asolini was wont to call 'I'azione', 'il pragma' or 'il fiue' (e.g. 1:"1:' 21 1; 1 dia/oKhi, 734-5)--and arc steeped in both ideology and physically tangible reality. Furthermore, this notion of action carries with it an assumption of agency, even ifmomentary and illusory: to quote Stephen I Ieath, 'signifying practices always produce relations of subjectivity. I .. ·1 sig'nifying practices arc subject productions' (lleath, 1991,38-9). Always in action, always interrclational, subjectivity acts or works, through any number of simultaneous signifying practices, to produce the efIect of a subject of speech ('sujet de l'enoncC'), which in turn is in complex, ambivalent and flawed rclation with the speaking subject ('sujet ue l'cnoneiation', Benveniste, 1(66), and with the sutured 'spoken subject' at the moment of reception (Silverman, 19H3, 43-53). The central enigma and focus of this book is, precisely, that 'work of subjectivity'. The phrase the 'work of subjectivity' is useful and suggestive for two reasons. First, it contains echoes of Pasolini's own nostalgic, antimodernist penchant for metaphors of artisanal work to describe his intellectual and aesthetic activities, apparent, for example, in the name of his most important journal O.flicinlt (Workshop). Second and more
4
INTRODUCTION
tellingly, it is coined in analogy to Freud's 'Traumarbeit' or 'dreamwork', a process whose movement between latent and manifest dream-content constitutes, for Freud, the essence of the dream's meaning (Freud, 1973, 207-18; 1976; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, 112). The work of subjectivity is a process that is similarly both transformative and secondary. It too tends towards the production of a 'manifest' single entity, the subject, characterized by apparent presence, unity, and plenitude, but can only ever produce incomplete and mediated signifiers of subjecthood. Thus tokens of an acutely desired 'full' subjecthood become arbitrary and even mutually contradictory, oscillating between effects of stasis-a fixed subject is a strong subject-and mobility-a fluid subject is living and immediate, and stasis is death. Its primary manifestations are constantly and unpredictably being reinverted. Thus, the work of subjectivity is always projected towards an elusive end point. Its work is never done. 2 To return to Pasolini, we find the consequences of the work of subjectivity played out at several conscious and unconscious levels. If his work is always profoundly conditioned by the fractures implicit in the nature of subjectivity, it is also frequently marked by a conscious and even strategic deployment of tokens of sclfhood. The latter are absorbed and modulated from a panoply of subject positions thrown up by the work of subjectivity in its most immediate manifestations. A simple example would be Pasolini's reprojection of imagery of solitude and exclusion as a cathartic and almost redemptive burden. As he says in 'Versi dal testamento': 'bisogna essere molto forti / per amare la solitudine' (You have to be very strong / to love solitude, Bl, 941). Contrary to a rather worn critical shibboleth, the author is very definitely not dead here, but nor is he quite fighting a rearguard action on behalf of the pathetic fallacy or the life-as-work-of-art, despite compelling analogies that have been drawn betwecn Pasolini and d'Annunzio (e.g. Valesio, 198o-I). He is rather an actor, literally, in the agonistic drama of his own subjectivity, and as such, his presence is couched in a performative rhetoric whose origin can be traced at least as far back as the 1949 poem, 'La crocifissionc': 2 The terms and issues raised in this paragraph, and thus some of the premises of the book, are, as will be clear to many, informed by readings of theorists such as Laean and Kristeva. On the foundation of subjectivity in lack and duality, see Laean, 1977 (and also Bclscy, 1980,60-1; Bowie, 1991; Silverman, 1983,149-93); ami on the subject as always 'in process', or 'thetie', see Kristeva, 1974; on the ideologies and sexualities of transgressive subjectivity, see Dollimore, 1991; Silver man, 1992; Stallybrass and White, 1<)86.
THE WORK OF SUBJECTIVITY
5
Bisogna esporsi (questo insegna il povero Cristo inehiodato?) la chiarezza del euore edegna diogniseherno,diognipeccato di ogni piu nuda passione ... (questo vuol dire il Croeifisso? saerifieare ogni giorno it dono rinunciare ogni giorno al perdono sporgersi ingenui sull'abisso)·l· .. J Noi staremo offerti sulla eroce I. ... J per testimoniare 10 scandalo (El, 376-7) (We must expose ourselves (is this what! poor Christ nailed up teaches us?) ! clarity of the heart is worthy! of every derision, every sin! every barest passion ... ! (does the Crucifix mean this? ! sacrificing every day the gift! renouncing every day forgiveness! leaning out ingenuous over the abyss). [... ] ! ! We shall be offered on the cross! I ... 1to bear witness to the scandal.)
The matrix of imagery on show here-of display and openness, of private innocence and public guilt, of sexuality and/through suffering (passion)--inaugurates a rhetoric of authenticity and of the expressivity of the poetic which will pervade his work. In 1959, Fortini influentially labelled this feature of Pasolini's literary project as 'the proposition of an authenticity by way of the inauthentic' (translated from Fortini, H)93, 29)· Dollimore, 1991, 14- I 7, includes 'authenticity' and 'style/artifice' in his series of binary oppositions (founded in that between culture and nature) which are subverted and inverted in different ways by what he calls 'transgressive desires'. Others include surface-depth, change-stasis, difference-essence, personal rolcessential self, maturity-narcissism, all of which are constantly renegotiated in Pasolini's work. But, as Fortini realized, Pasolini used such binarisms as oscillating models of identity and difference, deploying both sides of such oppositions and dramatizing the resultant discord as the 'noise' of subjective work. He does not quite fit either of the arc hetypalmodels of trangression offered by Dollimore, therefore: whether Oscar Wilde's anti-essentialist and performative 'Don't ever write I anymore' (quoted in Dollimore, 1991,74), or Andre Gide's essentialist and ethical 'it is above all to oneselfthat it is important to remain faithful' (quoted in Dollimore, 1991,39). Pasolini is both performative and essentialist, to the point of obsession.
6
INTRODUCTION
Even Barberi Squarotti ends his polemic with an acknowledgement of the potential complexity of the endless self-dissections he had described so witheringly, once their nature as rhetoric or 'recitation' has been acknowledged: 'the vast rhetoric Pasolini uses to declare and confess his "I" [ ... ] is, nevertheless, also a sign of the difficulty, today, of reconstructing poctry as the exclusive voice of the "[" '(translated from Barberi Squarotti, 1986, 226). On closer inspection, then, that difficulty reveals itself as symptomatic of deep, ontological tensions between the individual author, the signifying practices and effects of subjecthood that surround him, his public and distorted, strategic and suffered presence as self or subject, and the elusive, floating qualities of subjectivity that subtend them all. Critical work on Pasolini already has a complex history in its own right, partly for reasons suggested ill the Prefacc, and partly because of the well-marshalled flow of int()rmation (e.g. biogTaphies hy Naldini, 1989; Schwartz, 19(P; Siciliano, 1l)llIa) and of unpublished or unavailable texts (sce Bibliography I) since 1<)75. 3 Perhaps the earliest milestones in the critical history were Ferretti, J()74 (first published in 1964), who posited a series of structuring pathetic dualities echoing Pasolini's own 'passione e ideologia', and Asor Rosa, H)f)() (hrst published in H)65), who articulated a criti4ue of Pasolini's aestheticizing (pseudo-)populist ideology. These two accounts set the parameters of many later readings. In the early H) 80S, a number of rigorow. studies appeared which reassessed his written !l'uvre as a whole, displaying a particular, archaeological interest in his Friulan period (Brevini, {()8rb; Rinaldi, 1982; Santato, H)8o; and cL Gonion . H)94, 35-7). These remain thc most convincing g'lohal accounts of Pasolini's work outside cinema, and the most prominent interlocutors or this book. 4 11owever, with the exception ofRinaldi, it could be said that they all treat Pasolini as a more or less passive and un problematic object of analysis. By contrast, some studies of his cinema . often fi'om outside Italy and inf(mlled by contemporary developments in film theory, and the few readings sensitive to theories or homosexuality, have tended to tread more carefully and more subtly when dealing with the complex self-constructing and self-framing dynamics that pervade his work (e.g. Casi, 1990<1; De Laurctis, 1984; Willemen, 1977, p. vi). Even the latter, however, have tended not to follow through their occasional insights in this direction. 3 Surveys of Pasolini's reception arc 10 he tClUnJ in Borghcllo, 1l)77; Martellini, "J7I); RinalJi, H)8z, 3<)<)-423; Santato, ,<)80,325-55; and Voza, '<)90. 4 Scc also Fortini, '993.
THE WORK OF SUBJECTIVITY
7
If what follows strikes a balance between close attention to the contexts and conditions ofPasolini's work, and an alertness to the theoretical and practical complexities that colour any monographic portrait ofPasolini, it will have at least succeeded in its preliminary aim to qualify the dominant approaches to his work. Before describing the general shape the book will take, a note on omissions is in order. There are two important areas of Pasolini's artistic work which receive less than complete treatment here: his prose narrative (with the notable exception of Petrolio in Part IV) and his drama (with the cxception of a handful of references to his versedramas, mostly in Part 11). There is of course much to be said both about the processes of autobiography and self-inscription in his narrative, and about the extraordinary mythicization of impulses and desires in his verse-dramas. Indeed the latter in many ways constitute a condensation and redeployment of the fundamental structuring patterns of his poetry. But, as will, r hope, become clear, fluidity of form is an essential prerequisite of lhe work of subjectivity in Pasolini, and such a conjunction is invariably identified in his work with a privileged, indeed mythicized notion of the poetic. I lis narrative and his drama both evolve as episodes in that vertiginous experiment in form. Both represent importanl moments in the genesis of new, hybrid poetic forms, whose nature, however, I have found to be most radically and consistently charted in his poel ry and in his 'cinema of poetry'. Perhaps only with Pelrolio did he conceive ora f()rm in prose that might begin to make such generic distinctions rcdundant. 5 The book is divided into t(Hlr parts, of which the first three are intended to stand as a sort of triptych, and the fourth as a closing reflection. The (irst three explorc the work of subjectivity in the public, poetic and cinematographic areas of Pasolini's (l!uvre respectively. In chronological terms they run concurrently, from the H)40S (or the late 1950S in the case of his cinema) through to his death in 11)75, and should thus be read as complementary and mutually integrating. 'Pasolini's Public Work' (Part I) encompasses his varied activities and activism in public, cultural arenas, broadly understood. It makes its first approach through a survey ofhis career as an artist and intellectual (Ch. I), before moving on to examine his particular involvements in a number of journals, magazines and newspapers throughout his life, and the modes of 5 Much important work has heen done on both Pasoiini', narrative and his drama. On narrative see e.g. ,10 important recent stuuy, Ward, [995: and on urama, narheri Squarotti, [<)80; (:asi, [990C; Groppali, [979; Van Watson, [989.
8
INTRODUCTION
public self-representation enacted in them (Ch. 2). The analysis concludes with a tracing of the general contours of his public selves as they have emerged in the preceding two chapters, and the public roles identified here as dominant throughout his career spill over into every other aspect of his work and of this book (Ch. 3). 'Poetry: A Movement of Forms' (Part 11) takes on the corpus of Pasolini's poetic work, the defining locus of his private self-contemplation, in a series of four complementary cross-sections (Chs. 4-7). Each follows a key aspect of selfrepresentation in poetry as a thread running from his Friulan dialect lyrics of the H)40S through to his strident, politically charged antipoetry of the HOOS. 'Cinema: Tracking' the Subject' (Part Ill), examines his turn to cinema, in his theory and his practice, as a continuation but also a prof(lllnd alteration of the concerns of both his 'public work' and his poetry. Each of its six chapters analyses an aspect of filmic discourse, in order to build up a multi-layered picture of subjectivity at work in a medium poised, as he saw it, between its collective and commercial constraints and its liberating referential immediacy. Finally, 'Unfinished Endings' (Part TV), offers a reading' ofthe long, unfinished novel PClrolio, as a conclusion and summation of Parts I-TIT. Petro/io's own rhetoric, coupled with its accidental and willed incompleteness, reatlirms the necessarily unending motion of f()rms of suhjectivity that best embodies Pasolini's poetic masque. I jonel Trilling's enigmatic description of the self's history as 'shadows in a dark land', quoted at the outset of this Introduction, is borne oul in all that t()llows: indeed, Pasolini's work strongly sugg'Csts that the enigma of selthood is greater still, that the shadows of its history arc restless, moving' shadows.
PART I
Pasolini's Public Work
Culture is something quite different from encyclopedic knowledge. It is oq\"anization, the discipline of onc's own inner sett; it is a coming to awareness of one's own personality, it is the conquest of a higher eonseiollsness, through which one can arrive at an understanding of onc's own historical value. (Antonio Gramsci)
AT AN early stage in his career, Pasolini intuited the indissoluble and traumatic link between the private and the publie that determines both the expression of selfhood and the relation of self to reality. The career that he followed as an intellectual and artist represented a continual interrogation of that founding intuition, often taken to paroxysmic extremes. He constantly laid himself, or versions of himself bare, with only moment,try pause occasioned by the dangers of going public through an ideologically fraught 'culture industry' (Adorno, 1991), with its appropriating mcchanisms of exchange, promotion, production and integration. Indecd, Pasolini's cvolution from provincial, romanticizing young poct to Roman intellectual, tilm-director and notorious polemicist lits almost paradigmatically into a history ofItaly's post-war cultural transli)rmation, following the so-called 'economic miracle' and tht: transition to a t:onsumerist culture in the late 1950S and early I ()60s (Asor Rosa, H)7S; J,anaro, H)9z). Blurring the boundary between willed and eot:rccd self-cxposure, his guiding maxim seems to have been 'nt:ver bt: afraid mhcrc you speak' (AA.VV., H)77, 87). And all the whilc he struggled to sustain the rhetoric of innocence and authenticity in which the illusion of a strong, stahle subjectivity must be grounded. This laying hare of thc self in a public arena became the dominant paradigm of his activit y, and its rhetoric is of central importam:e in ulldnstamling his role as a cultural operator. This first part sets out to cxaminc that rhetoric ami thus the workings of subjectivity in Pasolini's public interventions. Its first chapter sketch cs tht: evolution of his Clrcer as a writer, intellectual and cinc-aste, following his self-positioning within or against various cultural metiers and industries, each with their own cultural, linguistic, industrial, and communicative characteristics. Its second and principal chapter analyses in detail the seven major moments in Pasolini's rich career as an essayist ami journalist between 1942 and 1975. And finally, the third chapter draws out /i·om the first two a series of almost talismanic roles which characterize and structure Pasolini's public self-expression and at times aftiml him the possihility ofsuhordinating the arena to expressiveend'i.
I
The Contours ofa Career Letters and documents of Pasolini's teenage life in the late 1930S and early 1940S show all the traits of a highly traditional literary formation: diaries, notebooks, passionate exchanges of juvenilia with friends, accounts of feverish formative readings, proliferating, eclectic projects for essays, books, paintings and treatises (e.g. Lellere, i. J 5; cf Naldini, 1989,24-48; Schwartz, 1992, 118-32). Such activity was fed by a largely unproblematized appetite for literary success,' and by a mutually supportive circle of friends. A marginally larger stage was provided by his involvement in Holognese journals of the fascist student organizations GUt' ('Gruppi Universitari Fascisti') and GlL ('Giovani Italiani del Littorio') (see Ch. 2 §J), and by occasional contributions in still larger arenas, such as the international youth conference in Weimar that he attended in 1942. Hut the primary arena ofliterary exchange tc)r Pasolini was a private con fraternity, and its most important early project was the unrealized journal, Hredi (I leirs), whose conservative ag'enda was to revisit the literary canon. };'redi was planned in HJ4I-2 with Francesco J ,eonetti, Roberto Roversi-·--later co-tc)lJnders with Pasolini of Officina-and T,1Iciano Serra, and although it was tc)iled by wartime paper shortages, it did lead to the private publication in Bologna ofPasolini's first collection of poems, in liriulan dialect, Poesie a Casarsll, in H)42.2 The t()lJnding moment ofPasolini's literary career can be traced back to Poesie Cl Casllnll, but not so much to its publication as to an extraordinary review in the Corriere del Ticino by the already influential critic Gianfranco Contini, who called it 'la prima accessionc dclla letteratura "dialcttale" all'aura della poesia d'oggi, e pcrtanto una modificazione in profonditi di quell'attributo' (the first accession of 'dialect' literature into the aura of contemporary poetry, and hence a profound I A significant motifofPasolini's later work is its traumatic ironizatioll of such an heroic notion of success, ('la viLtoria'), and failure ('la sconfitta') (sec Ch. 4 helow). 2 The others in the group also published collections of poems: Leonctti, Sop", unll padulll estate; Rovcrsi, Poesie; and Scrra, Can/a tij memorie.
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13
modification of that aspect, Contini, 1943). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Contini's approval and Pasolini was astonished, in all innocence: Chi potra mai descriverc la mia gioia? Ho saltato e ballato per i portici di Bologna: c quanto alla soddisfazione mondana cui ci si pUG aspirare scrivendo versi t... 1ormai posso benissimo fame sempre a meno. (Quoted in Siciliano, 19 8Ia,86.) (who could ever describe my joy? I jumped and danced under the porticos of Bologna: and as hlr the social gratification that writing poetry might bring L... ] I could now do without it tilf ever)
His relatively recent and somewhat eccentric interest in dialect 3 was confirmed and redoubled, and it remained a flexible and distinctive vessel f())· his poetic development in the fi:Jllowing decade and more, as he moved from hermeticist to popular-fi:llkloric anu then to politicocultural forms. But more importantly, he was very quickly noticeu: Antonio Russi, AlfiJI1s0 Gatto+ and the Bollcltino ddla socield ji/ologica friulana all reviewed the book, and the latter led to a long and at times difficult involvement with 'official' organs of Friulan culture (sce Un paese di lelllpomli c tli primulc). This, alongside his teaching activity in and around Casarsa after his night there in the autumn of U)43, leu in turn to a committed interest in Friulan language and poetry and its autonomous culture- -he set up his own Friulan 'Academiuta' in 1945 -- and thereby to his brief period of militancy in the pcr (Partito eomunista italiano), from H)47 until his expulsion in H)49. At each stage of his carly career, t hercfi:)re, the contours of a public persona, and of a political position-'Ieft-wing' Ltscism, anti-fascism, reg'ionalism, or communism-remain determined by a literary practice rooted in the intimacy of private exchange or expression. The dominant register in his poetry up to U)50 remains the diaristic (sce Diarii, I pianli, and Dal Diario ([(J4.,)-f(J47) ). Conlini's patronage was instrumental, in the years after 1947, in aiding Pasolini's entry into a largely Roman intellectual world, which would fi:Jrm the basis of his literary milieu and his career after his move to Rome in 1950. For example, Contini offered an introduction to the journal Fiera letteraria, and Pasolini began to publish reviews, poems 3 i'a,olini only began writing in Friulan a short time bci()rc publication ofthc book (I,dtere, i. xxxvi-xxxix). lIe had planned an Italian collection entitled 1 (on/illi, some o[whose poems are now in H2, 1937-544 Russi's review was in Primalo, 1 July 1943 (now in RHssi, 1967,38-43); Gatto's ill La molll, I, 1943.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
and stories there, and then in several other literary journals, including Paragone, which was edited by his former professor Roberto Longhi, himself closely associated with Contini. Contini also arranged a meeting with Giorgio Bassani, another former pupil of Long hi's, who would provide a route for Pasolini into screenplay work, and become an important literary friend, leading to encounters with Attilio Bcrtolucei, Alberto Moravia and Eisa Morante, among others. It was in turn Bertolueei who suggested Pasolini as editor of an anthology of dialect poetry for Guanda, leading' to Poesia dialettale def Novt'ccnlo (U)S2) amI Can:::;ol1it're ilaliano (H)SS).5 And Contini also directed Pasolini's literary eff()rts, including poems that would later t()nn part of /, 'usigmilo, towards v,uiolls minor literary prizes, several of which he won, in the tc)Uowing years (Schwartz, 1<)<)2, I7()-XS, 252-6<). Thus Pasolini underwent a gradual, overlapping immersion in three very different intellectual milieux-Ihe Udine-based Friulan cultural amI political enclave, the group of youths under his aegis in the .·/wdI'1IliUla and in Ihe classroom, and the Roman intelligentsia. Whal is striking is Ihe exlenl 10 which his rapport with alllhree is driven hy an innocenl amhilion and self-conl1dence. Each is experienced as liTe from economic constrainl and untroubled by lhe variel y of instilulions and j(m] involved. Such eclectic activism marks Ihe origin of a romantic assumpl ion which will characterize Pasolini\ puhlic self·t(IJ·nlations lhroughout his career: tha t intimate self-expression, even if hosl ile 10 others, transcends iIs location. An emblem of I"his ulllrouhled public engag'ement, and self· definition, is discernible in Ihe arch lillc of an article attacking Ihe tradil ional picl uresque idiom of Friulan poetry: 'Tranquil/a pofc11Ii{(l sullo Zorutti' (A calm po/cmic on Zonmi, emphasis added: rif,crlll, f () October 1<)46; in Un/west: tli /cm/lllrafi /' ili primllfe, 2[4-17). Pasolini published f(lLlr piaquelle volumes of poetry bel wecn 1945 and 1949 (sce llihliogTaphy f.I),;I1 private expense, as well as numerous single compositions in journals (Bz, 15X4-63(l). Such small-scale projects continued weIl beyond his move to Rome in January 1950, t(lllowing his prosecution for propositioning, dismissal from teaching and expulsion from the PCI. Despite the trauma of this experience, and the profound loss of innocence which it entailed, making his homosexuality 5 The former was co-edited by Mario Dell' Arco, although it was almost entirely l'asolini's work (Lettere, i. 468-9). A third, less successful, anthology appeared in "J6r, co-cdited with Moravia and Bertolucci [or Garzanti, but again with the detailed commentary by Pasolini, entitled Stllt/ori della reallli dall'VIII al -"OX ,.ewlll. The three would latcr collaborate Oil NlIllvi argometlti (see Ch. 2 §s).
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IS
public for the first time, the capacity for literature to maintain a cordon sanitaire around self-expression survived. His poetry, still in both Friulan and Italian, continued to be personal, diaristic, published in plaquettes, journals or not at all; am] narrativc projects, many of which had been conceived and written in Friuli ('La meglio gioventu', later to become If SIIf{110 tii una cosa; Aui impuri and Amado mio; 'I parlanti'; Romans), proliferated, on occasion published in literary journals, as he moved towards the Roman sketches which would constitute Ragazzi tii vita, Una vi/a vio/enta and Ali daKli oahi azzurri.(i As if to emphasize the continuing intimacy, /Itti imflUri and Amatio mill were largely derived fi-om Pasolini's own diaries, the so-called 'Quaderni rossi' (extracts used in Naldini, 'I)SI), 6-126); and the diary /(lfITI in poetry continued in RII111a IIJSO. Diarlo (published in H)60). All this activity demonstrates the survival of a broad freedom or lack of restraint in the essentially private expression of a personal voice. Going public is still secondary to the acl of self-expression; the trauma of subjectivity is located and explored in I he movement from sclflo language, if anywhere, rather than in the confi-ontation with the locus of acts oflanguage. J.ater this rclal ion will be traumatically and irredeemably reversed, when, to paraphrase Forlini, H)9J, 227, he gave his kecnest attention to his public rather than privale pronouncements, and ("he possibility of unproblemalic, private expressivilY survived only as a mourned residue. Despite SHch continuity, I he period 1950-4 also saw the emergence of signs of at rans/ilrmal ion in relal ions bel ween self and sites of expression. Pasolini slruggled to survive in awful private teaching posts in Rome, living with his mother (and later his Llther also) in run-down areas, first in the old Jewish ghetto and then in ("he grim periphery (the 'borgate'), which were to become personally and artistically paramount (ill· him. Poverty represented a grave threat to unmediated selfexpression, fracluring the idea of lilerary production as eclectic, dilettante and autonomous (i·om economic parameters which had determined much of his work, even his politicizing work heretofore. Aesthetic expression in high cultural till·ms could no longer bc simply a compliant instrument hlr the subject's narcissistic self-explorations. But this alienation from 'pure', high culture was, fCI/· Pasolini, immensely seductive and liberating, bound up with his headlong immersion in the erotics of poverty, as shown with suggestive clarity in a letter to Nico Naldini of Fehruary 1950: 6 On Pasolini's IirSl encounter with Rome, sce lIaranski, \()IISb; Dc Nanli~, ")77,67-103; Thornson, 11)86.
16
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
CaroN., ricordi il protagonista di Sotto il sole di Roma? Ebbene suo fratello, di diciassctte anni, molto piu bello di lui edivenuto il mio amico. Ci siamo incontrati ieri sera per opera di un dio. Non ho dormito niente, sono ancora tutto tremante. Mi occorreranno dei soldi: prendi un paceo di libri (edizioni Laterza, filosofi) e con una scusa vai a Padova a vender ne per 3 0 4 mila: immediatamente, e poi spediscimi i soldi l ... ] Roma cdivina. Bisogna assolutamente che lavori e che guadagni molto. Ciao P. P. (Le/ll!rl:, i. 407) (Dear N., remember the lead in Sotto if sole di Roma? Well, I've made friends with his brother, who's I7 and much more beautiful than him. We met last night through some divine stroke. I haven't slept at all, I'm still shaking all over. I'm going to need money: take a pile o[hooks (J .aterza philosophers), lind some ex·cuse and go to Padua and sell them for 3 or 4 tholls'lIld, allll thell send me the money [ ... 1 Rome is divine. I absolutely mllst work hard and earn some real money. Ciao (P.P.)
The urgent need for money is hound to the erotic impulse surrounding the discovery of a new world, and icons of [()flller cuhural value arc sacrificed to it. 'l~he resulting direction of his literary work, based on a sublime landscape (,Roma c divina'), represents an openltion of shifting, suhterranean absorption of thc ncw or the other which will recllr several times in his career. There is a weak analogy, commonly noted hy critics, between the Friulan peasantry and the Roman suh-proletariat (and later the poor of the Third World) in Pasolini's erotic and literary perceptions, just as there is between these and the isolated, private suhject. The weakness of the first analogy, however, shores up the strength ofthe second, and thus allows the locus and f()rm ofliterary language to alter strikingly without undermining its essentially private nature. Hence, the stories which will make up Ruga:::.:::.i di vilu relocate literary discourse and language in the mock-epic, erotic guest of the boys fi)r the grail of 'la grana' (cash), and this voicing of a new economy of writing recentres the marginalized narrating voice also. The key to the implicit shift in the cultural and subjective status of his work here lies precisely in that primitive notion of economic exchange and its link to the erotic. Throughout Pasolini's career, the pattern of shifting absorption of the other is paralleled in the radicallcaps in his conception of culture, from the early aspiration to traditional 'high' culture, to his absorption of
THE CONTOURS OF A CAREER
17
Gramscian ideas of national-popular culture along with the broadening vision of his dialect researches in the 1950S, and then to the 'aristocratic' abandonment ofGramsci and increasing interest in an anthropological definition of culture as a defining system of habits and customs (see se 45,211-·-12). The moment of immersion in the 'borgate' produces the first major shift ofthis kind. Two events in 1954 mark a turning-point in the modes of going public in Pasolini's career: the publication of Meglio, by Sansoni, sponsored by Longhi's Paragone, and his first screenplay collaboration, with Giorgio Bassani, on Mario Soldati's La donna del jiume.7 The former, 'da considerare la mia prima opera pubblicata' (to be seen as my first published work, I,eIlere, i. cxxix), transformed the scale and nature of Pasolini's literary work, effecting a move away from the artisanal, interpersonal subject-reader rapport, towards a public, mediatC<.1 and in the final analysis commercial onc. Similarly, the latter, as with the advance ofL. 50,000 oflered by Garz.lI1ti fix R aga.zzi di vila, merged his incomesource (previously teaching) with his aesthctic production: Naldini, quoting l'asolini in pari, describes screenwriting as 'questo lavoro improvviso, che "per luCfo" andava sognando dOl anni' (this unexpected work, 'filr lucre', that he had been dreaming or lilr years, I,el/ere, i. cxxviii).x But again, scriptwriting brought frustrating problems of alienation from the industrially, collectively produced finished work: Illavo1"O di uno scrillore per il cinema pw\ essere bellissimo I . . . 1 Purrroppo si lavora in mezzo a !?:ente i~llOrante, stupid .. , chc non sa qllello cite vuole. Uno scrittore scene~~iatore non dovrehht.: neppllre sapere che csiste una produzione o un nolq~~io: dovrehhe lavorare col re!?:ista t.: hasta. (I,et/ere, i. cxxvii-cxxviii) (The work ofa screen-writer can he wondt.:rfllll ... 1But unfortunatdy we have to work with i~norant, stupid people who have no idea what they want. A writer of screenplays shouldn't even know that productions or hiring exist: he should work with the director and no onc dse.)
The period betwecn H)55 and 1960 is often touted as the moment when Pasolini held centre-stage in Italian literary culture, and as a moment he never managed to transcend. RaKazzi di vila achieved substantial critical acclaim, despite its prosecution for obscenity. It was caught up in the seminal debates over realism and nco-realism alongside Pratolini's Melello (1955), Visconti's Senso (1954), the (rc)publication 7 For Pasolini's olher screenplays, see Belti and Thovazzi, II}BI}, 203-5. 8 In Pasolini's correspondence with Livio Garzanti after 1954 there is COllstant tension between the demamls of screenplay-work ('il mio lavoro falso', my false work, Lellere, ii. 388) and literary projects which suffer as a result: scc Lellere, ii. 102, 113, 126-7,232,274.
18
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
ofGadda's Quer pastiaiaccio brutto de via Merulana (1957), and the decidedly anachronistic best-seller Tomasi di Lampedusa's JI gattopardo (1958) (Cadioli, 198 1,46--51; Ferretti, 1979). The journal he co-edited, Officina, offered a genuinely fresh approach to the politics of writing (Ch. 2 §3) and Pasolini became a major interlocutor for a large number of literary and political journals. And Ceneri won praise as an historically vital departure in poetry from the post-war impas~e hetween ncorealism and second-generation hermeticism (Brevini, 198 I b, 199-200). In other words, Pasolini was suddenly in grcat demand. This 'marketahle' demand determined the appearance ofL'us~~ll()/() in 1958, the year after Certeri and over ten years after its initial drafting as a collection;() guaranteed immediate agrecmcnt from Garzanti fi)r a sequel to Ragazzi di vita; and made viable a collection ofliterary-critical articles, Pa.l".liolll: l' itie%gia, also with Garzanti. This meteoric promotion into the ranks of the literary-intelleclual dite both limited anu protected the stability and autonomy or the lirstperson voice. The most telling limit is perhaps ideological: the elite promotes a patlern of intervention, ofpuhlic pseudo-dialogue in which both the primary position expressed and the expressivity of allY utlerance arc attenuated. One oflhe damning' erilicisms Icvelled al Of/hillll by l'erretti is precisely Ihal its prestig'iolls g'uesl contributors (almosl all contacts of Pasolini's) were accepleu hc/()l'e any inlclleclual or ideological criteria fi)r Iheir co-opera Iion were considered (Ferrett i, I (n 5, 33-'47). But I he dite also protecls ils own. The wil nesses f()I'lhe defCnce in the trial of Rlll',a:::.:::.i di 1!ita (4July 1I)5{,) included Carlo Bo, Pielro Bianehi and written testimony fj'OIll Ungareui, Contini, Dc Roberlis and Schiaffini-antl Pasolini's co-dc/endanl Livio Ciarzanli. Thus, at least hcf()re H)58-1), he paradoxically continued to separale thc lilerary as a safe-haven, even when threatened on a juridical or political plane. If the scale of intimacy has changed radically 1"0 encompass a hroad Iraditional intellectual caste, his absorption of it has not seeming')Y threatened the pattern of privacy shored lip by a delimited public exchange. The ambitions of the young Pasolini to succeed in the arena oftraditional high culture, then, are fulfilled to a remarkable degree, but at that very moment of apotheosis, signs of fracture in the suhject-culture 9 There had been" series of abortive attempts to find a publisher filr }.'ltsiKIIO/t!. Contini ha<.l tried as early as '947, as had Bassani, through his involvement with HOlleK"e oscure. It callle close to publication by both Monda<.lori al\<.I Bompiani in 1950, with the help ofGiacinto Spagnoletti and Vittorio Sereni, before appearing in '958, by Garzanti's concession, with Longanesi, where Naldini worke<.l. Scc Lellae, i. 381-1)6,6[0; Lellere, ii. 364-73.
THE CONTOURS OF A CAREER
rapport appear and mark the inception of a different, more complex and fragmented public work. After I958-9, for a combination of historical and subjective reasons, he beg'ins to be distanced from the high collective of intellectuals, and to perceive the institutions of culture and its denizens as alien. The traumatic end of Officina in 1959 broadly coincides with a series of events including the death of his father, the ambivalent reception of Una vi/a vio/cnta and the subsequent failure to complete a planned trilog'y of Roman novels, and a certain loss of poetic vein after Ccncri. The end or Officina also shortly precedes the move into film-direct ing (AuaIlOrlC, 19(1l), which marks a fundamental break with organs of traditional high culture as a primary means for selfexpression and self-location, and a loss ofprestig;e, ofcastc solidarity in thosc circles. Volponi, ((n7, 19, for example, suggcsts that cinema diverted 1~lsolini's at t ention fi'om the 'serious' pursuits of reading and writing. Thc t wo major poet ry collect ions after [(ll I----Rusa (1964) and TraSU11lilllllr (1971)- were rclatively nq.,-kcted or disliked (Brevini, I981 b, J51, 504). Siciliano makes the point in reference to the reception ofthe complex book, '/I'orl'lI/{{: it was n:ceivcd hy crit ics I . . . 1 as iCit welT;1 film t n:at mcnt allllnot hing; else: the stratagem ora worried ex novelist, his cye fixed to the viewfinder, intended to up his profile in the literary arl'11a. (Il)Xla, 3XI)
As if to con firm this (!;rowin!',' host ilit y, I'asolini Jinall y (dl out wit h l,ivio Garzanti over what he saw as the poor promotioll of Ji'aslIlIllll7tlr, Hi;' and Ca/dcl"/iu, and in unJ shifted alk(!;iance 10 Einaudi (Siciliano, 1981a, 440). 10 From 1()60 to un5, Pasolini was more or less constantly planning, shooting', often durin!',' extensive periods oftravd, or promoting his own film projects, whilst his published literary work became more sporadic and of a different nature. The collective process and pragmatic and technical constraints of film-production, with its reliance on the enabling figure of the producer and his budg-ct, and on promotion and distribution, inevitahly trans(ilrmed Pasolini's relation with the aesthetic, as well as altering- radically the scale and nature of his audience, not only for his film work, but also hii-> other activities. The implications of this extraordinary move into film tilr the work of subjectivity will be examined in detail in Part Ill, but here three broad points can usefully be made. First, Pasolini had relatively little difficulty in adjusting to the 10 LL was however (1ublisheu by Garzanti, and Schwartz, tended to return to Garzanli with Pe/mlio.
I<)92,
666, suggests that he in-
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PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
strictures of production. After an initial failure to secure backing for Accattone from Fellini's company Federiz, he was. well served by a series of loyal producers, despite constant legal and financial difficulties. 1 I Indeed, the banning and/ or prosecution of nine of his commercially released films, with charges often directed against both director and producer, which dragged on for years (Betti, 1977), seems only to have reinforced his rapport with producers. As with Ragazzi di vita, trials were often occasions of public displays of solidarity, as whcn Edoardo Dc Filippo dramatically appeared in a Naples court to defend I racconli di Canterbury (Schwartz, 1992,590-3). Furthermore, with some significant exceptions, he felt well able to control the work of productionfrom actors to editing to music and costumes -to manipulate film as a viable medium for self-expression. \2 Second, the tensions created by the problems of film-production and mass audiences were exploited and promoted by Pasolini in thcory and in practice, and used as vehieles for that very process of self-inscription which they would seem to undermine, thereby maintaining the model of shifting absorption noted above. F'inally, the relationship between poetry (and other written work) amI film evolves into an intricate and fertile field of exploration, within which both arc transformed. Ilis tirst three films, Aaatlone, Mamma Roma and I.a rico/lit, tap into the same 'borgata' world as his prose narrative; sections of Rosa and '/'rasumallar arc setdiaries; EE theorizes a 'cinema di poesia'; and the vcrsc-1Tagcdies begun in 1966 inspired the myth films made bctween 1<)67 and Hn I (fdipo, Teorema, Prmile and Metlea). All these examples show the two media constantly moulded to each other's contours. Indeed the bulk of Pasolini's published work between 1<)60 and 1975 is partly or wholly determined by film. In particular, the series of published screenplays amI set-diaries (sec BibliogTaphy 1.4) reprel)ent a new model for the book, a transitional, f()rward-projected work-in-progress, preliminary to the realized object, the film itself (see Ch. I I). This f()rmal characteristic runs throughout Rosa and Trasumanar, and works sllch as I.a divina I I Alfred .. Bini produced Pasolini's (ilms, except I he episodes I.a mbbia, I,a terra v;.
Salo). 12 Of the various unrealizcd projecls, only 11 padre seivagx;o and Paolo appear to have been blocked by production objections. In the first case, the trial of La ricolla was to blame, and in the second personal matters and the budget (Sa'l Pllolo, 169). As with the 'Orestcia' project, the problems arc more practical than prejudicial.
S""
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21
mimesis arc little but work-in-progress. Indeed by repeatedly offering such texts for publication, the aesthetic status of publication itself is further modified. These contingent works, rooted in the future, claim a different vitality for the word from the closed, monumental quality of the traditional published work. By contraf>t, works of a private, more straightforwardly literary or textual nature published after 1960 tend to show a weakened and rcgressive quality. He reworks an early Friulan novel into Il sogno di una wsa (I (62), collects fragments of his Roman prose in Ali dagli occhi azzurri (I (lIS), and publishes the collcction of essays EE (1972) more as a gesture of closure than of polemic: 'si presenta come disperatamente inattuale' (it is offered as desperately out of date, Lettere, ii. cxli). In each case the present explorations of the subject are only implicit at best, and going public is now synonymous with retrospection. To take only the literary texts of the period 1973-5, Nuova is a reworking of Meglio, La divina mimesis a project largely elaborated in 1963-5, and Caldel"lin, a play lirsl written in [()66·-7. These are nostalgic, not culturally presenl interventions, even if the nostalgia is perverted, as in Nuova. The subject in dialogue with its own history, as opposed to the presenl, is indicative of isolation caused by ideological and cultural conditions, ami a crisis in the efficacy of the published literary work as previously conceived. The latter now inhabits a sort of posthumous afterlife, as both Nuova and I,a divina mimesis metaphorically express, caught in a Illetahistorical or anachronistic stasis (Sanguineti, 1(75). A parallel loss of vitality, and offaith in public dialogue, can bc seen in the abandonmcnt of Gramscian aspirations to a 'national-popular' cinema altcr (()67, and a withdrawal into a 'cincma impopolarc' (Betti and Thovazzi, H)Xl), 10<); f f 273-80); and in the bitter ironization of the possible autonomy of poetry or its origin in a stable subjective voice which runs through ii-asumanar. At thc samc time, however, after 1967-X, he remained immensely tCrtile in untinished or unpublished written work (/,cllerc, ii. 624-6). Beyond the plays, translations and stories eventually available in book t(lrm (incluuing the massively ambitious Pelmlio), numerous unrealized film projects and a planned series of Greek or Greek-style tragedies (Leltc1"e, ii. 607, 644), his unpublished works from this period include, among others, songs and plays for Laura Betli, a ballet with songs entitled Vivo e coscienza, a verse noveIl screenphlY Bestemmia (now in part in B2, 2287-93), a collection of over 100 sonnets for Ninetto Davoli, L 'hobkv del sonetto (B2, 234 I -8), and a 27-page poem-sequence entitled F.
22
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
In the last years of his life, then, Pasolini's cultural operations moved ever further away from traditional forms of high culture and its elite caste, into a more dynamic, protean and dispersed mode. His public profile, national and international,13 grew exponentially, due to his involvement in cinema, and his appearance in scandal after scandal, often involving prosecution, and in polemic after polemic, in various masscirculation newspapers, mag'azines, and journals. Hc was still an important figure amongst the vibrant and culturally powerful Roman intellectual milieux centred on Moravia (Siciliano, I<)9J).lIis intensely controversial and increasingly current interventions-whether on Dante, on semiology, on the barbarisms of the new techno-consllmerist Italian language, on the weaknesses ofthe 'neo-avanguardia', anti then the J<)6S student protests (all in j:"/:", passim), or on the wrong's of ab ortion, social homogenization, the 'new l:lscism' ofthe Christian Democrat governing class (Se, j,r), or on the sexual-social and thus ideological purity of the Third World-all provoked hostile response from every quarter. The responses were often int()rmed by his constant conflict with judicial authority and by the barely suppressed homophobia of so many quarters of the broad cultural and political arena. I lis position simultaneously fragmented vertically, into 'lower', massproduced culture, and horizontally, across a range of contingent interventions (reviews, preLlces, promotions, hook series, film festivals, interviews, occasional writing 14) into a dizzying maelstrom of activity ami image. 'I'his was paralleled hy an increasing'ly frustrating awareness of a disjuncture between himself or his aesthetic trajectory, and that of the booming culture industry spawned by nco-capitalism in which he operated so prominently. And in another, final attempt at a synthesis of his notion ofculture and his notion or project ion of seHhood, I his problem became an ever more traumatic concern openly explored in his work. To adapt Umberto Eco's f()rmulation (I':co, Hi)4), Pasolini's experience of the fi'acture between selfhood and culture evolved in the final period of his life towards a precarious position of apocalyptic integration. His death and the immediate responses to it (GonIon, 1995a) thus merely set the seal on an extraordinary public rhcl"oric and role which his career in public had moulded in all its ambivalent energy. IJ Scc e.g. his encouIller wilh Alien Ginsherg(LC/lnc, ii. ('J 1-3); or I he first ,1,seSSlllenls or him in Brilain (Macdonald, ")()(); Stack, ul)(); Wallin~ton, I()ll<). 14 Sce e.g. L'o"o!"/' del/'jllllia, an accollnl ora Irip 10 India with Mora,i. and Morante wrirten for J/giorno and puhlishcd by I ,onganesi in 1<)62 to exploit the marketability orPasolini's name, again Ihrollgh Naldini. Moravia's diary was also puhlished as Un'idea delf'l"di". Sec Bongie, 1<)91, 2oH-·IO; Golino, I 'IllS, 241-.1.
2
Projects in Journalism Over the course of his allult career, b'om H)42 to 197 S, l'asolini concentrated much of his journalistic and essaying activity in the f()llowing seven journals or cultural arenas, ami this chapter examines in each of fhem particular rhetorical practices anll ideolog'ical parameters of selfexpression: I. The journals of Clscist youth organisations, 1 ()42--3. 2. The cuitunl and regional politics ofFriuli, 1943-'9. 3· 0lliut/lI, I (ISS'(), 4· Vic tlllli1'{', 19()O'-S· 5. NlIl17Ji argolllcllli, 19()6--7S· 6. Tcmpo il/lIslralll, Il)M! 70, 7. Corril'fL' dl'l/a Sl'ra (and otll(:rs), 1973-S.'
2. I.
nil' ]ollrtla/s II(FIISl'isl
YOllth Orglllli:::'llI ions, I (N2 .)
Pasolini's involvement in two Bolof!,"llese st udent periodicals, Architravc and If SI'IIlU:ill, organized hy (iU F ami (JIJ. respectively, was relatively limitcd, all houf!,"h he was oflicially 'vice cOllsulcnte' (vice consultant) of the latter and enthusiastically supported the group of slullents who produced it. 'I 'he journals were two of a large number of similar smallscale operations which characterized a late flourishing of youth culture encouraged by the t:lscist g-overnment, allll in particular by the Minister I
, These cvi
5 43, 4S' 2)_ Sec l'.J~, 1'0rticII ddlll mortl' It" " selection of such an ieles from "142 III "171 . Several journals were ref(ul •• r, lonf(-term collaborators: IJtl./i"ra kUtTaritl, frolH" May 1<)47 arlicic, ~L'isJlirazionc nci cOlltclnporanci' to a November "174 inlcrview, 'Q~leslo cinema "scdleralo" '; Pari/gm1l" which published poems !'rom 'L'Appennino' (now in H" '7SH4) 10 '11 mondo Sir!vato dOli ragazzini' (Ill, H60-7H), and his iII-faled allempls OIl I hnte crilicism in 19('S ·6 (I.lter ill 1,/:' HS-125; sce Garboli, '96S; Magrini, It)H(,; SCf(rc, "llS); and Rina-,,,ilil, which was Ihe arena lilr an important dehate Oil Ihe 'questionc delta linf(ua', prompted by Pasolini's article 'Nu()ve questioni linf(uistichc' (sce Cadioli, 1911S, IS-107; Segre, 11)66), In "174, he even had a short-lived film-review column with Italian Playlm)!.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
for National Education, Giuseppe Bottai. 2 In practice, it provided a focus for a radical 'fascismo di sinistra' (left-wing fascism), which opened the path for many young intellectuals towards outright antifascism. The group of students in Bologna were no exception. For Pasolini, they constituted a first entry into public writing and into a cultural arena charged with complex ideological connotations, which nevertheless retained several characteristics of intimate, private exchange. Neither the constraints nor the risks run were ever very great here, although tensions evidently grew with fascist authorities during 1943. Pasolini's handful of lucid articles, alongside several poetry ,md art reviews and poems, display a superficial acquiescence to the status quo, with submerged hints at a passive, non-do~'ll1atic resistance to fascism. He enters into the current debate over the role of the intellectuals, in particular during war, which had resurfaced at a national level in Bottai's vibrant journal Primato (sce Mangoni, ]()77). Despite or perhaps because of their relatively neutral rhetorical and ideological attitude, Pasolini's contributions retrospectively illuminate a model or subjective inscription which will underpin many of his future cultural and political interventions. The first important article, 'I giovani, I'attesa', in the opening issuc of l! Sctatcio, November 1942, addresses a commonplace of fascist intellectual dehate, the role and nature or youth in history and in fascist socicty. A mythology of youth will become onc of the most consistent and fundamental features of Pasolini's work, the principal locus where sexuality and ideology are established as the two dominant economics of self-cxpression, permanently reorganized into archetypal collision, and no single work from his earliest poetry to his final Lutheran letters omits it. This first confrontation with the theme consists of a bold, if rhetorically imprecise account of the young as caught in a transitional yet static pose: Coscicnti che, prima di csscre degni delle nostrc speranzc, dovremmo segretamente patire in intcnsid tllltc le distcsc cspericnzc di chi ci ha prccedut.o, non abbiamo nemmeno timore di ammettcre l'impotenza, 0, almeno l'.lCcrbit,j di questo nostro stato d'attesa. (49).1 (Aware that, before being worthy of our hopes, wc ought to suffer secretly and intensely all tbe extensive experiences of those who havc gone bcfi)re us, we 2 Bottai was responsible for the campaign, amI Galeazzo Ci.mo amI Mussolini himself, 'Principe della giovcntu' (Prince of the Young), were fervent supporters. Sec Addis Saba, 1973; Bertacchini, 1980, 148-6,; Folin and Quaranta, '977; Zangrandi, [()62. 3 Page references arc La Pasotini e '11 ScllIa;o'.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
25
have no fear even in admitting the impotence, or at least the bitterness of this our being in waiting.)
They are suspended in heroic hiatus between a past which must be suffered and a generational coming to fruition vaguely denoted as 'I'attuazione' (realization): (; ora posta in noi giovani la nuda responsabilit,\ di non tradire il nuovo senso della vita I ... J anzi di approfondirlo, seavarlo, ridonar\o alia storia come purificato attravcrso la completa attuazione. (50) (we the young now have in our hands the stark responsihility not to betray the new sense ofli/c I ... 1but to deepen it, to f~lthom its depths, to restore it to history as purjlied hy its complete realization)
There is certainly a thinly veiled political message here: the wait can only be fin· something other than I;lscism. But of more general importance is the perception of a cultural locus as a state of continuous becoming, o/"polenti
Fascistic imagery of pioneering physical f(>rl.:e and struggle is applied to metaphysical ends, to what he calls the 'duro mestiere, di conoscerci, e conquistarci [ ... J Fatica, estrema autoconoscenza, travaglio interiore individuale e eolleuivo' (harsh business of knowing and conquering ourselves I ... 1Toil, extreme self-knowledge, inner individual and 4 As already noted, imagery of victory recurs throughout Pasolini's poetry. There is a remarkably similar image of unknowing victory ('quando sarcmo vittoriosi, non 10 sapremo', when we arc victorious we shall not know it) in an article of revolutionary politics in Tempo illl/strato,7 Dec. 1l)68, now in I dia./of!,hi, 537.
26
PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
collective pain, 50). As was in many ways typical of intellectuals' responses to fascism, he is building an elusive position out of its vocabulary and rhetoric which is sublimated into a semi-poetic, confessional discourse. In this case, fascist rhetoric ofthe body and of youthful physical force is used as a means of intellectual posturing. Both his later realism and his phenomenological semiology offilm derive from just such a substitution of the bodily for intellectual praxis. Furthermore, the association sketched out here between a privileged materiality and a present, caught between nostalgia for the past amI despair for the future, develops into a recurrent pattern of self-inscription in his work. An indication of the ambivalent, but crucial role of the self, and its echoing of typical strategies of the time, in this putative youth manifesto is its forceful use of the first person plural to assert both a collective subjectivity of the young, speaking with onc voice, and an autonomy for the single subjective voice within the group. Such a strategy is not yet motivated by any traumatic imperative to shelter from a hostile 'other' in a stable group identity. On the contrary, here it is a declaration of infallibility in so t;lr as it confidently reconciles two apparently exclusive conditions, the individual and the collective. Nevertheless, it will be little altered by later trauma, when the group will become the marginalized (the poor) or the persecuted (homosexuals, Jews, blacks), and when the autonomy achieved will be precarious, to say the least. Here, the synthesis between the seH~ the group and vital reality is perfect: 'noi non vogliamo avere un nome: 0 meglio, ciascuno di noi vuole avere il proprio nome' (wc do not want a name: or rather, each of us wants his own name, 5 I). Pseudo-collectives, such as movements, arc superseded by rhetorical absolutes such as youth, or 'real life' , as shown in this typically cryptic analogy with ideological and national identity: Come nun siamo faseisli, se senza llIutare il senso della parola, possiamo ehiamarci italiani, cosi non vo~liamo chiamarci, ~enerica11lente, ne Illoderni ne tradizionalisti, se modernitn e Iradizione non significano altro che viva aderenza alia vita vera. (51 ) Oust as we an: not fascists, ifwithuut chan~ing the sense of the word, we can call ourselves Italians, so we do not want to call ourselves, generically, either modems or traditionalists, if modernity and tradition mean nothing other than vital adherence to true li fe)
By allying generational identity to such apparent absolutes as real life or nation, ambivalence is ironed out, as intermediary, contingent ideologies or cultural imperatives are diminished. Hence, the writer can
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
coherently represent a first person plural whilst working in isolation: 'noi sentiamo che la nostra ricerca ulteriore dovra svolgersi in solitudine' (we feel that our further research must be undertaken in solitude). As a final indicator of the untraumatic stasis brought about by a lack of agonistic division betwcen internal and external discourse, the article concludes with this statement of passive f()rbearance: non abbiamo proprio niente contro cui batterci I ... 1Non chiediamo altro, a noi stessi, che di esse re dolorosamente eoerenti alia nostra sofferta attesa, c, agli altri, di non ul11iliarci nei nostri altissimi impeg·ni. (52) (we have absolutely nothing to light against I ... 1 We ask nothing more of ourselves than to be painfully faithful to our grim wait, and of others not to humiliate us in our immense undertaking) The themes and strategies exemplified in '1 giovani, l'attesa' recur in and inform all Paso\ini's articles /()r fI Settlccio and /lrrhitrave. The idea of hiatus reappears in the poem-dialogue 'Consolazionl:' (66-8), in Ungarettian imagery of dawn reawakenings in '( :ultura italiana e eultura europea a Weimar' (68--7 I )'-' ·'I'incerta IlIce del\'alha che tllttavia una cerlezza del giorl1o' (the uncertain light of dawn that is still a surc herald of dayt ime), and in the dialogue 'I ,e piag'he illuminate':
c
1I Sun/o, IIIcdil 11 III/f), diu: '('ulli gli uomini dormono. Nel pallore mortale che precede il risveglio, anehc I'adulto cinerme, ma il sonno 10 prote{','ge. (77)
(The Saiut SlI)lS, lIIer/itlltiug: J\llmen are sleeping. In the mort',ll pallor that precedes reawakening, even the adult is ullarllll:d, hut sleep protects him) Chino il capo e obhedisco. '('ulta la mia esistenza si c ineencrita, poichc io credevo ilmio intnminato silcnzio IHe{','hiera, ma lul/>lrwllgdlll dici che era attesa. J\ndn') dove t II mi guidcrai, nei luoJ!,'hi dovc la Icnchra si alterna al sole luminosissimo, {','elando le lacrime ne! pai'.icnle riso degli uomini. (79) (I bow my head and ohcy. J\l1my existence has hurnt to ;Ish, sinec I helicved my endless silence to he prayer, hul' youllhc ."nhtll/g-dl say Ihat it was waiting_ I'll go where you (','uide mc, in I he places where Ihe dark alternates with the hrighl'est sunlight, freczin{',' men's tears in their p;llienllau~h.)
Imagery of transition and waiting is here again associated poetically with solitude. Although much of Pasolini's poctry of this periou is intensely aestheticizing,S there arc also instances of repeated imagery in certain Italian dialogue poems of [(.142-3 and the discursive language ofthese 5 Porsir {{ Casal'Sa, prerared in precisely this period (I,ellm:, i. '27-43; /1 Sl'laaio, S(" IJI, 172-3), is largely immune from politics.
28
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
articles. To give one powerful example, 'Ultimo discorso sugli intellettuali' (79-81) ends its argument on the role of the intellectuals with a long parenthetical 'prose poem' on the ineffable personal pain of war, which begins: '10 e mia madre sediamo dentro la stanza che ha protetto prima la sua infanzia e poi la mia [.. .]' (I and my mother are sitting in the room that once protected her as a child and now protects me [ ... l, 81). The stark juxtaposition of registers extends and elaborates the political case through the aesthetic. His articles of literary and artistic criticism, by contrast, adopt a moral rather than political language, exploring the notion of 'pure' poctry (52-5), again echoing current literary debates. This symbiosis facilitates Pasolini's man(cuvering between a humanist and darkly private view ofthe intellectual and a veiled anti-fascism, which increasingly became the norm in GUF and GIL activities in 1942-3.6 Towards the end of' I giovani, l'attesa' Pasolini had explicitly expressed his support for Bottai: 'ci sentiamo perfettamente sicuri dell'opera illuminata del Ministro Bottai' (we have complete confidence in the enlig·htened work of Minister Bottai, 51). The brief for Primato, 13ottai's studiedly open-minded review, was to promote a new sense of civic responsihility in the Italian intellectual community, and to dehate its mission t()[ thc nation (Bottai, HJ40). It presented oppositional views in often polemical counterpoint to official positions-Giaime Pintor was among the wide range of contrihutors-and thereby attracted the attention of many of the radical members of GUF It is no surprise, then, to sec such praise from Pasolini togcther with statements toying with anti-fascism ('come non siamo hlscisti I... j'), or implicitly criticizing it-'ora da molte parti-e ancora privatamcnte-si avverte una mancanza di una matura c alta civiitft che ci raccolga' (now on several sides-still privatcly--one notices the lad of a mature and high civilization that unites liS, 'Filologia c morale', 170 )--or indeed staking claims against it: I'odierna cultura emopea si cvenuta automaticamente maturando, al di fuori di qualsiasi li.nalid politica, quasi a dimostrazione dell'l liherta della creazione poctica c dcll'amorc alia poesia, non legata a nessuna 'lncora propagandistica. ('Cultura italiana e cultura cmopea a Weimar', 6il)1 6 Archilrave and 11 Selaail! both ceased publication "fter the tall of Mussolini inJuly [943. A sixth issue of /1 Se/aail! appeared (n. 6, May [943), and a seventh was prepared, hut left unpublished. 7 Pasolini's attitude to fascism at this stage is unclear. Whilst in 'Allettore nuovo' (Poesie, 1970, 7) he claims to have been turned against fascism on being introduced to Rimbaud in 1937 (corrected to H)3H-<) in Siciliano, [9H1', 79, 82), his Jewish friend Giovanna Bemporad
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
(today's European culture has automatically matured outside any political end, as if to demonstrate the freedom of poetic creation and of the love of poetry, unshackled by any propagandistic chain.)
The more complex semi-political, semi-poetical 'Ragionamento suI uolore civile' (56-11) moves beyond questions of simple approval or disapproval, into a rhetoric of contradictory reasoning so ubiquitous in the maturc Pasolini. The poct casts himself again as isolated-'questa solitudine, questa turris eburnea' (this solitude, this ivory tower)-from both the 'umili cd affannose tradizioni dell'csistenza famigliare' (humble amI strug·gling traditions offamily existence) and the infinite itself: 'L'infinito r... 1ora giace stanco e chius() nei propri conjini, Hdavanti a noi che non ahhiamo un gesto 0 un grido per cancellarlo 0 conquistarlo' (the infinite [... / now lies tired and enclosed in its OlIJn con/iues before us who have neithcr a gesture nor a cry to cancel or conquer it, 56-7).9 Isolated in time and space, the poet nevertheless aspircs to a 'civilta': li [gli uomini 1asslImiamo, parte della nostm slessa natura, ad un amOfe che da egoistico I .. ·1 diviene civile. Al di \;\ di ogni schema idealistico 0 supcfumanistieo, in qllesto Cda riconoscere una sorta di cosciel1\e ulllild. (57) (we engage with them 1men I, as pari of"our ViT)1 Iw/ure, in a love which goes from heing selfish I ... Ito heing civic. Beyond any idealistic Of superhuman schema, tl1l're is to hc recognizcll in this a sort or conscious humility.)
In locating himselfin slIch a desert, where spiritual hrotherhood, rather than the power of epic heroism, g·uides history, he can safdy depoliticize or dellale the gTand bscistic themes of Man's adventure-'I'ignoto, la gloria, i viaggi, la lotra, la patria, Dio' (thc unknown, glory, travel, struggle, the nation, God). He elaborates on the nation, explaining the possibility of a poetic patriotism tilr whoever loves their country as a sort of platonic, impulsive love. He thus reduces his audience to a 'Happy l,'ew'-'a chi PlH) intendermi' (to those who can understand me), 'a coloro che sono coscienti e quindi respol1sabili' (to those who are consciolls and thus respol1siblc). Aping the idealism of both Crocc and recalls his ahsolute lack ofqueslioningofthe morality of{'lScism as late as 1943 (ibid. 8]--4, and IJarnabo Michcli, 1()H6). The imagery and rheloric of several of these articles has clearly bcen initially absorhed from t'lscist cultures. 8 As noted above, •I confini' was the planned tide of I'asolini's first collection of poctry, bct()re being substituted by the Friulan verse ofl'lIesie a Ca.,ars". Ct: 'Dialoghi e figure' (62-8). 9 Echoes of I ,eopardi (see Handa, 1990a) and Ungaretti (sce Siciliano, 198Ib) abound in 1hcse pieces. Beyond the cultural identity gleaned fi·om contemporary debate, l'asolini shows <"qual energy in creating and legitimizing an identity through interaction with the literary l",lnQn,
30
PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
Gentile, he claims that 'piu che le vite offerte [ ... ] verra a contare davanti alIa storia, la possibilita di amore che la patria avra ottenuto dagli uomini' (more than lives offered [ ... Jhistory will take account of the possibility of men's love that the nation will have garnered). ID The lack of a sense of material, as opposed to metaphysical struggle, which Pasolini was to learn from post-war Friulan peasant protests (Naldini, 1989, I26-30; Siciliano, 1981a, 155-63) and from his own prosecution in 1949, suggests an attitude of static conservatism, neither revolutionary nor reactionary. But love, humility and stasis are themselves anathema to the rhetoric of fascism (except perhaps to its Catholicizing currents). Even ideas close to a primitive materialism are couched in a predominant humanism which carries with it a hierarchical scnse of the relationship between intellectual and society, making a privileg'Cd collective of intellectuals, as he had done with 'noi giovani', but with no spirit of hum hie, retrospective submission: la genesi di una eiviIt:i n,tsce da prof()J1tie ragioni umanc, e poi pratieo economiche; e i\ conlrihulO che noi Icllcrali pol rcmo arrecarc-ripeto·-- Cl riguanla come Hlllllinl 't:he han"o e che sanno'. (Filo\ogia e morale', 170) (the genesis of a civilizal ion is horn OUI of" deep human, and also praetie,t1economic reasons; and Ihc conlrihulion lhal we men of Ictters can offcr- I repeal·· -concerns us as III/'II 'who know and have', 'Filologia e morale', 170)
Earlier he had quoted Modigliani: 'I.a vila c un d()J1o dei pochi ai Illolli: di coloro che sanno e che hanno a coloro che non sallno e ehe no" hanTlo': quesla fi'asc di Modigliani dovrebbe tocearci nd pilt prolimtio ddb nosl ra coscieTlza di inlellelluali. (Uj9) 11 (' I ,ile is a gi n of" I he kw 10 I he many: of" illOse who know and have to those who do nol know and do nol have': I his phrase of Modigliani ought to touch us in the deepesl pari orour inlelIeclUal's conscience.) On I'a,oli"i alld Croce, sec llaLl1iski, '1)1)0. The imal,(ery of possession and kn"wlcd~e, alld Ihe I )al1tesque phrasing of il, remain with P,lsolini inlo the laiC IIISOS and ()Ilicil/II. 'I'here, il is 1""" ofa nel work of mClaphorical associations bet ween havil1l,( and knllwill~, alld Ihe "ciusion from history by dint of their lack. It is the basis of Ihe cOl,(nitive alliance of Ihe inlelleclual wilh the I.umpcnproictarial: ~Regrcdirc Ira chi nfJn sa c darllc lcslinHHli.lIlZ.l di fnutlt' a t..:hi sa, 1l()1l .. ielllra nci nostri dlJVcri, non C Iln,1 delle possibili Iloslre azioni? I ... 110- a cui ti rivoll,(;--1101l sono lIllO di color che sanna?' 0') 1,(0 back amongstlhose who do 1101 kllow ,lIld hear wilness 10 Ihem amonl,(slthose who know; isn't this part o/" 01\1" duty, onc of our possible actions? I... 1I\m not I·-to whom you're talking- ·-OIlC of those who know) (to Fortini, .1 Dce. !l15(" /,CIlCl"l', ii. 255). Sce also the poems 'Una poicmica in "ersi' (Cl'lIai, B" Z('4 -72) ,lIld FOrlini's reply 'i\I,1i 1,\ dclla ,peranza' (Ferretti, 1975,256-70)10
'I
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
31
As before, this hierarchy has some mitigating aspects. The civilization aspired to must involve 'un dcfinitivo progresso morale, politico, intcllettualc' (definitivc, moral, political, intellectual progress, 169). And just as solitude was turned paradoxically into an index of collcctivity, of civilization itsclf~ so the Happy Few are humbled, and brought closer to a broader social reality through the topos of pedagogy: 'eduwre; sara questo f()rse il piu alto-----c umile-eompito affith\to ~llla nostra gcnerazione' (to a/urllte; this will perhaps be the highest--and thc humblesttask assigned to our !!,·eneralion, 170) (see Ch. 3). Through such a vocation, the artist can aspire 1.0 the high task of the expression of shared truth, suggested by the doeull1entarist Grierson: 'L'opera dcll'arliSla i:: di dare espressione individuale e bcllczza tClrmale a un complesso di sl·ntimenti e pensieri eOllluni ehe e~li eondivide col suo pubblico, pensicri C opinioni che per la sua ~enerazione h;lIlno valiJid di verid universali' (irierson. ( 1(19) ('the work ort he art ist is to f!,"ive individual expression and fClI·mal beauty to a complex or common reclin~s and Ihou~hts that he shares with his puhlic, thoughts a"d opinions that h,r his ~ent:ration have the validity of universal truths') Finally, the pompolls lone of many ofl hcse arl ides is tempered hy their conslant sense ofl ransienee, a residue of Etseist vitalisll1. The value assigned 10 YOUI h 11l'/".It' is always secondary 10 I he inevitability of its passing. In 'Cultura ilaliana e ellhllra europea a Wcilllar', this sensibililY to time is applinllo lilerary I radiI ion: La tradil.ione "011':, 1111 ohhlif!,"o, IIl1a strad;l, C l1eanche IIn sentimento 0 Ull amon:: hisof>;l1a orlllai intel1dere qllesto termil1e in un senso antitradil.ionale, cioi: di ullltinua l· infinita trasfcll·ll1al.iol1e. «()()) (The tradition is not a dllty, a road, nor even a fCclinf>; or love: the term needs now to he taken in an anti traditional sense,;1S a continuous and infinite transform;] t iOI1.) And in 'Filologia e
III ora le':
le present i condil.ioni della vit;1 storiea, che vuolc esscre vissuta intensamente, ma tut tavia, con la cOlIseienl.a della sua continf>;enza. (t (,il) (rhe presl:llt conditions of historieallife, t hat wishes to he lived intensely, and yet with an awareness of its contin~eney.) noi su~geriall1o I;Ii biovani I di g·llanlarsi Ull po' indict ro, e rahbrividire al silenzio mort ale chc h.llasciato dietro di se O~lli polemiea, og'ni recrlldes"enza cultllralc, sia in h1Vore del COlHenllto ehe in E1Vorc del"l f(lrma, 0 di ljualisiasi altra ljuestioneclla ret oriel. (16X)
32
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
(we suggest [to the young] that they look behind them a little, and shudder at the mortal silence that every polemic, every cultural recrudescence, whether in favour of content or form or any other petty rhetorical issue, has left in its wake.)
The work for Architrave and Il Setaccio does not form a coherent, continuous or evolving whole. It is littered with unintentional contradictions and with boldly oxymoronic syllogisms. 12 It suffers from derivative forced rhetoric and lack of focus, and from an acceptance of or abstraction from contemporary reality, despite latent signs of resistance. But this is only onc side of the picture. Beyond such evident immaturity there is an articulated attempt to find a role and voice for the self into the context of debates over youth and the role of the intellectuals. The implicit pattern of inscription outlined here prefigures Pasolini's later cultural interventions well beyond his ideological epiphany of'the discovery of Mar x'. The emphasis on isolation, and hence on autonomy of identity, is set alongside a certain non-threatening eolleetivity through total, narcissistic identification. The tension between these two dynamics is smoothed over by a rhetorical appeal to absolutes, whether moral, literary or ontological. Subjective aspiration to 'success' is thus a desire to recast non-subjective reality-cultural, civil or political-through dynamic subjective impulses such as pain (,dolore') and love, much as the infinite became a source of moral catharsis through being 'ent:iosed in its {)]pn confines'. The strategy ideally achieves a temporary equilibrium, expressed in the notion of waiting ('attesa') and ever-deferred realization ('attuazione'). Ideological COIl-sequences arc conservative, but the Bergsonian sense of expectant, perpetual becoming looh lixwards to a possible role for the intellectual as vessel of potential energy ti)r historical change. I3 The conflation of thc potential ti)r stasis (Thanatos) and the potential for dynamic change (Eros or Agape) is apparent in all its vibrancy, danger and heroic subjection in a passage from 'Ragionamento sui dolore civile'; Ci siamo mcssi in UIlIlUOVO moto I ... J un moto d'amore (che a noi sembra nuovo, anzi c nuovo, perehi: se cosi non tilsse un passo dell'esistenza umana sarebbe inattuato), simile a qucllo che spinse la misurata anima greea a mari ignoti, al pMion pletos iiperon che estinse Bruno ncl rogo 0 Battisti ne! patibolo. (57) 12 See c.g. 'Filologia c morale' (168-71) ami' "Umori" di Bartolini' (165-7) which, rc~ spectively, mock and embrace attitudes of'moralism'. IJ Asor Rosa, 1969,374-5, without referring 10 the work under discussion here, takes 'I'attes.' as a key term in the development ofPasolini's vision of history. Rinaldi also uses it in his general description of the structural slippage in Pasolini's work: 'a waiting l attcs.] continually intersected by the future, always re projected forwards' (translated fmm Rinaldi, 1990, 34).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
33
(We have followed a new impulse [ ... ] an impulse oflove (that seems new to us, indeed is new, because if it were not, a step in human existence would remain untaken), like that which moved the measured Greek soul to unknown seas, like the chifdish milSS (!/"the IKnrmmt that snuffed out Bruno at the stake or Battisti at the gallows.)I4
The strategy and the rhetoric become necessarily more strained in the future as external institutions impinge on Pasolini's freedom to create such a centralizcdlccntralizing space for cultural expression, and as the possihilities of containment within subject-controlled limits become ever fewer. The poised, tragic equilibrium of this early period will later itsclfbe the object of retrospective, nostalgic attempts at reconstruction and liheration.
2.2.
'I'hl' CI/Ill/ta! rllld Rl'p,i(ma! Politics 4Ptiuli, f(J43 '-9
In the period 0[" the 'civil war' and Resistance in Italy, hack in Casarsa following his escape from military service under the Germans at Livorno in Seplemher II)4J, Pasolini developed furrher his already strong at lachmenl tl) I'riuli. lie setup a peripatetic school/in' local children whose education had heen interrupted hy the war. With the help of friends, he 1aughl 1hem lileralure arid classics, ami encouraged his pupils to compose poelry and music (Naldini, H)SI), 62 ff.). From these classes a semifi)rlllal soeiely fiH' the promorion o("[oeal Frilllan culture gradually emerged. According to Naldini, the idea was discussed as early as OCloher 11)43, bUl the opening issue of the group's first journal -Stroh~~/;1 tli Cl! tla l'i1ga--appeared in April 11)44, opening with Pasolini's programmatic opening article 'I )ialet, Ienr;a e stil', and it was followed hy a second issue in August. I S The 'Academiuta Ji lcnga furlana' was fi)rmally founded Oil I X Fehruary 11)45, and provided a meetin{!,"-vlaee filr the small group and their guests to read poetry and play mllsic. [n August H)4S, the 'Academiuta' was redefined as a vehicle for the promotion of I 'riulan culture through the puhlication and translation ofpoctry. StroliKut tli cd da {'aKa hecame simply /I SlroliKttt (n. I, August H)4S). In Octoher H)4S, Pasolini also joined the 'Associazione per I'autonomia friulana', the Association for Friulan Autonomy. At 14 For a fascin,"ing analysis, verging on the nccromantic, of Pasolini's obsession with ucath, sce Zigaina, H)l:i7. [5 The name was ill contrast to the Uuinc-bascd, esmblishcd journal Slro/il"jurlan, which published five of Pasotini 's poems from [946 to H)49.
34
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
private expense, several plaquette volumes, by Pasolini and others, appeared under the auspices of the 'Academiuta', including Diarii (December 1945), I pianti (September 1946) and Dov'e la mia patria (1949, illustrated by Giuseppe Zigaina). 16 The group entered into lively debates with the more conservative organs of Friulan culture, such as Ce Fastu?, broadened its brief to include the promotion of Catalan and other minor Romance languages, [7 and Jl Slro/if{lll chang'ed once more into Q}taderno romanzo (first and only issue, n. 3 [sic[, June 1947). IH Pasolini, now officially a teacher, signed the foundation manifesto of '11 Movimento Popolare l'riulano per I' Autonomia Regionale' (The Popular Friulan Movement for Regional Autonomy), and his activities extended across critical, political and narrative pieces for regional newspapers (J,ibertd, II rflatlino de! popolo, 11 meS.l"aKl~ero veneLo), org'anization of cultural events in Casarsa, increasing commitment to the local PCI, HI entry of several poems and books tilr literary prizes (including early versions of parts of];usignolo), composition of a number ofFriulan and Italian plays pcrfi)fllled by his pupils (including' I Tuns tdl Frul and If (appellano, later Ne! '40!), and a growing range or correspondence and friendships with other intellectuals (including hrst cont"acts with Roman circlcs). The period, then, is one of intense and eclectic activism, cut short by his trial, dismissal, expulsion ri'om the PC!, and his subsequent flight to Rome. I le develops a collect ive, albeit highly localized, political outlook, perceiving the prospect rilr dynamic change through a sentimental militancy which marks a break from the aesthetic and passive 'attesa' or his writings in /1 Seltl(cio. In most" respects, his central concerns arc literary even now, ~o and his polit icizat ion comes about through interest in a dialect which was in origin a precious literary hybrid of his own ,6 Poe.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
35
creation. Its use for political ends is apparent in the wall-posters written in Friulan by Pasolini for his local PCI section in 1949 (Betti, 1977, 73-95; Guagnini, 1976, J()-29), which attack the Christian Democrats, offer stirring calls f(II' peace, often cast in religious vocabulary ('the unthinking rich will surely bc punished by God', 'Christ our common master') and several short, simple moral fables. Each has a trite but strong political point to make, reinforced by thc f()lk-wisdom of dialect culture. In 'La cuardura dal ho', f(H' cxample, the poor arc likened to their oxen who, if only they knew they were being led to slaughter, would never be held by such a wcak yoke. But Pasolini's evolving notion of dialect can be t()llowed most instructively in a series orarticles written between ]()44 and H)49. 21 Some of the elements of rhetorical excess fi)und in 'I giovani, I'attesa' survive, but thc proccss or appropriatin!!," this and other half-grasped vocabularies, such as that of linguistics ('non c'e nulla di piLI scicntitico della glottologia', 't hcre is nothing more scientific than linguistics', 250), has already becol1le more subt le. Pasolini builds up a sort of sub-lexicon of terms fi)tll1d in such vocabularies, and proceeds to qualify their meaning and connotations, to create a highly personalized, often ecu:ntric cognitive system (I le Mauro, II)X); Viano, H)<)J, I 43). I lebmiliarizing and then recreating these terms, hc all but fctishizes them, treating them as talismans o/" precarious idcological and/or ontolop;ical ahsolutes, madc such hy the operat ions or subject ivity. 111 ot her words, he begins to operate that process or ap;onistic misreading ·-what he calls pastiche or reading 01 /111(;11' which will ddim: all his later encounters with Marxism, ,)'Iy/l..,.ili/,', psychoanalysis, scmiology, anthropology, 'critical thcory' and other disciplines. In the dialect articles, rhe terms he dwells on revolve aroll\l(l patterns of transfi)rmation or equivalence, between language and dialect, and hy extension between languag-cs, reality, and history. And the Illeans oftransfimnation or equivalence is consistently bound lip with work ofa suhject: se quakhidull, insoma, al erodes di esprimisi micj eu '1 dialct de la so eicra, pi nouf, pi frcse, pi ruart si no la lell!!,"a nasional imparada tai libris? Se a qualchidull a l(hi veil ehe idea, e al e bOil di realis.t1a I... \ alora ehcl dialct al doventa 'lcll!!,"a'. I ... 1 PlIrtrop pen', il I,'rillll ... 1 a no '1 avut in nisun timp un grant poeta e'al eiant,Is ta la so lenga e a l(hi des splendour e renomansa.l ... j 21
Unless st'lIed, p,lges reieren.:es in the rest of this section arc to Un paese di lemplJmli e di
prilllule. The analysis which ",llows summarizes a more extensive treatment in Gonion, H)94-
On the political-cultllral and literary implications of I'asolini', theories on dialect in this period, ,ceHrcvini, 1979; Dc Mauro, 19X5; Fido, I<)XH; Guagnini, 1<)76 and 19H2; O'Ncill, 1970.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
Chel stil al e ale di interiour, platit, privat, c, massime, individual. Un stil a no '1 ene italian c ne todesc e ne furlan, al edi chel poeta e basta. ('Dialet, lenga, stil', Strolif{ut di ca cia ['aga, April 1944,5-7) (In short, what if someone thought he could better express himself with the newer, fresher, stronger dialect of his land than with the national language he learned from hooks? If someone had this notion and was able to put it into practice l ... J then that dialect would become a language. [ ... ] Unfortunately, Friuli [... J has never had a great poet who sang in his language and gave it splendour and repute·l· .. J Style is something inner, hidden, private and above ail individual. A style is not in Italian or German or Friulan, it is of that poet, and no onc else.)
Thus the equivalance between dialect an<.I language is founded in the struggle of a subjective voice tllr self-expression and for the expression of reality. And the subjective voice is empowered to enact this equivalence through its aesthetic embodiment in poetry. Pasolini took the term 'equivalenza' directly from Contini's review of his Poesie a Casarsa (Contini, J()43), where it appears several times as a term for elevating dialect to the level of 'lingua', or 'volg·are illustre' (illustrious vernacular). For Pasolini, it suggests a dual dynamic, in which the subjectivity of poetry creates hmguages and collapses difference, but in which, conversely, the constant residual interplay between languages and dialects (and any medium of expression, as Pasolini's entire career will demonstrate) creates a style, and thus embodies and emblazons the subject. The movement of t(lrms creates the phantasm of a unitary, originary subject. The process of binding subjectivity to language and to reality through the difference and simultaneous equivalence between languages is evident in the inclusion ofItalian translations of the Poesie a Casarsa, described in a note to MCJ;lio as 'parte integrante del testo poetieo' ('an integral part of the poetic text, BI, 172).22 And it is explored further in the elaboration of several recurrent terms connoting binding, synthesizing, moving between; terms such as grafting, crossbreeding ('innesto'), translation ('traduzione'), and metaphor ('metafora'): 22 Their importance is unucrlined by the tact that Contini, 1943, disliked the translations ('la non bella traduzionc IctLcraria'); and furthermore, according to Faggin, 1990, Pasolini was the first Friulan poct to adopt this practice. I le discllsses in detail the 'translatability' of dialect, a problem also brought up by Contini, in 'Dalla lingua al friulano' (1947) 225-7; and 'Sulla poesiadialettalc', Poesia, 8, '947, 1'4-16 (thc lattcr article is not included in Un parsedi temporali e di primlt/e). Pasolini's polyglot tendency is eviuent also in his creation in 1945 of a hybrid Romance languagc in 'Las hojas uc las Icnguas romanas' (82, 1996--2008).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
37
e
poeticamente questa lingua non il dialetto degli zoruttiani e nemmeno il dialetto, COS! suggestivo, parlato dal popolo, ma una favella inventata, da innestani nel tronco della tradizione italiana e non gia di quella friulana. ('Lettera dal Friuli" August 1946, 211-12) (poetically this language is not the dialect of the Zoruttians, and not even the highly suggestive dialect spoken by the people, but an in vet/led tongue, to be grafted onto the trunk of the Italian, and not the Friulan tradition.) la fisionomia umana fa parte del paesaggio. I ... '1 Natura geografica Iratiol1tl in natura umana, il Friuli piU. perfetto c nei eanti del popolo friulano. ('11 Friuli', 1953,200; cf 204, 211-12, 257) (human physiognomy is parr of the landscape. L... JGeographical nature Ira1l.lfated into human nature, the most perfect Friuli is in the songs of the Frilllan people.) in che senso un poeta dialettale pui) illnesla,/"Si ora nella I'radizione italiano? Risponderemo suhito: usando il dialetto come una lraduzione ideale dell'italiano; ma pill che traduzione·la parola lIsata da Contini-noi diremo appunto, meta/i,ra. ('SlIlIa poesia dialettale', 1 14)23 (In what sense can a dialect poet now gm/; ltimsclFonto the Italian tradition? Our reply is swift: by lIsing his dialect as an ideal/uf.I1s!ali011 of the Italian; but more than translation--the word used by Contini·-..·we can say, precisely, metaphor.)
Each or these terms posits a iJealtTansition from a terminus it qUIIwhether a real ohject or the subject-to a terminus ad quem, its perfected representation in language(s). But their power anJ resonance rely on their continual deferral of actual, imperfect transition, and hence on their autonomous status as aspects of a new f()I·m. Whence a final, key contrast of terms: un'ulteriore, piu essenziale distinzione tra lingua lelterale come 'illvclItum' e lingua come ';l1V£'l1lio'.I . .. ] 101 seconda c lingua anti-costituzionale, adoperilla sia dai pilrlanti in IIl1a coloritil e dinilmicil contaminazione con gli istituti (da qui l'evoluziolle della lingua), sia dagli scriventi-poeti. ('Ragioni del i"riulano', November 1948,236: emphases added) (a further, more essential distinction between literal hlllguage as 'inventum' and language as 'invent;o'. I ... 1 the latter is an anti-constitutional language, used both by speakers in a ruddy and dynamic contamination with institutions (hence the evolution of the language), and hy writer-poets.)
2]
Emphases arc added.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
The exploration of experimentalism or stylistic freedom which Pasolini will undertake in OjJitina between 1955 and 1957 (see §3 below) has its roots here. This 'inventio'--or continual 'creation de langue' (258), or 'lingua virtuale' (virtual language, 215)-identified with poetry and thence with subjectivity, has ramifications of an ideological kind for Pasolini, as the second part of this quotation illustrates, as well as of a historical kind, as each act of invention reclaims the archaic, prehistorical, absolute aspects of language in order to project them subversively onto the worn reality of evolved language. This is an early formulation of the notion of nostalgia and regression as critique which will inform his mythcial films and the TriloKia delta vita, as wcll as the provocatory nostalgia for fascism in some of his later polemics (e.g. se 140--7). The patterns of self-inscription traceable in this sequence of terms also inform Pasolini's evolving notion of education, or pedagog·y, already seen in 'Filologia e morale' in An-hi/rave, and in his professional activity as a teacher hetween H)44 and f 949. Four articles for Il maUill1l del pop% in November 1947 and July 1945 (266-S3) describe a teacher who stimulates curiosity throug·h scandal ('scandalo'), revelation ('rivelazione') and drama (,drammaticit;l'), and becomes a 'means not an cnd oflove' ('mezzo non gi;l fine d'amore') for the students. In other words, the teacher should initiate the child into a potentially liberating, subversive 'inventio' (2S I). A fundamental role in Pasolini's later public work is present here in flua (sec Ch. 3).1.4 The love which characterizes this act oscillates between the Platonic and the erotic, reclaiming the subjective by precluding the model of teacher as object or modcl or fetish ('Scuola senza feticei', 277-9). Finally, the 1947 article 'Sulla poesia dialettale' suggests a broad ami suggestive analogy between the notion of poetic practice as a metaphorical or unrealized form oflanguage and a personal sense of marginalization. Such poetry is metaphorical, he notes, '[perche] risponde a un bisogno profondo di diversita. I... E'l atto a ottenere una poesia "diversa" ([because] it responds to a deepfclt need for difference. [ ... It is] apt to obtain a 'different' poetry, 'Sulla poesia dialettale', 1I6). This is doubtless a figuring of his own 'diversiti'-his homosexuality-and his perception of his own marginalization, but it is an idealized figure of difference which is not traumatic, but rather itself an essential, absolute 24 On pedagogy as a interpretative key to all ofPasolini's work, sec Golino, 1985; Santa to, 1986b; Zanzono, 1977.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
39
metaphor ('metafora assoluta', 257) of the work of subjectivity, immanent to but not bound to reality. Towards the cnd of this period, in 1949, Pasolini also began to pronounce on the explicitly political aspect of the role of the intellectual in the PCI. In a speech written for the first 'Congresso della Federazione comllnista di Pordenone' (Pordenone Communist Federation Conference), but never given/ s he set out the vocation of the 'modern man of letters' as a hourgeois 'disposto a tradire la sua classe sociale' (prepared to betray his social class), as exempli/led in Gide, Proust, Joyee and Eliot. The ambivalence or this position, however, complicates the adherence ofthe intellectual to a workers' movement: 'non scmpre chi ea sinistra in leUeratllr,1 C a sinistra in politica cec.; c'c dunque un doppio gioco di rapporti tra I'avanguanlislllo letlerario e I'avanguardismo polil ieo' (nol everyone who is 10 the len in lileratme is 10 the left in politics elc.; there is thus a double play of links hetween literary avant-ganlislll and political avanl" -ganlism). Jf the intellectual retains but modifies his tradil ional inlrospective pursuils 10 eflecl an historical, materialist 'pn:sa di cosciellza' (coming 10 consciousness), he Ihen remains hOI h literarily 'completely free', and politically 'a loyal comrade'. Both in ils admiratioll fi)r lllodernism and il's rcf"usalto 'suonare il pifTero della rivoluzione' (10 play the pipe of the revolulion), Pasolini's posit ion is closer 10 Vittorini's in his fiulloUS 11)4() dellale wit h Togliatti in Po/il("(lIi(o, than to a party line which had tightened st ill hlnher since then.!h IIUI, Illore I han Vittorini, he insisls on anchoring- t he ideological validilY of an intellectual positioll in an operalion of subjective introspection, in an elusive quality of disavowed sellllOod. The crescendo of act ivislll hel ween 1943 and I 94() was curtailed by an eXlernal apparalus (his prosecution), and by a polil ical instilulion (expulsion rrom the PCI), which inaugurated a traumat ic hostility between Ihe private and public and a necessary loss of confidence and control. The fluid, open rapport hetween intellectual and conlCssional self-expression and its site, which characterizes the work in the fascist student journals and the Friulan intervention:>, cannot survive sHch a trauma intact. N(;verthcless, the patterns and strategies of sclfinseripl ion tilll11d there do not disappear. Indeed the extent to which they retain their eflicacy is rcmarkable, until, shot throug'h with loss and 25 It was published as 'Un inlervcnl" ril11a"dalo' in the con[:ress reporl, f'er III P"ce c per if lavoro, and latcr in Nil/llIrila, n. 43, 4 Nov. [977, 4!! ( :adioli, H)HS, 107-10). 26 On P"IiICmi((), scc Valentc, fin!!. Pasolini disliked Viuorini inlcnsciy: scc I.ellerc, ii. 35[,
37 8.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
agonistic instability, they evolve into ever more dynamic and strident forms, which, certainly after T9Sil, render the possibility of an unchallenged 'completely free' subjectivity nothing more than a phantasm.
2·3· Officina, 1955-9 The four years of OfJi(ina 27 represent both the apotheosis and the nascent disintegration of the model of public self-inscription encountered in Pasolini's work thus far: that is, the identification with an in-gToup or category which extends the suhjective into a puhlic arena with minimal risk of a loss of autonomy. The periodical hcgan as the resuscitation of the Hredi project, with T.eonelti and Roversi as co-editors,2H and it is no coincidence that the group reformed as the dominant cultural debate of the intervening years-over nco-realism and 'impegno'-was dying out. ]t marks a period of retrenchment of post-war cultural ideals and a hiatus bctl)re the rapid transtl)J·matiol1 in culture and society effected hy economic expansiol1 in lhe late 19Sos. Its pluralistic, rescarchoriented and text-based approach madc it an apt vessel for such a transitional mOlllcnt. ~'I Its project was litcrary, but born of an acknowIcdg·cmellt of the need fill· a materialist socio-politieal reinterpretation of culture, and it saw the means to that cnd in historical stylistic analysis. Indeed, its systemat ic dual assault on hoth nco-realism and 'novecentismo' (a label fi,r the f(lI·malist, hermeticist aesthetic that had characterized the century), on both 'impegno' and 'l'autosufficienza dcll'illlellettuale' (the sclf-suniciency of the intellectual), found its most fertile moments in the rc-evaluation of the nineteenth-century canon, in the section of the journal called 'La nostra storia': Pasolini's 27 Rclcrences are to Ihe ori!:inal isslles of Ol.7i{illa, now reprinted in t'lCsimilc (sce llibliography , ..\). The jo"rnal has heen amply anlhologized in Ferreni, 1<175. For ,'ssess·· mcnts of its intelleclu," projeel in Ihc conlexl of post-war Italian cultural hislory, sce Foni, 1971,29-37; Paula"o, ",rll; I'elrllceiani, "1("), '5--('Z; Siciliano, 1965,47-£>1. 28 For the shorl-lived second series in 1<)5'1, the three original editors were joined hy Franco Fortini, Angelo Roman" and (iianni Sc:!li", who h'ld all heen involved in Ihe first scries also. 29 See Ferretli, 1979; hlq~acs, H),!O. Ollirilltl coincided wilh signiticant developments in literary journals in the mid-I!),os. For example, in H),4, the PC! launched a weekly cultural journalll conlemporall~o, edited hy Carlo Salinari and Anwncllo Tromh"dori, whieh took ,I markedly less dogmatic, 'zhdanovist' line than h,ld Emilio Sereni, Togliatti's cultural commissar after the war; Moravi" and Albcrto Carocci founded Nu()v; arKo/lle/lti in 1953 (sce §5 below); and Luciano Ancesehi launched II Vcr,.;, which would lalcr become the main vehicle of the neo-avanguardia of the "l)os, in 1 95('. For a survey oflhese scc Piseopo, [978.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
'Pascoli' (n. I, May 1955, 1-8), Leonetti's 'Leopardi' (n. 2,july 1955, 43--58), Romano's 'Manzoni' (n. ], Sept. 1955,87-91) and, although not in that section, Scalia's 'Un paradigma: l'attualiti di De Sanctis' (n. I, May 1955,28-31) ..10 Dc Sanctis in particular proved a useful model for Officina's grounded historical criticism, hostile to the ontological 'malattia dell'ideale' (sickness of the ideal, JI), as Scalia explained shortly after t he collapse of the journal: Da oll/%Kiol la niliea I in Of/it/nil I si fCee melod%gim. I ... 1 I.a critica onlO/ogiCll cra il rillcsso della poesia consider,lta COllle on/%gia: assollltezza, auto~enesi, alltosuflicienza, inte~ralc 'aulOl1omia' extrarazionalc cd extracomunicat iva I .. ·1· In soslanza: I.a concezione dclla pocsia come rdiKio c della criticl come at to rituale I· .. 1· (Scalia, 11)61,31),4°,43)
(In Oflicillll crilicism welll fi'om hein~ oll/II/ogim/lo hein~ 1II1'//IO'/o/lIgiral.l· .. 1 On/o/lIgirll/ criticism was a reflection OfP0c(TY seen as I1I1/%gv: the ahsolute, self-~eneralion, sdf-surticiem:y, inte~ral 'autonomy' heyond reason and heyond conll11unicat ion I ... 1. In short: 'rhe concept ion or poet ry as rd(~'io and of criticism as ,I ritllal ,let I ... 1.)
This pro!-\T
But if ()l!irini/'s hostility towards the 'two fi'onts' (Ferretti, 1(J75, 9-13) of t went icth-eentury literary culture was clear, its proposed alternative was less so. In its choice of collaborators, which Leonetti 0 3 The scries conlilllled with Seali" on 'I Renalol Serra', n. 4, Dcc. "IS5, 127' .16; P'lSolini, '11 nco-spcrimcnt,llisl11o', n. 5, Fell. IlIS6, 16<) Hz; l.conClti, '1I,lccadcnlismo come prohlema contcmporilllco', n. h, Apr. I()S6, 211-27~ Roman(.., 'I.a Scapiglialura\ 11. 7, Nov. H)S6, 255-6); Sell;a, 'I ncpuscoLtri', n. H, Feb. IIIS7, )01--11; Roman,), 'Osscrvazioni sulla Ictteratura del Novccento', n. 11, Nov. 1<)57,4'7"44; I,conclli, '])uc vcr si sulb rivolllzionc' Ion CarducciJ, n. '2, Apr. '<)5H,477-<)0.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
affirms was largely Pasolini's domain, it produced an eclectic literary mix, and seemed to operate few programmatic restrictionsY Indeed, Pasolini seems to have effected an un discriminating combination of his Officina in-group and his immediate circle of personal, intellectual friends in Rome, unhindered by qualms over aesthetic or ideological differencesY The journal operated in dialogue with other similar organs, as its sales figures demonstrate: around 600 copies of each series (1,000 for the Bompiani-funded second series), were produced-twice the number of a similarly organized left-wing review such as Ragionarnenli, but much fewer than party-backed organs such as Il alnternpoYaneo. Subscribers were in the main other journals and colleagues, and very few copies were sold commercially)3 Pasolini's policy is an extension of the drive fill" success in a sense already seen, a search for dialogue, for a presence anti authority in a circumscribed arena of high culture, untroubled by incidentals of aesthetic or ideological coherence. And as in Friuli, the operation is ohcn enacted through the confident drawing of polemical lire. With his 'Piceola antologia sperimentale' (nn. 9-10,June 1957, 347-5S), he takes on the role of analyst and arbiter of trends in recent poetry. But Sanguineti's damning, parodic riposte to the idea of the anthology ('Una polemica in prosa', n. Il, Nov. 1957, 452-.7) tilreshadows his almost complete intellectual marginalization in the generation dominated by Sanguineti and the 'neo-avanguardia', and challenges the inclusive eclecticism of O.fjicina in general. Nevertheless, it also offers the mirage ofa position and a clearly delineated voiee filr the interlocutors. Similarly, the fierce exchanges between Pasolini and several PCl intellectuals, sparked off by 'La posizione' (n. 6, Apr. ]956,245-50) and 'Una polemic\ in versi' (n. 7, Nov. ]956, 283--<)0; then Cmeri, lh, 264-72, 2S0-2), over Lukacsian prospectivism, which spilled over well beyond Ollitina into Il conlernpoYalleo and even Pasolini's Vie mlOve coitmm,.l4 emphasize the irritant power and authority that polemic aff(lrds. And the epigrams in 'Umiiiato e olfeso' Pasolini denied I.conelli's claims (('errelli, "175,33·-4). Outside contrihutors, excluJinf'; the six editors of the second series, were G. Bassalli, A. Bertolucci, I. Calvillo, G. Caproni, 1.. Erha, C. E. Gadda, C. Girholi, M.I.nzi, A. MO«lvia, S. Penna, C. Rehora, C. Sharharo, L. Sciascia, C. Vivaldi, P. Volponi, G. Ungaretti (sevell others made up Pasolini's 'I'iccola antologia sperimenmle', nn. 1)-lo,Julle 11)51' A. Arhasino, M. Diacano, M. Ferrctli, E. I'agliarini, B. ROlldi, E. Sanguineti, M. StTallicro). )) In the 'Fondo manoscritti di autori contemporanei', Pavia, the Officina papers include a balance sheet by Roversi for nn. 1-1' 'expenditure D,]6,H02-illcome [, 14t),('oo--copies sold [36'. H For two exchanges bet wcell I'asolini and Salinari in Vie 11/1""'·, ill July J<)6o and Oct./Nov. 1961, which are a reprise of the 1956 debate, sec I dia/"f{hi, 24-H; [95 -9. )1
)2
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM (NS n. I, March-April
43
1959,32--9; then in part in Religione) are vital, but strained rejections of a wide range ofliterary-cultural figures, indicative of an inner crisis of doubt over his own legitimacy, authority and stability, confirmed by the paradigmatic epigram 'A me'. The inauguration in 1959 of the permanent series of juridical attacks on Pasolini simply amplifies the sense of nascent crisis. The collapse of 0lJidna's editorial consensus in 1958--<), leading to the demise ofthe rcview by the second issue of the second series pointed up this inherent instability in Pasolini's eclectic and polemical approach. In particular Fortini's dissent was fierce, as he insisted that the journal he subject to collective planning and constraint, to some internal coherence;J5 and Scalia declared his 'rifiuto decisivo dcll'eclettismo che c sostanziale a~nosticismo etico-politico e inditlerentismo scientilico' (decisive rejcction of an eclecticism that is in substance an ethicalpolitical agnosticism and scientil1c indifference, Scalia, 1961,57). It marks an important moment of rupture, not only fcx the breakdown of group identity, but also, more importantly, because the attack on the strateg·y of eclecticism was an attack on the vitality and validity of Pasolini's analogous research into a poetics of experimentalism and pastiche. Ling·uistic past iche, or 'contaminatio', was the predominant stylistic characterislic of Rllga::::.::.i di villi, with its intercalating of idioms and registers to create a dynamic linguistic energ·y, between imitation, record and creation. It represents a general departure from the emphasis on purity and morality in his earlier work, setting value on the contrary hy impurity and interference (Ferretti, 1')75, 55-H). Its souree is in Contini's notion of 'pluriling·uismo antipetrarchesco' (antiPetrarchan pluri-lingualism, (:ontini H)SI), which Pasolini turns into a celebration of the non-lyrical, dialogic possibilities of poetic language, through which it can encompass histury and rcality. In this sense, along with other terms derived from Conlinian or Spitzcrian Stylkritik, eclecticism or pasl iehe point to the connections bctween the dominant literariness of 0flidllil and its pretences :Is an organ of cultural ideology. The most signil1cant t()rmulation of this pluralism in the journal, and perhaps the most important correlative in all his theoretical work to the dynamic of subjectivity in his own work, is to be found in three key articles written between 1955 and 1957-'Pascoli' (n. I, May 1955, 1-8), 'Il-neo-sperimentalismo' (n. 5, February 1956, 16!)--82) and 'La 35 Sce rhe internal report by Fortini of May 1958, in Ferretti, 1975,437.
44
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
liberta stilistica' (nn. 9-10, June 1957, 341-6)36-which show him developing and defining what he terms 'sperimentalismo' (experimentalism). In Pascoli 37 he finds a dialectic between an obsession with stasis'tendente patologicamente a mantenerlo sempre identico a se stesso, immobile, monotono' (tending pathologically to keep him identical to himself, immobile, monotonous, 3)-and with renewal-'uno sperirnentalismo che [ ... ] tende a variarlo e a rinnovarlo incessantemente' (an experimelltalism that r... 1tends to vary him and renew him unceasingly, 3). The dialectic, rather than elements of innovation within it, is the clear source of Pascoli's latent, but powerful influence on twentieth-century poetry. Furthermore, Pasolini identifies a subjectivizing impulse in Pascoli's linguistic experimentalism: 'e sempre in funzione dell a vita intima e poetica dell'io' (it is always a function of the intimate, poetic life of the 1,8). '11 neo-sperimentalismo' returns to this problematic rclation between subjectivity and stylistic experimentalism, identifying' three experimental tendencies in contemporary poetry-the pathological or expressionistic, the hermeticist and a new, formalist 'impegno'-each of which is innovative, but conditioned more or less consciollsly by the dominant ontological poetics of 'novecentismo'. He reservcs his most personal and intense comments f()!· poets ofthe expressionist type, including Leonetti and, in particular, the young Massimo Ferretti: 11 suo sperimentare non c altro che il suo attaccarsi alia vita: un solo gesto, cioc per valcre deve essen: sempre diverso. lnoltn: appunto perche la vita 10 esclude e 10 isola, il 'segnato' la ama di un amore pill fill'le: e la ricerca di continuo, ndla sua monotonia si rinnova incessantmente. (l73PH (I lis cxperimellling is nothing' more than his attachment to life: that is, a single gesture must always he different to have any value. Furthermore, precisely because life excludes and isolates him, the 'marked one' loves life all the more strongly: and he searches fi)r it continuously and in its monotony he is COI1stantly renewed.)
Again, stasis ('monotonia') is indivisible from renewal, and, in a pattern familiar from 'I giovani, l'attesa', their synthesis is guaranteed by a 6 3 All three were later included in Passio,,/! e itlc%Kia, 26)-71,466-79,4110--7 respectively. 37 Pasolini's interest in Pascoli began with his 1945 degree thesis (AnloloKia della lirim pascoliana) and continued in an important H)47 article 'Pascoli e Montalc' (11 portico della morte, 5-13)· Pascoli also plays a key role in his introductory survey of PoeIia dia/ellale del Novecmlo (later in Passione e idc%Kia, 5-134). Scc Borghdlo, 19!16. 38 On Pasolini and M. Ferrctti, see Mumri", 1989.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
45
profound affinity or love for life. But that love is now formed out of rejection and difference, out of violent trauma, not harmonious identification. Hence a dynamic of constant movement-'sperimentalismo' -rather than suspense-'attesa'-now binds form to the expression of selfhood. That the portrait ofFerretti is also a self-portrait is confirmed by 'La Iiberta stilistica', where he sets out an alternative to the illusory and prosaic stylistic freedom of 'novecentismo' in similar terms: 'un vero e proprio sperimentalismo r... J intimo e sprofondato in un'esperienza interiore, non solo tentato nei confronti di se stessi, della propria irrelata passione, ma della stessa nostra storia' (a genuinely real experimentalism [ ... 1 intimate and deep within an inner experience, not only attempted in regard to themselves, and to their own unrelated passion, but to our very history, 342). Thw; stylistic choice is intimately bound lip with ideolog'y and subjective crisis, given its constant acknowledgement of the redundancy of the self and its choices: Nello 'sperimenlare', dunque, ehe rieonoseiamo nostro I ... 1 persiste un momenlo con1 raddilorio 0 negal ivo I ... 1 che richiede il continuo, doloroso sforzo dclm'lIllenersi all'altezza di un'altualid non JlosSedUla ideologicamcnte [... J: e queslo, poi, implica una ceria gr'lIuil;llli lJuello sperimentare, un certo eceesso I .. ·1 Ma vi illcide anche ullmomenlo pOSilivo, ossia l'identilicaziol1e dello sperimentare eOIl I'illvelllare I... lull'operazione cuiturale ideallllenle precedente l'operaziolle poelicl. CH4) (In that 'experimenl ing', Ihell, that we recognize as our own I ... 1 there persists acont radiuory or Ileg"tive moment I ... Ithat requires the cOI1linual, painful cffortofstayingellual to a present we do not possess ideologically I... .1: and so this implies a certain gratuitolls clement in tha.- experimenting, a certain exeess I ... ] But Ihere is also a posit ive moment, or the ident ilieation of experimcnting with invcntin[,!: I ... 1a cultural operalion that ideally precedes Ihe poetic operation.)
The essay ends with an admission that a new freedom ofthis kind would return inevitably to the expressionistic: ma sappiamo t:he, alia line, la serie di esperimentazioni risulter:l una strada d'amore-amo)'c fisit:o e sentimentale per i fcnomeni del mondo, c amore intcllettuale per illoro spirito, la storia: che ci fara semprc esse re 'clIl scntimenlo, al punto ill cui if nunlllo si rinnova'. (346) (but we realize that, in the cnd, the serics of experimentations will turn into a road oflove-a physical and sentimental love for the phenomena of the world, and an inteIJectuallovc for their spirit, history: that will always place us 'with feeling, at the point lvhere the wllrld is renewed'.)
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
This is much more than a clarion call to 'Make it New'. It is a synthesis of possible desires of the subject to write itself across history and reality, through permanent, monotonous renewal, thus dissolving its actual alienation from them. It makes of the dynamic of the movement of forms in experimentalism---or of pastiche or eclecticism-a potent vessel for subjective plenitude. Eclecticism might also be said to characterize the hybrid model for the intellectual developed in Ojji(ina. For Ferretti, as for Fortini and Scalia, it was based on an anachronistic, Romantic model, guided only by literary taste and a diffidence of genuinely 'avant-garde' cultural militancy (Ferretti, 1975, 31). And indeed, it did represent a rejection of the 'scientific' or 'technical' model of the intellectual, which would be championed in literary milieux by 11 mCllahri of Calvino and Vittorini ..l<) However, the interdisciplinary vitality of 11 menabd bears interesting comparison with the less rationalized eclecticism of OjJicina. The latter's ideological reinterpretation of the texture and style of poetie language prcJigures a wide range of intellectual currents in the period shortly after its collapse, from early structuralist critiques and the 'nouveau roman' to the 'nnuvelle vague' and Antonioni, just as Pasolini's 'neo-sperimentalismo' prctig'ures the 'neo-avanguardia', despite the mutual hostility between them (Giuliani, 1965,5-6). Fortini himself conceded in H)74 that Pasolini did indeed represent some sort of a forerunner or the Marxist structuralism of the 1960s (Ferretti, H)75, 23), and Scalia similarly grew more tolerant of Pasolini's 'disorg'anic' method, as it evolved in his H)7J-5 polemics (Scalia, 1978), But what sets Pasolini's work ti)r Of/it'illa apart from its immediate successors (but not their successors) is the distinct role played by subjective practices. This is perhaps most evident when a state of crisis in the perception of selthood and of a historical condition, and in the choice of a style, is directly bound to an ideological position: l'ingcnua c quasi iJlcttcrata (c anchc hurocratiea) eoazione teoriea Idi Salinari c di altriJ derivava dall" convinzione che una letteratura realistic;! dovesse fondarsi SlI qucl 'prospettivisl11o': I11cnlrc in una societa come la nostra non puo venire semplicel11entc ril11osso, in nome di una salute vista in prospcttiva, antieipata, eoatt", 10 stam di crisi, di dolore, di divisione.' ('J.a posizione', n. 6, April 1956,250) 39 Published in ID isslIcs, 1/ menab,; (")5'1-67) was supportcd hy scveral of those involved in Officina, induding Fortini, Sc,lia ,md Lconctti, but not by Pasolini. Sec Vittorini, 1967, for his notes on a new 'rationalist' tellsion in literaturc, On the ucvclopment of the technical model of the intellectual, and other new intellectual functions at this time, see Caesar anu Hainswonh, 1<)84, 25-JJ; Capizzi, "17 I; ]>ran.Jstaller, 1972; Romano, 1977,
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
47
(the ingenuous ami almost illiterate (and also bureaucratic) theoretical imposition [of PCI critics such as Salinari and others] derived from the conviction that a realistic literature should be fuunded on that 'prospectivism': whilst in a society such as ours, it is not tenable simply to suppress, in the name of prospective good health, the present state of crisis, (If pain, of division.)
A literary style is bound up with the traumatic subjective perception of a historical condition. OJ/i(ina collapsed filr certain practical and financial reasons. Most notorious was the withdrawal of the backing of Valentino Uompiani, who had been refused mcmbership of the aristocratic 'Circolo Romano dell a Caccia' hecause ofPasolini's epigram on the death of Pi us XII CA un papa', NS 11. I, March-April 1959, 37-(): HI, 536). But the increasing strain on its intellectual projcct (and particularly Pasolini's) was also clear: its centre could not hold and would not coalesce into any filcused programme of cultural ideology, which it had aspired 10 filrmulate, hut never to realize. This and the historical moment dictated that a method of working through eclectic, suhjective plurality towards ideology could not be sustained. The conditions (iH· a ret urn to ami development ofPasolini's implicit str~ltq;y in Of/hina will he Iillll1d in thc linOS, but for now, thc desire tiH· renewal has overllown the very vessel of renewal, and the moment of closure is all too evident: 'una fi)r:/.a confusa mi dice che un nuovo tempo / comincia per tuui e ci obbliga a essere nuovi' (a confused (illTe tells me that a new time / is hCf:~inning li)J· all and is forcin!!," us to be new, 'Ai redattori di "OHicina" " NS n. I, March-April 1959, 36; ReligiOIl£', B I, 534). ] n (1)60, Pasolini looked back gloomily over the live years of Of/irillll and how it had been mislInderstood. l-Ie concluded, simply, 'Of/int/tI Cstata inutiic' (Of/itinll achieved nothing, II portiw delllf.lIlortc, 174).
2.4. Vie nuove,
1<)60-.')
The column '] )ialoghi con Pasolini' (Pasolini in Dialogue) in Vie lIUOVC lasted from May H)60 until Septemher 1965, interrupted hy a long break between Deeemher 1962 ami October l()Cl4. 40 Vie nuove was a mass-circulation PCI weekly, tillll1ded in 1946, with a declared pedagogic ambition to educate and inf()rrn party members, but also to 40 Articles are referred with their ,hlte ofpuhlication in Vie ,,/lIIVe, f()liowed hy a page reference to J dialoghi, which reproduces all the artides. The artides' titles were editorial and arc thus not used here.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
provide an alternative to the expanding commercial magazine sector. It was highly successful in these terms, running series on 'I grandi Italiani' (17 figures from Frederick II to Gramsci) and 'I grandi dell'umanita' (Christ, Dante, Marx, Lenin, Einstein, ete.) in 1958, and using modern formats and language, to grow to a peak readership of 350,000 in 1952.41 Already a regular contributor-he covered a Moscow Festival of Youth, the 1960 Rome Olympics and had a book review column (for two weeks only) in 1957 (Jl portico della morte, 170)-Pasolini was given the task of responding to readers' letters on an extraordinary range of topics. These included Hung·arian literature, existentialism, religious doubts, Latin, the mining industry, Soviet military power, family legislation, the Communist youth league, Marxist theory, how to find a job, a reader's literary manuscript, drugs, Eisenhower, D' Annunzio and llrigitte Bardot (Ferretti, 1992, pp. xi-xii). The extent of official approval of his pedagogical role was nevcr made clear, and conflict inevitably arose with and within the editorial board, particularly after the departure of the instigator of the column, Maria Antonietta Maeciocehi, on 4 November 1961.42 Internal politics aside, however, this was Pasolini's entry into the consumer-driven (if tendentious) mass media, and his first committed and sustained attempt at public dialogue. The alienating and dehumanizing qualities of the medium were partially offset by direct contact with the readers. Clearly his was a position of considerable authority, and knowledge, but the often personal, provisional and eccentric nature of his responses worked to confuse and complicate his ex cathedra power. Despite echoes of the intimacy and pedagogical militancy of the 'Academiuta', the column becomes in practice a vehicle for the evolution of a deepening crisis of subjectivity, whose origins lie beyond the pages of Vie IlUOVC, and which overwhelms the project of the dialogues. The vacillating register resulting from this intrusion gives the column a dynamic uneasiness which reflects Pasolini's new-found, and often extreme, ambivalence towards culture and the cultural arena. The project was not, initially, to he in any way confessional, and he insists in several early articles that he wishes to avoid talking about himself: 'Vorrei evitare di parI are troppo di mc' (I'd like to avoid talking about myself too much, n. 30, 30 July 1960: 26); 'Mi vergogno di 41 On Vie nuove, sec Gundlc, HI')I; Isncnghi, 1<)83, 159-1i2. 42 According to Ivlacciocchi, she left because of an attempt hy Togliatti himsclfto remove Pasolini's column from Vie nuove (Ivlacdocchi, 198ob, 32). But this claim is dismissed as highly implausible by Ferretti, 1992, pp. xxx-xxxii.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
49
parlare di me' (I'm ashamed to talk about myself, n. 48, 3 Dec. 1960: 69); 'mi obbliga a fare della mia opera e di me oggetto di discussione, cosa che io vorrei evitare il piu possibile' (it forces me to make my work and myself a topic of discussion, something I would like to avoid as much as possible, n. 44, 29 Oct. 1964: 331). But these remarks soon come to seem disingenuous beside the intensely personal or autobiographical tone of many ofthe articles. The most obvious examples arc discussions of his own work-in-progress with the readers. The second and third articles of all, in June 1<)60, arc taken up with extracts from Ceneri and Ulla vila vio/elltll, indicating a wish for the readers to become familiar with and address themselves to Pasolini the writer-artist above all else. The poet thus acts as the intermediary between the people and the party cadres, through the conceit of his organic identification with the immediacy (noll-intellect uality) of the former, in a variation on a Gramscian theme. But more important in terms of emotional investment arc the discussions of recently or not-yet-puhlished works, such as A((allfllle (I July 1961, 144--X), I,a raMia (20 Sept. 1<)62, 21J4-X), Mamma Rflma (4 Oct. 1962, .W2- 7; I XOct. (1)62, 30<)-10), ~-allgc/fI (22 and 2<) Oct. 1964, ]2734; H) Nov. I<jC)4, 341-5 etc.), and, most importantly of all, the complete working through of the orig'inal conccption of [lac/lacci e ucccllilli (29 April to 20 May Ic)65, ]CJX--412). These show an intimacy which is lost when his arl icles respond 10 'high-level' intellectual ljg'ures or journals, such as Carlo Salinari (16 Nov. u)6 r, 195-<), J,ucio I.omhardo Radice (26 July r<jCIZ, 272--5) or Mot/do nl/flVfI (22 Oct. 1l)64, ]2X-]0). On an aUlohiographicallevel, several replies consist of narratives of Pasolini's own past, otien in contradiction with his other versions of the same events or peri()(J.4-' This illuslrates the ideological pressure of his position as well as a constant. in his poetic practice, the reinterpretation and rcf()]'Jl1ulation of the past as a key to the present and future. Such minor inconsistencies arc signilicant only in so far as they show a concerted modulating of the scll~ in order to accommodate the f()rm and arena of the dialogue. They ccho explicit expressions of concern as to the inadequacy of his personal responses. 'So hene che le mic lcttere su Vie IlUO'VC sono piene di difetti' (I am well aware that my letters in Vie nuove arc full of defects, 22 Nov. 1962, ] '4); or, in reply to an accusation that his letters arc monologues, 'I'egoismo che mi protegge nel mio vero lavoro I fa si che] questa rubrica di Vie nuove e spcsso una faticosa 43 Sec e.g. on hi, joining the 'Partito d' Azionc' in ")45, the articles ofH and 15 July 1961, 148-53, and I,cllere, i. 201; or the literary autobiography of ,6 July 1960,23-4; or the description of hi, non-Christian upbringing on 22 Oct. '964, :\29.
er
50
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
interruzione' (the egoism that protects me in my real work [means that] this column in Vie Nuove is often a tiresome interruption, 3 June 1965, 418). The latter points to a further peculiarity of the column, its declared subordination to other areas of discourse. Relative to his first experiences of film-directing, and a whole swathe of more or less absurd criminal and civil prosecutions, Vie IlUIIVe represents for a time another liberating 'safe-haven'. Hence Pasolini makes clear his ambivalence over the authority that might be incumbent upon him: E' vero che noi abbiamo hiso~no tli 'miti' e 'autorira', e COllli chc, attraverso I'industria clllturalc 0 l'appoggio di una corrente di opinione 0 I'organizzazione di un partito 0 il caso, divema un 'mito', 'un'alltorira', acquisisce nllovi doveri verso sestesso e verso gli altri. Forse un po' anch'io ormai: ma lasciatemi ancora qualche anno di lavoro e di studio per imparare a farlo meglio, a trovare meglio il pun to di coincidenza tra "utmit;) e sincerit;1. (15 Oct. 1964,324)
(It is true that we nced 'myths' and 'authori.-ies', and that whoever becomes a 'my.-h' or an 'authority', '-hrou~h the culture industry or through the support of a current of opinioll or the organization of a party, or by pure chanee, acquires new uuties towarus himself and towards others. And perhaps it's now tTue of me a little: hut ~ive me a kw more years of work and study to learn to do it better, to search out further rhe meeting-point of authority and sincerity.)
Concern over the stat us of the project spills over into concern over the sta tus of the self~ both in and beyond Vie nUllve. His defence of his own coherence rests on an extension of the policy of eclecticism, contradiction and pastiche fiHlI1d in Officina. He identifies absolutely that policy with the poetic, and himself with both: 'in dcfinitiva io sono protetto dalle mie contraddizioni' (1 am definitively protected by my contradictions, 15 Oct. 1(,64,325); 'a un artist.. va lasciato il diritto all'errore almeno in quanto contraddizione () ipotesi precoce 0 ritardata' (an artist should be given the right to make mistakes, or at least to contradict himself or to formulate premature or out-or-date hypotheses, 3 Dee. 1964, 349). Hence he is able to defend himsdfwhen read over-literally, as in the controversy caused by his claim that Marxism had bccome a ritualized church (26 July H)62, 274-5). In a device which will be used in much of his polemical writing up to the final 'corsair' writings, he describes his struggle as ideal, not literal, in need of , integration' via his other works. 44 The poetic text, or the text of the poet, is an incomplete text, awaiting realization. 44 See se 1-2; and his disingenuous deni.l, after much hostile response, that his 1975 proposals to abolish school and television were meant to he taken literally (LL 165-78; Volgar 'e/oljuio).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
51
In his general discussion of cinema, also, the poetic is privileged, as in an article on the expressivity ofChaplin's Modern Times (10 Dec. 1964, 352-3), or in his view of the 'cinema d'auteur' as a 'cultural necessity' (4 Oct. 1962,305--6). Furthermore, in the former article, the notion of the expressive or poetic is contrasted with the 'comunicativ(}-funzionale 0 tecnico' (technical or functional-communicative), using a Crocean distinction that was the basis of his influcntial historico-linguistic broadside 'Nuovc 4uestioni linguistiche' (Rinascila, n. 51,26 Dec. 1964: 19-22; then /:1:' 9-2H), in which hc declares the existence of the first truly national Italian language in the homologizing communicative, non-expressive blandness of commercial language. The shift to a technical nco-capitalist culture leaves the artist with the desperate task of simply retaining an arena li)r expression: 'Egli Il'artista I non deve tacere llulla, perchc in un artista il peccato piLI grande c l'omissioneessendo la sua funzione l'esprimere, e dunque l'esprimere c tuUo' (I the artist I must not kt:cp silent on anything, hecause the greatest sin ti)r an artist is the sin of omission--since his function is 10 express and hence expression is .111, .1 ] kc. I()()4, 349). Furthermore, the artist has a ljuasicontractual ohligation to express the truth: 'Non pensa il giornalista borghese, nelllmeno per un istanle a servire la verit.\: a esscre in 4ualche modo onesto: cioc personale' (the bourgeois journalist never ti)r a moment thinks of serving tTut h: of heing in soml~ bshion hones\: in other words, personal, 15 Oc\. 1960, 50). 'I m pC!!,'n 0' , therdill'e, is no longer a tactical subordinat ion to ideology, but rather this very drive t(lr org'anic exprcssion in an historicalmolllent of rupture, Even at sllch a 'momcnto di "zero" slorico' (;1 historictl 'zero' moment, 3 I kc. H)64, 351), the past remains vitally present and the futurc 'non partle] da zero, ma dalla sOl1lmid delle cspericnze culturali e storiche vissute anche a rovescio, come delusione' (does not start from scratch, but ti"om the height ofcllllural and historical experiences lived also in reverse, as disappointment, 351):~5 The impulse to Iotal and truthful expression on the part of the intcllectual tinds several examples in Pasolini's sustained explorations of taboo issues, starting from onc of the earliest articles (25 June H)60, ID-13), which discllsses erotic literature, 'gallismo meridionale' (southern machismo), prostitution, women's rights, and the sexual taboos of the left, largely influenced by Freud, who ini(lrms several areas oftl1l: column, As well as confronting moral-political issues, such 45 On 'impcg;llo' and the illusory natmc of" uncommiltcd ti'ccdom, sce also zll Aug, 1965, IHJunc J()6o, (,-10.
443-~);
52
PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
as youth-as ever-racism, illiteracy and fascism,4 6 he clashes with the editors of Vie nuove itself over his comments on the crisis in Marxism, and on the Catholic-Marxist dialogue encouraged by Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, to the cxtcnt that an article on the Church was censored by the management of the magazine in December 1964 (77 1- 2 ). On the question of Marxism and tradition, Pasolini repeats the ti:lrmulation of his new 'impegno'-progress through awareness of history as crisis: 'Andare avanti significa metterc in crisi quello che c'c dietro, sempre' (To go forward entails instigating a crisis in what has gone before, always, J8 Feb. 1965,382); 'Solo la rivoluzione pue> salvare la tradizione: solo i marxisti amano il passato' (Only revolution can save tradition: only Marxists love the past, I S Oct. J 962, 310). Similarly, he describes his own status within literary history as a 'scontro-fusione' (clash-fusion) between a politics of revolution (Marxist and prospective), and a 'modified' aesthetics of decadentism (retrospective).47 Poetry is located beyond the present-in his misused terminology, it is 'diachronic' (11) March 1965, 389-{)0). These parallel modes of insertion of the subject into time cach point to a by now familiar dynamic or permanent transition. The writer, commodified by the culture industry (6 Dec. 1962,3 J 8-H», is no longer a sacred oracle, but is potentially still bound up with the prophetic in his/her relationship with time. Furthermore, the culture industry itself artificially reconstructs the 'aura' (Benjamin, J(73) of art, encouraging the traditional role of the artist as an instrument tilr the manipulation of consumer desire, within limits. Pasolini, however, did not fit the limits. His creation as a public 'personaggio', as a victim on a public stage, brought a profoundly suffered loss of subjective autonomy which informs and precedes the dialogues in Vie nuove. A scries of tortured confessions reveals the true penetration of hostility, which cuts offthe strategy of shifting absorption as the guarantor of the stability of the subject. The key word he uses to describe his bound subjectivity is 'mistificazione' (mystification): 46 The theorization of a 'new fascism' in the polemics of I<J7]-5 is already to be fOllnd ill nuce in 20 Aug. 1960,35-7. 47 His relationship to decadentism is most often deeply hostile: he denies vehemently having anything in common with a series of decadent 'poctes maudits' from Villon to Rimbaud (28 Dec. 1961,219), and he strongly rejects the 'esaltazione dell'io' (exaltation of the self) typical ofD'Annunzio (22 July 1961, 1.13-7). Indeed there is an extended series of antiD'Annunzian articles in 1960-1 (19 Nov. 1960,59-62; 30 Sept. 1961, 175-8; 14,21 and 2H Oct. 1961, 182-8).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
53
Mettiti un po' nei miei panni, e cerca di capire esistenzialmente I'esperienza di uno che viene sistematicamente, regolarmente, atrocemente mistificato. (16 Nov. 1961,199) (Put yourselffor a moment in my shoes, and try to understand existentially the experience of someone who is a victim of systematic, regular, atrocious mystification.) la mistificazione dclla mia opera leJ una mistifieazione totale, eompleta, irrimediabile. (10 May I (lI2, 255) (the mystification of my work lis.! total, complete, irremediahle.)
The agent of that 'mistificazione' is industrial power and its corollary, state and political conformism. And power entraps through the desire for success, which is now scen as always prof()Undly alienating: Ecco che cos'': il successo: lIna vita mistificata dagli altri, che torna mistificata a te, e finisce col Irasf(lrmarti veramente. I ... 1So cosa signitica essere guardati come heslie rare, essere dali in pastil senza discriminazione aJl'odio (e assai piu raramente alia simpatia), esse re continuamente, sistematicamente falsificati. (15 Oct. I ()60, So . I ) (This is what sllccess i~: a life mystified hy others, that comes back \0 you in ils myslified form, and el1(.\s up actually changing you. I ... 11 know whal it means to he stared 011 like rare heasls, \0 he ted indiscriminately to halTed (ami, much less freqllenlly, 10 sympathy), \0 he continuously and systematically falsified.) 1I successo':, pcr IIna vila morale e senlimcntaie, qualcosa di orrendo, c hasta. (6 Sept. \1)62, zHI) (For a moral ,lilt! cmotionallite, success is appalling, and that's thal.)
The degmdal ion of the t(lrmeriy creative, harmonious drive fill" success is the result ofa loss of control over his work, attacked not only by an invisible oligarchy, but also by a (manipulated) public: 10 non posso pcnnellermi di shagliarc un'opera; sono ridotto a questo I· .. J. J.c masse I.. ·1 sonocol1le dei re. E io di fronte a questi re, ormai, sono un po' come un giullarc che se shaglia un motto viene condannato a morte. (J 2 July 1962, 270 )
(1 cannot allow mysclfto get a single work wrong; it has come to this [ ... 1. The masses l ... Jare like kings. And I am now, hefore these kings, rather like a court jester who has only to put a word out of place to be condemned to death.)
But, more seriously still, the subject becomes alienated from its very self: 'io cereo di lottare, donchisciottescamente, contro questa fatalita che mi toglie a me stesso' (I endeavour to struggle, like Don Quixote,
54
PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
against this fatal destiny that removes/steals me from myself, 6 Sept. 1962,289). It is a grim panorama, but onc containing seeds of a future strategy of resistance: here, the image of the 'jester' and of Don ~ixote creates a mock-heroic, tragicomic circle of sympathy for his struggle, and works to preclude rational dissent from his position at the margins. The mock authority which is acquired and cultivated as it is denied in these articles actually enhances his condemnation of power. In defiance of the increasing negativity ofthe governing ideology of the site, and the consequent weakened autonomy of a subjective voice, thc latter begins to learn how to resist and undermine the t()rmer by rhetoricizing itself, its instability and its potential interlocutors. The atmosphere of crisis is at its most acute in the dialogues from Il)60 to 1962, and particularly the period of the trial for attempted armed robbery at Circeo of 1961.11ut it remains in some form throughout, as each new film brings further controversy and publicity. The final article (30 Sept. H)65, 450-3) expresses regret at the lack of a role for a Marxist intellectual outside the party, hut more importantly, perceivcs a historical fracture which simply leaves Pasolini at a loss as to how to sustain the subjectivity-with in-history, which is his defining state, when history has turned in on itself (what he calls 'la nuova preistoria', the new prehistoric age, in his poetry) and will tolerate only the inscription of com11lodified, reitied, subjugated subjects.
2·S. Nuovi argo11lenti, 1966-75 The cnd ofPasolini's collaboration with Vie nuove coincided with, and was partly caused by, his decision to co-edit a new series of Nu(}vi argmnenti. FounJed in 1!)53 hy Alberto Moravia and Alberto Carocci, Nuovi argomenti had been a cultural-political review broadly similar in outlook anti many of its aims to Otlhillll, seeking a left-wing cult ural and ideological renewal to salvage the by now worn optimism and vigour of post-war debate. It was centred on the Roman intellectual milieu of whieh Moravia was the dominant figure, and, like Ollicinll, it looked to ask fundamental questions and open debates----()ften through its hallmark, the questionnaire or enquiry-rather than make dogmatic prescriptions. Unlike qflicitla, it did not normally accept poetry, but a major exception to this rule was the publication in nn. 17-18 (November 1955-February 1956) of ' Le ccneri di Gramsci', after the strong insistence of first Eisa Morante and then Moravia (sec Siciliano, 1981a, 252).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
55
In the early 19605, the impetus of the review had been dented somewhat by the success and high-profile of the Gruppo '63 and its own journals, such as Il Verri, Quademi Piacentini and even, although not strictly adherent to the 'neo-avanguardia', Il menab(l, and hence the launch in I96S ofa new series. Siciliano (i98Ia, 363-4) describes how Pasolini was initially even more keen to realize the project than Moravia himselt~ arranging for backing first from Editori Riuniti, and then from his own long-term publisher J jvio Garzanti. The new series was more literary than the old, and more intent on the promotion of new writing. For Pasolini, the experience of mass-communication through Vie nuove, even if the 'mass' was of a focused, orthodox kind, was suspended, and Nu()vi argomcllti represented a return to some of his unacknowledged roles in Officina; [hat of pat ron, ami of eclectic co-ordinator of ideas and responses. If the rejection of his' Piccola antologia sperimentale' by Sanguineti had marked a point of rupture with an emergent g·eneration of poets, Nllllvi argrnnC1lli saw Pasolini discovering a third generation in poets such as I hrio Bcllczza, Giorgio Manacorda, Silvana Mangini and Renzo Paris, and promoting other established voices such as Attilio Bcrtolucci and Amelia Rosselli. Another onc of t he third g-clleration, Enzo Siciliano, was editorial assistant, and would later become a /"ull editor after the death of( :arocci in [()7z.+H Pasolini's opt imismii)J· the new series is evident in a letter to l.eoneHi fromiale I()('S: 'comincia dllnque una nuova epoca. Ell c 4uinili necessaria ulla nuova rivisLI' (so a new era is beginning. And so a new journal is needed).+'l But his most extelllle<J expression o/" intent is to be fimnd in t wo letters wriuen to Franco Fortini in November 1()6S and January H)6(" in which he implores Fortini to hecome a re!!,"ular contrihutor, to little clfect.so In the iirst, he describes the review in terms even more open anil provisional than Officina's ilirected eclecticism: it is to he a 'trihuna lihera' (opcn platti,,·m), 'sede delle autonomc ricerche di 1111 gruppo di amici-l1emici' (site of the indepcndel1t research ofa group of friends-cum-encmies): {H Several of these tiPIITS (Siciliano, M:m:lconla, llellez4a) laler hecame important critics amI cha11lpions ofl'asolini's work, as did olher conll'ihlllors (Zanzollo) ano members of the Roman circle (Belli). (ii,\Il Carlo FelTelli :mo Watter Siti, although not involved in Nllm,i argommli, were lirst in touch with I'asolini in this period (I,,'lIere, ii. S50, 655, 674, 70S). 4') I,ellar, ii. S91l. The sense of a new era is a strong underlying motif of lfacllaai e 1I{celli,,;, completed inJan. 1966. 50 I,ct/ert', ii. 600-[, 60S· 6. The exch,mge was continued in a third letter oflan. 1966 (609), and Fortini's name did appc,1f in l'asolini's list ofeollahorators in the call li)T comributions in the first issuc. On the remarkahle relationship hctwe~n Fortini and Pasolini, scc Fortini, 1993, passim; J.upcrini, 1'l1l!; Thiine, 1990, 157-86.
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I nuovi 'Nuovi argomenti' non sono dunque una rivista, come noi l'abbiamo concepita finora: sono la sede per la costituzione di una futura rivista possibile. Percio cominciamo non da zero, ma dai punti in cui ognuno di noi si trova: [ ... ] illavoro in comune-svolto 'a puntate' neIla stessa sede-in ricerche parallele-finiriJ. forse con 10 stabilire un reale equilibrio: 0 la convergenza su certi problemi e certe soluzioni, 0 la definitiva divergenza. Lascieremo insomma tutto aperto, in questa 'costituente'. (So the new 'Nuovi Argomenti' is not a journal in the sense we have conceived of them previously: it is the site for the constitution of a future, potential journal. So we are not starting from scratch, but from wherever each of us finds ourselves: l ... J the work undertaken together--carried out 'in instalments' in the same place--in parallel-will perhaps result in a real equilibrium: either a convergence on certain problems and certain solutions, or definitive divergence. In short we are leaving everything open in this new 'constituent assembly'.)
His enthusiasm f()r the project is based on its tentative and pluralistic openness, and this is reaffirmed in his call for contributions, placed in an appendix to the first issue, where he repeats his formulation of the journal as a collaboration of autonomous voices who have in common only the perception of a crisis and the site at which to resolve it. There is no programme apart from 'la necessita di ricominciare tutto daccapo' (the need to begin all over again). There is no journal as such: 'la nostra e anzitutto "una rivista che serve a preparare una rivista" , (ours is above all 'a journal to help to prepare f()r a journal')Y Even the decision to place these pseudo-manifestos at the cnd ofthe journal displays a desire for continuity and unclamorous renewal, rather than anything more forceful. The trajectory ofPasolini's involvement with Nuovi argomenti seems to fall into two distinct periods, before and after 1970. From 1966 until 1970, he contributed a steady stream of articles, poems and plays to the journal, and his hand is clearly behind several of the unsigned editorials which often adapt his theoretical, aesthetic thoughts to political issuesY 51 See 'Appendice: uue note per I'invito alia collaborazione', Nu()v; "'KIIII1Wti, NS n. I, Jan.-March 1(j66, 231-6. The first ofthese two notes is by Moravia, who claims that liule has changed between the old and the new series. Roth are dominated by 'una eflcniva presa sui reale, comunque e con '1ualun'lue mezzo ottcnuta' (an effective grasp of reality, achieved in whatever way and by whatever means). In the past that 'impcgno' had qlincidcd with Marxism, but now that coincidence was in crisis and required renewal. Pasolini felt uneasy about Moravia's attitude, as his second lctter to Fortini shows: 'tieni conlO, ti prego, piu del mio prcamboletto che di Ijuello di Moravia' (please pay more attcntion 10 my short preamble than to Moravia's, Lettere, ii. 605). The formula 'una rivista per preparare una rivista' had first been used by Pasolini in his last Vie nuove 'Dialogo'. 52 Sec e.g. 'Il presidentcJohnson sogna', n. 2, Apr.-June 1966,3-7, or 'Napalm LTD', n. 9,Jan.-March 1968: 3-6.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
57
A series of often controversial essays-'Appunti en poete [sic] per una linguistica marxista', 'La sceneggiatura come "struttura che vuole essere altra struttura" , (n. I), 'La lingua scritta dell'azione' (n. 2),53 'La fine dcll'avanguardia' (nn. 3-4), which provokcd fiercc debatc, 'La paura del naturalismo' (n. 6),54 'Ci() chc cneo-zdanovismo c cia che non 10 C' (n. 12), '11 cincma impopolare' (n. 20)-and the pocm '11 PCI ai giovani!!' (n. IO), were all later included in FE. Indeed, a Icttcr ofJune 1966 to Livio Garzanti suggests that HE, originally entitled Laboratorio,55 was first conceived of as an anthology of his Nuovi argomenti pieces: 'per questa primavera, io penserei I... 1a "Laboratorio" (volume di saggi e poesie sag-g-istiche-Ia questione linguistica e tutte le altre cose che ho scritto e amlro scrivendo pcr N uovi argomenti), (fix this Spring, I'd look to I. _.1 'I,aboratorio' (a volume of essays and essay-pocms-the debate on language and all the other things I've written and am writing fi,r Nuovi argomenti), Ll'llm:, ii_ 617)'l'he letter to Garzanti is onc of ten horn January 1<)66 to June 1<)67, and together they indicate Ihallhe start of Pasolini's involvement with Nuovi llfWJlllcnti coincided with a pcriod of intense creative activity. Within these months, and these letters, plans Ii,r many of the projccts which were 10 dominate the final decade of his life arc sketched. Apart from 1,Il/mrtlIOrio, he hq!;ins editing li,r Garzanti a series of published screenplays (' Film e discussioni') and another of film theory (again 'I ,ahoratorio') with (iiacoll1o Gambetti, and these will include his own work, ami that or Marco Bellocchio, Sergio Citti, Godard, Bazin and Metz; hc makes a drati or the screenplay of .\'a.n Paolo; he begins Bcsll'mmia, a screenplay or novel in verse, and plans an anthology of his poet ry ('un alto conclusivo di un mio "periodo" letterario per aprirne un altTo', a closing act one of my literary 'periods' so as to open up another, L:llcre, ii. () '7); he completes the treatmenlS of both Teorema and /idipo; he makes further progress on I,a divina mimesis, known at this stage as Frll11l11ll'1lli or /vlcrnoric pralithe; he makes a first, very vague reference to Pclmlio; and he plans a comic-book growing out of his work with Toto. His greatest enthusiasm, however, is reserved ti.)r thc six verse-dramas, conceived during- his month-long convalescence from an Sol I.aler entilled 'I.a lingua scrilta ddla rca\1;\', U! 202-30. Much ofthe issuc is dedicated to papers !(ivcn at the I'esaro cinema fCstival of [966, including a strong attack on I'asolini', scmiology from Saltini, 1966. These fCstivals were central to I'asolini's developing intcrest in semiotics ;111<1 film theory. S4 Lller partly entitled 'Osservazioni suI piano-scquenza', FE 24[-5. SS Lahora/,,,,'() was a title Pasolini went to some lengths to preserve. It suggests a return, with a certain clement of modernization, to the model of the 'olneina', or workshop_
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ulcer operation (March-April 1966), his subsequent plans for a new 'teatro della parola' (Theatre of the Word), and a series of classical works to be staged by the Teatro Stabile di Torino, translated by himself, Moravia, Leonetti, Siciliano, Morante, Bertolucci, Piovene and others. Nuovi argomenti is at the heart of this new lease of creative life. In another letter to Garzanti, he writes complaining of the delay in distribution of an issue of the journal: cio mi allarma pcrche vi ho pubblicato una cosa a cui tcngo moltissimo, e da cui dipendc tutto il mio lavow futuro: cioc il 'Manifesto per un nuovo teatro' I... 1. 11 nuovo teatro, poi, sara oltre che teatro anche movimento culturale e in qualche modo politico (una componente <.Ii una vera 'Nuova Sinistra' ecc.: e 'Nuovi argomenti' ne sad I'organo). (I.eller!:, ii. (34) (it alarms me because it includes a piece of work I am very attached to, which is the basis of all my future work: the 'Manifesto till" a New Theatre' [... J. Ant! the new theatre will be a cultural and in some sense political movement, hesides being a theatre (a componellt of a gelluine 'New J.eft' etc.: and 'Nuovi argomenti' will he its mouthpiece).) As well as the manifesto, he published two of his plays in NUOlli argo11lenti, Pi/ade and AITahulazione (see Bibliography 1.6). After the publication of Rosa (Ui)4), Pasolini wrote little significant poetry fi)r several years. 56 In a note to '11 PCI ai giovani!!' he describes himself ,tS 'un poeta che da alcuni anni non scrive piu versi c ha deciso di non scriveme piu' (a poet who has not written poetry for several years and has decided not to write any again).57 He had done much to promote younger poets' work in Nuovi arJ!,()menti, but had only published some old poems of his own written in 1963 in n. 6 ('Israele'), as a reflection on the Six-Day War o/" 1967. However, after the furore over '11 PC! ai giovani!!', he began to present new poetry regularly, and for much of 1969 and 1970, he ceased to publish essays here and contributed almost exclusively poetry. All of'L'enigma di Pio XII' (n. II), 'Trasumanar e organizzar' (n. IJ), 'Poemi zoppicanti' (n. 16), 'Poesia della tradizione' 56 Fcrretti, H)(j2, p. xxix, links Ihis crisis with Ihe arguments oflhe two key essaysoflhc period, 'Nuove questioni linguistiche' (H)64) and 'La fine dell'avan~lIardia' (H)(,(»). The return to poetry in 19M1....j was f()reshadowed in 1(j66-7 by the composition ofa small numher ofimportant long poems, in part conncctetl lO the verse-tragedies begun in lhe same period (sce Tea/TO): for example 'Teoria dei due paratlisi' (lh, rll! 8-23), 'Beslemmi.' (H2, 1824-30) and 'Poeta delle ceneri' (B2, 20S6--H4). 57 'Note (importanli), to 'I1 PC! ai giovani!!', n. 10, Apr.-June 196H, 2]. The poem, although intended for NUllvi argolllC11li, had already been publishetl in L'Espres.\fI, I ()June 196H. under the editorial title 'Vi odio, cari studenti!' (I hate you, dear students!). It was fmm th;lt base that it became something of a cuuse cilebre of the 1968 student movemenl in Italy. See Pasolini's comments in Tempo illus!ralo, 17 May 196(j (1 dialllghi, 629-30).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
59
(n. 17), 'La restaurazione di sinistra' (n. IS) and 'Manifestar' (n. 20) would, with minor rewriting, become part of Trasumanar (1971). Whatever the significance of the return to poetry on an aesthetic level, it clearly represents a final flourish of activity within the confines of this version of the fraternal intellectual group, and also a certain withdrawal from cultural politics. Solitude will return as a constant theme of the Tempo it/uslmlo columns in 1969, in the wake of persccution and controversy over both Teorema and Poreite. The extent to which the arena and audience provided by 1('mpo illustrato supersedes aspccts of Nu()vi arp.mnenli \ function as an arena jill' self-expression and confession is further indicated by several articles in the former on film theory, and, perhaps most strikingly, by a public exchange of letters on the matter between Moravia and Pasolini in 7i'mpo illuslra/o, and not in the journal they jointly edited. sx Other aspects of Pasolini's activity, the state ofNuovi arg01nenli, and its position in the context ofthe cultural status quo, reintiH'ee the sense of a withdrawal or modulation of role after uno. The publication of TrasulIlanar, and thus an acknowledgement that the period of new poetic creativity h,ld in turn come to an cnd, fi)lIowed the ti)rced end of the column in 'li'lI/po il/lIslrlllo in January lino (sce § () below), ami the start of t he long location-·work tilr the tilming of 11 /)ccllllleroll. The (iarzanti paperback ant hology, Pllesic, first planned in H,67, finally appeared in lino also. Furthermore, n. 21 of Num,j argllflll'1lli (Jan.-Mar. un 1 ) explicitly declares the cnd 01" an era tiH' the journal, and a return to a more convent ional till'mat of literary criticism and creative new writ ing which it has retained ever since. 'Editoriale per i NI/woi argllmenti '97' (Appunti)' acknowledges that the journal has survived the chaos ol"the J()(IOS, and is now EICed with a void. The ncw direction it will take will simply aim to fill that void, to 'man\cnere il disordine' (kecp the disorder), but in a more stable manner. The none-too-hidden subtext of the editorial refers pI" course to the demise of the 'neo-avanguardia' in the wake of the 'hot autumn' of social and industrial unrest, and nascent terrorism. Pasolini's long crusade against the generation of the 'neoavanguanlia' loses its object, and thus that role which had created a form of stability through hostile isolation during much of the decade founders in turn. In this conted, two articles are particularly significant in that they show him constructing a new adversarial target: the SH Sce I dill/OKhi, 6!lS-7, 692-7,700-1. The argument was sparked off by onc of Moravia's regular lilm reviews (o[Fellini's Sall'ri(()l1) lilT I:Hspresso.
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damning review of Montale's Satura (n. 21);59 and his last signed article for the journal before his death, a prologue to the first Nu()vi argomenti 'inchiesta' in the new series, entitled '8 domande sull'estremismo' (n. 31, Jan.-Feb. 1973, 5-I05). The latter, a version of a lecture he had given in April 1972 ('E. M.: estremismo morale 0 estremismo metapolitico'), opens and closes on notes of crisis: Prima di tutto devo dire ehe non mi trovo in un momento molto felice della mia vita di intellettuale: sento vagamente, per esempio, ehe qui le mie parole suonano senza i caratteri ne della novita ne dell'autorita (5). (First of all 1 must say that this is not a very happy moment of my intellectual life: 1 have a vague feeling, for example, that here my words lack the ring of either novelty or authority.) Ho eomineiato con un aceenno al mio ca so pcrsonale, e con un altro aeeenno al mio caso personalc voglio finirc. Trovo scritto in un libro che sto leggendo [ ... 1: 'Chi semina virtil raccoglic la fama, chi dicc la verira raccoglie l'odio'. (17) (1 began with a reference to my personal position, and I want to end with another. I find in a book I am reading [ ... 1: 'lIe who sows virtue reaps fame, he who speaks the truth reaps hatred')
He casts himself as Cassandra, condemned by his insight into truth to be rejected by those closest to him. Hut evidently the melancholy of these statements is also a rhetoric of self-reinforcement through positioning a perceived enemy as 'other'. The new policy after n. 21 was clearly successful, as the journal reverted to two-monthly puhlication from n. 25, January-February 1972, but Pasolini contributed little. 6o Othcr openly conflictual and wider arenas drew Pasolini incxorahly away. This last contribution to the journal coincides precisely with his first articles for the open platform ('tribuna libera', just as he had described Nuovi argomenti) in Corricre della sera, which inaugurated the 'Scritti corsari' and would be his last public stage (sce § 7 below). (lI Nu()vi argomenti, during the first period in particular, acted as a reliable site in a way which Pasolini had described hopefully to Fortini at its inception. It provided a forum for the limited 59 Montale replied to the review with the hitingly sarcastic poem 'Letter;\ a Malvolio', in
L'Espresso, 19 Dec. 1971 (now in Diu,io del '71 e del '72, Montalc, I!JH4, 466..... 67). Pasolini followed up with a scries of epigrams ending in one addressed to a Homeric Nobody: 'Ouli.,', n.z7,May.....June 197z,146-8;Bz,19ZJ--8. 66 He was the author of an anonymous editorial note in n. 26 explaining the shift to mOre frequent editions in characteristic terms of a struggle against 'neo-zdanovismo'. 61 The first, 'Contro i capeUi lunghi', appeared on 7 Jan. 1973. Only two others followed in 1973, but the rate increased markedly during 1974 and 1975 (see Let/ere, ii. 748-9).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
dissemination of a series of ideas on a varied range of to pi cs, and it contrasted sharply with periods of withdrawal from poetry, of persecution, judicial and otherwise, and of lack of creative direction with which it partly coincided. In its stability then, it had much in common with the role played by qflicina; however Nuovi ar!{omenti itself, and its constituent parts, lacked meaning in their project in a way that OjJicina did not. The conjunction of ideas and people failed, and indeed never aspired, to achieve a synthesis. It lacked ideological direction, even one of eclecticism, and instead developed into an anthological review, not unlike in this respect more glossy, popular magazines. As a result, perhaps here more than anywhere else, Pasolini treated a public space as a workshop tilr new anti oltl work anti ideas, for learning, without constantly ceding to his obsessive need ro confront the nature of the site in his exploration ofthe self 2.6. Tempo iIIustr
62
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
previously filled at various times by Massimo Bontempelli, Curzio Malaparte and Salvatore Quasimodo. Unlike the Vie nuove column, here there is only a limited amount of direct interchange with readers. 65 'Il caos' is largely a column of thoughts offered ex cathedra, by a notoriously controversial writer, and where there is dialogue, it is most often polemical exchange with other public figures. 66 The consequent detachment restricts the sense of intersubjective reinforcement offered by dialogue, but also acts to liberate and extend Pasolini's field of enquiry, opening out the possibility of a forceful maverick's role which will be further crystallized in and LL. Hence, he engages with and attacks a series of important contemporary political and cultural events, from the Premia Strega, Italy's principal literary prize, and the Venice Film Festival to the centre-left government and the Socialist leader Pietro Nenni; from the student movemelits in Italy to Vietnam and the American 'New J .eft' to Alexander Panagulis, Rudi Dutschkc and Jan Palach in Europe; there arc even articles on the moon-landings. The news-driven nature and range of these issues make of the column for Pasolini 'un fronte di piccole battaglie quotidiane' (a front of little everyday hattles, rH Oct. I!)6!), 707) whieh ahandon the high ground of revolutionary subversion ti:)r more active, pragmatic targets. The function of' 11 cows' as an intermediary stage between the pessimism and sclf.. marg·inalization of the public self in the early Hi)os, and the public monllism ofthe mid-J()7os is emphasized by Ferl-ctti, H)!)2, who notes the nascent polemics against superstructural cultural institutions such as school, thc Church and television, as well as ex . · tended engagement with the 'prohlem' of youth, and consumerism, and secs the column as an 'apprenticeship' for the 'Corsair' season. However, the evolution ti-om thc {()rlller to the latter is far from sl1looth. The voice of the Con;air will be more f()rccful and more suhversive, and will create a powerful instrument for resistance out of the somewhat uneasy compromise with thc organs of consumerist culture seen here. Pasolini's typical rhetorical tricks recur. He protects himself by disingenuously declaring 'ho semprc detto e ripetuto che sono un dilettante' (I have always said and repeated that I am an amateur, 7IH).
se
65 Sec the following- exceptions: 3 Sept. [()oH, 477 (where a reader regrets l'asolini's move from Vie mlOve to Tell/jlo illuslralo and predicts that he will cnd up in COlTierc "clla sera); a scries oflctters in dialogue with/ about prisoners in Parma (2 I Dec. I <)6H, 545-56; 3 I May 1<)01/, 634-8; 5 July H)69, (,52 ...6; 30 Aug. 196<),677-<); 4 and I I Oct. H)O!), 701-07); and the final three columns in HJ70(1O, 17 and z4Jan. 197°,756-67). 66 These include a Prime Minister, Giovanni J.cone, Moravia, Silvana Mangano, Arpino, Pampaloni, Zcflirelli, Suldati, Fcllini, Maccioechi, Arbasino, Visconti, Anna Magnani.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
He privileges the physical 'gettare il nostro corpo neIIa lotta' (hurling our bodies into the fray, 745) over the cerebral. He continues his familiar imagery of solitude and exclusion: 'il mio non c qualunquismo, ne indipendenza; c solitudine' (mine is not an attitude of Q!.Ialunquism [approx. I'm-all-right-Jack1, nor of independence; it is solitude, 6 Aug. I96H, 459); 'io sono wmpfetamente solo [ ... 1 Amo la solitudine' (I am (Ompfelely afone I... JI love loneliness (11 Jan. 1969, 557-H; and cf 631). And he constantly slips ti'om politics into self-analysis, only to regret it: 'ho poi pariah) troppo di me' (I have anyway talked too much about myself, IH Oct. 1969,707), 'si, sono "egocentrico" [ ... ] come tutti gli autori' (yes, I'm 'egocentric' I... ] like all authors, 1 Nov. i969, 718). But there is a new quality to his writing, engendered by the nature of the arena and t()rmulatcu in the earliest articles, which heralds a new complexity of understanding of the medium in which he is working and the need to exploit it through its own structures. The programmatic opening piece (6 Aug. 11)6H, 4S7-(2), stakes his claim as an authority who denies authority and protection, and who rcf()rmulates the trauitional role of the int ellectual with a new cynicism: 'io approfitto delle strutture capitalistiche per esprimermi: e 10 /;u;cio, percill, ciniwlIletlte' (I am exploiting capitalist structures in order to express myself: and I am thereI()JT doing it IYllicalll', 460; and see 27 Aug'. 1!)6H, 472). If the goal of self-expression remains ('I'esprimersi I ... 1 c sempre l1leraviglioso' (to express yourself I ... 1 is always marvellous, q Sept. II)6(), 6H4) ), the new awareness or the need to ex ploit all intrinsically hostile medium with irony, cynically, produces the most extensive analysis yet of that culture industry. The authority which he shuns is gencralized into principle in the opening article: 'l'autorit.\, infatti, c semprc terrore' (authority is, indeed, all/'a)!s terror, 4SH). And indeed he offers a working suhtitle t(lI' his column, 'Contro il terrore' (Against Terror, 4SH).67 Part icularly in H)6H, the terminology of terror and terrorism recurs regularly as indicative of the repressive. mechanisms of power, from left ami right. The attempt to prevent the showing of films at Venice was terrorism, and Morante's long poem If mondo salvato tiai raKazzini is a blow struck against cultural terrorism (27 Aug. 1968,470,473-4); terror is labelled the partner of resignation in public opinion (7 Dec. H)6H, 536). Terroristic structures of power are described as mono··· logistic, and hence television (28 Dec. 1968, 547) and the moonlandings (9 Aug. 1969,667) are given as typical authoritarian vehicles. 67 Indcec.l, Falaschi points OUl in his notes to J dilllllglri (lxxxi) that 'Contro il terrore' was the only title Pasolini used when beginning to work on his column.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
Under these vague, totalizing notions of 'terrore', 'autorita' and 'potere', Pasolini assimilates the actually repressive-such as the continuing sequestration of Teorema despite its acquittal (11 Jan. 1969, 555-8)-with institutional and cultural apparatuses of integration. He borrows from Marcuse 68 another term, 'il sistema', the system, which either marginalizes or integrates the intellectual: I'intellettuale C un reietto, nel senso ehe il sistema 10 relega al di fuori tli se stesso, 10 cataloga, 10 tliserimina, gli affihhia un eartello segnaletico: ontle: 0 rentlerlo tlannato, 0 integrarlo. (14 Dec. 1l)6H, 538) (the intellectual is an outcast, in the sense that the system banishes him to exile, catalogues him, picks him out, and attaches a placartl to him: so as cit.her to tlamn him or absorb him.)
The alternatives are deeply pessimistic, and arc reiterated elsewhere in the formulation of his own role as the 'bufl<)lle di corte' (court jester) who is not only reduced to total dependency and thus loss of autonomy-'l'intellettuale cdove I'industria culturale 10 colloca: perch,; e come il mercato 10 vuole' (thc intellectual is where the culture industry places him: because and hOIll the market wants him, I3 Aug. 1908, 462}--but who is more seriously 'incapace di t:lre vera esperienza e capace solo di vegliare sulla sua coscienza' (unahle to have true experiences, able only to watch over his conscience, 7 Dec. 1968, 534). But at other points, the system is not so all-cmbracing as to eliminate altogether the possibility of true knowledge and experience of reality which, lilr Pasolini, is a radical challenge to the consumerist status quo. Knowledge is inevitably mediated-'Ia rea Ita [ ... ] potremo sempre conosceria "attraverso" il sistcma, mai "al di la" del sistema' (we shall only ever be able to know reality 'through' the system, never 'beyond' the system, J Sept. 1968, 476 )-but in this dynamic of integration, a positive potential is mapped out. The system works vertically, monologically and through abstraction, but leaves freedom t()r change and subversion on the converse horizontal, dialogieal and concrete levels: 'eio che e male in astratto (l'assimilazione del sistema) c bene in concreto (il rapporto col singolo)' (what is bad in abstract (assimilation to the system) is good in concrete (rapport with the individual), 478). 68 According to Gcrard, Pasolini was introduced to Marcusc by Fortini in 11)57 (HjH 1,33). If the vocabulary of 'critical theory' begins to inform the anicles of 1968, from April ul'9, they shift towards the anthropological works ofJung, Mauss and Eliatle. The combination of these two discourses, leading to the proclamation of a 'mutazione antropologica' (anthropological mutation) in Italy brought about by the homologization of nco-capitalism, will be a founding intuition of the 1973-5 articles.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
65
Poetry equally survives the system because of its intrinsic resistance to modes of consumption: 'La poesia [ ... ] non emerce perch€: non econsumabile' (poetry is not merchandise because it is not consumable, 14 Dec. 1968,540). Poetry is neither produced nor consumed, except in a brief interval between writing and reading: 'io "faccio" un libro [ ... ] "come un vecchio artigiano" che "fa" vasi, sedie, stivali' (I 'make' a book r... '1 'like an old craftsman' who 'makes' vases, chairs, boots) (27 Aug. H)68, 471). The return of the artisanal model, and hence a recourse to humanist values/'l) at the same time as Pasolini is producing his most uncrati:ed poetry, is not so contradictory as might first appear once the full impact ofthe emphasis on action, on 'fare', with particular reference to the student movements, is appreciated. Pasolini is far more positive towards the students than any of the polemic over '11 PCI ai giovani!!' might suggest. They are seen as antielite, mass movements (9 Nov. 1968,517), 'giuste e oggettive' (right and objective) in their accusations against their elders (IS Oct. 1969,708), and arc even coupled with the mythical moment of revolutionary potential ti)r Pasolini ,md the Italian left in general: 'la Resistenza e it Movimellto Studentesco sono le due uniche esperienze demoeratieherivoluzionarie del popolo italiano' (the Res:;;tance and the Student Movemcnt arc the only two democratic-revolutionary experiences of the] talian people, 21 Sept. [q()S, 489). But the profound est moment of epiphany on the actions of the students comes in an article of 6 December l(l)() (7345), where the governing image and structuring principle or '/"rIlSUmal111r is worked through. lIe picks up an idea from the radical journal Po/ere o/Icraio--'solo chi si da praticamente a "organizzare" la lotta I ... 1si trova veramente nel corso rivoluzionario' (only those who work practically to 'organize' the struggle I ... ] are really on the revolutionary track, 734)-and notes the exelusion of the intellectual, whose revo\utionarincss had always consisted in words, or in 'la sua pura e semplice presenza' (his presence, pure and simple):70 Ho capito di colpo chc cosa Coggi il Movimento Studentesco. Esso cun movimenlo politico la cui ascesi consiste ncllilre. (735) (I understood in a flash what the Student Movement is today. It is a political movement whose asceticism is action.) ()(I Sce 1I Jan. 11)61),558-<) and I) Aug. 196<),668-9, which attempt to salvage and redefine the term 'umanita' against the terrorism of the modern world. 70 cr 'I'opera di un'autorc i: come la raccia di un negro. E'con la sua stessa prcsenza, con il suo "esscrci" che c rivoluzionaria' (the work of an author is like the face of a black man. It is with its very presence, its 'being there' that it is revolutionary, 14 Dec. 1968, 539).
66
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
The aspiration to 'il fare' or praxis as mystical, transcendent and revolutionary, is the impetus behind the modification of the poet's role in accepting the site of '11 caos'. If poetry can become action, and the poet-intellectual an 'actor' or 'organizer', it can bypass or 'cut across' the system, and preclude reification. Hence, the assertion of an artisanal model for poetry is emblematic of a dual dynamic in Pasolini's conceptual framework-both retrogressive (what he calls 'battaglie di retroguardia', rearguard battles, 14 Dec. 1968,541) and, or in order to bc, progressive and revolutionary. The dual-projected nature of the ethics of action is thus coterminous with an attempt to resist the dehistoricization brought about by nco-capitalism, to salvage from bourgeois conservationism 'la sacral ita del passato' (thc sacredness of the past, 22 March H)69, 600): it futuro si prescnta come L... 1privo di prumesse e di 'domani', vissuto interamcnte 'qui', da un umno eome mens momentanea, immunizzato dall'angosei" dell a storia I... 1it tempo sta per divenire un 'continuum' senza principio ne fine (se non puramente tcnomenici) eome per !:(ti uomini della preistoria. (I () April H)6(), (16) (the ti.,ture is offered as I ... 1 stripped of promises and of 'tomorrow', lived entirely 'herc', hy a man as momentary 'mens', immunized against the anxiety of history \ ... 1time is ahout 10 hecome a eontinuum without beginnin!:(or end (exeept in purely phenomenal terms) as for prehistorical man.) This is clearly a restatement of the image of the New Prehistory that pervades Rosa (sce Ch. 5). But the vibrant overlaying of such a nascent socio-anthropological critique onto wide-ranging interventions on topics of current affairs points to a potential synthesis between poetry, or at least poetic discourse, and political, subversive action. The realization of that synthesis still awaits the final recreation of the self as a disembodied, mythical voice-of-truth achieved in 1973-5, which is most clearly adumbrated in onc ofthe unpublished pieces of'Il caos', where Pasolini sees himself cast once more as Cassandra (1 dia/oghi, 783). But already the power ofthis developing use of journalism as political action contributed to the cessation of the column. After the retirement of Tofanelli, Tempo illustrato was edited by Nicola Cattedra from 17 May 1969, who wrote to Pasolini on 20 January 1970: La rubrica non appare perche Lei affronta temi specificamente potitici, anzi direi tecnicarnente politici ehe non rientrano nella ternatica del 'Caos'. (I dialoglzi, Ixvi; and cf Naldini, 1989,348)
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
(The column has not appeared hecausc you discuss specifically political, indeed I might say technically political themes, that arc not part of the brief of 'Il caos'.)
And on 3 March 1 ()70 came another letter summarily suspending' the culumn (I dia/ogizi, Ixviii). Specifically, the magazine took fright at Pasolini's increasingly direct ealling into question of the Italian president Giuseppe Sarag'at's response to terrorism (r dia/ogizi, i,i,z-7; cr 131, I04S-6; Ferretti, H)<)2, pp. xli-xlii). But more generally, the possibility of real, incisive political action through polemic seems to he confirmed here as it is suppressed, and the cynical, hostile alliance between the consumerist mediulll and the public voice of the 'poet' is, for the moment, broken.
2·7. Corriere dclla sera (ami others), f()73 S Pasolini returned 1"0 "/1'/11/111 i/lusl1"it/o with a weekly series of hook reviews from z() November 1()72 to 24 January 1(n 5.1' The magazine clearly kit no qualms ahout wekoll1ing hack a writer they had summarily dismissed thirty months earlier as too 'politicl]'. Indeed, the marketahilit y of Pasolini's namc is apparent in t hc shamcless exploitation of that incident in the presentation of his new slot: (Vlesto di P"solini C UIl ritorllo sulle colOlllle dd Iloslro sellimanale. Per due alllli IPasolillil ha tcnuto, illEltti, ulla ruhrica, '\I Cows', chc, COil il 'Ballihecco' di (:urzio Malapartc, rapprescllta la pit'l alia e 'Ilt iva punt a polemicl del passato prossimo di 'Tcmpo': Ull momcnlO allehe di Iaccrazione, perchc la sua firma, il suo impq!;llo, \;1 sua liher!;' di Icslimone, il suo coraggio di cOlllraddirsi, provocarollo I .. ·1 viokllle prcsc di I'osi/.iolli, scandalizzati ahhandolli, i11llignatc rinuncc all'ahhollamcllto. (,/i.·III/w i//lIs/ 1":: /11,11.47, 2() Nov. I (J72; [ dia/lIghi, Ixviii) (Pasolil1i's appearancc is a return tu Ihe I'ag'es orour magazine. Ilor t wo years he r,1Il a columl1, '( :haos', which, "Iongside (:urzio Malaparte's 'Squabble', represents Ihe highesl and most vibrant level of polemic in Tcmpo's rccelll history: and also a moment or dispule, sillce his hy-line, his commitmcnt, his ti-eedolll as witness, his hold self-contradictions, provoked I... 1violent stands, scandalized dcsert ions, indignant cancel\at ions of subscriptions,)
The extraordinarily wide range of books reviewed-from contemporary Italian prose and poetry to anthropology to Italian and foreign 7' Collecled ill Ikwr;;:';()J1; ili d('sa;;:.i()/li, excepl fill' the ")lIr1CCn ;llrcady in the 'I )oclIrncnti c allegati' section orSc.
68
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
classics such as Strindberg, Dostoyevsky and Manzoni-indicates an important resuscitation ofliterary energies and interests, confirmed in turn by the work on Petro/io, begun in earnest in 1974 and heavily influenced by books reviewed here (Fortini, 1993,245-6), by the continuing elaboration ofthe verse-plays, by the re-written Nuova and the 'ltalo-Friulan' poems of 'Tetro entusiasmo', first published in La stampa (16 Dec. 1973). But such renewed literary interest by no means represented a turning away from political concerns, as was evidently the intent of the managers of Tempo i//ustrato. Indeed his reviews were deeply conditioned by and fed into the dominant and more public mode of the so-called 'Corsair' or 'Lutheran' writings of the period 1973-5, which have come to overshadow the whole of Pasolini's other work through their dramatic rhetorical impact on the socio-cultural and political debate over modern Italy. The articles for Corriere del/a sera, and related pieces for Paese sera, I/ mondo, EpoC(l, Rinascita, L'E'lIropeo, Panorama amI Tempo i/lustralo, which go to make up SC and LL,7 2 began in H)73 when Piero Ottone and Gaspare BarbieIlini Amidei, editor and assistant editor of a new, liberalizing regime at Italy's most authoritative daily newspaper Corriere dellll sera, invited Pasolini to become a regular contributor to the 'tribuna libera' in their paper. The first article appeared on 7 January HJ73, entitled 'Contro i capelli lunghi' ('11 "Discorso" dei capeIli'), but, as Siciliano notes (198Ia, 444-8), his contributions only acquired their extraordinary provocatory momentum with 'Gli italiani non sono piu queIli' ('Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia', 10 June 1(74), which declared a transformation in Italians so protc)Und that a fascist and an anti-fascist 'sono culturalmcnte, psicologicamente, e, que! che e piu impressionante, fisicamente, interscambiabili' (are culturally, psychologically, and what is most terrifying, physically, interchangeable, SC 42). In a crescendo of radical fervour over the course of 1974 and 1975, Pasolini elaborated a damning critique of an homologized, hedonistic and pseudo-permissive Italian society, attacking the Christian Democrats, elements of the PCI, several respected intellectuals and writers, and, of course, the Church and the Pope (Paul VI). It is to the sheer power and awkward grace of this Pasolini that Italian political culture has regularly 72 The books also include a number of other items: a preface 10 a selection of sentences of the Sacred Roman Rota (Se 34-R), and the address to the 'Partito Radiealc' conference, read Ollt by Mareo Pannella two days after his death (I,I- 185-95). Articles are referred to by their original newspaper titles and followed in brackets hy the title as given in se, if different. The editors of LL have standardized the titles as explained on p. 206.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
69
and often fantastically returned since his death, whether over the kidnapping of Aldo Moro (Sciascia, 1978, II-16; Siciliano, 198Ia, 521), his putative proximity to the MSI (Forcella, 1988; Pepe, 1988) or the 'Lega' movement,73 his knowledge about the 'strategia della tensione', 74 or his views on the 'Tangentopoli' corruption scandals which erupted after 1990.75 But at the moment of apotheosis of the public role of the subject as freewheeling maverick, neither marginalized nor neutralized, the nature of the subjective work in the texts undergoes a substantial and unexpected transformation, so as to work for its own attentuation, and this transt()rmation accounts for both the resonance and fertility of the new voice, and the constant misreading of it by Pasolini's closest and most direct interlocutors. The substance ofPasolini's arguments and, to some extent, his style in expounding them have been analysed extensively.76 But less note has been taken of the compelling subjective undertow to this textual praxis. The articles accumulate their momentum largely by reiterating keywords, and by appropriating and transforming their meaning. This familiar pattern, already identifiable in his writing on dialect in the late H)40S, here achieves its most reson,mt realization. The new meanings, produced by ,\ new context or a new perspective, thus inject a vitality into worn concepts and create a diachronic, metaphorical dynamic for the words themselves which reflects Pasolini's more substantive contenlion that there had been a qualitative leap in conditions of being since the years of t he 'economic miracle'. Indeed, the failure to perceive the radical nature of the transi()rmation of political reality, and to respond adequately, is his primary accusation against the stultified ruling Christian Democrats and the Church, whose power no longer obtains despite their belief that nothing has altered (Se 34-8, 77-87; 1-1, 114-2 3). The link between meaning and social transformation is evident in the on-going interest in semiotics as a method of deciphering non-linguistic systcms. Hence the early articles of 'rcad' semiologically the
se
7.1 L'E.<pre.<.WI fcatureo extracts !i'om his Friulan writings in U" pae.<e di temporali e di primule unocr the title 'Vos[ro Pier Paol" leghista' (3 Qct. l()I)3, 102·-6). 74 The 'Strategy orTension' was the extreme right's attempt to destahilize the state under the guisc of extreme Icli terrorism, in order to provoke an authoritarian backlash. Cr. '11 romanzo delle strap;i' ('Che cos'c '1uesto golpe?', se 88-93), anu Asor Rosa, 1990. 75 Pa,wrama, 30Ct. 1993, featured a survey often prominent intellectuals under the title 'Tangcntopoli. Che cosa ne avrebbc detto Pasolini?' (134-43) 76 Sec e.g. Caesar, [985; Fcrrctti, 1976,86-100; Golino, 1985, 187-204; Romano, 1977, 162-84; Roversi, [985; Sealia, H)78; Zanzotto, [977.
PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
implicit meanings of faces, and of long hair as it developed gradually from a token of rebellion towards a declaration of quasi-fascistic vacuity (5-1 I; and cf. LL 34-63), or, in the Barthesian '11 folic slogan dei jeans Jesus' ('Analisi linguistica di uno slogan', I7 May 1973, se 12-16), the meaning of the slogan 'non avrai altri jeans all'infuori di me' (Thou shalt not have any jeans besides me). In each case, meaning is dependent on context and is subject to radical change, depending on the recipient. The recurrent keywords are similarly reread, transformed or translated into a new language by thc new reality: 77 tolerance (tolleranzll, 199-200), both sexual and political, has become a false and monovalent force which conceals coercion and actually reinf(lrces difference and prejudice;/ascism (Se 143-5) is split into the historical regime, which was reactionary and pernicious but under which, he maintains, the plurality of cultures and the notion of strident opposition survived, and the new fascism (Iluovo/ascismo, 50) or new power (llUOVO polere, 45-6), which is more insidious, elusive and destructive, and which assimilates and homologizes (om%ga.z.ioflC, 45) all-including previous forms of anti-fascism-through consumerist levelling, and through nco-capitalist development (sviluppo, 17 5-8), which has no regard for the more pluralistic and experiential progress (progresso, ibid.). Hence, the sub proletariat arc now indistinguishable in their desires and in their bodies from the bourgeoisie-there has been an anthropological mutation (muta::.ione antropologica, se 41), or a gC110-· (it/e (Se 226 ),7 Hrepresented poctically by the disappearance of fireflies from the landscape (Se 128-:)4). The radical responses to this catastrophe also cluster around keywords and ideas. Most notably, Pasolini instigates a campaign filr a Trial (if Processo, L/, 107-5 I) of the Christian Democrat leaders, the courtesans of the palace of power (/1 Palazzo, /,L 92-8). But he also returns regularly to (Lutheran) proposals for the rcfimn of the Church ('dovrebbe passare all 'opposi::.iofle', it ought to go over to the opposition, 80), to the pernicious influence of television and schools on language and society (LL ) 68-7 I; Vo!gar'eloquio), and to the politics of sexuality, {i·om his obliquely argued opposition to abortion (Se 98-127) to his clearest public statements yet on homosexuality (Se 197-210). At several points (,\'C 20, 73) Pasolini acknowledges that, in fact, only parts of what he has to say
se
se
se
se
se
se
77 In the following paragraph, the keywords have been italicize'!. One reference, which is either comprehensive or representative, is given lor each. 78 See Caesar, 1985,58, on the sources of this tcrm.
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
are original-the Frankfurt School continues to be an unspoken and only half-familiar precursor-but he insists on the importance of saying them where he does-in Italy, on the front page of Corriere della sera-and in the way he does. The terms of the debate which he instigated, and which attracted an astonishing range of interlocutors,79 are set by his reiterative ami consecutive style, so that words and concepts t<)llow rhythms of prominence and eclipse over the course of two years. However, this striking level of self-projection and control is achieved through a high pitch of hostility and a sharp reduction in the frequency of self-analysis or introversion, which was the norm in so much earlier activity. or the relatively few occasions when Pasolini does talk about himself, the mosl numerous are (i'om specific replies to counter-attacks on his ideas and his person---hy Moravia (Se 105-7, 56-7), Calvino (se 51--2), Franco Rodano (Se 117-11'), Leo Valiani (1.1.125) and in general (1,/, ISS)-which are often presented as tiresome deviations, or necessary pedagog'ic correclions. The paradigmatic example is 'Pasolini replica sull'ahorto' ('Sacer', 10.59), where he defends his ideas a~ainsl Mor.lvia's accusation Ihal they all derive fi'om his (atypical) personal experience, and arc thus eccenlTic to ~eneral realilY. Pasolini rcplies that many, includin~ Moravia in his way, arc horrified hy what he has simply ohserved:
se
c
In qllanto rill adino, vno, lll'l dal conslIll1ismo Isono tocctto comc Il:, c slIhisco cOllie le una vioknza chc mi olh.'ndc (c in lIUl:sto siaJllo al"fi-atdlali, possiamo pensan: insiellle a un esilio cOlllune). (l 07) (As a citizen, it is I ruc, I am touchcd Ihy consumerism I jusl like you, and I lIndeI"l~1I it jusl like YOll a~ a viobtion Ihat olfends me (and in this we arc hrot hns, wc cm look lin'ward tll~cl her to a shared cxilc).)
Bul he perf()rce invesls a further de~ree orhimsclfin his experience of Ihe clIaclysm ofhomol()~izalion: mol come persllna (IU 10 Soli hene) ill sono inlinitollllente pit"l coinvolto di le. 11 consumismo eonsiste in ElIt i in un vero e proprio cll adisma anlTopologico: e io l,i1111 esist'cIlziolIIlleIllc, talc cataclisma I . . . 1 Ilci mici ~iorni, ndlc limnc della mia esistcnza, IIclmio wrpo.l . .. 1E' dOl lI11esta espcricIlza, csistcnzialc, dirctta, COI1creta, (l}rporct:, che naSCOIlO in conclllsione IUlli i miei diseorsi ideologiei. (107) 7') Thc,c included M. Fcrrara, F Fcrral"OlIi, I. Ctlvino, T Dc Mallro, A. Moravi:!, L. Sei'lscia, N. Ginzhurg, F Forlini, G Bon:a, U. Em, G Manganclli, F Rodano, M. '}anndla, (i. AnllrcDUi, J o. Vali,mi, J o. FirpD, ran [(cd across thc Spl'clrum ofncwspapcrs and m'1gazincs frum J,'m.'il·n~{II"n·"()IlItUWllO (,'h"spreSHJ,1O Ilman~/i·slo.
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
(but as a person (and you well know this) I am infinitely more involved than you. Consumerism consists in fact in a veritable anthropological cataclysm: and I live that cataclysm, existentially [... Jin my days, in the forms of my existence, in my bo(i:V. [... JIt is from this existential, direct, concrete, bodilJl experience, in conclusion, that all my ideological discourses are born.)
The extra degTee of investment of bodily persona manifests itself in the displacement or sublimation of subjectivity. The authorial voice of these articles is no long'er a diffuse subject with a history autonomous from the text, but is detached from its bodily origin, all but exclusively focused on the reinforcement of the 'sujet de l'enonce', of the textual, ideological voice and the rhetoric of its campaign. Hence, when unreconstructed self-observation does occur, it often reveals the latent personal investment in general statements clsewhere: the third paragraph of the 'trattatello pedagogico' (little pedagogical treatise) to Gennariello (1,/, 23-6), is in fact a restatement of his general usage of the keyword 'tolleranza', but it is prefaced by the simple declaration of what was implicit in that general usage: 'sono, cioc, un tollerato' (that is, I am someone who is tolerated). Similarly the second section (1-J, 19-22), is an impassioned restatement of several of the 'corsair' themes, after a paragraph of warning about 'ci() che la gente dice di me' (what people say about me). The treatmenl" of the term 'scandalo' is particularly noteworthy, given its paramount importance as a figure in Pasolini's work from as early as 'La crocifissione' (L'usir:no1o, BI, 376-7).1 lere, the self is no IOllg;er a giver of scandal, but a receiver: 'ci(') c scandaloso. E io sono scandalizzato' (that is scandalous. And I am scandalized, 140). Ile is thus guilty of all the banality and conformist wrong-headedness of those whom he had previously scandalized (Se 97; IJ 134), and his alLempt at action, or praxis, throug'h writing-'c I'agire che qualitiea' (it is action that qualifies, IJ, 47)constantly risks being mere reaction. So The force and particularity of the subject is, then, strengthened by what amounts to a radical challenge to the role of the intellectual, a theme which becomes more prominent in LL, acquiring its own set of keywords. In Pasolini had tilrmuiated the need filr the intellectual constantly to question and to move on from received opinion:
se
se
80 Sce also se 51-2, where he denies Calvino's acclIsation of nostalgia for 'I'Italictta', recounting his long experience of'linciaggio' (lynching), a keyword bmiliar horn Vic nllove and poetry of the same period (e.g. B I, 62 I, 6(5), and now transformed under the new power (ef.
SC7 1-6).
PROJECTS IN JOURNALISM
73
il proprio modo di essere intcllettllali: consistente prima di tutto nd doverc di rimcttere sempre in discllssione la propria funzione, speeialmente hi dove essa pare piU. indiscutibile: cioe i presupposti di illuminismo, di laicitii, di razionalismo. (126) (their own way of being intellectuals: consisting above all in the need always to challengc thcir own function, aIllI cspecially wherever it seems to be least in question: and that is in its Enlightenment, lay, rationalist assumptions.)
In the first of the 'lettere lutcrane' proper, 'Ahiura dalla Tri/op;ia della vita', he develops this dynamic image into a devastating and ambivalent response to failure and historical change-the sort of response he consistently accuses the])(; and the Church of failing to entertain: Il croJio del presentc implica anche il nollo del passato. I ... 1 Mi c davantipian piano senza pill alternative--- -il presente. Riadallo il mio impegno ad lIna maggiore leggibilit;\ (,""IIIt/?). (73,76) (The collapse of the present implies also the collapse of the past. I ... 1 Bcli,re me---slowly without any alternative- -is the present. I shall readapt my 'impegno' towards greater legihility (,,">'a///?).)
The enignutic 'S'alr;?' leaves the full negativity of this response sllspended and throws emphasis on the open-ended dynamic of 'readaptation', which recurs several times in ensuing articles (fJ. 75, So, 127) and is characterized as necessary, but also degrading-'un patlC!~giamento col male' (a pad with evil). its relationship to the earlier dynamic is clear: hisog-na avere la liH'za di 'riadat tarsi' I . . . 1 di ahbandonare···--del proprio hagagJio di idee- proprio le idee ehiave, le idee pill eerle, le idee pil'l eonsolarriei. (12S) (yoll need to have t he strength to 'readapt yourself' I... 1to ahandon--from your own baggage ofideas-· --the very core ideas, the most certain, the most consoling.)
The constant modulation of position allows the intellectual to appreciate the larger picture (,1'Insieme') rather than t()llow the political expedient of self-serving 'separazione dei fenomeni' (separation of phenomena, I I 10<), 148), In contrast to the 'piecolc hattaglie quotidiane' of '11 caos', Pasolini instructs Gennarie\lo, 'hisogna avere la forza della critica totale' (you need to have the strength for a total critique, LL zS). The capacity to sce beyond the immediate to a macrocosmic picture echoes the interest in transformations of meaning and languages already noted. The intellectual, despite a lack of'scientific' (i.e. materialist; LL 184) knowledge, is privileged through such intuition, which may be
74
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
translated into scientific language by others. 81 The elusive and polyvalent potential ofthis position echoes the insidious ubiquity ofthe 'nuovo potere', which is the cause of the 'riadattamento'; it is, in other words, a subtle elaboration of the cynicism of'l1 caos'. In response to the amorphous and contradictory conditions of power-'condizioni ambigue, contraddittorie, frustranti, ingloriose, odiose' (ambiguous, contradictory, frustrating, inglorious, odious conditions, 28)-the subject apes and exploits equivalent features in itself. Against the permanent presence ofthe new reality, the struggle of the intellectual must he both 'anticipato' (ahead of time) and 'estremamente ritardato' (extremely retrograde) (Se 28; and cr IJ 40)' Against its ungraspable nature, intellectuals must render themselves 'contilluamenlL: irriconscibili I ... 1 e continuare imperterriti, ostinati, eternamentc conlrari, a pretendcrc, a volcre, a identificarvi col diverso; a scamtllizzare; a bestemmiare' (continually unrecognizable I... 1 and continue undaunted, obstinate, eternally contrary, to make demands, ro want, to identify with the other; to scandalize; to blaspheme, 1,1, r <)5; Rinaldi, r <)<)0, J8 and passim). By being unrccongizable·-··c1usive, in permanent movement, present in and through the past and future, positive and negative, apocalyptic and integrated-·t he 'radical' Pasolini delineates a position as a subject which, tin' the first time since the H)50S, is onc of limited control and centrality, at least Il'i/hill the ambit of the homologizing system. lie is constantly misread by his interlocutors-they claim to 'recognize' him-but he sets the terms or t he dialogue, even if through paranoia, negation and neg;ativity. The remarkahle ability to infiltrate and influence the apparently autollomous voices of his critics, both journalistic and, elsewhere, literary,X2 is emblematic of a flawed subjective strength, independent of ohsessive self-scrutiny, which represents the final twist in the trajectory ofthe cultural operations of the subject. Indeed, even the imag'ined leg'ihility of Su/,; disguises a deeper, pro-foundly disturbing exploration of illegibility (Petro/io?),
se
H, The ide" oftr,lIIsl:llion (1-1. 1114) as 'Ill intcr"Llion het ween dilfercnl 1ll00ics o!"expression and imervenrion is an extension of the intmduLlory note of (1--2), where the reader's' !er-vore lilologieo' (philologic,1 fervour) is Lalled upon to 'ril1lettere insieme' (pllt h"ek together), 'ricongiungere passi lontani Lhe pen; si integ'rano' (link distalll pans that go together), 'organizzarc i nlomcllri (;oIltraddittori' (org-anizc lllc contraJic..:tory m0I11cnts), 'dilninarc ineocrcnze' (eliminate inLoheren.:e), 'ri.:ostruire' (reconstruct) (cf. se 11, [4H), Sce also Lettere, ii. 7411-<), Sealia, ((nil; and Wagstafl; 191\5, '2J- 4 on its role in h'F, It has its roots in Pasolini's theories of'tr;\IIslatability' li'om the (()40S (§ 2 ahove). 82 On the influence of his style and ideas on the media reaction to his death, sce Gonion, 1995:1, On his exceptional symhioti.: relationship wilh his critics, sec, among others, Rinal
se
3
Vocations
Archin~ across the chronolo~ical history ofPasolini's public work as it has emerged from chapters I and 2, alternately both its cause and effect, there is a series of archetypal roles or 'vocations' which persistently attach themselves to and embody Pasolini's public figure. Each has its own history as a filter bet ween self and reality, and between self and puhlic. A nd each develops, or rather offers a rhetoric of its own development, along' broadly similar lines; from an all but mystical, visceral origin, to a consciously elaborated, self-imposed mask, and then to a debased, ironic residue of that mask. The three most important roles of this kind arc: t he self as poet, t he self as teacher, and the self as outsider. A look at each in t urn provides hoth a summation of Part I and the basis lin' an approach to every aspect of Pasolini's work. Pasolini took on t he mantle of poet al every step 01' his career. From his earliest Bolo~na essays, to his 'cinema di poesia', to the 'poema' of PI"r()/i(), his every act and statelllent declares explicitly or implicitly that it is made l'fI/)()(:'I', in the nallle or poetry; and this even bctilre approaching the massive and acutely metapoetic body of his actual poetry, the heart of his 1l'1I7'rl'. The funct ion of this rhetoric of the poet is to connect the self, in its core heing, to the cluster of absolutes that organizes Pasolini's philosophy reality, history, vitality, the body, {ill'm-and to protect t he self (i'om categ'orizat ion by its slippery elusiveness and mystery. For Pasolini, to speak as a poet implies above all else to be driven by sincerity, authenticity and immediacy, to obey a vocation to lay bare the inner self As Barberi SLJuarotti notes, the topos of nudity is itself a recurrent motif in Pasolini's work: 'what matters is to be naked LI)udi], that is, not to keep silent, not to hide anything of oneself (translated tj'om Barberi SLJuarotti, 1983,209). This Romantic impulse is from the outset itself the subject and object of ambivalent exploration, since its very mythology of introspection and inner truth places it under permanent threat of distortion or annihilation in every act of going
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
public. The history of the self as poet is thus a history of the constant displacement of the locus and form of private self-expression at different public sites. From this displacement flow three further defining aspects of the role, all founded on the assumption that the poet exists in a different, unconventional relationship to reality, the reader and language. First, the role of poet facilitates unfamiliar forms of discursive and critical writing that renounce the cool, coherently scientific analysis of normal intellectual exchange. In place of the latter, two very different approaches cmerge: on the one hand, contradiction and error ('io sono protetto dalle mie contraddizioni' (I am protected by my contradictions, I dia/of;hi, 345) ), irrational and incomplete intuition (Se 1-2), subjective and often sensual sentiment ('Ultimo discorso sugli intellettuali', Pasolini e 'I1 selaaio', 81), and eclccticism (Officina); and on the other hand, a synthetic, totalizing form of knowledge, appealing to a sense of absolute Truth, which in the extreme takes the poet back to an ancient, mythical role as prophet, 'Vates' or Cassandra (e.g. Colombo, 1975; I dia/oghi, 783). Second, the rhetoric of the poet implies an extraordinary relationship with language. The poet creates language anew by appropriating proteiti)rm idioms for the selt~ as styles, whilst at the same time retaining thcir primitive anchoring in reality. Already theorized in 'Dialet, Icnga e stil', the same extraordinary sense oflinguistic creation and renewal subtends the Corsair polemics and many moments in between. Finally, the poet is positioned, at least ideally, as ideologically immune to the commerce or ind ustry of intellectual-artistic discourse. As he explained in '11 caos' (l dia/oghi, 470-2, 540), poetry is somehow definitively artisanal in its workings. The poet can express himself and a certain reality prior to the commodification of his product, and thus aspire to communicate directly with a reader on some level, bypassing the mediations of 'the system'. Similarly, poetry is irredeemably 'aristocratic: inconsumable', as he labelled his cinema after 1969, in an attempt to resuscitate the poetry of film (Ostia, 213). Like the artisan, the poet 'makes' his work, and the poetry is in the process of making, and thus to resist reification and remain poetic is to remain 'in the making, not like a finished object' ('nel suo farsi, non come una cosa fatta', Pasolini quilted in AA. Vv., 1977,101). The vicissitudes of the role ofthe poet are often violent and volatile, as its apparent innocence is ever more starkly confronted with its untenability, its disingenuousness and its ideological dangers:
VOCATIONS
77
Ma quali orrendi peccati comporta tale filosofia? Ho fatto per essa i nomi di 'azione', di 'irrazionalismo', di 'pragmatismo', di 'religione': tutti quelli che io so essere i dati piu negativi e pericolosi della mia civilta. I dati stessi, per esempio, di certo fascismo!! Dovro rendere conto, nella valle di Giosafat, della debolezza della mia coscienza [... ]? (EE 240) (But what appalling sins does such a philosophy entail? I have uttered in its name the terms 'action', 'irrationalism', 'pragmatism', 'religion': all the most negative amI dangerous features of my civilization. The same features, indeed, of a sort of fascism!! Will I be callcd to give account, in the valley ofJehosophat, of the weakness of my consciousness/ conscience l· .. J?)
But part ofthe mythology of the role is the poet's driven inability to stop flaunting such dangerous insights. Perhaps the most extreme and charged exploration of its collapse is f()Und in the play Bestia da stile, whose poet-protagonist Jan Palach is reduced to immolated silence, confirming the failure of poetry, of language and of all public intervenl:ion. Silence is anathema to the poet, an~, as Fortini cruelly pointed out, to Pasolini also: 'Molte cose Pasolini sa fare. Non la pill importante per lui: che sarebbe di stare un po' ziUo' (Pasolini is capable of many things. Not the most important for him, however: that is to shut-up on occasion, Fortini, UN:), 44). The rhetoric of authenticity, however compromised and precluded, remains as a shadow over all his work, as long as the voice of the poet is never fully silenced. The pedagogical 'vocation' also runs throughout Pasolini's public career, grandilOlluently evoked in 'Filologia e morale' (Paso/ini e 'It selaa-io " 1(9), energdically enacted in his leaching and cultural activism in Friuli, and rcvived tilr different mass audiences in his columns tilr Vie nlurve, Tempo illuslralo and the 'trattatello pedagogico' of his Lutheran letters to Gennariello (Golino, 1985; Santato, 1986b; Zanzotto, 1(77). The parameters of his understanding of pedagogy were set in the 1947-8 articles for 11 mallitlo del popolo, discussed in Ch. 2 § 2, where he envisaged teaching as an act oflove for the child and filr the world, an initiation into ethical and ideological awareness through a mixture of Platonic and erotic and therefore 'scandalous' affinity_ Such affinity is an embryonic form of collective consciousness. These qualities are closely akin to the poetic, of course, and in the same articles, he also envisages drawing the child towards poetic intuitions of its own, alongside a degree of instruction, through developing its free creativity ('inventio'). In his artistic (£uvre, these principles, and their relation to poetry, are put into practice and explored with striking intensity in the screenplay It padre selvaggio. This tells the story of an
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
unnamed European teacher working with boys, and especially the sensitive Davidson 'Ngibuini, in a recently decolonialized African state. He tries to make them see the world anew, but when he succeeds with Davidson, he does so at the terrible price of alienating him from his native culture, and Davidson undergoes an appalling crisis when he is thrust back into that culture. His sensibilities heightened, his sense of isolation acute, Davidson is transformed by his learning about history and difference, and becomes a poet: 'povero Davidson, povcro POCltl, c (()sa gli e(os/a/o diventar/o!' (poor Davidsou, pO(lr poct, and ]phut u price he has paid to hecome (lne!, If padre se/vaggio, 54; in italics in the original). If padre scivaggio enacts the ambivalent beauty of teaching, which is to hastcn the cnd of innoccncc but also to rctain its aura in thc harsh reality of history that 1()llows. I In later manifestations of the pedagogical vocation, Pasolini develops the early professional ideas of the J()47-S articlcs in several directions. But whether in his replies to readers of his columns or in his modelling· of the rapport between writer / dircctor al1<.l reader/spectator, he maintains their t(Htnding dynamic of a simultaneously autocratic and loving t!tan towards others. As he notes in Pe/mlio, quoting· Ezra Pound's (ilT
The balance between authority and suhmission that has its source in this role ofthe selfas teacher is echoed in many more works than those explicitly focused on educational ends. The rapports of Toll> and Ninetto with the irritating, intellectualizing crow and then St Francis in Uaellaui e uccellini; ofthe Guest with the family in Teorema; ofPasolini with the 1968 students; of Chiron with Jason in M et/ea; of PasoliniVirgil with Pasolini-Dante in I,a divina mimesis and its reprise in Pel1'olio: all these arc broadly pedagogocial, based on love, 'scandalous' in their sensuality or ideology, and aimed at mutual transformation, whether positive or negative. And running as an undercurrent to them I On Il patl,.cse!Vllr.gio, sce Bertini, 1979,115-105; Bongic, "J91, 21 1-15.
VOCATIONS
79
all is the father-son dyad that gradually comes to dominate Pasolini's entire late (£uvre (sce Ch. 7). If archetypally, the role of the poet casts the self as an innocent son (often a mother's son), the role of the teacher casts the scJf as the father (authority) who wishes also, simultaneously, to be the son (submission). The teacher of Jf padre se!vaggio is in counterpoint to Davidson's real father, who draws him back into barbaric cannibalism and the conflict between the two 'fathers' is what makes Davidson a poet. 2 The scandal of this inversion between father and son leads us directly to the third and broadest vocation, that of the scJfas outsider. Both the poet and the teacher arc to some degree already outsiders in Pasolini's vision. But they arc so, at least initially, through voluntary self-exclusion, positively projected towards another, deeper knowledge through difference. The role of the self as outsider, as marginalized, isolated, scandalously and irredeemahly 'diverso', is also constantly lived by I'asolini as a corrupt vocation, a dcvastating curse imposed !i'om the outside. These two poles of difference arc in permanent tension throughout, as he constantly both remodels a possible ideal of ot herness, and strug'gks with the agony o/" involuntary otherness. The t(lI'mer pole can be seen in the heroic solitude oft-he young generation called l(ll' in Il sclarcio; in the poetic exploration and later practice of 'scandal' to hn:ak taboos and proclaim the presence ofthe other; in the poetic 'love o/" life' that characterizes the 'segnato' (marked) poet Massilllo Ferretti, as portrayed in 0llicilltl; and in the subversive energy o/" t he:unrecognii'.ahility' oft he selfin t he texts and artieles ofPasolini's linal years. Even amongst these, howevCl", ;l sullcred quality to the role of the outsider is seen in its rclations with readers, owing to a frequent reliance on hostility to shore lip his own sensc of subjective cohesion, and on mere provocation to make his presencc felt. But the extremes of neg;at ive diftcrenn: arc manifested in t wo particular instances of marginalization, that arc hoth biographical root-causes of the vocation t()r diflcrence, and also symbolic roles in their own rig'ht: homosexuality and juridical victimization. Pasolini's experience of his homosexuality was a deeply traumatic onc, that defined the stark division between public and privateemblematically and literally between his days and his nights. Of particular significance was his long-term public disavowal of his 2 This vacillating nlpport bctwccn fathcr and son aiso charactcrizcs Pasolini's complex relationships with figurcs or inl1ucncc-Dantc, Rimballl.1, Gramsci, among many othcrs-in a highly charged instance of the 'anxiety of influence' (Bloom, 1973)-
80
PASOLINI'S PUBLIC WORK
homosexuality, until it was forcibly thrown into the open by the events of 1949-50 in Friuli. Following this, he certainly evolved towards a more defiant valorization of this difference, but he never quite threw off the deep ambivalence of his early attitude to his sexuality, as expressed in an extraordinary confessional letter to his friend Silvana Mauri, from Rome in 1950: 10 ho sofferto il possibilc, non ho mai acccttato il mio peccato, non sono mai vcnuto a patti con la mia natura c non mi ci sono neanche abituato. 10 ero nato per cssere sercno, equilihrato e naturale: la mia omosessualita era in piu, era fuori, non c'entrava con me. Mc la sono semprc vista accanto come un nemico, non me la sono mai sentita dentro. (Lellere i. 391-2) (1 have suffered all I could, I have never accepted my sin, I have never come to terms with my nature and I have never even got used to it. I was born to be calm, balanced and natural: my homosexuality was added on, was outside, had nothing to do with mc. I have always seen it besidc me like an enemy, I have never felt it within me.)J
Psychologically, of course, the roots of all his later impulsive, sweeping identifications with the poor, Jews, Arabs, blacks-'ogni umanid bandita' (every exiled humanity, 131,639), as hc called them-and of his scaring inner divisions arc here laid bare. Even in his much later, more defiant and positive statements about homosexuality, such as in 197-210, therc is a residue of ambivalence and eccentricity in his sclfpresentation; for example, in his claim that most homosexuals' desire is focused on heterosexuals, or that the political significance of homosexuality is in its erotic transcendence of class barriers (Se 208). The consequences fix the public work of subjectivity of his conception of himself as irredeemably and g'uiltily other arc immense: the conflict between 'normality' and 'sin' is played out again and again on social, ideological and literary levels. Beneath every act or exploration of 'scandal' lies a more or less sublimated form of the first sin, the 'scandal' of 'unnatural' love. The redemptive, subversive energy of scandal is thus both cause and effect of the positive turn on his sexual difference. Redemptive potential is found in an impulse towards awareness ('coseienza') and then knowledge ('conoscenza') of the other, whether from bourgeois to subproletariat, from literature to the illiterate, or from the text to the body. Thus the outsider reclaims a form of transversal universality through difference. His appalled reaction to the new
se
3 Several orthcess~ys in Casi, 1 990a, argue in strong terms that Pasolini was anything but a positive force for the acceptance or even the understanding of homosexuality (149-87).
VOCATIONS
neo-capitalist, homogeneous universality is so intense precisely because it corrupts that other universality. Pasolini's role as a permanent, juridical 'accused', under civil or criminal prosecution in 1949-52 (corruption of minors), 1955-6 (Ra/{azzi di vita) and then from 1959 until his death (see Betti, 1977), runs alongside his homosexuality as a cause of institutional marginalization. And like his homosexuality, it is lived by him as externally imposed, but at times ambivalcntly integrated with his internal selfperceptions, embraced and valorized. It recalls a similar conjunction in Jean Genet, or at least in the mythologized Genet created by Sartre's autobiography-cum-hagiography Saint Genel, who, once castigated 'tu es un voleur' (you are a thief), resolves to accept this exile: 'J'ai decide d'ctre ce que le crime a fait de moi' (I decided to be that which crime made of me, Sartre, 1952,23, (4). The persistent recourse in Pasolini to a vocabulary of guilt begins in a confessional, Christian vein, especially in Cusigllolo (see Ch. 6), and recurs later in key texts for the understanding of the traumas of subjectivity: 'In questo mondo colpevo\c, che solo compra e disprezza, / il piu colpevole sono io, inaridito d'amarezza' (In this guilty world, that only buys and despises, / I am the guiltiest, parched dry with bitterness, 'A me', Religione, HI, 529). This "is later assimilated 10 a strain of legalistic or persecutory rhetoric, from poetry that uses his prosecutions as subject-matter ('Rccit', CWl'ri, 111,236-42; 'Pietro Il', Rosa, 669-8J), to his terror of putting a single step wrong, at the risk of lynching or death, in Vie nuove (I dialllghi, 270), to his crusading call for a Trial of the ruling dite in LL l ] 4-51. Perh~lps its most resonant deployment comes in a text that parades key elements of all three roles outlined here, San Pa%. The saint's progress, his vocation indeed, is measured Ollt in moments of imprisonment and persecution (e.g. San Pa%, 67--9, 121-3, 149-54). A whole eluster of such religjous-cum-legalistic imagery--of testimony and martyrdom (etymologically meaning witness)-that persistently fascinates I'asolini reinforces the rhetoric of the outsider in privileged relation to truth, like the poet. The conjunction of the three roles of the self-as poet, teacher and outsider-sets the contours of the work of subjectivity in Pasolini's public work. Indeed, where they overlap wc can identify the foci of that work of subjectivity that we will find again and again in every aspect of his work, well beyond the confines of his journalism. All three roles share an origin in absolute 'love', typically 'love for the world', which sets them apart, gives them that privileged relationship with truth. All
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PASOLlNI'S PUBLIC WORK
three attempt to shatter conventional modes of discourse a priori, through a form of scandalous difference. All three set out to negotiate a powerfully direct relationship with the reader through variations on the father-son relationship. A 'good' reader-naIve, subproletarian, innocent, authentic-will be receptive to a sort of deep affinity that works through difference and mediation to transcend language and ideology, to unify self to self, and reality. A 'bad' or rather 'ambivalent' reader, liable to be the actual reader, will not have access to such a semimystical experience, but will instead be cast as a misreader, challenged and reconditioned by the otherness of the poet/ teacher / outsider. Finally, all three map their characteristics onto a vision of history and of ideology, so that their profoundly intimate, subjectivc dynamics arc always understandable as explorations of much grander discourses and much grander truths. As was noted at the outset, these other histories of the determinants of subjectivity arc to be read as in large part rhetorical pert(lI·nlance. The probing of subjectivity through them is actually deepened by their nature as spectacle; what Fortini, UN3, J 87, calls Pasolini's 'sonluoso spettacolo di chirurgia "a cuore aperto" , (sumptuous spectacle of 'open heart' surg·ery). Each role is very soon problematized and questioned, and couched in the ambivalence born of acute self-awarencss. Indeed in the later work, this reflexive quality oli:en provokes an extreme, sarcastic dissolution of their assumptions. Nevertheless, their residue remains fundamental throug'hout, and this is perhaps best illustrated by the survival of the very idea of vocation itself. For Pasolini, vocation suggests a given public role, visceral and self-inflicted, but somehow also suffered and Job-like, that pr1lmises a higher truth and therefore redemption at the price or a (self-)renunciation of some kind: 'la vocazione alle piaghe del martirio che l'autore fa a se stesso' (the author's vocation fi)r the self-intlicted wounds of martyrdom, 1:'1:' 274). One need only look at the recurrent enquiry into such a VOCiltion tilr 'santita' (sainthood) that pervades Pasolini's last work, Petmlio (sce Part IV), to confirm that the notion remained fundamental to Pasolini to the last. Much earlier, in the 1949 speech 'Un intervento rimandato', we can trace the essence of the renunciation in a traumatic impulse that colours every step of his public career, to map the private work of subjectivity onto history: cia che si richiede all'intellettuale non c una cosa facile ne comoda: si tr
VOCATIONS
questo suo lavoro, piu oggettivo e piu, diciamo pure, cristiano: si collochi nella stoTia umana. (Cadioli, 1985, 110) (what wc ask of the intellectual is neither easy nor comfortable: it is a question of a renunciation. Let him too, by all means, carry out that introspective, inner, diaristic enquiry that is indeed the vital gymnastics of mankind [ ... J; but let him strive, in this work of his, to he more ohjective, and more, why not say it, Christian: let him find his place in human history.)
PART 11
Poetry: A Movement of Forms
And Ihese lend inward to mc, and I lend outward to them, And such as i I is to he of I hese more or less I am, And oflhese onc and all I weave the song ofmysclf (Wah Whilman)
is dedicated in large part to the exploration of problems and anxieties of subjectivity. It is driven by the construction of multiple and simultaneous masquerades of self-inscription. Its subjects of speech arc constructed, through broadly g-cnre-based rhetoric, whether of authentic self-exploration and self-expression (lyric), of narrative ahout experience, poetic evolution, history and ideology (epic), or of discursive dialogue or contlictual interaction with an Other (dramatic).1 The eom;trllction-work is, of course, beset by complications and tensions as suhjectivity in Ianf!,'uag'e is in permanent contlict with itself~ and as external discourses resist- and challenge its masquerade of agency. llcnee the poetry alternates hetween being a privileged 'private' arena fill' the liTe work ofsuhjeelivity, and a further exlraneous source of rest riction and subject ion to add to other public fora. The subject vaeillat es both in its dCl~ree of awareness and its power of resistance. Thus, t he history of Pasolini's poet ry is, as Rinaldi has it, 'the history of the poetic subject of his texts, with its own advenlures, Elilures, flights: the history not of Pasolini but of his authorial fi[!;lIl"C, of his relationto the text, of the subjects of the "cnoncc" and the "cnonciation" , (translated from Rinaldi, I!)()O, 24). The (clllowin[!; analysis of I)asolini's poetry traces (imr of the fundaIllcntal patterns or tropes of its c1aboration ofsubjectivity that run throu[!;hout his poetic /t'II1'r/" from 11)41 to uns. 2 First it cxamines the autobiof!,Taphieal subject, as it writes its own history in (i'af!,'lllcnts or poet ie narrat ives const fuctcd at various tel11poral levels. Autobiography is here (iJllnd to be an intermittent and volatile textual function rather than a categoricllly distinct f!,-cnre. Poetic memory and perceptioll of time, r~lther than record, distil and distort experience into a Iyricized narrative, whose very distortions are the predicates ofsuhjectivity. The traditional lyric nature o('poetry is thus maintained and modulated into (i>rlllS of subjective narrative. PASOLlNI'S POETRY
I (h1 Ilu.: slrllcll1ra( .11u.llliSl()1'ical persi~'encc or, hesc three psclldo-l\ri~tol~lian gcnrc~) sce (iClll'ltc, fin'), On Pasolini\ poetry and gCllresccJewell, It)()2., 2J-III), ~ Fach ch'lpter concentraLes on Lhe major collections publishe" in P.lsolini's tiICLimeM<'.~Ii(,. ('"<'II<'I"i, 1:(t_,i}!.lIo!o. I?dij!,iollt, Nox", TI"II-"'lIIl1l1l1ran" NlliWII (all now in BI)---whilsL drawinl( on plaqucL!e volumes and Lhe mass of uncollected '\I1d unpublished material (much of whieh is now in 112) where appropriate. Some reference is also made to his verse-dram'l (lealr(l). Sce llihliop'aphy 1.1 fin' oril(inal publiclL ion demils. Unless oLherwise indicated, page references throughouL Part II arc Lo III and lh_
88
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Second, it traces a more discursive pattern, centred on the paradigmatic external apparatus which defines and determines the self and its position in reality, history. The self is written into a polyvalent idea of history, alongside a cluster of cognate and satellite notions, including ideology and myth. This and the autobiographical trope represent two complementary poles in the field of the work of subjectivity, and the potential for synthesis between them is a fundamental source of the poetry's dynamism. The third pattern consists of the (re)figuration of the speaking subject in secondary, fictional or indeed mythical subjects that are objects both of projective desire and of 'misprisions' (Bloom, 1(73) or 'misrecognitions' (Althusser, 1971; Bclsey, 1980, 56-63), which work to produce subjects of speech. These figures of identification tilrmally rely on a quality of identity as fragmentary 'sameness', more than as retle;(ive 'sclfhood' (Ric(cur, 1991; I,aplanche and Ponlalis, 1973, 187- (2), and hence f(mnd a dynamic of equivalence, through a rang;e o/" tropes such as synecdoche, analogy, metonymy and metaphor, which amplify the epistemolog'ical resonances of subjectivity. The f()Urth pattern filCuses on a particularly fertile conjunction of figures, which cuts across each o/" the three previous sections and illustrates the intense desire-laden sexuality inherent to the work ofsuhjeclivity in Pasolini's poetry: the dual figuration of the father and of the hody. Unresolved Oedipal hostility towards the autobiographical father f()rms gradually a non-specific figure of the Father, whom the suhject fears emhodying, llcnce the hody of t he subject traces the ahsent hody of the father by its simple presence~only the Name of the Father is present~and this distorts the entry of the subject into history alltl ideology, The body and the father thus combine to dclimit the traumatic experience of ideolog'y in poetry, displaced towards a radical praXIS. These f<mr tropes, whilst clearly neither exclusive nor exhaustive, provide a matrix f(lr reading the processes of subjective work in this poetry. Each produces effects of subjectivity through some sort of transformation or distortion~of ideology, of reality, of the self; oftexts, oflanguage. And as the text misreads, and as it increasingly witnesses and performs its own misreadings, it creates in negative an imprint of selfhood, more Echo than Narcissus. Franco Fortini's 1963 epig'ram, 'Per Pasolini', captures with acute cruelty the negative fertility of this masquerade:
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
89
Ormai se ti dieo buongiorno ho paura dell'eco tu, disperato teatro, sontuosa rovina. (Fortini, 1993,37) (These days if I greet you I'm afraid of the echo / sumptuous ruin)
YOll
desperate spectacle,
4
'Who is Me': The Impulse to Autobiography The 1970 paperback selection ofPasolini's Po('sie is prebced by a brief prose account of the author's life and work, addressed 'AI \cHore nuovo'. It is filf all intents and purposes an autohiography offered as a 'user's guide' to the poetry which tilllows, and so stresses the funcl"ion of autobiography as an archaeological substrat um to the poetic voice. I An earlier version, prohably begun in Aug;ust I 9 ()(l , is in the fClrm or a poem, entitled 'Poeta delle ceneri', or 'Who is me',2 which provides an ideal starting point fill' an examinatioll of the eccentric paneJ"lJs or autohiography at work throughollt his poetry. Whereas traditional autobiography is dependenl on tilrms of narrative fiction,J 'Poeta del\c ceneri' rc-moulds emblematic moments orthe poet's past into a tC)I"mally subjective account orlime, which is al odds with the demands or traditional narrative. The expression and perception of experience intclrms the history of experience to create a hybrid where lyric overlays narrative. The poem's ~lccount of Pasolini's flight to Rome in IIJ50 ~leknowledgcs this indirectly, and justifies it hy ironic recoursc 10 psychopat hology I Pasolini rC[(lllarly provided crit iral [(nilks 10 his own works. Scc C.[(. 'Poesia diakllak del tlovcccnto' (I'II.,siolll"l" id"ologia, 5 '.1+ IuS, 'V +1); 'Pastllini rcecnsiscc I'asolini' (I1.~io/"llo, J June ")71, Ihen 11 porli!"o ddl" 1II0rll", 2S1 5); 'Lliden'lIl' ('I <'IIIPO , IX Nov. 1117.1, then IJ,'s(ri;:.ioui di dl'saj:::.iolli, 212· I (»). 2 NlI{)vi _'lrgolJll'l1li, NS nn. ()7 Xl July·-I)cc. IqXO, 3- "Z(), with:l note hy I':. Siciliallo; !lUW in 112, :1056,,-X4. The poelll Clllll' oul ofl'asolilli's lirsl s"'y in New York in.!uly l,jI,(,· hellcc refer cnecs 10 America, thc EIl[(lish subtitle, and Ihe Ctluchillg of the pocm illlcrms of an inlCl"view (cC 'Una uisperala vitalit'l', Rosa, Ill, 72('+X), anu was only laler adapted lelr the (iarzanli anthology. But it is worth notillJ>; Ihat as early as April [()66, Pasolini had illmindlile idea flLlIl allthology alldlhus perhaps also the 'user's ~uide' fUllctionlelr 'l'oela delle celleri' (I.('I/cr(', ii. 6/2). er. 'io non sto che bcendo UIl poema / bio-oiblio[(ralicfI' (I a1ll ollly Wrilill[( a 1>iohihliop'aphie poem) (2065) . .1 Most notahl), asserted hy Fryc, 1957, JOT 'Aulflbifl[(r'l),hy is allolher f'"'1)) which lllerJ(cs with thc novel hy a series ofillscnsihlc J;rad,niolls.' It is also implicit in r.ejellnc, 1')75, '4, who char~u.:tcrizcs autohiography as Irct:il'.
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
91
Ho vissuto < ... > quella pagina di romanzo, l'unica della mia vita: per il resto, son visslIto dcntro una lirica, come ogni ossesso. 4 (20(11) (I lived < ... > that page of a novel, the only onc of my lite: / otherwise, <what can 1 say,> / I have lived inside a lyrie poem, like every obsessive)
The structure of the poem is governed by implicit or explicit ljuestions from a journalist, and by a chronological seljuence of sorts, but also by a progression along channels of the f(llInding motifs ofPasolini's work where autohiogTaphy, metaphor and myth combine. It opens with his birth 'in una eitt.l piena di portici' (in a city full of porticos)-image replacing inf()J·mation, as Bologna is never named-and moves swiftly 10 descrihe his mother, Ett her, bml her, his first poems ,\I1d I·'riuli which dilate \0 lill the first section of the poem. Other events arc similarly dilated fUrlher on: the trial filr armed rohbery in Circeo, onc of the prosecutions around I,a ri(olla, and his fulllre works, from Tcorcrna to .1f/itlmli/ :::.io1l1'. There is also a striking conI raction of other events which produces a lapidary tone, more memorial Ihan memory. J lis 'conversion' 10 Marx ism is a case in poinl. J\ n extended description of the Friulan peasanls ends 1hus: Fu cosi che io seppi eh'er:lIlo hraeciallti, c chc t1ullquc e'erallo padrolli. Fui dall.1 parte dei hraceianti, e lessi Man. (.w6.!) (It was thus I fi)lllld out they were lahourers, / and that therciilre there wen: hosses. / I look thc part orlhc lahourers, and I rcad Marx.)
The incisive preterile verbs, which indicate an almost heroic stahility, bUI also become markers ofloss and ahsence, arc a recurrent fCature of Pasolini's selr·cn:ation in poelry.' The poem is also marked hy a fluid and organic rclalionship hctwecn the autohiogTaphical pasl, in its Iyricized and provisionallilrm, and the considerat ion of the presenl and the fut ure, as hoth an extension ofthe project orseW·dclinition and as ~l generalizing- expansion beyond the life of the individual: ... P~II"Cnlhcscs in .his qllolalion ;lIT as lIsed in 112: scc Bz, 2oS61(uO an explanation of.heir implicalioll', and g;ellerally H" 1'. "viii. [11 all subsequCllI ver,e qUIII.llillns, unless olhcrwisl· ~Iatcd, square brackets contain my own pOlnts of OI11isslon Of explanation, i.UHj other P;IrCIl-
thesc, IIr ,u'pcn,ionmarks .IIT a, used hy Paslllini himselfor Ihc edilor, ofB, and Ih_ 5 er Pcrmli", '.10: 'I pa"ali rcmoli, cioc i lempi (inili ,i addiconll ag-li emi' (Preterite" thal is linilc len,es/tinished times arc hecoming III herocs).
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
in quanto poeta saro pacta di cose. Lc azioni della vita saranna solo comunicate, e saranno esse, la poesia. (2083)6 (as a poet I shall be a poet of things. / Life's actions will only be communicated, / and they will be poetry.)
The unfinished patchwork of 'Poeta delle ceneri' is, like much of Pasolini's poctry after 1964, deliberately diffuse and unpoetic. He repeats three times within three pages (2070-2) variations on the refrain 'ho raccontato queste co se / in uno stile non poctico / pcrchc tu non mi leggesfii come si legge un poeta' (I have told thefie things / in an unpoctic style / to stop you reading me as a poet is read). But the open combination of autobiographical effects workfi as a guidc to the often latent and even involuntary (Bellocchio, 1<)88; Larivaille, 1985, 107) lyric autobiography in the mainstream of his work, which functions as an 'architexte' (Genette, 1979), a submerged, but immanent category upon which the surface discourse t(lrmS itselt~ and through which thc text contains and even controls its own misinterpretations. At numerous points within poems, within collcctions, and within thc span of his literary career, Pasolini deploys such patterns of autobiographical selfrepresentation as those in 'Poeta delle ceneri'. Their trajectory gives a strong indication ofthe varying contours ohhe subject's concern to derive meaning from its own history, and, in a sort of secondary poetic autobiography of self-portraiture, (i'om the present perception of self 7 '1 'he remainder of this chapter f(lllows such autobiographical impulses throughout his poetic (J!llvrc. The incidence of primary or sccondary autobiography in Mcgho is minimal, but f
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
93
context, let alone the necessary inner split which precedes selfknowledge of any kind. The first part of the book is non-narrative, and the figurative'!' is immersed in singing dialect cadences. The second part turns sharply towards popular-narrative form, but deliberately aims for a folkloric, archetypal and thus non-subjective register. Nevertheless feints towards autobiography are not uncommon. 'El testament Codn' (127-3 I), f()r example, is an autobiographical testament of an innocent orphan who is captured and executed by the Germans in H.144. His legacy is his defiance of his cxecutioners and of death: I .assi in reditat la me imadin la la cosientha dai si()rs [ ... 1 Coi todeses no ,Ii vut tim()ur de lass;lla me dovenetha. Viva cl coragiu, cl dol('llIr cIa nOlhentha dei puarcth.
(IJO-I)9
(I leave in legacy my image / ill the conscience of Ihe powerl'ullriechi 1[ ... J / With the Germans I was no .. afraid / to leave my youth. / I .ong live courage, pain / and t he innocence of the poor.)
I kath is herc a gesture which a/l()rds meaning to life's story and such a relation bet ween testament and autobiogTaphy will be a constant undercurrent in Pasolini's poetry. Through it, poetry acquires part of its ncgativity, hecoming a trace of an ahsent self: who narrates his life in writing' hecause ofa lack of prcs en cc to himself and in reality. 10 Poetry necessarily n~collects from beyond, although in Meglio death is not nq~ative, but integral to a natural cycle o{,being, as the boy's emblematic and vital death in 'El testament Contn' illustrates." 'I I'aslllini always provided Italian translations or his Friulan poetry, which he intended to he read as part and parcel ort he text (sce t he ',)54 note to Mq/io, Bt, '7' 2). English versions arc ~ivcn hC"l"~ hUI where apprnprialc, ciclllcnls uf Pasulini's h~li.ln versions arc g-ivcn in parentheses alier the English. lIel;onli allll I"a~gin, I')H7, '(12-99, offer sOllle alternative, corrective translations into Italian of some or the poems. '0 This r,lises" cluster orprohlems rclatinv; to autobiography, hut also to the nOllurc of meaninv;and the suhject's position in lanv;ua~e. Sec Flcishman, J()S], 27-J5; Mchlman, ")74. Dc Man, "n'), 9JO, provides a characteristically eniv;matie f
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF fORMS
Throughout Meglio the poetry is nostalgic and memorial, an a posteriuri reflection of the fabric of the Friulan idyll. Indeed, even the extant unpublished poems written before the publication of ['oesic a Casarsa share this fundamentally nostalgic, estranged perspective. (Z In a tellingly entitled July 1941 poem, 'Nostalgia del tempo presente', the present is experienced in a state of permanent alienation in both space ('volontario esilio', voluntary exile; 'io sempre e altrove di me stesso', I always and elsewhere than myself, Lellere, i. ] TT, I JI), and in time: (~Iando
rievochen\ sos peso il canto,
i lenti !!,"iorni e la mite sola~na di codcsti compillti, inlaui e Irapassali ~esti d'lIomo che vivc I.. ·1
(I,mere i. 55) (When I'II recall, OIlCC the son 1:\' has slopped, / the slow days and Ihc !!,"cnllc Iighl / of Ihese l:oll1pletc, intact anc.1 dead / !!,"eslures oLI Iivin!!," man I. - -D
Premature nostalgia is already a token o(exclusion and so in t his sense, the illusory Frilllan idyll is always already conditioned by negativity, only available through memory and ret urn _M eglio nostalgically r;at hers a series of sublimated self-portraits into a rc-evocation or the remem' hered idyll. This series !iH'ms a tertiary autobiog-raphy, an illusory history of the sclfas represented in languag'e and poetic {()rm, as sug-gcstcd by the epigraphs to 'Suite furlana', 'Mijuvenllld, -utiliI£' aiios cn lil'rra dl' Caslilla . .. (Antonio Machado)' (My youth, twenty years in the Ialld of Castille, 51 )---.md to 'Tornant al pais' -'Oil sonl Ics nClj!,'I'S t/'llnlan? (F Villon), (Where arc the snows oryesteryear? 22). Thus Mtglill offers an early example of the immanence of subjectivity within the very texture and textuality of poetic langllag-e that is the precondition of more suhstantive uses of poetic autohiography. The section Clnit led 'Appendice', written after the move to Rome, takes leave ohhe idyll and thus touches on several more directly autobiographical notes (particularly in its enlarged form in NlIllva): IJ nostalgia filr a Casarsa heyond time ('Li ciampanis dal Gloria', 1545; 'Lunis', 101-3), a Proustian reawakening of the senses of the past ('I veeius sav()urs', I392-3) and [2 LeIlC"!, i, 52,85, IOH, For these early poems, not included in 112 (scc Ill, xxv), sce 1,"/lNt', i, 20-[, 29-3', 42-3 (to Franco l'-aml/i); 4S-52, 55-61, 64-7, 73-7, il4--!) I , 106--7, Ill- I], 116---2[, [.10--2, [64-5 (all to Serra,I .coneui and Roversi-thc 1'l"l'Ili group in Bologna); ')4'5, 217 (to others), On these, sec IIrevini, [I)il[", Serra, 19S5lJ On the differences hetween the original A1eglill and the version of it included as the first pan of NI/lll'a, scc Bz, 1050; [ 18,-4,
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
95
memory ('Illuzour', 1549-50), a personification oflandscape and song as past companions ('Cansion', 106--8). Finally, in 'Congedo' the former self is cancelled out in a melancholic assertion of irrevocable changc: A c dut linit, du! ('Llmis', 102)
(Jt is all over, everything) Adcs si ch'a cis d i scaturissi vuanUnt lis, par di U dai dis, il di ch 'jo i eri un i"rlll, ad che chel (i·ut veri noso) PI)O ('I)e loinh', 104)
cs
(Now there is something / to hcali·aid 01; / staring, / beyond thl: Jays, / the day that I was / a hoy, now thattrul" boy / is no long·er me)
This division of the self from the ((Inner self is ,\ ((Illllding dynamic of fully lled!!,Td autohio!!,"raphical discourse that is only adumbrated in Nlcg/ill. It marks the doublin(!, which is a sine qlla 111111 tilr a cluster of events, includin!!," entry into lan!!,"ua!!,"e and into the symbolic order, dcfin in!!," sUhjCl:t hood itscl t~ which are worked throu!!,"h alon(!,side Mcglio in I, 'USigllll/lI. /,'IISip,III1/11 movcs onto a mOl·e open stage of autohio!!,"raphical selfexposure. If Nlq~/ill chronicles the experience of a timeless, lost childhood, couched in the poetry of the imaginary, l:usigl1l1/0 records the concurrent devclopmenttowards the institutional, authoritarian and symbolic··towards adulthood. The bridge between the two is made by several internal trans((lrmations within the sequence of poems: of the Christ ian liturgy (i·olll primitive ritual to hostile source of blasphemy; of poetic language from a pure, pIT-linguistic litany reminiscent of dialect to the monumental weight of Italian; of sexuality from the unproblematic sensuality and fertility of a\l things to a source of trauma and exclusion. In this context, autobiogTaphy and self-portraiture become more articulated. Retrospection is now strategically deployed in an dIort to grasp anc.1 transfc)rm the present. In 'Lingua' (351-3), the poet attempts to project return into the future as a defence against the stolid institutionalization of poetry:
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Ripercorro a ritroso il mio cammino: privo di te ['orribile statua'J com'e dolce il paesaggio padano, senza ombra di miraggi! [... ] Senza la tua minaceia d'alabastro rivivro gli slanci per mia madre, [ ... J Riprovero stupori senza ombra per I'orologio, il topo, la fionda (352) (I go back over my path again: / without you Iawful statue J how sweet is the landscape / of the Po, without the shadow of illusions! [.. .11 Without your alabaster threat / I shall rclive the impulses t(lr my mother, [... 1 / I'll feci once more the shadowless astonishment / felf the clock, the mouse, the sling) The contracted preterite f(lrmulae, seen later in 'Poeta delle ceneri', emerge also, not as units of a coherent sequence, hut as fragments em-hedded in other [imTIs of discourse like fossils in stone: Non a me ma al mio sesso era promesso l'Eden. 10 bevvi la sua g:ioia. Fu promesso: e fll dato. Non posso pil\ morire Ji pura privazione (' Ilarllch', 371) (Not to me but to my sex / Eden was promised. / I drank of its joy. / It was promised: and it was given. 11 ean no longer die / ofpllre privation) Finch6, segrcto al mondo it ClIore e al cuore il mondo, ardevo di timidi entusiasmi e di orgogliosi orgasmi, III un rOll1anzo il mio vivere d'errori ... ('Madrigali a Dio IV', 396) (As long as, my heart kept secret from the world and the world / ti-ommy heart, I hurned with shy enthusiasms / and proud orgasms, my life of errors was a novel. .. ) These non-sequential, l1on-diegetie autobiographical fragments make metaphorical incisions into past experience under the f(lrmal trace of autobiography. The primary source of metaphorical vocahulary used to transform experience in //usign% is the languag·e of Christian litany, but there arc others: the sequence 'L'ltalia' (379--{) I ), f(lr example, uses the idiom of landscape poetry which will hecome central to the poetry of the 1950s. Its second chapter sets the poet's life-story against an evocation of Bologna, Par ma, the Euganean Hills and Rome: 'dal Ventidue al Cinquanta, anni pervasi / di sola memoria, tu, Italia
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
97
mattutina ... ' (from '22 to '50, years shot through / only with memory, you, morning Italy... , 384). The language of landscape poetry is deployed as a sublimated narrative of the poet's own memory and experience. The use of auxiliary idioms, such as landscape and litany, as vehicles for self-expression facilitates the fluid transpositions between, and dilations of, different themes within single poems which will characterize Pasolini's longer poems of the 1950S and early 1960s. Alongside retrospection, introversion and self-portraiture also come to the ()re in the poems of J:usign%, particularly after the political awakening of H)47-<), leading Fortini, [<)93,26, to describe them as 'autoritratti in costume' (dressed-up self portraits). Before 1947, //usign% is very close to the dialect work. '4 Hence, the nascent tendency fin' self-examination in the section 'JI pianto della rosa' (H)46), bound up with a loss off~lith in the sanctity of religion and language, remains cast in the Ianguag-c of the myth of Narcissus which suffuses the first part of Meglio. Even the verse f()I'm is still based on the 'villotta', the only poetic fi>TIn which originates in Friuli (Greg'or, H)7S, 34). Nevertheless, evidence ofa present crisis, ofsubjeclivity split through a doubling selj:·awarelless fraug'ht wit h death, closure and transgression, is rill:: No, nonli rassq~ni a saperti per sempre ndle appartate tendlre dove non hai ritq,;ni I..
·1
,'e
I.'illeeito in euore e solo esso vale, ridi del naturale millenario pudore. ('l.'illeeito', .F5--() (No, you are not resigned / \0 knowing yoursdfalways to he / in the seduueu darkness / where you have no restraint I ... 1 The illicit is in your heart / and only that is worl hy, / you laugh at the natural / millennialmodesty.) 110 la calma di un morto ('llimnus 1sic! ad noeturnum', 347) (l am as ealm as a uead man)
l~ Santato, H)Ho, 46, refers to an 'osmosis hctween two autonomous linguistic /'lfms'. Rinaldi, "IX2, 6--7, notes the practical difficulty of tracing whether the first versions of the early poems wc re in dialect or it.lli.tn_
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
No, col mio onesto cuorc non mi allco. E' troppo puro, ha il frcddo della morte, I... .1 avetc la speranza che 10 ascolti questo ladro di se che io sono. ('Dies irae', 360) (No, I am not allied to my honest heart. / It is too pure, it has the cold touch of de,nh, I ... 1/ you 1angels 1hope that I will listen to it / this thiefofmysclfthat I am.)
'Dies irae' ends with a terrified premonition of death as the ultimate separation from the previously integrated self and the world: ... 0 Dio, c'c g;i,l in me il mio Etntasma, il mio auwma, che mi soppiantenl, nel vecchio aroma della mia Sl
11011
si appassiona.
(3601)
( ... 0 God, there is / already in me my ghost, my automaton, / which will re· place mc, in the old aroma / of my room, ofthe town, and alas, / of the world, still all hut untin·llled, / / tilr which the dead man, hy now, has no passion.)
Clearly the intimacy and intensity of this and many other poems of Cusign% is an effect of the hyhridizat ion ort(lrms hetween autohio[!,Taphy, self-portraiture and Cat holic liturgy and scripture, which produces a particular autohiographical register of confession. 15 Pasolini's ohsession with Christ ianity and the 'sacralita' (sacredness) of t he real lends a strong confessional aura to many of his self-explorat ions. In contrast to the stark preterites seen ahove, the confessional register is characterized by a succession of narrated actions in the present or nearP,lst, couched in terms of guilt and transgression. 'Lingua' ends with just such a sequence, where tones of [!,·uilt and innocence are synthesized into a collage of archetypal Oedipal motifs: No, non ho madre, non ho sesso, ho m;eiso il padre col silenzio, amo la mia pazzia di acqua e assenzio, amo il mio giallo viso di ragazzo, '5 Fryc, It157, 307, brackets all autohio~raphy under the 'conli;ssion I(.rm'. Flcishman, H)83, '4-[5, argucs convincingly againsllhis ,}ssimilarion, noring olher distinctive li.rms such as apologia, self-promotion, (psycho)analysis and self-concealmcnt. On confessional discourse in gcneral, sce 'rambling, ")90, and in Pasolini in particular, Asor Ros,}, 1969, 349; Sicilano, 19110.
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
99
le innoccnze ehe /lngo e !'isterismo che eelo nell'cresia 010 seisma del mio gergo, amo la mia culpa l· .. j (353) (No, I have no mother, I have no sex, / I have killed the father with silence, / I love my mauness of water anu absinth, I I love my boyish yellow face, / the innocences which I lCign and the hysteria / which I hide in the heresy and schism / of my slang, I love my guilt [... [) The climax to L'usign%, the ten short lyrics cntitled 'La scoperta di
Marx' (407-q), is a distillation of the secondary autobiographical narrative underpinning the whole collection. ,(, It moves from birth (I: 'Fuori del tempo c nato', he is horn outside time) and identification with the mother (11: '0 ingenua sposa / e infante genitriee', 0 innocent spouse / and inbnt parent), through childhood to traumatic exile, entry into the 'mondo ragionato / spietata istitllzione' (rcasoned world / pitiless institution) (11), into time and language (VUI), death (I), and finally collective history (X): hence the discovery of Marx in the title. The model o/" a self-querying, autohiographical sequence oflyric fragments, dispcrscd across a numbcr o/" auxiliary discourses, is here given its most conCl:ntratcd realization to date. M uch of Cl'1Icri, wit h the notable exception of '\{ccit' (2:;()'-42), is in stark contrast to "'w/:~1/olo. Formally, it represents a radical departure fi'olll t hc lyric, and even narrativc, towards the discursivc. In parallel to thc research into thc nineteenth-century tradition undcrtaken by 0llir;lIl1, Pasolini attempted to hypass hoth hermcticism and neorealism ill Cl'I/{:r; by rcturning to the I )antesque 'terzina', by way of Cmlucci and l'ascoli.'7 The reclaiming and reworking of traditional fiu'm remains the most potent aspect oflhe book from a literary historical perspective, and it is accompanied by significant changes in the work of subjectivity within it. Shot throug-h with tensions betwecn the self and political, social and physical reality, eCl/cri tends to avoid the directly autohiog-raphical or sclf:-lIescriptive. Other, more extrovert stralcgies or iigurat ion and projection are employed to distribute the J() Wrillen in IlI"'1 ,lIld ori~inally entitled 'I Alii ... riccrca lli mia madre' (Boyer, IlIX7,I)H; Natdini, IIIXI), ,,(.), it w,'s (luhlished in "153 as 'Canzonellc', in {filleJ"l/ri, :l-4,JlItl'-AlI~. 11)53 (/,clIl'n', i. 3l)H; Rinaldi, 111Hz, 6H 70; Satllato, IIIXO, 13X~ 43)- There is SOIllC uebate over the datin~, li.l1owin~ a claim hy Bandini, "177, .IT- H, that it was wrillen later than 11)41), bur sce Siti, III X" '55-7. '7 On these lilfll1al ami metrical aspects ofCmeri, sec Asor Rosa, '1)("1, Jih-h, J<)2-J; Mannino, ".I7J; Siti, [()72. On l'asolini's 'anti-traditiona!' notion ofthc tradition, sce Santato, II)X6a; Siciliano, 11)65, 6J-64; and Ch. 2 §§I illl
100
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
subjective across the poetic canvas. However, a major exception to this rule is the first three sections of '11 pianto della scavatrice' (243-54)' where a powerful autobiographical and memorial narrative describes the Ri/dung of the poet, the process of learning and transformation operated on him by the 'stupendous and wretched city' of Rome. By emphasizing the duration and the process of learning, and also the pedagogical agency of the city, the poem acquires a tone of ongoing, spiritual revelation that links love to knowledge: 'Solo l'amare, solo il eonoseere / conta' (Only loving, only knowing / counts, 243). The poet is let in on a series of universal cognitive truths of which he has previously been deprived: Stupcnda c miscra cin:'t, chc m 'hai inscgnaLO ci(', che '1IIq~ri e fcroci gli uomini imparano hamhini
I.. ·1 come andarc duri e pronti nella ressa delle strade, rivolgersi a lIn altro uomo senza ITemarc I .. ·1 a difendermi, a of/cndere, ad avere il mondo davanti a!{li occhi c non sol tanto in Cllore, a capire che pochi conoscono le passioni in cui sono vissuto. (244 -5) (Stupendous and wrelched cilY, / that has taughl me what, happy and licrce, I men learn as children Ill . .. 1 how 10 go hard and ready into Ihc throll~ 11 or the streets, to facc another man I wil hout tremhling I ... j 11 to defcnd Il\yselt~ to of/cnd, to have Ithe world hdi,,"e my eyes and not I only in my hear!, to Ullderst.uHJ 11 that kw men know the passions I in which I have lived.)
This urban pedagogy is juxtaposed with more immediate impressions of the 'borgate', and the whole comes to signify a growth beyond isolation towards reality and knowledge, hence towards a plenitude of 1he subject in harmony with the other: Un'anima in mc, che non era solo mia l ... .\ cresccva, nutrita daIl'allegria di chi amava, anche se non riamato·l· .. 1 Ero al centro del mondo (248) (A soul within me, that was not only mine [... 1/ grew, nourished on the happiness 11 of one who loved, even ifthclovc were not returned.l ... j 11 I was at the centre of the world)
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
101
The result is a surging feeling of vital freedom: ... Ah, giorni di Rcbibbia, che io credcvo persi in una luce di necessita, e che ora so cosi liberi! (252-53) (... Oh, Rebibbia days, / that I thought lost in a light / / of necessity, and that now I know to have been so free!) The third section builds via an innocent entry into history and ideology (,Marx 0 Gohetti, Gramsci 0 Croce, / furono vivi nelle vi vc esperienze', Marx or Gobetti, Gramsci or Croce, / were alive in living experiences, 25:l), throug'h his transfcll'mation into a 'mite, violento rivoluzionario' (gentle, violent revolutionary, 254) to a high rhetorical climax: 'un UOlll0 fioriva' (a man blossomed) (254). The narrative towards progressive understanding of and immersion in the world has none of the neg'ativity ofalllohiography as separ'ltion. As he proclaims in 'Picasso', 'Q.uanta gioia in quest a furia di capire!' (1 low much joy in this fury fillknowledg'e!, 1 <):l); 'NeI rest arc / dentro I'infcrno, con marmorea // volont,l di capirio, cda ccrcare /Ia salvezza' (In staying / inside the hell, with a marble // will to understand it, is to hc sought / salvation, 11)6). This is autobiography at its most heroic, until pain and anxiety return in the poem's final three sections, echonl in t he wail of the digger and its recall to t he destruct ive movement ofhistory. '11 pianto' was wrinen in 1()56, contemporary to early parts of /lcft:l!,iol/c, where autobiography and self-portraiture generally come to the fClIT once more (Rinaldi, 1990, 12<)-:l5). Echoes of the idealized autobiog-raphy of' 11 pian to" fill" example, can be tiHmd in 'A un figlio non nato' (511), where the selfis a harmonized combination of intrinsic and acquired qualitics: milezza, salulc l" clllusiasll10 ehe ho avuto nascendo I... 1 . - -amore, lin-za e eoscienza ehe ho acquislalo vivendo (--meekness, health and enthusiasm Ihal J had al birth / I... I-----Iovc, strength and conscience that I have aequired in Iile) The two long, semi-narrative poems, 'La ricchezza' (421-75) and 'I ,a religione del mio tempo' (487-520), hoth develop the imagery of the 'borgate' as a correlative to the poet's inner condition. In 'J ,a ricchezza', material poverty is compared to 'wealth' of knowledge ami thought; the vitality of the 'rag'azzi' to his excessive passion ('E' l'io che hrucia', It is the hurning' I, 433). And the final section, describing a screening of Rossellini's 1945 film Roma {ilta aperla, is a full autobiographical
102
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
reassessment ofthe past. It opens with a lapidary 'Chi fui?' (Who was I?) (469), and struggles to retrieve the experience of the Resistance seen on screen. But unlike the euphoria of part of'lI pian to della scavatrice', the emblems of the past are all turned to the negative. Thc language of poetry was one of the 'inganni / istituiti, [lel dovute illusioni' (instituted / deceptions, [thc] fitting illusions, 471). Dialect showed only the 'indecente / ehiarezza d'una lingua chc evidcnzia / la volonta a non essere' (indecent / clarity of a language that makes plain / its will not to be, 471). There follow the familiar elements of idealized autobiography-the Resistance, thc hcroic death of his brother (cf 'A un ragazzo', 477-86), and the birth of a new hope for justice which is his political awakening, all marked by the rcti"ain 'cd era pura luce' (and it was pure light). But all is then nullified by the present, and by hindsight. The autobiography ends with a void, and a new intense solitude: tu tta q uclla luce, per cui vivemmo, fu soltanto un so[!:J10 ingiusl ilicalo, inogg;c11 ivo, 1(1I11e ora di solilarie, verg;og;nosc Iacrimc. (475; cr. '] ,a rclig;iolle dclmio lempo', 5 I (,) (all that light, / I(lr which wc lived, was only a dream, / unjustified, ullobjective, a source / now of solitary, shamcfullears.)
All that remains in this void arc the three 'obsessions' running throu[!:h the poem, tokens of an overdetermination which turns t hc suhject in on itself and cuts it off from the world: 'testimoniare, am arc, [!:uada[!:nare' (to hear witness, to love, to earn, 43 J -5). The negativity and sense of crisis which cap 'La ricchezza' and 'La religione delmio tempo' arc dramatically augmented in the second and third scctions ofRcligione, written between 1958 and 1960, which otfer telling evidence of the general crisis in Pasolini's cultural, polit ical and aesthetic operation. The epigrams of the second section ('Umilialo e offeso', 523-37, and 'N uovi epigrammi', 539-56) portray a self unable to understand reality or to control himsdfor his self-distorting excesses and neuroses ('Ai critici cattolici', 525; 'A Barberi Squarotti', 532). IIis sense of loss is morbidly expressed in 'Ai redattori di "Officina" , ('passo come un morto tra i vivi', I pass like a dead man amongst the living, 534), and in 'A mc' ('io, inaridito d'amarezza', I, parched with bitterness, 529). The third section, 'Poesie incivili' (567-92), evinces even more violent self-scrutiny. Autobiography returns in its most distorted form
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
IQ3
yet. It either makes a mockery of learning experience by its trite formulae: Da Cristo a Croce, chc cammino consolante! E poi la speranza dclla Rivoluzione. E ora eccomi qui (590) (From Christ to Croce, what a comforting stroll! / And then hope of Revolution. / And now here I am)
Or it is pervaded by death, which is now much more than a mere figure ofloss: 'Vengo da te e torno a te I . . . 1Mi fai ora davvero paura, / perchc mi sei davvero vicina' (1 come from you and I return to you [... ] Now you really fi'ighten me, / because you really are nearby, 'Frammento alla morte', S7H-<)). The link between the confessional mode and death (Tambling, 1')<)0, 105) is made explicit: I,a furia di confessione, prima, poi la furia tlella chiarezza: era da t.e Ila morte 1che nasceva (5711) (Thl: fury to confess, / first, then the fury that it was horn)
I()]'
clarity: it was /i'om you IUl:athl
c finita, anche la l11ia. / (:ol11e ogni vecchio, io 10 nego: sola / consolaziolle per chi, se I rema, muore ' (every road is finished, even minc. / I -ike every old man, I deny it: sole / consolation fi)r those who, if they tremble, die) (576)and conlJates once more the al1tohiogTaphical with the cognitive through its altema! ing rcli'ain '\ {o saputo, eccollle ho saputo! r... 1Non so ora, quale sia / il problema' (\ knew, boy, did I know! I ... 1 Now I don't know what / the problem is).,H The 'io' of the present is crushed by a terrifying anger: 'A quasi ql1arant'anni, / io mi trovo alla rabbia I.. ·1 non avn') mai pace' (At almost l()rty, / llim\ myself enraged I... ] \'11 never be at peace, SH4); 'la mia vita, disperata che abbia / solo ferocia i\ 1110n(\0, la mia anima rabbia' (my life, desperate that the world / 'AI sole' (573 6) shares this sense of doom- -'ogni strada
I X SlH..:h c(lv;nitivc dissonance , seen also in ~II pianto dclla scavatricc ' , ,,"'as already a Iuarkcr "i"separatioll in 'l\1elllorie' (!:l/Si~110'O, .l('S··7), through the break with the mother: 'tu di me conosei / gli ahballdoni I . . . 1 Ne ignori una rasscgnazione' (of me you know / the desertions I .. ·1 You know not hing; of my resignation). The theme remains important throughout Rcli~iol1l': '/\ un ragazzo' interrogates the young noy's tragic desire ItJr innocent knowledge of what can never be innoeel1l; and hoth 'La rieehczza' and 'La religione del mio tempo' reiterate the theme ('supillo / nella sete di sapere, Ilcll'ansia di eapire', supine / in my thirst for knowledge, my desire to understand, 4(1I; 'mi sforzo a eapire ogni cosa', I struggle to understand everything, .106). And ct 'Una dispcrata vitalitii' (Rosa, 728).
I04
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
has only cruelty, my soul only anger, '11 glicine', 592). The climax to this crisis sees a gulf open between the self and its place in history: 11 confine tra la storia e I'io si fende torto come un ebbro abisso ('11 glicine', 588) (The border between history and the self / cracks open twisted like a drunken abyss)
Onc further clement of the 'Poesie incivili' points forward to Rosa and beyond: the ironic vocabulary of success, victory and defeat. Ambition to succeed is repeatedly seen as having' led to a pyrrhic victory: Intransigenza e dolore crano sola garanzia di qualehc vittoria I· . ·1 I'angoscia non cpiLI scgno di vittoria ('AI sole', 576) (Intransigence and pain / were the only !',"lIaranlee of some viclory / an!',"uish is no lon!',"er / the si!',"n of vielory)
I ... 1
sono nel rogo, gioco la carla del ruoco, evincol·· .1 ho huo fiJl·tuna ('Frammenlo alia mol"le', 57 X, 57<) (I am in the pyre, I play the card orfire, / and I win I ... 11 have madc my /()rlIlIlC)
I.alotta cterminata con la viUoria. ('I.a rahhia', 5X:l) (The struggle ended / in viclory) per ognuno il conquistare la vita c una tacita SC01l11l1essa che 10 hi cieco padrone di luUo ci(') che sa ('11 glicine', 5<)O)I'J (for everyone, conquering / lite is a tacil bcllhat makes them / blind owners or all that they know)
The confused sense of failure through success here, of a compromised autonomy brought about by the very process of growth celebrated in '1I pianto della scavatrice', leads to an increasing·Jy ironic and negative poetry in which there seems ever less point in moulding' a unitary 19 Cf. 'Un Cristo' (L'llsignoio, 3-'4), 'La pcrsccuzionc' (Rosa, 662-3, 66R),
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
10 5
image of the self and its meaning, and ever more temptation simply to parade a series of discordant, discontinuous poses. From this point on, Pasolini's poetry will gradually disintegrate formally, as will the forms of autobiography encountered thus far. Masquerades of self-portraiture will develop as the self is dispersed across an ever-more imping'ing present, so that autobiography survives only as a parody or pastiche of itself. However, the poetry of Rosa still tempers that impulse with another variant on the autohiographical ti.Jfm, the diary,20 A great deal of Rosa consists of daily record, 'Poesie mondane' «(1I1-21) is a slightly expandcd version of the 'Poesie di Mamma Roma' (in Mamma RI/ma, 15J--{)0); 'Pietro IT' (669-82) is a record of the trial of I,a riwlltl lill' blasphemy in March H)6J; 'Israele' and 'L'alba meridionale' (757-~)J) arc meditations on Pasolini's ahortive trip to Israel and Jordan (27 June to 11 July H)6J) to find locations filr Vallgc/o, These poems contain little retrospcction, and thus make little attempt at cohesion or unity --'le contraddizioni venglo Ino rese estreme, mai conciliate, mai slllllssate' (its contradictions arc made extreme, never resolved, never muffled, (:amon, 1<)(15, 1(l») , Instead they portray a self at moments or despair, out ortime, barren: 10 sono lIIU (ill'za dcll'assato, Solo nella tradizione il mio amore,l_ , ,I E io, kto adlllto, mi ap;!!,"iro pill 1l1Oderno tli o!!,"ni moderno a cerea re fratelli che non sono pill. ('Poesie lIIondane', ()(I)
c
(I am a IillTe of the Pasl. / Only ill tradition is my love_I, _ -1/ And 1, an adult (iletlls, wander arollnd / IllOre J1lOtlcrn than every modern / in search of hrothers whoare no lon!!,"er.) ( :redendomi inaridito per sempre, I, , _I continuando a scriverc (qllando allora il silcnzio sarehhc meg;lio) riempio l'aridit;\ con una lihidinc, a slla voIla arhitral"ia, d'azionc I __ ,I ('1 .'alba meridionale', 71111)
I""
20 '1I1ihro I Nostll ha la lill-ma intel"ll;l, anche se non cSlcrna, di un di'lrio' (The hook the intcrnal, cvcn irnot external fill-m ora diary, "asolini 10 CUllon, [(l>s, I!)S)- As waS noted in P,\Ct I, Ihe diary fi>rm was rundamcnlal to "asolilli's c;trly poclry_ Sce q~, /)fu,-ff, I pfallli-;t chronicle or his ~randmothcr's dcath in TI)44- -Oa! /)fllYio (1 'NS I 1Nl ), Roma [(JSo: Dill,-io and SOl1ell(/ primllveri/,' (112, 126J- 309; 1417-41; 1461-95: ,lnd cL a lar~e lIumher o[uncollected or unpuhlished diary poem ill 112; ,',g_ J63H-I), 16H6, 2157-6], 2JHI-7 etc.)_ Sce Santato, Hjllo,35-1 11.
106
POETRY: A MOVF.MENT OF FORMS
(Thinking myself parched out for ever, [ ... ] / carrying on writing (when / in that case silence would be better) / I till in the aridness witha libido, / in its turn arbitrary, for action 1)
r· ..
The lack of vitality and control provokes an acute self-awareness and detachment: 'Osservo me stesso massacrato' (I observe my slaughtered self, 'Poesie mondane', 6zl). The t1iaristic snapshots intensify and recast earlier autohiographical motifs in a present that is ideologically anathema to the poet. For example, acquisition ofknowledg'e, a key to subjective plenitude in Ccncri, crumbles in the fever-pitch and /(JrITIal chaos of ' Poem a per un verso di Shakespeare' (703-[7). Iag'O's dying' words, 'what you know YOll know: / From this time f(Jrth I never will speak word' (OJhel/o, v. ii), in Pasolilli's version mark an end to learning: 'Ci() che hai saputo hai saputo: il resto non 10 saprai'. Non 10 sapn'l? I': allora che senso ha avu\o una vita ehe non passato e con esso nasee ogni giorno, come un rosaio? (705)2'
c altro elle
('What you have known you h'lve known: wh'lI remains you will nor know'. I won'. know? Well then, whal sense has a !ill: had Ihal is only pasl allll wilh it every day is horn, like a rose-hush?)
Here and in 'Vinoria' (SI]'Z5), otlH.:r motifs also collapse or are ironized, such as history ('Scienza della storia, aiutami!', r listorical Science, help me!, 4ZS), success ('UIl': I.A IUVOI.UZ[ONE DlVENTA AIW)l'rA / / S'I~: SENZA MAl VITTOHIA .. .', f(JI' the rl~vollltion is hecoming' aridity / / we are f()JTver without victory, XZZ)/2 and confession (' Prendo Sll di me la colpa I... 1', I take the hurden of blamc, SI 5, X2I). There is also a rcturn offamiliar narrative (i"ag-ments in references to the W'lr, Frillli, the Resistance and the death of (iuido. Bul all these tokens ohhe past are now untenable, as tbe screaming- end o/" 'Poema per un verso di Shakespeare' blurts out: 'NI·:s.~UNO DE[ PIIOIlIoEMI 1>1-:(;1.[ ANNI ClNQlIANTA
M'IMPORTA Pili! TIIADISCO I LlVIDI MORALIST(
cm: IIANNO
FATTO
DEI. SOUA[ .ISMO UN CATTOI.ICESIMO U(illAI.MENTl': NOIOSO! \ ... \
ABIURO DAI. RIDICOLO DECENNIO!' (717)23 21 On this poem see Onofi-i, 19H4; 'lIld et: I"lsolini's use of Olhcl/II as the hasis of 1.11 law visla da/la "/nil. 22 Sce also the ICllcr-pocm 'Ncnni', AVllnli!, J 1 nee. 'I)il'; Bz, J 717- -20, 2] In Camon, J()IiS, 196, f>asolini qualifies (his much"'1l1otcd statement: 'Ma '1ucsta :lbiura va lerra come si legge una poesia I.. , .J i: fonuamentalmenle vera I ... 1111:1 il "to no" di ljudl'abiura c poetico c non rcalc c mi suggeriscc tcnnini ccccssivamcntc carichi di rancorc c di
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I07
('none of the problems of the fifties I interests me any more! I I betray the spiteful moralists who have made socialism a Catholicism that is I just as boring! t... J I renounce the ridiculous decadc!')
'1 'he ideological source of this crisis is of course the consumerization of culture and society: Ah, non potn) pi Ll resistere ai ricatti dcll'opcrazione che non ha uguale, credo, a fare dei miei pensieri, dei miei atti, alt ro da ci(l che sono: a tras/i)ffllarC alle radiei la mia Jlovera persona: c, cam Attilio, il patio industriale. ('I ,a Guinea', (06) (I\h, I can no longer resisllhe blackmail I oflhe operation without equal, I I believe, 1hal makes of my thoughts, my deeds 11 something other than what I am: 1hall rans/ilrms I 101 he eure my poor persona: I it is, dear Attilio, the induslrial pact.)
What n:mains of I he autohiographical impulse, then, is distorted into pastiche, otien a pastiche of t he very liu'ms of self-narration. The poem 'Coccodril1o', written (11' the American journal Avanl Garde in 1<)(IS, lakes its title from the journalistic slang tilr obituary, and is another allempt OIl a pastiche-account of his own lile.!4 Apart from its tone of post hU1l10us, ironic despair, it is sig'niticant (lr its recurrent inahility to realize its own beg·inning·. Variations on the refrain 'let's begin a[!:ain' ('ricomincianlO') interrupt the How of retrospect ion no less than nine times. Similarly, 'U na dispcrata vit alibI' (726-4S), like 'Poeta delle cencri', parodies t he interview fi)l'm as precisely a consumerist distortion of Ihe ;Illlohiographical impulse. The interviewee is asked to confess and analyse bis past 10 explain his present and future, in an arena which only admilS caricature ami commodity. And yet, the complicity of Ihe suhject is till'ced by his poet's tear of silence: 'io volonlariamente marlirizzato' (I willingly martyed, 72<).25 He provides a splTanze' (Ihis renuncialion should he read poelically I ... 1 if is fundamentally true sug~esls lcrms excessively burdened with rancour and Ilew hopes). !\ similar g'lo,s c;1Il he tillnHl in 'Poela delle eeneri': 'Vi ho falsamente abiuralO dall'ilHpq~no' (I (alsd)' ;Ihjurcd col11miUlJCnltbere, .w(6) . IlllOve
I... I hIli ils 10lle is poelic alld nol real and il
.'4 First pUhlished in French (I )ullol, H)M I, "40-49), now 112, 2085-93. Thc conceit of inlerprel ing onc's lilC from afler death, be{(ull in 'El teSLtment Curan', recurs in Orgia, 505-9, ami is lheorized in 1:1:241. 25 Belwcen 1<)56 and ")75, Rinaldi, H)~12, 452-60, records over 2]0 single and fuur bookIcnglh inlervicw,. Fur Pasolini's highly ambivalent attitude [() interviews, see his own preface tu Dullo!, «)H 1,7-10, and parudies in Te()rcma, 17&-'79, 193-96, and La r;cotla.
108
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
half-serious 'synoptic table' to sum up his life in typically formulaic, preterite terms. As the poem ends, the interviewee becomes ever-more incoherent (' ... [balbetto, / preso da impeti di morte]', ... [1 stammer, / taken with onrushes of death], 735; suspension marks and square brackets in original), slips into the third person, Benveniste's nonperson (741), and ends with a stammering 'Io? [ ... ] Io?' (Me? I ... ] Me?, 748). All that remains is the elusive 'desperate vitality'. 26 Other forms of self-narration arc manipulated in both 'Poesia in forma di rosa' and 'Nuova poesia in f()rma di rosa'. The 'calligrammes' ofthe latter are described as 'embarrassing' because they fail to disguise the fact that there is nothing new to say: il vero dolore ccapire una reald: qllcsto mio esscrc di nuovo nel '63 ci(\ che fui nel '43 I... .1 ogni L1omo ha lIn'epoca sola nella vita (752) (the true pain is in understanding a reality: this being / again in in '43 / [.. ·1 every man has only onc epoch / in life)
'C)]
what I was
'Poesia in f()rma di rosa' uses a highly fractured 'terzina' t()rm/ 7 describing five petals of a rose ('Uno e Cinquino', One and Five/()Id) which are schematic emblems of his existence, representing a fivct()ld confession of error: 'Ho sbagliato tutto' (I have mistaken everything, (51). The rose had been a recurrent, hig'hly charged figure of harmony in [;usiJ;n% and MCJ;lio,2H and its tTanst()rmation here into a token of fragile multiplicity and confused negativity of the self represents a sig'nificant trauma enacted in the fractured /()rm and schema of the poem. The petals are torn away in turn to reveal loss and lack, ohsession and error. Disintegrating 'terzine', chaotic semi-prose and 'calli grammes' are all symptomatic of an increasing obsession with poetic f()rm in Rosa, reflecting the overwhelming crisis in the self's arid relation to reality: non mi resta chc lilre oggctto della mia poesia la poesia (7H9) (all that is left to me / is to make poetry the object of my poetry) 2(, As Gcrard, If)H3, 47, anu Tren1!), If)I)O, XI, hoth note, the term 'disperata vitalil;i' is taken by Pasolini from Longhi, "n3, 7.13. Critics have seen thc phrase as cmblem;11 ic oflar!(c parts ofPasolini's work (Fcrretti, [976, BClli, tI)Ro). 27 ef. 'Una dispcrata vitalit;i', 729: 'Vcrsi, versi, scriv!)!, vcrsi l [ ... 1/ Versi NON PIll IN TERZINI':' (Verses, verscs, I writcl, vcrses! [ ... ] / Verses no longer in terzinas). 28 e.g. Me!!,iio, 43, ')7--{)H; L'usigll%, 304, 3 H) ff., 370; anu later Religionc 490, 5HI-4; Row, 754. On rose imagery, see David, 1970, 556--62; Jcwcll, 198z; Vannueci, 19H5.
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A similar preoccupation with the failing role of poetry is found in 'La mancanza di richiesta di poesia', which again morbidly emphasizes the poet's anachronistic status: 'Tu con le Ceneri di Gramsci ingiallisci' (You fade to yellow with the Ashes ofGramsci, 682). And this obsession will dominate much of Trasumanar. The most powerful synthesis of the disintegrating threads of Rosa comes in 'La realta' (631-47), where the crisis in poetry ('quando / scrivo poesia c per difendermi e lot tare, / compromettendomi, rinunciando / / a ogni mia antica dignid', when / I write poetry it is to defend myself and to struggle, / compromising myself, renouncing' / / all my age-old dignity, 63 I) leads to an attempted return to confession ('Eccomi nel chiarore di un vecchio aprile, / a confessarmi', Here I am in the lig'ht of an old April, / at confession, 632), and to a series of configurations of his past-again his father, his mother, his homosexuality and m,lrginalization, his bndscapes-which arc worked and reworked into a rich network of poetic tensions. But the entire record of the self and its relation to reality is reduced in the tinal terzina to a mere precondition and ohstacle to the esscnce of what he dcsires to represen t: Solo dello questo, 0 \lrhllo, la Illia sorle si pot r,lliherarc; e eomineiare ilmio discorso sopra la realt;l «('47) (Only having said, or screamed this, will my [lie / he set free; and will hegin / my discourse on n:alilY)
Self-inscription is always only a prelude to a beginning;, as 'Coccodrillo' insisted: 'ricominciamo'. ~(J Trasumanar hrings renewed emphasis on the loss of role for the self and {()r the self as poet, and by now, autobiography is only evoked in residual fragments.3° Tn 'Richiesla di Iavoro' Pasolini refutes his former practice of writ ing poetry f()r posterity: .lIJ (:r Pas()lini~s ~Ioss to 1he title of P"XSiOlll' (' j,/c%gill, .... XX: "Prinl;') p;lssiullC ('fill; iJco)ogi.l", 0 rncglio "Prim;) p;ls,sioIlC ma l)()' idcolo~ian I CFirst P;lSSIOIl (I lid fhe" iocology\ or rarher 'Ii,.,t pas>ion, b"llhell idcolo!,:y') . .1 0 I n ~Pasolini n:censiscl' Pas(llini' hl' notes 1h;\l pari 'li'oSII1I1Utlllr is 'UIl diari() privalo, in cui l'a,olini p,I,.1a ddle sue giornate, per to pii(, nere, mc,mlando allc angosce--ma anehe ai piaccri, andiamo!----i prohlclni umctalinguistici" c sociali del brc pOCSi,l' (;1 private diary, in which "asolini talks o("his !nOSily hlack days, mix in!,: in wilh an!,:uish··-buI also pleasures, why nOI!-the social and 'mctalinguistic' problems oi"making poclry, 1/ "orlito tld/Il!llorit', 2111). Rinatdi damns thc hook ,IS 'non-poctry', 'Ihal pillorics, onc ahcr anolhcr, all his previous ercdos, or rathcr lhc possibility of making poetry o[lhem' (I!J!lz, 3+3, .1+7-11). I
I
or
IIa
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Ero rolemaico (essendo un ragazzo) e contavo I'eternita per I'appunto in secoli. Consideravo la terra il centro del mondo; la pocsia il centro delIa terra. l.. ·1 Ora [... Jla vocazione cvacante. (837)
(I was Ptolemaic (since I was a boy) / and I counted eternity precisely in centuries. / I thought the Earth was the centre of the world; / poetry the centre of" the Earth. /
l.. ·1 Now l· .. J my vocation is vacant.)
This is the cnd point of a parabola which began with the youthful ambition for literary success of a highly traditional kind, as evinced in his early letters and journalism, and which developed into the ambivalent imagery of success and victory after 1 <)6a. Now the whole poetic project has been displaced away from the Romantic onc of insight and selfexploration towards 'poesie su ordinazione: ordigni' (poetry to order: devices), ceded knowingly to the demand and supply laws of an economic infrastructure: 'smello di essere poeta originale che costa mancanza / di libert.l' (I r;ive up being' an original poet, beCluse it costs a lack / of freedom, 'Comineato all' ANSA (Scelta slilistica)', (00). The new project also translilrms the diary element o/" earlier work into public record ('cronaca') and public per/ilrmance: hencc 'Patmos' «(H554), on thc bombing' of Piazza Fonlana in Milan in 19()(), and a series of poems on the student movements and the incipient terrorist 'anni di piombo'; 'Er;li 0 tu' (H:n·_·6) on Ihc death of Bobhy Kennedy; 'Dutschke' (HH(l--7), 'PanaguJis' (H5X .(»; 'Pocma politico' and its 'Riassunto' (9()!)-loo4) about Nixon. Thc subjcct is not absenl tj'om these pieces-it is proti)lll1dly implicated in thc student movements, and identifies in turn with Kennedy, who is repeatedly addressed in hoth second and third person, I )utschke and Panagulis-nor is the personal diary tilrm ahandoned--l,i.::: the cycle of pocms lilr Maria (:allas. But the subject has lost all that 'antica mia digniti' which came (i'om a control over the lang'uage 0[" its poetry and its personal history: I he 'io' now speaks in 'LJuesto mio pal'lar da buffime' (this I(Iol's speech, X35). It takes on a cacophony of other voices insteaJ of reformulating a sing'le voice. Death anJ rebirth, in Friuli part of an animistic cycle, are now reduced to the palingenetic, arbitrary shift from one mask to another, each one a 'nascita Ji un nuovo tipo Ji buttime' (hirth of a new type of fool, XXI fT). This has hoth linguistic and formal consequences. J _anguage is devalued and diluted, and ultimately reduced to noise:
or
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
III
io wnlJsCII e vIIgll1J l'inutilita di ogni parola ('Il Gracco', 885)
(1 knlJm and man! the uselessness of every word) E cosi vado verso il balbettio -ehe eontiene ogni lingu.l-ridendo ('Proposito di scrivere una [loesia intitolata "1 primi sei canti del Purgatorio"', RRR) (And so r 1!;0 towards prattle 1-- -t hat contains every language-/laughing) Vorn:i mimarc I'eeolalia, esse re latieo, tltieo, e eosi esprimere, 011 grado pill hasso, il tutto_ (,Pmposili di Icggerezza', X9S) (I'd like to mime the eeolalia, to be phat ie, phat ie, I and so to express, at the lowesl level, everyl hing.)
r lowever, silencc as an adequate response is once more precluded: 110 pama della lihcrt;t ehc mi verrehhe daltacere ('I ,ihm lihero', !)H7).l1
(I fear the liu'domlhal silenec would hrin!'," IllC)
()n a lim11al level, the cult ure-industrial pastiche in Rom is extended, as can he seen in the !lve poems ent it led '( :olllunicato all' ANSA', addressed to the nat ional press a[!;ency.v The precarious status of the sell' as poet, and orpoctry and Ian[!;ua[!;e, is rdlccted in the provisional na t ure of so llluch of 1he collection. This had already hegun in 'Progetto di opere future' and 'Poeta delle eeneri', with their descriptions of work in pro[!;ress, hut here it is taken to extremes, Poems 'lIT rewritten, in onc casc three times (,La restaurazione di sinistra', q()5--}0), summarized ('Riassunl"O per un "I )igest" del "1'oema politico" " 1004), left in note !iJrlll ('Manifestar (appunti)', [OZS-30), added to ('Coda alle co se successe eCL', I °41-2). Again, this li)rmal chaos primarily contrasts wit h a traditional view or poetry as a craft, a product of careful, hut hidden reworking, By leaving uncovered the raw process or work, the texts rdlcct the self's desire an-d need to avoid stasis, even at the cost of disintep;rat-ion . .I' The Il;I,..,doxic.,1 nol ion of'libert,,', alreaJy presenl in Rosa ('1,01 rcolil,\', (,3H), is invcstig-,ILed 1lI0re flllly in 'Manifestar (appllnli), (I o2H-30)_ Scc also /i/i 2hl)_ V There ,Ire three more in 'I'oesie di Pier Paolo I'asolini scrille Junlllte la lavoraziolle di Met/ea' (Met/ell, IOIJ "47; 112, I H74-l) I HI IHI) 1--2, I Hl)7il, a film-diary, contemporary to mllch of 1'raSU1fJlltlar which ShilfCS olany of ils chanlCtcristics.
112
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Nuova, Pasolini's final collection of poetry, is another remake. It returns to the language and poems of Meglio to annihilate them systematically through a disillusioned updating. Another retrospective rewriting, this act is in some sense autobiographical: as a cancelling of the past and of the validity of history, it might also be taken as antiautobiographical par excellence. 33 I ts only sustained recourse to autobiography is in the rewritten version of 'Suite furlana', where the poet struggles in vain to capture elusive past self-images: 1 fai par vuardiimi tal spieli par jodi se che jo i soj stat, ma il spieli al si m()uf eoma n'aga e a si m()ufse eh'i soj dovenr;1t. (1127)
(I go to look at myself in the mirror / to see what 1 have heen, / but the mirror is moving like water / and what 1 have hn:ome Illoves too.)
He once more casts himsclfbcfore his father in guilt ('illari', the thief), and his mother in rapt attention; as an exile in Rome, and as a writer who 'al serif i dis da la so vita' (writes the days of his life, I J 2q). But the writing is undone, as is the life, in the final section: 'e invessi di scrivi al scanscla / parse ch'a no'l ha 'na storia' (and instead of writing, he rubs out / because he has no history, I 12<». 1.ike 'Tornant 011 pais «tuinla variante)' (1083), this is more epitaph than autobiography. In the more contemporary, political final section, 'Tetro ent usiasll1o' (1145-82), written in a mixture ofFriulan and Italian, 'Versi sottili come righe di pioggia' (I 173-5) exploits the chasm between received opinion and Pasolini's position by an impersonal and sarcastic condemnation of all he holds dear. The portrait of society is onc in which the sclfis 'disperatamente interessato' (desperately implicated), but as a 'misero e impotente Socrate' (wretched and impotent Socrates), unable to impinge upon it:. The book ends on a moving, but as always ambiguous and ironic note of closure when he abrogates his 'impegno' to a new interlocutor, a young fascist: Hie desinit eantlls. Ci,lpiti tu, su li spa lis, chistu zcit plen. Jo i no pos, nissun no eapircs il scanduL l· .. J Ciapiti su ehistu pcis, hmt,lt eh'i ri mi odiis
(t I~lI-2)
.13 Critical opinion on Nu(}vl/. has heen overwhelmingly llcp;ative. Ferretti, l!n6, ,,6, call~ it 'too Qllculating'; Rinaldi, 19Hz, 357, 'a false reflection,;l vacuous exerci~e'. SantalO, t"Ho, 24", a polemical declaration of'pointlessne~s of poetry'.
THE IMPULSE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY
113
(Here endcth the song. You, / take it on your shoulders, this full basket [fardello 1. / I cannot, no one would understand / the scandal. [... ] / You, take up this weight, you child who hates me)
The trajectory of self-representation and inscription ends here in denial-of the self as the appropriate speaking subject of poetry; of the ideological impetus which, however pessimistically, informed the history of his poetry since 1947; and thus, finally, of the very possibility of poetry itself:-'Hic desinit cantus'.
5
'Pura luce ': A Vision ofHistory The Friulan idyll ofPasolini's early poetry is huilt on a nostalgic return of the suhject to a prehistorical realm, which evolves in Meg/io and L'usigl1% towards an entry into history and thus into ideology, language and loss. The entry into history is, in other words, a defining; moment in the subject's history (Ch. 4), and the relation between these two polar histories gives form and vitality to a gTeat deal of Pasolini's poetry. The /irst part ofMeglio all but eschews the historical, in its choice of dialect and verse form, in its intimate and mythologizing strategies of self-inscription, and in its descript ive tone. 'I 'his childhood realm exists in a state of timeless sllspension: I no jot un Pass;11 Ma doma ;Iins semis e nos disminliadis e passi('lIls sol erad is la UI1 limp sellsa i dis ('I ,a 1101 di maj', ()2)
(1 do 1101 see a Pasl / / BUI only dark years / and I()rg:ollen nig:hls / and buried passions / in a lime withoul days) un Frilll eh',,1 vifsolllUSSll1 eu la me zovcnlllt di \;\ dallimp, la un timp sdrum;\t dal villi. (' Lllllis', J 02)
(a Friuli that lives unknown / with my youlh / heyond time, in " lime / upturned by the wind)
Entry into history is effected in the second part of the book hy the shift from lyric to popular narrative forms, particularly in the 'Romancero' section, but history is still more than an objective, narrative event. As Santato, 1980, 179, notes 'past and present arc in Pasolini,
A VISION OF HISTORY
II5
more than two historical times, two forms of being'. '11 vecchio testamento' (163-70), for example, brings together three different mytholog'ies to create a hybrid history within which there is no hierarchy between the subjective and the external. The first level of the poem is narrative and strong'ly historical, giving an account of the 1943-5 civil war, shaped hy the tides of the three sections '11 quaranta quatri', '11 quaranta sine' and 'J ,a miej zovcntlIt'. The flrst section describes the Nazi occupation, the secoml their ueparture, anu the thiru a new beginning' as the 'meglio gioventll' (best of our youth) leaves Friuli for adventure in the world, Even this most documentary level tends towarus the mythical, however, through the trauit ion.t1 war-song '11 ponte di Perati', which stands as an epigraph to the entire second part of the Ml',!',lio: SlIl pontc di Ilassano la mqdio giovcllIl1 (011 I he bridgl: al Bassallo lIndergnlllnd)
handina nna va solo In;\ (I I I)'
black flag hlowing I 1hc bl:st of our YOllth· 'go
Ilistory is g'ivell a clear documenlary (i'ame bUI also a Elblc-like tone. A second level rein 1(IITes I he (irsl I hrough a rall]!:c or topoi connoting limeless harmony, cxpresscd t hrou]!:h t he poet's inner voice. I kscription is slIstained and realistic, bUl conditioned by a Elmiliar lyric tone: In tai bores 1i ciampanis a hotizcin di fil:sta par li cors hl:1I nctadis par la ci;\mp;\gna frcs-cia, 1;1 che trops di (i'lItis eh'a ghi sillS la slressa par ga1criis di vencs a van1cgris a messa (167) (Inthl: villages Ihe hells alT ringing Olll I he holiday I1 hrollgh I he wcll-kempt cOllrlyardslhroll!','h Ihl' cool counlry, I when: swarms of girls - Iheir plaits glcnning Ilhrough IlInnels of wider - go along happy 10 mass)
Similarly 'I Collts' (145(11) combines historical narrative with a personal hist ory of the ElIllily or t he poct's mother, Susanna (nee Colussi). 2 But 'll vecchio testamento' adds a Ihird level which recalls the Christian liturgy of I, 'uxignolo. The note at the cnd of the book int()rms us that the , See Sa"lal", II)XO, 101. There is dead)" a d"se relalio" hel Wemlne second pari or Mt'glill and Pasulini\ Ctlll:.."".(}ni('rl' ifali((lw, 'rhe inlrnJut.:lion {o that VOllllllC (Pa ...... iollt.! t' idc%Kia, lJS 25 1)) indudes a scclion on li,lklorie poetry 'IIHI military song:s (z4X-51)), which provides models lill' hOlh 'I Coli,,' and '1I vccchiotcstamclII"', Scc also '11 canl" popolare' (H2, 1443(10, thcn in part in Cl'1I",i, 111, IHS-X), '11 pOllle di l)cr,lIi' is sling: in S"It;, 2 For rhe f'lmily hislory on which 'I Colils' is h'ISCU, scc Naldini, [I)SI), S-6; SchwarlZ, 191)2, ')J-I Otj,
II6
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
final verses of'lI quaranta quatri' and '11 quaranta sinc' are free translations from the Bible (171). This clearly points forward to future work such as Van~e1o and San Pa%, but here it fashions a trans-historical synthesis, creating in the contemporary context of the documentary narrative a myth-history emerging from the poetic myths of the subject's own pre-history. Such a synthesis, such an emanation of a vision of history is one of the founding; principles ofPasolini's work. The parabola of L'usign% follows a parallel course. At its start, the sense of an absolute, mythical time is expressed through the emblemcharacters ofthe dialogues, as in 'L'usignoto' ('Ah, vedo che sono omhre i vostri anni!', Ah, I sce that your years arc shadows, 2(8). The vocabularies of the animistic countryside and of religious devotion harmonize on a level of pure spirituality:
c
Gente del Rosario, passato ma{!,'{!,'io... E{!,'1i solo resta a cmtare le litanie del povero ra{!,'azzo appogg-iato alia Fonte dell' AClJua Santa. Ormai qllelle rose sono Ion lane, nuvole d'incenso nella rosa penluta. (.1°4).1 (People ofthe Rosary, May has passed ... I k alone remains to sin{!,' the litanies of the poor boy leaning- on the Iloly Water !illll. Now those roses arc hI' away, elouds of incense in the lost rose.)
This early practice of juxtaposing the sacred and the real by transformative analogy will he developed in the 'contaminatio' of t hc Roman novels and films, and in the anthropological readings of history in the cycle of myth films of the late I ()hos. But here, the immediate effect is to create a prehistory f()\' the metanarrative of' /, 'u.I'ignll/o, preparin{!,' f()\' the suhsequent shift into a history at odds with spontaneous harmony. Even more so than with Mcglill, /, 'usiKno/1I is f(JI'llled as a controlled narrative, and hence the entry into history coincides with the parallel entry into autobiography disellssed above. The sense of rebirth in the section' 1I non credo' (3.17-48)-'la mia vita I nascendo si ascolta' (my life I listens to its own hirth, 'I ,a sorgente', 343; cL 34s)-prepares f()r the '] -ingua' and 'Paoto e Baruch' sections (34()-7H), with their exploration of the tragic consequences of the dichotomy hetween self and history, between self and prehistory, and ofthe intimation of death as a condition of history. Time, language, poetry, Christianity, and sexuality all 3 The "me ahistorical, acstheticizing harmony will he an objeCT of intense nostalgia in laTer work ('La rcligionc del mio tempo', 4<)3). cr Fcrrclti's 'evangclical-viscer:t1 religion' (t974, 163-HS), onc pole of an ubiquitous duality he discerns in I'asolini's work. For David, I 'no, 5SH, the Church, and fascism, arc both 'faulty sublimations of Eros' . On Pasolini and religion, sce Conti Calahrese, 1994; Fantuzzi, [(n6; P. and C. Lazagna, 1970.
A VISION OF HISTORY
II7
become objcctificd and institutionalized as the imaginary cedes to the symbolic. The self is subsumed into grander discourses, as is encapsulated in the epigraph to the 'Lingua' section, the last entry in Leopardi's Zibald(me [4526, 251: 'I'uomo resta attonito di vedere verificata nel cas 0 proprio la regola generale' (man is astonished to find that his own experience confirms the general rulc).4 'La scoperta di Marx' (4°9-13), finally, retells in nure the rupture between the prehistory of the sclC and the self-in-history. New ideologically laden terms, such as 'coscienza' (conscience/consciousness), 'ragione' (reason) and 'istituzione' (institution), acquire prominence here f()J· the first time in Pasolini's poetry. Rut they arc talismans of a new relationship to the world rather than intellectually or poetically articulated concepts. Similarly, history remains more an absolute idea of time, place and heing· than a vessel oftransf(lrmation: 'la nostra storia! morsa / di puro am ore, t(lrZa / razionale e divina' (our history! hitten / hy pure love, a lilrce / Iboth I rational and divine, 413). Even a vision of history as ideology, then, draws on imaginary, subjective topoi oscillating between idealist and materialist models of history. The resonance of the oscillat ion, more than its ideological substance, is the vessel of the work of subjectivity. If'T.a scoperla di Marx' rehearses the emotive transition from innocence to nascent historical consciousness, the plaquette volume R01lla I ()so. /)illfill (1477-()S), and a sequence of contemporary uncollected poems (Bz, r6JI) 41, zoz6-35), record a further transition, hetween Friuli and the 'bm·gate' of Rome, hetween the discovery of Mar x and the guilt of expulsion. The trauma threatens the cnd of youth: J\dulto? Mai-mai, coml: I'esistenza che non mal ura- -Testa sempre acerha (1479) (i\duh? Never---never, like existence I which never matures--always stays unripe) Non so dare un addio, una eondanna, un ,Ivvertimenlo: Ullto resta ugualc, distante at bene e almalc (148])
(l cannot give" farewell, a comlemnation, I a warning: everything stays I the same, distant from good and evil)
-l
l'asolini used the same quotation on several oe<:asions: see the 1945 collection Poesi, (B2,
1261); Alf'ahu/Ilzi(me, 224; Oytia, 572. On l'asolini and Leopardi, sec Banda, 1990a; Mannino,
1973, 13-2 4-
1I8
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Ragazzo mi ridesto, e mi ritrovo vecehio (14R6)5 (I wake up a boy, and I find myself / old)
Roma 1950. Diario moves towards a possibility of renewal through the first encounter with the festive Roman landscape: penso ehe non c tutto, il min passato; penso ehe la mia esistenza si rinnova, se mi ritrovo aperto a questo puro passo che valiea le tenebre (14R7)
(1 think it is not all, my past; / I think my existence is renewed, / in find myself open to this pure / step that erosses over rhe darkness)
But equally some of the other poems dwell on the baseness of the landscape ('escrementi e spianate / nere di fango', excrement and hlack / plains of mud, 16:\9), on exclusion ('in, escluso / dal mondo, che non so odiare ne quindi amarc', J, excluded / from the world, who cannot hate and thus cannot love, 2026; and cC 203 [,2034,1(141) and on the insta-· bility and insig'nificance of man ('10 stato / dell'Uomo sulla scorza del mondo I .. 1cdi poca sordida polvere', the state / of Man on the crust of the world I ... 1is of mere sordid dust, 2035). Roma 1950. /)i(J,l"io ends with a powerful contrast between his previous, introverted experience of time ,md space and that of the city: muovermi ... in ~iorni llIui fuori daltcmpo chc parcva dcdieato a me, scnza ritorni c senza soste, spazio tutlo colmo del mio stato, quasi un'estensione della vita mia, del mio calore, dclmio corpo... c s'c inrerrotlo... Sono in un altro tempo, un tcmpo chc dispone i suoi maltini in qucsta straua ehe io ~uanlo, ignoto, in questa gente frutto d'altra storia ... ('495) Q!-ICS[O
(My moving ahout ... in days quite outside / of a time that seemed dedicated / to mc, with no returns, no pauscs, / a spaee liIleu up with my state, / almost an extension of my / life, my heat, my bouy... / and it has been cut off .. I am in another time, / a time that displays its mornings / in this street that I am watching, unknown, / in this people the fruit of another history... ) 5 On the imagery of ripeness and maturity here, sce Oldcorn, 1<)80-1, 1111, ,md Oil l'asolini's general 'rejectioIl maturity', sec Fortini, IC)<)3, 182-91; Santa to, H)80, 17(>-77.
or
A VISION OF HISTORY
119
The other history, both traumatic and hopeful, in which the self is now immersed lies at the heart of Ceneri, whose exploration of the role of the subject in history makes it a high point of what Moravia called Pasolini's 'poesia civile di sinistra' (civic poetry of the left) (perrarotti, 1977; Moravia, 1980). Running through Ceneri arc two complementary strands of history, conjoined by imagery of light, and carried by the parallel depiction of the subproletariat and the poet in relation to them. The first two poems, 'I} Appennino' and 'IJ canto popolare', each emphasize onc of the strands. In the fi)fIner, the geographical sweep {(mnd in 'L'ltalia' (L'usigrlO/o, J7<)-91) is supplemented by architectural and sculptural emblems-in particular the 'palpebre chi use' (closed eyelids) ofJacopo delhl (tuercia's funeral monument t(lr I1aria del Carretto in Lucca. 6 The poem equates the elusive yet permanent hmdscape and people of central Italy with those. on the banks of the Aniene in the 'borgate' . . rime and space, but als.\I the power of institutionalized history, work to exclude these zones, as symholized in Rome hy the Church: Un escreilo aeClIl1palo nell'allesa di I:trsi crisliano nella cristiana citl;\, oceupa ulla marcila dislesa d'crha sozza nell'aceesa campa~na: scendcre aneh 'e~li dent 1'0 la hor~hese luce spent (I X1)7 (i\n army camped wail ill~ / 10 hewllw (:hrisl ian in Ihe (:hrisl ian / city, oeellpies a roUen expanse / / oflihhy (!;rass in lhe vivid coulllry: / he loo hopes to descend inlo / Ihe hour~cois Ii~hl)
From early ill ClIsigflO/O, ima~ery of Christianity had been closely tied to imag'ery onig·ht. The \·wo sClluences 'J .'usignolo' and 'J ,a Chiesa' arc linked by a continllin~ epigraph adapted from John I: S: '10 non sono la luce I .. ·1 ma sono per render testimonianza alia luce' (1 am not the light I .. ·1 hut I am come to bear witness to the light, 298, J04). Imagery of light recurs frequently in the early devotional pieces (,La passione V' (294); 'J .'usignolo III' (2<)<»; 'Alba' (J0<); '))avide' (Jl I» where it represents grace and revelation, but also a magical quality ofthe landscape. In Cet/cri, the associations arc expanded and corrupted to include the light of reason, and hence a bourgeois vision of history, as in John J: 19 (, SantalO, J(jlio, IsH, traces a source in the 'chillsc palpcbrc' of Ungarctti's 'Memori,\ d'Ofclia d' Alh,l' (Sentimento de/tempo). On l'asolini and Ungaretti, sec Siciliano, 1981b. 7 On the nOlion of'altesa', sce Ch. 2 §I.
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
used by Leopardi in 'La ginestra'. Cut off from light like I1aria's eyes, the army becomes an ironic reincarnation of Italy itself (']acopo con Ilaria scolpi l'ltalia', ]acopo sculpted Italy with Ilaria, 177), but only by remaining prehuman, and silent: [ognuno J chiude nell'ineoscienza le palpebre, si perde in un popolo il cui clamore non cche silenzio (184)8 ([each onc.! closes in their unconsciousness / their eyelids, is lost in a people / whose clamour is nothing but silence)
'11 canto popolare' moves the imagery of light and history towards a more active, but also more idealist notion. Here, popular song is thc vessel tilr an essential 'race-memory', a history from which the alienated bourgeois poet is excluded: non abbiamo nozione vera di ehi cparLccipe alia storia solo per orale, ma~iea esperiellza; e vive purn, non oltre la memoria della generazione in cui presenza della vila c la sua vim perentoria. (186) (we have no true notion / oft-hose who participate in history / only throu~h oral, magic experience; / and livc pure, nol beyond the memory / of t he gelleration in whose presence / oflife is their peremptory life.)
The 'ragazzo del po polo che cantl a I' (singing boy of the people) emhodies the constant renewal of the world, which transcends dialectical renewal: Nella lua ineoseienz,j c la coscienza che in le la sloria vuole I.. ·1 E ormai, lilrse, altra scelta non ha che dare alia sua ansia di gi ustizia la forza dell a tua fclicil,i, e alia luee di un lempo ehe inizia la luce di chi cci(J che non sa. (188) (In your unconsciousness is the consciousness / that within you history wants [ ... j / And now, perhaps, he has no other choice / but to give to his desire for H The image of noise a.~ a marker ofpre-linguistie and hence af prehistoric vitality recurs ill 'Recit'-'Meridionali voci, risa di vecchia gente f hanno aHora un clamore <;he la slOria non sente' (Southern voices, old people's laughs I have then a clamour that history cannot hear, 238)-and in 'Le eeneri di Gramsci'-'quesra I ronzante pausa in cui la vira lace' (this I buzzing pause in which life falls silent, 233). Ct: 'La ricchezza', 428--9.
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121
justice / the force of your happiness, / and to the light of a time that is beginning / the light of he who is that which does not know.)
Pasolini challenges the Marxian rejection of the subproletariat by suggesting that there is a fc)rce beyond political consciousness, within the vitality of the 'borgate', which potentially liberates another history. History as both a force fClr materialist progress and a vehicle of bourgeois hegemony is a neg'ative and hostile agency which overcomes the individual agent: come io possiedo la storia essa mi possiede; ne sono illllminato: mol a ehe serve la IlIee? ('I.e eeneri di (iramsei', nH-l)) (as I possess history / it possesses me; I am lit up by it / / but what lIse is the light?)
'L'umile ltalia' devclops the geographical sweep of'!.'Appennino' by till\owing lhe perspective of swal\ows in night over Italy. Flight opens up new mythical perspec1"ivl's Oil time, where history and prehislory arc synthesized: Ah, non c ilte1l1po ddla slOria I ... 1 non sono questi gli aiti, im:olori luoghi di una patria divelluta coscienZ;l oltre la memoria. Ma dove meglio rieonoseerli ehe in qllesti antiehissimi ineami in cui sono pill vil:ini? Fossili (I'un 'esistenza ehe ai eom1l10ssi oel:hi, non si svda, si eanta? (zoX) (Ah, this is not the time of'history I ... 1/ these arc not the high, colourless / places oLl nation heeome / consl:iollsness heyond memory. / But where better to rel:ognize them / than in these most aneienr enchantments / in whil:h they arc most near? Fossils / of an existence whil:h to emotional/eyes, is not unveiled, hut is sung?)
Thc link bctween poctry, thc 'canto popolarc' of the boy above, and the '(in)canto' of the swallows is clear. All arc catalysts for the intuition of a sublime history. The swallows-'umilissima voce / dell'umile Italia' (humblest voice / of humble Italy) (207)-also pick up on the sense of national identity in 'L' Appennino', which is a significant vessel of subjectivity in
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
histary.9 Rome stands emblematically for the State, as well as for the Church: impotcntc la Roma del poterc ne sente, ancora plcbe, I'ansia nazionale (206) (impotent / the Rome of the powerful feels, / still plehean, its desire of nation)
The self creates a negative other to the (bourgeois, historical) centre of the state, by positioning the marginalunderclasses amI their language as a secondary centre for the c1aboration of identity. The declaration in '11 pianto della scavatrice', 'ero al centro del mondo' (J was at the centre of the world, 24X), invokes just such an alternative centre, as does the oblique perspective on the hidden landscapes of haly ('il ventre campestre d'ltalia', the rustic belly or Italy, RcIiKiorll:, 42]) in several poems. The technique creates tension through the simultaneous aHempt to define the subject by exclusion li·om t·he centre ot"power, and to posit an authentic essence ofltaly, marginalized by accidents of history. Ilence in Rosa, wc find both 'vera Italia, t"uori dalle tenebre' (true Italy, 011101' the dark, (77) and 'Italia vera, nazione / a me COS) lontana' (tTue Italy, a nation / so far away from mc, 7X5; cL 7()O-]). An idea of Italy--its centre and margins, its surElCe power and essence----{.Ievelops later into a more general idea of national, or even racial identity: Chi non la conoscer'l, lJlIesta sllpcrstile terra, cOllie ci pold capire? (Religiollc, 544) (Who will not" know it, this survivinl{ land, / how will they lIndersland liS') la blalit" Ji essere l:sislellza inalienabile, razza (Rosa, 637) (the Lttalily ofbl:ing inalienahk / existence, race)
And the potential ti)1" collective identillcation will soon be transferred to a mythologized Africa or Third World. 10 But the phase of Pasolini's I) The na"ive euphoria of these carly, sdl~projcctiIl~ eIlwlIntcrs with the nation is recalled in 'Poeta delle ccncri' (2064): 'Mi p,lrcva chc 1'lIalia, la SU,I dcscrizionc e il suo destino, / dipen
A VISION OF HISTORY
12 3
vision of Italian national identity ends with the damning 'Alla mia nazione' (Religione, 555), where Italy is stripped of all meaning and existence: ecosa sei? 1... 1 Proprio perchc tu sei esistita, ora non esisti, proprio perchc filsti cosciente, sei incosciente. [... 1 Sprofonda in queslo IUo hel marc, Iihera il mondo. (and whal are you? I.. .11 JUSI because you have existed, now you don't exist, I just hecause you were conscious, you are ullconscious. / [ ... 1 Sink into this your bcaUI·iful sea, free Ihe world.)
To return to Cl'IIl'ri, 'Picasso' (IH()-<)7) and 'Le ceneri di Gramsei' (222-35) deal more directly with the position of the subject in relation to lin·ces orhisfory. The ligure or Picasso partakes ofthe 'furia di capire' (fury 10 undersland) which was so imporlanl filr the autobiographical project above, and also fulfils the Johannine role of witness to the 'seandalo c ft~sla' (scandal and celebration) of I he world he portrays ( I<}o-- 1), and in these aspecls I he art ist and poel coincide in their search lilr 'questo esprimersi che remle I alia lllce I... Ila nostr
sua bnlasia·l· .. 1 i\ssenle
cda qui il popolo: il cui hrusio lace in quesle tele, in l\uesll, sale, quanto fuori esplode (dice per le placide strade fCstive, in Ull eOIllUlle canto ch'ell1Jlie rioni e cieli, horghi e v;ll1i lungo I'halia, I .. ·1 (1(15--6; see Asor Rosa, 1()6(), ]I)J; Siti,
11)80,207-1])
(he moves away / from the people and enters into a non-existent time: I false, with the very means of his same old 11 imagination. l... 1The people / / are ahsent from here: 1heir murmur falls silent I in these canvases, in these rooms, as / outside it joyously explodes in the placid 1/ festive streets, in a common song / that fills quarters and skies, villages and valleys I throughout Italy, l· .. J)
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
This passage repeats in brief the visual and aural picture of the city and its quality of time first sketched in Roma 1950. Diario. 'Le ceneri di Gramsci' uses similar imagery of light and noise, ending with a tragic acknowledgement of the self trapped in bourgeois history, despite his inclination towards 'incoscienza', and despite the absence of myth and renewal from that history: io, col cuore cosciente di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita, potro mai piu con pura passione operare, se so ehe la nostra storia cfin ita? (235)
(I, with the conscious heart / / of someone who only has life within history, / will 1 ever be able to function with pure passion / if! know that our history has ended?)
The cry of the digger in '11 pian to della scavatrice' provides the crowning image of the pain and tragedy of history in Ccncri. I I The triumphant BildunKsroman of the early sections placcd the poct at the centre of the history of the margins, but the cry of the machine reawakens the tragic nature of historical changc: Pian~e cic) chc ha fine e ricomincia·l· .. 1 Pian~e
Cill che muta, anche per farsi mi~liore. I.a luce del futuro non cessa un solo istante di lCrirci (262-3) (That which comes to an / cnd and bc~ins a~ain wceps. [... 1 / / That which changes, even / to improve itself; weeps. The li~ht / of the future does not let ofT for a moment / / from wounding us)
Linear history-the transformation of the past into the fut ureundermines the aspiration to a mythical history derived from the vital I I The 'pianto' is aoother image, parallel to rh.1t of noise already nOled ,.hove, that ()ri~in ates in L'wigno/(1 and Mcg/io and survives lrans/flrmed in the new civic poetry. Sce c.g. 'Corots' ([ S[8-[9), '1IIujar' (Meg/io, (4), the section '11 pian to della rosa' U.'U.,igllll/O) ,md the plaqucttc J pianti. In the violence of the 'pianto della scavatrice', echoing the 'Iatrato' (harking) of'Reeit' (239), there arc already seeds of its next incarnation in the 'urlo della Magn,mi' (Magnani's cry) in 'La ricchczza' (Rdigifmc, 465), which soon becomes the poet's own: 'Avrci voluto urlare, eero muro' (I wanted to cry,.md I was silent, 494), and then theshollt ('gridare') of ' La rabbia' (582), the 'urlo' of ' La reaiti' (Rosa, 647), and the incoherent 'ecolalia' of Trasumallar (895). Sce also Teoyema, I<J9-200. Another parallel aural sequence can he traced from the bird-songs and popular songs of Meglio and 11 mnto popo/are to the third-world music of Rosa and Trasumanar, and the sublime voice of Maria Callas in Tmsumanar.
A VISION OF HISTORY
12 5
force and the 'luce poetica' of the underclasses. But linear history contains its own non-nostalgic, prospective force, figured here in the topos ofhope-'illoro [gli operai] rosso straccio di speranza' ([the workers'] red rag of hope, 263)-as it was in 'Le ceneri': 'Come i poveri povero, mi attacco / come loro a umilianti speranze' (Poor like the poor, I cling on / like them to humiliating hopes, 228; Asor Rosa, 1969,372). The cntry into history, explored as a category between 'coscienza' and 'incoscicnza' in Cene1"i, is accompanied by on-going treatments of secondary thcmes already f()Und in L'usiKn%. The Church, and its idcological cognate, the Party, arc prominent in 'Una polcmica in versi' and 'Terra di lavoro' (264-78), written during the year of crisis in Soviet and European Communism, 1956. These poems, together with 'Comizio' and 'Rccit'-judged by many critics to be the weakest in the collcdion 12-show thc medium of poetry being dcploycd a:s discourse (Benvcniste, 11)66,242), intcrvening in immediate political issues, and .tddressing specific interlocutors (Agosti, 11)82; Fortini, 11)93, 154-5). Poetry becomes critique, not by preduding the subjective, but by exploit ing its dialogic potential. Thc polemical poems and epigrams of Rdi.l!:ill1u:, ,lIld the 'poesie-intcrvcnti' orthe 11)60s take thcir start from here. In Rcligi()1U:, 'I ,a ricchezza' brings together all the topoi of eivic poctry in a narrative sequence. Through Iiteml and metaphorical imagery oC light emblazon cd on another Renaissance icon (Piero della Francesca's '1 ,egend of the True Cross'), an associative transfer occurs -from the aest hetic light of thc ti'cscos to thc real light that surrounds the boys who witness them (441). The near-revelatory quality of the transfer of\i[!,'ht reinti))'Ces the subseqllent annunciation of a new order sprung from the 'rifiuti del mondo' (refuse ofthe world): Ilas!:e un nuovo mondo: n
(a new world / is horn: new laws arc born.1 where there is no longer law; a new I honour is horn where honoUl' is dishonour... )
This figure of paradox is sustained throughout, becoming the basis for the mythical history in which the subproletariat live, between prehistory and the new order: 12 ASOT Rosa, 11/)9,4°6-9; FcrTcni, 1974, 287-SS; Sant'lto, 1980, '74, 180. Rinaldi, 1982, 117-23 is more positive,
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
E come se Roma 0 il mondo avesse inizio in questa vccchia sera, in questi odori millenari (461) (And as if Rome or the world had begun! in this old evening, in these millennial! perfumes)
And again, as in Ceneri, the subject is cast in a dual role, as witness and agent (Friedrich, 1982,34): 'Testimone e partecipe di questa I bassczza e miseria' (Witness and player in this I baseness and poverty, 4(1). He is positioned between a contiguity underscored by separation ('I j osservo qllesti llomini, educati I ad altra vita che la mia: ti-utti I d'una stc)J'ia tanto diversa', I observe them, these men, educated I for a life other than mine: fruit! of a history so very different, 4(3), and a similarity which the subject promotes amI desires: Al raHinato e al sOt\oprolctario spetta la s\essa ordinazione gerarehiea dei senlimenti: enlrambi fuori dalla storia (464; Asor Rosa, I 9()(), 395-'(jl>, Rinaldi,
[()lh,
100--J)
(To the man of rclinement and the suhproletarian is due! the same hierareh ieal order! of reelings: hot h outsillc history)
The desire ti>r 'wealth' is equivalent in both, as is the quality or obsessive hope-'estetizzante, in me, in essi anarchica' (aestheticizing, in mc, in them anarchic, 4(4)-which ddies the limits or their realily, allll is hence transgressive. The Irace of ideology in Ihe imagery of hope, already seen in Cmeri, draws a link between this present and I he mythhistory of the Resistance, evoked by Rossellini's iconoclastic masterpiece RI/ma (illd aj>erta. Anna Magnani's cry of despair as she is shol down by the Germans is an emblem not only of an historical moment, hut of a poetry which precisely reactivates such history in order to transform the present: it is emblematic of the subjective expression of history through art: Q!-Iasi emblema ormai, I'urlo della Magnani, sotto le ciocche disonlinatamente assolute, risuona nelle disperale panoramiehe, e nelle sue ocehial"C vive e mutc si addensa il senso della tragedia. E' li ehe si dissolve e si mutila il prcsente, c assorda il canto degli aedi. (465-6) (Almost an emblem now, Magnani's cry, ! beneath her messily absolute locks, ! rings out in the desperate panning shots, / and in her living, silent looks / the
A VISION OF HISTORY
12 7
sense ofthe tragedy is crystallized. / It is there that the present dissolves and is mutilated, / and deafens the song of the poets.) The recollection centres once again on imagery oflight, from the flickering screen ('le immagini assolate', the sun-drenched images) to the mystical light of innocence ('cd era pura luce', and it was pure light) to ideolog;ical enlightenment which encompasses consciousness and hope in a precarious vision of future salvation-cum-revolution: lucc era speranza di g'iustizia I ... 1 I ,a Iuce csempre ug'uale ad altra luee. Poi varit'l: da luee divenh) im:erta alba I· .. \ Nclla sloria la gillstizia fll coscienza d'una umana divisione di rieehezza, e la sJleranza ehhc nuova luce. (47 2 " J) Q~lclla
(That lig'hl was hope ofjllslice I ... 1/ I ,igohl is always the same as olher light. / And then il changed: /i-omlight il hecame uncertain dawn I ... 1 / In history jUsl ice hecame consciousness / or a human divison of wealth, / and hope look on new light.) Only at the point or entry into consciousness and history, where the transit ional, sllspended statlls or heing; in time produces a dynamic of prospcct ive t rans/(mllation, is resistance possible. Other motifs of this period arc also developed to suggest an historical dynamic of transj()rmation, rdig'ured in later poetry in the obsessively provisional nat ure of poctic (()rlll. Survival ('sopravvivenza'), f(u' example, indicates a residue of past plenitudc, but also a separation fi"om full, base vitality. The past, or prehistory, survives as a neg'at ive, immanent power that revitalizes, hut also dissolves the present. 13 And in 'A un ragazzo' knowledge marks a transitional or transvcrsal relation with history. The boy-the young Bernardo Berlolucci-is precluded from knowledge and hence history, hllltends with curiosity towards a knowledge of history which will destroy his innocence, as the t()rce of history had destroyed Pasolini's brother Guido. The poet is caught between his desire to enlighten the boy and the impossihility of knowledge without death. The hope and trauma of the encounter with the 'light' of history hegun in H)50 continues to determine the contours of Religione. Its second and third sections, however, look /()rward to crucial changes '.1 Imagery of~;urvival occurs in eweri, 233; Rtligilme, 517, 544; Rosa, 6011, 622; and the poem-song writlen I',r Marityn MolUoc in the film I,ll rabbill, which is a paean to her 'hcllczza sopravvi>Sllta dal mondo anlico' (heauty survived ('rom antiquity, 'Voee in pocsia', in Dc Giusti, 197<), 122; 'l\hrilyn', Bz, 1 77o-z 1 1771 l); sec also VO{gll/"'e!lIqU;II, 31.
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POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
in the vision of history in Rosa and in Trasumanar. The epigrams envisage a brutal, fascistic new era ('Ai rcdattori di "Officina" " 534; 'A Bertolucci', 543; 'A Bompiani', 554) and a schism between the self and his peers ('Ad alcuni radicali', 527; 'Ai letterati contemporanei', 543). They are biographically prophetic and poetically biunt, parading poetry's dependence on institutions of power and commodification, whether State, Church or Party. The ideological problems of writing under such conditions are explored in further depth in both 'In morte del realismo' (557-64) and 'La reazione stilistica' (569-72), where the lost cause of realism is mourned as 'qucllo stile [che] vo\cva darvi la storia' (that style [whichJ wanted to give you history, 561). The 'Poesie incivili' develop this historical pessimism in more substantial poetic form and language. For the first time in Pasolini's poetry, we find the term 'nuovo capitale' (new capital): non so se posso tornare I· .. J all'ombra ui una nuova lotta, e ai soruiui inviri uel nuovo eapilalc, gi,' paurone ('AI sole', 574-75) (I uon't know if! can return I... 1/ to the shadow ofa new struggle, and to the soruid / invitations of new capi!;ll, already in charge)
E Ila massal s'assesta
I., dove il Nuovo Capitalc vuole. ('11 glicine', 51)1)
(And 1the mass 1is put in order wherever New Capital wants it.)
Also for the first time, the successor to the 'borgate' as tenor of the immanent light of his vision of history, which will permeate Pasolini's work from the early 1960s until his death, is evoked at the end of 'Frammento alia morte': E ora ... ah, il deserto assoruato dal venlO, 10 slllpendo e immonuo sole dell'Africa che illumina il momlo. Africa! Unica mia alternativa .............. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (580 )'4 (And now... ah, the desert ueafened / by the wind, the wonderful and filthy / sun of Africa that lights lip the world, / / Africa! My only / alternative) '4 Passing re/erences to Africa arc to be found earlier (Cenai, 205,241); Rehii(me, 16<). 'FrammeIlto alia morte' is contemporary with Pasolini's preface to the 1961 anthology Lelteratura negra (De Andrade, 1()61), where he compares black poetry to poetry of the Resistance. See Salinari, 1967,374-7.
A VISION OF HISTORY
I29
Here and in Rosa, Africa betokens a profound alienation from the identity of nco-capitalist Italy. It is a symbolic space, at various stages filled by Asia, Israel, Latin America, even Australia (Nu()va, 1084), embodying the increasingly distorted search for the marginal Other upon which to fix an idea of collective identification. 15 These glimmers of future directions modulate the very idea of history itself The new era entails a reactionary decay oflanguage, reason and hope. The future (of history) is turned in on itself: No, la storia che sad non e come quella che e stata. Non consente giuuizi, non eonsente ordini, e ]'eahu irrealizzata. ('1,01 reazonie stilistica', 571) (No, thc history / to come is not like (hat already gone. / It does not allows jud~ement, it does not allow orders, / it is reality maue unreal.)
The schismatic rapport between the self and the new unreal reality bursts to the /(lre in the climax to the book, '11 glicine', where the materialist vision of history cracks ('I mi sento vittima] d'una storia apocalittica I non di qllesta storia', II feel a victim Iof an apocalyptic history I not of this hiSl'ory, SR7), and ncw guides arc needed: Vico, 0 (:roce, 0 I,'n:ud, mi soccorrono, Illa con la sola sug~es( ione delmi(o, dclla scienza, nel!;, mia abulia. Non Marx. (5HH) (Vico or Croce 01' Freud help me / hu( only with (heir sll~gestion / of myth, of science, in my indecision. / No( Marx.)
The daunting ahyss between the self and history precludes the possibility of positional harmony or synthesis between the two amI instead only of/ers disharmony as a possible recourse: (Ta il corpo e la storia, c'e questa Illllsicalit'l che stona, stupcmla, in cui cib ch'e finito e ci() che comincia e uguale, e rcsta tale nei sccoli: uato dcIl'esistcnza. (58!!) 15 Sce Arhasino, "171,355, where Pasolini explains his lIse of the tcrm Handling ,IS 'un selllllll ~eo~ratico per comprendervi la tisicitit dei "re~ni di I,nne", il felOre da pecora del mondo che man~i" i slloi prodoni (il riICrimento al I,mo storico I .. J cmarginale e easualc), (a ~eographical emhlem to take in the physicality of the 'realms of hunger', the sheep's stcnch of the world that cats its products (the reference to historical events [. .1 is marginal amI
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
13°
(Between the body and history, there is this / wonderful, jarring musicality, / in which what is finished / and what is beginning is the same, and stays / the same down the centuries: a datum of existence.)
The imagery of permanent dissonance as a marker of being ('esistenza') sets the stage for Pasolini's widespread use of contrastive registers and pastiche in a range oflater works, IIi by rooting it in an essential, defining disharmony of thc self in history. 'Progetto di opere future' in Rosa (797-8°9) deplores the impact ofthis disharmony on the politics of art: 'non ha piu senso / chc un'aristocratica, e ahi, impopolare opposizionc' (all that now makcs sense / is an aristocratic, and alas, unpopular opposition, S09; c( IS<)7--{)). Rosa also develops the future-projected dynamic of 'Poesie incivili' and transforms it into an obsessive refrain (Rinaldi, u)82, 202), a unifying undercurrent of an increasingly dispersivc poetry. Various tilrmuiations and metaphors arc used to express this vision of the future, but they arc all filcused on the dynamic cusp bctween the cnd of history and the beginning of another. Prophecy, or pseudo-prophecy, of an apocalyptic or personal kind is onc of the key e1emcnts of the ncw relation to history. In 'Pocma pcr un verso di Shakespearc', history is paradoxically up-turned into prophecy-'scienza delt. storia! Mostruosa schematicit~1 / che prevede, di cill chc fu, ogni forma I ... 1 storia c prolCzia, / dico tilllemente' (science of history! Monstrolls schematic liJrm / that fill"Csecs, of that which was, every filrm I . . . 1 history is prophecy, / r say insanely, 70(" 7 Ij). Conversely, t he events of prophecy have hccollle history: E la fine del Monuo cg-i.l accaduta: I ... 1 Ah, saero Novcccnto, rcg-ionc dcl\'anima in cui]' Apocalisse c un vecchio cvcnto! ('Poesic mondane', (,.W) (And the cnd / ort he World has already happened: I... 1/ Ah, holy TwcIltic\hCentury, reg-ion of the soul/where the Apoe'llypse is already old hat!) coincidental)). See '11so 'I :uomo di Ilandullp;', 112, 1773- H4. On the Third World, sec Bon~ie, I!)\J I, I HH--22H.
l"l~olilli's
represelllation or
16 This is or course only the latest sta~e in an cvolvinf( notion of pastiche, whose earliest formulation is in the prolap;onisl'~ dream of a new Illusie in Alii impuri: 'Apportcrei delle 1nel\'altimo pill snervante e tenero della mclodia I... 1. Farei un nuove nOlt' "slonale" pastiche f;lI1tastico' (I would hring new 'jarrinp;' notes I . . . 1 at the most tender amI unnerving moment in a melody r... 1. J would create a marvellous pastiche, /I",(/.dll mill, IOS); and cr.
r...
I:UH/t,llllilJ,403-6.
A VISION OF HISTORY
13 1
Thus, far from heralding a return to the sacred role of the poet-prophet, the new future brings dissolution and ridicule for the self: io posso scrivere Temi e Treni e anche Profezie; da poeta civile, ah si, sempre! ('Una disperata vitalit.l, 746) (J can write Exempla and Threnodies I and also Prophecies; I as a civic poet, oh yes, .t1ways!)'7
Section VU of 'Una disperata vitalid' (741-4) takes the negativity to extremes in a parable of an unborn child, tragically prescient oflife as a prehistory of death. J jfc can only be lived in advance. The new era and shape of history arc given several names. In 'Profczia' «()()J-9), couchcd in the mythical narrative of the invasi
IX
ing titles for the Rosa.
13 2
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
The formula recurs next in 'Pietro II' (669-82) where the figure of the poet-Pope-martyr, in his isolation and devotion, is an emblem of a new cycle of history: since no Pope takes the name of the first, there is no Pietro II, just as 'la nuova preistoria' is a projection towards an impossible resolution, a repeated beginning. In 'Una disperata vitaliti' the image forms part of the synoptic table of section VIII (746), and it is also to be found in 'Poema per un verso di Shakespeare', 'Alba meridionalc' and 'Progetto di opere future'. It subtends and subverts the diary form of the collection, based on record and sequence, casting it into a halflight of unrealized history or reality, and at the same time opening new axes of temporal analogies, which also inform films of this period such as La ricotla and Vangelo. As history fades in t()rm and meaning, so modcs of historical change also fade, and following Rosa, Pasolini's poetry increasingly offers a vital model of poetry as praxis, rather than as discourse, as outlined in 'J jbro libero' (986--87). Trasutnanar demonstrates as much in its disunity and strident incoherence, but a poem from .Mu/ea, 'Callas', draws out most clearly the philosophical nature of the crisis; the cnd of the tl ialectic, replaced by a model of anthropological and quasi-mystical origin: J ,e due cose furono (e sono) sempre contemporanee. I superamenti, le sintesi! sono illllsioni l ... 11.a tesi e I'antitesi convivono con la sintcsi: ecco la vera trinitol dell'lIomo ne prelogico ne logico, ma reale I.. ·1 J.a storia non c'c, dici;lmo, c'c la sostanza: che c apparizione (Il)O]) (The two things were (and are) always contemporaneous. I The overtaking-s, the syntheses! are illusions I... 1The thesis I and the antithesis live together with synthesis: that's It he true trinity or man, neither prelogical nor logical I but real I... j I There is no history, lct's say, there is substance: which is apparition)'9
Extensive immersion in the landscape of the Third World is a utopian attempt to escape the pressures of the new prehistory and its alliance with power: I'idea del potere non ci sarebbe se non ci fosse j'idea del domani; non solo, ma senza il domani, la coscienza non avrebbe giustilicazioni. CaroDio, facci vivere come gli uaelli del (iell! e i gigli dei campi. ('Preghiera su commissionc', 1\1\0) '9 The rejection of the dialectic became a mainstay of his work: see Gardair, 1971; Arccco, 1972, 175; Bonfiglioli, 1988,9; and Fortini, 1993, I N8, who <:alls it 'his most appalling message'.
A VISION OF HISTORY
133
(the idea of power would not exist were it not for the idea of tomorrow; / that's not all, for without tomorrow, consciousness would have no justification. / Dear God, / make us live like the birds in the sky and lilies in the fields; ef. Matthew 6: 25-34)
The vocabulary of the Apocalypse, already in some poems in the previous collection, is amplified in 'Patmos' by extensive reference to Revelation in its violent, ironic vision of the victims of the Piazza {'ontana bombing. This vision of another end of history ends with another biblical image: la porta della storia c una Porta Stretta infihtrsi dentro costa una spaventosa fatiea e'c chi rinuneia e da in giro il eulo e chi non ei rinuneia I.. ·1 e chi vuole entrarci a tutti i costi, a gomitate ma con dignita; ma son tulli li davanti a quella Porta. «'54)20 (the v;aLe of history is a Strait Gate / to slip inside costs a terrifying expense of effill·t / t here arc t hose who give up and show it their arse / and those who don't give up I ... 1 / and those who want to enter at all costs, pushing and shoving, hut with dignity; / hut thcy arc all there hdill'e the Gate.)
The moment ofentTY into history, a thresholll offounding importance in Pasolini's poel ic enterprise, is here reduced to anarchy anll farce. It is no longer a journey towards a light of revelation, but a degrading, cynical sI rugglc to which al\ arc condemned. The vocahulary of Christianity is also violently manipulated in Pius XrI's imagined monologue, 'L'enigma di Pio XII' (~4[-50). The Pope represents Ihc epitome of institutional religion, which has retained the dog;mas of Llith and hope, but lost the Pauline capacity to understand the mystical workings of Charity. Z) In this, he is seen to coincide with the world ofthe 'nuova preistoria': Essa c dunque Nuova J .cggc: ICdc c speranza eontano (eontilluano a contare): la eoneretezza della earit;l c... c... perditempo... sentimentalismo (1143) (It is thus a New J.aw: faith and hope count (they still count): the concreteness of charity is ... is ... a waste time ... sentimentalism)
or
20 Echoes of Ihe Bihlc ,md Gide, whom Pasolini had read avidly as ,) young man (Serra, uJ79; Schwartz, H)'J2, 22), 239), arc evident; and perhaps ofKafka's par"blc 'Before the Law', wilh J lislory in the place of the Law. Kafka is mentioned in 'Isr"e1c' amI 'Progetto di opere filtllfe' (Ro,l'a, 763, So6). 21 Ct: 'There arc three Ihings that his! ti)rever, faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love' (r Corinthians 13: [3)·
I34
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Institutions-a recurrent concern of Trasumanar-retain an ambiguous relation to 'carita': la carita le] il contrario di ogni istituzione!! Pero la carita sa che le istituzioni sono anch'esse commoventi I· .. J anche il Partito Comunista, in quanto Chiesa, ccommovente. (844-5) (charity [is] the opposite of every institution!! / But charity knows that institutions are moving too l ... ] / even the Communist Party, as a Church, is moving.) The Party, as institution and as orthodoxy, lies at the heart of 'Restaurazione di sinistra' and its variants (965-7 I), 'J !ortodossia' and its 'Rifacimento' (990-2, 1025-7), and 'Trasumanar e org'anizzar' (904-8), with its revolutionary, but also Pauline ideal of the collective and institutional as a vehicle for transcendence: Non a easo ho slIlla schicna la mano sacra c lIntllosa di San I'aolo chc mi spingc a questo passo. J.a contcmporaneil;. temporalc del tT
pushes me on to this step. / Is not the temporal eontemporariness oftransccnd· ence organization?) All reiterate the integration of apparently revolutionary and subversive movements into the structurcs of institutions, and search lil\" possible compatibility between transcendent and institutionalized history. These poems form the basis filr the expression in poetry of Pasolini's deeply ambivalent encounter with the J<)6S student movements, and the 'autunno caldo' of 1969. The dominant mode o("lhat encoulll"er was as much subjective and passionate as ideological, silH:e tilr Pasolini it was played out as a confrontation between himself as 'Either' and the 'sons' who opposed him (sce Ch. 7), hut as such, it was also another livingout ofthe competing visions ofsclfand history which subtend all his poetry. Nuova represents a final and more pragmatic shift in the incidence of history in Pasolini's poetry. The key historical image and dynamic is here of return that at once destroys the language and idiom of M egfio by rewriting it to oblivion, and also facilitates a small-scale, but open vision of future change following this tabula rasa. In the rewritten Meg/io, focus is very much on the dynamic rather than the cnd point of returning:
A VISION OF HISTORY
135
i no plans parse che chel mond a no'l torna pi, ma i plans parse che iI so torn a al efinit. ('Ciant dol li ciampanis', 1084) (I do not cry hccause that world will not return, / but I cry because its returning is at an cnd.)
In ''}'ornant oil pais', the final three variant versions of the third section arc a catalogue of patterns of return, from the nostalgia for return in the fifth and final variant ('e a no a ciatat pi nuja / pi dois di chcl torna', and he has never f(mnd anything / as sweet as that returning, 1083) to the confession that return is impossible as 'A mi vevin puartat / via prima di nassi' (They had carried me / away belt)re being born, '(tuarta variante', IORz) to the twisting paradoxes of the third variant: Par un ch'al ama il mond ta la timua chc il limp al ghi;, dat, cu'l torn;, scmpri cunp;,in, muri v(lul Jizi picnlilu. (:onscrvalu CllSS!, v('nll d izi savl,j di podcj sempri torn.!, tal soziru di mu;lrt. (1011.1) (For hc who lovcs t he world / in the fin'm that time / has given it, with returning / always accompanying lugua1c a se stesso I, to die / means lusing it. / Tt) keep it thus, / mcans to know / he can always return / in his death turn.)
Ret urn is predicated on a dynamic of death that is at once innocent and destructive. It has lost its meaning, and is now associated with a time which is not in motion: No hisugna m(')visi par torn;,. (:ui ch 'al si minI!; si m('mf par na strada (lreta e sensa lin. I.. ·1 La seconda fi)rma dal timp a Csensa fin. ('Ciants di un muart', 1114) (There is nu need to muve / tu return. / I le whu moves, muves along a straight road / without cnd. / I... .1 / The second tiJrm of time has no cnd.)
Indeed, the refrain which links the third part of ' Torn ant al pais' to its first and second variant is 'il timp a no'l si mouf' ('time does not move'). Static time, imbued with the possibility of return, is at once consolatory
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
and hostile: '11 pi gran dolour / al era la pi granda / consolassion' (the greatest pain / was the greatest / consolation, 1081). But present, active time, by contrast, is now only the destructive time of modernity attacked in the 'scritti corsari': da dcis mil iins ti er is coma ch'al ,\ da essi un zovin: altris dcis ains, e ogni misteri al ccambik (,David (Terza Variante)" 1075)22 (for ten thousand years you were! like a young man should he: ! another ten years, and every mystery has changed.)
The anthropological chang·e pen:eived hy Pa~olini in his final three years is also at the heart ofthe final section ofNullva, 'Tetro entusiasmo'. The poems arc still weapons [or political critique, in polemic with the PCI and its historic compromise with power, and with consumerist values-hut: in a more lucid and studiedly simple manner and /()rm than 'J'rasumanar. lIere return is a political necessity, despite the dangers of nostalgia: 'I plans un mond mwlrt. / Ma i no soj mU,lrt jo ch'i lu plans' (l mourn a dead world. / But I who mourn it am not dead, 'Significato del rim pian to' , I J 53): abbiamo IiItto allL:he un alt ro sha~lio. Ahhiamo creduto che '-Iuest!) camhiamento dovesse essere tulta la lluova storia. lnveee grazie a I )io si pui) tornare indietTo. Anzi, si dew tornare indietTo. ("57) (we made another mistake too. ! We thought that this change! / oughl to he the whole new hislOry. / Instead, l hank (iod we ean go / baek. Indeed, we must go! hack.)
Transt()rmation through return is possihle, amI indeed error is itself a f()[ce t()J· change: 'Storia, Lt che flcciamo / ancora un altro sbaglio... ' (History, make us make / yet another mistake ... , II57).2J The two prose pieces 'Appunto per una poesia in lappone' (1159-.60) and 'Appunto per una poesia in terrone' (I 1fi4-5) rcpeat the same insight: 'bisogna rijiutare III "sviluppo" , (me must reject 'development); 'hisogned 22 er the denial ofretum and nostalgia in the 'Ahiura dall" "Trilogia della vit,," ',LI,71-() (73)· 2] Cf. 'E' all'errore / che io vi spingo, al rcligioso / errore' (it is to error / that I urge you, to religious / error, 'Una polemica in versi', Cener;, 269).
A VISION OF HISTORY
137
tornare indietro a ricominciare daccapo' (we must turn around and go hack to begin all ovcr again). In one sense at least, thcn, thc 'Scconda forma della Meglio giovenlzl' is not a totally pessimistic annihilation of the poetic origin and history of the self, as is often claimed. If the poems which remake Meglio attcmpt and t;til to discover a tenable role for nostalgia and return, and hence record a fracture hetween history as iueal cycle and history as material progress, that failure seems nevertheless to provide the premise t()r another synthesis hetween history and return in 'Tetro entusiasmo', through the crllsauing voice of renewed polemical critique. 24 2+ On Nu(}l'II as panllliJ.\"11l.lIic {ill' Lhe whole Irajcclory of Pasolini's work, scc Fricdrich, II11l2, :17; Schrawy, II)XS·
6
'Un folie identijicarsi ': Figuring the Self The founding figure in the gallery of figures of identification in Pasolini's poetry is Narcissus, who embodies a pure self-con,templation which fails to break out ofthe limits of reflexivity. I Its prototype is to be found in a 1941 poem '11 flauto magico' (I,mere, i. 29-3'), in which a 'piper' narrates to himself ('f;mciullo adulto', boy adult,), and to the train of children whom he leads out of childhood, his nostalgia filr his own 'violent and sensual' lost childhood, rc-evoked by the enchanting music of his pipe (Ct: Teorema, (3). In Ml'glio ('Poesie a Casarsa'; 'Suite furlana') and, perhaps more surprisingly, I,'usignolo ('11 pianto della rosa' and various othcrs), Narcissus is constantly recast in evolving patterns of associative imagery, starting from the beguiling second poem or Meglio, 'IJ nini muart': Sera imh'lriumitia, tal filss'll a eres I'aga, na fcmina plena a ciamina pal ciamp, Jo ti recllanli, Narcis, ti vcvis il col('nlr da la sera, quamlli ciampanis a sunin di llIU,lrt. (J 4) (Shimmering [luminosa[" evening, in the ~'ully / the W,lIer grows, a prq?,"n;lnt woman / walks through the field. // ] rememher you, Narcissus, you had the colour / of the evening, whcn the bclls / ring out fi)J" the dead.)
Narcissus is established here as the tilCUS ofa network or archetypal elements in Pasolini's fo'riulan landscape: the peculiar evening light, water, the fertile and natural interaction between woman and nature, the I On Narcissus in literature, sec Vinge, 1<)(,7; and on P,lsolini's use of it Asor Rosa, [()fill, J65-70; David, [(nO, 556-62; Rinaldi, 19H2, 9, 35-·P; San taW, 19Ho. I J --I], 56. 1l3-43· 2 Pasolini was very taken with th~ word 'imharlumida' and used various Italian won.\s to capture it: see versions of 'IInini mUilrt' (HI, 14, 1'92), '0 me donzc\' (HI, '7. 1 H}S) ;md Lellere, i. 88.
FIGURING THE SELF
139
figure of the boy, the mechanisms of memory and the ritual, Christiancum-animistic vision of death. These clements recur obsessively in the rest of the book. Almost every poem, for example, is populated with a variation on the boy figure: the proliferating lexicon of terms to denote the boy-Narcissus includes 'nini' and also 'fantassut' (15), 'donzcl' (17), 'bicl fi' (18), 'frut' (20), 'zc>vin' (21), 'sorand' (36), and 'zovinut' (1530). Furthermore, the fluidity and sexual indeterminacy of the landscape allows the figure to merge and overlap with feminine figures whose archetype, the childmother, becomes the poet's most intimate interlocutor (Asor Rosa, HjCJ(), 361-4). A young girl ('fantassuta') appears in 'Tornant al pais' (22), and 'A Icluja In' introd lIces the figure ofthe child-mother: 'to mari tal sorcli / a tornava fruta' (in the sun your mother / turned back into a girl, 30). 'Romancerillo' (37--<) g·ivcs a voice to the mother. 'J ,a domenia uliva' (41-50) splits her inlo 'mother' and 'girl-mother', each in dialogue with the 'son'. The dialogue between them not only interweaves the Iwo mother-figures, but also conllates the seasonal cycle of nature, embodied by Ihe olive·selling girl, with the liturgical cycle marked by Eastt.:r Sunday. Pret.:isely the same synthesis of nature and peasant cullure with religious ritual is to he t(mnd in 'J ,a messa', 'I,'annunciazione' and 'I ,itania' U,'usigl/ofo, 301), 313-1 X), where the 'madre-fanciulla' lig·urt.: slips into the iconogTaphy amI litany of the Virgin Mary.·~ But such slippage is always anchored in the sell"-projected figure of the son or hoy: in 'I.a domcnia uliva', his obsessive introversion clearly evokes the ligUIT of Narcissus: 1<'1'
.10 i no SOli di nillls! Pienllll t;\ la me villls i sint s('mlla me V()US i eianti la me V(lllS.
(Son: I know nOlhinr; of crosses! / l.oSI in my voice / I hear only my voice / I sinr; my voice.)
The dialogue proceeds with the son denying a voice in turn to the sky, the ycars, hodies and women, fin,llly reiterating 'SOUL LA ME VOUs' (ONI.Y MY VOICE), setting out the determinant of the narcissistic voice as .1 Anothu- poinl "roverlap hCI·wcen Ihese two idioms is the recurrent imagery ofbclls or hell-lowers, which variously rcpresenl calls to worship, to the peasant festivals or the deathknell ('lInini lI1u,hl'; 'Ciaols di un lIlu,]r!', 5S; 'Tn mcmoriam', L'usigllo/n, 21)6-7). This is another indicator of early Leopardian (and/or I'ascolian) influence. Sec 'Ciant da li ciampanis' (25), 'Alcluja VI' (30), 'Romanccrillo' (37), 'Li ciampanisdal Gloria' (1545), 'Fiesta' (I '7-11): allll bter 'Alle camp.ne di Orvieto' (Religi(me, 549).
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
its appropriation of nature, time and memory, the body, fertility and desire. The mother-figure also comes to the fore in two poems near the cnd of 'Suite furlana', in the version of Meglio in Nuova: 'Sera di estat' (1534) and 'Suspir di me mari ta na rosa' (97-8). Both draw the mother as an object of desire, and hence once more recall the shadow of selfdesire in the son: AI aia bussat doma. . . so mari? Epllr a disin i so vuj: bussaimi! (1534) (I ras he only kissed ... / his mother? And yel his eyes / say: kiss me!) Dutis dos dismintiadis, la mari e la rosa! Zint cui sa duhi OIl ni ,I dismintiadis. (9/l) (Both fi)rgonen, / the mOlher and the rose! / Going who knows where / he has forgotten us.)
The traces of the original myth arc minimal here, relying on an ,lmbiguity of person in the first case, and the absence ofthe son-selfsuhstituted with his objects of desire-the mother and the rose-in the second. But as they follow a sustained sequence of openly Narcissistic poems, they only confirm the t()rmative role played by sexual desire of and identification with the feminine in the subjective reprojection of the myth. The next most frequent emblem ofthe fig'ure of Narcissus is imagery of reflection, which is loaded with associations of insight into the self; of desire and of representation, whilst remaining rooted in the physicalmythical landscape, IIinted at in the water of '11 nini muart', it first opens out in '0 me donzel': , . ,I nas tal spicli da la roja In ehcl spicli Ciasarsa -----{;oma i pras di rosadadi timp antic a trima, (17)4 ( ... I am born / in the mirror of the canal / / In that mirror Casarsa / -like the meadows of dew- / tremble with ancient time.)
+ The sound of the word 'rosada' was, in Pasolini's own mythicizing account, thc magic'lt catalyst to his first intuition of the poctic potential ofFriulan '<.Ii ca da raga' (EE ()2-3),
FIGURING THE SELF
141
Reflection embodies the natural mutability of the landscape, transforming the landscape ('a trima') via an analogical inscription of myth ('timp antic'). In the following poem, 'Li letanis dal bicl fi', an actual mirror performs an analogous transformation: Ciantant al me spicli ciantant mi peteni. AI rit tal me vuli ill hlul pl.'Cia(hlur. Sun.lit, mes eiampanis, padilu indavour! ([(j-20)5 (Sin~in~ 011
my mirror I sin~in~ J comb my hair. I The sinnin~ Devil I laughs in my eye. 11 Rin~ oul, my bells, I push him haek (cacciatclo indietro)!)
The oscilla~ing g'aze goes on to encompass and, again, appropriate sun, rain, leaves, and crickets, all synthesized in 'il me cwlrp / di quan'ch'i eri frut' (my hody / of when I was a boy), Reflexivity is amplified to include metaphorical identification with landscape and song, under the narcissist ic aegis of the look of the sell: Mirror and water imagery, as well as strains of other narcissistic im;lgery--ofllowers, birds, and songs--recur in 'J.a not di maj' (62-4), 'Tal cClllr di un frut' (under the title 'Spiritual', 1373-6), and 'Cansoncta' (()s),!\nd these three poems prepare t()\' the '))anze' subsection of 'Suite furlana' (6cy,l{7), the culmination of the myth in M('glio, whcre a bucolic mixture of self and nature, hound by a uesiring, reflected gaze, shapes the Elmiliar images. The poem 'Suite furlana' (71-3), ti)l' example, presents a hoy who searches fill' his own image behind the mirror-glass, 'par jodi s'a e un ndrp che Forma' ('to see if that Form is a body'), lie finds only the wall, with its spider's web, and, later, memories of the 'muarta ciampagna' (dead countrysiue), of the bells, of his 'mari fj·uta'. Returning to the mirror, only an elusive, insuhstantial 'harlun tal veri' (glimmer in the glass) remains, yet another image ofrcflcction and light. The fi)llowing tiHlr poems-three 'l)anse di Narcis' and a 'l'astorela di Narcis'-all develop in fi)rm and imagery that scene ofhucolic innocence. The second and thiru '])anse' work as variations on the first, picking up again on the images of violets and the uawn, hut also on the self as oesiring subject: 5 Scc a\so '11 ))i,}ul cu tllllari' (H3-s)and 'Scrmoncdcl diavolo', f,'usig,IfI/O, 323-4: 'Vai ano spccchio e guardi / mc, it Dia,olo', Go to Ihe mirror ami look ai/mc, the Devil), On the figure ofthc devil, and its origin in Uaudclairc, Rimbaud and Lautrcamont, scc Santato, 1980, 122.
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Jo i soj neri di amour ne frut ne rosignoul dut antcir coma un fl<'mr i brami sensa sen. (74) (I am black with love / neither boy nor nightingale / perfect entire as a flower / I desire without impulse [desidero senza desiderio J.)
The 'Pastorcla' has the boy-self gazing on and then becoming a young girl, who then takes on the identity of the mother. The slippage between desiring to have and desiring to be, whieh is the key to the role of the mother in the Narcisslls poetry, as it is in psychoanalytical narcissism (Lacan, 1966; Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973,261-65; Perrella, 1979), is evident here: 'e al so post i soj jo' (and I am in her place, 79). The rewritten '0 me donzel' in Nuovu, where Narcissus is a distant echo supplanted by the fig'ure of'St Paul (1105, I 127-:15), acknowledges the ambiguity in this slippage: 1 volevi essi me mari ch 'a 111i amava, Illa i no volcvi am'l me stes. (I wanted
to
(I O()7)
he my mother / who loved me, hlll / I did no! wan! to love myself)
'Memorie' U;usign%, 365-X) narrates the same split between the self' and the mother-'ho compillto il viaggio / che tu non hai compiu\o', I have made the jomney / that you have not made---and hOlh locale the origin ofhomosexll
143
FIGURING THE SELF
And in the final poem of the 'Tragiques' section, 'Ballata del delirio' (4°3-6), which acts as a closure to the book before its lapidary summation in 'La scoperta di Marx', the mirror returns as definitively negative, The self is a prisoner of his reflection, and thus no longer within reality: ormai sono vivo ndlo specchio, sono la mia immagine immersa nelb vita di luce eieca nello specchio del giovinetto prigioniero dellume lerso. Sono denlTo to spu(hio mulo
(404)
(hy now I am alive in t.he mirror, / I am my image immersed / in the life of blind lighl / inlhe mirror o['lhe young hoy / imprisoned by the dear light. / / I alii illside Ihe /flule mirror)
As the mirror splinters ('10 specchio in frantllmi', 405), am] words and lines fra~mcnt, so the 'io' is shattered. Two poems from '11 pian\'O dclla rosa' invoke NarcisslIs hy name'Solitutline' (327,·H) and '11 Narciso c la rosa' Cn2--J)--and they too trace the disinte~ration orthe myth as a vehiclc till' idcntification and self-inscription, In the {ill'mer NarcisslIs becomes a token of precluded otherness rather than a vessel orllllid appropriation of the other, leaving I he selfin onanistic isolal ion, in ,I darkness no lon~er illuminated by ~Iimmers of light: I )isprezzo e tellerezza verso di le, Narciso, I ..
·1
imprcndihile lid luo esislere puro, . .. IIlgelluo, e COIISClO, VIVl: anche a me sei oscum. (pH) (Scorn and tenderness / towards you, Narcissus, I . . . 1 / / ungraspahlc / in your pure being, / ingenuous, amI conscious, you live: / to me loo you arc dark)
'11 Narciso e la rosa' is even more explicit. Narcissus is emblematically denied three times: 'Non Narciso I, .. 1No, Narciso non c'entra [ ... ] contempJiamo insieme / I'assenza di Narciso' (Not: Narcisslls [. , .] No, Narcissus has nothing to do with it I. , ,I let us look on together / the ahsence ofNareissus), The mirror is not a token of being. It has been demythicized and darkened, as is apparent in some of the diary poems of the same period, where the mirror is no longer a dynamic agent, but
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
rather a source of terror and suffering: 's'incolla in uno specchio abbacinato / il mio viso, senza sangue, di tisico. / 10 tremo' (stuck in a dazzled mirror / is my bloodless, consumptive face. / I tremble, 'Mentre nel silenzio degli orti .. .', 2026). At best it survives as metaphor for a poetry and a desire of nature which is f@unded on the exelusion of the self: Moralira 0 poesia o bellczza, non so, protendo qucsta rosa a rispecchiarsi sola. ('11 Nareiso e la rosa', 333) (Morality or poetry / or beauty, I don't know, / I stretch out this rose / to be reflectcd in thc mirror all alone.)
The degradation of narcissistic desire here finds a parallel in 'J ,ing'ua' (351-3) in the entry into the symbolic order of poetry in Italian, mther than a private dialect, and hence into a state of negativity. There, Narcissus is for the first time a vehicle of bntasy built on nostalgia ti)r an untroubled harmony between self, language, nature and desire; the flower rather than the figure: San> il Narciso tiore che si speeehia amante senza amore, (;on I'oreeehia distratta dalle voei (;hc I'amore senza parole inventa per il {iore. (352-3) (I shall be the N;m:issus /lower in the mirrur / a loveless lover, with the ear / turned away by the voices that love / invents without words f(u' the flower.)
There is onc further aspect of Ihe myth in /, 'uIigll% which is important for future work: the nexus between Narcissus and Christ. Already an undercurrent in Meglio (47, 64,125), the figure of Christ and the (:hurch dominate the section 'J .'usignolo della Chiesa Cattoliea' (Rinaldi, H)S2, 25-29). In 'L'usignolo V' (3°1), the image ofthe boy is reflected not in any ordinary water, but in holy water. 'La passionc'l> (2!)I--()5) shows Christ, like Narcissus, as both a boy and a girl, both dying ('oggi muoio', today I die, 291), associated with drawn, with tlowers,7 with morning 6 The term 'passione' is an important term in Pasolini's lexicon of subjectivity, encompassing suffering and martyrdom of a pseudo-religious kind, the passivity of the coerce cl self; as well as that introspection ancl desire latcr set paradigmatically against iclcology in PII.ui(me e ide%gia. Sce Lconelli, J(~H6; Viano, HJ,)3, +0--45. 7 Fortini labels the whole of L'usig>w[ol'asolini's 'violet period' (1993, 25). For other /lower imagery sce 'Le primulc' [primroses, but also slang for primary-school children], 39!H); 'll glicinc', Religione, 583-92; 'Poeta delle ccncri', 2057.
FIGURING THE SELF
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dew and with the poet (,Sereno pocta, / fratello ferito', serene poet, / wounded brother, 292). And in 'La Chiesa VIII': La Chiesa ferita si eaperta le piaghe con le Sue mani, e un lago di sangue le e caduto ai piedi. Ed essa prima di morire ha fatto di qucllago uno specehio, e un lampo ha illuminato la Sua immagine dentro il sangue. E' solo quell'immagine riflessa che noi preghiamo! (307) (The wounded Chureh opened its wounds with His hands, and a lake of blood fell at its ti:et. And before dying it made a mirror of that lake, and a flash lit up IIis image in the blood. It is to that reflected image only that we pray.)
The mirror is a violent token of absence here, onc of the earliest signs of rejection of the Church which the collection narrates. Later, in 'L'exvita' f()r example, narcissistic self-contemplation, predicated on absence, evolves into contemplation of the houy of Christ as a token of presence: In un debole lczzo di maeello vet\o l'immagine del mio COfpO: seminlldo, ignorato, quasi mono. E' COS! che mi volevo crm:i tisso (4°0) (In a weak slau~'hter--hollse steneh 11 sec the image of my hody: 1 half-naked, unknown, almost dead _1 This is how I wanted myself crucified)
Imaf!;ery of Christ's body reachcs its apothcosis in 'J ,a crocifissione' (376-7) (Imberty, H)S I). Exposed to the sun, nude and bloody and under the humiliating gaze of all ('sguanli che J.o bruciano [ ... ] il sole e gli sguardi!', loob> that burn Him I ... 1 the sun and the looks!), Christ's bodily presence teaches a public ethic fundamental to the future political-cultural role of the self in Pasolini's work: Bisogna esporsi (qllesro insegna il povern Cristo inehiodato? la chian:zza del CllOfe Cdegna di ogni schcrno, di ogni pcccato di ogni pill nuda passione ... [... 1 Noi starcmoofTcrti slIlIaeroce l- --I per testimoniare 10 seandalo. (376-7) (Wc mllst expose ourselves (is this what / poor Christ lpoor Wreteh 1nailed up teaches us?) / the clarity of the heart is worthy / of every derision, every sin / every barest passion .. .I Wc shall he offered on theeross / [... ] to bear witness to the scandaL)
The topoi of display, nudity, scandal, humiliation and martyrdom all emerge here by way of a narcissistic, desire-laden figuration of the self
146
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
in Christ that transcends the Christ of the 'Chiesa Cattolica' to create a new Authority for transgression, sexual and otherwise. ~ Beyond Narcissus, two indirect, but significant techniques of figuration in this period of Pasolini's poetry provide a bridge to Ceneri and beyond; they might be termed archetypal and mannerist figuration. Archetypal figuration denotes the network of secondary images, creatures or objects in the Friulan landscape that arc assigned a poetic voice, as aspects of both self and other. In the dialogues of'L'usignolo' (298-3°3), for example, we hear voices ofa young hoy, a girl, a strang·er, a goldfinch, dawn, evening, a dead man and the nightingale itself Several are simple personificatiolls of images which drift hetween the real, the mythical and the subjective-ventriloquist glimpses of a volatile self: Here and in klcglio, such enigmatic dialogues arc not dramalic, but rather have a texture or rhythm of sensuality and esscnce which shapes them as archetypal prcdicates of subjectivity. Other archetypal figures remain at the level of image and epithet rather than personification. A particularly important example is representation of guilt and trangression by an implicil cast ingoflhe self as criminal, most commonly as a thicf~ as in '11 J)i,tul cula mari I V' (85), 'Laris' (152(); in //usign% in '11 canto degli angeli' (356), 'Dies irae' (360), 'Memorie' (]66), 'Baruch' (172-73) and 'Madrigali a Dil) Ill' (396)." The term 'reo', hoth morally evil and juridically guilty, occurs three times in the 'I ,ingua' section alone. /?OlJllt f()SO. /)illrio and olher diary poetry of the period evoke Illore directly the actual trial of [949-50, and arc also marked by recurrent imagery of 'castigo' (punishment) and 'condanna' (condemnat ion). And it is no coincidence that these lyrics also represent the first sustained lig·uration of the self as outsider (sce Ch. J). More generally, the casting of the self in I hese archetypal roles looks forward to the performative rhetoric of many later works. H l'asolini's uiaries at this time descrihe a section ora book entitled 'Un'anima' thus: ''!'ut\o qucsto c st;u'O scriuo ad ogni 111odo ;,l un solo line: qucllu di ollcncrc un'llllloJ'i:"z(l::.iom', In chicucvo a Dio ui autoriaarmi ,\ peccarc!' (All this has hcen written anyway I()r onc cnd: to ohtain llulhor;Zillion. I was asking Gou to ,\uthorize my sinning!, quoted in I,el/ere, i. xcix c). Adam, another transgressive figure of Christ, according to a theologicaltt·,,,lition, is used as a latent figure li)r the self in hoth 'I,'illecito' ('gusti il !i·ullo proihito', you taste the I()rhiddell fruit, 325) and 'Baruch' ('al mio sesso / era prolllesso l'Eden', to my sex / was Eucn promised, 37 1 ). Cl Thc figure of the thief remains a powerful presence in the Roman novels and {ilms, retaining echoes orthe thieves crucified with Christ: sec e.g. Stracei in I,ll riCOI/Il, and the poemsequence describing it ('Pietro Il', ROIa, 66q-XzI675J), and 'Da "L'itaii,tno c iaoro" Ill',
164 8-54.
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147
Mannerise o figuration also grows out of the Friulan landscape, but rather than giving a voice to aspects of subjectivity, it gives them a look, a way of seeing that landscape which is itself a secondary figuration of the subject. J,andscapc is looked at as a tension between perceived forms. Owing little to mimetic realism, this technique builds sequences of motif.,; and shafts of light and imagery, to suggest the essence of a reality, hut also to evoke a myth, and develop a figuring' self. The first extensive instance comes in 'L'Italia' (L'US1;~I/(JI(J, 37()---<)I), the model for the grand vistas of'L'Appennino' (Ccncri, J75--84) and 'La ricchezza' (Rclip:iollc, 42[---75), and several modulated descriptive excursions in later works." 'I :ltalia' sweeps fi"om location to location in Italy via analogies hetween certain micro-elements of landscape: in the first chapter, the play of sunlight and shadow, the sounds ofhirds, trains and speech; in the fifth, the various 'lCste'. Many simply extend the motifs or the Friulan landscape hy way or hoth autobiographieal association and t()I'mal mod ulat ions across space and time. The technique takes on particularly Mannerist connotations when t he patterns or descript ion arc derived b'om cxisting iconography. The dense evocat ions of Della Quercia's 'flaria' in '].' Appennino', and of Piero della Francesca's (j'cscoes in' I .a ricchezza', li)cus mctonymically on rragmcnts or their object·-lIaria's eyelids, the lines and colours of t he halt le··sccnc or the True Cross cycle-and use them as metaphorical vessels lill', resJlectively, the history or Italy and the vitality of its maq!,'ins. '2 'Picasso' and 'Quadri rriulani' bot h experiment with ways of seeing through artists' models, setting the self against another eye-the 'punt angoscia e pura gioia' (pure anguish and pure joy, H)2) of Picasso, and the 'solenni, fcstanti colori' (solemn, rejoicing colours, 221) of Giuseppe Zigaina. '1.01 Guinea' 0Jlens with a sensuous immersion in landscape, via memories of colour, hrush-stroke and sculpted form. The synthesis is, precisely, 'il gusto / del doJce e grande manierismo' (the taste / ofswect, great m~mnerisl11, (03). 10 The lerm, which Pasotini was fillld of' loo, reClIrs freqllcn,ty in eri,ics: Fortini, I<)9J, 'S' 72; Men!,:aldo, "n!!, 7H2; Sili, I
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
There are also instances ofPasolini's own painting practice emerging in poetry as a source of ways of seeing, and in particular, his almost fetishistic, synaesthetic fascination with extracting colour from plants: 13 Potrei anche tornare alia stupenda fase della pittura ... Sento giii i cinque 0 sei miei colori amati profumare acuti (' La ricerca di una casa', 626--7) (I could I also go back to the marvellous phase 11 of painting... I can already feci my five or six I beloved colours giving off their sharp perfumes)
Several poems arc similarly structured around sequences of colours, such as 'C'e un colore antico... ' (dedicated to Rcnato Guttuso; Ilz, 1732), 'A Dc Rocco' (1737), and the NU(Jva version of'Ciants da li ciampanis', which contains a paradigmatic statement of colour's metonymic power: I no rimpl:ins 'na real tat ma il so val(')ur. I no rimptans un mond ma il so colilllr. (I o!l4)'4 (I do not lament a reality hut its value. I I do not lament a worM hut its colour.)
Conversely, at moments of crisis, colour tenLls to dissolve (ReliKill111~, 159, 163). Mannerist, formal patterns of this kinLl crcate a prof()l1l1d, ontological link with the real, without recourse to mimesis, representing reality always with the imprint of subjectivity. Their full significance can be gaug'ed by the prof(lUnd crisis that accompanies thcir alienation from the self: disamore, mistero, e miseria dei sensi, mi rendono nemiche le f()rme dd mondo, che fino a ieri erano la mia ragione {\'esistere. ('11 pianto della scavatrice', 243) (estrangement, mystery and poverty I of the senses, make inimical I the t(lrms ofthe world, that until yesterday I were my raison d'ctre.)
In successive drafts of the Ceneri poems, Pasolini gradually camouflaged the self with an eye to creating a more political and 'civic' poetry (Rinaldi, 1990,92-5, 113; Siti, 1981). Recourse to narrative and to [J Sec I disegni; the description given in the screenplay of La rico/la (AIi dttgli occhi ttzzurri, 480); and Zigaina, 11)87,43-61. [4 See Vannucci, 1985, for a compendium of colours in Pasolini's poetry.
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descriptive evocation of landscape are both means to this end. But the mannerist figurations we have described suggest that the attenuation of the subjective in such poetry is only relative. Furthermore, there are major exceptions, not least the central 'Le ceneri di Gramsci' itself, preceded by 'Quadri friulani'-a return to Friuli and selfcontemplation-and followed by 'Recit'-with its traumatic suffering of difference-and the autobiographical sections of 'Il pian to della scavatrice'. 15 Even beyond these, a knowledge of the prehistory of the figures of Pasolini's poetry allows us to discern latent workings of the subjective permeating the collection. The transposition from the Friulan 'frut' to the 'ragazzo di vita' is obviously one point of preservation of the figures of earlier poetry. The urban landscape produces new figures and new archetypes to describe and inscribe the self For example, the 'scavatrice', the mechanical digger, whose cry is an emblem of tragic change and of the city, is also a vehicle of identification between the self and the desolate landscape: Perch\: dentro in me c10 stesso senso di giornate per sempre inadempite che c ncl mono firmamento in cui sbianca questa scavatrice? (252) (Why is there in me lhe same feeling / of days for ever unfulfilled / that is in the dead tirmament / / in which this digger washes white?)
The 'feste' in Friuli are reformulated in images of the self in a crowd in Ceneri. And again, the reformulation is a turn to the negative. In 'Le ceneri di Gramsci', the crowd, the sound of the Testaccio district, is a filtering noise which disrupts the desired consonance between the poet and Gramsci. Even more explicitly, 'Comizio' describes the journey of the poet through a meeting of (ne(}-)fascists in Piazza di Spagna, and disturbingly discovers in the crowd fascism as an aspect of the self: Ecco chi sono gli esemplari vivi, vivi, di una parte di noi che, morta, ci aveva illuso d'esscrc nuovi-privi d'cssa per sempre (200),6 '5 Following Pasolini's own division of Celleri ('Allcttorc nuovo', 10-- I I), some critics have taken the structure of the book as inherent to the duality of its content. See Ferretti, 1974, 26!1-7o; Santato, 19!!o, 155-56. 16 Siti, HJ8 I, 163-5, shows how an earlier version, 'Nolte a Piau"~ di Spagna', addresses the fascists themselves at length, prefiguring 'Saluto e augurio' (NI/ova, 1176-82). Fascism is an integral part ofTommasino's story in Una v;la violellla, who moves from the MSI to the DC 10 the PCI in a smooth parabola of political martyrdom. See also 'A Bompiani' (Religione, 554);
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
(Here's who they are the living exemplars, / living, of a part of us that, having died, / deluded us into thinking ourselves new-stripped / / of that part for ever)
The young boy and the crowd are now a source of troubled desire, of desire tempered by self-denial and disapproval. A similar operation transforms the image offlight. In 'L'umile Italia', the swallows represent all the birds, and by extension the landscape, of Friuli, or of central Italy. 17 But, in Rome, their voice goes unheard: Q!li, nella campagna romana, tra le mozze, allegrc case arabe e i tuguri, la quotidiana voce della rondine non cala, dal cielo alia contrada umana, a stordirla d'animale festa I... 1 IQui ... 1senza rondini, di cani uda la sera. (Z04-5) (Here, in the Roman countryside, / among the cropped, happy Arab houses / and the hovels, the daily / voice of the swallow does not filII, / from the sky to the human quarter, / to bewilder it with animal joy I ... 1 / / [Here ... 1 without / swallows, the evening cries with dogs.)
The swallows {()Ilow the same trajectory as the poet, and their song is a correlative for the subject's self-expression. The swallow is another figuration ofthe self ,11 The most resonant use of figuration in Ceneri, however, comes in the title poem. The figure ofGramsci is, as several critics have pointed out, mythicized, 'misread' by Pasolini as an image of himself J(J The prototype for identification with Gramsei is clearly still the Christ of 'J.a crocifissione', where the topos of scandal in 'Le ceneri', developed as an exaltation of contradiction-'lo scandalo del contraddirmi' (the 'Poesie momlane' (Rllsa, 62 I), 'ho pied per i !(iov,mi fascisti' (I feci sorry ",r ,he yOlln!( fasesists ). '7 For swallows in Me/dill, see '11 di,tul ell la mari' (114); 'Or di not' (1535); 'Un rap di mt' (1546). rH The figuring of the sclfin flight continues in Rllsa, in 'Poesie mondane' (621), 'La nllon storia' (685--<)2) and, in degenerate filrm, in 'Poema per un verso di Shakespeare' (7°3-17). '9 Asor Rosa, J()69, 398, calls him a 'Marxistizcd Silvia', referring to Leopardi's 'A Silvia'; Rinaldi, 1(j82, 129, a 'Gramsci-phantasm'. Pasolini himsclfwrotc to l--aivino 'dcvi prcndere le "Ceneri di Gramsci" come un mio falto personale, non come 1I11 fatlO paradigmatico' (you must take the 'Ashes of Gramsci' as personal to mc, not as paradigmatic) (Lettere, ii. 175). On Pasolini's ideological relationship with Gramsci, sec Buci-Glueksmann, 1980; Macciocchi, 1980b, 26-31; Sillanpoa, 1981.
FIGURING THE SELF
scandal of contradicting myself, 227)-{)figinates. 2o Gramsci is tentatively assimilated into the poet's schema of himself by way of a series of plaintive questions which structure the poem: Nonpuoi, 10 vedi?, che riposare in questo sito estraneo, ancora confinato. (223) (You cannot, / do you see?, but rest in this place / outlying but still enclosed.) Mi chicdcrai tu, mOTto disadorno, d'abbandonare questa disperata passione di esserc nel mondo? (232) (Will you ask mc, unadorned dead man, / to abandon this desperate / passion for being in the world?)
Another question, as he nervously approaches the tombstone hints at the even more radical misreading, or even betrayal, ofGramsci which is to f(llIow: (0 c(\uakosa di divcrso, f()rsc, di piu cstasiato
c anche ui pillumile, ebbra simbiosi u'ado\eseente di scsso con morle ... ) (226) ( (Or it is something / uiftcrent, perhaps, more enraptured / / and even more humhle, a heady adolescent / symhiosis of sex with ueath ... ) )
The trace of Narcissus returns here, as does the bucolic, dionysiac sexuality of the Friubn idyll ('ebbra simbiosi' prefigures a later 'ebbro peccare', heady sinning·, 2]0), which deviates the poet's gaze onto a second figurc in the Protestant Cemetery who all but dislodges Gramsci as a figure for the self and his 'desperate passion', Shelley. The aura of the foreignness of the cemetery, and hence the sense of Gramsci's continuing exile, is created by images of England and Englishness: 'noia patrizia' (patrician ennui), the 'giardino gramo / e nobile' (miserable / and noble garden), 'laiche iscrizioni' (lay inscriptions), 'orizzonti dove inglesi sclve coronano / laghi spersi nel cielo' (horizons where English woods crown / lakes lost in the sky, 223-5). The crescendo of images, ·amid echoes of English graveyard poetry, ZO Fortini in 11)59 (then 1993,21-2), followed by many others, defined from here the governing figure of speech in Pasolini's (XliV," as 'sineciosi', the dependency oftwo contradictory objects on a single verb. Pasolini himself adopted the term, entitling a poem and an entire section of T,a.,"mana, 'Sincciosi dclla diaspora' (993-4; 981-1009). The OED does not have an English equivalent .
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
culminates in a quotation in English: ' "And 0 ye Fountains... "-le pie / invocazioni ... ' ('And 0 ye Fountains .. .'-the pious / invocations, 225).2[ And after the climactic confrontation with Gramsci and the split selfin section IV, the poem returns in section V to a high-flown invocation of the vitality and intensity of Shelley: Ah,come capisco [... JI'anima il cui graffito suona Shelle)! . .. Come capisco il vortice dei sentimenti, il capriccio [... ] che 10 inghiotti nd cieco celeste del Tirreno; la carnale gioia dell'avventura, estetica e puerile. (z:W) (Ah, how / I understand [... ] the soul whose inscription rings out / / Shelle,)! . .. How I understand the vortex / of feelings, the whim I ... 1/ / that
swallowed him in the blind / blue of the Tyrrenian; 1he carnal/joy of adventure, aesthetic / / ,md boyish.) There follows another sweep over sites ofItaly, bird-like as in 'L'umile Italia', only to be sadly interrupted by the second ofthc tentative questions to Gramsci quoted above. It is, in other words, Shelley-and, no doubt, a misread Shelley, perhaps confused with Wordsworth-who occupies the position of self-figuration in 'Le ceneri di Gramsci', and not so much Gramsci who is all but overwhelmed by the still-narcissistic reflexivity of the speaking' subject. Religione reverses the attenuation of the self attempted in part by Ceneri, but there is little substantial return to self-figuration. One could point to the experience of the self in the urban crowd in 'La ricchezza 11' (436--9), with its descriptions of city mornings and bus-rides, and with the scene in Red Square in 'I.a religione del mio tempo' (501-3); or to the figures of the 'ragazzi' in the inquisitive, idealized innocence of Bernardo Bertolucci in 'A un ragazzo', and in the pair espied from the poet's house who run through the long meditations of ' La religione del mio tempo'. However 'In morte del realismo' (557-64), a sustained 21 As perhaps the lakes suggest, the quot'ltiol1 is from Wordsworth: 'And 0, yc Fountain" Meadows, Hills, and Groves, / Forehode not any severing of our loves!' ('Ode: Intimatiolls of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood', [802-4,11. 187-8). Foscolo, the most important Italian pr'lctitioner of the graveyard genrc, was a profound early influence on Pasolini (Lettere, i. 83, 96). Shcllcy was quotcu in 'Dialet, Icnga, stil' and named in 'L'ltalia' (L'usiKn%, 385) and La tiivinll mimesis, 33; II Slroiigut, n. [, Aug. [(J45, 20, included some Wordsworth translated by B. Bruni.
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pastiche of Mark Anthony's funeral oration for Caesar, with realism as the slain hero and Carlo Cassola as Brutus, is merely a play for polemical effect and attention. And in general other mechanisms of selfinscription are more important here. Certain of the epigrams are exceptions to this rulc, when addressees are cast as ambivalent or ironic figurations of the self. The notorious 'A un Papa' (536), for example, amplifies the violence of its polemic against Pius XII by deploying a religious vocabulary of sin and the imagery of vitality ofthe poor, which both served the poet's own self-projections in the past. And perhaps the most subtle and sustained self-figuration in Religione is 'Alia Francia' (528), which returns to the systematic misprisions of Ceneri: Ho la lieta sorpresa di veder ehe assomiglio a Sekou Toure, il presidente della Guinea: il naso schiaeciato e gli oechi vivi. Anche lui risalito al grigiore della storia di baratri di puro spirito sclvaggio: negro proprio come era hiondo Rimhaud. Forse a chi c nato nella sclva, da pura madre, a essere solo, a nutrire solo gioia, tocca rendersi conl0 della vita reale: rinunciare a ohhedire al sesso per pensare, finire d'esscre fanciullo per diventare eiltadino, tradire gli I ki per Iona re con Marx! (It is a pleasanl surprise 10 sce that I look like I Sekou Toure, the president of Guinea: I the crushed nose and lhe sparkling eyes. I He too rc-ascended to the greyness of the history I of chasms ofpme wild spirit: I black just as Rimbaud was hlond. I Perhaps he who is horn in the wild, from a pure mother, I to be alone, to nourish only joy, I is destined to he aware of real life: I to renounce oheisance to sex in order to think, I to give up being a hoy to hecome a citizen, I to hetray the Gods to struggle with Marx!)
Toure is assigned an ideal biography to parallel that ofthe speaking subject, amI is then like Gramsci elevated to the status of a mythical figure who aspires to move from passion to ideology through a renunciation of desire. The two halves ofthe poem-description and mythicization (11. 1-6), followed by hypothesis and apotheosis (11. 7-12)-present an ideal paradigm for figuration (Richter, 1977). 'AlIa Francia' represents a model fix the epigram complementary to 'A mc' (529), which lays bare the latent, desperate introversion of all the others. And the profound loss of autonomy which the genre entails is confirmed by the repeated recourse, in the 'Nuovi epigrammi'
154
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(539-56), to doubts over existence itself. 'Esistere' or 'l'esistenza' (to exist, existence) occur eight times. Also noteworthy in Religione is a move to include cinematic figures, such as Anna Magnani in Roma ciuri aperta in 'La ricchezza'; also in 'La ricchezza' there is a glimpsed evocation of Chaplin, 'un pur triste chapliniano riso' (a still sad Chaplinesque laugh, 469), which will recur often later.22 Figuration in the next two collections will not be built on sustained images of the self in the other, but on just such glimpses and on a more ambiguous and ironic 'casting' of the self in a performative role. The key to understanding Rosa is its perception of the power of external discourses to determine and distort the processes of subjective figuration. The speaking subject is diminished and alienated from the subject of speech: Ondc non io, ma colui chc comunico, trae la dispcrata conclusione, di esscrc il reictto di un rauuno di altri ('La realra', 6JH--<))2 3 (Whence not myself, but the onc I communicate, / draws the uesperate clusion, / that he is the outcast of a gathering / / of others)
COI1-
Narcissism only occurs now as an ironic token of the consumerist loss of differentiation, or a pastiche of earlier idioms: oh come sa ognuno-nello sbanuamento che rende tutti uguali I. ... J -mostrarsi contento di se. Narcissismo! sola fiJrza consolatoria, sola salvezza! (,Poesie mondane', 616-17) (oh how / cveryone knows-in thc disbanding / that lcvels alii· .. 1/ -how to look happy / in themselves. Narcissism! our only consoling / force, our only salvation!)
22 See Rosa, 675, 779, 806; and '11 motivo di Chariot', 2043-4. For Buster Keatnn, see Medea, '45 (B2, '915); even Harold L10yd appears in Row, 67H. All clearly prefigure the films with Toto and the increasingly Chaplinesque Ninetto Davoli. 23 See also 'Poesia in forma cli rosa': '[il] soave poeta, qucl mio omonimo / che ancora ha il mio nome' (the gentle poet, my namesake / who still has my name, 651), and ef. Benvenisle's already cited definition of the third person as a non-person.
FIGURING THE SELF
155
(Verita evanescente della situazione domestica, I'ossessione narcissica [... ] ecc. ecc.) ('Poema per un verso di Shakespeare', 703)24 ( (Evanescent truth of the domestic situation, the obsession with Narcissus r... ] etc. etc.) )
Even the vocation to be Christ-like is ironized by subordination to the crowd: Prenuo tutta SlI ui me le colpa (vecchia mia vocazione, inconlcssata, facile fatica) della uisperata nostra uebolczza per cui milioni ui noi, con una vita in comune, non furono in grauo ui anuare lino in limuo. E' linita, trallal!.., cantiamo I ... 1 ('Vi\toria', SIS) (I take on mysclrall the hurden of guilt (an old / vocation of mine, unconfessed, an easy labour) / or our desperate weakness / / •hill meant that millions of LIS, with a life / in common were not ahle / to f(lllow through to the end. It's over, / / la-di-da, let's sing I ... 1)
The imagery of Christ in 'Pietro 11', derived from I.a ricolla, spills over inln imagery of the persecution and demystification of the self: 'il sangue di Cristo si c LlIto eeralan:a I la ceralacca polvere, la polvere omissis' (the hlood of Christ has turned into sealing'-wax I the sealingwax into dust, thc dust into on/i.uis, 679). The destructive power ofthe crowd itself figures the controlling other. The self is regularly pictured lost and alone, in groups, or vast crowds ('La persecuzione', 661-8), and the imagery of the crowd is now almost macabre: 'La radiosa Appia I che formicola di migliaia di insetti I-gli uomini d'oggi' (the radiant Appia I that teems with thousands of insects I -the people of today, (19). The crowd is only onc of several old tropes to he revived only in distorted or desperate form: a poem of devotion to his mother, 'Supplica a mia madre' (622-3), is tinged with an anxiety that is only indirectly revealed as mourning; and the myth of the mother figure is violently revised in 'Ballata delle madri' (599-601), where she is given a series of masks, becoming in turn vile, mediocre, servile, fierce, and made 24 Scc also 'La c()uvade' (Met/ell, '38; ll2, [()o,), '11 narcissismn tramortitl>--a cui e staw dato pill voltc / c()n I'olio san to I'ultimo addin·-rillasce' (narcissism in a faint-who's been given m()re than once / the last farewell with holy oil-is reborn).
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
responsible for the neutralizing conformism and ideological integration of her children (Rinaldi, 1982, 2 11-13). The self is even cut off from that essential link to reality, the landscape: i pendii, i colli, I'erba millenaria l ... ] tutto questo nasconde me (635) (the slopes, the hills, the millennial grass [ ... ] all this 1 conceals me) esse [le strade] non sono mio posscsso, mio paesaggio, mia intimita, ma appartengono ad altri (680) ([the streets] are not my possession, my landscape, 1 my intimacy, instead they belong to others)
Landscape is no longer a mode of self-inscription and self-expression, but a token of absence and concealment. The trial of La ricotta reduces the self to a puppet of the media and the judiciary. The poet's interlocutors become the 'punters' ('scomettitori, puntate sulla condanna', punters, put your money on g'uilty, 678-<)), just as in 'Una disperata vitalita' it will be the culture industry, in the form of the inane interviewer. These external f()rces arc now the agents in refiguring the self ('gli osceni sogni della stamp .. borghese [ ... ] m'hanno ridotto a Diavolo', the ohscene dreams of the hourgeois press l, , .] have turned me into a Demon, 678). Inevitahly, then, Rosa sees an increment in the image of the self as different and excluded, hut all possibility of a revitalizing sense of identity through difference is overridden hy the negative hranding of ' divers ita'. The second half of ' La realtii' digresses from its autohiographical impulse to launch an anguished meditation on exclusion, on homosexuality and difference: Nulla epiu terribile ddla diversit.l. Esposta ogni momento -gridata senza finc--cccezione inccssante-follia sfrcnata come un inccndio--contraddizione dOl cui ogni giustizia esconsacrata (646) (Nothing is more terrifying 1 than difference. Exposcd at every moment 1endless bawling-incessant 1 exception-unbridled madness 1 like a firccontradiction 1 that deconsecrates every justice)
And it also introduces the single most important figurative mask in Rosa, the self as Jew:
FIGURING THE SELF
157
E cerco alleanze che non hanno altra ragione d'essere [... ] che diversita, mitezza e impotente violenza: gli Ebrei ... , i Negri ... ogni umaniti bandita (639)25 (And I look for alliances that have no other raison / d'etre [... ] / than difference, gentleness and impotent violence: / Jews... , Blacks... every outlawed humanity)
In 'Una disperata vitaliti', a further working title for the book is given as' "Monologo sugli Ebrei" , (730). And indeed, a poem ofthat title, not included in Rosa but containing clear echoes of 'Una disperata vitalita' and several other poems, was published in L 'Europa letteraria in H)63 (Bz, 1744-53). The poet meditates on photographs of Jews at lluchcnwald and the humanity which survives in their ability to smile and metaphorically to sing to his own song, or monologue: '10 so la delicatezza che li fcrisce [ ... J10 so cosa vuol dire essere diversi' (I know the delicacy that wounds them [ ... 1I know what it means to be different, 175 I). In Rosa, it is in the 'Israele' section that the texture of the figure is most carefully considered. In the piece beginning' ... Kafka poi avra supposto' (763-4), the poet identifies with the trauma still alive in Israel from the I Iolocaust, and also with a sense of exile from and nostalgia for Europe. The next poem emphasizes still further this rapport: Tornate, ah torn ate lIella vostra Europa. Un trans/ert tremendo di me in voi, mi fa sentire la voSlra nostalgia che voi non sentite, e a me d;' un dolore ehe sconvolge ogni rapporto con la reald. I ;Europa non c pill mia' (767) (Go back, ah go back to your Europe. / A terrible transference of me in you, / makes me feci your nostalgia / which you don't feci, and it causes a pain in me / that upsets my every rapport with reality. / Europe is no longer mine!)
Israel and the Jews, as misread by Pasolini, seem suspended between a corrupt Europe and a fully differentiated Third World. 'Israelc' moves from complete identification ('Ha la faecia / uguale a quella di noi ebrei', He has a face / like that of us Jews, 769) to disillusionment with the bourgeois presence even there: 'Ma sono Ebrei. Perche si co mportano / cosi come figli di borghesi ariani [? .. ] L' ebreo per cultura ed 25 This is the (irst full intuition of an elective affinity with Jews, but cc. 'I1 canto degli augcli' (I,'u5Ign%, 356): 'Come gli Ebrei ho aneh'io il mio vitcllo / d'oro' (Like the Jews I too have my golden / call).
IS8
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
e1ezione, adesso / li guarda deluso' (But they are Jews. Why are they carrying on / just like sons of bourgeois Aryans [? .. ] The Jew by culture and choice, now / looks at them, let down, 772-3). The model of Jews as Europe's exiles, risking an horrific mimesis of European nco-capitalism because of their exile, and of the self as profoundly Judaic in an antique, perhaps biblical sense, shapes the otherwise fragmented poem 'Progetto di opere future' (797-809). Even the impulse for a new creative energy seems to derive from this identity ('io Ebreo offeso da pied / ritrovo una erudcle freschezza d'apprendista', I a Jew, offended by piety, / rediscover a eruel apprentice freshness, 798). And the self finds models in a litany of great (supposedly) Jewish figures: Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Chaplin and Kafka-'oh popolazione dei miei fratelli' (0 population of my brothers, 806). Nostalgia for Europe becomes nostalgia t()[ Romance and Occitan Europe (526), a mythiC
The figure of the Jew runs on into Trasumanar, despite the hreak after 11)64 in writing poetry.26 In 'Egli 0 tu', the poet is 'of Israeli nationality' and aJewish 'buffone' (834, 835). And in the poem-review of Eisa Morante's 11 7nont/o salvato dai raga:::.:::.ini (8(10-78), Eisa is a matriarchal Jew 'with the Talmud in her belly' (860). 'L'enigma di Pio XII' adopts the voice of the Pope 'scandalously', to t()rce him to justify the Vatican's silence over the Holocaust. Pius, himself a distorted projection of the tortured contradictions of the self and a symbol of the institutionalized Church, identifies in turn with Paul, with Paul's betrayers, with the Jews and finally with Hitler: 10 so che tradisco la chiesa di Paolo I... 1 J.o so per il semplice fatto .·he sono riilivCl1uto un Ebreo I· Fede e speranza trionfano di nuovo nel Terzo Reich
.. J
26 See also the plays, all begun in H)hh, hetween the puhlication of Rosa and the first poems of 7'rasu1I1anar. In Caldertin, tilr example, the heroic and enigmatic Sigismondo is Jewish ('que! tuo ignohile Ehreo', that ignohle Jew of yours, Tealrll, ]7). PlIl"l"i/e is centred on the thinly veiled respectability of two German industrialists who made their names exploiting the Nazi death camps, and features the archetypal heretieal Jew Spinoza (Tealrv, 482-91). See also Teorema, 87-<J2.
FIGURING THE SELF
159
come nei tempi antichi. La mancanza di carita non cehe un semplice peccato (il mio stesso [ ... J) (843, 848)27 (I know 1 am betraying the Church of Paul [ ... ] / I know for the simple reason that I have hecome a Jew again l ... ] / Faith and hope triumph again in the Third Reieh / as in ancient times. / The lack of charity is only a simple sin / (my own I· .. J) )
The Church, a Pauline institution, becomes a symbol of all institutions, from the bourgeois 'Law', which for Pius is a Jewish invention, to the shady powers behind the Kennedys' deaths and Vietnam, to the PCI. The poem ends playing grotesquely between Hitler's Third Reich and Paul's third Heaven in a phrase which is repeated in several other poems in Trasumanar: Potrei parlare di UNO che cstato rapito al Term Ciclo: invecc pario di un uomo deboic: /<mdatore di Chiese. (850) (\ could speak of onc who was taken up to the Third Heaven / instead I speak of a weak m,m: ,1 founder of Churches)
Othcr figures which recur in Trasumanar arc largely jarring and confused. There is a new pattern to the poetry of centrifugal disunity, and poetic extremism. Idcntification is now with extrcme opposites of the sclt~ PillS XII and Nixon ('Poema politico', 999-1003), and is carried off as per/ilrmancc. The scandal-giving youth is present as a trope, but only as a mediated and dependent image filr Morante's 'Pazzariello' (875); and scandal as a political strategy is no longer tenable, except as ironic perfi:Jrmance ('11 Gracco', XXS-7). Communication is hlocked, and so is communication of the self: vicnc liquidaLo il mio narcisismo. Che ne c di esso?
COS)
110 perso la compagni'l di un sentimento.
0, meglio, della 'forma di una vita' (la mia) ('La nascita di un nuovo tipo di buf/(lI1e', 883) (thus my narcissism is liquidated. / What about it? / / I've lost the company of a ICcling. / Or, better, of the 'form ofa lite' (my own»
The 'buffone' itself is a new pseudo-archetypal role, signifying the loss of autonomy to create roles for the self 27
The figure ofSt Paul recurs in the poem 'Trasumanar C organizzar' (908), and of course
San Pa%.
160
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
However, one familiar pattern is developed to a striking new intensity, via a transformative relation to political reality. In '11 piagnisteo di cui parlava Marx' (918-19), the poet is again caught in a crowd, this time in Recife, Brazil: Essi sono la che agiscono [ ... ] In una sola mattinata ho trovato una patria piena di innocenti e non mi muovo, non oso andare tra di loro (They are there in action [ ... ] / In a single morning I have found a homeland full of innocents / and I stand still, I dare not go amongst them)
The crowd is here a token of political resistance and action, and the self is fixed still, inert and thus excluded from action. The same exclusion from radical collective praxis marks 'La raccolta dei cadaveri', where it is precisely the 'cell' structure of the revolutionaries which alienates: un covo di giuvani rivoluzionari; non lontano da Regina Cocli; io, frequentatore di eovi l· . ·1 Ora mi trovo a disagio nelle tane; tra i g;ruppi minoritari (<)56) (a den of young revolutionaries; / not far from Regina Coeli; / mc, a frequenter of dens l ... J / Now I feel uneasy in lairs; in minority groups)
The apposition of the self to collective groups, divided by the impossibility of communication, is also the structuring principle of 'Mirmicolalia' (851-5), which alternates between a nonsense di'llogue ('mirmicoeffare') with prisoners and a 'more reasoned' dialogue with law students. But the confrontation with the students in Trasumanar (and other texts of the same period), in which the self once more attempts to appropriate, through active misprision, a figure in history and ideology, cannot be fully appreciated without insertion into a more long-standing drama of figuration-the emblematic conflict between the father and the son, governed equally by a writing of the body and desire and by ideology.
7
'Mio corpo insepolto ': The Body and the Father Whilst the figure of the mother pervades every element of the Friulan idyll, and representations of the body carry some of its most potent meanings, the father is apparently conspicuous only by his absence in the early phases of Pasolini's poetry. In both MeKlio and L 'usiKn%, the figure of the father appears explicitly only a handful of times, is still absent fi'om Rot1la [()so. Diario, and in Ceneri, appears only once. The governing Oedipal strategy of these texts is summed up in 'T ,ingua': 'ho ucciso il padre col silenzio' (I have killed the father with silence, /, 'usign%, 6<). The father is literally written out ofthe subjcct's nostalg'ia, whereas, as we have seen, the mother takes lip a central and fluid position in the canvas of self-exprcssion. I On those occasions when the bther does appear, however, the seeds of a f;u more imposing presence, bound up with a traumatic recognition of the poet's sexuality and his adulthood, can be discerned. 2 In 'Litania', a sequence imbued with devotion to the mother and to her chastity, the father is simply the agent of violation and impurity: 'non v'ha violato / mano di padre' (no hand of a fathcr / has violated you, 3 17). But since the self is already marked with sin and transgressive desire-'Su ridestiamoci, / che il nostro cllore vllole peecare' (Come on, up we get, / for our heart wants to sin, 3 I H)-there is already an affinity between the father and the subject. The trauma which thc rare references to the father explore is the I The h(~)k PI/nic a Cam,.,,(/ was in !;lCl dedicated to Pasolini's father (B2, I (87), hut he later explained that the de
er
162
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
problem of coming to terms with, and becoming, the father. The bell in 'Tornant al pais Ill', sees fathers in their sons, in an analogy which is at once a token of the prehistorical lack of differentiation in Friulan life, and also a quiet harbinger of future anxiety: 'Il timp a no'l si mouf: jot il ridi dai paris, coma tai ramis la ploja, tai vuj dai so frutins' (24) (,Time does not move: / look at the laughter of the fathers, / like rain in the branches, / in the eyes of the children ')
These fathers represent the weight of unchanging millennial tradition, manifested elsewhere in a disturbing, at times morbid control over the young boys, who are the defining figures of the lanuseape, by the phantasms of their ancestors: li l
And in both these poems, the image of the unseen father in whom the son lives, or whose death the son embodies, spills over into Christian imagery. The analogy between fathers and the Father, ami thus transgression, is most explicit in 'Baruch VI': (I padri e il Padre... gli uni simili a noi, I'altro simile al padre.. . ed il padre ecattolico) [ ... ] 11 figlio si ribella
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
(e nasconde it peccato), diverra cattolico nel tempo ideale (373) ( (The fathers and the Father.. .I the former like us, I the latter like our father .. .I and our father is Catholic) t... JThe son rebels I (and hides his sin), I he will become Catholic I in an ideal time)
And also explicit here is the pattern whereby the rebellion of the son against the father is only a hidden mechanism tor the transformation in turn of the son into the father. 3 The denial of identification with the father is a subtext of the alternative identification with the mother, or the boy, and the attempt to dismantle the hierarchies of time and gender which distinguish father, boy, mother and girl. If the father is always already within the son, then the trauma of becoming is debarred. In Ccneri, where the self is deliberately marginalized, the single occurrence of the figure of the father is onc of denial of such hierarchy: '[Tu] in lJuel maggio italiano [ ... 1dei nostri padri-non padre, ma umile I fratelIo' (/ You 1 in that Italian May I ... ] of our fathers-not father, but humble I hrother, 'Le ceneri di Gramsci', Cmcri, 223).4 If the father is an object of denial, the body in Mep,lio is a transubstantiating vehicle t(lI· the expression of ungendered sexual desire, and of an ontological desire fill· the real. The body is written across the landscape, part human and part elemental. The Narcissus poems of ' Suite furlana' arc imbued with imagery oflhe body, which, in reflection, is ret()J"[l1ed as light or water. And elsewhere it is also seen rd()rmed as the other elements, fire, air and earth: II Tilimint, cu'l stratlon tli sfalt, e li planuris vertlulinis, cu Ii boschel is i1apis e il zal dai ciamps di hlava, fra il mar e la montagna: dUI ardeva ta la me ciar frutina. Al era un f(IUC il mal. ('Un rap di ua', 1548) J cr 'Nuova poesia in I()rma ui rosa' (Rosa, 753), where the sons are ucstineu to 'ripetere a lino ~ uno gli alti dcl padre, / ~nzi, a riereare il padre in terra' (repeat onc by onc the acts of the lather, / inueeu to recreate the tather on earth).
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
(The river Tagliamento, with the asphalt main-road, / and the greenish plains, / with the small withering [appassite1woods and the yellow / of the maize fields, between the sea / and the mountain: / it all burned in my boy's flesh. / Evil was a fire.) il me cor al edi aria e tai me vuj a rit la int ('Mi contenti', 120) (my heart is of air / and in my eyes people laugh) Rit, tu, zGvin lizcir, sintint in tal to cuarp la cicra cialda e scura e il frcsc, clar scil. CA Rosari', 60) (I ,augh, you slight young boy, / feeling in your body / the hot, dark earth / and the fresh, clear sky.)
These elemental metamorphoses arc often images of dissolution, but also of release and ecstatic sublimation: 'i soj z()vin, vif, bandunat / cu'l cmlrp ch'al si cunsuma' (I am young, alive, abandoned / with a body that is wasting away, 91 ).5 The sublimation is at once erotic and spiritual. The body of the boy Sticfin', evoked in 'Ciants Ji un mu art VII', 58, the body of'DaviJe' (L'usign%, 310-12; and er 21), and of the myriad other young boys, are objects of a particular kind of love which is desiring but also transformative, through which the self physically penetrates his surroundings. This love, which is otien equated with the force of song, and hence poetry, is the prof{)Und meaning of the 'rustic amour' of ,Dedi ca' (13).6 The spiritual side to this 'am()ur' is an undercurrent in Meglio ('jo i soj un spirt di am()ur', 1 am a spirit of\ove, 25), but comes to the fore in the religious crisis of L'wign%. The body is here imbued with intimations of mortality, as shown in two poems already mentioned, 'Le albe' and 'Davide'.7 And along with the reality of 5 The uis~olution of the bodily ,clfinto an clement ofland,cape is also a llIotifofthe poetry of summer 1941 and '942 found in Pasolini's lctter~. Sce e.g. the title image of"Sciogliersi di canto al mattino' (To dissolve in morning song), the closing lines of'La tempesta' ('10 mi disperuo [ .. .]', I am dispersed) and the poem 'Divengo la sera' (I become the evening) (I,ellere, i. 91, 94-5, 86). (, The importance ofthiHesonant phrase is underlined by Dc Mauro, 1 <)X5, 12, who points out that 'rustic' was not in the Pirona dictionary ofFriulan until 1967, and was probably coineu by Pasolini. 7 A similar motif recurs in the plaqucttc collections Poes;e ([225-(, I) anu I pia1lti (1277-309). See c.g. in the latter, poem XXIV, which ends 'questo mio corpo immortale / toccherd / I'incredibile morte' (this my immortal body / willlouch / incredible death, 1306). Another
(hson Wdlcs plays I hc I )ircclor of I hc (,ospd filon ·wil hin- I hc-tilm , hcrc isoial cd in ,norhid f(randclIr. (Brili sh I!illll In slillll'C)
]'I .A'n : ,. / .11 r i mllll .
Pun:
2. A cccttlone . Accattone (Franco Citti) is framed in portrait, set against the deep perspective and oppressive sunlight of the 'borgata' landscape. Echoes of Masaccio. (British F ilm Institute)
PI.ATE
3. Oal'lI/I.{"(; /:
II{{C/fin;. '1'01(' ;l11d N inello (Davoli), I'asolini's pseudo-couple, wander Ihroug;h the urhan 110- 1l1;.lJl'S land . (Brilish Film Instil lit e)
I'I.A"n: +. 1'~I."l/gc/(). Th e scene of Ihe Jbplism in Ihe Ri ver Jordan, lilmed fi'om ahove ;lIld at a dislance, shancred the /i'ontal iconog;raphy of I'asolini 's tilm-style. (British Film Jnstitlll'c)
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PUTI-: 5. AI/I'f/('(f . The ( :elll ;II,r ( :hiroll (I ,allrcn t T e rzieH) ctlu c lI cs Ihe youllg; Jaso n in!'o a prccivili zcd alIinit y with nalllre and Ih e !(ool s. (Ilrilish him In slitul e. Every elli"',, has heen m;Hk 10 ohtaill per mi ss ion 10 rcprodll ce Ihi s p rin t. Any oonission s will he recti fi ed in f uture cdilions.)
6. La l'il'olta (in colour in the ori ginal). Pasolini / Orson Welles' Ma nnerist reconstruction of Rosso Fiorentino's Man nerist Deposition. (British Film Institute)
P LATE
Slf.hi. Onc of the dis<'IIscs and th e pianist per/i.rl11 their J.: r
PLATE 8. La. ricolta. The diva (Laura Betti) relaxes, carefully framed by the extras, the props and the roman landscape. (British Film Institute)
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
death, these two poems also contain images of fathers or fatherhood. Furthermore, the sexual aspect of the body is no longer sublime and ungendered, but guilt-laden and imbued with transgressive desire, in poems such as 'Lingua' ('amo la mia colpa', I love my guilt, 353) and the sequence 'La verginita' (321-35), where traces of taboos such as incest and masturbation are overlaid with a vocabulary of shame and sin. Where the body becomes a token of suffering and death or guilt, it becomes an object, and the figure ofthe father displaces the imaginary (maternal) subject. This is most evident in the two climactic points of the representation of Christ in L'usiKn% discussed in Chapter 6, 'La passione' (291-5) and 'La crocifissione' (376-7). In the former, heavy emphasis is laid on the body of Christ Incarnate, and on the physical suffering ('passione') of that body. And the latter makes explicit the barely implicit sensuality of its representation of Christ's suffering in its summation of the scene of the crucifixion: 'morte, sesso e gogna' (death, sex and pillory). The central imagery of exposure in the poem ('bisogna esporsi') is itselfan image of the naked body, as is conveyed by the physical intensity ofthe adjectives, all prominent rhyme-words: Perch£: Cristo i"u ESPOSTO in Croce? Oh scossa llel cuore al nudo corpo del giovinetto... atroce of/csa al suo pudorc Cfudo... (:'176) (why was Christ EXPOSED on the Cross? I Oh hlow of the heart to the nude I hody ofa young hoy... atrociolls I ortcncc to his crude modesty... )
A strong' line of rhetoric surrounding Pasolini's later public persona has its origins in the imagery of nudity t<mnd here. HAnd the clarion call of 'I.a crocitissione'-'testimoniare 10 scandalo'----{!stablishes the direct relationship between the crucial topos of scandal and the body. 'I.a ricchezza' (Religione, 434) will articulate this even more explicity: 'ardente / legna di questa antica ansia / di testimoniare-la came' (burning / firewood ofthis ancient urge / to bear witness-flesh). import,mt parallel is wit h the image of the hody as ,\ token of the pasl, ,mdthe passage of lime, which is already in Me/',lilJ: sce, for ex,nnplc, 'Li lelanis dal hid fi Ill' (HJ-20) and 'La not di maj IV' (64). In both, the figure o"the father is also a shadowy presence. R The imagery and its disturhing strain of violence, also in 'I -ingna' and 'L'ex vita' (400), resurfaces often in later poetry. Sec e.g. 'Rccit' and '11 pianlo della scavatrice 11' in Cmeri, where the 'rag
166
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
In L'usignolo the body becomes a meeting point for several restrictive discourses. It is a burden and a limitation, but only in 'Memoric' (365-8) is the actual source of the complex ambiguity of desires around the body made explicit: Mi innamoro dei eorpi ehe hanno la mia earne di figlio---col grembo ehe brueia di pudorei eorpi misteriosi d'una bellezza pura I· .. J, corpi spenti dai tremi:i della eame I.. ·1, i corpi dei tigli coi calzoni fdici, col bruno 0 il biondo delle maclr·i nei passi, c un troppo grande :lIllOre, nd cuore, per ilmondo. (36!l) (l litll in love with bodies / that have my !Iesh / oft he son . wit h t he lap / hurn·· ing with modest.y·- / the mysterious bodies / ofa pure heauty I ... 1, / hodies extinguished hy the tremors / of t he lIesh I... 1, / bodies or sons / wit h joyous trousers, / with the auhurn or the blond / of their mothers in their step, / and too gre;lt a love, / in their heart, (u· the world.)
This is a rare expression of homosexual desire laid open, hut it is a homosexual desire of a particular killll which ~athers a series of motifs around the si~nilicance ofthe body. The 'love fill· the world' is an echo of the 'rustic am()ur' of'])edica'. The appeal to the mother, and to the purity and spirituality in the sons, is an attempt to sublimate carnal desire into their 'amore per ilmondo', the transti)rmative life-(i)rce of the ideal world ofFriuli. But it cannot conceal the ,\ctual trauma of guilt and destructive excess which subtends the presence of the body as a loclls of homosexual desire here and throughout Pasolini's work. The near-absence ofthe father and indeed the mother ti·om Ceneri is echoed by a noticeable diminution of the sensuality of experience. Where a poetry of desire does emerge in Ceneri, it varies little from the earlier work. The sense of an 'amore per il mondo', and hence a desire for the present/ presence of the physical world, survives in the aphoristic opening to '11 pianto della scavatrice', 'Solo l'amare [ ... ] conta, non ('aver amato' (Only loving [... ] counts, not having loved, 243), and in 'Le ceneri di Gramsci':
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
se mi aeeade di amarc il mondo non eehe per violento e ingenuo amore sensllaie (227) (If I happen / / to love the world it is only with a violent / and ingenuous sensuallove)
Ecstatic dissolution of the body, and hcnce the self, returns in 'Quadri friulani', which recreates-as memory filtered through art, howeverthe dionysian Friulan 'teste' lIsing the same elemental imagery of violent passion: Ti ricordi ljuella sera a Ruua? (bIClnostro darsi, insiellle, a un gioeo di pura passione I... I? Era una lolta hrueiante di se stessa, ma il suo ruoeo si spallllcva oltr;; noi (2[4-'[5) (1)0 you rememher t hat evening at Ruda? / . rhat giving ourselves up, together, to a game / or pure passion I... I? / / It was a stru~'glc / burning with itself~ but
its lire / / spread out heyond us) And further on in the poem, t he sublimation implicit in 'darsi' is articulated in a description ofZip;aina's painting' of'spettri del caldo sesso / adoleseente' (spectres of hot adolescent / sex, 21(}--17). Anot her locus oCholllosexualit,y in Ceneri, ag'a in originating' in earlier poet ry, relates to the evocation o/"lhe exclusion and solitudc of the city. The solitary journey throug'h a desolate landscape, often the city at night, peppered with sporadic sexual encounl'Crs, is a major recurrent narrativc amI sI rllctllral panern across Pasolini's IJ:lIl'rc, wil h its roots in his own night Iy {()rays, whether in Rome, New York, Clicutta (sec C(){/ore dc!l'lndia), or elsewhere. It runs through the night-timc epics of his narrat ive works, {i'om RlIga,z,zi tli ,)ila and Ali dllgli oc(hi azzurri to I.a divina mimesis and Pelrolill; and through the narrative content and shot-construction of many films, such as Accallolle, Mamma Roma, Villlgc!O, M edea and Teorema. In an essay in the co-written screenplay of Sergio (:ini's film Ostia, he relates the topos to knowledge of the other: ] }arehel.ipo del roll1anzo ll1oderno c il viaggio; la eonoseenza, vera 0 ideale, di ljualchc altrove I... 1. Ora si PU(\ dire ehe non esistc pillllltrove (0 sta per seomparire uel tutto) I... J Siamo Wtto !fui. (Ostia, 171J-Ho) (The archetype of the modern novel is the journey; knowledge, real or iueal, of some elsewhere l ... J. Now we can say that elsewhere no longer exists (or is about to disappear entirely) l, .. .1 We are all here.)
168
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
In its myriad different representations, this topos creates a shadowy alternative space where the relation of self to reality is somehow felt as more direct and essential, although no less traumatic, beyond mediated conventionality. The otherness of the vagrant space created is perhaps best seen in the enigmatic, alienating world of Uaellacci e uccellini (see Ch. 11). But such vagrancy can also be seen as a textual, formal pattern in itselt: which challenges the restrictions on selfhood, as a correlative of experience or emotion which poetry might recollect in tranquillity. Indeed, the journey is often recalled as if at a moment of hiatus in wandering, from a still, small, enclosed space. The emblematic exploration in poetry of this particular space and time is 'Versi del testamento' (Trasu11lanar, 941-3), but in Cenai, hoth 'Rccit' and '11 pian to dclla scavatrice' narrate just such a journey through the city fi.)llowing an exhausted return to a closed, cool and dark room. In the dark, the exhausted hody and its sensuality and mortality hecome a crucible of all the experiences of the outside world, as they had done in the night poems of'lI non credo' in J/us(~llolo (337-·4H): Enlro c mi rinchiudo, mllto C spcnto come un impiccato solo col suo corpo e il suo nome (,Rccil',2J9) (I come in and dose myself in, silent and Iitdess like I a han~ed man alone with his body ami his name)
Perhaps the earliest image of this second, enclosed space is in /)al/)iario (J(J4S-47), where several bmiliar motifs-history, Narcissus, quality oflight, the botly and nudily----come together: E nell'interno della morta c;lsa di Casarsa, sorridi tu, () Cosciente, e nel tllO s~uardo fisso, Ji maniaco, io Ic~go la mia storia. 1':cco qui la stanza, tomba dei tepori e delle tetre solitudini del mio corpo; 10 specehio dove guanJo, intenditore, gli scorci del mio viso; illetto senza fantasmi, nudo, a cui la nmla luce da eandori di gesso, e che il tuo riso sospenJt! nel passato. (1434) (Within the dead house I in Casarsa, you smile, 0 Conscious One, I anJ in your staring, maniacal look, I I rt!aJ my history. Here is I the room, tomb of the warmths anJ of the I dismallonelinesses of my body; I the mirror in whieh I sec, knowingly, I the glimpses of my face; the hed with no I phantasms, naked,
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
to which the naked lig'ht I gives chalk whitenesses, and which your laugh I holds suspended in the past.)
'La religione del mio tempo' is also built upon the locus of the closed room, from where two boys are espied and desired. But there is little of the charged immediacy or sensuality of other portraits of objects of desirc: 'il dono / disperato del sesso, candato / tutto in fumo' (The desperate / gift of sex has gone / up in smoke, 490). In 'A un ragazzo', the melancholic tone derives in part from an acknowledgement that the poet is divided from the boy by his experience of history, and ean only communicate as a father-figure, not a brother, nor as a desiring subject. The epigram 'A un figlio non nato', where the self is again cast as father, extends this detachment. It describes an encounter with a prostitute in the 'borgate' landscape, culminating in a resigned acceptance of the loss of his 'primo e llnico figlio non nato' (first and only unborn child): 'non ho dolore / che tu non possa mai esser qui, in questo mondo' (I feel no pain / that you cannot ever he here, in this world, 53 I). The division between knowledge and innocence has become an absolute division between birth and non-birth.') The sensual vitality and immediacy of the world of the 'borgate' remains the strongest correlative of the sexual: un l11ondo chc non ha alt ri varchi chc vcrso it sesso e il CUOfC, altra pro/()Jldit:. chc I1ei sensi. In cui la !!,'ioia (; gioia, iI dolorc dolore. (464) (a world that has no other way through I except towards sex and the heart I no other depth except of'the senses. Iln which joy is joy and pain pain.)
But the inclination towards a physical 'amore per il mondo' has already degenerated into the hysterical: 'Ed c amore-voglia disperata/ dei sensi, lllcido isterismo' (And it is love---desperate desire/ of the senses, lucid hysteria, 434). The split self inherent in hysteria manifests itself dramatically in 'Tl glicine': 11 coniine (ra la sloria e l'io si !Cnde torto come un ehhro abisso (5811) Cl The prostitute in this epi~ram acts dually as both an emblematic vital element orthe 'horg;ata' landscape (sce also 'La ricchezza 4', 453-4, 457; 'I'oema pcr un vcrso di Shakespeare', Rosa, 707; 'I ,a strada delle pUllane', TrtltlSIIII1{/tf{lr, 93J--4), and a mute medium j"r dialog;ue hetween the sclfand the phantasm orthe 'fi~li() non nato'. [n eithcr case, she exists only ;\s an 'ahject' non-subject On the hi~hly amhi~uous role of the prostitute in Pasolini's prose and film narrative work, sce l'hilipps, H)92.
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
(The border between history and the self / cracks open twisted like a drunken abyss)
And this heralds the explosion of sexuality and paternity, and poetic form, in Rosa. (0 All the poetic work around the body, the father and the desiring subject, up to and including Relir:ione, seems in retrospect a prologue to their treatment in Rosa amI Trasumanar, as well as in a number of pivotal, uncollected and formally diverse compositions, including some of the verse plays, written during the same period. The first of those compositions in which the father is used for the first time as a phant,lsm of terror which inhabits the actual father, is 'E I' Africa?', written in January H)63 and later included in the screenplay of the unrealized film If padre se1vaggio (S8---61; B2, d~47-S0). It deals with the pain of the failure to bring· the fi Itn-project to fruition, and the poet-'auolescente vcstito / dalla maure' (an adolescent dressed / by his mother, I H47 )-flnds himself stand ing bctilre the castigating figure of Alfredo Bini, his film producer. Bini is transtilrmed into the poet's t~lther 'non nominato I ... 1 dal dicembre del cinquantanove, anno in cui mori' (not uttered by name \ ... \ since the I kcember of II)S(), the year he died, J S4H), 11 and is then reincarnated as the bther-'padre ormai non solo mio, padre nient'altro che paure' (father now not only mine, father nothing else than father, I H4y)-or a category of thought in which the real f~lther represents 'olu truths' acquired through suffering. This vision of Bini as the bther is a momentary one-·-'ma suhito rifll il mio coetanco goriziano' (hut he immediately turned back into my Gorizian contemporary, [H4H)---hut it marks a uramatic resurg-cnee of the figure anu its metaphorical significance, and t·hus a key to the diffusion of the theme in Rosa. The relation of the self to the father in Rosa is onc of unprecedenteu volatility anu uncertainty. The pathological, or perhaps hysterical, emphasis on defining the self in terms of [lthcrs and sons is only matcheu by the oscillation between diHerent definitions: riflette la mia lingua una fantasia di ti.glio che non sad mai padre (,La realt:\', 6]1) (my language reflects an imagination / of a son who will ncver be a fa ("her) On hystcri~. sce Cixolls and (:Icmcnt, ['J7S; J .~planehe ~nd Pont~lis, [973, 177-Ho. Pas(llini's f"ther actu~lly died on the night of H) Decemher [()58 (I,ettere, ii. 404). 'Poeta delle cencri' (2056) makes the same slip. 10 11
THE BODY AND TilE rATHER
i padri-mia eoetanea, nera razza ('La rea Ita' ,633) (fathers-my contcmporary, black race) i miei coctanei, i figli ('I ,a realra, 635) (my contemporaries, the sons) 'i miei padri crearono una condizione padronale, e qui comando io' ('lIlihro delle croci', 6(0) ('my
I~lthers
created / a system ofhosscs, / and here I am in charge') sono mici figli Isitl, gli lInici di cui pot rei dirmi padre ('Mcntre ... "i nostri ragazzi sono"', 771)
(they arc my sons, / the only ones or whom J could eallmysdf father) non so, 'clfct t ivamcntc', esscrc padre, padrolle I ... 1 Padre, che COS'I mi sta slIccedendo' ('Un aeropiano dove si hl"Vl" challll);lgne, Camvdle" 7H2) (I don't know, 'pract ically', how to he a lilt her, a mastcr 11 . . .11 Father, what is happening to me?)
The trope of contradiction is here elevated to new intcnsity, and rcsolution is precludcd more than ever. We see an evolved, darkcned form of the fluid interchangeability between g;ender and generation in the I "riulan phase. I [ere, the oscillation is a markcr ofloss and anxiety rather than free cxpressivity. [[owevcr, the figurc of the (",lther is amplificd, elevated to the stat us of an ontological category. The subject does not adopt the mask or role of the father or the son, hut instead inseribes itself into the autonomous, myt·hieal dyad between Father and Son, or bthers and sons. In the final poem ofthc book, 'Vittoria' (RI3-25), the dyad is simply transposed into political discourse, such that the PCI, or the communist intellectual, becomes the f.tther, and thc worker thc son. But thc communists are strangely failed father-figurcs-'ombrc di eompagni I. .. ·1 voi, padri / senza nome' (shadows of comrades l... ] you, fathers / without name, 81 5)-and the youngsters ('giovanotti') havc in their eyes 'qualcos'altro che amorc' (something other than lovc, 817). Thc mapping of dcsirc and thc patcrnal onto thc political is partial here, but such a conjunction will becomc a dcfining charactcristic of Trasumanar.
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
The violent energy of the father-son pair feeds into and is fed by the equally violent praxis of the body in Rosa, by what 'Come in un velo giallo' terms 'la pace I che I'Erotomania vuole per il suo Inferno' (the peace I that Erotomania wants for its Hell, 777). Even the confusion between roles is related on a number of occasions to a hierarchy of desire, and once more, to the charged 'amore per il mondo': In rea ita, io, sono il ragazzo, loro gli adulti. 10, che per I'eccesso della mia presenza non ho mai varcato il confine tra l'amore per la vita e la vita ... l ... ] Cil mondo ehe io amo in lui t... J le generazioni, il corpo, il sesso ('I.a realt.1', 6]4) (In reality I am the boy, they / the adults. I, for the excess of my presence / / have never crossed the border between love / oflife and life ... 1... 1 / / it is the world / that I love in him l... 1/ / generations, / the body, sex)
But this love which is 'pure sensuality' ('I.e belle bandiere', 722) is evidence of a lack, a desire for the vitality of the object, which the self does not possess. More than simple love, then, this is the psychopathology of what Pasolini will later call his fetish for reality, or for life, and it is signalled both by the inverted hierarchy between father and son, and hy other parallel inversions and negativities, between life and death, preseOlT and disintegration: 'tutto il monlio c mio corpo insepolto' (the whole world is my unhuried hody, 72 [). Most important of these signals is the role of the libido in subjugating the selfto the power of desire, but also in renewing the impulse to death through the desire for vitality. The rule of the transgressive libido in all its ambiguity is formulated in 'La realti', via a typical Dantesque calque: 10 sono un uomo libero! Cmdido cibo della liberta e il pian to: ebbene piangef(). E' il prezzo del min 'libito far licito' (6]6) (I am a free man! Candid food / ofliberty is in weeping: and so I shall weep. / It is the price of my 'making lust lawful')
'Poesia mondane' includes a meditation on 'I'idea di fare un film suI tuo suicidio' (the idea of making a film about your suicide, 615), which dwells on grotesque details of bodily destruction, and is also accompanied by a disturbing erotic impulse:
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
173
esesso, grandezza della libidine, sua soavit.L .. Il protagonista emacellato; [ ... ] Una spaccatura gli scende dal palato allo stcrno, e irradia dei tremiti per tuno il corpo (615) (it is sex, grandeur / of the libido, its sweetness ... / The protagonist is butchered; [... 1 / A rupture runs down from his palate / to his breast-bone, and spreads tremors / throughout this body)
The libido in this condition becomes a channel for a reified sexuality, for repetition of acts which 'sono divenuti monumenti di pietra / che a migliaia affollano la mia solitudine' (have become stone monuments / that aowd by the thousand into my solitude, 723). In Jerusalem the spiritual is conjoineu with anu overwhelmed by the sexual in its reified form: sesso a Gerllsalemme, religione a Gerusalcmme L· .. .1 libidine a Gerusalcmme, pied a Gerusalcmme [... J non c'era altro eOllllllereio che quello del sesso (777-8).12 (sex in Jenlsa\cm, religion in Jemsa\cm I ... 1 / libido in ./erusalem, piety in ./erusaleml ... 1/ there was no other commerce but sex)
Anu oncc back in the Italian sOllth, the libiuo in its arbitrary repetitiveness continues to dominate: tll\tO ljllest'O ammassandomi come in una lista, at to di lihidine pilt aUo di libidine, in un solo ljuartiere, in una sola cinu, nell'alha meridionale (7811) (all this piling up of"myselrIike in a list, / an oflihido followed by act oflibido, / in a sole quarter, in a sole city, / in the southern dawn)
The impulse to repctition partakes of both aspects of the libido which generates it-the vital impulse and the death impulse. In '1.01 reald', the encounter between lacking desire and the 'sesso integro' (whole sex) of the young boys is only vital if repeated: 'E mille volte questo atto c ua ripetere: / perche, non ripeterlo, significa provare / la morte' (This act is to be repeated a thousand times: / because, not to 12 The 'commerce' of sex is no jonf(er the innocent exchange as discovered in the 'borgatc', but rather has become pan of the nco-t~lpitalist 'nuova prcistoria': 'vcro, il Possesso, / prctestllalc, il Scsso' (Possession, true / Sex, pretcxtllal, 'Poesie mondane', 614), prefiguring Pasolini', 1V1arcusian aUitudcs of the "nos and the elaborate economics of possession in Pe/mlio.
174
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
repeat it means feeling / death) (636). 'Una disperata vitalit:i Ill' builds to a nostalgic description of masturbation which is cast in similar terms, and which again is an act of a reified narcissistic libido devoid of a real object or economy, but also a necessary affirmation of the subject's vitality: sono corso l· . ·1011 cimitero vecchio I· . ·1 ,. eompicre, e a ripctere, lino ,.1 sangue I' a th) pi':l dolee della v ita, io solo (733-4)
(I ran l ... J to the olu cemetery I... 1/ to carry out, and blood / lite's sweetest act, / me alone)
\0
repeat, till I urew
Sexuality and blood are disturbingly related at several other points, as in the depiction o[ the struggle in 'Poema per un verso tli Shakespeare': 'si potrebbe esse re incerti sc ccoito, sonno 0 dllello all'llltimo sangue' (you might be uncertain as to whether it is coitus, slecp or a duel to thc death, 706). A similar conjunction closes the poem 'Come in un vcio giallo', relating it: directly to the threat ofloss ofliiC and loss ofa meaningful poetry: non mi resta che "lfe oggetto ddla mia poesia la poesia, se tutto il res to Cormai sotto la sICra di una brutla morte. I.a carne vuole sangue. (7X<j; Orglll, 536)
er
(all that is left: to me / is to make poet ry the object of my poet ry, / if all t he rest in now under the sphere / oran ugly death. Flesh wants hlood.)
The rule of the libido produces the synthesis bet ween sex and death on the level of ideolog·y which is lacking in 'Vittoria'. The original t(lrmulation in 'La reald'--;--'Iibito t~lr Iicito'-is f(lllowed by another dramatic declaration: 'sesso, morte, passione politico, / I... 1T.a mia vita / non possiede altro' (sex, death, political passion, / [... j My life / has nothing else, 637). Similarly, along·side the identification with the Jews ofIsrael runs just such a conflictual, political, and erotic desire f()r the 'disereditali L... Jfigli' (disinherited I ... ] sons) of the PalestinianJordanians (780). [3 In the trinity of sex, death and ideology, through whieh the violence and introverted negativity of the libidinal impulse is sublimated into an ideology ruled by passion and thus equally prone to 13 Sce also 'Coccodrillo' (2089), 'Egli 0 tu' (1,·u,sulllanllr, 833): 'un chrco Ji elczioI1e / (ma che pur) am are carnc araba, csclusivamentc), (a Jew hy choice / (hut who can love Arab flesh, only) ).
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
I75
violence and reification, the work of subjectivity within the figuration of the father-son's body reaches an apotheosis. Two further motif.., in Rosa are worth noting. On the one hand, discourses of the body are not exclusively or directly sexual. There is an undercurrent of physical violence which is best illustrated by the fear of lynching looming over thc persecuted figure of thc 'divcrso'. In 'Poesie mondanc', thc poet opposcs 'mitezza' (gcntleness) to mystification: Guardo con I'occhio d'un'immaginc gli addctti allinciaggio. Osscrvo me stesso massacrato (621) (1 watch with the eye I of an image, the experts in lynching. I I observe my slaughtered sell)
Similarly, 'J.a pcrsccuzionc' provokcs a particular 'angoscia dellinciaggio' (fear oflynching) (665), and 'La couvade' (I907-9) narrates a tense encounter with a g;roup of Ctscists where violence is fatalistically risked and avertcd by chance. Thc death inherent in the body as a corollary to Eros is not, then, simply an idea or an image of negativity. The sensc of mutilation is lived as immediate. '4 On thc othcr hand, the ligures of the body seen and dcsired in the 'ragazzi' arc often perceived through a (I.onghian) 'way of sceing' as sculpted or even ahstract /()rms in movement, embodiments of pattern alltl energ'y, as much as bodies, irreducihle presences (Trento, I990). The trans/i)rmation of the real father into symbol, or category of being is chartcd in anothcr uncollected poem, 'Teoria dei due paradisi' (B2, J 1) T8-2J), later adapted in Teorema, 74-79. its pscuJo-mathematical structurc and meaning suggest the deployment of synthetic systems rather than oforg'anic mimesis in dealing with reality. The 'theory' is a corrective reading of the ostensibly autobiographical fact of the self\ obsession with the mother since earliest childhood. The pocm asserts that there was an even earlicr period, the 'first l'araJise', which was undcr the sign of the tather. But there is very little room afforded here to autobiography. Each 'character'-the 'father' and thc 'First Father', the 'mother' and the 'mothers', thc 'baby' who is split into Cain and Abel-and each of the loci of this parablc-the 'first' and 'second' Paradises, both lost, and the 'first' and '~econd' Bells-arc cyphers, stripped bare of personal association, ornament and description, and relcntlessly reiterated in a hybrid ofOIJ Testament, tragic and scientific styles. The masquerade, set in such a clearly allegorical or anagogical 14 On 'Jinciaggio', scc Dadoun, 1980; Rinaldi, 1990, 157; "n" Ch, 2 §7,
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
rhetoric, is identical to Teorema, whose texts constantly insist that temporal sequence and realistic description are irrelevant, and that the members of the family are immediately recognizable as archetypes. The 'Guest' mysteriously releases repressed transgressive desire in each of the characters, and then withdraws, leaving each to compensate for his absence with secondary objects of desire (Teorema, 95-I07). Desire is always formulated through the body (Teorema, 42, 67, 81-2), and through the dual role of the 'ospite' as father and mother in onc (Teorema, 29-30, 38,46,73). With the exception of Em ilia, all the characters attempt to substitute the compromised father's body, which is then sublimated into failed art (Pietro), catatonic inertia (Odctta) and arbitrary sexual encounters (Lucia). However, Paolo, the father-only named when his authority has dissolved through his bodily desire (Teorema, 80)-sublimates his desire into a radical ideological response, giving his factory to his workers and literally exposing himself as a statement of scandal (cf. 'La crocifissione'). The transf(mnation ofthe figure of the father through transgressive desire is also the archetypal moment examined in the play Alla/Ju/a:::.iortl" where the 'scandalo' is in the reversal of the 'normal' father-son connict. The father gradually becomes the son ('il padre sei lu. / 10 sono il bambino', you're the father. / I'm the hahy, Alla/Julazione, 223, and er 192, 208, ;n 8), desiring to be killed, not to kill. The eventual murder of the son is constantly prefigured by the disquietinJ:!,' presence of the body ofthe son to the father: E' la presenza stessa dclliglio, inf:llt i, che mette in scompiglio la socicd. Il membro fresco, umile, assetato, scandalizza per se stesso (Allhhu/uzione, 2(6) (Indeed, it is the very presence of the son / that upsets the order of society. / His cool, humble, thirsty member / is a scandal in itself)
Indeed, the play open with a mysterious dream in which the f;lther experiences a shadowy premonition of desire through a glimpse of the phantasm of the son's body. AjJabulazione reverses and intensifies the trauma of becoming the father. Two very different poems, 'Coccodrillo' (2085-93) and '11 PCI ai giovani!!' (1851-63), retain the unstable dynamic between father and son, and continue its displacement towards a political praxis. 'Coccodrillo' contains an analysis of '1' Autorita eserfitata dal padre-fascista'
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
(the Authority exercised by the father-a fascist, 2086), which is transferred to the self as he becomes father-'la prima crisi vera della sua vita / [ ... ] perche per la prima volta si reseconto d'essere un padre' (the first true crisis of his life / [ ... ] because for the first time he realized he was a father, 2087). The students of 1968 arc, again, both sons and fathers to him. '11 pcr ai giovani!!' develops the polemic, attacking the students for being 'bourgeois father-sons', caught by their double potential as bourgeois and Marxist. Authority becomes a more specifically political power, and the means of radical change is seen in the appropriation of the revolutionary, oppositional father, the pcr, rather than in an aping of bourgeois power; in the good father rather than the bad f~lther. Trasumanar, the poems from Medea, and the remakes of Nu()va, follow this line of a highly politicized, highly performative poetry, in which politics is, however, misread through the eccentric categorizations produced by earlier suhjective mythologies amI desires surrounding the Etther and the body. Despite the hostility of'lI per ai giovani!!' to the students, which in Cld was only partial in any case, there is a ccrtain political optimism in 'traSllI1Ul1lil1" around the possihility of action, coupled with a pessimism over the possihility of the self's participation in it. The key image, Elmiliar ti·om 'Picasso', 'Pocta delle ceneri' and elsewhere, is of immersion in the magma, of bodily, fctishistic commitment to the struggle as the only route to radical action:
I Kcnnedy I hai gcttato, come il migliorc degli studenti degli Stati Uniti, il tuo corpo nella lotta (,Egli 0 tu', 835) (I Kennedy I you have hurled, / like the best American students, / your body into lhc fi·ay)
1 giovani gettano, si, illor/) (Orpo nella loua (,Charta (sporea)', 93!j) (The young hurl, yes, their bOl~Y into the/i·ay)
Per natura sono dentm la misl'hia per etd ne .IOno fuori ('1"01 man chc trema', 9 (3)
(By natul·e I am in Ihe meftJe / kJI aKe I am outside it) This allows moments of genuine revolutionary fervour:
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
eio che eonta cil eorpo; la eui povcrta cgaranzia di ricchezza [... ] ma il eorpo ceol popolo il corpo ccol popolo il corpo ecol popolo ('T :orecehiabile', 917) (what matters is the body; / whose poverty is a guarantee of wealth / l ... ] hut the hody is with the people / the hody is with the people / the hody is with the people)
But the selfis cut offfrom the arena of such vitality, with his 'cor po vano come un sughcro che fa / che rifa, come se niente f()sse successo' (body empty as a cork that does / that does again, as if nothing had happened, 'Appunti per un'arringa senza senso', 973). The bodies of the intellectuals arc only vacuums: [Eisa j ehe ne cdi noi? Dieo delle nostre attuali persone, che pur son vivcnti, presenti e vive... 1.. ·1
I nostri corpi, EIsa, straeei hagnati, I ... 1seompaiono ('11 mondo salvato dai ragazzini (eontinuazione e line)', R7S) (IElsa 1 what ahout LIS? I mean our present personae, / that are srillliving, present and alive ... I... J / I Our hodies, Eisa, soaked rags, l.. ·1 are disappearing)
A similar air of decay, of a split between self and body, pervades Medea poems such as 'J .ungo le rive dell'Eufrate' ('il sesso (proprio in quanto parte del corpo)/ c degradato I... / ed c un po' buff()', the sex (precisely because part of the body) / has degraded I ... 1and it is a bit silly, 1880); and hoth 'Osscssione sotcriologica' (1894-6) and 'Dopopranzo nclla regione di Kayseri' (1905), and '(ierarchia' (Trasumanar, 1031), where the poet is simply 'an old man'. Similarly, Nu()v{l is also poetry of a tlisemhodied self: In 'Ciant tla li ciampanis' (1084), the self returns 'sensa cuarp' (without a hody). In 'Li Ictanis dal hid fi Ill' (1070), the old man contemplates 'il me cuarp / sensa etit ne pudour' (my body / ageless anti shameless). Gradually even the elements of continued faith in the essential power of the body are degraded. Dialogue with young fascists, in 'Saluto e augurio' (1176--82), and also in 'Introduzione' (1053-5), is justified by the bodily authenticity of their violence: 'fassis'c ta l'anima e tal cu.drp' (fascists in their soul and in their body', 1054). The book itself, described in 'Introduzione' as a 'cuarp drenti un cuarp' (body within a body, 1055) would seem to partake of this dubious authenticity. And one ofthe most powerful protest poems, which owes something to the famous 'corsaro'
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
179
article on the disappearance of the fireflies (Se 128-34), is the rewrite of'Mostru 0 pavea?' (1136-8), where ecological decay and destruction of the transformative elements of the landscape spill over into the vitality of the flesh which is now dirty, worm-eaten and corrupt, 'a sa ama doma che se ch'a costa' (it knows how to love only what it costs, 1138). In 'Charta (Sporca)', a similar uecay of the bouy and its political potential degrades even the old trope of crucifixion as a figure of subversIon: Il cor pO (ogni corpo), coperto di eroste, ed eternamente croeitlsso (non c'e nientc da Eire!) C preso per scherzo (l)Jl» (The hody (every hody), covered in scahs, ilnd eternally crucified / (there's not hing you eall do!) is taken in jest)
All the imagery of the body in these texts is already ideological, and inevitably once more int(lrms and is in(lrmed by the casting of the roles of f:lther and son. As in RI/XII, there is never a simple attachment of onc htbc\ to one body. There are constant paradoxical inversions of roles ('I hll"Schke', 8S(I); and Illulriplc associations so Ihatthe self can be son and brother at one moment ('I1mondo salvato dai ragazzini', 874), and on the threshold bet ween Euher and son al another: 'non abhiamo tauo intiltti ill tempo a essere callivi tigli / che giii siamo cattivi padri' (indeed we were not in time to he bad sons / and here we are already had lathers, IJ39). In 'Sui path'i' (Met/ell, 140; B2, 11)10--11), the tlther creates new (at hers hy default, through error and ignorance amI disreg-ard for the laws ('insomma, quesli giovani padri, ne hanno bue di tutti i colori', well, these young f:tthers, they've reall y messed up). However, unlike in NOXIl, there is a genuine allempt to develop a hierarchy of archetypal figures and thus an incipient ~malysis of power in a strictly political sense. The poem '(ierarchia' (1031-S) f()lIows, (i'om the perspective of the t()reign yet familiar Brazil ('mia terra natalc', my native land), a Dantesque journey through 'il cerchio piu basso dc\la Gerarchia' (the lowest circle of the llierarchy) which is yet another search for sexual gratification in the impure. But here the search is politicized by casual confessions: 'io sono comunista, e; io sono sovversivo; / faccio il soldato [ ... ] per lottarc contro i sovversivi e torturarli' (I am a communist, and; I'm a subversive; / I became a soldier l... 1to fight against subversives and torture them, 1033). This provokes the insight that powcr transcends simple political allegiance, and inevitably accrues to the catcgory of the old:
180
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Non si puo sfuggire al destino di possedere il Potere [... ] Accuso i vecchi di avere accettato la vita (e non potevano non accettarla, ma non ci sono vittime innocenti) (1034)15 (There is no escaping the destiny of attaining Power / [... ] I accuse the old of having accepted life / (and they could not not accept it, but there are no / innocent victims)
Furthermore, the role of chance-'c COS! per puro caso che un ()ra~ilian()
e fascista e un altro sovversivo' (it is thus by pure chance that onc Brazilian is a fascist and another a subversive, I034)-fixes an impenetrable force at the centre of power: Gosi in cima alia Gerarchia, lrovlIl'ambiguila, ilnodo inestriwbile. (I03S) (Thus althe zenilh oFlhe Hierarchy, / Ijind (/./IIbif!,ui/jl, Ihe incxtrjw.b/c knot)
The new quality of this vision of power resides in the impotence of the individual, who is caught in grand 'political' discourses and determined by them and by their forms, and the father-son dyad is the filrmal matrix for expressing these determinants. The sell' remains responsible tilr his/her choices-hence, Sartre-but is ultimately unable to assign them autonomous political significance. All the poems which address the student movements reinfilrce this synthesis of the mythical and the political. 'Trasumanar e organizzar' (1)04-5), 'T ,'ortodossia' (990-2) and its 'Rifacimento' (r025-7)' and much oflhe section 'I.a restaurazione di sinistra' (963-79) warn that there is an arhitrary relation hetween power and protest. The paternal institution or the PCI, the new orthodoxy or Church, which is the only pseudo-alternative to the old onc, the 'inquietanti analogic' (disturhing analogies, ()60) between the 'ragazzi' and their fathers, and the recurrent paradox 'e tu ohbedisti disobbedendo' (and you obeyed by disobeying, 1)6J, 102 [; er 'Una disperata vitalita', 744): these arc all variations on the theme of political inexorability, in which only knowledge and consciousness ('coscienza') of the impossihility of meaningful action di~tinguishes categories from each other. 'Poesia della tradizione' is the most powerful expression of the paradoxical rule of 'coscienza' and 'conoscenza' (knowledge): the students addressed there are unaware of history and of poetry, and are hence condemned never to exceed banal formulae and empty gestures (960-2). But Pasolini's performance of the role of 15 Pasolini's own footnote here simply reads 'Sarlre'.
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
paternalistic castigator here is also studiedly banal and empty, imbued with ambivalence and signs of dissolution. Indeed the strongest index of the latent instability of the poem's apparently merciless critique of the young radicals is its controlled ugliness and incoherence, precisely as it evokes the values of beauty and truth of the grand tradition of its title. The first person voice thus implicitly rejects, through irony and through foregrounding the performative quality of the text, his own self-imposed voice of power, of the father. 16 The father remains the dominant symbol of power. 'L'orfano Von Spreti' (983-5),17 describes the death of a father as a liberation: 'non c cosa dOl tutti i giorni restar orfani, / sentire ncl sesso la liberazione dal padre' (it is not an everyday occurrence to be orphaned, / to feel in your sex liberation from the father, (83). But even this personal and sexual rite of passage is now politicized by the symbolism of the father, and by the importance of the boy's g'estures at the funeral: 'I'intero sistema dcl mondo era in g10CO' (the entire system of the world was in play, 984). In the 'Tetro entusiasmo' section of Nu()va, the attitude to political reality, and hence the deployment of images of political vision, moves on somewhat. The importance of the 'figli-ragazzi' (boy-sons) remains paramount, as in the 'Gennaricllo' section ofI/~ 13-07, but none of the optimism (even compromised optimism) is left: 'i piu giovani figli / degli operai avevano ormai sorrisi I borghesi' (the youngest: sons I of the workers now wore hourgeois I smiles, 'Significato del rimpianto', 1154). The tone alternates between onc of hitter protest and onc of intimate resignation and failure: Ma hasla con qucsto film ncorealistico. Ahhiamo ahiurato da ci() che esso rappresenta. (' I ,a reccssione', I 1(3) (Bur that's enough of this nco-realist tilm. / Wc have renounced what it stands I()f)
'Saluto e augurio' attempts to rc-import the category of the father as a fertile political instrument, but the urgency and bitterness of the dialogue precludes it:
t.. ·lIa mari. I paris [... ]. 16 For a dose reading of'La poesia <.Idla tra<.lizionc', sce Gordon, 1995b.
Count Karl-Maria von Spreti, German Ambassador to Gualemala, was kidnapped on 31 March '970 and killed on 5 April by left-wing guerrillas. 17
r82
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
ma son dutis robis dal passat. Vuei: difiendi, conserva, prea. Tas (I 178) ([ ... ] the mother. / The fathers [ ... ] / / but it is all stulY from the past. / Today: to defend, to preserve, to pray. Shut up)
A more active synthesis between the father, the body and the desiring subject takes place earlier, in the apparently apolitical context of the poems for Maria Call as. 18 The key image of these poems is of a lack, a 'vuoto del cosmo' (cosmic void), which divides the subject from Maria, from the possibility of intimacy, and ultimately from any communication of desire. And the void is repeatedly identified as an absence of the father: Chi c'c, in qucl VUOTO nu. COSMO, che tu rorti nei tuoi dcsidcri e conosci? Cc il padre, si, lui! ('Timor di me?', 1013) (Who is there, in that COSMIC vom, / whom you carry in your desires and whom you know? / There is the father, yes, him!) ci<) che conla c lui, il Padre, si, lui: 10 dice uno che non 10 conosce non ne sa nulla, non 10 ha mai viSlo, non gli ha mai parlalO, non I'ha mai JScoltalo, non l'ha mai amato, non sa chi C, non sa se c'c (,RihicimenlO', 10'7) (what matters is him, the Father, yes, him: / one who does nol know him says so / who knows nothing of him, who has never seen him, / has never spoken 10 him, / has never listened 10 him, / has never loved him, knows not who he is, knows not ifhe is)
CalIas is pictured as nurtured hy the presence of the Father which she attempts to find in the poet. For him, the lack is a terrifying weak point, where all the imperfections ofthe self arc concentrated. The ahsence of the father, in a manner which returns to the very earliest of his poetry, determines the search for a secondary Other, in himself or God, in the body or poetry. But the failure of each model Cal POSH) dell' Altro I per IH Contained in the last four sections of Trasl/mulltlr (and Met/ca), they intermingle "nd overlap with some of the most highly polilicizcd poems. On I'a.,olini and Callas, sec Clement, 1980; Siciliano, 19H1a, 403--7. On this cycle, sce Cigni, H190; Rinaldi, 19112, 350-7. TraslI1nanar also contains two intense lyrics ((lr Ninctto (923-{'), recalling the stilllargcly un.1'IJ11cttn (20 Aug. published sequence of 118 sonnets dedicated to Ninctto, L 'h 11 bby 197I-Feb. 1973; in part in B2, 2341-H). See Sicilano, 198Ia, 410-13.
"t!
THE BODY AND THE FATHER
me c'e un vuoto del cosmo', in the place of the Other / for me there is a cosmic void, 1015) is laid bare by the desire ofMaria, and the result is terror: 'e 10 sgomento, piu terribile, ben piu terribile / di avere un corpo separato, nei regni dell'essere' (it is the dismay, more terrifying, much more terrifying / of having a separated body, in the realms of being, 1015); 'il mio cor po e attratto dal pieno / dove gia cia che regna e la morte' (my body is drawn to the plenitude / where that which reigns is death, 1017). Lack is written across the body of the subject who can only compensate with already compromised secondary plenitudes. Here, in the dichotomy between the subject and an idealized interlocutor, as much as in the chaotic rhetorical pseudo-synthesis of the political poetry, the desperate search for subjective plenitude finds its emblematic climax, or at least its most distilled confrontation with the void.
8
Poetry into Cinema
Pasolini's poetry exhibits a remarkable range of strategic positions and tropes of poetic subjectivity, and, in its incessant modulation and transformation of these tropes, it constructs its own reception, or better, its own misreading. Its governing dynamic of polyvalent tensions mapped onto poetic language and form, poetic figures and discourses of desire, both produces an imprint of the multiple, intersecting planes of the work of subjectivity and evolves towards a redefinition of the poetic text as a permanently provisional form. This is poetry as process-'da farsi'-which produces an ambivalent subjective vitality through instability. It is a poetry subject to the provisionality of the text, but not onc dependent on a formalistic, ludic metatextuality, because t()rm is constantly and desperately anchored to sellhood as lived, hodily heing. Such a hybrid is profoundly fertile, with the t()rm of the text ceding' to the subjective, and the subject necessarily reborn and remade at every new formal turn. Each of the fi)Ur trajectories described in Part Tl have reflected this permanent palingenesis. Chapter 4 described the impulse to autobiography as it produced constant rd()rmulations of the self, governed not so much by sequential, narrative memory as by a fragmentary refraction of memory through unresolvable questions such as 'Chi fui?' (Who was I? 469) and 'Who is mc' (2056). In Chapter 5, the vision of history inherent to the poetry was, precisely, one of fluid analogy between past, present and future, in which all arc immanent and potentially subversive and subvertible within amI through the others. The subject takes its place as a similarly fluid phenomenon in poetic time, with the meaning of external apparatuses or institutions subordinated to their capacity to be themselves constantly reformulated. And in chapters 6 and 7, the figuration of the self in others, and of desire and ideology in both the body and the real or imaginary father, were read as modes of inscribing the subject only and paradoxicall y in an economy of projection and transformation. It is here that the repeatedly touted
POETRY INTO CINEMA
Pasolinian trope of contradiction, Fortini's 'sineciosi', acquires its most profound significance: as a figure which debars monumental and coherent closure, and demands movement, discontinuity, provisionality or some other form of poetical energy in a sort of quantum physics of poetic language. The subject is formed and deformed in the shifts of state and in the discontinuities and the readers' formation and def()rmation of the texts follow a parallel path. Neither is allowed to retain a unitary or verifiable cohesion. Each is caught up in misreading the other. To encapsulate, if it were possible, this layered work of subjectivity in Pasolini's poetry, we could turn to his enthralled 30-year-old recollection of the lectures by Roberto J .onghi that he attended as a student in Bologna in the HJ40S (I)escrizirmi di tiescriziolll, 251-5).' As slide followeu slide, the sequem:e of visual f()I'ms on screen captured something almost mystical: lilmio riconlo di quel corsol ~, in sinlesi, il riconlo di una eonlTapposizione 0 ncllo eOI1/"ronlo di 'fill·me'. Sullo schermo venivano inEmi proiettate delle diaposilive. Ilolali e i de\la~li dei lavori, eoevi e ese~uili nello slesso luog:o, di Masolino e di Masan:io. 11 cinema IlKivtl, sia pure in <.juanlo mera proiezione di fi'lOg:rafie. E a~iva nel senso che una 'inquadralura' rappresentanle un campione delmondo masoliniano . ·in quella conlinuil:l ehe c appllnto lipico del cinema··--si 'opponeva' drammalicamenle a una 'inquadralura' rappreseJHanle a sua volta un eampione delmondo Illasaccesco I... 1. 11 fj'ammento di un Illomlo f(.rmail: si opponeva tJuindi fisicamente, materialmente al frammento di un altro Illondo fi,rmale: una '(ill'ma' a un'altra 'till·ma'·I· .. 1 I.e Illeravig:liose clp,u:it'l istrioniche di I.on!\,hi, le sue ~ioielil:rie severe, non son null" in con fi'onto del suo lllCido, ullliil: ascett ismo di osservalorc del moto di fin·me. (f)csrrizilllli r/i dc.'(I'i;:.illlli, .l52, .l5S) (I my memory ofth
[ On Longhi ,mu Pasolini, scc Marchesini, 1992; Trento, 1990, 81-H2.
186
POETRY: A MOVEMENT OF FORMS
Longhi's marvellous performing abilities, his severe jeweller's art, are as nothing before his lucid, humble asceticism as an observer of the movement of forms.)
It is no coincidence that this extract, chosen to embody the expressive energy of Pasolini's poetry in the compelling 'moto di forme', also captures the essence of his vision of cinema.
PART III
Cinema: Tracking the Subject
The masks of film are so many emblems of authority
(Thcodor Adorno)
PASOLINI BEGAN shooting Accattone in October 1960. His move into film was the terminus ad quem ofthe I 958-<) crisis in his work, and in his public role, discussed in Part I. The attempt to create simulacra of in nocence and authenticity within literary language, begun in Friuli and carried over into his Roman work, had failed, and written language had become an alienating force, as he explained to Jean Duflot: '[Les] meditations poi:tiques ou romanesques interposaient entre la vie et moi une sorte de cloison symbolique, un ecran de mots' ('working in poetry or prose set up between life and myself a sort of symbolic barrier, a screen of words', Duflot, 1970, 17). Cinema seemed to afford an immediacy and plenitude, in its contact with real phenomena and its attenuation of symbolic representation, which in turn promised a parallel plenitude fc)r the subject. The founding internal dynamic ofPasolini's cinema is this triangulation between cinema as a privileged form of representation of reality, reality itscl f and subjectivity. It is clear from a very early stage, however, that such a dynamic is conditioned and often energized by external constraints. When Aaauonc almost collapsed after Fellini's refusal to continue backing it, Pasolini learned the first of many lessons in the compromises imposed by a collective, commercial and industrial medium such as film. Suhsequently, he strove to absorb and exploit the characteristics of the mcdium to set up a field of self-expression through its form. In this, of course, he was repeating a pattern familiar from his journalism and poetry; amI indeed, his work in film could usefully be understood as an attempt to rework and synthesize elements of both his cultural activism, with its play between expressivity and conditions of place, and his poetic work, with its spiralling exploration of the contours of selfexpression in an uneasy literary language. In his cinema, we find versions oft:he tropes of his poetry-autobiography, history, projective self-figuration, the body-and the equally familiar struggle to take on his medium, 'never to be afraid of where he is speaking'. The particular conjunction of the internal and external forces in cinema, however, makes t()r the development of a highly speeific and often more troubled language of expression, and a parallel metalanguage in his essays in film semiology (EE 169-301), which work in multiple, often overdetermined ways to imbricate subjectivity into the image- and the soundtrack of the cinema. It is this 'tracking' of the subject which will be followed here in Part Ill.
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
Six interlocking aspects of film discourse will be examined as channels for the work of subjectivity. The most striking initial evidence ofPasolini's need to confront the tendency ofthe medium to silence the first-person is found in his repeated assertions of authority, his attempts to subordinate the pro-filmic to that authority, and the parading within the films themselves of variously underscored markers of reflexivity (Ch. 9). A transposed and sublimated form of such direct selfreference is then shown in the attempt to appropriate and colour the technology and techniques of the medium for stylistic, subjective ends. Style does not mark the presence of the subjective so much as suggest its immanence across the filmic and the pro-filmic, within the syntagmatic forms of representation itself, and this conception of style as a subjective signifying practice follows a pattern similar to that evinced in Pasolini's poetry and indeed his later journalism (Ch. fO). A third axis follows the active role played by pre-filmic, intertextual genesis, through forms such as the screenplay, in determining the hermeneutic status of the film (Ch. 1 I). And this in turn leads to an investigation of two aspects of meaning in film with profimnd implications fi)r the location and impact of filmic sclfhood; metaphor (Ch. 12) and film-time (Ch. 13). In conclusion, all these axes arc sounded out together in a consideration of their impact on the construction of spectatorial subjectivity in Pasolini's cinema (Ch. 14). Cinema brought Pasolini success, even a certain degree of wealth, and, as we have seen, an ambition to succeed had been part of his makeup since his earliest work. Furthermore, since the decision 10 move into film was an openly strategic attempt to break out of an impasse in his literary and intellectual carecr, it was c1carly in part a 'cynical' move, in the sense he so carefully used later in describing his collaboration with Tempo illuslralo. But it was also in part utopian, a reaching out fi)r an absolute of expression and representation. It should be apparent" from the outset that these two impulses, whose interaction condition the nature of all his work, in film and elsewhere, after 1<)60, are fraught with difficulty, indeed are radically irreconcilable. Irresolution is the dominant register here, and as a result, the movement from individual to subject to subjectivity in his cinema is at its most emphatic but also its most insecure yet. To track the subject offilm in Pasolini is to track contours of anxiety.
9
Authority and Inscription Pasolini's heliefin his capacity to impose his voice on any medium, despite its constraints, was reaffirmed and indeed intensified by his experience with film. Hc repeatedly asserted his autonomy and authority as an 'auteur', confidently declaring his control over every aspect of the film-making process: I never conccived of making a him which would be the work of a group. I've always I hought ofa hIm as the work of an author, not only the script and the direction, but the choice of sets and locations, the characters, even the dothes-I dw()sc cverything. (Slack, )()69, J2) Je ne crois pas, jllsqll'aujourd'hui, aI'
And even in his theoretical eSS:lys, despite their wholesale adoption of a vocabulary of semiology which tends to privilege textuality over selfexpression, he steadLlstiy anti at times simplistically maintained his belief in the authorial voice: 'In quanto spettatori "semplici" non gllardiamo tanto per il sottilc I... 1. Noi ci identifichiamo semplicemente con I'autore, viviamo la sua visione' (As 'simple' spectators we do not go in for anything very clever [ ... 1. We simply identify with the author, we live his vision, FF 2In). The principal method Pasolini adopted to f()reground this almost patholog'ical insistence on the single origin of film discourse was to disrupt the naturalism of film: 'I hate naturalness. 1 reconstruct everything' (Stack, Jl)6l), 132). His attitude towards actors and acting is a good example, and his position could not he clearer: 'I am not interested in actors' (Stack, 1l)6l), 40); 'Chiunque pUG fare I'attore cinematografico' (Anyone can act in films, Lodato, 1977, 76: see Bertini, 1 l)7l), 3 r -51). And indeed, he often used non-professional [ On alllcuri,m, sce for example Lapslcy and Wcstlakc, 1988, 105-28; Wollcn, 1969, 74- 116 .
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
actors, usually friends and acquaintances, from both the 'borgate' and from Rome's literary milieux. 2 As with a number of other aspects of his cinema, this preference has its roots in neo-realism,3 but Pasolini's reprise of it works to undermine the naturalistic effects of nco-realist and traditional cinema in general. He disrupts the smooth mimesis and emotive naturalness of narrative cinema, what he would later call 'cinema di prosa' (prose cinema), and tends towards a raw, unpolished immediacy. Even in his personal rapports with non-professional actors, he set himself against the exploitative or professional pattern of traditional director-actor relations, and looked for an immediacy reminiscent in some ways of the pedagogic intimacy and innocence of the Friulan period. The exclusion of professional actors was, however, far horn consistent, and his uses and treatment of them reveals interesting insights into methods of achieving control over the medium. Some of the major actors he employed were Anna Magnani, who played 'Mamma Roma', Or son Welles, the director in La ri(()ua, Silvana Mangano and Alida Valli in Edipo, Tot() in Uuellaui e uccelli1li and the shorts Che (()sa S01l0 le nuvole? and I.a lerra vista dal/a tuna, Terence Stamp in Teorema, Maria Callas in Medea, and the list could continue to include Ugo Tognazzi, Pierre Clcmenti, Julien Beck among others. Some of these, such as Magnani and Stamp, were imposed by produccrs (Bertini, 1979, 37)· And the on-set clash between Magnani and Pasolini reg'arding their respective roles was difficult and at times traumatic. Pasolini's taped shooting-diary of Mamma Ronul, published in the screenplay, describes a wary process of failed coming to terms, with fhe director insisting on his right to total control over aCfion and intcrpretation in the face of the actress's disconcerted resistance and instinct ti)r characterization and continuity.4 2 The key players from the 'horgate' were Franco ond Sergio Cilli, Ninet\o Ihvoli, EUure Garol•• lu and Mario Cipriani. Intellectuals 'lI1d artists he used included I.aura Betti (several films); Srefano lJ'Arrigo, EIsa Mora11lc (Ar.·(IIlllmc); Paulo Volponi (Mall/lIla Roma); Enzo Siciliano (La fit-olla, Vallgeio); Eisa Dc
(.'lair;) . .1 Scc Bondanella, HJ90; Liehm, 1<)84; Marcus, 19H6, 22, and passim, l'lf all later rc/erences
to nco-realism. 4 'Le pause di Mam1/la R01/l,,: diario al registratore, 3-4 maggio 1962', Mamma R01/la, 133-52 (140- I, 147--<)). Sce also Bertini, 1979, 45-7. l~ ... an actor's account of working with Pasolini, sec Quintavalle, 1976, on Salo.
AUTHORITY AND INSCRIPTION
193
In several cases, a strategy similar to his 'misreading' of Gramsci and Shelley in 'Le ceneri di Gramsci', and any number of other figures discussed in Chapter 6, can be discerned in his use of actors. They are displaced from their 'professional' capacity as players of fictional roles to connote some perceived inherent, iconic quality or meaning. Orson Welles in La ricotttl, for example, is used less as an actor than as a director, or rather the Director, and the Director as self (he is clearly an autobiographical figure) (Plate I). His portrayal bypasses mimesis by way of direct reproduction, just as thc extras in the film are played by real extras, and just as in Pasolini's theory, cinema reproduces 'realta loul ((JurI' (reality in itselt~ EE 205), unmediated. Welles also acts as a cypher set up in apposition to his role. His very presence and fame as a cinematic icon inf()I'ms the film with meaning by association. This is also the case with TOt
194
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
which will be discussed further below, to play down diegesis and the suspension of disbelief, and thereby throw emphasis onto image, duration and presence. The destabilization of mimetic acting is reinforced by a deliberate refusal of preparation, emotional or otherwise, in the actors. Like Fellini, and in another neo-realist calque turned against naturalist ends, Pasolini would instruct actors only while shooting was in progress, producing an unnatural spontaneity out of tune with situational realism. The first scene of Accattone is a striking example of this method, showing a series of forcedly laughing faces which mock and disturb the viewer as well as Accattone, complementing the oppressive sunlight which dominates the landscape, as it will throughout the film. In a 1965 interview, Pasolini explained how in order to achieve a suitable alienating effect of this kind he would feed a line to an actor ('buongiorno', 'hello'), and later dub it with something quite different Cti odio', 'I hate you').7 And post-synchronized dialogue itself, yet another feature associated with nco-realism, is a further important element in his campaign against the interpretative, narrative force of acting. Out of step with the 'nouvelle vague' and most contemporary cinema, P;lsolini not only did not regret the necessity for dubbing, but positively valued it as another guarantor of the unnatural dissonance of the whole, and of the monovalcncy of the speaking subject: '1 think dubbing enrichcs a character: it is part of my taste for pastiche; it raises a character out of the zone of naturalism' (Stack, 1969, 39).H Dubbing and counterpoint between aClOr ;mt! dialoguc contribute significantly to }>asolini's most e1ahorate cxploration of his suhjective anti-naturalism, La ricoua. The sequence of the throw-away comic refrain, 'la corona' (the crown), f(lllowing the Director's call t(lr the crown of thorns, is onc ofthe film's most ironic and potentially blasphemous moments, one Pasolini had to defend in court against the accusation of 'contempt for the State Religion': Il grido di 'Corona, corona' cla prima avvisaglia della superlicialitii incrcdula, scettica, plebea, del mondo che circonda Stracci c sanl testimonc del suo martirio. 11 tono noncurante, 0 pow inerente, non si riferisce penl, qui, tanto alia 'corona', quanta all'andamento tipico Jellavoro del set; e, se vuo\c sfouerc qualcuno, sfotte la spocchia del regista, monosillabico, paratattico e annoiato [... ]. (Guadagni, 19% 47) 7 'Interview with Pasolini hy J. B1uc', Film Comment, Falll96s, cited in Bcrtini, 1979,40. 8 See also 1 Jia/IIKhi, 6!l5---
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195
(the cry 'the crown, the crown' is the first skirmish with the incredulous, sceptical, vulgar superficiality of the world that surrounds Stracci and will witness his martyrdom. The dismissive, or inattentive tone is not, however, so much about the 'crown' as about the typical nature of work on set; and if it is trying to mock anyone, it is mocking the arrogance of the monosyllabic, paratactic and bored director [ ... 1.)
I,a ricotla is, in part, a satire of relations between the director as artist and the constraints of production and promotion. The figures of the non-professional actor-extras, the production team and its paraphernalia, the t()()lish journalist, the archetypal director, and the proti)Undly authentic and alienated hero Stracci, represent the spectrum of Pasolini's operations on set. In his defence of the 'Corona' incident, he goes on to indicate a moment of epiphany in the film, when the crown is wrested hack from the superficialities of the satirized film world and reclaimed as sacred by the hand ofthe real director, himself: 10, diret tamente, come autore, intcrvengo quando-spente le irriverenti grida-Ia corona viene alzata dOl due malli di operaio, contro il bianeheggiante panorama della cit ... , dominandolo. (Guadagni, 11)<)4,46) (I intervellc directly as 'alltem' when, OIlCC the cries have died away, the crown is lined up by two worker's hands, set dominant against the whitening panorama orthe city.)
This sequence, then, is a paradigm of the agonistic relation between director and mediulll, shown up by a moment of dissonance, followed by a retllJ'n to harmony, authenticity and control.!) Several other aspects of film-making arc subject to similar effects of controlled dissonance as that produced by the use of actors. For example, the choice of music t(lr deliberate effects of counterpoint with the image or narrative is a striking feature of his most successful films. 10 Similarly, Pasolini's own conceptions of costume design took on an increasingly significant role with the pastiche of Renaissance iconography in I,ll ri(otta and Vanp:e/o, and later the elaborate, but markedly inauthentic or unt'amiliar creations tor the myth films Edipo and Medea. From Tellrema on, Pasolini even acted as his own cameraman (Gcran], 1981, 100). And finally, but crucially, since it binds the issue of authority most directly to the bedrock of reality represented ~ For several accounts ofl'asolini's relationships with his producers and crew, sec Bcrtini,
uJ7<),
10 7-21 4·
The use of music as ;t limn of commentary on other aspects or the films is particularly evident in the anthology of sacred music that hacks Vange/o. After 1965, l'asoIini often collaborated with Ennio Morriconc. See Bcrtini, 1<)79,51-69. .0
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
on/by film, the careful search for locations, validated as an autonomous discursive practice by the release of several reconnaissance films, is also constructed as a hermeneutic practice undertaken by the author. Sopraluoghi in Palestina per 'Il Vange/o secondo Matteo' (1964; cf. Vange/o, 21-4; Rosa, BI, 757---(3), Appunti per unjilm sull'/ndia (1968), and Appunti per un 'Orestiade afi'icana (1970) all show the enquiring, creative author figure as the pivotal co-ordinator of the diffuse elements which will make up the signifying matrix of the film-in-thc-making. It is clear that, in general, Pasolini's cinema forcibly tends towards the non-collaborative, as Bertini pointedly asserts: 'Pasolini's cinema can therefore be qualified as a work of'manipulation', not of ' coliab orarion' (translated from Bertini, 1979,36). A single vision is all, and other individuals just as much as production structures are to he neutralized in some way. He manipulates, disturbs and renews the pro-filmic in the hope that it will serve him as ,tn idiom t(H' self-expression, much as he had, for example, created his own intensely cxpressive Friulan dialect, flexible enough to challenge the worn, picturesque tradition of dialect poetry and later to adopt the ideological baggage of popular song without sacrificing expressivity and control. Both cinema and Friulan represent, initially at least, languages in privileged, evcn mystical contact with reality on the one hand, and with the self on the other. Fundamental differences divide the two, of course, and not least the evidcnt tension between the mass audience of cinema and Pasolini's impulse towards intimate self--expression, as opposed to the symbiosis betwcen self and addressee in Meglill. Nevertheless, it is no surprise to note a preponderance of images ami topoi and patterns of self-represcntation Elmiliar from past aesthetic or alll'obiogTaphical moments such as the Friulan period. It~ then, the rhetoric of Pasolini's appropriation of the pro-filmic is a reductio ad unum, or at least: attempts to be so, the single voice it creates is filled out and reinforced by a range of reflexive references which needs to be elucidated. In moving from the authority to control the medium of film to the characteristics of the films themselves, we move from the pro-filmic to the filmic, but we remain within the bounds of a cohesive attempt at self-expression or selfrepresentation, fully conscious of the processes and language of that medium. Two primary categories of self-reference operate in Pasolini's films; self-representation and archetypal figuration. The first consists either of personal appearances on film or veiled autobiographical selfportraiture. The range and nature of these allusions recall elements of
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197
autobiographical fragmentation and transposition discussed with reference to poetry in Chapter 4, but they operate with less fluidity and less specificity. There are straightforward instances of non-diegetic appearances in documentaries such as Comizi d'amore and Le mura di Sana, where Pasolini is both street-interviewer and voice-over, fully identified with the intellectual project of the films, mediating, respectively, between attitudes to sexuality and between cultural histories. 11 More interesting are his spare commentaries and interrogations of landscapes and people in the location films which instigate a dialogue between himself and a reality loaded with potential meaning, or potential filmic articulation of meaning. As is generally the case with documentaries of this kind, the voice-over, and the corresponding real-time presence of the author, create a sort of metalanguage which gives a pseudo-unitary and ahistorical coherence to the self, as it frames and deciphers fragments of reality (J .apsley and Wcstlake, H)88, I7 1-2). In the main hody of his work, his most significant personal appearances arc in "·dipo and 11 /)ewmeron. In "·dipo, Pasolini appears as the IIigh Priest and spokesperson filr the citizens of Thebes. His long speech is in fact made up of extended quotations from Sophoeles' Oedipus l)lrltn11 llS, and thus his mediating dramatic role hetween Oedipus and the people is echoed hy his mediation between the original text and the film's rc-reading of it. The moment of his appearance thus hecomes 'highly metacinematic' (Greene, 11)1)0, ISI), as he locates himself at the centre or a transfilrmative and figural interaction between past and present which is, as will he seen below, fundamental to the signifying practice of his cinema. In 11 f)ccllrm:rorl, Pasolini casts himself explicitly as an author! artist figure, just as he will play Chaucer in I rauonti di Canterhury. Here he is Giotto's pupil, whose progTessing work on a fresco cycle in a Neapolitan church frames the second halfofthe film.'2 The stories and characters Three other doeumentaries are partly or wholly attrihutable to Pasolini: the first half of ",""i" (, (il), mnsis' int( of newsreel imat(es aemmpanied oy Pasolini's commentary and poems read hy Jlassani and GUllUSO (the second half was hy Giov;tnni Guarcsehi); Dtldici diamhrc, made in HJ72 'fmm an idea "fPier I)aol" I)asolini' hy 'Lotta Continua', and partly lilmed hy him; and the unedited Lo seiop",o dCKIi spuzzilli (or Appunli per un rOlllanzo .11I!l'iIllI/lOntlczzll; Boyer, 1987, )47), made in HnO by Pasolini I(H· the 'Comitato cineasti italiani contro la repressione' (Committee of Italian Cincastcs Against Repression). '2 The DUlltllenm story (vi. 5) from which this character is taken (Boecaceio, 1966,73&-40) has Giotto himself as a character, and Pasolini initially offered the part to hoth Paolo Volponi and Sandro Penna. When he took on the role himself at the suggestion of Sergio Citti, he changcu the role to that of Giotto's pupil without altering its symbolic impact. Sec Gcrard, 1981,86--87; Naluini, [(JS9, 351. I I
I,ll
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
of the second half are framed by and emerge from the bustling marketplace outside the church, where the artist ventures to find incidents and models for his 'realist' art. A significant shot shows him observing people through a frame-viewfinder shaped by his fingers, as if both painter and cameraman. IJ If the parallel urawn in Edipo is latent and based on poetic, or at least textual reading, in the Detamerrm Pasolini instigates a figurative triple analogy between the vivid, realistic aesthetic of Giotto, Boccaccio's energctic realism, and the operation of synthesis represented by the popular and celebratory carnal realism of his film. He interpreted his presence thus: Cosa significa la mia prcscnza nel J)aumeroll? Significa avcr idcologizzato l'opcra aLtraverso la coscienza di cssa: coscienza non puramenlc cSlctica, ma, attraverso il vcicolo della fisicid, cioc di lutlo il mio modo di esscrci, lotale. (Naldini, (()R9, 351) (What does my presence in Ihe '])ecameron' mcan? 11 mcans having ideologized the work through a consciousness of it: Ilot a purely aesthetic consciousness, hut, through the vehide o("physicality, Ihat is ofevcry aspect of my way of being wholly present.)
In other words, he saw his bodily presence as a strategically deployed channel between a subjective vision and total immersion-··-'esserci'-in the modes and ideology of medieval realist art. It is worth noting, as a caveat, Pasolini's casual altitude lowards his acting. As already indicated, he only stepped in to play Giolto/(iio\to's pupil at the last minute. In Carlo J.izzani's lIl"obho (H)60), he halfjokingly took on a bit-part as ,l gUll-loling gangster 'J ,eandro 'er Monco'. '4 His lack of interest in acting' in general extends 10 his own experience, and his appearances arc important more as spurs to and paradigms for subjective readings of many other aspects of his film work than as exceptional foci of self-reference. Volponi as Giotto would have retained strong auto-referential impact, just as in lIaelluai e uaellini, Franceso Leonetti's voice ofthe crow sounds very much like Pasolini's, both in timbre and attitude. '5 What hoth J~'diplJ and JI Daumcron (and / racl"fmli di Canterbury) do underscore is the alliance between subjective inscription and the history of cinematic form, through its orig'in in texts (Sophocles, Boccaccio) or icons (Giotto), or aesthetic practices I] The same parallel was famously drawn by lIenjamin, 1973,235-40. '4 A still from the lilm was later puhlished in 1f1("IIIPO, JO November ,,)61, when \';lsolini was accused of armed rohhery of a petrol s[;ltion! Sce Siciliano, 19!1Ia, 30211; Naldini, 19HI), 245 ff. 15 Some reviewers assumed the voice was Pasolini's (e.g. Biraghi, 11)66).
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199
(tragedy, realism). In this context, the strain subtending his appearances, produced by their detached, discontinuous or framing relation to the diegesis of the film, suggests a more problematic and incomplete process of inscription than that confidently offered in his own explanation of his 'esserci, totale'. Self-representation is also t()lmd Pasolini's films in less direct forms of autobiographical self-portraiture, oftcn based on oblique allusion. Examples would include the casting of his mother, Susanna Colussi1'asolini, as the older Virgin Mary in Vange/o, echoing the identification between self and Christ in his poetry; the entrancing prologue and epilogue of EdiplI, loosely based on his birth and early childhood; [6 the director played by Orson Welles in I,a riwttll, whose status as an ironic, collapsing version ofPasolini is made explicit by his ostentatious recital of part of a poem from the screenplay of Mamma Rllma; the crow in l/ae!faai e u{ceflini, as already indicated; the unnamed colonial teacher in the unfilmed screenplay If padre .l"ei-va!'.j.{io who conflates Pasolini's vision of the '1 'hird World with his f()rmative intellectual experiences as a teacher and inspirer of young poets and artists in the 1 940s. These instances show fragments of t he self's history, or of its historiography, synecdochically transposed into film. Such transpositions are of course often invisible to the uninitiated spectator, but their presence is often cryptically signalled, as occurs in I,a rirollll, and in Uadfaai e urcellini, where the crow is identified by an intertitle as 'a left-wing intellectual Film he/im' the dealh or l'almiro 1fJglitlui'. The signals thus point more to problems of subjectivity and tilmic autobiography than to the specific subject and its history. This is confirmed by the persistent use of counterpoint"s to such signals, which create a strain on the selfrepresentation not unlike that apparent in Pasolini's personal appearances. For example, the implicit identification in Vangefo between author and Christ, via the mother-Virgin Mary, is countered and complicated hy suhsidiary analogies with Judas (Baranski, 1985a, 95-8); the power of I,a riwlla lies in its depiction of the wf/upse of the self; and the crow of lhceflllui e u(cellini is similarly already a sclf-in-crisisliterally disembodied and later disembowelled-and is clearly not quite and not always a simple mouthpiece for a fixed 'auteur'. Patterns of detachment and self-disavowal within the retlexive tropes of each film prepare for less rigid and less author-hased readings of the work of [6 Even wirhin the main myth narrative of Etlipo,J ocasta's c.Iwelling was c.Icsigncc.l as a copy of Pasolini's mothcr's home, accorc.ling to Dante Ferrerti (set designer, with Luigi Scaccianoce); !lertini, J()79, [69·
200
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
subjectivity in film, opening' up for interrogation a field of other possible subjectivities (filmic, spectatorial), through a weakened figuring of the single subject. The second categ'ory of self-reference, that of archetypal figuration, takes as its starting-point the contrapuntal, negative figures of subjectivity noted above as qualifiers to the first category. These figures leave the self latent, as a shadow dispersed across certain archetypal configurations of characters, a spectrum of identity and difference. For example, if the prologue and epilogue of Edipo introduce a strong implicit autobiographical identification, they also configure the main myth of Oedipus as an interrogation of subjectivity, through the charged, unexplained suture between the modern and the ancient. The entire central narrative is refracted through the lens of subjectivity. It is not only the autobiographical resonance of the frame that comes to promote the film as an interrogation of subjectivity, but also and above all the process of suture itself. The suture makes possible the twof()ld aim for Hdipo that Pasolini outlined to Stack: 'to make a kind of completely metaphoric-and therefore mythicized-autobiography; I . . . 1 to confront the problem of psycho-.tnalysis I ... 1 I have re-projected psychoanalysis on the myth' (Stack, 1969, 120). It is in the configuration of the child and Oedipus, constantly reawakened by echoes between modern and ancient settings and stylistic patlerning, that the metaphor or reprojection occurs. Similarly in Met/ea, the dyad Jason-Medea embodies the conflict between primitive and civilized society, a conflict whose articulation is at the centre of Pasolini's poetic strategies in and after eeneri, in his verse-tragedies and the unrealized lilm--cycle Appunli per un poema sullerzo mOl/do. 17 The contlict in Teornna is a variation on the same theme, and indeed the theorem itself is a working through of the config'uration of all five family members amI the guest, each a vessel of latent subjectivity which resonates through fi'agmentary autobiographical associations. In Port'ile, Pasolini invests his sense of ,divers ita' in the two protagonists, Julian and the cannibal, who both challenge founding taboos of civilization, and who both die f()f their difference. Indeed, all the films mentioned so far have in common myths of founding moments of history, or collapsing back into prehistory, as narrative vessels t()r the investigation of subjectivity, and this secondary, but fundamental link will be further elucidated in Chapter 17 A series of prc-production notes in the Fondo Pasolini, written in 196H, se IS out five episodes of the cycle: Pae.
AUTHORITY AND INSCRIPTION
201
13. Figures of difference also recur in this regard: in Il Decameron Pasolini's own appearance in the second half of the film implies a parallel affinity with the framing character of the first half of the film, Ser Ciapelletto, whose homosexuality, mentioned in passing in Boccaccio (1966,47), is highlighted. And Pasolini's interest in this character is further demonstrated by a treatment written as early as 1963 or 1964, entitled 'Sant'Infame' (sce Bibliography IAa), in which an evil scoundrcllike Ciapellet\o is f()rcibly shut in a seminary and on becoming a priest, starts a 'city of boys' to satisfy his lust, but is taken as virtuous for his vocational dedication to the young, and dies as a saint (sec Chs. 3 and 15). Perhaps the most sustained example of poetic identification through such configurations is to be found in the project for a film about St Paul. In its systematic updating of the locations of Paul's biblical wanderings, San Pa% represents a culmination ofthe process of suture between past and present embodied in the structure of Edipo, and adumbrated in different ways in VUllge/O, Porcile, Medea, Appunti per un 'Orestiade uFriama, /.e mura tli Sar/a and in still more attenuated, nostalgic fashion, in the trilogy. Pasolini combines elements of the texluallidelity to the Bible which characterized I/cwge/o with the appropriation or Paul as a ligure of the self I H As Greene comments: The published scenario leaves no doubt thatl'asolini viewed the bther of the (:hun:h in a deeply "utobio~r"phieal li~ht I... 1. r,ike Pasolini, this unhappy saint is misunderstood and mocked by the pro~ressive intellectuals who should best have understood him. (11)1)0, 171\)
But beyond simple self-projection of the kind suggested by Grecne, San Pa% also illustrates a final, recurrent type in this category, what might be termed the pseudo-couple: two bound, mu! ually integrating symbolic characters, who posit and aspire to wholeness, or to subjective cohesion. Paul is particularly interesting since he embodies the split within himself Early in a first draft of the screenplay of San Pa%, written in May Iq6X (sce Bibliography I.4b), there is a passage of rhetorical crescendo which culminates in a declaration of Paul's fundamental uuality: III I'asolini was known amongsl his 'horg'He' friends as 1',1010 (!Odipo, 22). h might he worth noting thallhc first-person narrator of Alii impllri is called Paolo (.-Jmadolllio, 102), the priest nun Paol" is the central eh,nactcr of the first version of 1/.
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
Anchc Paolo fu picno di doppiezza! Ci furono due Paoli! Ci furono due nature in Paolo! Paolo cbbc due volti. E li vedretc: un volto duro e sicuro, un volto debole e smarrito; un volto sano, c un volto mano; l· .. J un volto di reazionario c un volto di rivoluzionario. COS! egli riprodusse la doppiezza di Dio, c diede scandalo. Anzi, rid scandalo. (P.14) (Paul too was full of duality! There were two Pauls! There were two natures in Paul! Paul had two faces. And you will see them: a hard and sure face, a weak and lost face; a sane face and a mad face l ... J a reactionary face and a revolutionary face. Thus he reprod uced the duality of God, and he provoked scandal. Rather, he provokes scandal.)
The absolute, irresolvable schizophrenia evoked here inevitably recllls '10 scandalo del contraddirmi' of 'Le ceneri di Gramsci', and the ultimate sublimation of the self in the divine throu~h a crisis of doubling suggests that the figuration of duality is, t(lI' Pasolini, an expression of the deepest shape of sclfhood, precariollsly on the CllSp between overdetermined excess and dissolute, permanent, violent loss. As the sister in the play Beslia dll stile, declares '10 Sdoppiamento del persona~~io in due persona~gi / c la pill grande delle invenzioni Iclterarie' (the doubling ora character into two characters / is the gTeatest literary invention, Tealfll, ()70). At:tual representations of bound couples, then, take on amplified significance. Jason and Medea, as Illent ioned above, arc mystically bound despite their prof(Hll1d symbolic difkrences, and this bindin~ is the f()I'ce which ovcrpowers them and leads to tragedy. It is emphasized by the mesmeric rapture which takes hold of Medea on (irst seein~ Jason, and her trance-like theft of the fleece and killing of her brot her whilst escaping-·actions which break thc fundamental taboos of religion and family. In Pllrcile, the relation between Julian and the executed cannibal has already been alludell to. Equally, it is possihle to read the couple of I hvidson, the poet-native, and the teacher in fI padre seh1aJ!,gio as a variant on the pseudo-couple, since the mythicalsymholic process of trans/()rmation narrated takes place along the axis oftheir mutually pedagogical interaction. By far the most sustained example of the pseudo-couple in Pasolini's cinema, however, is the pairing of' J'ot() and Nine(to Davoli, in (Tccelfllai e uccellini (Plate 3), I.a lerra visla dalia furta, Che (osa sono le nuvofe?and, the unrealized project Po/'rto-leo-k%ssal. It) HI Sec Bihlio[;raphy 1.4{/" 'I'orno-teo-kolossal' tells the story or a mouern-uay Wise Kin[; and his servant wanuering through the city-states or Souom (Rome), Gomorrah (Milan), Numanzia (Paris) allll Ur (somewhere in the Thiru World) in search of the Messiah. The
AUTHORITY AND INSCRIPTION
20 3
Their portrayal is always in some way pedagogical (see Ch. 3), either as father and son (main part of Uaellacci e uaellini, La terra vista dalla tuna) or as mentor/master and novice/servant (medieval episode of Uccellacci, Che (()sa sono le nuvole?, Porllo-teo-ko!ossal), and they represent a humorist, fabulistic variation on the innocent vitality of the 'ragazzi di vita'. They exist in an unreal space, between the fabulous and the miraculous, and speak in simple dialect, or indeed in mime and gesture. 20 This magical space moulds the couple into an archetype of the representation of split consciousness. The dual centres in these films encourage a search for other more attenuated, but none the less important, dualities elsewhere. In Uccellacci e ulullilli, a secondary couple can be identified in the interplay between Ihe crow·--a bird who preaches to men-and St Francis-a man who preaches to the birds-and the pairing confirms, as so often in Pasolini's vision, an equivalence between Marxist and Christian ideologies. 21 In [,it ril:olla, the tragic end reveals a powerful affinity between Or son Welles and Slracci, which figures exactly the profound empathy Pasolini himselfldt with the 'sottoproletari' in all their base purity, and its relation to a prot(HlIld aisis ofselthood. u The si ratcgies descrihcd in this chapler t(lI' wrenching authority away fi'om the mechanisms and practices of film production towards the self-proclaimed 'allleur', and for stamping a slIbjectivizing imprint on a range of single liV;urcs and clusters of figures, have tended towards the agonisl ic. They posit a conscious, pre-existing self; isolated from and acting upon the filmic and pro-filmic aspects of the medium. At anal,,!,:olls lIpdalin!,:of'pl'I<:e recalls SII/l1'1I0/0. Pasolini hi,d Ihe role inlllind lin' Tot,) when the lalleT died ill ")('7. lie I'cllIrlled 10 Ihe projccl in "175, now caslin!,: a,wlher cultural icon hlo,ml" de Filipp" as I he kin!,:, and Ninell" as his serv,nll (Naldini, ,,)R(), ]79). A scries of projccls involvin~ '('ot('1 werc ClIt short by 'l'otl)'S dC;)lh, including- i.l version ofPillo(Chio (/.('lll'r£" ii. exii, 6.!4 (), and Ihis was sif.!;nilicilnt in delermining 1he sharp change in Pasolini's l'incl1I:I :llier "'('7 X. '0 Sce Ihe lin:ll scene of lft-al/tlffi, where '\(,1<, mimes e:lling the crow 10 Nine\to; and cOllllnunico.t,io)) vi;, millle wilh Ihe deaf-mUle Assullfa in /,a terra "vis/a dallaluna. ! I [n:l roun
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
various moments in the discussion, however, it has been suggested that these strategies only set conditions for analysis of a more fluid, less anchored work of subjectivity, inherent in intermediary patterns of film language, film representation and viewing. The next chapter will move towards a consideration of such patterns by focusing on how technique or film style might be seen as a further vehicle for the figuration of subjectivity on film.
10
Style and Technique
The projection of the self onto charactcrs of a film, although often ambivalent and discontinuous in its binding, creates a subjective axis parallel to the diegetic track: it is, at heart, autobiographical. Set across that parallel axis, however, is an axis of sublimated self-expression in non-diegctic features, such as imagery, landscape, self-citing narrative mot ifs and their modes of representation: we can describe this axis as stylistic. Elements of Pasolini's own theory illuminate here. In the essay '11 "cinema di poesia'" (Rh· J7J-()I), he analyses cinema using categories of prose-style, and in particular intcrior monologue and 'style indirecte lihre'. Both these techniques involve the ~ldoption hy the author of the psychology and language of a character, hut the nature of the exercise is necessarily 'prctestuale I ... 1 serve a pariare, indirettamente I.. ·1 in prima persona' (pretextuall· .. 1it allows 1the author] to speak, indirectly I ... 1 in the first person, H) I). Hence, in practice, the character I!!an only be of t he same cult ural/()rmation as the (bourgeois)· author. The apparent projection of the self onto the other is a device for neutralizing 'otherness': 'la horghesia, insomma, anehe ncl cinema, ridentifica se stessa con l'intera umanita, in un interdassismo irrazionalist ico' (the bourgeoisie, finally, in cinema also, reidentifies itself with the whole of humanity, in an irrationalistic interdassism, 191). To comb'lt this smothering of difference-although of eourse the theoretical f(lfI11ulation is a posteriori-Pasolini's Roman novels had attempted an immersion in the culture of the underdasses via philological, documentary and therefore non-stylistic research. The canvas of mores drawn in Raxazzi di 11ita and Ut/a 11ita vio/entll, and much of Ali da.gli ()({:hi azzurri, relics on a direct language denuded of the condescending, populist assimilation outlined in '11 "cinema di poesia" " based instead upon a re-evocation of the noise of a certain reality, its presence felt physically or orally. There are instances of authorial figures (e.g. 'Giubileo', 'Notte sull'ES', Ali dagli occhi azzurri, 53-79), but the subjectivity repressed at the surface reemerges rather in descriptive and
206
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
narrative passages, in the literary interstices of the philological reconstruction, which have led critics to talk of a (ontaminatio of styles in Pasolini's prose works (Borghello, 1977, 145-82). The principal vehicle of subjectivity there is the technique of the novelistic idiom or genrc rather than in the stylelcss noisc of the reality dcpicted. Thc transposition to cincma is, apparcntly, dircct. Here, too, and particularly in the early 'horgata' films (Aaatlonc, Mamma Roma, La riwlla), it is through tcehnique that Pasolini inserts thc suhjcctive voicc. He himself repeatedly and dising;enuously playcd down the switch to cinema as merely a renewal oftechniquc: le passage tic la Iilleriltme all cinema I ... 1 n'esl qll'lIne queslion tic ehangemen[ de technique. (I hlllol, J()70, 16) (thc movc /i'omlileral me to cinema I . . . 1 is merely" q uesl ion ofchang'ing tech, nique) J :esperienza cinemalogralica e qlldla lelleraria I, . ,I sono fin'me analoghe. 11 uesitlerio di esprimerllli all raverso iI cinema riell1 ra nd mio hisogno d i adottare una tecniea l1uova, una tecnica che rinnovi. (C'il/l'/I/11 flUII1I(), 150, I (J(lI ,l]uoted in Figazzolo, Il)l)O, I) (CincmatogTaphie and lilcr'lry expnicncc I ... 1 arc analogous ((n'llls. The de sire to express myself via cincma is part oflllY nced 10 adopt "new Icchniquc, a techniquc that renews,)
Ilowcver, to play down such a change as tcchnique is disingcTluollS, since on it hinges a key aspcct ol"the role of subjectivity. I Thc 1I0VelS' dynamic contamination 01" t wo or mort: registers dcpended 011 their original separability. In cinema, howcver, the aural! oral reconstruction of thc 'bOl'g-atc' ·thc 'noise' of the novels-and t he literary matrix of description-the stylistic-subjcctive register of the novcls-are both containcd within audio-visual techniques of1()oking or rcprcsentation on film. The separability of levels of audio-visual discourse is fraught with difliculty, and thus lIif"ferenl" axcs of differentiation sct the parametcrs for subjectivity. Far more than in prose, thc first -persoTl subject in film cocxists with and cuts across the object, the physical landscape and its inhahitants, via ways of seeing- that synthesize style and tcchnique. This synthcsis is at the root ofPasolini's positing in '11 "cinema di poesia" , ofa cincmatographic 'style indircct Iibre', tellingly lahellell 'soggettiva Iibcra inllirctta' (frce indirect point-of-vicw).2 It also I In 'Poeta dclla Ceneri" he mnlCsseu the 'insincere' nature of the d'lim, aumitling the prot(lUnd philosophical amI politi,,;!1 implications of the move into film (Ih, 20(7), 2 Pasolini's uetinition ,mu USL'S of (he term have taxed his most theoretically atert critics: Dagraua, IIJHS; Greenc, 19<)0, 115-2.1; Turigliatto, 1<)76; WagslJtf, IIJ85, 114-19.
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
20 7
explains why Accattone and Mamma Roma differ so markedly from the sub-genre of 'film pasoliniani', based on his stories or screenplays, made both before and after his own debut as a director. As Carlo Levi noted in his preface to the screenplay of Aaattone: 'Aaallone non e pasoliniano' (Accat/one is not Pasolinian).3 In describing Pasolini's strategies tilr controlling the pro-filmic in Chapter <), several areas of his film technique were already noted in passing, from his penchant for post-synchronized dialogue to his disruption of naturalistic mimesis and diegesis. The consequences of these practices emerge in his most considercd account of his own filming style, an essay in the screcnplay of Uaellacci e UI;cellini suggestively entitled 'Con/Cssioni tecniche' (Technical Confessions, 44-56). There, he recounts his intuitive lcarning of the craft, from his total ignorance of lenses and shots whcn he began work on Aaallone, his misunderstanding of the term panorama, his reliance on iconic sensibilities to construct at least a partially visual expression of the desired effects,4 to his use o/"colour and past iche in I.a ri(()tla, and his disappointment with Ihe 'sincerilY' o/" Vangc/o and discovery of what he calls the 'mechanism oranalog'Y' (Anlles, l()7(), I Sil-9). The mosl signilicant 'confession' for our purposes is Ihat of Ihe conllict between sty les in Aaallone and V!f,1/gl'lo, since in his analysis ofthe 'sacralit;\' (sacredness) ofthe {()filler and the contrapuntallechnical 'magma' of the latter, he demonstrates that the indirect suhjectivilY ofsl'YIc outlined above depends on a willed discrepancy het ween diflerenl vehicles of style. The (in'm in film analogous to the mosaic o/" contamination filUml in prose is located in the dissonance between various simultaneous tracks ofsignilication. The sacredness of .'1crllllone, Pasoiini explains, originated' "ncl modo di vedere il mondo": nclla sacralit;\ tecniea del vederlo' ('in my way of seeing Ihe world': in the technical sacredness of seeing it, 45). In praelice, this rclers to Ihe statiC, frontal iconography ofthe film (Plate 2), rein/i)rced by abrupt cuts which do not construct a point of view, but rather fix images as fragments of a "material reality. There is little .I The '!'asolinian J;ll11s' (Jilllowed by his rol.;.in each), were /,a nolll' hmVll (M. Bulognini, ]()S'I; Irealmenl and screenplay); /,11 giomalll halrm/II (M. Bolognini, 1960; co-scriptwriter); /,11 ((/71111 delle mllrllrle (e. Mangini; source and voice-over); La wmmare secc(/ (B. Bertolucci, ]()(,2; treatment ;lIld pari of screenpl.iy); Uti" villlelioif1ll" (I'. lIeusch/B. Rondi, ,,)62; from the novel); Oslia (S. Citli, 1'170; general collaborator); Slorie swllemle (S. Cini, 1973; general
coilaborator). Sec J ,odalo, 1977. Frustration at others' use ofhis material was a factor in drawing Pasolini towards directing. 4 Mamma Roma is dedicated to Roberto Longhi 'cui sono debitore della mia "fulgurazione ligurativa" '(to whom I owe my 'figurative illumination').
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
shot-reverse-shot continuity in Accattone. Where the camera does express a point of view, as of the policeman following Accattone in the final scenes of the film, it is to objectify the figure of Accattone through a panoptical embodiment oflooking, rather than to mark out an internalized perspective. 5 A fluid sequence of shots would tend to reinforce a unitary narrative and undermine the mystical importance of the materiality of the filmed object: 'Sacralita: frontalita. E quindi rcligione' (Sacredness: frontality. And thus religion, 44). Consistent use of strong front- and back-lighting, not balanced hy kcy- and fill-light positions which create plastic three-dimensional depth, as well as strong natural sunlight, (, enhance the two-dimensional iconographic effect, as does the striking use of Bach's choral music. But all of these devices depend filr their power on a counterpoint with the emphatically base, and at times immoral and squalid narrative content. When the pimp Accattone dives cruciform into the Tiber horn beside one ofBernini's angels on the Ponte Sant'Angelo, in sight o[St Peter's and recalling Peter's inverted crucifixion, the scene acquires expressive impact because Accattone is an archetypal 'ragazzo d i vila" dcn ied access to the centre and history of'la cristiana cilt;i' (the Christian city, Ceneri, B I, 181): his failed, parodic martyrdom is fiu· a bet about eating potatoes. Simple narrative bathos hecomes a more complex token of ambiguity at the level of technical effect. Just as Pasolini's Elseination with faces-obsessive in Vtmgc/o, where the peasants arc a correlative to the landscape, and to the historical and mythical elements of the Gospel story (and similarly in the location films)-is essential and material and never psychological, so the juxtapositions in ..1((({llonc arc never couched in effects of emotional empathy or caring outrage. They arc aesthetically formal, but ;llso material, always at the service of displaced forms of expression, of subjective inscription into film and into reality. For Vange/o, Pasolini goes on to explain in 'Confessioni tecniche', he began by filming as he had done for /lcmuone. But the sacred nature of the Gospel text made his own technical 'sacralita' seem rhetorical and obvious, 'pura enfasi' (pure bombast, 46). By force of circumstance, he narrates, he had to shoot the baptism of Christ from above, thereby losing the iconic, frontal effect (Plate 4). This unleashed a flood offree5 The finat sequence is also a pastiche ofGodard'sA bOllt dcsOl!f7lc( 1(59). Ct: 'Una dis!'erata vitaliti', Rosa, 131, ]21>-8. 6 'In ((mdo fare cinema c una questione di sole' (At heart creating cincm,) is a question of sun[light], Mamma Roma, 150). Scc Siti, 1989.
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
20 9
wheeling asymmetry and diversity of camera-angles, lenses and movements, creating a 'nuovo caos stilistico' (new stylistic chaos, 47) which he found wholly concordant with his dual desire to create a Gospel laden with two millennia of cultural interpretations, and to adopt 'sincerely' (49) the alien mind-set of a true believer in representing it. In other words, the new technique inaugurates a genuine free indirect speech, a 'soggettiva libera indiretta' to (self-)express otherness. The equivalent of the counterpoint in Aaattone is between that magmatic dispersal and the pure unity of the text of Matthew's Gospel, especially the voice of Christ (Enrico Maria Salerno) recited in all its sacred rhetorical glory, often as a voice-over to disturbingly discontinuous sequences of shots, frames, locations, movements and lighting effects. The contrast is, significantly, used to most powerful effect in the climactic and most politicized moments of the text: the Sermons on the Mount and to the Pharisees. In the gap opened by that counterpoint, Pasolini heeomes a reader of the Gospel text, not a simple copyist, and the tilm becomes onc of sclf-expression.7 The scope f()r analysing film technique, or ways of seeing, as vehicles f(H· suhjectivity is all hut endless, given the persistent foregrounding of (tlawed) technique, and its anchoring in subjective looks. Pasolini's own phrase might be adapted to deserihe its workings: it offers a sort of free, indirect subjectivity. Two further, related aspects illustrate particularly well its 'freedom' from a single, unitary voice, and its oblique 'indirect' channelling through secondary articulations of filmic language: shotcomposition and editing. I'asolini's cinematic practice is t()llllded on a poetics of the gaze or look. It drastically reduces dialogue and promotes, often to excess, the visual and the static. H The tendency of his camera to remain fixed and/ or distant in diegctical scenes of action or dialogue has already heen mentioned with reference to Aaattonc. And although Pasolini's Hexihility with the camera increased with each film, and particularly after Van/ic!o, later work still assigns an important function to the static camera-eye. Thus, f()r example, in Pun·ile, during the long dialogue betwecnJulian and his girlfriend Ida as they walk along the symmetrical lakeside framing the monumental Palladian villa in the background, the
7 On Pasolini's not wholly faithful adherence lo the Gospel, sec Baranski, 1985"; Stack, 1969,91; Viano, 1993,33]-3, who lists the film's sequences alongside the relevant chapters of Matthew. 8 Scc 'La "gag" in Chaplin' (EE 260) and '11 cinema e la lingua orale' (EE 270-2).
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
camera is fixed at a distanced perspectival centre throughout; and this is echoed by the contrapuntal lingering over the desolate volcanic landscape in the cannibalistic episode of the film. Similar distancing is found in Teorema, where it has the ironic effect of diluting the specificity of each sexual conquest by the Guest, and of creating symbolic topographies, such as the enigmatic receding tramlines outside the family's house. In Met/ea, we follow at a crawl the progress of Jason and/ or Medea across the desert, and from the town to the temple in Medea's homeland. The distanced camera reaches its apotheosis in the final scene ofPasolini's final film, Said, when two guards spy from the villa on the horrific torture of the young prisoners below, and embrace in a dance of perverse indifference. Again, this aspect ofPasolini's style runs counter to the raw techniques of the nco-realists, who, for <;conomic and aesthetic-ideological reasons, tended to favour the handheld camera and the medium-shot. Instead, the stasis and uistance of the camera creates an architectonic or pictorial aura and uraws attention to the camera-frame. The signifying, iconic fi)rce of the gaze or the static camera by no means implies, however, that Pasolini's camera is atemporal. Shots, or looks, arc syntagmatically articulated by the uiscontinllolls and dynamic process of editing. In his fundamental ess.JY, '1 ,a lingua scritta della realt:i' (FF 202-30), Pasolini expresses the move from s1a1·ic shot to dynamic edited sequence linguis1ically, as a move from 'sostantivazione' (a substantive, or noun mode, 213-15) to 'verbalizzazione' (verbalization, 216- J R). A shot 'rappresenta qualcosa (he C' (rcpresents something that is). A con catenation of such shots creates a verbal dy-· namic: in his pedagogical example, 'the teacher ,,,ho teachcs' and 'the pupils who listen' becomes 'the teacher teaches the pupils' (217). Typically, Pasolini acknowledges the tentative imprecision of his terminology (EE 213), but it provides nevertheless an important insight into his filming practice. An illustration of the relation between shots anu editing in his own work can be found in his set diary ti)r Mamma Roma, one of his earliest statements on technique: 10 giro a brevissime inquadrature~inquadraturc chc non durano pill di 2, 3, minuti al massimo f. ... J che poi coordino in un montaggio che esattamcnte quello che ho in mente prima di girare. (Mamma RI/ma, 140)
c
(I shoot in the briefest of takes~they last no longer tha t 2, 3 minutes at the most [... ] and I then put them together in a montage which is exactly what I had in mind before filming.)
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
2II
He subverts linear, temporal continuity on the image-track through the compositional temporality of directed montage. 9 But what is also made clear here, and is implicit in the move from noun to verb in film language, is the role of subjective agency in forming the alliance between shot and editing (,quello che ho in mente'). The look is not limited to the look of the camera in a single shot, hut it is given a history, is constructed as a narrative sequence and thus made an index of subjective processes, expressed by Pasolini as necessarily rooted in his own intention. In a 1971 essay, 'Teoria delle giunte' (!if' 2S9-92), he restated this view in onc of his most tellingly 'auteuriste' assertions: 'mentre un poeta si riconosce da un "verso" non c possibile riconoscere un regista da un'inquadratura 0 da poche inquadrature: occorre almeno un'intera sequenza' (whilst a poet may be recognized from a 'verse', it is impossible to recog·nize a director from a frame or a few frames: at least one entire shot-sequence is required, l:'h' 2S9). The importance of this history of the looking I is further suggested by the apparently cont radictory impulses in Pasolini's shot-composition described above: on the olle hand he prefers long·, static architectonic takes, and on the other, very bricl~ truncated takes. And examples of both abound in his work. The contradicl"ion is only apparent hecause both spatial distance and perspective, and fj·onul immediacy and fragmentation work as g·enerators of]ookiug: the rhythm of disrupted coutinuity is the echo ofthe work of subjectivity. In 'I ,a ling·ua scritta della reald', when considering· the verbal mode of lilm lang·uage, Pasolini suggests that the rhythm of the relative duration of shots has no equivalent in the (oral) language of reality, and thus rhythm is the most arbitrary, arrog·ating element in the I1lming process (21 S). 'Teoria delle giunte' develops this, offering the notion of spatiotemporal 'ritmemi' (rhythmemes) as an essential integTating semiolog·ical articulationl()r audio-visual 'cincmi', cinematic phonemes (1,'E 20S). The 'teoria delle giunte' is a theory of suture. Rhythmic variation and lack of continuity or convention in shot-sequence is paralleled by a lack of continuity in the macro-editing, a constant characteristic of Pasolini's films. They arc marked by abrupt beginnings and endings and unexplained shifts of scene and setting. And as already indicated in Chapter 9 with reference to Rdipo, overarching structural suture can rehact and transform the entire subjective status of a film. There and in Medea, frames serve to define the specificity of the readings of the 9 There is a striking uiffcrcnce here too from nco-realist practice which tcnucd to favour the long lake, anu was deeply suspicious of montage. On the 'piano-scquenza', see f:E 241-5.
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
myths. In Medea's prologue, the young Jason is educated by the Centaur at intervals of years (Plate 5). The scenes are marked by sudden visual discontinuities set against the centaur's continual pedagogical voice-over (as in Vangelo). Sharp, unannounced cutting allows for further play with time in the double portrayal of the death of the king's daughter, where none of the conventional dissolves or other markers for dreams are used. In both Poreile and Teorema, there are rwo loosely connected intercut parts. In Teorema, we cut away from the main narrative to a number of disconcerting scenes of desert wasteland. These scenes destabilize the schematic coherence and symmetry of the theorem, threatening it with emptiness and inexplicability. And indeed, the desert is ultimately revealed as a prophetic glimpse of the Father's final refuge, and therefore as the 'QED' to which the Guest has propelled the family. The apparent scientificity of thc structure contains its own f()undation in chaos in the cut-aways. The second part of Ponile was planned as a companion piece to Bufiucl's Simeoll del desierlo (I C)6s)(Stack, H)6<), 140). It has a complex, over-determined rapport with the central episode which critics have elaborated at length. 10 The important point here is that the stark contrasts are enhanccd by discontinuous editing which links thc two by juxtaposition, with minimal indiGttion of their temporal or signifying relation. As with Fdipo, this has important implications for the potential metaphoricity of film which will be explored further in Chapter 12. The usc of both micro- amI macro-editing as a rhythmic, temporal dimension to the work of subjectivity rcpresents onc of the most alienating and anti-naturalistic effects in Pasolini's cinema. The oversustained shot takes the viewer beyond the naturalist illusion engendered by the instantly decodeable rhythms of shot-reverse-shot, or 30° and J!~oo rules. Much avant-garde film disturbs this codc, and thus jolts audience's preconceptions or raises its consciousness. But Pasolini's practice is more ambiguous, less interested in consciousness than in subconscious impulses. Long, apparently un motivated concentration on scenes of little specific narrative importance or visual richness, and awkward, reiterative patterns or sudden shifts of scenes puncture the narrative and the aesthetic form of his films. The effect is reminiscent of a certain theorization of the female as the object of the male camera-gaze. Mulvey, 1975, for example, famously characterized 10
See e.g. Arccco, 1972,45-59; Estevc, 1976; Gcrard, 1981,55-8,75-7; Purdon, Ifj77.
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
21 3
women in classic cinema as spectacle, 'to be looked at', and demonstrated how the paradigm of the narrative function of the female is to suspend action, to divert the male hero from his Herculean task, before ultimately submitting to the 'advances' of the plot, and of the hero. I"ilmic pleasure, in this model, resides in the suspense and deferralnarrative and erotic---of the climactic phrase 'in the cnd'. The Thousand and One NiKhlS is the epitome of the narrative, erotic pleasure of deferral, and Pasolini's film of it, Jljiore delle 'Mille e una 1IOue', shows him at his most ludic and celebratory. However, the 'to-be-looked-at-ness' of much of Pasolini's cinema is not simply a subversion of the malefemale/history-sexuality paradigm of narrative cinema. He distorts both the straight politics of the erotic, heterosexual gaze and the ideological tenor of its avant-garde subversion. His long, lingering looks at landscapes, faces and bodies are not so much, or not primarily, looks of erotic desire as of desire t()r essential, ontological plenitude. The erotic, more often than not, acts as significr rather than signified or sign (see Klimke, I<)il7, 11-27; and Ch. 14). Thus, the duration of his shots does not ofler tantalizing hints of narrative resolution and climax, but instead creates an anxiety which dreams oblique forms of the irreducibility of the real, articulatcd in the odd syntax of his film language. The oneiric quality of Pasolini's film style, both cause and effect of this stylist ic rhythm, also suggests how and why, in practice, the ideological implications of his style arc often attenuated or secondary. It is not by chance that the long, static or tracking take is most prevalent in the myth Glms ofthe period H)67-70, in many respects his most ideologically problematic films, which promote a prehistorical, even ahistorical solution to the trauma of entry into history. As Pasolini would see it, his essential, oneiric language challenges and creates a newly radical language t()r ideology, because it is radically other. And indeed, the constructed world of each of his films is studiedly unreal and oneiric in some respect." None of his films is fully and historically present. The 'borgata' settings of Aaallone and _Mamma Roma arc constructed by various mcans as prehistorical and pre-Christian. La ricotta combines r r As in his literary work (e.g. Ca/den;,,) dreams are frequenl and important elements in I'asolini's cinema, from Accattone's dream of his own funeral to the linalline of Jl Dcrameron: 'perchc realizzare un'opera quando cco si bello sognarla soltanto' (why realize a work when it is so heautihtl just to dream it). See Brunetta, 19S2; Escobar, ")77. In RE '72, Pasolini notes 'ogni sogno c un seguito di im-segni chc hanno tutte le caratteristiche delle sequcnze cinematogratiche' (every dream is a succession o[image-signs which have all the characteristics of cinematographic sequenccs). Metz's filmic 'vi,;ce' i,; elaborated on a complex comparison of cinema and dreams akin to Pasolini's (EE 293; Metz, 1982,99-147 [113]).
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
this with the studied artificiality of the film-set and the film of the Crucifixion itself. Vangelo is the first elaborate attempt to combine history and the power of myth which will develop into the myth-scapes of Edipo, Medea, and also the cannibal part of Porciie. Ulxellacci e uccellini is partly set in the no-man's-landscape of a universalized 'borgata' (Plate 3), with its nonsense road-signs and desolate trajectories, and partly in a fantasy Middle Ages which will recur in the trilogy. Finally, Teorema, Ponile and to an extent Said arc all cut off from conventional, realistic narrative setting by their caricatural simplicity, and/or pseudo-geometrical construction. All these aspects detach the films from reality. But this quality does not render the filmic vision itself unreal or immaterial. On the contrary, Pasolini attempts to use the material weakness of the oneiric to tc)reground the full ontological presence of his vision, and his prime vehicle tc)r this is a series of ohsessively reiterated and modulated synecdochic motifs. I f this tactic works-as is far from certain-emphasis is thrown onto the essentialist, or totalizing aspiration of the films and away ti·om the representational or naturalistic. Each motif is then freed li·om the const raints of its contingent role in onc particui.lr fiction to connote a range of transcendent meanings and associations. The dominant motils in Pasolini's cinema are those images and acts which come to represent, through overdclermined repetition, archetypal human impulses. Unlike those of traditional narrative cinema, they arc not elements of a system of internal struct mal oppositions which narrative teleology works lo resolve, since, as wc have seen, narrative progress and resolution is undermined at every turn, through the fi·agmentation of shot-sequences, the dislJuieting rhyt hms of cameratime, a denial of character-psychology, emphasis on physical immediacy and abrupt juxtapositions of emotional extremes. 12 Three key motif.,; can be takcn to illustrate this connotative unfurling: death, eating and desire. q Death is undoubtedly the most frequent motif in Pasolini's cinema. Each of his films ends with a death of some sort, apart from the Tri/op,ia films; and even there, the Dewmel"llll opens with a mysterious and never-explained murder, '4 and J rac(()nti di Canterbury ends with a Bosch-inspired vision of Hell. Only 1(Iiort: delle 'Mille e una nolle' remains a fully life-affirming vision, with the play of its mise en ab)lme Scc Nowcll-Smith, 1fJ77; W'lllinglon, ,,)6<). Sce Klimkc, H)87; Malleini ano Perrclla, H)8z Ia stills cllalogucl. q Brunetta, 198z, 661-2, suggests that the vietim is a figure ofGiouo, or Paso\ini himself.
12
I)
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
21 5
narrative structure and symmetrical resolution in the happy reunion of Zumurrud and Nur-ed-Din. However, from the outset, the role of death is marked as something more than mere narrative closure. Accattone's dying words-'mo sto bbene' (now I'm OK)-underline the arbitrary, but fundamental nature of death as accident. This is closure which conditions the tone of all that precedes it, without being causally connected to it. 15 A similar pattern recurs in Mamma Roma and La riwtta, and strikingly in Uaellaui e uCi;ellini, where the crow is tolerated until his audience, bored and hungry, kills and cats him. The irony that Tort) and Ninetto finally assimilate something of the crow's pedagogy by literally consuming it confirms the naturc of death as a creator of vital meaning, and ultimatcly a shaper of being: 'i professori vanno mang;iati in salsa piccante [ ... [ Pen) chi li mangia e li digerisce diventa un po' profcssore anchc lui!' (professors should be eaten in a spicy sauce I ... 1 but whoever cats them amI digests them becomes something of a professor himself).·6 In Che ((}sa sono le nuvole? the puppets of (ago (' rot(») and Othello (Ninetto) are left on the scrap-heap, only to trans/(II'm the moment of death into an awestruck epiphany of the real-'che cosa sono le nuvole?' (wlut are clouds?). Emilia, the maid in lcorema, elects to die, buried alive as a saint, but creating new life in the /()rm of a bush which grows from her tears, whereas her bourgeois masters find nothing in response to the Guest but a living stasis exemplified by Odetta's catatonic coma. Medea's violent and primitive final act is, likewise, a reappropriation of meaning and identity in life by the power ofdeath. The apparently metahistorical bias ofthis incessant thanatolatry begins to be corrected in Salri, where death is restored to its fully I eleological position as the ultimate effect of systematic violation: it denotes itself and is constructed to connote a political and historical critique of capitalism ('Sail,') and consumerist nco-capitalism (the present). Sa/ri's implicit critique of consumption through its portrayal of perversion and death also points to the second major motif, that of eating. From Accattone's death-defying bet that he can swim the Tiber after a meal of potatoes, to Stracci's death-by-ricotta, to the greedy devouring of the crow already noted above, or ofJulian by the pigs, eating stands as an index of often-doomed vitality, parallel to death. The trilogy, and in particular its first two parts, with their unabashed emphasis on bodily functions, is constantly engaged in hearty feasting, and at every turn, '5 Violent. arbitrary death is familiar from both Ra~azzi di villi and Una vita vio/mla. ,6 Not in the puhlished screenplay.
2I6
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
eating and drinking arc bound together with a cycle of base valuesfood, death, sex, money-which originate in the Roman novels, but are the founding motifs ofPasolini's cinema well beyond the Roman films. However, there is a less innocent connotation of eating, which is precisely born of the analog·y between consumption and consumerism, that reaches its apotheosis in Salrl in the eating of excrement in the 'girone della mcrda' (circle of shit). Already in La riWlIa, Stracci's hunger and subsequent death arc in contrived counterpoint to the filmproduction industry at work and at lunch on the set, its desecrating strip-tease, and the Mannerist construct of the film within the film. The critique of consumption first emerges fully in Por{ilc, where Julian's death is a figure f()r the machinations of his father and Henlhitze, and also t()r the destruction oqews in the Final Solution (both Julian in the pig-sty and the Jews in the crematoria disappear without trace), and contrast uneasily with the elemental cannihalism of the film's other part. Finally sexuality and desire clearly carry many of the same multiple associations as /(lOd in their dieg·etic function. They too are indices of vitality, caught up with death and corrupted hy hourgeois repression. But further elements accrue to them as motifs, owing to their impact on filming practices. The 'poetics or t he gaze' noted earlier is also a technique which promotes the display and production or desire and the often homo-erotic play on bodily t()rm which is particularly characteristic ofthe lilms after H)67. The 'saeralit:t tccnica' of the early lilms becomes explicitly hound to qualities or desire-the tragic inexorahility of desire in Tcorl'ma and Medell; the comic ubiquity and polymorphous perversity of desire in the trilogy; and the systematic desiccation and desecration of desire in Salll. As also noted earlier, however, Pasolini often uses motifs of desire, and we might add of death and t()od, as an index of another level of relation with reality (and hetween subject and image), of fetishist-ic, ontological presence. Pasolini's ohsessive deployment of these fun<'!amentall11otifs creates a tramformative dynamic which allows them not to ossify as stock symbols or static prerequisites of meaning, or of an authorial style. The dynamic is one of combination and counterpoint on the denotative level, and hence higher analogy and connotative innovation, and in this it relates closcly to Pasolini's understanding and use of 'pastiche', which can be read as a stylistic variant on the motif-dynamic, and vice versa. Pastiche is perhaps best illustrated by Pasolini's extensive and complex use of art and art-history as a vocabulary from which to draw
STYLE AND TECHNIQUE
21
7
elements of his film lexicon. 17 The well-documented recourse to Piero della Francesca and Masaccio (Accatlone, Plate 2; Vange!o), Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino (La ri(()tta, Plate 6) and Giotto (Il Decameron), among many others, shows how he made use of the qualities of the original medium and art-objects-staticity, plasticity, tension between form and movement, or form and narrative, realism-to transform the medium offilm and to rc-read the source material itself. Thus the visually 'already-said' is exploiteJ for its iconic value-for example, a quality ofform and space in Masaccio, as echoed in the lighting and location of Aaauonc-and then distilleJ into a metonymic essence of itself in order to contribute to the multi-faceted meaning of a film. The artificial virtuoso 'sacralit.l' of Mannerist torms in La ricotta, reintl)fced by the further multiple tensions between the static icon and the permanent motion of the filmed image, stands metonymically {(lr the film's ironic contamination between the conventionally holy, the consumeristic exploitation of it and the base purity of Stracci. Finally, the icon is deployed as an index, most often of the essence of essences tllr Pasolini, the Real. Thus, the work ofrhe painter in /)aamt:ron, depicted in detail in the preparation of paint, the espying of subject-matcrial, the speeded-up images of inspired painting·, the scaffolJ and the assistants, argues f(lr a Jeep link between the art ist and the physical nature of reality, Tagire nella n:alt.1' (hF 210). More than just multiple citation and self-citation, Pasolini's pastiche and his use of motifs arc characterized by the metonymic and metaphorical shifting between levels of signification, as the medium Of f(ll·m of expression changes, and by the exploitation ofmot\ulalet\ repetition as a modelfilr complex Jialectical elaboration of meaning. Whether in the techniques of filming or the texture of the imagery and objects of the t1lms themselves, the stylistic dynamic of free, inJirect subjectivity in Pasolini's films vertically fi-agments the filmtrack, evoking a 'higher' level of essence. This absent other is accessible through a process variously analogous to dream-work, poetry, metonymy or metaphor, but perhaps its most resonant characterization comes in the I l}67 essay 'Osservazione sui piano-sequenza' (EP 241-5), where editing is equated somewhat mystically with death: 'la morte compie un fulmineo montaggio della nostra vita [ ... ] il montaggio opera dunque sui materiale del film [ ... ] quello che la morte opera 17 On i'asolini's use of art history in cinema, scc GcranI, 1983; Marehcsini, I<)l)4; Santato, 19S8; Zigaina, 1987,4]-61.
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
sulla vita' (death performs a montage/editing on our lives [ ... ] montage/editing' therefore does to the material of the film [ ... ] that which death does to life, 245). Lives only acquire meaning when over, films only when edited. The metaphor relates death to meaning, and life or 'vitalita' to filming, or to the genetic process of becoming or approaching meaning. Any actual film is a return to Plato's cave: it can only be a shadow of the essence that filming/life embodies. The same point is adumbrated in 'La lingua scritta della rcalt;i', where a film (i.e. the 'parole' of the 'Iangue' of cinema) is defined as 'il momento "scritto" di una lingua naturale e totale che c I'agire nella rea It.\' (the 'written' moment of a natural and total language which is action-within-reality, EL' 210). Editing, creating the final film, denudes the tilm as conceived in the abstract ofthe totality ofthc languag-c of 'agire nella reald'. It is no longer in a relation of unmediated interpenctration with reality, hut it is thrust into history, language and meaning, into deal h. This is ultimately a tragic vision. Editing, signifying, and thus COIlcrele expression, is a form of dying that gives out a dim echo ofhcing: '0 esscre immortali e iIlespressi 0 esprimersi e morire' (Either he immortal and unspoken or speak onesclfand die, h'/:' 251).
11
Genesis and Intertextuality
The uiscussion in the previous two chapters of traces of the self in Pasolini's pro-filmic anu filmic work began with a dynamic of reduction-the reductio ad unum of his wrenching of autocratic controlfollowed by a lilling out into complex patterns of subjective presence. The categories o/" that amplification spiralled out from the most literal sense of self-inscription and appropriation-·Pasolini on s<:reen as aut hor and author of the film-to pastiche-a projection of the self across any image or mode of discourse. What facilitates the tracking of the work o/" subjectivity in so many diverse aspects of Pasolini's film work and theory is its tendency to promote the very dynamic of spiralling out as a vehicle of subjectivity, allowing us to draw transf<Jrmative lines or analog"y hetween them. The movement between analogous /(JI'ms is tellingly exploited in Pasolini's film work not only horizontally, bet ween jostling' elements or filming practice or of the film-track itself, but also vertically, in his conception ami practice ofthe textual genesis of film. Onc of Pasolini's most bscinating' and stimulating essays on cinema is 'I,;] sceneggiatura COJlle "struttura che vuolc esse re altra struttura" , (The screenplay as a 'structure that wishes to be another structure', EE J()2-201), in which he considers the relationship between cinema and literature by recasting the problem in terms of what might now be called intertextuality (Kristeva, HJ74; Worton and Still, 1990, 1-44). Hc analyses the structure of a t<Jrm or text which must needs bc provisional anu incomplete-the screenplay--and from the analysis, we can eluciuate fundamental aspects ofPasolini's attitudes to textuality, literary and filmic, and to the role of a textual dynamic in the signifying structures of cinema. The screenplay, he writes, should be considered as an autonomous form, beyond an original literary text which mayor may not exist empirically, and projected in tension towards a film which is as yet unmade, in the making, 'da farsi'. It has, in other words, 'una volonti di
220
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
forma [ ... ] un vuoto, una dinamica che non si concreta' (a will to form [ ... ] a void, a dynamic which will not crystallize, 193). A signifier in this form of text splits, to refer on the one hand to a written, actual signified, and, on the other, to an hypothetical signifier and signified of the film in the making, and this necessarily induces an image-led and translational reading. The screenplay's founding stylistic trope is its 'rozzezza e incompiutezza' (rough-edged and incomplete quality, 193), and it is only completed by a sort of shadowy presence of a visual sign, the 'cinema' or cineme, latent within the written sign ('grafCma', grapheme), as the oral phoneme is latent in the written. However, in the case of the 'cinema', the screenplay contains within itsclfthe sign of another' lanKue', an entirely separate signifying system or t()fIn (J()4-S): 'coglie "la forma in movimento" r... el una struttura che vuole essere altra struttura' (it captures 'form in movcment' I... it is I a structure that wishes to be another structure, H)S). Split between two posited cnd-points, without departure or arrival, the 'sceno-testo' (screen-text) is pure, suspended process, 'un processo che Bon proccde' (a process that does not proceed, 199). Furthermore, its t()rmal status is so ambiguous as to lack any identifiahle, autonomous norms of its own, and thus its system is purely a stylistic one, ti)lIowing a concept of sty le derived from Contini ami Spitzer as a breaking of norms, and as we saw in Chapter 10, style is the suhjectivc imprint stamped on a language system ('langue') in its actual usage ('parole'). I The only access we have to norms is via analogy with the literary norms of the origin (I 1)3-A). 2 This summary of the essay, which ti)llows the jumps and irregularities in Pasolini's sequence of thought, contains several points of interest. Pirst, in his insistence on the autonomy of the screenplay as a genre or form, set apart paradoxically by its lack of a distinct 'Iangue', he demonstrates again the primacy of the technical as a criterion tiu· distinction and analysis. From a hiographical point of view, it is no surprise to sce such a significant part of his writing activity after H)S4 promoted to the status of autonomous art-ti)rm.J In itself: this smacks ofthc need for self-affirmation, but more interesting are the terms in which the promotion is cast. At first, these seem denigratory, and militate against See also Pasolini's essay on his narrative style '11 metodo di lavoro', 210. Here Pasolini's betrays his literary bias hy constructing literary norms as prior to cinematic norms: on this tendency, sec Wagstan~ 1985. 3 See Ch. I. And cf Tempo i/lwtrllto, 27 Sept. 196<) (J tiil/log"i, 6()7), to AlherLO Moravia: 'E smettila anche di pensarc che le parole nelle sceneggiature non ahbiano un valore letterario ossia esterico. Perchc ciD mi offendc pcrsonalmente' (And stop thinking "Iso rhat words in screenplays have no literary or aesthetic value.l:lccause that offends me personally'). I
l
GENESIS AND INTERTEXTUALITY
221
any apparent gcneric stability of the form; 'rozzezza e incompiutezza', coupled with elusive movement and change, seem to denote an antitext, just as so much of his later poetry is destructive and studiedly anti-poetic, projecting itself as form into oblivion, into another form. As in that case, however, so here a vocabulary of flux-'movimento' (movement), 'processo' (process), 'un film da farsi' (a film to be made) -sets up a dialectic between the dynamic and the static, in which the former is a privileged tenor of potential energy, but in which the latter is always already present-'il processo che non proude' (the process that does not proceed); 'wglie "la forma in movimento" , (it captures 'form in movement'). The potential supersedes the actual, and the latter becomes associated with reification ('un vuoto che non si concreta', a voi<.l which will not uystallize), and ultimately death (emphases added). This is not to say that Pasolini simply prefers the screenplay to the actual film as an artistic form. The emphasis on the visual here, and the au<.lio-visual in other essays, and his actual practice demonstrate the contrary. + I Jowever, the possibility of extending the notion of textual dynamism beyond the direct contrast screenplay-film, and into areas connected to the work of subjectivity, is offered precisely by the instability of the autonomy of the form, by its uneasy incompleteness. This is suggested by the description of the dual structural ambiguity of 1he screenplay as a 'v%nlfl <.Ii '()rma' (I/'ill to f()rm), 'una struttura che vuolc essere ahra s1rutlura' (a struc1ure that Il'ishes to be another structure) (emphases added). This inscription of will or desire into a tcxt can he t~l ken as coterminous with the inscription of subjectivity into a text. 5 Furthermore, the f()rmulation strongly implies that textual desire, and thus subjectivity, are located within ·the process of tr~lI1sition, within what Pasolini misnames as the 'diacronia' (H)St) between the structures and languages which makc up the ambiguous screen-text. 'Volonta di forma' differs from 'f()rma' in that it lacks fullness of form, but also in that it is inscribed with will, or desire. A structure which <.Ioes not desire ~ See e.~. 1:'1:' 20+. I.aler Ihi, cmph,,,i, i, a<.ljus\ed: 'il cinema I ... cl una lin~ua spazialetempor'lle e non alldio-visiva---se non a una prima c materialc analisi' (cinema [... is1a spatiotemporal and nor audio-visllallan~ua!(e--{!xecpt on an initial, material analysis, 290). On the differences in BE between the essays /i·om 1l)6S to Uj67, and a second !(roup from 1969 to Iln I, sce TlIrigliatto, lln6, 123-4. 5 Bertini actu'llly psychtianalyses the screenplay 'IS ,I metaphor fi)r Pasolini's self: both are 'dimidialo, 0, me~lio, parteeipe di due "stl'uttul'e" , (split in two, or, better, taken up with two 'structures', Bertini, [979,79). () On l'asolini's misuse of this term to mean dichotomy, and other misnomers, see De Mauro, 1985,66-7; Segre, 1965,80-1. One could speculate on the implications for subjective processes of a lapsu.' whereby history (diachrony) is substituted for absence (dichotomy).
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CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
to be another structure is a structure which does not desire. This truism can be mapped onto many other structures or pairs of structures, where desire is desire of another form, of the other. Pasolini's poetics of pastiche can be reformulated as a variation on, or a reversal of~ this model, wherein, for example, the filmic reconstruction of Pontormo's and Rosso Fiorentino's Depositions in I,a rirolla desires to be and cannot be the actual image or fresco, and that within the tension between the two images lies the space on which subjective discourse and interpretation centres (Plate 6). The comedy in j,a rirolhl derives from just such (Mannerist) tensions: in the actors' unwillingness or inability to comply with the ))irector's demands to remain as still as a picture whilst also expressing emotion; in their forced laughter, a familiar Pasolinian trope; in the playing of the wrong music; and in the diva's silent scream of'basta!' (enough!). An analogous dynamic is to he tiHlI1d in Pasolini's formulation of Vallgclo as 'the life of Clll'ist plus two thousand years of story-telling about the life of Christ' (Stack, Hill), R3). There too a space-between a tixed past and 1he present-···is opened, ;md is fllled by the plenitude of history: the speciticity of the film's reading of the Gospel and its subjective impact are located within the filling. More generally apparent is Pasolini's repeated desire to leave his films unfinished, or bener, suspended in a Barthesian sense: 'I always intend Imy tilms I to remain suspended' (Stack, u)61), :i7); 'le message "politique" circulc:\ travers tous mes films mais I... ill restc toujours suspendu' (the 'political' message circulates around all my films but I... it! always remains suspended, Dullot, I <no, 57); the Ily-Icaf of the novel TcorclIlll describes it as 'questo manualclto lain), a canonc sospeso' (this small lay handbook, its canon suspended). The oneiric, unreal quality of the constructed worlds of so many or Pasolini's tilms, discussed in Chapter 10, derives from this quality of suspensioll. lis literary source is perhaps sug;gested hy Pasolini's t(mdness t()r a roughly remembered quotation by Roman Jakohson of Paul Valcry's view of poetry as 'une hesitation prolongce entre le sens et le son' (sic) (a prolonged hesitation between sense and sound, 'Allcttore l1UOVO', Pocsic, 1970; cl'. Jakobson, 1<)60, 367). Indecd, any signifying' system conf()rms to this pattern, for Pasolini: 'ogni sistema 0 struttura c in realt:\ un processo' (every system or structure is in reality a process, Tcmpo illuSlratll, 4 Oct. I969; I dia/oghi, 701).7 7 Sec Kristcva, [(174, 10-,10, .XH, on the notion of a 'sujet en proces'. 'Proces' and 'processo', ti>r hoth Kristeva and Pasolini, retain their IIther, juridical meaning as an underCUHcnt to the sense of'perpetual becoming' (Gcrard, H)H [, [ 17).
GENESIS AND INTERTEXTUALITY
223
The most direct manifestation of this trope is in the remarkable variety of processes of construction in the genesis ofPasolini's films. Before 1964, the relationship between planning and production seems straightforward, largely dominated by the attempt to realize as faithfully as possible the inner vision ofthe former in the latter. The screenplays to /1aallone, Mamma Roma and La ricotta, derive from the world of the Roman novels and of earlier screenplays, and his transformation of them in filming is a stylistic one, as we have seen, in which he saw himself 'putting together a montage of exactly what I had in mind before shooting the film' (Mamma Roma, 140). The film-essay La rabbia, and the film-inquiry Comizi d'amore, are both somewhat muted attempts to make use of the film medium for directly socio-ideological purposes, and arc if anything films which 'desire to become' linguistic discourse (essay or inquiry), rather than the inverse. After 1964, textual st.ltus is more complex, and the filmic product cedes in different ways parts of its autonomy to other forms or images. The Sopraluo!{hi ill Pairslilla arc presented as complementary to Vange/II, and their mere existence, organization anu release demonstrates an interest in the prospective, I()rward-project'ed status of such t()otage. Certain techniques in So/mt/uo!{hi derive directly from Comizi d'amore, and will be reused wit h resounding sllccess in Appunli per un 'Ores/iade africarla, where the lack of a realized narrative film of the Ores/eia, and the sophisticatcd comhination of narrative information on the proposed final product, pure ohservation, speculation on how narrative and landscape might be spliced tog;ether, and open discussion of the contemporary political relevance of the myth to Africa, powerfully promote the transitional ()rm. H The autonomy of this improvised fClrIn challenges its assumed status as sig;nifier by drawing instability or process into itself as sig'nified, and, in the case of a completed film such as Medea, casting; the film as itself a signifier of a latent and unstable cluster of implicil4uestioning discourses. I,e mum di SUr/a rcpeats the combination of history, observation and enquiry, and makes explicit and political an appeal already implicit in the 'Trilog;ia della vita'. The subtitle itself ('documentario in f()rma d'un appello all'UNESCO', a documentary in the form of an appeal to UNESCO) is of a shape constantly ~ Pasolini had, by all accounts rather hastity, translated Aeschylus' Oresleia. for performance by Vittorio (Jassman and the Tcatro Popolarc in 1960, and the text was published by Einaudi in that year. See Schwartz, 1992,336,370; Siciliano, 1981a, 292, 513. The language and interpretative approach of his version reads like a preliminary sketch for all his later work in theatre, and his myth fitms.
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reused and reinvented by Pasolini, from 'Poesia in forma di rosa' (Poetry in the form of a rose) to 'sceneggiatura in forma di una poema' (screenplay in the form of a poem) or 'romanzo sotto forma di sceneggiatura' (novel in the form of a screen play) ,9 which neatly formulates the transitional nature of the text in each case. To return to Vange/o and the Sopraluoghi, the former is the product of the latter's provisionality, since it narrates the jailure to discover required locations in Palestine, the historical biblical site, for the filming· of the Gospel. This failure, which precedes and foreshadows the technical 'failure' experienced during the filming of Vange/o described in Chapter IO, can be seen as a founding trauma of the literal-what is present and identical can no longer faithfully or literally represent what is past-and leads to the important discovery of the 'analogous method'-what is present and different can represent analogously what is past. It is no coincidencc that this point marks the cnd of the non-prohlematic, or naivc, transitions from treatment to screenplay 1:0 film. 'La scencggiatura come "struttura che vllole essere altra struttura" , was written in 1<)65, thc year after Vange/o was made. Vange/o in itselfreprcsents a special casc with regard to thc relationship hetween text and film, because ofPasolini's dccision to remain entirely faithful to the tcxt of the Gospel: 'non hI) aggiunlO lIna hattuta e non ne ho tolto nessuna' (I ncither added nor cut a single line, Vangt:/o, 2<)8).10 This decision was undoubtedly the source of the astonishing approval granted the {ilm by Catholic organizations-·in J()64 it won the highest prize offered by the 'Office Catholique Internationale du Cinema' (Schwartz, J()<)2, 453-s)-and perhaps f(lr its perceived fililure to convey what thc director had thought was its strongly divergent gamut of film styles. But t(ll· Pasolini, tcxtual fidelity was in fact a vchicle t()r pastiche. Literalness libcratcd the visual and aural as variegated interpretative discourses in their own right; hcnce his assertion that 'la visualizzazione I... cIla letlura migliore che si possa fare di un testa' (visualization I ... is] the best possible reading of a text, Vallgelo, 14).
The cxperiment ofwholcsalc tcxtual fidelity was not repeated, but the underlying interplay between an original text and a filmic reprcsentation of it subtends the film adaptations that dominate Pasolini's filmography after Vallge/o: Edipo, Medea, It Decamerort, I racconti tli '! Lettere, ii. 617, 624. A fragment of the screenplay-poem was published as 'Bestcmmia', Cillema efilm, 2 Spring 1967,224-7. Now in B2, 2zIl7-93. 10 Although sec note Ch. 10, n. 7.
GENESIS AND INTERTEXTUALlTY
225
Canterbury, lI/iore delle 'Mille e una notte' and SalO are all readings of fundamental mythical texts, as would have been San Paolo and Un 'Ores/iade africana. 1 1 In a different sense, both Teorema and Porcile interact with written texts by Pasolini himself: the former is in particularly subtle tension with the 'novel' of the same name (originally conceived as a play), and the latter originates in a play of the same name. It has already been noted how, in Edipo, the Sophoclean original is deployed strategically as a marker of authorial presence. The textual vehicle of that presence and source of the universalized, mythical world depicted there, is marked by the occasional use of intertitles to disturb the audio-visual and thcrefore narrative fluidity of thc film. 1I IJamnemt/'s textual adaptation operates on several different levels (Marcus, 1I)80-r). The most notable deviation from the letter of Boccaccio's text: is the abandonment of the 'lieta brig-ata' in favour of a narrative frame closcly bound up with the subject-matter of the stories themselves. Boccaccio's first story, of Ser Ciapelletto, itself becomes a frame; ami the Giottoesque artist played by Pasolini in the second half begins as.1 protagonist of his own brief story, and then becomes the observer of the Neapolitan market-place, from which all the subsequent protagonists emerge. Also, the setting in Naples, and in Neapolitan, of large parts of the lihn allows Pasolini's interest in dialect as a token of genuine popularity and reality to resurface. Sa/dlll.lrks an cnd-point in the exploration of the modes ofvisualization of text in film, as it marks an end-point in many other senses. De Sade's /,e.l" Cenl-villKI jllUYJ de Sodome is taken as a negative mirrorimage of the f(mnding moment of European bourgeois hegemony, the Englighlenment, and adopted as a cypher. Textual fidelity is all but irrelevant, as is narrative reconstruction. What matters is the immanence of thc secondary symbolic impact of the text's qualities of exhaustive, repetitive, systcmatic, totalizing perversion, mapped onto the equally symbolic interpretation of Mussolini's puppet-state of r943-5, the Republic ofSal<1, and the interaction or synthesis between the two. A final, but significant level of intermediary textuality between idea and film is to be found in Pasolini's regular use of story-board pictures or 'fumetti' as preparatory aids in filming. There is evidence of this as I I It is also worth noting that much of his work on screenplays betwccn 1954 and 1960 consisted in 'l(lapting novels: I1 prigirmiero ddla. 1II01ztagna. (L. Trcnker, 1955; novel by G. Benek), J/.w!e ne! ver/,re(H.J55, unproduccd; novel by]. Buugron), I promessisposi (1960, unproduced; from Manzoni-scc Brunctta, 1985), J/ h,!l'Anlor/io (M. Bolognini, 1960; from Brancati), La. giofllala balorda (M. Bolognini, 1960; from Moravia) and La lunga nolle del '43 (F. Vancini, 1960; from Bassani).
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early as Mamma Roma,lz and, given Pasolini's activity as an artist and his reliance on the Longhian iconography of art for his early filmic technique, such a practice is far from surprising. However, a different attitude emerges, again after 1964/5, in the Toto films, where perhaps for the first time, there is recourse more to cinematographic than literary or iconographic pastiche: Uccellaai e uccellini, for example, clearly pays homage to Rossellini's Francesco, giullare di Dio (I C)so) and the Fellini of La strada (1954). The photos of Pasolini's drawings in the Mamma Roma screenplay show Pasolini transferring directly from 'soggettosceneggiatura' to a shot-hy-shot story-hoard. In I,a terra vista dalla tuna, however, the drawings themselves are the screen-text and as such hecome another variant on the latter's fluid {i)fln: non possedendo un linguaggio, lino stile per esprimere per isaitto, verhalmentc, questo tipo di comicit,t, sono stato cost reil 0 a scrivere la scenegl!,"i.ltllra 1~leendola a fllmeni, eioc disegnando Tot() e Ninelto ne!le varie silllazioni appllnto come fllmeui. (De Ciiusti, ((jSJ, 54)'·1 (as I had no written, verhallanguage or style at my disposal 10 express this typc of eomcdy, I was li)rced to write I he screenplay as a cartoon, thal is drawing Tot() and Ninetto in thc variolls silllations as, precisely, cartoon ch'lraclers.) The unpuhlished written screenplay, under the provisional title' I1 buro cIa hura' (Bibliography 1.4h), is preEtced hy advice that 'queste righe vanno lette pensando alle "comiche" lli Chariot 0 Ridolini 0 ai rumeui di Paperino' (these lines should be read thinking or Chaplin or Ridolini's 'comedies' or ofDon .. ld I )uck cartoons). In the introduction to the catalogue or Pasolini's collected drawings, Dc Micheli comments on I he cartoons or I,ll lerra 'ViSIIl d"ll" lun" th us: Pasolini 'secs' his characters, he ti)!Iows them in their [\'estllres, their dialo[\'ue, their scenes. I lis hand is swifi, lively and representative I... 1. The eye or the draughtsman coincides with the eye of the director, who visualizes sequences, dose-ups, rhythms and dissolves. This group or sheets elucidates in the hesl possible way his creative mechanism which manages to translate into a highly agile, t1uid succession of images the poetic essence ora story. (Translated rrom I disegni 1941/15. IS, unpaginated) De Micheli emphasizes hoth the position of the drawings at the cusp of two visualizations-the eye of the draughtsman and of the director meet-and the rapidity of Pasolini's transformations, and he thus 12 Sec the photos of the director and his story-boards in Mamma Roma. 160f1 See also Bctti and Thovazzi, 1989,25-33. 13 Thirty-four of the comic framcs arc to be found in I disegni )(J4li 7S: plates 89-122.
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intuits the search in Pasolini for 'la forma in movimento', for translatability. 14 The fluidity of form allows Pasolini to adapt every aspect of his technique and choice of medium for the purposes he requires. La terra is pure fable, constructed around silence and mime and the miraculous resurrection of an image. A modern-day convenienlia allows him to adopt the language of'fumetti' as the only possible language to intersect both that of fairy-talc and film m:lgic. The theoretical and practical status of the screenplay in Pasolini's work, and its consequences for his methodology of film-making, at once confirm and amplify the impact of the model of self-projection examined in Chapters <) ami 10. The tension in form which opens a space for suhjectivc insertion is common to both, and in particular to the vicw of pastiche, which could he taken as a paradigmatic model of the modes of direct and indirect inscription. Furthermore, that tension, that dual structure, is yet another, if not the fundamental, figure of the 'doppiezza' also discusscJ above. The sequence of the analysis has already prefigured the major areas that remain to he considered: the interplay between the static and the dynamic invitcs a discllssion of the axis of time in determining the suhjective stat us offilm; and the sum eftcct of all Ihe tracking of subjectivity in (ilm on processes t hat determine spect.llorial suhjectivity needs to be addressed to qualify the (()CUS on the 'authorial' origin of the discussion thus far. But first, the ubiquitous notion of transf()rmation, from t he moment of discovery of the 'meccanisll1o dell'analogia' during the filminr; of Vallgdo, mentioned more than once above, calls into questioll the role and possibility of metaphor (etymologically a 'carrying' over') in lilm, and it is the impact of Ihis issue, together with the inscribed 'will to ()I'm' oflhe genesis offilm in Pasolini's creative practice that tends to sublimate the simple poetics of the gaze into something more, to transform seeing into a Willgensteinian 'seeing as'. I.l Compare Dc Michcli's nOlion or translation, already in 'La sceneggiatura come "strullurot<:he vuoic essere att ra SI rutlura" , (FI! 1114--5; and cl: 207-8, 267"-<)), with Pasolini's ("S(:ina,ion with translatahility hom 'J)iaicl, leJ1!(a, sril' ri!(hr th .... ugh until 1-2 (see Ch. 2 § 2; (,ordon, 1(11)4). Translation and tfilllslalahility arc also closely rcialcJ III metaphor (see <:h.12),
se
12
Metaphor Pasolini saw cinema as a vehicle for linguistic renewal. It offered a him a technique of expression which overcame the ideological impasse in which he felt his writing was caught. The basis of the impasse and of the renewal was both ontological and cognitive, eoncerned with acquiring and articulating in signifying form a link between the self and the real. Renewal on this basis suggests that metaphor and metaphorical patterns of thought were to be of fundamental importance in Pasolini's work in cinema. I Metaphor, understood in a broad sense as the representation of one notion or unit in terms of another, allows t(lI·the expression or creation of concepts which have no firm hold in a given language. It allows, that is, for the naming of the unknown, and thus extends both language itself and cognitive capacity through its opening out towards otherness. Under this schema of language renewal, the process of extension is t()lIowed by one of integration, whereby the metaphoricll tends to be reabsorbed into the literal through repeated association, and the metaphor becomes a 'dead metaphor'. Thus, to give I wo simple examples, the 'leaves' of a book or the 'arms' of a chair have acquired literal validity from clear metaphorical origin. In a certain sense, fhen, the paradigm of linguistic renewal implies both that the metaphorical precedes the literal,z and that full knowledge and renewal are a product of the dying of the former into the lalter. Between the function of poetry, in particular modern poetry, and the function of metaphor there are substantial affinities. Poetry also extends language beyond itself and transforms meaning and perception through oblique association and substitution. This, as Jakobson pointed out in a seminal essay (I()88, 61), leads to a natural affinity between poetry and metaphor:
I Within the vast liclo of metaphor theory, I have founo the following useful: Jakobson, 1988; Rica:ur, 1978; Stacks, 1979; Whittock, 1990. 2 Scc Metz, 1982, 159-60; Whittock, 1990,7-8.
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Since poetry is focused upon the sign, and pragmatical prose primarily upon the referent, tropes and figures were studied mainly as poetic devices. The principle of similari ty, underlies poetry. [... ] Thus, for poetry, metaphor [... ] is the line ofleast resistance.
Similarly, metaphor by its very nature disrupts continuity and therefore tends to undermine the narrative function in any use of language. It conceals causality of connection and promotes transversal leaps or vertical deviation from a strong line of horizontal sequence. Thus, within the context of narrative, it imposes a strong interpretative role on the reader. Furthermore, metaphor's constant drive for renewal and for disturbing perspectives implies a tendency towards ideological disruption and subversion of stability and status quo. As Whittock points out, there is a tension created by the cognitive leap between the vehicle and tenor of any metaphor, and 'through its tension a metaphor calls into question the ordered simplicities our received categories give us' (1990, S)..1 And it is on similar grounds that Kristeva builds her ethical defence of textuality, or textual practices, in I,a Revolution du lanKaKe poitique: 'I'cthique ne fi'cnonce pas, elle se pratique i perte: le texte est un des exemplcs les plus accomplis d'une Iclle pratique' (ethics ifi not enounced, it is practised at a loss: the text is one of the most accomplished examplefi of slIch a practice, Krifiteva, u)74, 203). The crifiis in Pasolini's poetic language and cultural role which precipitated the fihift: into film can be fieen, then, afi a crisis in the metaphorical posfiibilitiefi ofthe poetic function oflanguage. The move is in itself of a metaphorical nature; it is an attempt at linguistic and cognitive renewal throug·h a new and vital technique with which to perceive reality. It ifi in itself a difiruptive reading ofliterature and the role of the intellectual in a certain historical context, t()Uowing Pasolini's own model of transgression as an hermeneutic advance (I~"F, 23S-40). If a fiecond-order 'metaphoricity' of this kind subtends the choice of the cinematic medium, an immediate problem presents itself in the actual making oftilm-the apparent impossibility of first-order metaphor within cinematic discourse: 'l'unica grave difficolti che uno scrittore deve afti·ontare per esprimersi "girando" cche nel cinema non esiste la metafora' (the only serious difficulty that a writer must confront in order to express himself'behind the camera' is that in cinema there is no such thing as metaphor, in Magrelli, 1977,20). In an essay in the screenplay of Aaatlone, 'Cinema e lettaratura: appunti dopo "Accattone" , 3 Tambling, H)S8, 55-7, points to important parallels with Nietzsche's notion of truth as deception.
23 0
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
(Accattone, 17-20), he expands on the problem. He claims that the only sort of metaphor tenable in film is one created by suggestion in the spectator, through a startling and direct juxtaposition of images. 4 The only stylistic figures which are fully available to film are those derived from the simplest, most archaic forms of literature, which he terms 'religious-infantile', and from music, such as anaphora and repetition. Although he later modified this view substantially, Pasolini was far from being naIve in these early pronouncements. Several theorists of cinema have seen the necessarily literal, or at least strongly indexicaliconic and non-symbolic, link between objects and their representation on film as a block to the figurative. S They tend to emphasize the speeificity or ontological plenitude of the filmed object to the detriment of association and abstraction, and hence presencc becomes the dominant factor in cinematic signification. However much Pasolini later adjusted his view on metaphor, he consistently retained an idea of cinema as a reproduction or articulation of reality, or at least of the living perception of reality. Indeed, there is a strong tension in his films between metaphor'!> increasingly important role as a vehicle ti)r meaning and the absolute value attached to the real, which will be discus!>ed further below. Pasolini never articulated at length his view of metaphor in cinema, but it emerge!> as a latent interest in many of his major theoretical writings. Most notably, it can be said to lie at thc heart orhis concept or 'un cinema di poesia', since the introduction or rc-introduction of poetry into a cinema traditionally dominated by 'prose' narrative can, ti)r all the rea!>ons outlined above, be identified with an attempt to create the possibility of metaphor in cinema. In the 11)65 paper '11 "cinema di poesia'" (HI:' 171-<)1), the disclls!>ion ofthe !>emiotic nature ofliter·ature and cinema and of the contra!>t between prose and poetry inevitably implies a discussion of metaphor. The writer who chooses from a lexicon of pre-established signifying units advances in an hisloriwl sense the cause of signification in choosing and combining these units. The advance is 'un'aggiunta di storicit,l, ossia (li realt;l alb lingua' (an addition of historicity, or of reality to language, 1:'/:' 173). Through a combination of metaphorical and metonymical processes--sclection and combination-language as a phenomenon i!> expanded in history or 4 In fact, with familiar literary bias, he refers to rhe reader, and lalcr of 'writing·' a film (Accallone, 19). On juxtaposition as a means to filmic metaphor, sce Whiltock, 11)1)0,57-1). 5 These includcJean Mitry, RudolfArnheim and early Melz: cr Whittock'sdisclIssioll of these and others (1990, 20-]6).
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in time. Because of the infinite number of units available to an audiovisual medium, cinema must first set up a morphological potential by making a meaningful image ('im-segno', im[age]-sign) from the chaos of undifferentiated reality, and this must be repeated for each film. In other words, the process of metaphorization is doubled. Narrative (prose) cinema, however, has reduced that operation to a single one by literalizing or 'deadening' the primary metaphorical movement from chaos to 'im-segno' through adherence to a conventional stylistic lexicon. To instigate a 'cinema di poesia' is thus to redouble the 'metaphoricity' ofthe filmic process. However, Pasolini points out, the objects of reality which make up each 'im-segno' abvays retain their intense 'storia pre-grammaticale' (pre-grammatical history), so they can never be anything other than initially concrete (EE 175).6 Hence, in order to express concepts, or abstractions, the cinema requires a process which imbricates thc abstract into the concrete-that is, metaphor:
1il cinema 1PU(', esscre parahola, mai esprcssione concettuale diretta l· .. ] llIallcando di lessico concettuale e astratto, C potentemente metaforico, anzi parte suhito, a f()rtio!"i, allivello delJa metal()!",l. (W:' '76, 179) (I ci Ilemal can he parahle, never direct expression of a concept I... .1 in the ahsence of a conceptual, abstract lexicon it is powerfully metaphorical, indeed it sets out from the start, u/iJrliori, at the level of metaphor.)
In essence, little has actually changed since his earlier hlanket denial of the possibility of film metaphor. Since cinema is always presence, he now says, to be discursive and not purely reproductive there must needs be met'lphor. The equation 'cinema-realta' is outlined in detail in the essay 'La lingua scrilta della realta' (h'E 202-30), where, as was seen above, cinema is described as a language of latent pre-articulate presence within actual reality-'il momcnto "scritto" di una lingua naturale e totale, che c I'agire nella reaId' (the 'written' moment of a natural and total language that is action-within-reality, EE 210). In other words, cinema repeats, at a level more immediately permeable to reality, the relation between the symbolic languages in which we communicate. That relation was based on the never-realized ur-language or 'langue', articulated into the oral on the onc hand, which is natural or existential, and, on the other, into the conventional or written. The written derives from 6 This is clearly a residue of those initial reservations on the possibility of the figurative in cinema. See Wagstan; 1985, 112, on the term 'pre-grammaticalc'.
23 2
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
both the oral and the 'langue'. The new relation sees the abstract 'langue' of cinema as having a written articulation in actual films, and, most radically, an 'oral' articulation in life itself, or 'l'intera vita nel complesso delle sue azioni' (the whole oflife in the sum of its actions, EE 210). The 'written' language moves beyond the 'oral' and thcreby delimits it and brings it to consciousness of itself Films similarly raise our consciousness of reality (cf. EE 236). Thus meaning is cxpressed through action or 'pragma' (EE 21 1), or the material, and semiology over spills into phenomenology. This is apparent in Pasolini's use of the term 'oggettuale' (objectual), as opposed to objcctive, to indicate a sort of concreteness ('un'imprescendibile concretezza, diciamo, oggettuale', a nccessary, say, objectual, concreteness, ':"1:" 173) which allows itself to be a vehicle tClr the oneiric, and thus to imply a subject. The connotative range and intensity of metaphor is thus strongly extended, so that fClr example Pasolini's faces-already notcd as a motif of his films---can powerfully connote thcir specificity, their 'face-ness'. The analogue between symbolic Ianguag'es and the language of cinema implies, for Pasolini, that whilst the former arc in a parallel, but never intersecting, relationship with n:;llity and have their own self-suHicient syntactical systems, the latter is 'perpendicular' to reality, constantly achieving ,letual contact, but requiring a double and external synt,lctic construction to achieve meaning, This helps to explain an apparently confused sequence of statements in the essay 'Battute sui cinema' (1:'F 231-4°) where he comments on an assertion by Barthes, in line with Pasolini's own earlier views, that cinema is a metonymic art. J le hrst agrees with Barthes, bur then rct(H'mulates t'he assertion: 'non c il cinema un'arte metonimica, ma cIa realta che c mctonimica' (it is not cinema that is a metonymic art, but it is reality that is metonymic, Fh' 237). Where does this leavc metaphor? Pasolini admits that the fClrmula does not take into account the metaphorical nature of a 'cinema di poesia', but there is an important implicit role for metaphor nevertheless, as a hermeneutic instrument. It becomes that part of cinema which transgresses the norm of simple metonymy, and in so doing allows the nature of cinema and of reality as metonymic to be consciously elucidated, In other words, the statement acts as a corrective to any overblown view of the function of metaphor in film, which at most creates the conditions for a perception of the mechanisms of a language, which mayor may not be metaphorical, by violating its codes.7 7 Scc Whiltock, 11)1)0,38-40, on Cullers distinction bet ween first- and second-order systems and violations of both,
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In a later essay, Pasolini is keen to play down the total identification of cinema and reality, preferring to see the codes of cinema and reality as analogous, each with different space-time co-ordinates, and each incomplete with respect to the other. 8 The idea of analogy is reiterated in another essay, '11 rema' (EE 293-6), where the first of three modes of 'cinematographic decoding' is a 'coscienza dell'analogia col codice fisico-psicologico della realti' (awareness of the analogy with the physical-psychological code of reality). As the term 'cod ice' implies,9 Pasolini is not talking of empirical use of analogy in films, but of structural analogies to the language of cinema. Although both are of significance in discussing his use of metaphor, they are not to be confused. The development of Pasolini's concept of filmic metaphor in his theory indicates a desire on his part to fill its initially perceived lack as part of his project to reclaim cinema for poetic discourse. The fact that its expression is never wholly clear nor central would seem to be significant in itself: confirming the role of metaphor as that of the poetic, as irrational, barharic, oneiric and held at a subconscious level in narrative cinema (I:F f76). Thc raising of the poetic or mctaphorical to an open level of 'consciowmess' would seem of itself to undermine its very essence as always latent and transgressive, never literalized or 'true' in a Nietzschcan sense. The paradox of this position need not, however, prevent an appreciation of the profound importance of the delimiting or defining cflCct of such tr;tnsgressiveness on the nature of l'asolini's cinematic voice, nor undermine his complex empirical uses oCmetaphor. Bcf()re examining specific films for evidence of Pasolini's use of metaphor, a final but crucial area of theory needs to be considered. Above, it was argued that there is a suhstantial overlap between his conception of poetry as deployed in the phrase 'il cinema di poesia', and that of metaphor, based on functional parallels between the two. In another direction, amI much more explicitly, the theory of the 'cinema di poesia' relics on the status of poetry as the medium of self-expression, of the subjective. As was noted in the discussion of technique above, an extensive investigation of the role of the 'soggettiva', or point-of-view shot, and free indirect subjectivity dominates '11 "cinema di poesia" '. His identification of dreams as a sequence of 'im-segni' (EE 1]2) is 8 'Rc> sun! nomina', RE 261-(). ~ Scc also '11 codiec dei codiei' (E1:" 281-8) and 'Tahclla' (EE 297-301).
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based on the nature of archetypal 'im-segni' as 'una base diretta di soggettivita' (a direct base of subjectivity, EE 177). A syllogistic argument would suggest that metaphor is also intimately related to the subjective, and this possibility is reinforced by a number of other associations. The problem of 'style indirecte libre' and inner monologue in cinema, resolved by recourse to the concept of'soggettiva indiretta libera' which ushers into existence the notion of 'cinema di poesia', is stated in the same terms as the problem of abstraction: the inner monologue transcends the immediate and concrete, as does abstraction and, like the latter, the former can only be possible in cinema via metaphor. The characterization of the poetic and metaphoric as equivalent to a repressed subconscious of a prose narrative discourse contains strong inferences, via its psychoanalytic vocabulary and even the use of the oneiric, that what is termed subconscious is also a figure of latent subjectivity. Just as reality is mctonymic, and the metaphoric transgresses and delimits the metonymy, so subjectivity can be said to be that which interrupts the diegetic or the (posited) simply referential or objecive, located where syntagm dissolvcs into, or is implied by paradigm, metonymy into metaphor. 10 Even in Pasolini's first articulation of the problem of metaphor a hmiliar marker of the work of subjectivity was prominent-'I'unica grave diffico\d chc uno scrittore deve affrontare per esprimersi ':~irand()" c che nel cinema non csiste la metafora' (the only serious difficulty that a writer must confront in order to express himself" 'behind the wmera ' is that in cinema there is no such thing as metaphor, MagrelIi, 1977,20; emphasis added). Pasolini's solutions to the problems of self-expression show him adjusting his view of metaphor to the demands of the medium, reconstructing the trope as a dynamic of transition and transgression which not only allows it a powerful defining role in the filmic discourse, but also figures the transience and alterity of the subject in crisis. A large number of his essays on the semiology of cinema duster around the mid-I96os, products of the semiologically pioneering Mostra del nuovo cint'ma or Pesaro Film Festival after 1964.11 Even 10 On the dangers of confusing syntagm/paradigm on the level of discourse with metonymy I metaphor on the level of reference, sce Mctz, I <)H2, 174-{) I. Metz also discusses the nature of censorship as the appearance of the unconsciolls in consciolls: 'Each is "in" the other and the other is in it: the olher of the other' (Metz, 19H2, 253-6sl2SH]l. The m6dcs of censorship-c,)ndensation and displacement-arc thus Ir/l.«).< of an inexpressible uncon-
SCIOUS. I I De Lauretis, 1<)84,40 notes that the Pesaro festivals of the mid-l<)60s 'practically set off the semiological analysis of cinema.' Sec Eco, 1968, 148-60; Heath, 1973.
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within that period, it is never easy to link theory to practice directly, and indeed Pasolini railed against it: mi offendo meMo che tutto quello che faccio e dieo venga rieondotto a spiegare il mio stile. E' UIl modo di esorcizzarmi, c forse di darmi dello stupido [... la mia tcoria] non caffatto una proliferazione del mio fare estetico, ossia della mia 'poetica' cinematogratica. Non 10 Caffatto. (EE 232) (I am deeply olICnded that all I do and say is put down as an explication of my style. It is a sort of exorcism, evcn perhaps a way of making me look stupid [...
my theory I is not at all a prolitCration of my aesthetic practicc, or of my cinematographic 'poetics'. It is not that at all.)
It is no surprise, then, to find a different level of solution to the problem of metaphor in practice than to that elaborated-and then largely implicitly-in theory. But even though he objects to a treatment of t'heory and practice as cause and effect, he constantly conflates the two as means of expression, and strong affinities remain to be drawn out. The cumulative workings of the motifs running through Pasolini's films could bc reread as part o/" the discussion of metaphor. The extension of their connotative and thus metaphorical potential, as they multiply their denotative referents through processes of incomplete repetition, can be traced along a rough parabola of metaphorical density through his film-work, which peaks around Uadlaai e uael/ini, and has different kinds of troughs in AallUone and SaId. In Aaattone, there is little elaborate metaphorical dIcct, although there is much that might be termed Ilgural, including elements already elaborated upon above, which is built on interplay between image-track, sound-track and narrative. As he says in 'Battute suI cinema', 'la scrittura riperde, dunque, col cinema, la sua "natura segnica" e riacquista I'arcaica "natura figurale" , (with cinema, then, writing loses once more its 'nature as sign' and reacquires its archaic 'nature as figure', EE 239). lfaelftlui e uucllini, by contrast, is imbued with metaphor and its cognates symbol and alkgory. The landscape and the characters are caught between base reality and surreal abstraction built into a discourse of ideology. Furthermore, the metaphorical texture is directed towards problems of interpretation and communication in language, those upon which metaphor itself is founded (Greene, 1990, 140). The myth films, Edipo, Teorema, Porcile, ami Medea, taken as a group can be read as an evolving exploration of the structural metaphor created by an overarching suture between parallel universes or sites of history: each film writes a language of immanence to splice together those sites, thus
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
moving from their simple juxtaposition to a metaphorical simultaneity. SaId concludes the parabola with its absolute introversion or reification of metaphor. Barthes is only the most eminent of many advocates for the view of Sa!r; as irredeemable because of its overwhelming literalness: 'Pasolini's film (this, I think, is his own doing) is devoid of symbolism', constructed upon one 'obscene' analogy between decadent fascism and sadism, and immersed in the horrifically literal imaging of violence, which, within the narrative framc and within the signifying system of the film, is consistently and only itself (Barthes, HJlh). 12 The connotative power of metaphor is reduced to a monovalent absolute. Furthermore, the metaphoric impact of the film itself reinti)rces and reiterates the always tendentiously literal motif-mctaphor of consumption in rclation to the consumption or consumerism of nco-capitalism. In SaId, not only is this painfully reiterated in the 'girone della merda', but, as Greene points out, 'Sa/I)'s "real" message lies, precisely, in its desire to be unbearable, that is, its refusal to be consumed' (11)1)0, 216··I7). Whittock (11)1)0, 4l)----61)) draws lip a ten-point schema for the identification of metaphor in films, which can be reduced to three broad types: metonymical, compositional and transgressive. The latter includes all t he technical aspects or editing and (ilming which distort or challenge conventions and which propel the spectator beyond the apparent and literal into potentially metaphorical readings. This category is thus the enabler of the lirst two, and Pasolini's lilms arc densely packed with its effects, many of which have already heen mentioned. The stal"ic plast icity ofiigures in //uallonc is alien to traditional film, as is the emphasis on disconl"inuity ofimage and sound via editing, and exclusion or steps in a logical or narrative sequence, such as in Valll':c!o. r.I These echo the central effect of the 'cinema di poesia' which is to 't~u· sentire la m,lCchina' (to make the prescnce of the camera felt, /:'/;. rXX). The disturbing stylization of the killing of I ,aius in /;'dipo and of the laughing characters of /I({:attonc and La ri(olla, and indeed Pasolini's general, studied aesthetic of unnaturalness, are all transgressive metaphorical patterns. The metonymical and compositional types arc more closely bound up with the detail of image and narrative. Ucccllacci c Ulxcliini will serve as an illustration. 12 Sec also ilcrsani, [()He., 51-4, I07-11; ilersani allll Dutoit, 19H2; Calvino, IIjH2; Wahl, IIjHo, HI-2. 1.1 On inclusion and exclusion as a dynamic of film narrative, ~cc Pasolini's essay 'Tetis',
97--1)·
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Uccellaai e uccellini is governed by two recurrent metaphorical images: the road and the moon. Toto and Ninetto are embarked on a Beckcttian journey which has no end, as the film's epigraph points out, quoting from an interview with Mao Zedung-' "Dove va l'umaniti? Boh!" '(Where is the human race going? Dunno!). From the start, then, the journey is marked as representative of a human condition and of a mock-ideology. Furthermore, the non-teleological wandering determines the film's errant structure, and thus promotes other metaphorical resonances. Images of roads dominate the modern section of the film. The two protagonists progress along strange, massive halfconstructed roau hriuges-literally roads to nowhere. And the entire landscape tills out the image of the road. Bizarre road signs ('Istanbul km. 42.53') anu road names of the dispossessed ('Via Lillo Strappalenzuola-Scappato dOl casa a 12 anni', I .. Sheetripper StreetRan away from home at 12), the fragmenteu, ruineu stretches of buildings isolated in open countryside, the almost ahstract geometrical f(lrmations oflines and curves f(lrmed hy the shapes of buildings and of the road girders (as composed by each shot): these aspects together create a fabulous set ling /ilr an 'idcocomic' fablc. The filmic style is caught hetween the iconicity or /lccaltonl' and VanKe/o '4 and the symmctries of Tl'orcma, as lhe camera consistently (i'ames to harmonize the protagonists with the /()l"Jl1S and shapes ofthe landscape. The appearance of the crow only enhances the power of the journey metaphor. Ilis first words-'l )ove andate?' (Where arc you going?}-articulate the question which the imagery has been hegging from the start, witholll" eliciting any answer ('annamo line e poi annamo lane', we're I!,'oin' here and thell we're goin' there), His offer to join them'non mi volcte come compagno di strada?' (don't you want me as a fellow traveller?)---opens up the meaning of the metaphor from its general associations (from the Dantesque 'il cammin di nostra vita >l5) into politics (the Marxist (dlow-traveller), and also of course, autobiography, The intertitle which heralds the crow's appearance, and which is repeated towards the end-'il cammino incomincia / e il viaggio egia finito' (the road begins / and the journey is already over}--confirms the pattern of paradoxical strangeness and deceptive movement in the '4 P"solini cut from the released lilm a sequence showing a Giottoesquc vision of Paradise seen hy frate Nine((,,: sce U(allaui e lIudlini, '3'-3. '5 (hall'lui e u((ellilli, a guided journey across the decaying lam]scapc of modernity, bears more than a little resemblance to Pasolini's reworking of the Commedia, La divina mimesis, largely composed between ,<)63 and 1965,
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
journey of the film. Further indications of absurdity, stasis and circularity permeate the film. The crow gives his home address in the idiom of the road-signs, only to be mocked by his companions: he comes from 'Ideologia', and lives in 'La citta del futuro, via Carlo Marx, n. 70xi (the City of the Future, Karl Marx St., n. 7ox7). The car of the circus performers does not work, even after being pushed in a circle. The circularity of oppression secs Tot() and Ninetto chased otT land, only to threaten with eviction a poor family-who have to deceive their children that it is still night to alleviate thcir hunger-and then be threatened in turn by the host of the 'I )antist dentists'. Similarly, in the medieval episode, Francesco (,sti santi!', these saints!) orders around Cicilio who in turn orders around Ninetto. !'rate Cicilio spends two years rooted to the spot, waiting fill· inspiration, only to be thwarted by another circular paradox when he does convert the birds: the hawks now love God, and the sparrows now love God, but the hawks still kill and eat the sparrows. And the mysterious death scene at the start or t he film elicits ~l clear statement of the dark, static side of the journey metaphor-'poveraccio passa da una morl"e alI'a It ra morl"e' (poor sod is just going b·om one death to another). The association with death is amplified by N inetto's innocent altempt to imagine death hy holding his hreath, by the encounter with Togliatti's runeral and its effect-"'ormai non vi chiedo pill dove ambte' (I'm not going to ask you any more where you arc going)-and by the death oflhe crow, which becomes the aClual cnd of the film. There is anot her cnd, however, and another image or circularilY in the metaphor orlhe moon. The film-titles open and dose on an image of the moon. The first lines of the film arc ahout the tides and t he moon (To\"(): 'Co' la luna nun se prende', no use getl ing upset al the moon). And in the tinal scene of the film, the E.tther and son meet a prostitute called J .una, who has sex with each of I hem in lurn in I he undergrowth, and who is instinctively and somewhat lllaternalIy attracted to them. Finally, '('oh) muses at onc point on travel in space, and on Gagarin'qucllo che candato sulla luna' (thc onc who wcnt to the moon) (sit)concluding 'cammino cammino e ci si arriva' (you keep on going and you get there in the cnd). Hence the moon is a positive end, whether or not its attainment is Emtasy. Its half-light echoes the strange, unreal landscape; but its force of sexual and maternal instinct sets it apart from the over-rational, ideologizing crow, and links it with the spiritual power of prophecy in St Francis, which the crow lacks ('si, un profeta! magari', sure, a prophet! if only).
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The road and the moon are metaphors of history and desire, of the bewildering, receding experience of consciousness of reality, shadowed by death and the failing voice of Ideology (the funeral procession of Togliatti), and the subconscious drive for immersion in the quiddity of reality. The pseudo-couple of Tot() and Ninetto are phantasms of subjectivity's encounter with those self-forming realities. And the studied patterning which interlaces the journey imagery with the moon and creates metaphorical resonances for both also extends into recurrent imag·es of eating, (in)digestion and hunger; and into the extensive play on the nature of language-from the talking crow, to the languages of the birds, to the miming to J .una and to each other by Tot() and Ninetto, to the acting of the circus troupe. ,(, What is more, the manner in which the film casts itself as an ideal vehicle for metaphor in film, through its fahulistic alterity, takes us back to Pasolini's dual assertion in his theory that to express concepls, cinema must work in parables, in metaphors, and Ihallo express the seH~ it must work in poety, in metaphor, in both cases "aal/se cinema is irretrievably bound to reality. Hence we might sa y Ihal this, the least narcissistic of his films, by being built upon an exploration of Ihe f()rms of metaphor and on metaphors of consciousness, is also onc of his mosl probing explorations of the work of subjectivity on film. ,(, ·I·h" circus is 11", sellinv; or" Ihird episode of Ihe film, of whid, only eiv;ht minutes was shol (known as ,·,,"(, ..1cirw'). h \V;" included in Ihe screenplay (,1.'1101110 hi'IIICU', Uaellacci (" 1/((dlilli, (,5 ",). Sce Ilonv;ie, "1'1', IIIX '1 '-
13
Being and P£lm- Time In the dominant motifs and the recurrent metaphorical practices of Pasolini's films and theoretical writings, two related governing figures emerge to bind the filmic discourse to that of the subject and its constantly frustrated desire for stability, plenitude and meaning: the Real and the past. The Real, or in its more distilled manifestation, the hody (Ch. 7) is both the source of the highly visual nature of Pasolini's hIm, and an expression of an axiomatic, even mythological beliefsuhtending all his work: 'che io usi la scrittura 0 che io usi il cinema altro non faccio che evocare nell .. sua fisicita, traducendola, la T.ingua dclla Rea\t:t' (whether I use writing or the cinema I never do anything other than evoke in its physicality, hy translating it, the Language of Reality, 1:"1:' 268). The streng·th of his reliance on the axiomatic value oflhe Real is demonstrateo by his rcfusalto modify it oespite the threat it represented to the whole eoi/ice of his semiological theories, as scveral more 'professional' semioticians were wont to point ouL I Contact with reality is, ti,r Pasolini, charg'ed with sensuality: Le cinema me permet de maintenir le contact avec la realile, Ull contact physique, charnel, je dirais mcmc d'onlre sensuel. (I )uflot, 1970, 17) (Cinema allows me to keep lip comact with reality, a physical, carnal, I would even say sensual contact.)
I Sce Beltelini, I<)7J,X'<),54-7;Eco, 1l)6X, 150 60; (iarroni, ",f.X, '4 '7,4J~. Much"f what Pasolini says is not, however, so scmiologic.lly nai've as Ihey su!(!(es1. I >cspile examples of rhctoric.lly c.tcgorical assertions sllch as 'WI",t is the dil"fere\l(:e het wcen cineIlla •• 11<1 reality? Practic.lly none' (Stack, ")CI<), 21), his "Irmutttiuns invariahly ackl1uwlcdge that reality is coded and partakes of culturally detcnnined mediatiun. Thus cinema is 'la lingua s(rillll della rcalti' (the JIIritll''' language uf reality), or 'lall1ea audio-visiva' (alldio-visllallalmiqllc, HI-.' 203; emphases added). Indeed, far (i'om shirking OIdes, he uses nine in his model ofarticulalions in 'Tahclla' (I,E 2<)7-Jot). Ami in direct reply to Eco's criticisms, he wrilcs: 'tUlle le mie caotichc paginc [ .. .", tendono a portare la Scmiologia alia definitiva culturalizzazionc della natura' (all my chaotic pages [ ... 1tend tu hring Semiology to the definitive LUlturaliz.ltion of nature, EE 283). For a convincing rehahilitation ofl'asolini's theory, sce Dc Lauretis, 19Ho-1 and 1984,40-52.
BEING AND FILM-TIME
The immediacy aspired to, as in the early dialect poetry, is coterminous with subjective plenitude and stability, without which the contact fragments or dissolves. The introduction of desire into the ontological and phenomenological problem of the real defines his trajectory in the latter: La mia filosofia, 0 il mio modo di vivere L... J non mi sembra altro, poi, che un allllcinato, infantile c pragmatico amore per la rea}ra. ReJigioso in quanto si /iHlda in qU:1lehe modo, per analogia, (';on una sorte di immenso feticismo sesslIale. (/;'1:: 233) (my philosophy, or my way oflife [... [ seems to mc, then, nothing more than a bedazzled, in/;mtile and pragmatic love for reality. Religious in so far as it is fillll1ded in some sense, hy analogy, on a sort of immense sexual fetishism.)
The fetish describes precisely a concentration on presence, on sheer (corpo)reality, on the 'objectual', rather than on the eroticism of absence and deferral. The object of fetishistic desire becomes a complement to the gazing' subject, and psychoanalytically, that object stands fill' the parI of the subject which it perceives itself to be lacking. And if fill' K lein, it would be fhe mother's breasl, and ((lr Laean the phallus, for Pasolini it seems 10 be being ifself2 By turning reality, and thus the Objecl as constantly encountered, into the Object of desire, the body validates and rein/illTes the subject, the agent of desire, and also achieves the eflect of denaturalization: 'il mio amore feticistico per le cose delmondo mi impedisce di considerarle naturali' (my fetishistic love fill' things in the world prevents me from considering them as natural, /;'/:' 2J I). In \'Urn, the unnatural opens the way filr ideological subversion and crit ilJue which will resurface below in the consideration of ('he self's position in time. By endowing the representation of objects of reality with an allra of ontological irreducibility, Pasolini suggests the possibility of being heyond systems of naturalized norms; and the vessel of this deEuniliarization is a sort of wonder. The product ofthe encounter with the real is, at least in aspiration, a discourse of 'real' presence cut to the measure of the childlike or fetishistic desire of the subject (Mulvey, 1975, 19). An eros not built on an arrested dynamic of deferral of pleasure can propel the subject towards a wholesale and somewhat transcendental identification with reality, as is hinted at in the image of a mirror Pasolini uses to explain how einema and reality interact: 2 On fetishism, scc Laplanchc and Pontalis, J()73, 1 [5-[7. On desire in Pasolini, see Nowcll-Smith, 1980.
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
Mi e successo, insomma, quello che succederebbe a un talc che facesse delle ricerche sui funzionamento dello specchio. Egli si mette davanti allo spccchio, e 10 osscrva, 10 esamina, prende appunti: e, infine, cosa vede? Se stesso L· .. 1 Cosi succede a chi studia il cinema: siccome il cinema riproduce la realti! finisce eol ricondurre allo studio della realt,l. (EE 2]6) (So, my experience was the same as that of someone researching into how mirrors work. He sets up in front of the mirror, and he observes it, examines it, takes notes: and, in the cnd, what does he sce? I Iimself. .. That's what" happens to whoever studies cinema: since cinema reproduces reality, st udy of it always leads back to the stuuy of reality.) A simple realignment of the axes of the simile indicates a clear desire to be within the real: the self and the real occupy parallel positions within the tenor and vehicle. If wc follow precisely the slippage that the simile is illumin;lting, the sclfbeeomes an emblem ofthe real. Guido Fink puts is more directly: The principal aspiration of alll'asolini's work I... is I to identify himself with Iimmet/csimllrsil the object, to annul himselflllnnullarsil int he character, to 'de scellli' to rhc level of 11l,ltler in ordcr to sllhlinute it and to slIhlimatc himself Isublimani I; and it is an aspiration that already het rays an awareness of rupture Ila ({Isciell;::;" Ji unafi'allural. (translated (i'om "ink, 1I)()6, 41.1.) Cinema in particular creates a channel between the Real and the suhjective through the simultaneous apotheosis and annihilatioll or the latter in the (H' mer. The most direct evidence (H' this is t he frontal, iconic body of the early films, and the increasing ohsession with the dis·play of the body and its functions and tcxture in later works. 'I 'here the body becomes both a last loclls of uncompromised reality in the increasingly alienated consumerist system, and a linguist ic system and loeus of'writing" in its own rig'hl (see the expressivity ofthe body in the Trilllgia and the hody language of thc I ,'rancisean episode of l hcc/lllui c
uacllini). :l The second governing figure after the Real is that of the past and its representation in the present. In Glrcfully paradoxiealmanIler, Pasolini uses the past as a metaphor f(lr revolution in the present, by drawing out affinities between the past and metaphor, both objects and effects of censorship, whether political or psyehoanalytical. All three-revolution, the past, metaphor-erupt into the present in fragmented or distorted J In rhe latter respect atieast, Pasolini's recourse 10 the body hears comparison with the positions oCfeminist theorists such as Cix()us and Irigaray. See c.g. Cixous and Clement, '975; Freeman, 1988; Moi, 11)87.
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form, and all three, for Pasolini, seem to be traces of an original, essential force for the aspiration towards the Real which Fink describes above. In several places Pasolini states this view explicitly: ci rivolp;iamo aU'Unesco in nome della seandalosa forza rivoluzionaria del Passato VI! mum. di ,r.,'allll) (we turn to Unesco in the name of the scandalous revolutionary furee of the Past) le passe est la seule critique globale du present. (Gerard, J <)1\ I, (n) (the past is the only global critique of the present)
10 sono una ()I'za del l'assato. Solo nclla tradiziol1e c il mio am ore. (Mu/Illlla RO/llII, I (10; ami Rosa, B I, 6H)) (l am a (.rce of the I'as!. / Only in tradition is my love.)
The met aphor is a function or the elaborate rc-evocation ofthe past in the present which is hased on I'he rc-sacralization or the present, as has .t1ready heen nOlcd. And in comhination with the fig;ure of the real or Ihe hotly, lhat of the past is suhsumed into a final area of investigation of subjectivity in the internal processes orl'asolini's cinema, film-time. The const rllct ion of Ihe self as a suhject in time is most immediately apparent in the inlertexl ual dynamic of t he many tilm adaptations after f/imgc/o. As already noted, l'asolini takes on and redirects texts which narrate (Htnding; moments or the history of civilization, or of history itself The specific meaning of each adaptatioll, and the concurrent subjective framework lilt· reading it, n:side in the action of the narrative of origin on the present perccptions of the subject, and vice versa. I 'urthermore, in cases such as t'lwp,e/o and h'dipo, the action is mediated and dispersed by secondary readings of the original-respectively 'two Ihousand years of storytelling; ahout the life of Christ' and 'psychoanalysis reprojccted on the myth Iof Oedipus I' (Stack, Il)6l), 8], 120)which arc equally active and acted upon as historical objects. And of course, the 'orig'inal' texts themselves in these cases arc no more than early readings of extant mythical narratives. The subject is thus constructed within a temporal tiekl of reading which is neither linear nor monovalent, but open to multiple dynamics of action and interaction. Pasolini reads and interprets the pre-texts on film, projecting himself and his subjective control over the filmic process, but also necessarily over the process of reading, which is then in turn repeated in reverse as the spectator is constructed as the subject undertaking the same
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
reading process-in other words, as the figure ofPasolini, the author as subject. In Edipo, for example, Pasolini creates a 'metaphoric autobiography' (Stack, 1969, 120) by specifying the look of the camera as the look of the child in the prologue, which then becomes the look of the spectator, and the look of Oedipus. Subjectivity is propelled across barriers of history and prehistory, rooted in the sutured analogy between the latter two, and in the (always temporal) processes of(re)reading. Adaptation conditions and often determines the film itself as a 'personal' reading, and in a sense facilitates a poetic cinema, but it does so at the glossing margins of a series of fUll(hlmental texts in the history of narrative. Once more the poetic function is thrown into relief by its marginal or immanent position. Indeed, despite Pasolini's promotion of poetic cinema, he never argued, cither in theory or praclice, t()r a wholesale abandonment of narrative. '1 'he 11)65 essay on the cinema of poetry clearly cordons off narrative as a sort of Crocean structure, labelling it a 'pseudo-racconto' (pseudo-story, I~'/~' I Xl) or an 'alihi' for the primary content, the content of the poetic '()rm (I~'J~' 11) I). In later essays, he seems to he more open to st raightl()fward narrative as a necessary colour in a film-artist's palate, and wonders if a fully lyric or poetic 'cinema di poesia' is possihle outside till'malist avant-garde pseudo-utopias, to which he is radically host ile: 'io cOlltinuo a credere nel cinema che racconta' (J continue to believe in a cinema that tells stories, 'I segni viventi e i poeti morti', I:'F 25X-\). Indeed, the '/h/ogia del/a vi/a promotes the play o('narrativity in its source texts as orfundamental value, powerfully analogous to the vitality and sexual freedom or the (pseudo)historieal worlds they depict. I Iowever, classic (U'I11S of film narrative arc of course constantly undermined and decent red, and in so far as film narrative is a vessel t(U' a series of conventions which synthesize film-time and real time, this decentering has considerahle implications. Narrative time in Pasolini's cinema is irredeemably split. h'dipo, 11 Decameroll and J raccrl1lti di Canlcrbur)! set up frames of apparenl"ly real or present time to control the mythical-dream time and narrativedream time, respectively, of the main body of the films. Uaellaui e uccellini also splits by way ofthe narrative excursus of the crow who narrates the parable ofthe Franciscan friars; La ricotla intercuts the blackand-white 'reality' of the film-set with the garish colour and iconicity of the film within the film, the Gospel story; Che WIll Iono le Iluvole? has the 'reality' of the puppets' backstage existence (and the further frame of the puppet-maker and dustmen) set against the 'fiction' of their
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on-stage performance of Shakesepare's Othello; and SalO, with its prologue showing the drawing up of rules by the four protagonists and the rounding up of victims, sets up an horrific other-world where the rhythm of torture stimulated by the narratives of the diseuses takes over from real time and annihilates desire, meaning and death (Plate 7). The victims arc portentously told as their ordeal begins, 'siete fuori dai confini di ogni Icg,llita I ... 1 per quanto riguarda il mondo, siete gia morti' (you are beyond the confines of every legality as far as the world is concerned, you are already dead). Teorema and Porci/e, as describcd above, arc even more starkly split in two. Furthermore, in each case, the real-time segments are always only apparently real and pres«.:nt: «.:ach sNs up a dream within a dream, and thus I1jiore delle 'Mille e una nolle " which simply l:Xtends the duality of all others into a smooth«.:r mise en ahyme of dream-narrativ«.:s, without apparent temporal discontinuity, could in fact stand as their epitome. A second group of films or screenplays, developed out of the discovery of metaphor I hrough analogy in Vange/o and its potential for hyperdetermined reference to historical and aesthetic intermediaries, displays morc historically and ideologically based splits which create strong, explicit links, and even simultaneity between past amI present, hetween real time and tilm-time. The use in Vatll~e/o of southern Italy as an analogue ofhiblical Palestine, in the quality of its physical being, extends into Pasolini's most ambitious, often unrealized projects. The Appunli pcr un 'Orcsliudc aji-iwna, San Pa% and POYno-leo-k%ssal were all planned as grand analogies under thc sign of a radical reevaluation of the past as an ideological critique ofthe present. Ores/jade shows precisely Pasolini searching for the characters and locations of the Ores/eia in the faces and landscapes of present-day Tanzanialooking for mythical time in historical-political actuality. Even Le ml/ra tli Sana shows the [rag-ic counterpoint between modern, destructive capitalism and the surviving residue of the ancient civilisation of Yemen, contrasting S,ma with Orvieto, where the residue of history is now engulfed by modernity. The overwhelming evidence of structural discontinuity in time moves the function of narrative itself away from sequential cause and effect towards metaphor and metanarrative. Minor disturbances of temporal sequence thereby acquire greater relief and potential for metaphorical effect also. The speeded-up image track, in moments of La ricolla, II Daameron and I racconti di Canterbury; the dream in Accattotle; Medea's un signalled prophetic dream of destruction; the
r... ]
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
repetitive circular rhythms of Teorema and Porctle: all these and others create a fragmented, non-linear axis of time and mark the nature of narrative progression as a vehicle for signification. In particular, they point to the importance of the transition between levels of time, and of their continuing mutual immanence. The moments of transition in Pasolini's work tend to emphasize, both technically and in content, the overlap between 'bcf()re' and 'after'. The modern prolog·ue to J;·dipo is mysteriously infiltrated by the haunting pipe-music of mythical Thebes, before the image-track cuts away from the child's swollen feet held by his f:tther to the desert and the child bound by hands and feet to the shepherd's stick. In II Decarneroll, both Ciapelletto and Giotl'o sce or hear the cllaracters of the stories bcf()re the film cuts away to Boccaccio's narratives, amI they are thereby implicated in the aesthetic and moral valucs of the latter; and similarly Chaucer in I rt/((Ol1ti tli Canll'r/JuIT is surroundcd by young men who reappear in the Pardoner's Tale and others, and is haranp;ucd by a wife who sounds very much like the Wife of Bath. There is a spilling-over fi·om onc time into another which is at once transgTcssivc and excessive,4 creating a powerful impulse to tTansfimnation and re interpretation, amI destahilizing the apparent hierarchics o(seqllcnce. The technical nat urc of transition and many othcr features of filmtime arc elearly dctermined in largc pari hy the proccsses o/" edit ing, as discussed ahove. I )iscontinuit ies and lInconventionally cxtendcd shots, staccato jump-cuts and slow panning shots have been noted as typical o/" Pasolini's editing· style, and this pract icc or montage was related abovc to the theorizing of editing as an equivalent o/"death in thc constnu:t ion of meaning and of lived action. I r we go back to Pasolini's theoretical writing Oil this topic, the temporal aspects of cditing will he confirmcd as closely related to the nature of subjectivity in lime. In his attempt to t()rmulate an answer to Metz's Elmous qllest ion 'cinema: langue oulangap;e?' (Metz, H)7I; j;'j;' 204, 231-2), Pasolini had distinguishcd a hypothetical 'lang·lIe'--'cinema'---·from an actual 'parolc'-'i films' (sic). The I()rmer is a 'tecnica audiovisiva' which does not exist as an object, and the latter a concretization of the former, just as it is a written language of reality. Hence, 'la realt,! non IcI, infine, che del cincma in natura' (reality is simply, in the end, cinema in nature, Fj;' 203), 'I'intera vita, nel complcsso delle sue azioni, cun cinema naturale e vivente' (the 4 cr 'e'cslla ucmcsure de eet :lmour [de Medcel4l1i Ill'" le plus fascine' (il is the excess of this love rof Medca's I which fascinated me most, Dullol, H)70, I I I).
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whole oflife in the sum of its actions is a natural and living cinema, EE 210). Cinema is analogous to living reality, or better, with 'I'agire nella
realti' (action-within-reality), because both are archetypally 'un continuo e infinito piano-sequenza' (a continuous and infinite plan sequence, EE 233,244): that is, reality is lived (until death) as a continuous present without meaning, without selection or combination, and necessarily by a single sensory agent or subject ofa long' point-of-view shot or 'soggettiva' (EE 241). Actual films, like death, select and combine time and space throllg'h editing and mise ell scene, and thus create meaning by multiplying points of view and integrating living reality and lived reality (El;' 242-4,265), The 'alltore' is now the agent of selection and combination, not the subject of 'I'agire nella realti' (which Pasolini calls 'soggettiva esistenziale', existenti,t/ point-of-view shot, EE 244), and hence the subjectivity of the film is at onc remove horn the simple 'soggettiva'-it is, perhaps, a free, indirect subjectivity (EL' 179--<)1), The transit ion horn cinema to /llm, however, does not simply multiply or qualify present point-of-view shots, but also operates on the level of historical time, as he notes in 'Osservazioni sui piano-sequenza' (ER 24 1 -5): trasl(u'ma il presente in passato I ... lul1 passato che, per ra~ioni immanenti al mezzo einelllato~ralico, e nOli per scdta estetica, ha sempre i m()(.li tiel presente (2 (il!l; un prl'SCnlt' slori((}), (Fh' 244) (illrans\()rllls the present into the pasll, . ,I a past which, till' reasons immanenl to Ihe cinemalo~raphic mediulll, and nol throu~h acsthctic choice, always has the f(mlls of Ihe pn:selll (il is ill olher /IIortls all historica.l present) ).5
Pasolini's obsessive preoccupation with the splitting of time in his film work, whether literally or only tig'uratively as a split between past and present, is therefore, on his own terms, always metacinematographic He acknowledges and explores the overspilling of past into present and vi(e versa, in a medium in which time past is always also time present. The imm;menee 0(" the past in the present in film prefigures and conl1gures the immanent structures of cinema as stated above, Such displaced figuration at onc remove is a model which explains the untenability for Pasolini of attempts to (re)construct in films the infinite 'piano-sequenza' of cinema. In an intuition familiar from both his poetic practice and the Mannerist tensions of pastiche, Pasolini realizes that to reproduce one element in an unfamiliar context is to transform both its meaning and its ways of meaning, As he explains in 5 Sce Turigliatto, 1()76, 125, 150-2.
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
'Battute suI cinema' (EE 234-5), if the 'piano-sequenza' is coterminous with 'l'agire nella rea ita' in cinema, in films it can only be naturalistic in a way that 'realta' and 'azione' are not. He can thus substitute the 'piano-sequenza' with its apparent opposite, montage and split time in his film practice, because the 'linearita ilnillilica' (anll/Vlii" linearity) of cinema becomes in films necessarily a 'linearita sinle/ira' (.~vn/heti{ linearity), and because both conceptions are governed by different manifestations of his (subjective) desire, or love for reality (flE 235). Hence the vehicle of immanence is the subjectivity of the 'author'-seen as theoretician and director conflated-and is to be located in the process of suture, between cinema and films (in theory) and between past and present (in practice), which also acts ro hind the spectator into the illusion of subjective plenitude offered hy the films as objects (sec Ch. 14). Returning to the films themselves, and to the diegetic role played by images of past and present and their intermingling, a further dimension to the suhject in time becomes apparent in the light or these theoretical considerations. There are, broadly, three pasts represented in Pasolini's films: the prehistorical, mythical period of a range of films fi·om j:·diplI, Medea and Orestjat/£' (also I,£, mum di Sil/Ut and /lppullti per lllljilm sul/'India) and rhe cannibal episode of Ponile to, in a differenl sense, Villlgdo and j,a ricolla; Ihc early modern periods of the Tri!ogia del/a vi/a ;lJ1d the Franciscan episode or llcrellacri e l/u;cllini; and the epitome of post-Enlightenment modernity in SIt/r;, prefigured in Ihe modern section of Po nii£-. I, The signifying powcr ofthe first group is besl illustrated hy the role of the centaur Chiron in Medcll. [n the opening section, he is shown as he educates the growing boy jason into his heritage and into the secrets of a world governed by gods and the mysteries of nature. The dawn-lit, watery landscape, which supports a static sequence of discontinuous poses over the period ofjason's youth, sets the narrative beyond history and society, where the eentam's dual nature represents a synthesis of man, nature and myth (Plate s).Jason is induced into a primitive wholeness which parallels the harbaric, sacred power of the priestess Medea, and makes their union tragically inevitahle. However, even hefore jason leaves Chiron to claim his birthright, the centam is transf()rmed into a (, Here, and in mllch of this section, .I/(WI/OIIl· and Mamlna Rom" seem to stand apart from the rest ofPasolini's films as roOled in the present. IIowevcr, even thcre, the 'borgate' have a prehistorical, pre-Christian aura at times and the v;trious stylistic effects of dissonance look forward to analogolls temporal tensions in later works.
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man asJason reaches adulthood and begins to lose the mystical link with nature and myth. Chiron and Jason therefore form a pseudo-couple representing a consciousncss split over time, just as much as Jason and Medea represent a subjectivity always already radically split by history. Jason is integrated into society, and ultimately betrays Medea for a politic marriage, but Chiron reappears to him in a pivotal scene in both his incarnations as centaur and man, to warn him that he cannot deny his origin, and his love for Medea that: is its irreducible residue. Pasolini explained to Dutlot (1981, 96) 'cette presence des deux centaures signitie que la chose sacrce, une fois dcsacralisce, ne disparait pas pour autant' (this presence ofthe two centaurs means that the sacred, once it has been desecrated, nevertheless does not disappear). Medea's final catastrophe is a figure ofJason's attempted suppression of 'la chose saCl·cc' and ofthe original synthesis. She reacquires her magical powers, long lost in the lay-culture of Corinth, only whcn she resolves to challenge the power of history Qason's royal marriage, his lineage). She is thus a figure of; on the one hand, the past or the prehistorical as a force of revolution or critique in the present, and, on the other hand, of a presence, ddined by action-within-reality in synthesis with the full t()rce of nature. The myth is transmitted to the mythical quality ofthe film as a synthesis (not analysis) of history, and hence, implicitly, myth spills over into ideology, and lay Corinth can represent the bourgeois present. The same pattern of synthesis through myth operates in the second gToup, where the medieval past is 'sacred' in its experience of open sexuality and unmediated bodily expression-in other words, again, in its presence---in contrast to the present: crisis in sexuality analysed by Pasolini in his essays of the J ()7os, written mostly after the making of the trilogy: 'in un momento di profimda crisi culturale I... ] mi csembrato che la sola realt.I j()sse quella del corpo' (in a moment of profound cultural crisis I ... 1 it seemed to me that the only reality was that of the hody, 'Tctis', 100). The body becomes a site for historical action, and the film the written lang·uag'c of that action. In the trilogy, and in l/ucllaai e uaellini, the exploration of the body as an expressive language is paramount. The failure of the trilogy is, among othcr things, a failurc to operate successfully the synthetic metaphorical transfer to ideology which Mu/ea and Uaellaai e uccellini achievc. The past remains as a literal, and thus false, construct, and is integrated by the present into conventional, exploitative narrative by way of its own overdetermined deployment of narrative patterning.
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The final examples of film-imaging of the past, in Porcile and Salo, produce a different order of synthesis. Both set up a three-way analogy which is revealed as a figure of pseudo-synthesis between reified order and physicality. The arehitectonic order and grandeur of the Palladian Villa Pisani where Porcile is set is parallel to the rational, regulatory order of the four dignitaries in Said, figures of a Sadean Enlightenment. The Nazism of Herdhitze is a premise for the industrial power games with Klotz, set in the sham respectability of the Villa; similarly the dignity of the SaIl'> fascists is annihilated in their extreme perversions, which in turn, as already noted, become a Iiteralized metaphor fi.)r neocapitalist consumption. Both films, and particularly SaIl;, are more sophisticated and conventional in their editing than is usual for Pasolini, and both modify the synthetic critique with a more analytical representation of the /()rms of modernity. The revolutionary power of the primitive, all but absent in Sail;, is retained in POrcill' by Julian 's 'natural' perversion, and its metaphorical c1ahoration in the cannihal episode. The further dimension apparent in these instances, seen in the light of the consistent split! ing; of film-time and the thcorcfical e1ahoration of a dual dynamic of metacinematic immanence, is /(HlI1d in the mode of synthesis (or suture) between past and present, and I hus history and reality. Analytical, ideological crit ique is a secondary and sporadic, hut none the less import·ant, product of this synthesis which, Elr li·om hcing materialist in orig·in, is governed by the work of subjectivity. The ohject of nostalgia, then, is less the past as such than the uncensored plenitlJ(\c of'l'agire nella realt,'t', or cincma, which can only ever surface as a trace of the imaginary, or oneiric, in a mediated, symholic actuality. It is pcrceived and represented as a vessel of'rcvollltion' hecause of its dynamic of erupting into and disturbing the present formally and, hy a loose analogy, politically. The living sllhjective desire I(u· inscription into material reality, for being, thus aspires to be contlatetl with the concurrent lived desire or the subject in timc to be inserted along a synthetic historical axis. The integration of these two orders o/" desire points to a powerful aspiration to grasp and in some sense to express what might be termed the subject's full heing in time.
14
Spectatorship To anyone J";uuiliar with the recent history of IlIm theory, the analysis undertaken in the previous five chapters might well have seemed somewhat perverse, since it has been more or less obsessed with the origins of the work of subjectivity in Pasolini himself~ or at the very least with the impression his work gives of having an expressive and constitutive origin of some kind. By contrast, subjectivity has become a fundamen tal and much deba ted area oflilm theory not in reference to an original self 'hidden behind' a film---'che si esprime "girando" '-but rather as an aspect of film spectatorship. There arc, however, good reasons f()lO having suppressed discussion of spectatorship in Pasolini until now, and good reasons f(JI' dedicating the final chapter of our analysis to it. The first and most compelling rea SOil derives fi'om the nature of the work o("subjectivity in Pasolini. As in his journalism and poetry, so in his cinema the history of the work of subjectivity has been read as a history of the negotiation hefween seIthood and t()I'm; that is, between conscious or unconscious manifestations of the need to express a self, and the restraints and filters of the languages, arenas, media, and genres of that seW-expression. In ot her words, his work has been read not only as a sympfol1l (Valesio, I !)XO-'l) of universal patterns of subjectivity, but also as a site JiJr the active confrontation and transf()rmation of those patterns. And the starting··point (()I' that conJi-ontation in Pasolini is invariably a loud, often over-anxious declaration of the presence and the importance ofthe speaking' subject in every act ofenullciatioll. 'Bisogna esporsi' (you must display I expose yourself), he wrote in 'La crocilissione' (B I, 376), and the same image recurs in one of several deeply personal interludes in l:'F, in the essay 'Il cinema impopolare': Vorrei accentuare la parola esihizione. J,a vocazione alle piaghe del martirio che l'autore b a se stesso I ... 1 non ha senso se non c resa csplicita al massimo: se non c appunto csihiLa I ... 1. Egli nc\l'atto invcntivo, neeessariamente seandaloso, si cspone-e proprio alia lcttera-agli altri. (EE 274)
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(I'd like to stress the word exhibition. The author's vocation for the selfinflicted wounds of martyrdom t... ] makes no sense unless it is made as explicit as possible: unless it is, precisely, exhibited t... J. In the act of invention, which is necessarily scandalous, he exposes himself--literally-to others.)
The figure of the author's self-exposure, of his strident attempts to wrench the medium to himselt~ is an obstacle which resists and distorts any attempt to read around it. Pasolini creates tc.)l·ms of discourse which write themselves as having an origin, precisely in compensation f(lr the anxious intuition of its lack or fragmentation. The vocation to martyrdom in '11 cinema impopolare' acknowledges as much in its imagery of pain and splitting ('le piaghe del martirio'). In this context, then, it makes sense to follow the trajectory of th,1t anxiety from aut hor to suhjects (speaking or of speech) to subjectivity, and only t hen to consider the reagent or spoken suhject, the spectator. Having reached that stage, it soon becomes clear that large parts of the task havc already heen figured in earlier stages. The attempt to separate out and promote the 'author' is a rhetoric, cven an ideolog'y that. disguises its own f;Jisity. To turn now to the issue of spectatorship is to transgress the limits of the pro-filmic, pre-filmic and lilmic manifestatiolls or subjectivity SCCIl already, in ortil'1' III /1C((l1/U: lIlI'Ilre (!/'them as rhetoric, just as (1)1' Pasolini, writing or cinema go beyond speech or reality respect ivcly ami create them as conscious t(lrms. Besides the organic sympathy needed lill' a reading' of subjectivity in Pasolini's work, there arc also autonomous t heoret ical reasons why the spectator as subject is integrating to ot her modes or suhjectivit y. 'I'hcse revolve around the notion or suture. At several points ahove t his term was used to descrihe the sti tchi ng together of visions or past and presen t through narrative structure and macro- and Illicro-editin~. In hct, (illll theorists have tended to use the term in a narrower sense, derived from I,acan, to refer to cinema's function as discourse, bindin~, ensnaring or interpellating the spectator in his/her status as a suhject, defined hy lack and aspiring to (an illusion) of unity and integrity (J ,apsley and Westiake, I 9SS, i:l6--t)O; SaCl'l1, 1I)77-S; Silverman, I(jS], H)4-236). As the concept was first proposed, hy Oudart and others, it referred specifically to the workings of the conventional shot-reverse-shot sequence which established the spectator's point of view and thus his/her strong identification as speaking subject, only to reint(lrce the sense of a lack upon perception of the frame. It was then extended by some to encompass several, if not every aspect of film form and narrative, both audio-visual and spatio-temporal, as they intersect the spectator's
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subjectivity, creating momentary bonding (see, for example, Heath, 1976). The suture of filmic elements of past and present described in Chapter IJ follows a pattern analogous to Oudart's or Heath's suture: they all entail the binding of fractured elements (past/ present; prehistory/history; author/film/spectator) to create a unit that contains, essential and immanent to it, a residue of the original fracture. The nature and meaning of that fracture fi)r the spectator ofPasolini's films depend on the L1urahility and penetration of that residue. As so often, his own essay~ in theory provide a useful starting-point. Pasolini only aLldre~sed the issue of spectatorship directly in his later theoretical essays, written in H)70 and 1971, and even then only briefly. The essay which contains the impassioned plea fi)r scandalous selfexposure quoted above, 'Il cinema impopolare' (EE 273-XO), explains the shift in Pasolini's film style after 1967 from the aspiration to a Gramscian national-popular cinema to an 'aristocratic' or 'unpopular cinema', in response to the disappearance of the popular world as Gramsci had known il. lis main concern is stateLl as 'la liherta dell'autore e liherazione dq?;ii spellatori' (the freedom of the author and the liberation of the spect;lIors, J~'/~' 273), and each of the terms in this phrase arc f!,"lossed: 'ti-cedom' is, al hearl, always the freedom to choose death (273); the 'author' is one who stands outside, is hated, knows transgression and death intimately and thus loves lite (274); the 'spectator' is imagined by the author as another author, as 'altrettanto scandaloso' (equally scandalous), who cedes an element of freedom in heeoming an actual spectator, but in return can be freed to 'godere della liherl;' all rui' (enjoy the freedom of others, 275), either empathetically-by identifyinf!," with the sado-masochistic freedom of the author· --or critically--by being scandalized by the author's transgressions (276). Pasolini also makes it clear that the nature of these transg-ressions is semiological, that is, a breaking' down of codes of representation. Thus the spectator's perceptions are determined by their relation to the author, on the onc hand, and to the audio-visual and spatio-temporal codes of cinematographic representation on the other (sce aIso' Il rcma', EE 293-6). Several points arc worth noting: first, the parallel between author and codes as factors in spectatorial perceptions confirms and expands the premise behind Chapter 10, that style and technique are intimately caught up in subjective processes. Also, the figure of the ideal author and ideal spectator identifying on the level of scandal links this aspect of Pasolini's work to one of the defining concerns of his poetry and his public interventionism, as well as his cinema
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(San Paolo), rooted in his homosexuality (Ch. 3). The scandalous transgression here is made both ideolugical, and explicitly erotic: 'gOt/ere della libertialtrui' (275, emphasis added); 'io stesso provo [ ... ] l'effetto quasi sessuale dell'infrazione del codice' (I myself feci [ ... ] the almost sexual effect of breaking the code, 278). It also extends the impact of the trope of scandal, here and elsewhere, by placing it in ambivalent tension with the notion of freedom and liberation: the freeing of the spectator to transgress and cause scandal with the author is a freedom to be destabilized as subjects, to experience oneself the author's marginality and intimacy with death, to be thrown into a vertiginous fall from comfortable self-recognition. The etymology of scandal-from the Latin 'scandalum', snare, or tripping obstacle-neatly captures its dangers, and prov ides at least an echo of our starting point, suture, also an ambivalent metaphor of both healing and entrapment. Suture hinds, cauterizes, but does not heal the 'self-intlicted wounds 0(" martyrdom' of the author: instead it allows tilr them to be captured in f(lrm ami potentially to capture the spectator in their /ilrm. Onc other aspect ofthe ima~ery offrcedom in 'J\ cinema impopolare' is pertincnt. The potential to 'enjoy the freedom of others' recalls the filrmula in '11 cinema di poesia' of free, indirect subjectivity as a response to the limitations of bourgeois literary filrms such as free, indirect discourse and inner monologue, which cannot represent the authentic voice of the other. The spectator, or at least the ideal spectator, seems to be offered the chance of experiencing otherness, ofliving' another's vision. The subversive implications of this possibility take us back to an earlier phase ofPasolini's theory, and to an implicit role there tin' specl"atorial suhjecl"ivity in definin~ cinema's relation to reality. Dc LllIret is (11)84, 40-53 148-531), offers a compelling reading between the lines ofPasolini's major theoretical essays of the mid-H)6os as {()reshadowing' the moves of post-semiological theory towards cinema as a social, discursive practice. I lis emphasis on living reality, on action, on pragma as that which cinema 'writes' is, lilr Dc Lauretis, an emphasis on 'cinema as the conscious representation of social practice I ... ] "signifying practices", wc would say; he said "the written language of pragma" , (SI). Similarly, his notion of life heing a continuous, unarticulated cinema-an infinite 'piano sequenza' (EE 210, 234)-and film being all hut devoid of the continuity of such an ontological 'piano sequeT'n' (such sequences in actual films are purely naturalistic), suggests that we can only ever know life, as actors and spectators (EE 209-10), and films, but never cinema:
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Cono8ciamo i 'films' (come conosciamo gli uomini 0 le poe8ie), ma non con08-' ciamo il cinema (come non conosciamo l'umanita 0 la poesia). (,Battute sui cinema', El.' 23 [: see De Laureris, [984,44,49-50) (We know 'films' (just as we know men or poems) but wc cannot know cinema (just as wc cannot know humanity or poetry).)
Life ami films exist, then, as social ami signifying practices and the grail ofEE, a 'Semiologia del!.. Rea\t;)' (232), would be a codification ofthose practices. It would also be profilUndly historical and ideological, as Pasolini's example on ,enin's life as a great 'poem obction' (210) indicates. The axis of film-time discussed in Chapter 13 is immediately relevant here, since life ami films, like discourse or signifying practices, exist in time and frame the tilrms of subjectivity for the spectator as a temporal sequence. Theorists of subjectivity in language such as Benveniste and Jakobson have often used the notion of 'shifters', elements of language which can only signify in concrete, diseursive situations (I, you, here, there, now, then, ctc). These elements distinguish 'parole' from 'langue' by the bindingofsubjectivity into temporal presence (see Silverman, 1<)1\3,43-53). I f we return to Pasolini's statements related to editing:, we tind a very similar pattern of reasoning: editing is that which gives meaning to a film by articulating its link to reality and giving it history; it is that which distinguishes cinema (Iangue) from tilms (parole). Splicing, as described in 'Teoria delle giunte' and '11 rema', is similarly particular to actual films. Cinema disavows history by representing a permanent 'now' and a unitary '1', but an actual living expression of subjectivity relies on films, with their constantly shifting, differentiated, contlictualllgures filr 'now' and filr '1'. And thus wc return to the positioning of subjectivity, in the film and for the spectator, in a broadly understood and ambivalent notion of suture, that is both binding and liberating. In order to describe the ways in which the problems of spectatorial subjectivity are enacted in Pasolini's 1l1ms, we can adduce other aspects of subjectivity already elucidated. Since Pasolini's Illm work, like his theory, constantly posits an authorial figure at its origin, it is not surprising' that the most direct means of absorbing the spectator into the film-track is to cast him/her as 'another author' ofthe film. This is most apparent in the adaptations which makes up the dominant part of Pasolini's work from Vangelo onwards. The author, as the reader ofthe original text, is immediately written into the film as a subject in time and in history, and as a figure for the spectator who is always already a
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
reader of some kind. The most interesting and compelling example of this pattern is Appunti per un 'Oresfiade a/i-iCllna (and Appunti per un film sull'/ndia, although it is a less satisfactory film), which combines location shooting, discussion with a group of students, music, poetic speculation and voice-over explanation to set up a rich, provisional texture that the spectator expericnces as a permanent, open questioning of thc possibility of mythical and historical analogy, and of film, and of the author's role in that film. A similar point can bc made {()r thosc personal, framing appearances of Pasolini as Giotto and Chaucer, where the spcctator relives through the figure of thc artist thc moment of distillation of the original text or icon fi-om reality, as wcll as implicitly that of the present film. Several shot sequcnces in 11 Decamerofl and 11"{lcamli di Canterbury show a simple construction ofthe spcctator's look as that ofthe respcctive authorial figures. To cast thc spcctator as author requires a certain metacinematographic dimcnsion to the prOl:ess of idcntification: the spectator mllst experience the film as a film, must acknowledge the Ji-ame, in order to projcct him/herself as its author. A broader version of this metacinematographic suture might rhcret()rc take in the incomplcteness, abrupt shifts and transvcrsal structures that characterize so many of Pasolini's films. Such lacunae invite the spectalor to attempt to complete the pic-· ture, to write over the gaps, to reorganize or re-edit their vision, having first pereiveo its incompletcness. Filmic metaphor also, in its simplest form, works by suggestive juxtaposition, which calls on the spectator to turn contiguity into similarity (Aaaltone, H». But, as I heorisls of suture such as Oudart realized, to acknowledge the Ilctive Ji-ame of the camera is to lose the illusion (and the 'jouissance') of full identification as an author. And it is crucial to Pasolini's work that no fully cohesive, naturalized final product should cmcrge to flatten the contours of anxiety which the films project from author to spectator and which create a bond between thc expcrience offilm and the experience ofliveo reality. The key entry in Pasolini's filmography for metacinematographic questions is La ricotta, and this case is no exception (sce also Che {(Jsa S(1110 le nuvo/e?). From its first frame, its two biblical epigraphs interpellate the spectator dramatically, setting the conditions for their perceptions of the film. The second records the anger of Christ as he clears the traders from the Temple, setting the film up as a critique of the film business he will portray; the first, from Mark 4:9, starkly invites the audience to interpret the film 'properly'-'se qualcuno ha orecchi per
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intend ere, intenda' (If you have the cars to hear, then hear). The film itself does not construct a centred point of view or point of identification for the spectator. Instead the camera holds off, settling most often on medium or long shots, allowing the series of interconnecting but isolated worlds amI textures of the film set to be organized by the viewer: he/she identifies with the system, or meaning of the film. The film has several centres of gravity: Stracci, off-set, in the rocky landscape, or roadways, alone or with his family; Orson Welles, sitting magisterially in his chair, as the camera three times zooms out to show him surrounded by props that look like gravestones; the music, dancing, laughing, stripping and eating of the actors on set; the 'tableaux vivants' of the Mannerist colour reproductions (Plate 6); the scenes of the three crosses, on the g,-round, carried up and down the hill, and finally set up vertically. At various times the spectator's empathy or sympathy is brietly t()cused on Welles (his ironic smile at the games he plays with the asinine journalist) or Stracci (his crestfallen look as he sees the dog eat his meal), and the two come together in the film's final moment as only Welles re,llizes the 'meaning' of Stracci's death. I But we are distanced /i'om both also, by the comic speeding up of Stracci's rushing around, especially when he is seen st uffing himself in sped-up motion as the actors gather and throw him morsels at normal speed. Welles, on the other hand, is alone and t(lrbidding, sarcastic and amhivalent. Both are more archetypally than psychologically drawn.llcnce rather than identify with them as characters, the spectator is bound into the film by its range of ways of seeing and filming: the distance from empathy becomes a marker of the experience of mediation in cinema and in reality in general, and the tensions or anxieties apparent in each of the modes of representation ollered-'saints' laughing cruelly, or stripping, or mocking and debunking the sacred 'tahleaux' -connote the danger and difficulty mediation brings. The key tCatures arc those which interlock and mediate between the various worlds and ways of seeing, echoing the spectator who settles in an 'in between', slightly detached and lost state. One of these features is the shrill voice of the prompter/production manager and the chain of barked commands he regularly sets off ('la corona!', the crown; 'illadrone buono!', the good thief), who also tests I In Lhe original version of the film, Welles' tinallinc was 'Povero Stracci, crcpare estato il suo solo modo di fare la rivoluzione' (Poor Stracci, dying was the only way he had to revolt). The final version echoes the screenplay in AI; dagli ()(th; a;:.zurri, 387, mo!'e closely: 'Povero Stnlcci! erepare, non aveva altru modo di ricordarci che anchc lui era vivo' (Poor Stracei! Dying was all he could do to remind us he was alive as well). Sce Guadagni, IIj94,92-3.
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Stracci on his line on the Cross as thc pack of press and personalitics arrives to witness the scene. His frantic, comic inability to maintain the separation betwecn the sct, with its shooting nccds, and reality, with its base needs for food and scx, makes him a partial figurc of both dircctor and spectator, as they Iwe try to organizc disparatc elcments beforc them. Another mediating element arc the mctal framcs burdencd with fruit or costumes, that open and elosc thc film and mark scvcral of thc moments oftransition betwccn thc various worlds of the film (thc diva sits before onc, flankcd by two rcsting, angelic, cxtras (Platc 8); Stracci takcs onc of thc costumes to gct somc extra food; thc actors carry a frame with the fruit and chccsc to thc cavc to throw at Stracci; thc journalist pccps through thc costumes). This paraphcrnalia is thc barricr betwccn thc artificial and thc rcal, and is dcadcning, indccd /:ltal to Stracci: it is no coincidcncc that thc t()Od and winc in thc opcning and closing shots arc still-life compositions, 'natura morta' (dead nature) in Italian, cchoing; thc Manncrist 'tableaux vivants'. Sct on thc stand, and thus also relatcd to the artifical, is the mcgaphonc, thc vchiele of the production managcr's out of framc commands. Thc still-life li)Od is furthcr cchocd in the obscenely luxuriant sprcad on the long tablc bcncath the three crosscs that awaits the visiting VI Ps and paparazzi: in both cascs, and unlike Stracci's dcsperately ingcstcd ricotta, thc /i)ot! has been stripped of all actual, non-symbolic valuc. Mcdiation--rcprcscntcd by the static or artifical imposition on rcality of fictional, commcrcial or iconographic norms---is shown as flawcd through thc positioning of the spcctator in thc intcrsticcs of a loosely articulatcd, loosely subjective film. Thc film makes it quite impossible li)r us 10 idcntify with Stracci, as it movcs us away ri·om him, and intcrvcncs with so much othcr mctacinematographic noise, but is also makes it absolutely neccssary ti)r us to identify with him. Stracci's dcath is thc only unmcdiated act or cvent of thc film. Anothcr vchiclc of suturc that is Icss immediately hound to mctacincmatographic perccption, and also less bound to authorial figures, is the poetics ofthc camera's gazc (see Ch. 10). And like the authorial form, this too works in Pasolini towards irrcsolution and anxicty rathcr than towards plcasurc. As notcd morc than once bcfore, this is most apparent in the workings of thc crotic gazc in Pasolini's films, sincc its typical dynamic for intcrpellating the spectator's dcsire is twofold: first, thc bodily 'fisicita' of thc object is intcnsely chargcd crotically, through close-up, excessively static or disturbingly fragmcntcd prcsence. And the eroticism is oftcn homo-crotic, but othcrwisc studiedly
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undifferentiated by gender..Aaattone, Teorema, Iljiore delle 'Mille e una notte', and Sa/{; mark the key stages in the evolution of this physicality, and in a more or less politicized or traumatized manner, they all confront the (male) spectator with a vision oftheir own suppressed desires. But wc find in each also a second characteristic stage, the disruption or indeed interru ption of the spectator's desire. In Aaattone this is achieved by the startling use of choral music in scenes such as Accattone's grappling, rolling, erotic struggle with his ex-wife's brother, as a dissonant commentary on the 'sacredness' of the vision. The sudden surge of music as the two bodies enlace instils a scnse of the sublime in the viewer which creates a detachment from the simultaneous homoerotic surge. The dissonance is so sudden and stark that it verges on the metacinematographic. In Teorema, it is the architectonic camera work, the f(lrmal patterning ofthe theorem and the silence of much of the film that not only d raw our focus to the Guest, to his body and its genderblind seductive power, but also metaphorizes the role of sexualliberation, presenting it as a catalyst filr radical transfimnation of the self. The erotic gaze is blocked as a vehicle filr pleasure. Of all Pasolini's films, perhaps only lljiore delle 'Mille e una nolle' could be seen to celebrate and enact erotic pleasure, alon!,\'side narrative pleasure, with harmonious, homo- and hdero-sexual coupling fi"Cely displayed. As Viano, 199], zS6, nOles, however, the smiles of the desiring characters which pepper t he him arc also markers of a detached, unnatural look which suggests that this film is as stylized as any other. Viano goes on to criticize Pasolini's 'male' vision of female desire in the film, shown by his construction oft-he latter as desire of the penis (Viano, U){)], 290-1), and this gives a hint, even here, of the anxious, arrested t(lrms of desire seen in other films. The spectator's pleasure is in some sense blocked here loo, even if simply because the male gaze constructs desire as iterative and thus irresolvable: tbe film is an idyll which connotes its own atemporality. As if to confirm this, the film that ti)llowed II jiore, Salil, was the most t1ystopic Pasolini ever made, and it provides us with the most radical and distorted illustration of the impact of the (pseudo-) erotic gaze on the spectator in his films. In Salil, Pasolini takes the unusual step of borrowing images from a series of narrative genres he usually disdained, but he does so to provide himself with a lexicon of absolute horror. For example, he frames each of his 'gironi' or Hellish circles with shots of mirror.s, familiar from 'film noir' but also neo-realism as signs of inauthenticity and duplicity. He shoots in rich colour, and composes quite beautifully symmetrical,
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art deco shots to evoke a certain inter-war decadence. 2 The 'diseuses' are reminiscent of torch-song cabaret artists from Expressionist and Hollywood films. And he devotes the first twenty minutes of the film, the 'Antinferno', to an extended and only slightly distorted genre sequence of a fascist round-up, familiar from any number of war and Resistance films. Furthermore, as has already been pointed out, the continuity editing, the precision of the camera-work and lighting and the narrative control of Sal'; are the most sophisticated Pasolini ever achieved. For once, then, formally and technically at least, the spectator is allowed to get his/her bearings by reference to recognizablc generic horizons of expectation. But, of course, this is only in order to intensify the trauma of the reality framed by those horizons. The spectator is also set up as such much more explicitly than in most of the other films. The selections of the victims occur in line-ups or auditions, with the dignitaries and the camera cast as the audience; the stories of the 'discuses' that animate each 'girone' arc set on the 'stage' of the drawing room, alongside the piano, with the three walls of the listening audience creating a theatrical peri(lrmanCe space (Plate 7); even the scenes in the refectory, the ritual marriages (with their grotesque costumes or nudity) and the altar scene arc constructed with this same 'proscenium' space. Thcre arc always perf(lrmanCes, and looking and listening going on, and the t(lUr creators of this other-world arc always looking and listening t()\· erotic stimulation, as their rulebook sets out. Indeed, each of the circles shows the four enacting with their victims acts of perversion analogous to those narrated by the women. So the spectator has an excess of audiences figmed on lhe screen onto which to project themselves: the film is in the first instance about the relationship between periilflnance or narrative, and the body of the watcher /Iistener. Nevertheless, the spectator does not tilllow the sequence of the four dignitaries: he/she is not turned on. Despite the blatant display of sexuality, eroticism is not only interrupted, but preeluded as soon as it is programmatically proffered in the narrative schema. This is achieved, as it will be in Pctro/io, by the combination of excess and repetition that Pasolini characterizes as the essence of the libertine anti-ethic he is portraying: as the 'Monsignore' opines after the signing of the rule-book, 'tutto cbuono quando ceccessivo' (everything is good when taken to excess). Signora Vaccari, the first of the 2 The walls of the private chambers of the villa arc strewn with abstract art, from the Futurist works of Severini, to others by Fcininger and Duchamps.
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26r
narrators to perform, starts off with what she considers an enticing tale, only to be reminded by the 'Presidente' that what is required is exhaustive, pedantic, even geometric detail on the sexual acts described. And when the 'Duea' and the 'Eccellenza' discuss the merits of sodomy over execution, their criteria are autonomy, death and repeatability. Sodomy, like execution, is 'il gesto [... ] piu assoluto per quanto contiene di fatale per la specie umana e il piu ambiguo perchc accetta le norme sociali per infrangerle' (the most absolute gesture in its fatality for the human species amI the most ambiguous in its acceptance of social norms in order to break them): and if sodomy has the advantage of being repeatable thousands of times, the Eccellenza notes, with an eye to the film as a whole, 'si PU() trovare anche il modo di reiterare il gesto del earnefiee' (there is also a way to repeat the gesture of the executioner). This system oflibertinage is a radically closed end in itself, it relies on no outside source, nor outsi<.le assistance, nor outside meaning. There is no outside in the villa: the only external sequences after the victims' entry are to show the <.Ieath of the guard and the mai<.l, an<.l then of the pianist, and then (in an inner courtyard) of the victims' themselves. There is no history, either, except in the ignored noises of planes overhead, Hitler's ranting on the radio, and, most quietly bizarre of all, the daylight that shines throug-h the windows onto most of the dark cabaret performances of the '<.Iiseuses'. In :-)al//, ultimately, nothing happens. It is this series of enclosing, excessive, reiterative aspects which cuts the spectator oil from the events on the screen, and precludes the eroticism of their look. An<.l as a result, it ideologizes that look. For if we are not implicate<.l on the level of pleasure, wc arc implicated on the level of knowledge: we recognize the world depicted, just as the victims adapt rather loo quickly to their roles, all but onc <.IutifulIy playing as dogs, and several betraying others to curry favour. As has been noted more than once above, Salt! synthesizes schematic markers ofthe Enlightenment, of fascism and of nco-capitalism, and subsumes them all in the literal immediacy of the horror wc conti'ol1t, thus reversing the structures of reality which subsume horror in the normative structures of an ideological system. Salt/lays bare and pushes fc)rward in the watching spectator the visceral, bodily pain that aesthetic and social norms mitigate, and indee<.l charge with pleasure. It says nothing about ideology, since it is neither 'histoire' nor 'discours', but it 'does' ('fare', 'pragma, 'azione') something about ideology to the spectator. Sa/a develops to an extreme the dynamic ofthe look of the camera in general as a vessel of the spectator's look which characterizes Pasolini's
262
CINEMA: TRACKING THE SUBJECT
films. The look is by various means seductively proffered and then traumatically and creatively blocked (Nowell-Smith, 1977), or arrested at the level of objectification. And as with the casting of the spectator as author, all the myriad techniques of disruption that characterize Pasolini's film style reinforce and reiterate the disruption to the spectator's identification of objects of desire. To use a term dear to Pasolini, it is given the potential to signify something other than itself by being fetishized (Ranvaud, 1980; Wahl, 1980). The other that goes beyond the gaze, and beyond the authorial figure of identification, in the constitution of the spectator as subject is the essential source of the anxiety that subtends all the work of subjectivity in Pasolini's cinema. It casts the spectator as a subject in crisis, as a subject dislocated and in suspension, looking t(lr an anchor in reality or in a vision of subjective plenitude. Nowell-Smith, 11)80, points up the problem, describing the recurrent interruption of Pasolini's films with the image of a smiling' f~lee: In the smile there is both seduction and threat. But mho is the object of this seduction? And lI>izy at this precise moment? I ... 1We do not know. Wc under!?;o the threat, the seduct ion. Our subjectivity is invested in t he look, t he smile that reaches us across the screen, But there is no narrative poilll-·oC-view on whieh this investlm:nl can rest. (Translated ri'om Nowell Smith, I ()SO, (4)
The spectator loses his/her bcaring:.., identification with character:.. i:.. blocked by the weakncss of thc diegcsis and the almost complete discarding of psychological realism, and identification with a detached narrative centre is malic impossible by hoth the unco-ordinated imm,"diacyand the dreamlikc unreality of the texture oft he material world depicted. The impulse to find f()]'ms ofsuhjeclivilY with which to identify.is dispersed and displaced across all the axes and dimensions and echoes of the work of suhjecl'ivity, as they proliferate and crowd into an overdetermined imagc- and sound-track, leaving the spectator unfettered, but confused, raw and exposed.' rhe contours of anxiety shape for the spectator the self-inflicted wounds of martyrdom. It should he apparent that an outline of the relationship of speetatorship to subjectivity i; also a summation of the film work of subjectivity in general. Both follow a dynamic that leads in an imaginary sequence from confident authority and presence to immanence and displacement, and finally to crisis and anxiety. Both demonstrate that cinema never could become either the utopian apotheosis of self-expression or the cynical means to a tactical end of which Pasolini dreamed ",-hen he
SPECTATORSHIP
boldly changed the course of his intellectual career and chose cinema as a terminus a quo for aesthetic and subjective renewal. His films and his semiology arc unsettled and unsettling, and compelling, precisely because they offer us illusions of the absolute-Cinema, the Real, the Self-but find no stable bearings in the field oHorees where the traces ofthose absolutes overlay one another and collide.
PART IV
Unfinished Endings
The essem:e oflifc is the migration of f(lrms (Bruno Schulz)
15
Petrolio: Selfand Form In a letter to Livio Garzanti ofJanuary 1967 that is brimming over with itleas for new projects, Pasolini makes the vaguest of references to a 'return to narrative' (Lellere, ii. 625). Garzanti's reply picks up on the hint with alacrity-'what excites me most is [ ... ] your long awaited return to prose' (I,el/ere, ii. (26)-hut it is not until five years later, in early 1972 that we find him sketching out the plot of a novel inspired by a single wortl !:danced at in a newspaper, 'petrolio' (oil). Over the following three and a half years, hetween filming Il./iore delle 'Mille e una nOlle' and .""aill, planning other lilms such as Porno-leo-ko!ossa/, reviewing a mass orhooks fin· ']'empo if/us/ralf), composing· the poems of Nuova, and writing his crusading polemics in the national press, he began to fill out that sketch into the burgeoning ti·agment of a 2,000-page novel. Some progress is made in 1973, as shown in another letter to Garzanti (I,l'lIl're, ii. 730), and work seems to have accelerated over the course of U)74 particularly; until, in early 11.)75, he began to make grandiose but enigmatic noises about the book in interviews: 110 inizialo unlihro chc mi impcgncr,i pcr anni, lim;c pcr il Tcsto dell a mia vita.
Non voglio parlarne ... ; hasli sapere che cuna specie Ji 'summa' di tutte le mie eSJlerienze, d i lulle le mie mellloric. (S/ampa sera, \0 J an. 1975, quoted in Pe/mlio,S(,()
(I have heg;ulJ a hook I hat will occupy me {i)1" years, perhaps f()!· the rest of my life. I don't want 10 talk ahout it ... ; suflice it to say that it is a sort of 'summa' of all my experiences, all my memories)
l.. ·1 contiellc tutto qllello chc so, sad la mia ultima opcra; mi diverte molto avere questo segreto. (/'(/ Stampll, 10 Jan. [()75, quotcd in Petro/io, 570) ([ ... 1it conlains ;lhsolulcly everything I know, it will be my final work; I am
greatly enjoying having this secre\.) At the time of his death in November 1975, he had completed approximately 520 pages of hand- and type-written notes, as first described by Siciliano, 1981a, 431-5, and these 'long awaited' notes were published
268
UNFINISHED ENDINGS
by Einaudi more or less as they stood, under the title Petrolio, in 1992.1 The published work contains an extraordinarily magmatic and disparate spectrum of extracts, at sharply differing stages of composition, ordered by Pasolini into approximately 200 erratically numbered, titled 'Appunti' (Notes) and other jottings. The two longest Appunti run for almost thirty pages ('11 pratone dclla Casilina', 201 -29; 'Carmelo: la sua disponibilita e la sua dissoluzione', 275-30)), whereas the shortest consist of blank pages, with only numbers or titles (172, 1<)6-R, 399, 421, 473-4). There are numerous outright contradictions, and many evidently fundamental aspects yet to be decided. Names change, places change, times change, characters appear and disappear, the formal structures of the entire work are constantly being reshaped. And of course, large swathes of material are simply not there, either set up but unwritten (e.g. the sections whose full texts were to' have ti)Uowed in Greek and in Japanese, lJ9-54, 536), merely hinted at (a brief note promises a full history of the H)6R movements, J R3), or all but unfathomable. It is clear, then, that no coherent, unitary text exists, and any analysis can only be provisional with respect to whatever Pc/mlio might have become. And yet, a duly cautious reading of Petmlio as we have it, from the particular perspective oran enquiry into subjectivity, provides a vertiginous array oftextual and discursive fcat urcs to confirm, qualify and rC-;lrticulatc what has alrcady been discerned in his journalism, poetry and cinema. Indeed, it is an especially rich documcnt in this respcct, to a significant dcgree hculUse of its unfinished state, so that ifthc shecr weight of unwritten material means that Petrofio cannot be the 'summa' Pasolini's dreamed of; it can be read as notes rowards a synthesis and summary of the work of subjectivity in his !CLIVI'£'. In so far as a main plot-line emerges with any clarity ti'om this unwieldy work, it could be summarized as fi,lIows: towards the cnd of the H)50S, the time ofItaly's post-war 'economic miracle', the protagonist Carlo Valletti, a young Turinese bourgeois ti'om a liberal family now living in Rome, undergoes a sudden crisis and is split into two identical fig'ures by two angel-devil figures Polis and Tetis. The first-Carlo I or Carlo di Polis-dedicates hims~lf to the pursuit of power through his I It is unclear whether Pasolini had finally settled on '!'etrolio' a, the definitive title; hoth Siciliano and Naldini refer to it more often under its other workin~ title, I'as (Vase, Vessel, or Crucible), a hiblical (Act, Q: 15), Dantesque (/njcYllo, ii. 28-30), and, accordinr; to Zigaina, 1993,300-2, Jungian calque. Unles> otherwise indicated all further pa~e references in thi, chapter arc to Pe/mlio. Serious critical work on Pelro/io is only just beginning: sce Bencdetti and Grignani, 1995; Fortini, 1l)9J, 2J8-48; Ward, 1995,88--114; Zigaina, 1993,299-336.
PETROL/a: SELF AND FORM
269
work for the petrochemical giant ENI and its shadowy connections with Christian Democrat and neo-fascist politics. The second CarlO-Carlo 11, Carlo di Tetis or Karl--dedicates himself entirely to the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Carlo 11 travels to Sicily in search of an unidentified female writer, who refuses to hear out his secret, and then to Turin, where he indulges in myriad sexual acts and fantasies with himselt: his mother, his grandmother, his sisters and dozens of young girls around the city. Meanwhile Carlo I frequents the Roman intellectual salon ofa Signora E where he enters the world of EN I and is sent to the Middle East in search of oil, in a journey based on Jason and the Argonauts' search for the Golden Fleecc. Both are followed in their journeys hy mysterious agents of power. We jump to the end of the J <)60s: Carlo I, ever morc powerful, makes a second trip to the East. Carlo II in Rome undergoes an epiphany on seeing young communists parading near Termini Station. He turns into a woman and performs fellatio and intercourse with twenty subproletarian boys in a 'borgata' field. (There is some suggestion that the boys would then have been killed one by one.) Carlo I returns to notice a prof(>und chang·e in his surroundings, contirmed by the apparent disappearance of Carlo 11. We arc now in the years J()72--74. Alter a drunken dinner with Christian I kmocrat and neo-htscist potentates, (:arlo I searches out Carlo 11, but to no avail, returning home to experience a vision of various divine heings, culminating in 'Salvatore ])ulcimascolo', a divine image of the ideal subproletarian. On awakening Carlo I too has hecome a woman. lie has a heady sexual encounter with a cloakroom attendant, Carmelo, an emhodiment of Salvatore, who then disappears (or is killed). We return to Carlo 11 and the crisis that led to his disappearance: perceiving a radical change in the world around him, he loses all sense of being, turns hack into a man, but resolves to have himself castrated. Carlo I (prohahly) experiences a lengthy vision of the degTadation of popular society in the neo-capitalist, consumerist '970s. I _ater he attends a reception at the President's Palace, the Quirinale, and the final scenes have him returning to Turin, first in another Vision sequence in which the city has been destroyed and returned to a state of primitive nature through which Carlo wanders before coming upon the new, soulless reality. He is then witness to a (rcal) nco-fascist demonstration and attends an anti-fascist reception with Turin's great and good, where the writer F. reads out his critique of consumerism, 'l\IIerci'. But the response of fascists and anti-fascists in the audience is indistinguishable, and the 'festa' eventually ends in chaos. Carlo I has turned back into a
UNFINISHED ENDINGS
man, and has another moment of epiphany, during which a voice within him blurts out a devastating, aphoristic tirade against the bourgeois world around him. He will now make a third journey eastwards, to Edo in Japan, and become an ascetic 'saint' of the powerful. All the latter part of the novel is set against the background ofthe events of I96H and the terrorist campaigns of the following years, and Carlo was clearly to have been involved in bombings in Turin in some way. The unwritten ending of the novel was to have been an ill-defined but apocalyptic 'cosmic crisis', connected to the oil industry am] to terrorism. The main narrative is supplemcnted by secondary sequences of stories, told by various figures at the receptions Carlo attends (see especially I2H-:n, I 5H-7H, 3HH, 40H-51), and hy the Visions he experiences (7H-H2, 250-7, 322-H7, 39H, 476-(1), which, as 'Appunto 103a' (452) explains, all intersect in oblique and symbolic ways with the fi))'ms and meaning's of Carlo's story and its historical context. And interwoven with all these narrative voices and reg'isters, a highly significant portion of the book reflects, in Pasolini's own voice, IIpon the j(lrm of the text as it evolves. As an initial approach to Pe/m/io, instructive comparisoll Illay be made with aspects of Pasolini's earlier narrat ive work. What is st rikingly familiar from both his Friulan and Roman narrative is the vital, lyrical evocation oflandscape, whet her rural and primit ive or urhan ami desolate (e.g,'. 20--7,476--9(1). When Pasolini laments that he feels viscerally unable to depict Parioli, an haut··hour{!,'eois area or Rome, hc turns in rcliefto nature: 'I kll'erbe e delle piante si che amo parlarl" (Or herbs and plants I do love to speak, 247). As in the earlier works, descriptive evocations, loaded wit h intense, onen sexual sensuousness and value, mark the most traditionally literary parts of Pclro!io. But, whereas in the Roman novels of the 1950S, description of this kind was set in direct, contaminating apposition 10 the phalie, repetitive dialect speech of the 'ragazzi', creating an experimental and ideologically charged 'plurilinguismo', here both dialect and direct speech arc all but: absent, and stylistic variation muted. When Carlo 1 exchanges some spoken remarks with his old Turinese friends the author comments: Queste battute-Ie uniche di qllesto romanzo, se Ilon erro (eecetlllati i raceonti incorporati in csso) I· .. j (4<)<)) (These spoken remarks-the only ones in this novel, if! am not mistaken (apart from the stories contained within ill I... j) And on describing the large head of'lI Merda', he notes:
PETROLIO: SELF AND FORM
(una volta i suoi amici gli avrebbero detto: 'Pe' [acce un giro attorno, un pidocchia ce metterebbe n'anno': ma ora non si usano piu espressioni simili) (324-5) «once his friends would have told him; 'a louse would take a year to get round it' [in dialect]: but no one uses such expressions anymore»
The exelusion of direct speech enhances the impact ofthe narratorial voices, and in particular the intrusive voice of the 'omniscient and even a little pedantic' (534) author-narrator. It also produces a certain greyness of style (Fortini, 1993,244) which, as is clear from its opening statement of intent (3-4), was a deliberate and integral effect. The whole work was to be framed as a critical edition of an unpublished text: 'I'autore dell'edizione critica "riassumera" quindi, sulla base di tali documenti-in uno slile piano, of!,f!,etlivo, KriKio, ue.-Iunghi brani di storia genera le' (the author of the critical edition will therefore 'summarize', on the basis of such documents-in a/fat, objeaive, grey (ete.) style-large tracts of general history, 3, emphases added). The critical edition would be a compilation from four or five variant extant manuscripts, of which two would be apocryphal and eccentric; it would inelude letters by the author and friends, reported testimonies, songs, illustrations and other miscellany, supplemented by historical documents, interviews, and films. Even ifit had been finished, then, Petrofio was to have had 'vast lacunae' (3) in its diegesis and its t()rm. If filr sociological and personal reasons, style has lost its vitality, other paths to meaning and self-expression arc available, beginning with direl:t apostrophe of the reader that bypasses language, as he writes to Moravia: in lJlIesle pagine io mi sono rivolw allettore diretlamente e non convenzionalmenle I .. ·1 in camc e ossa I... J. 110 reso il romanzo oggelto non solo per illetlore mol anche per me: ho messo laic oggetto tra illettore e mc, e ne ho discusso insieme (544) (in these pages I have aJJresseJ the reader directly and not though conventions I· .. J in Ilesh anu blood I... 1. I have turned the novel into an object, not only for Ihe reader but also for me: I have placeu that object between thc reader and me, and discussed it with him/her)
The relationship between that object amI the flesh and blood of the author is founded in the text's radically fragmentary form throughout. Indeed, it constantly, neurotically casts itself as an immense experiment in self-conscious narrative and linguistic form: queste pagine stampatc ma illeggibili vogliono proclamare in modo estremo-ma che si pone come simbolico anehc per tutto il resto del Iibro-Ia mia
UNFINISHED ENDINGS
decisione: che equella di non scrivere una storia ma di costruire una forma [ ... J (155; and see also 19,413-30,452) (these printed but illegible pages wish to proclaim to the extreme-but also symbolically for the entire book-my decision: which is not to write a story/history but to construct a form [... D parlo della mia ambizione a costruire una forma con Ic sue leggi autopromuoventisi eautosufficienti, piuttosto che a scriverc una storia chc si spieghi attraverso concordanze piu 0 menu "a chiave" con la pericolosissima reald. t· .. 1 Cia che io desideravo fare si attua proprio in questo farsi e spiegarsi deIl'opera con se stessa, anche letteralmente. (534) (I'm talking about my ..mbition to construct a form with its own self-promoting amI self-sufficient laws, rather than writing a story that is explained by way of more or lcss hidden concordances with a highly dangerous realilY· I . . . 1 What I wanted to do is realized precisely in this creation amI explanation of the work with and through itself, even in a literal sense.)
A fluid and active notion of form, understood in its broadest sense, runs throughout Pasolini's work. From the interplay between dialect and 'lingua' of his early poetry and essays; to his uses of popular song, dialect t(lrmS and 'high' literary forms in the 19Sos; to the 'moto di forme' of his poetry as a whole; to the 'experimentalism' in Oflil"illll; to the move into cinema seen as a change of language or filrm of expression; all these, and many other instances already discussed in Parts I-Ill, arc interrogations of the nature of fi)fln, as persistently dct"ermined by its capacity to connote something essential ahout sellhood and reality. But the problematic of t(H·m explodes most vitally in the final, intensely creative period of his life, lasting from around J(lI7-H until his death. Work of this period is characterized hy an impulse to destahilize and disperse filrm across an ever more elusive and provisional canvas, to create a strident, agonisticalIy rhetorical irony, and thus become 'unrecognizable', as he himself described the poetry of Trasumanar (,Pasolini recensisce Pasolini', JI porliw ddla morle, zHS; cf Gordon H)9Sh). Petmlio's fascination with tilrm represents the final manifestation of that impulse, but the pivotal text in the move towards this conception of form, and in many ways the key prose precursor to Petro/i.o, is La divina mimesis, hegun in 1963, reformulated in 19661] and 1975, and published shortly after his death. La divina mimesis is a barely begun rewriting of Dante's Divina ("ommedia, whose core material consists of versions, or notes towards versions of Inferno 1-4, and 7 (La divina mimesis, 4-55, 63-S). Several aspects link it to Petro/io. Of particular significance is a Dantesque con-
PETROL/a: SELF AND FORM
273
ception of narrative form as a schematic, oneiric and obliquely mimetic allegory used to fashion an ideological critique of modernity: all the dreams and Visions and many of the secondary narratives in Petmlio share this conception. 2 Specific features of La divina mimesis also reappear, such as the Garden of poets (La divina mimesis, 43-8; cf. the Medieval Garden of Carlo's Vision, Petro/io, 250-7), and the zones of Conformism, Vulgarity, Reductivism and Continence (La divina mimesis, 49-55), which in Petrolio become fully fledged 'gironi' and 'bolge' in Carlo's vision of'lI Merda' (322-88). Furthermore, the ideological critique in '11 Merda' centres on a sort of corrupted 'divine mimesis', as the inhabitants of each circle define themselves through a cultish 'imitation' of a horrific icon or 'Modello' that governs the cirele and embodies its essence CB2-3). Perhaps most importantly of all, however, I,a divina mimesis offers the most stark and naive early example of what was called in Chapter 9 the Pasolinian pseudo-couple. The Commedia's Dante and Virgil arc here played by two versions of Pasolini himself: 'un piccolo poeta civile degli Anni Cinquanta, come egli diceva: incapace di aiutare se stesso, figurarsi un altro' (a minor civic poet of the Fifties, as he himself put it: incapable of helping himself, let alone someone else, I,a divilla mimesis, 16). In Pe/mlio, the splitting of (:arlo is the f(mnding structural and narrative device-it is the poem of the pseudo-couple-and as in {,a di'vina mimesis, the split also facilitates a certain bitter humour in the text, that recalls the rhetorical irony of Trasumallar noted above, and that is fundamental to Petmlio's form.3 The filrmal innovations in La divina mimesis arc furthered in two notes /i'om H)64 and 196617 respectively (La divina mimesis, 59, 61-2). The first proposes to present the text in incomplete form-'un misto di co se fatte e cose da tarsi' (a mixture of things done and things still to be done)-including all drafts of each section, dated to resemble a diary. In this way the /i)nn will contain its own genesis across time, and thus its own history: it will be 'una stratifieazione cronologica, un processo formale vivente' (a chronological stratification, a living formal process, La divina mimesis, 57). The second develops the idea of a living form with 2 At morc than onc point, the Dream is su~gested as a potentially governing structure of the texl: e.g. 'll viaggio c tutto inventato cillc sognato' (the journey is cntirely made up, that is dreamed, J7); 'Carlo sogna I . . . 1 per cui tutto il resto dcll. II parte non cchc un "flashback" , (Clr\O is dreaming I ... 1so all the rest of part II is merely a 'flashback', dlo). Cr. Chs. [0 and 13 on the oneiric. J Scverals works contemporary to La divina mimesis, such as La riwilll and Rosa, also show thc first substantive use of irony in Pasolini's work. The link bctween humour and the pseudocouple is amply demonstrated by the work with Toto and Ninctto.
274
UNFINISHED ENDINGS
the conceit that the manuscript be found after the murder of its author in 1963 in Palermo, the date and place of the founding conference of the Gruppo '63. 4 The living·, hut fading ('ingiallito/endo' is a recurrent epithet; La divina mimesis, 14, 62, 67) form of the text is bound up with the death of the author, in a manner that recalls Pasolini's views on editing and death. And as his presentation of Pelrolio to Moravia shows, the notion of the posthumous text is inherent here too: Questo romanzo non serve piu molto alia mia vita I... 1, non cun proclama, chi, uomini!, io esisto, ma il preamholo di un testamento (545) (This novel is no longer of much usc to my Iifc [... 1, it is not a proclamation, hcy, pcoplC!, I exist, bur rather the preface to a testament)
And in terms ofliterary form, too, Pelrolio is somehow located beyond, 'in quanto rievocazione del romanzo' (as a rc-evocation of the novel, 545)· Pe/rolio, then, plunders I,a divina mimesis for aspects of its material and in particular as a means to its complex interrogation of the nature of form and its movement. 5 When Pasolini writes, as quoted above, of his wish not to write a novel, but to constTllcl a 'self-promoting and self sufficient' (534) form with Pt:lrolio, he is taking to an extreme the tend ency of all narrative to delineate and populate a living dimension other than that of reality. Constructing a t(lrm entails constructing a system in which' "qualcosa di scritto" ormai non rimanda ad ahro che a "qual-cosa di scritto" precedentemente' ('something written' now rclers to nothing other than 'something written' previously, 4(1I). To achieve such autonomy the text must disrupt and subvert conventional narrative links to the space-time parameters of realil y, and Pe/mlio does so in a variety of ways. Certain characteristic features of 'classical' or realist nineteenthcentury narrative are programmatically precluded or reconligured, such as psycholog·y, heroism, and pathos or character:
4 This 'Nota dcll'Editorc' is sufficiently plausihle and uncannily prescient 10 havc scrvcu as a guide to the eventual editor OfP"I,.o/io, Aurclio Roncaglia (sec his 'Nota filologica', 567.-/\ I 157 8-9J) 5 In HJ75, Pasolini, added to divilla mimcsis a 'pholographic pocm', (07-X()), which suggests how hc might havc incorporated historical imagcs, with thcir own chronology, into Pelrolio; and as a 'Couicil' (91-2), an cxtract from •• book rcview (Descrizilllli di d(strizilllli, 442-5) that notcs thc 'scandal' of Contini's 'tcnder lovc' towards Gramsci, suggesting the deep, suhjective affinitics betwecn diffcrcnt hcrmcneutic forms: again echocs of Pclrolio arc clear.
ra
PETROLlO: SELF AND FORM
275
In questo mio racconto [ ... j la psicologia c sostituita di peso dall'ideologia. Il leaore dunque non si illuda: egli non si imbattera mai in quei personaggi che misteriosamente si svolgono e si evolvono, rivelandosi agli altri protagonisti, e allettore l· . ·1 (119) (In rhis story of mine I ... 1 psychology has been replaced ell bloc by ideology. So the reader should not be under any illusion: he will never come across those characters who mysteriously uni(lld and evolve, revealing themselves to the other protagonists and to the reader I· .. .1) se Carlo pril110 fosse vissuto un seeolo b, 0 fOl'se anche einquant'anni fa, sarebbe stato un eroe I ... 1. r,a stessa eosa potrei ripetere per Carlo secondo. I... Mal egli non eonoseeva gli ahissi dell'inlilmia e della perversione, esattamente come Carlo primo non conoseeva le tentazioni presidenziali 0 dittatoriali. (11\4-5) (if Carlo I had lived a century ago, or maybe even fifry years ago, he would have heen a hero I .. ·1· I could say .. he same thing lilr Clrlo H. [... Butl he did not know the depths of inElIllY and perversion, just as Carlo I knew nothing of presidential or dictatorial temptations.) 11 sistema st ilisrico di questo mio lihro mi impedisce < ... > di inventare un personagg'io la cui ddinitva partenza 0 la cui morte, possa Elr commuovere [... ] (457; on the usc of < ... > and ot her editorial marks, sce PcLrolio pp. v-vi) (The stylistic systelll of t his hook of mine prevents me < ... > from creating a character whose definirive leaving or whose deat h might· he moving [ ... J)
In I'he lisl ofPasolini's literary and philosophical sources reproduced in facsimile on p. ii, the only nineteenth-century novelists present are I )ostoyevsky (particularly The Demons) and Gogol, both of whom are important models, but deviant fi"om the realist norm in significant ways. The rest of the lisl ranges fi"om classical (Plato, Aristotle, Apollonius Rodius) to eighteenth-century (Dc Sade, Steroe, Swift) to modernist and fi)rmalist (SITindberg, Joyce, Pound; Propp, Shklovsky) texts. In the body orlhc work, Balzac is reg'ularly adduced as a model of what the text cannot be (e.g. Iq, I H6). As in his cinema, Pasolini is attempting to undo the naturalist illusion, and to {()und an essential, 'sacred' form of representing reality. Eschewing the dominant narrative f()rm, we note instead a concerted efti)rt to find other forms and genres-the 'nonliterary' lang'uages of essays, journalism, or screenplays (544); the lyric, in the book's heady exploration of sclthood and sensuality; or the epic 'poema' (HR, I HI, 247), evident in the USe of the Ar/{onautica as the model f()r Carlo I's journeys and in the 'moderna epicita' (105) of the Troya ENI empire.
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The epic quality of Petrolio is also more generally apparent in vital aspects of its narrative technique. De Angelis, 1993, sees its prime manifestation in the uses of repetition, 'a stylistic device much loved by the epic', and also a key device for the recasting of the parameters of space and time in the text. Endless, driven repetition of sexual acts is the pleasure and neurosis of Carlo 11, and when he disappears, the impossible mirage of Carlo I's searching. The first epic set-piece of the text is the 'poema del ritorno' of Carlo 11 (40-84) to Turin (echoed later by Carlo I's return in the last part of the book, 476-533), during which he restlessly and indifferently seduces or exposes himselfto his family and dozens of others in the city. At several points, however, it is hinted that repetition expresses in essence a desire for a single, solitary, totalizing act, for a 'sentimento di totalitii' (a tceling of totality, 42) that renders the pleasures of so many sex acts 'ogni volta unici, sublimi e inesprimibili' (each time unique, sublime and inexpressihle, 55). The shadow ofa singularity behind all the repetition is also suggested by the analogies between the two other 'epic scenes' of intercourse in the book: Carlo I1's pleasuring of twenty boys in '11 pratone della Casilina' (201-2(» and Carlo I's later vertiginous encounter with onc man, Carmclo, the incarnation of Salvato['e Dulcimasc% (26(). Both episodes arc expressions of an epiphany for their protagonists, of'il miracolo' (the miracle, 208, 288), revealing through their degradation, whether with onc or with many, a cosmic dimension: 'tllltO il cosmo era 11, in qllel pratone' (the whole cosmos was there, in that field, 202). The miracle at times seems embodied in the phallus: 'era sotto f()rma di miracolo che si presentava il cazzo' (it was in the form of a miracle that his prick was offered, 208). Rut the nature of this cosmic revelation, a prefigurement of the cosmic crisis that was to have ended the novel, only begins with the phallus. It is elsewhere related to both dcath and creativity of fl)rm through the figure of the mother. As Carlo II moves to rape his mother, the narrative notes 'cominciava la manovra, I'attesa manovra, in cui era in gioco il cosmo' (this was the start of the move, the long-awaited move, in which the cosmos was at stake, 55). To return to the mother is to return to wholeness and also to death, as the narrator of'Storia di mille e un personaggio' intuits: 'morire, come in effetti si muore, eiaculando nel ventre materno' (to die, as indeed onc does die, ejaculating into the maternal womb, 419). To repeat the act of conception or birth and the act of death, at one and the same time, is to fracture any cohesion of time and to dissolve any discrete completeness of being, and this profound unreality can only be dreamed outside of reality, in an autonomous
PETROLlO: SELF AND FORM
created form. 'Storia di mille e un personaggio', the richest and most elosely self-referential of all the secondary stories, makes this comment in the context of the projection of the self into otherness in narrative: Nello stesso tempo in eui progettavo e serivevo il mio romanzo I...1proprio ncll'atto ereativo ehe tutto ljucsto implicava, io dcsidcravo anche di Iibcrarmi di me stcsso, eioe di morirc. Morire nclla mia crcazione: morire come in effetti si mllore, di parto (419) (At the same time as I was planning and writing my novel I... J precisely in the creat ive act that all this implied, I was also desiring to free myself from myself, that is to die. To die in my own creation: to die, as indeed onc does die, in giving birth)
The real, cosmic miraele-'la vera ripetizione' (true repetition, 188), not 'mera iterazione' (mere iteration, 50(J)·-is in this originary and bodily death and birth, that the simple iteration of actions at different hisforical moments or creation of forms can only ape miserahly. Another story 'Storia di due padri e di due figli' (42{)-35), addresses precisely the grotesque inadequacy of male creativity in these terms, telling of the hirth 10 two men of living excrement (the source of 'Jl Menla' perhaps). And finally, another Appunto, entitled '11 fascino del fascismo' (2(J2-4), gives a historical-ideological gloss on the impossihility oftrlle hodily repetition, in the body and the absolute necessity of simlllacra for our sense of scltll0od: Ci(') ehe c stalo visslIto dal eorpo dei padri, non PlHl essere visslIto dal nostro. Noi eerehiamo di rieostruirio, di immaginarlo e di interpretarlo: eioc ne seriviamo la sIOI·ia. Ma la sroria ei appassiona tanto I... 1perchi: ci() ehe c'l'; di piu importanle in essa ei stugge irreparabilmel1te. I ... 1 Se noi non ei illudessimo di TiClre le stesse csperienze esistenziali dei padri, saremmo presi da un'angoscia intollerabile, perderelllmo il senso di noi, ride;! di noi; e il Jisorientamento sarebbe assolul.o. (262--3) (That which has been lived by the hody of our tathers ca1lnot be lived by OUT own. We atrempt to reconstruct it, to imagine it and to interpret it: that is we write its history. But history is so compelling to us I ... 1 becallse what is most important in it eludes us irreparably. [... J If we did not delude ourselves that we were repeating the same existential experiences as our fathers, wc would be overcome with intolerable anxiety, we would lose our sense of self, our idea of ourselves; and the disorientation would be absolute.)
The rape of the mother was, of course, precisely a doomed attempt to repeat and create the aet of the father. Another figure for this flawed repetition of the past in the present is 'Anachronism' (250), recalling
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Pasolini's own presentation of himself, in La divina mimesis and elsewhere (e.g. BI, 655, 752) as a man whose time has passed, as posthumous. Repetition of sexual acts is only onc of myriad displays of repeated, listed, reflected, or schematically patterned actions, events, narratives or places that run throughout the novel, all interwoven as the autonomy of the form demands. Two broad and apparently opposing trends characterize this range of repetitive katures, and their synthesis indicates another fundamental ambition of the project of Pe/rolio. The first trend is repetition as accumulation or excess-'il Pllro e sempliee accumularsi della materia' (pure and simple accumulation of material, 39)-and much ofthe sexual repetition f;ll1s into this category, as is selfevident in 'I1 pratone della Casilina'. But it is also to be found in I"he prolikration of redundant Jetails in the history of ENl, in the eclectic list of books from the intellectual's library (Xli; er p. ii), amI in the proliferation of secondary stories and Jigressions lhat erupt 'alia Sterile' (I 17) into the main narrative. AnJ repetition as excess, as with death anJ the mother above, is linked to sexual and narralive creativity in their tOl"alizing aspirations:
I.. ·1 il
piacere di raecolltarc, che, come si sa, pecca sempre per eceesso (chi tlecide di raeconlare lIualeosa ha suhito la !lossihilit;\ di raccontare I'intero univcrso). (1('0)
(J .. ·llhe pleasure of narralive, thaI, as is well known, always cOlllmits the sin ofcxeess (whoever decides 10 narrate sOlllelhinf!," immediately has Ih(; possibilily ofnarral.inf!," the enlire universe).) '11 scme deve esse re seminalo con sprcco: csso se non l: troppo nonc ahhasl.anza' (533) ('The seeu must he sown with ahandon: jf it is nol loo much il is not ellouf!,"h ')
Excess anJ accumulation breed ranJomness, disorder and dispersal, and can thus be e10sely related to the t(lrmal, fragmentary disorder of the text. The planned use of Greek anJ Japanese text is excessive, as 'Appunto 13 I' (534) admits; the aping of The Demon.! and the Argonautica and any number of other intertextual echoes are Jeliberately laboured and hyperdetermined; the prolikration of many stories, where the text itself acknowledges that onc would d
PETROL/a: SELF AND FORM
279
Three strains of imagery epitomize the disordered motion of this unfocused dispersal: imagery of the swarm ('brulichio'), the vortex, and the plunge from zenith to nadir: Il mio non
c un romanzo 'a sehidionata', ma 'a bruliehio' (97; and again 117,
418)
(The form of my novel is not 'like meat on a spit', hut rather 'like a swarm of bees') till bruliehio, 0 vortiec, I ... 1 C l;I Ii~ura struuurale c.Ic1 mio raeeonlarc; e il let\.ore lleve prenderlo come un c.Iivertimento. (\)S) (the swarming, or vortex I . . . 1 is the structural figure of my storytelling; and the reader musl lake it as an amusement.) Il'openl eoglie le eose I nelloro molo, nella I.. ·11 ra vertiei e baratri (I SJ)
loro evoluzione, nell .. lom storia
(1lhe work captures thingsl in their movement, in their evolution, in their evolution, in Iheir historv I ... 1 between summits and abysses)
The swarm and the vortex evoke an inner violence and vitality that from the outside seems continuous and steady, but is in reality without beginning or end, only ever in movement. There is a dear temporal analogue to this aspect in the uisruption oflinear time effected by the structure of the text, making time, and as wc shall sec below, history into inner (unctions of the text. Even more than with the archaeological stratification of I,ll divinll mimesis, here the content of the (lrm has its own temporal history. The very first Appunto, f(lr example, consists of only lines of suspension marks, with an unobtrusive ()()tnote that reads 'Questo romanzo non comincia' (This novel has no beginning, I)). And when the lext slips into the imperfect to describe the habitual life of the two Carlos over the course of a decade (I H7-H), the author regrets it, because, he says, the norms set by the work uemand a permanent present or past definite tense to unhinge events and characters from contingent reality, from '10 spessore della storia' (the dense texture of history). The 'bruliehio' sets in restless Brownian motion the spatial and temporal parameters of the t(Jrms of the text, whilst maintaining a sort of suspended unreality in the sense of a whole, single form, were it ever actually realized. It powerfully promotes the 'illegibility' and autonomy of the text. The second and equally prevalent aspect of repetition, however, seems to work for the opposite; for order, clarity and system. The heart of this aspect is found in the patterns of allegorical symmetry in the range of dreams, Visions, symbolic journeys and stories already
280
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mentioned above in relation to La divina mimesis. Most prominent among them is, of course, the main narrative conceit of the splitting of Carlo into two equal and opposite figures, and the distribution of the four so-caIIed 'momenti basilari del poem a' (founding moments of the poem, 194,265, 394, 504-5), when the two Carlos change sex. But the text is full of other local symmetries: between nco-fascist and antifascist politics (179,452), ENI and Montedison, industry and power (94-1 IS); between two identical briefcases (46-S); and between the v,lriow; stories built on numerical patterns, such as 'Storia di mille e un personaggio' (413-20), 'Storia di un padre e delle due sue liglie' (422-8) and 'Storia di due padri e due figli' (42<)-35). These represent the medieval aspect of the work: 'tutto in esso Iquesto scriuo le infatti greve alIegoria, quasi l11edioevale (appunto illeggihile)' (everything in Ithis piece of writing·1 is indeed weighty alleg'Ory, almost medieval (precisely illegible), 4S); 'J.a cuitura di ogni grande scril!ore cmedievale' (the culture of every great writer is medieval, 87). The medieval structure is elsewhere envisaged as a series of 'symmetrical architectonic bodies', like great: cathedrals (535), and t he vast range of echoes and sYlllmctries that the text offers could indeed be envisaged as part of an intended architectonic whole, which organizes the chaos and disorder of reality through harmony and counterpoint into a system of both beauty and meaning. Ami as was noted above also, this would re/lect t he common I )antesque foot of I.a divina mimesis and Petratio, since I )ante's h~/i:rt/ll (and indeed the entire C'ofl//11cdia) ligures in its allegory the order of Divine.lustice and Purpose that lies behind the human chaos of reality. But the allegorical side of Pc/mlio is always incomplete in its symmetry, always oblique ,lOll arch in its meanin]!:s, always in some sense itself excessive. It is always already in crisis, because its signifying- mode relies on a bond with reality that the text is in the process of eschewing. Order and form spill over into disproportion, legibility into ilIegihililY'medioevale (appunto illcggibile),-alHl not only hecause the text is unfinished: 'I ),altronde, Catledrali e Allq("orie, si /())1dano sulla simmetria, anche quando poi siano magmatiche, sproporzionate e abnormi' (Besides, Cathedrals and Allegories arc founded on symmetry, even when they are also magmatic, disproportionate and deviant, 535). The order of Allegory must be iIIeg-ible, since it relics on an ineffable 'Mistero' (Mystery, r82), a code of analogy between reality and form. The Vision of '11 MerJa' (323-89 [3261) illustrates this Mystery in the relationship between the allegorical 'Scena delia Visione' (Scene of the Vision) and the 'Scena Reale' (Real Scene): the former reproduces and
PETROLlO: SELF AND FORM
281
thus covers up the latter, but since they are always out of phase-in time and space, and as the Vision wilI make clear, in ideology-the Real always 'filters through' ('traspare'), in some unfocused, residual, immanent form. Thus the Allegory allows for only a confused, provisional reference to reality, despite its orderliness. Fortini's own architectural analogy compares Petrolio to another unfinished folie de grandeur, Antonio Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona (Fortini, J()93, 246), since both arc grand medieval, alIegorizing projects which declare their own excess and anachronistic unrealizability. The two types of repetition arc, then, not as starkly distinguishable as had been apparent. The drive t(lI' order and the drive for disorder in the content of the form of the text arc bound in a permanent oscillation. And the rhythm of that oscillation implicates the que~.tion with which the discussion of the 'construction of a f()rm' began, that is, the relationship of /()rm to reality and to the self. As an early Appunto, 'La valip;ia col verbale' (46-8), explains, the text and its representation of events mllst always be open to the illegihle, since their development is a physical token of an irreducible presence of the self: 'io vivo la genesi del mio libro' (I am living Ihe genesis of my book, 48). The key Appunlo in this respect is 'Preeisazione' (181), which sets 0111 the I wo poles of the text as dissoeation or the splitting of idenlily, which is conventional and ordered, and the splintering of identity, which is disordered ami illegible:
< ... > Qucsto pocma non c un poema sulla dissociazionc, contrariamcnte alI'apparellza. I.a dissociazionc altro nOI1 Cchc un motivo convcnzionale.l ... ] AI cOlllrario, lIucslo poenu c iI poema dcll'osscssionc dell'iucntiti, e insieme, della sua fralllUl11azionc. I.a uissociazionc cordinc. I :osscssione uell'idcntit,\ c la sua frantumazione c disonlinc. IImolivo della dissociazionc altro dunllUC non cehe la rcgola narraliva che assicura limitalczza c Iq~gihilit;\ a qucsto pocma; il quale, a causa dclI'altro mOlivo, pill vero, dell'osscssionc dcll'iucntita e del!;1 sua frantumazione, sarchbc pCI' sua lIal ura illimitato e illeggibilc.
« ... > This poem is not a poem of dissociation, contrary to appearances. ])issociation is simply a conventional motif. I . . . 1 On the contrary, this poem is a pocm of obsession with identity, and at the samc time, of its shattering. Dissociation is order. Ohsession with identity and its shattering is disorder. The motif of dissociation is then nothing other than a narrative rule that ensurcs limits and legibility to this pocm; which, because ofthc other, truer motif, of obsession with identity and its shattering, is pwbably by its nature limitless and illegible.)
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Thus far, the Appunto sets out the binary nature of the form of the text recast in terms of the structures and workings of subjectivity ('identita'). It then destabilizes that binary structure in a typical deflation of its own pretence to clarity, so much so that the Note itself collapses into silence: Ma c vero .lI1che il contrario: cioc c sui primo motivo (quello della dissociazione) che fondandosi I'ordine del romanzo si canche /imdata I'idea simbolico-allegorica in cui il romanzo consiste; c che t1unque 10 rcnde, in pratiea, illeggibile. Mentre c t1al secontlo motivo (quello dell'ossessione dell'itlentitil e della sua frantumazione) ehe nascono lJuelle f()lale t1i vila e lJuella concretezza, sia pur folic e aberrante I... 1che rendono lcggibile la pedantesca, verticale, dislImana ........................... . (Blit the opposite is also true: thal is, that the f()rmer motif (dissociation), as the b'lsis of the order of the novel, is also the basis of the symbolic-allegorical idea of which thc novel consists; and which thcrci()re in practicc rcndcrs it illegible. Whilst it is out of the secontl motif (obsession with identity and its shattering) Ihal arc horn those gusts of lire and Ihat perhaps crazy and aberrani COIH.:reteness I ... 1 t hat makes legible I he pedant ic, veri iell, inhuman .............................. .
The contrasts and el}uivalences set out in this repetitive note-hoth schema and fragment arc both legible and illegible-demonstrate the profound ambiguity of the workings Ofl(lI'lll in the texLits oscillation is an attempt to reconcile the two radically different economics or representation that onc mig'ht say have competed and f()J'ged alliances throughout Pasolini's work: on the onc hand, representation through unmediated presence, whose paradigm is the hody or the phallus (denotation); and on the other hand, representation that mediates helween reality and meaning through systems of analogy or metaphor (connolation). To have both is to have both the selfor reality ami the other at the same time. The text walks a tightrope balancing these two models, and carefully watchcs itself in the attempt. Its milling crowd of f()rmal possibilities defies the dimensions of space and time of reality, but intersects and rearticulates that reality to arrivc at an ambiguous, dream-like effect of meaning: 'questo libro ad altro non rimanda che a se stesso, I... ] magari anche-perchc no?-attraverso la realt.l' (this book refers to nothing other than itself, l... 1even if-and why not?-by way of reality, 39). The ambiguity ofthis balancing act is written into the text in its most striking and most elusive strain ofmetaliterary imagery, that of the text as 'Gioco' (Game) or 'Scherzo' (Joke).
PETROL/O: SELF AND FORM
Pasolini's list of sources (ii) is predominantly made up of authors who are comic in some sense: Dostoyevsky's The Demons, Gogol, Dante, Swift, De Sade, Joyce, Pound, and Sterne (and Shklovsky on Sterne). References to these, calques and citations occur at numerous points within the body of the tcxt, particularly to Sterne (e.g. 47, 87,156), Pound (e.g. 156, 183, 5I9-20), and Dostoyevsky (e.g. 463-74,5°8-25); and onc might add Petronius' Salyriwn (3; cf. Zigaina, 1993, 3I3-15). And significant parts ofthe book arc quite clearly written as satire, parody, or as metaliterary trickery, including a range of apparently postmodern fCatures (multiple languages, sclf-rcferentiality, fragmentation of spacc and timc, the ludic). Using the models as a catalyst, the text works to fashion a different idea of the ludie, in a charactcristically oblique attempt at appropriation and transformation of an adopted idiom. The reader is constantly reminded of the narrators' conception of tcxts as gamcs: qllesto scritlo uoveva per (i,rza esse re I... Iun 'nuovo luuo' (41'1) (I his work haulo he I ... 1a 'new game') illellore deve prendere lilmio raceonlarel come un divertimenlo. (1)1'1; and er 156 7) (lhe reader musl lreat my narrating as an amusemenl) Posso l'lre dunque Hlno queslo solo a patlo di prenderlo come gioco (113; and cr .N,) (I can only do all this, therefi,re, on condilion thal I Ireal it as a game)
'110 erello questa slatlla per riderc' I ... quesla iscrizione I si pone addirittura come epigrafc di lulta intera la presente opera I ... il suo senso I c infatti irriuente, cOlTosivo, c..Ielusorio (mol non pef() per questo meno sacro!) (31'15-6) (' I have huilt 1his statue \0 laugh' I ... I his inscriplion I may even be put as an epigraph (i,,' this entire work I... ils sense I is indeed mocking, corrosive, delusive (but none the less sacred /i,r Ih,II!) (In ci() consisle I'assolula originalita (10 scherzo) di questo poema) (506) «(In that consists the absolute originality (the joke) of this poem) )
The gamc of Pelro/io is a g'ame of concealment and revelation, a sort of hide-and-seek between the said and the non-said, between the text and reality and the tcxt and the self. It represents an oblique, flawed and rhetorical attempt to evoke another Scene by interweaving and overmapping form, self and rcality to make them unrecognizable and
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dissolute. A story from the 'Epoche' sequence gives clues to the working's of this game: 'Storia di un volo cosmico' (436-43) provides yet another analogue for the patterned ambiguity of the tcxt, in the shape of a dream of a spaceship, made of two spheres produced by two conflicting powers, from which first the Earth and then its identical sister planet 'Ta kai ta' arc observed by two double agents. The story abounds with mise en a/~Jlme, dualisms and near symmetries, and is narrated with 'civetteria' (coquetry, 436) and 'umorismo' (humourlirony, 436). And the narrator makes the link between these two features through the intrinsically comic nature of spying:
r.<1 spi:! C comiea.l ... 11.a eomieid poi cancora piu lilfle e scoperta liuando la spia vicne alia line smaschcrata. I hamhini ehe non sanno ancora parIare "mno le prime vere risHe quando lJualcuno si nascol1lle e si seopre. L'a{!;nizione c il paradigma primo di og-ni ilarid (4J9) (Spies arc comic. I ... 1 And Ihe comedy hecomes even slronger and more open when a spy comes 10 he unmasked. Bahies who cUlIlol yel speak l:lug-h properly ((11'1 hc lirsl lime whcn someone hides and then comes out ag·ain. Reco{!;l1il ion is the 6rs! paradigm oLtlllau{!;hler)
The child's game recllls Freud's 'Iilrt I da' game, described in Beyond the Pleasure Prillciple, and] .acm's rereading o/" it, in which the child's sense of lack is visualized and arliculated lilf Ihe (irsl lime by Ihe creation of a controllable system of presence and absence (Bowie, '99', 7S-S7; Silverman, II)S3, 12(~·93). T.ike the sig'nifyinf!; ordef o/" self and other into which the '{i)l·tl da' game propels the child, however, the hide and seck of Pc/mlio is neither innocently playful nor built on pleasurable recognition or repetition. 11 is inauguraled with Carlo's initial crisis and collapse, when he suddenly sees his own body f~llllo the gTollnd heside him, and can 'read' as an observer all its {i)rms and all its characteristics ([0-1 2): he secs himsclfas other. 1I Recognition is turned bitter, laden with annihilation and wilh the sense of a void in the subject's observation of his own fi'aetured identity. The game's dark, ag'onistic undertow is experienced in a similar way to the action of the erotic in the (, Mediation of the n~rrativc through a look ahounds, particularly in the early cpi",dcs: 'imaginary characters', such as \';lSquale e\7-XI.), spy on ami narrate Carlo I and It 1(" the shauowy "nu" o[Powcr; Carlo 11 looks upon objects ofhis untCtrered sexw,l I,mtasies, upon himsclf('Carlo l"flllegato nuuo a quella ruota, C, contcmporaneamentc, visi vedeva', Carlo IPIlS tied naked to rhat wheel, ;ulll, atlhe sallle time, he ((Juid see himselFlied Ihere, 7B) anu upon his visions as an emblematic subject ('C~r1o, eolui che vc"e', LlrlO, the onc who secs, 324). Textual cquiv~lents, such as free indircct speech (201-2) aT,d namnion arc also in 'Ihunuant evidence.
PETROLlO: SELF AND FORM
cinematic spectator, discussed in Chapter I4. It is an arrested or interrupted game, that implicates in its form disquieting ontological aporia. The particular role played by narrative in this scenario, and its interpellation of subjective processes, is evoked in the metanarrative musings that open most of the 'Epochi:' stories: for example, 'il soggetto narrante, di fronte alia propria frase fondatrice, entra in stato di crisi' (the narrating subject, confronted with its founding sentence, enters a state of crisis, 429). But its most extensive treatment comes in 'Storia di millc e un personaggio' (413-20). The story tells of an Adam-like figure 'Saulo' who, banished from his primal Paradise, conceives a Novel. To create the conditions for narrative, he takes the only character he has known, the Father-Creator 'Dio di Saulo', and splits him first in two (order), then into a crowd of a thousand (disorder), and then repeats the process ti,r himself But at each stage he realizes that the dismemberment is only ever a more or less ordered ti)l"mal projection of the self's 'unicit,\ originaria' (originary singularity, 415) that can never be reproduced. The novel is abandoned when the author realizes it is only a cypher fill· his twin desires for 'possession of reality' (419) and for death, and he drowns himself in the sea off Calahria. The parallels with Pc/mlio arc manif()ld, hut most important here is the gloss it puts on the text\; narrative game. First it pictures the grotesque impossibility of expressing fully either the self or the other, even whilst any text is quite evidently a masquerade of characters aspiring to that dual aim. Second, since the protagonist becomes a narrator when he is banished from his Edenic Garden, the story suggests that what turns the gamc sour, and gives it its vital charge, what turns it into narrative and projects it onto reality, is the subject's entry into history. Pl'iro/io's dense historical dimension plunges its roots into the subsoil of lived, current reality. If it has its own inner history as a form, as we have already seen, it is also always poised between that autonomy and a series of deep incisions into the social, cultural, economic and political history of Italy between the 1950S and linos. Even in the unfinishcd text, there is a mass of detail or planned coverage of this history in evidence: a satirical account of the growth of ENI, its ramifications, its founders and their roots in the Resistance, the 'secret history' of its relationship with the State and the ruling party; planned portraits of young communist and nco-fascist activists, a detailed history of the I968 student movement and subsequent terrorist campaigns; and a satire of the bourgeois intelligentsia, with its literary salons and receptions, in hock to industry and the State, and the
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commodification of its product, art. Carlo's story is closely interwoven with this material, through Carlo I's work for ENI, but also through the anthropological class characteristics of both Carlos' sexual exploits: their pivotal sex changes, for example, always occur as epiphanies following political encounters, and their status as male or female is always closely bound up to a deeply suspect mythologized economics of possession (male) and being possessed (female), prostitution and slavery (,Acquisto di uno schiavo', 160--70; cf 217,309,318;-19; ami Fortini, 1993, 242). Similarly, a mythologized, or archetypal vision of history emerges recurrently from thc Visions and secondary narratives to inf(lrm both the subjective processes centred on Carlo and the documentary value of the other materiaL Thus, the I(lrmal obsessions of the text are integrated with a hugely ambitious ideological critique of neocapitalist modernity (clearly rooted in the articles or se ami /,/,) and once again the figure of the 'Gioco' or 'Scherzo' is pivotal to that process of integration. Two Appunti arc particularly significant in this historicizing of the narrative game, 'Prima fiaba suI Potere (dal "Prog;etto")' (r28-.n) and 'I1 gioco' (395--7). The latter is a veiled autobiog;raphical cxplication of the origin of the gamc and thc loss of scltllOod it implies. It; the author writes, somconc who has belicfs loscs thosc beliefs, he is confronted with a void ('il nulla'); not a mctaphysical void that could coalescc into a new, nihilistic belief and an ascetic withdrawal, but rMher a social void, in which all that remains is banal and quotidian praclicality. The discovcry of this void brings with it 'la scnsazionc csilaranlc che \"Utlo ci(. non sia che un gioco' (the hilarious sensation that it is all merely a game, 395), to which a f()()tnote is added: 'E' dOl un'esperienza del gencre che c venuta all'autore I'ispirazione di questo romanzo' (It is from such an experience that the author derived the inspiration filr this novcl). I J;lVing entered this state of mockery (,irrisione', 3(il), this figure becomes profoundly ambiguous, since, like the gesture of the worker that is at once servile and potentially revolutionary, mockery is both a critique of an order and fully integrated into that order: 'contiene \'integrazione, ma la svaluta di ogni senso' (it contains integration, but it strips it of all meaning, 396). It is both apocalyptic and integrated. Finally, this state renders especially comic the idea of the future, since hope, change, protest arc all integrated and dissolved into 'sbandati fantasmi' (disbanded phantasms, 397). '11 gioco' is part of the explanation of Carlo I's disappearance in 1973, and is clearly to he connected with the profound historical rupture that Pasolini locates at that moment, when an
PETROL/a: SELF AND FORM
undifferentiated bourgeois homologization has destroyed precisely all possibility of real resistance or autonomy. It is one of a range of Appunti that rehearse all the arguments and lexical patterns of the Corriere polemics, about the corruption and amorality of power and the annihilation ofthe subprolctarian type (sce especially 266-8, 497,5°1-3), represented in a grandiose codification in '11 Merda' (323-89), and in the painful, lyrical journey of'l Godoari' (476--{)7). '11 gioco', then, locates the narrativc game, and in particular, its arrested lack of pleasure, in the response to a catastrophic historical transformation. Thc Faustian 'Prima fiaba suI potere', on the other hand, directs us towards a somewhat more pro-active potential for subversion in a reemergence of the sacred vocation through the 'Scherzo'. A neurotically ambitious and confilrmist intellectual is visited by the Devil, who asks him to choose any means to power he desires. In a flash of originality, the intellectual eschews all normal means and asks to attain power through saintliness ('Santit;'i'). He rejects money and women and dedicates himself"to public pronouncements on Faith and Hope (but not Charity so as not to scandalize) and he soon acquires an aura of sainthood. But this is pure perfilrmance until a crisis overwhelms him and he is propelled into a genuine slate of I )ivine love ('Carita') which consists of a heretical intuition of values heyond Good and Evil, 'non solo non parlabili, ma neanche intuihili, se non come Scherzo' (not only unspeakable, but not even intuitable, except as a Joke, 134). Now God appears to him to tell him the I }evil had been :Him in disguise, and that the whole operation was a joke aimed at 'redefining saintliness' (135), hut the experiment biters when our saint is turned to stone, like Lot's wife, on turning round lilr onc last look at this God-I }evil. The stone becomes an enigma to geologists for its amalgamation of infinite contradictory and inseparable elements. The fahle's meaning is itself studiedly enigmatic, but what is elear is that the Joke here is the foundation stone of a new post-moral order, that does not distinguish between good and evil, and that is therefore both radically liberating if lived to an absolute of 'Carita', and also a product of an embodiment of 'Power' (135). The mediocre intellectual protagonist of this fable is clearly an analogue for Carlo I, who, Pasolini insists, is himsclfmediocre and repugnant (e.g. 185,469,545), and who also comes to acquire a strange sacred aura. When Carlo 11 disappears, destroyed by the anthropological change society has suffered, Carlo I tries and fails to reabsorb his twin's nocturnal, private, pleasure-driven impulses (234-8). But he proves physically unable to enter into the
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UNFINISHED ENDINGS
sexual odyssey of Carlo 11, and thus he must reject any shadow of a private existence: 'Non gli rcstava che scegliere (?) di essere soltanto "pubblico", e quindi "san to" , (All that remained for him was to choose (?) to be 'public', in other words 'a saint', 238).7 The last part of the tcxt as we have it, centred around the Turinesc anti-fascist fete (closely modelled on Oostoyevsky's The Demons, Part Ill, chs. 1-2), is the story ofCar!o's transformation into a new sort of ascetic, public, mocking saint, perhaps the new saint the hero of the i:lble was on the verge of becoming bef()re being turned to stone. The fete ends with his Illumination, consisting of a flood of unstoppable, joyous jokes, puns, tricks, neologisms and caricatures (532-3), and in the cnd, Carlo's exaltation is such that he has bccome sublimely sparkling ('brillante') 'not only in his Ianguagc but also in his body' (533). And the /inal note of all, 'Appunto Q3', entitled 'T }irrisione', has Carlo returning from his third journey East, to Japan, to becomc a priest in the cult of a ' "I )io scherzoso": il I )io che gioca a nascondersi' ('joking God': God who plays hide-anti-seck, 537). 'Prima fiaba suI Potere' anJ '11 gioco' suggest how possihilities ofdif. . ferent relationships bctwcen self amI reality, different games in lite and in narrative, arc necessarily dependent on historical-ideological change, and in particular on the assumption t hat over the course of t he perioJ covered by Petrolill, a graJual and finally definitive historical paradigm shift has occurred: what the text calls 'l'EpochC' (23(), 399 . 453). The Epochi: represents a suspension ofhislory, a further fiu'mulation of what Pasolini had called 'the new prehistory' in his poct ry. All difference is suspended, so that even the hody now lacks real presence or meaning' except, as in the dystopia '11 Merda', in grote:-oque imitation of some homogenizing model. In these conJitions, actions, bodies, words take on radically new meanings, because their context has starkly transformed and ahsorbed them: qudla gente nOli era piu quella di un tempo, qllella genIe /lOll aveva piCI la purezza (sia pure coatta) dell .. poverd, quella genre 1/011 aveva pill I'anlieo rispetto, quella gente IIIJIl aveva pill I'antica ansia di riseatto, qllella genIe rum ereava piu il proprio modello umano, quella gell1e non opponeva pill la sua cultura a quella dei padroni, quella gente nr!n eonoseeva piu la santita della rassegnazione, quella gente non conosceva pill la silenziosa volont.l della rivoluzione. [... ] Tutto cia era espresso dalla loro presenza tisiea, dalloro modo di essere: dalloro corpo. (497) 7 The relation between puhlic sainthooJ anJ rraJitional hermetic saimhooJ is explnreJ further in 'Storia di un padre e delle sue due figlic' (4zz-R).
PETROL/O: SELF AND FORM
(those people were not the same as they once were, those people did not have the purity (even if imposed) of poverty they once had, those people no longer had their ancient respect, those people no longer had their ancient desire for redemption, those people I/O longer created their own human models, those people nil lllnger opposed their culture to that of the bosses, those people no /onlfer knew the sanctity of submission, those people no lllnger knew the silent wish for revolution [... 1 All this was expressed by their presence, by their way ofheing: hy their hodies.) Furthermore, as Pasolini had noted in 'Abiura dalla "Trilogia della vita" " not even earlier meanings in their bodies survive untainted, since their present state implies they were always potentially thus (381; fJ, 7]). Thus the tragedy of personal history seen earlier-the son heing unahle to recreate the body of the father-recurs on a macrocosmic stage. Micro- and macrocosmic catastrophes arc figured at many moments throughout the text, in the failed repetition of cultural (the receptions), geo!,\nphical (the journeys, the Third World), inncr or historical forms. But several ofthese cycles move from a twof()!d dynamic-before-andalier·-··to the adumbration ofa threcf()ld, prophetic dynamic that is not olle of dialectical progress, hut nevertheless posits some possihility of a future. This is most apparent in the short fragment 'Storia della ricostruzione di lIna storia' (411-12), which sets out a sort of Vi chi an cycle orhuman history, consisting of three 'ends of the world'. At the lirst ending, man's harmony with nature is superseded by his ingenious, technical circumvention of nature's dangers, 'la pericolosira della natura'. At the second ending, the now of the story and indeed of the Epochc that is the main f()cus of Pelmlio as a whole, man's power evolves into a tendency to destroy himself and the world, 'la perieo]osit;i dell'uomo' (thc dangerousncss of man). Of the third, prophesicd and definitive, ending of the world-'la finitezza della natura' (the perlectionl cnd of nature, 4' 1 )-the narrator simply says 'staremo a vedere' (wc shall have to wait and sce, 412), hut it can certainly be rcIated to that unwritten endingofthe novel, the 'cosmic crisis' that is also envisaged at times as hoth perfection and destruction. At the end of'II Merda', Carlo intuits a similar disaster to come as a result of the degradation he has witncssed: 'quei giovani e ragazzi avrebbero pagato la loro degradazione col sanguc: in un'ecatombe [ .. .J' (those adolescents and children would pay for their dC!,\'fadation in blood: in a mass slaughter [... ], 381). And the final scene of thc vision, a statue of a massive, grotesque fcmale monster holding a large phallus, is intended as both a
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UNFINISHED ENDINGS
culmination of the entire Vision and a prefiguration of the orgiastic and purificatory' "atto mistico" che accadri alia fine di questo romanzo' (the 'mystic act' that will occur at the cnd of this novel, 386). This scene takes us back to the comic, and in particular to liberating obscene comedy involving genitalia: 'e nota come il "riso" abbia una funzione risolutrice di crisi cosmiche, se causato da esibizione di "membra" 0 "vulva" , (it is well known that 'laughter' has a resolutory function if caused by the display of a member or vulva, 386-7). Such laughter recalls the laughter of the child in its physicality, lack oflinguistic play and flouting of social taboos. Thc text seems to envisage no such cathartic laughter as possible in the flattening cataclysm of the Second Age, bm at times can imagine its return in somc form in a Third Age. Indeed Carlo I's extraordinary, garrulous transformation at the end of the text, at the anti-fascist g·athering in Turin, shares some of these characteristics: it scandalously breaks all social norms, its flood of language is 'una frenesia quasi afasica' (an almost aphasic frenzy, 532), and, as has already heen noted, culminates in a fill·m of bodily transubstantiation. The mirage of thc threcfilld model ,If/(lHls a deep structure to Petrolio, by way of which the schematic binary oppositions of the text are projecLnl in more complex, dispersed and unresolved directions. This applies as much to the historical-ideological matrix of the work as it does to its concern 10 position self and reality in ambiguous relation to its own form. J\ll these aspects are brought toget her and worked through, as one might expect, in the story of( :ar\o. Carlo's hody and his consciousness are the sites where the subjective, historical and 1(lrmal concerns of the text jostle and merge with each other. His splilt ing in two represents bot h an apotheosis of the permanent trauma that COIlstitutes subjectivity and the playing out of the fi-acture between historical cycles. The diffcrenL and parallcl experiences of Carlo I and Carlo II arc themselves analogues of the diflcrent, often opposite meanings of identical events repeated in dif1crent historical moments, so that the pair can be seen as corrupted projections of the first two Epochs of history. 'Appunto 6' (34-6) explains that Carlo 11 is necessarily subordinate to Carlo I for reasons of social hierarchy, but Carlo 11 is also prior to Carlo I as the matriarchal, fluid goddess 'Tetis' (Zigaina, J()93, 318) precedes the patriarchal institutional order of the 'Polis'. Carlo's story demonstrates the necessary ehain of evolution that leads inexorably from an initial incompatibility between these two interwoven t()rces to the disappearance of Tetis to the collapse and redefinition of Polis as something radically other. The text is thus precisely suspended at the
PETROL/a: SELF AND FORM
instant, in terms of this macrohistory, of the detachment, disappearance and re-emergence of Tetis through the public persona of Po lis. It is this dramatic sequence of grand transformation that vitalizes the repetitiveness and studied greyness of Petro/io. Carlo's persistent and failed desire to possess or to be possessed by that Pasolinian cluster of ahistorical absolutes-solitude, poverty, totality, pure sexuality, the hody, presence, death (e.g. 42, I 89-()3, 201-29, 308--<))-is evidence of an anxious, impossible dream of stopping history, hy either separating definitively or returning to a mythical unity. The desire necessarily fails to be realized, despite desperate conscious and subconscious efforts, because Carlo I and II embody the ambiguity of their historical condition: they are and remain throughout 'bourgeois', mediocre, unable to resist the force of history. Even Carlo I, who seems to step outside his bourgeois origin in his scandalous transgressions, is unable to arrive at the simple, mythicized, ahistorical unconsciousness of figures such as Salvatore Dulcimascolo, Carmclo, and the twenty 'ragazzi' of '11 pratone della Casili na'. Carlo II and Carlo I are unrealized figures of the tirst two cycles of history, jlist as the final incarnation of Carlo I is but a phantasm of a possible, potentially both apocalyptic and renewing, third cycle. But on top of this contingent explanation comes the essential t()nnal intuition of Petm!io, and much of Pasolini's late work, that beginnings and endings are now precluded, as is exact repetition of the other or of reality, as is perfected f(>rIll. Thus the quotation from I.eopardi in 'Appunto 72e' could stand as an epigraph to the entire hook, the premise ofhoth its formal and historical aspects: ' "je ne fais pas d'ouvrage, je fais seulement des essais en comptant toujours prClllllcr... " , (377).
It is all too tempting to read Petfolio as an ending, not only because Pasolini's death made it his last work but ~llso becaust~ the text envisages ilself as such, 'il preambolo di un testamento'. But the driving force behind it, and what makes it perhaps the most fertile of all Pasolini's experiments in the work of subjectivity, is its resistance to teleology. Whilst restating and reimagining the material and insights ofSa/tJ and Nuolla (and much of se and LL), Petrolio draws away from the annihilation and aphasia that the latter enact anu opens up prospects of new tc)rms, new registers and new histories. That is not to say that Petro/io rediscovers an optimism of outlook, but rather the grinding elimination of extant forms and histories is here turned inside out, in an explosive history of that elimination and a prophetic lunge into the dark of what
UNFINISHED ENDINGS
might follow it. It hardly needs stating, then, that here too, the entire project can and in part should be read as a sublimely inflated autobiography. But there is more to its exploration of subjectivity than that. Petrolio contains a self-conscious medley-'ogni grande scrittore ama prima di tutto i Centoni' (every great writer loves centos above all else, 87)---of the mechanisms of the work of subjectivity that characterize Pasolini's a:uvre. The spectrum goes from the voice of the author, who talks directly to the reader and ruminates on his text, its meanings and motivations; to the archetypal figures ofthe self, in Carlo but also every other minor protagonist and antagonist who populate the book; to the grand, mythical or epic movements of history that themselves rdlect and inform different forms of consciousness; to the elusive vessels of selfhood or subjectivity, imbricated into I.tnguage, {ilnn, its genesis and its means of representation of reality, all triumphantly and ambiguously brought together in the notion of 'il gioco'. Its most compelling achievement, even in the fragment wc have, is to have woven around the figure of Carlo so many of these lines that from it emcrges a powerfully subtle and complex portrait of how subjectivity in history intersects and conditions the history of the subject. Fortini writes of Pasolini's encyclopedic folly ill his conception of Petrofio, 'he had gradually persuaded himself that he could encompass everything and anything ['tutto di tutto'I' (translated trOI11 Fortini, IlJlJ], 240-1). But Fortini takes this vein as an abjuration of his self-obsessed writings of the twenty preceding years ('to hide himself from himselfl ... 1to cut himself off from his first twenty years' work'). Instead, Petro!io's grandest, Platonic ambition is to collapse the barrier between suhjectivity and 'tutto di tutto', to contain all in a movemcnt of (ilrlns, not so as to dissolve the text's presence inl'O a postl11odern panoply of metaliterary feints, but to dream ,tn impossible alchemy that transforms the material reality of thc text-that-eontains-All into t he material presence of the self.
Bibliography I. WORKS llY PASOLINI
l.
r. Poetr)'
Poesie a Ca.l"arsa, Bologna: Libereria Antiquaria Mario Landi, 1942. Poesie, S. Vito al Tagliamento: Stamperia Primon, 1945. Diarii, Casarsa in Friuli: Edizioni dell'Academiuta, 1945. I pian/i, Casarsa in Friuli: Pubblicazioni dell'Acadcmiuta, 1946. Dov'c la mia patria, with thirteen drawings by G. Zigaina, Casarsa in Friuli: Edizioni dell' Academiuta, 1949. 1{t! {(JUT di un/rut, Triccsimo: Edizioni di lingua friulana, 1953. Dal DiaJ-io (19451947), Caltanisetta: Sciascia, 1954. La mef(lio Kioventu, Florence: Sansoni, 1954. 11 ("{Into popolare, Mibn: Edizioni della Meridiana, 1954. /.e eeneri tli Gramsci, Milan: Garzanti, 1957. CUJiKnolo del/a clliesll (lIt/o/im, Milan: J.ongancsi, 1958 .\'onello primaverile ([(63), Milan: Scheiwiller, 1960. Roma 19.')0. Diario, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1960. I.a rclif(ione del mio tempo, Milan: Garzanti; 1961. P/II!sia injilTma di rosa, Milan: Garzanti, 1964. Ponie, Milan: Garzanti, 1970 [paperback anthology]. TraJuma.nar e orKanizzar, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. /.c pocsie, Milan: Garzanti, 1975 [collection of Ceneri, ReliKilme, Rosa and Trasumanar J. I.a nUOVll Kiovcntu, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. /Jcslemmia. TUlle le poesie, edited by G. Chiarcossi and W. Siti, 2 vols., Milan: Garzanti, 11)1)3.
1.2.
Narrative
'I parlanti', (1948), in Raf(llZzi di vita, Turin: Einaudi, 1979,215-38. Rllf(llZzi di vita, Milan: Garzanti, 1955. Unll villl vio/mtll, Milan: Garzanti, 1959. Donne tli Roma, Milan: 11 Saggiatore, 1960. Il sogllo di ulla WSll, Milan: Garzanti, 1962. AN dagli occhi llzzuni, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Teorema, Milan: Garzanti, 1968.
294
BIBLIOGRAPHY
La divina mimesis, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. !lmad" mio preceduro da At/I impuri, edited by C. I)' AngC\i, Milan: Garzanti, ":l H2 . Petrolio, edited by A. Roneaglia, M,. Careri and G. Chiarcossi, Turin: Einaudi, 1992.
Romans, edited by N. Naldini, Parrna: c..;uanda, 1994. 1,3. Lssa:),s, Journa./J', JoumalisrI/, and nchale,~ (a) Collections
Passillm' e idenlll/flil, '\lilan: Garzanti, 1960. L'odore dell 'India , Milan: Longal1l;si, I<)62. l:;mpm~\'m(} ('retim, Milan: G,[rzanti, U)7;!. Saittl corsari, IVlilan: Garzanti, HJ75. Lellere lureranc, Turin: Einaudi, HJ76. VO//far 'c/oquio, Naples: Athcna, HnC!. Pow/ini c '11 sl!tac(io', edited by ~V1. Ricci, Bologna: (:'lppdli, 11)77. Descrjzirmi di desf1'izlVni, edited by G. Chiarcossi, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. If portico della morte, edited b)· C. Segre, Rome: Associazionc' Fondo Pier P,[olo Pasolini', 1988. I dirt/of!,hi, edited by G. Falaschi, Rome: Editori Riuniti, H)()2. ODifina I T-I 2; ,,,'.S. 12 J. Bologna T9SS'S9 [facsimilL: reprintl, Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon, 1993. Un pal'sc rli lcrnporali t: di primu/e, edited by 1\. Naldini, T\lI'Ina: liualHla, 1993. I, 'A.'fldemiula Fill/ana e le SlIC ri1:isfc Ifacsimile rcprin1 I, editcd by N. Naldini, Vicenza: Neri Pona, llJ94.
Cb) Miscellaneolls
'Sull" poesia dialcttale" Pocs;a, X, llJ47. '11 me\odo di bvoro' (19~X), in Rllga::.::.; tli vila, Turin: Einaudi, 1979,209-13. "Ibis', in Boarini, IIJ74, 95-10].
1-4- Saccnplays (a) Published ;/(Wl/OllC,
Rome: Ediziom: F .'V1., 1961 (first draft in All dll)!./i ouhi azzurri,
249-](2).
Mamma /?oma, :\liian: Rizzoli, IC,l62 (also in A/i daJ{h on'hi a,:zurri, 3634)4). La ricotta, in Ali dagli ouizi (lz.zurl'i, 467-X7. Il VlIngl'lo sCf(mclo ;\tfillfeo, cdited by G. Gambelti, lVlilan: Garzanti, J()64. [/ctellacn e uadhl1i, edited by G. Garnbctti, .\lilan: Garzanti, 11)66. Eclipo re, edited by G. Gambctti, Milan: Garzanti, 1967.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
295
1. 2 above I 'Che cosa sono le nuvolc?', Cinema efilm, n. 78 (Winter-Spring J()69), 73-84. Medal, edited by G. Gambetti, Milan: Garzanti, 1970. Ostia, co-author S. Citti, Milan: Garzanti, 1970. I1padreselvaKgio, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. La Iril()gia del/a vita ill Decamerrm, f racc()nti di Canterhury, II fiore delle 'Mille e una notle'!, edited by G. Gattei, Bologna: Cappdli, 1975· San Paolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. 'Due incdili di Pasolini' l'Sant'lnfame' and 'Porno-teo-kolossal'], Cinecritim, NS 11, n. I] (April-June 1989),34-53.
[Tcorema, sec
(b) Unpublished
In lhe 'Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini', Rome: 'UcceJlacci e ucccllini', typesL"Tipt dateu 3 September I(j65, pp. 1-299; 'lista dialoghi', pp. 1-41. 'L1lmw c la bura' I La terra vista dalla luna], undated unnumbered typescript (1966), story and screenplay, pp. 1-61. 'Porcilc', typescript dated March-September 1968: I, pp. 1-34; I1, pp. I~O, with manuscript corrections; pp. 1-7 added on the set.
In the 'Bibliotcca Nazionale', Roma: 'San I'aolo', typescript of various drafts, .'Vlay June IQ6.8,.Rome: Biblioteca Nazionale, DOl1o Eredi Pasolini 1l)77/80, V. E.. 1563/J1-1I_3. {·5. Films Directed hy Pllso/i1li
For fuller filmographies, see Bertolina, 1976; Betti and Thovazzi, 1976; Greene, 1990,225-33. A((:attonl' (made 1960-1), released 1961. Mllmma RI/ma, made and released 1962. /.11 rimua l episode of RoGoPIIG or Lllviamoci it cervetlo], (1962) 1963. I,a rabhia Ifirst halfl, 1l)63. Cmni:::i tl'amort' (11)63-.4),1965. SopmluoKhl in Pales/illll per il film '11 Vangelo sewntio Maftco' (1963-4), 1965. l/ Vange/o secolldo Mlt/II'o, H)64. Un·et/aai e IIccellini (11)65), 1966. l 'Toto al circo', unrdeascd, unfinished episode of Uuelfacci e uccellinij. La terra -rista dill/aluna !episode of Le slrc!(hrJ, (1966), 19tJ7. ft/iI'll re, 1967. ChI' cosa sOllole nu"vile? [episode of Caprimo (lI/'/llIliana] (H)67), 1968. Apputlti per ulI/llm .lull 'IndIa (1967-8), 1()6fl on R AI-TV. Te()1"{/lla, 196H. La sequcnza del jiore dl carta Iepisode of Am ore c rabbill] (1l)68), 1969. Partite (1968-1)), 1969.
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[. 7.
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I.R. /1nt/w/ogics Edited /J}' Pasolim Pocsia dialeuale del Novecc7ltfl, co-editor M. Dell'Arco, Parma: Guanda, 1952. Canzoniere itahano, P,trma: Guanda, 1955: reissued in a shortened version as Poesia pop(llare il{t/iana, Parma: Guanda, 1960. SerittoTl del/a rcalla dall'Vlll al XIX sewlf), edited with A. Bertolucci and A. Moravia, Milan: Garzanti, 1961. Antologia della hrica pasmlilt7la [Pasolini's degree dissertation 1, edited hy M. A. Bazzorchi, Turin, Einaudi, [993.
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Index
absorption,
Jynallli~
of 4, I ()-17, • R, 20, 52,
6.t, 18'1,288 '/\cadclllilll;l lli Icn~;1 ('"rlan,,' 1.1, q,33-4, .. B. 122 n.
art hislory '2], '+7 <), '(,7, 183-;,1<)7-8, 21(' "7,225,226 .'it'(' alsol ~onghi, nlanncrislTI and IOU/I." ;'Illil';du(f/ (fTt!>/.,
aCTion, .\1'(;' praxis Adllis Saha, !o,.1. 24 n. Adorno, T. 1',' 1\7
Asor Rosa, /\.. 6, 1'.12 n., ('I) n., <)8 n., 1)911.,12], lZ5 & n., 126, 13811., 131),
:\e~chylu>"
aurel!rism, authorship 6,87 in dncma 19]--'204, 21 1,216, 2 I~, 225, 243-4, 24H, 251-60; .,,'e aim 'soggcTliva
15011 .
Ore,/c;lI 223 & n., 245 .'Cl· "/.HI Pnsolini. Appllllti per UII 'Ore.
Afi-i~. 78,122, 12!!-1), 131,200
n., 223
Ag"mben, G. T<)2 n 'a~irc nella rc"hi' 217-.11,231,247.-8,250 .~f!f! aiw) prolxis .\l(oSli, S. .25 A;ello,:-.1. 6, n. Alighicri, D. 22, Z3 n .• 30 n., 4H, 71l n .• l)l n., J7l, 1791 2]7, 2M~ n.) 272- J, 2XO, 283 ,\hhusser, r .. BIl an,}log-y berween cintm;l anJ rtalilY 246-7 hel "'cen cinema 'lIld literature 1R6, I
helween li,rms ofsubjeelivilY 21l/ helween pas(/prc-hislOry ami present ZOl,224-,244,245,250~.!S6 'illnL'L't:.llli~imo dcH~ ;u)alogia' 207, .2'24, 12 7,245
in Sail}
in Petrolin 271,274,285,286,292 authcnlidty 2-3,5, J., 75, 77, 82, 87, '71\, 111<), 'l/5 aUlhorilY 42-3, 48, 50, 54, 60, 63-4, 7 H· g, '4(, &: 11., 17()-7, I()I 20 .. ,262 autohiogTilphy I,.."! n., i-~, Z 1,49, 54. 75-/),8',1/0-".1, .1-1+, .8<),19' '204, LOS, 237, 2 .. -1, 286, 21.1'-2 A1'al//
Gad,
'07
Amn/i.! ,0611. lhell, J. S.
208
Balzac, H. 275 Handa, A. 2<) n., 117". Handini, F 34 n., 99 n. Baranski, Z. 30 n .• 199 D,u'!lcri Sqll'}TOlli, G. 2,
/',
7 n., 7';, <)2 n.,
102
llarhicllini "mi(ki, G. 68
216,250,260
,ee 11/.'" melaphor
Bardlll, Il. 127 B'lrnabi, Michdi, I. 2\j n. Hanhcs, R. H2, 2.12, 2JIl
Anc~schi,
I .. 40 n. Andr~ol\i, G. vii, 7 I n. Anlonioni, :'v1. .. 6 :\pollonius Rodills 275 .-lrKlmall/i"" 278 /\.rnasino, A. +211., (,2 n., An-hi/Ta!'c 23-33,38 l\.rtcco, S. 13211.,212 11. Aristolle 275 Armes, R. 207 Arnhcim, R. 230 n. Arpino, G. 62 n.
inJirerta Iibera' in journalism 6.1,65 n., 72. 82
Hassani, (i. '4, 17, I Xn., +.2 225
n.
Ihlldclairc, C. I.p n . 12<) 11.
RlZin, ,'t,. 57 ))c~k,
J
"/2
l!clanli, W. <jJ n. Bcllczza, J). 55 Beli()c~llio, M. 57
Hcliocchio, l~ <)2 13ehllllndn,J-I:'. '-I7n.
11., 1<)211.,
INDEX Belsey, C. 8H Hemporad, G. 28 n. Benedetti C. and fit. Gr ignani 26!! n. Jlenek, G. 225 n. Benjamin, \\;'. 52 Jlcnvcni'lc, E. 2,3, '12 n., 108, 125,255 Herni, E 9211. Dernini 20!! Bcrsani,1.. 2J6 n. Ilcrr.lcchini, R. 24 n. Bertini, A. 78 n .• IIjI, 1l)2 & n., 11)5 n., 196,
199n.,221 n. Dcrwlini, I .. 1)211. Bcrto\ucci, A. 14,42 n., 55. 58 Dcrtolucci, H. 127,1,2 La (ommarl' s!~aa
207 o.
fktlctini, G 240 n. DCl1i,T... 1711.,20,21,35,55n.,108n., T~)2 n., 226 n. Bial1chi, P. 18 Bihle 11 5-16, I H) 20, LH & 11., 1,(r7, 1Ii8 n., 201, lOq & n. Bini, A. 20 n., 170 Bloolll, 11. 7'J n., 88
Bo.t:. 18 Bucca, (i. 71 n.
Boce'Lceio, G. 19711., L98, 201, 225, 246 SU 1I1.
240 '-],25<),260,261
ill
jOllrllit1i~nl 25··6J 71-2~ 75
in Pc/w/io 27(' 8, 2XO, .82, lil4, 288·· 91 in pocl.-y 8X, I rX. 12<)-.10, 140, I.p, '4S, 160, 161 8] Sr!(
a/:.;o
hOlllOscXU,llity
Bol/ellillo "dill wcielli/ilologtwji.",III,/(/ 13 Bologna 1:l-13, 2]-4, 7:;,')1. '14 n., ')£', 18 5 BollIgllini, :\·1.: 11 /,dl'.·/1//(/1/;" 225". I.II.~i"m{/I{/ !lair""!,, 207 11.,225 n. /.a mJlle ''''(1(1[1 l07 E 20] 11.
tl.
Bol~.()I]i,
Bompi"ni (puhlisher) III n., 42 Bompiani, V. 47 1I0Il
Royer, A.-M. IjIJ n., 197 n. Draneari, V.:
11 bell'A'lIlmi" 225 n. Brevini, F 6, Jii, Il) ':15 n., 94 n. brnthcr Jigure I oS, 145. 169. 179 Hrunclta, U. P. 213 n., 2Ii Il., 225 n. Bruni, B. 152 n. Iluchenwald 157 Buci-GILlcksmann, C. 150 n. Iluiluc\, L.: Simeoll del de,iNto 212
Cacciari. :\.1. 14 n. Cmlioli,l\. 1 S, 21 n., JIj n., 83 Caesar, .\1. 46 n., 69 n., 70 11. C"I\"" M. riO, 12-1"., dl2-J, 11)2 (;,lviIlO,1. +211·,46,71,72n., '5011., 2J611.
I". lOS, 10(1 Capizzi, A. 46 n. eaprol1i, (j. +2 n.
CimlOD,
n.
C:lrava~~io 147 11.
L •.-ducti, G. 41 n.,99 Cuor.:.:i, A. 40 n., 5+, 55 Casi, S. .1, 6, 7 n., Ho 11. Cassola, C 1:;3 Caltedra, N. 66 Cavani, L.: Prancesco tla .. Issi.,; 20.111. (:haplin, (:. 154, ISH, 226 Modall lillles 5' Chaucer. (i. "17, .'.-1(', 256 .~('( al'io PasoHni, I rll{(onti di ClulIl'rhllY.V Ch.-i,. S, .15, -IH, 10,1, 'H' 6, 'So, '55, 16;, "J.I, IC)'), 2011··,), Ut, 24J, 2S(, Ch.-isli;tni,y HI, K.'., ll], 1)5'''(', 'Ill, 11<), 131, 1].1, I:~(h 162
3,
10J 11.,
.loX
Church, 52,62, M! 70,73.116 N., 119, 1Z2, 12._, 12X, I34, Ii4 6, 1589, IRo Ciano, (i. 24 n. Cig-l1i, F 182 n. 'cinema ,h poc,ia' I H5"(,' :lOS, to(" 230-4, 2:1(', ..!44, 254 (:iUOlIll num. '() 206
Cipri"lli, M. 11)2 n. Ci!1i, F 11)2 n., 11).1 Cil1i, S. 57.167,1<)211., "J7 n. UtilI/ 20711. Slnr;" -"el/crllte 207 n.
CixoLl',11. 17011., ..!+2 n. C\cmclH, C. 170 n., IS211., 24211. Clementi,l'. H)2 Colomho, F. 76
INDEX
Colussi-Pasolini, S. (mol her)
15,
2R, 115,
19'1
sce also mother tigllrc confession Ii, 26, 39, 48- <), 5Z-], 51), 81, I)!! & 11.,103, 106,107, ,oH, 10<),207 COIHi C"I"hrcsc, G. 116 Il. Contini,G 12-14, 11i,36 7,43, /61 n., 220, z74 rt. COlTcggio '47". Cor!"iae ddlll sad 2.\, ho, liz /1.,67-'74, 2R7
Corri,"{' rid Titil1f1 12 n., 5 I,
(;ro~e, B. 2<),30
101, 103, 'Z(), 244 crowd: ,Is image in poetry '49 '50, '.V, 155, /60, /7.1 in Pt/mlio .zSS
sulitude Culler,). -'3z 11. ~yl\icism ClJ, ('7, 74,1.\3,1<)0,26" So' al::'/J
IlaLloUIl,R.17S n . I )a\-:rada, E. 206 n. 1)',\ nnul1zin, G. 4, 52 11.,
127
diakcl: Frill!;m 6,~, 12-15,17,33-40, 6R, 69, I go, 240, 272; .fCC also Pasolini, Potsie"
Cd.
lack of in Pe/m!io 270--1 others 14,.H 11.,203,225 Dollilnllrc,J. 3, Cl /)"'1 Qui.mlc '.l-4 r (ill The [)enwm 275,278, 2RJ, ~8!1 drcants: oneiric quality of cinema 2[3-14,232-4, 244-6,250 in Pe/filii" 273 & n., 276-7, 279, 282, 2<)1,
DO~If)ycvsky,
29:1in poctry 102, 156, 176 urcam-work 4, 217 Duchamps, M. 2()0 n. Dul1ot, F 107 n., If19, 191,1<)2 n., 206, 222,240, 246 n. ])uroil, U. 236 n. J)utschkc, R. 62, I 10
Dallle, .,~,. :\ li~hieri, I). 1)'Arri~o,S. 1'l.!Il.
l)ilVid,M.IO!!II.,116n.,IJ XII .
I )~voli, N. (l\iinctto) .h 711, I S4 11., 111211., IlJ2 n .. I t)J, l02·'j • .ll 51 237-- 9. 273 n. I)C (I kmucr"zi;). ~rislian") vii, 22, 35, hI!- '70,7], 1.19 n. lle !\l1draLle, .\1.: J,t'III,,-t/lura l1egra I.!R 11.
I k i\11~clis, F. 27(, I k Filil'po, E. 20,20311 Ddiiurgi, F. I I)..! 11. Dc Giusli, r.. /27 Il., 12(' Dc Laurelis, T .1,6, 2:H 11., 240 n., 2.:;4·S I kll',"'rco, M. q Il. Ik:\lall,P. In n. Dc MallTn, T. .15,71 n., 'h4 n., 221 n. 1le Michcli, I .. uh, 227 11. I le Roocrtis, (i. I X Dc Sauc, :"vbr,!uis 2.30,275, zH3 1.f.'i Ct'Ul-l'lIlgIJMlry(!r:.\'ot!m7lt.: 22.1
sce II/S0 Paso!ini, .';"lii F .p c.Iesirc(erotic) 1,4,7,HH, '40-2, 144&11., 145-6,149-5 0 ,153,160,17 2-1), dh-3, TR4, 212-3, 2I6, 2~1 -J, 23<)~ J)c Sanctis,
~40-2, 245, 248, 250, 254, 258-1>2, 27(}-7, 2R4-S .<eC Cl/SO
homosex.uality
Diac3no, M. 42 n.
Eco, lJ. 2.2,71 n., 234 11., 240 11. <:ditil1!( 210--12,2.1(,,246, 24H, 250, 252, 255 amI dealh 2'7"!!' 247, 274 Editori Rillniti 55 Einaudi (puhlisher) 1'),223 n., 2M\ Einslein, A. SH, ISH Eisenhower, D. 127 Eliude,M. 64n. Eliol, T S. 39
Epo<"
cdccri{;ism I, J 2,
14~ l5,
.14, JR, ·H-7, 50, 50;, ('1,7 6,270 ,27"--2 Fa~~ill, G 11> n., 9.1 n. F"bschi, ( •. 63 Il. Fantuzzi, V. 116 n. FawJii, F 'l4 Il. {"ascisl11, allli-t:lscism, neo-f.LScism: in cinema 236, ~;O, 2(,0, Z(lI, 26<)
in carly
j()llrn~llislll 12, 1J, 22, 23
-C),
2!! n., 2'J-.~I,:l1I in lalcr journalism ~2 n., 6R, 70, 77 in P,'uII/i" 2('9, z!!o, zi!S, 2H~, 290 in plletry 112, "un., 12~, '49 '50,175, '76-7, '78, ,So
INDEX father figure 7H---!), H2, 1:\8, 91,98--<), 109, 112,134,160, ,61-83,203,277,285, 28 9 Fcderiz 20 Feiningcr, I .. 260 n. Fcllini, F. 20,62 n., 18,),194 I.a .'Irad" 226 Satyriul/I 59 n. Ferrara, M. 71 ll. Femlrroni, F 71 n. Fcrrelli, J). 1 <)9 n. Fcrretti, G. C. 6, Ill,)o n., 4011.,43,46, 4H, 55 n., SH n., 61 11.,62,67. (1) 11., JoR n., 112 n., I !Cl n., 125 n., 14-<) n., 161 n. Ferrcni, M. 42 n., 44-:;, 79 Fido, r. 35 n.
Gagarin, y. 23H Gambctti, G. 57 game, joke: in PelrofilJ 282-9 Garholi, C. 23 n., 42 n., 192 n. (iardair, J,-!\1. 132 n. Garofolo, F.. 11)2 n. (iarrnni, E. 240 n. Garzami (puhli~her) '4 n., 17, 18&n., 19,
Fiera IdUraria '3,23 n.
Figazzolo, R. 20ti !'ink, Cl. 242 "3 Firpo, I .. 71 n. Flcishman, A. 2, '13 n., 9H lI. Folin, A. anu M. <).uaranta 2+ n. I'orcella, E. ()(j riu'gacs, D. 40 11. l()rm' in eincm'l I 119 .'<)0, 1<)8, 206, 217, 219-2 I, 223 4,227,251-2,254,262 movement of J, 7,44, 184-6; .Ice also cXJlcrilllcntali~'m 141,
Foni,I\1. 01-0 n. Fortini, F vii, S, (, 11., IS, .lO n" 40 n., 4.1, 46,55 & ll., 56 n., 60, 6411.,611,7' n., 112, HI!, HC), 1l7. IIH n" 125, IJ2 11.,
n,
14+11" '47n .• I51 n., Ills,aM!n.,zRI, 29 2 Fl,'>colo, U. '52 n. hanl.rurt School 71 Frc"crick II oil! Freeman, B. 242 n. Frcud, S. 4,51, C)J n., 12<), ISIl
B,:>'(!/U/lhe /'Ieasllre Principle 2K4 Frieurich, P. In n. Friuli 6,13-15,16,30,33-40,77,7<)-80, <)1, IO(), '17, '47, 150, 167, 1H9, 192 se< also dialect Frye, N. <)0 11., 9H n. Gadda, C. E. 42 n.
Quer ptlSli(wl<"io hullo tlr via M,ru/m/a 18
GUUUl, A.: I.a Sarra"" nll"ilill 28 I 1j2
Gerard,1o: 6411., loll n" (1)3, 1<)5, 197 n., 2'211.,2]7 n., 222 n' l 243
Gide, /\., 5, JI), 1]3 n. viI. 12,2), z!l Ginsbcrg, A. 22 n., 19.1 Ginzburg, N, 71 n., HJ2 n. Giordana, M. T vii viotln 147 n., 197 & n., 1<):',214 n., 217, 2Z5, 2.17 n., 246, 256
viuliani, A. 40
in Pe/mlio 267,270,2] r--q2
in poetry (}9, I o~, 1 10- J], 127, 147- X, '59, I(,H, '7 0 , 175
59 G,u·l.atlli, L. 17 n., ,Il, 11),55,57,58,90 n., zl17 Gassman, V. 223 n. G;nTo, A. 13, 11)2 n.
Gladio "ii ()obelli,l'. 101 (i(l(bnl,J L. 57,147 n.
:J /lfllI( tI,· .3 55,274 !a'a also nco-;l\,anv;ullrdiil Guadagni, E. 11)4, 195, z57 n.
Guagnini, E, 35
Guanda 14 GUF 12,23, zR
INDEX guilt, imagcry of 50,81, 9H-<), 112, 117, '55-6, 16 5-6 sce also trial Gundle, S. 4H n. GUHUSO, R. 148,192 n. Hainsworrh, P. 40 n.
I \cath, S..1,234 n., 253 I Ieusch, P. and B. Rondi: Unll 1';1" violC1lI11 207 n. history: in cincn13 I89, 200~ 208, 2I3, 2[8, 222, 22),2)0-1, 2J'1, 243-'50, 25),255-6, 261 as crisis 52, 54, 66, 73 critique nf(OI/itina) 40'-7 as idea 25,2<)-30,31-2, .15, 38, 75, 111-3 in PelrlJlilJ 268,271, 285-<)2 in plletry !lS, <)9,101,104,106,112, 114-37, Ibo, 1()R-70, 18()-1 prc-history 38, 54,66, '31, l62,200,
213-'4; see al.", myrh ofscll; see autobiography lIitler, ,\. IS!!,' 5<),261 homosexuality 2 :],5,6, 14-'5,26, J!!, 70, 79-8 I, 109, 142, '5(', ,66-70,20 I, 2,6, 253-4,2sH-q .f'!" al", bod); uc~in: I IOllgron, j. 225 n. I lowarth, W. <)2 n. iucnlogy: in cinema IlIH, Zl3, 229, 2.17-<),241,245, 24<1,25 0 ,253-4,255,261 in journaliml 6, 22,24, )',35, .lX, 4', 45'-7, SI, 54,712, 76·H, Mo, K2 ill Pc/mli() 273,275, 2XO" J, 2H6, 2<)0 in poelry H7, HH, 10', 107, '0<1 n., ' '4, J 17,126-7,1.1+, '44"., '53, ,(io '11 GlOS' (magazine column) 61'''7,73,74,
76 II «()tIle'mpllrall"() 40 n., 42 /I KiOTTlfI 22 n.
7' n. Il mal/mu dcl pllp()li, 34, 3H, 77 11 mmal,,; 46, 55 11 me'<S
illegibility,.lee unrecognizahility
'impcgno' 40,44, 5t & n., 52, 56 n., 67, 73, 106n.,112 Infuma, M. 34 n. intellectual, role of 24,26,28,30,32-3, 39, 4 0 ,46-7,5 1,54,63,64,65-6,72-4,7 6, 82-3,17 1,17 8,199,229, 287 Irigaray, L. 242 n. Isncnghi, M. 48 n.
Jacopo della QlIcrcia: llaria del Carrmo 119-20,147 Jakobslln, R. U2, 228--<), 255 JeweU, K. g7 n., 108 n. Jews (as figures of identification) 26, 80, 156-9,173-5,216 Joyce,J. 39,275,283 jUng, C. 64 n., 268 n. Kafka, F 133 n., I 57-H Keaton, D. 154 n. Kcnnedy, R. IIO, 159, 177 Klein, M. 241 Klimkc, C. 213,214 n. KristL'va,J. 4,93 n.,219,222 n. I.a Ril'o/u(i'ln t/ulangaK<' pllhique 229 l,aC:lIl,j. 411.,93 n., 142, ':41, 284 l.anaro, S. I I land~capc 16,37, 270 in cinema 205, 20(i, 208, 2'J, 214, 223,237 & 11., 2J8, 245, 2411 inpoclry 96'7,109, I,g-22,138'''4I, 147-50, 'Sf>, 162, ,6J-·4, 1(,7, [79 I.:lplanchc J. an" j.-B. Pumalis 4, 88, [42,
"n,
I70
n' l 24f
J ,JPslcy, R. an" :,,,\. Westlakc 25 2 I ,'lriv:lille, P.
ta $larllpa
1<)1
n., 1<17,
<)2
fill,
2(n
Laterza 16 I ,autrbmom, Comte "e 14' n. Laza!.'11U, P. ami C. 11(, n. J,cga nonl vii,6,) r .ejcunc, P. n. I,enin 4H, 255 J ,cone, G. 62 n. Lconclli, G. '44 n. Lcol1cni, f. 12, 4()-1, 42 n., 44, 46 n., 55, 58,94 n., 192 n., '911 • I.eopanli, G. 29 n., 41, 120, '39 11., 1.;0 n., 2<)1
,,0
Zibaldmu
1 '7
L'l:.'.<{lrc.Ho 58 n., 59 11., 69 n., 7' n.
Il':"DIOX CEuropa /('t/aar;"
I ~7
\\arrcllini, I ..
J/Huropeo (,X
"n.
.:\cbI'X, \hrxism 1,32, 35, ~6, +11,50, 'i2, 54,
Levi, C. 207 /,iberlli 14, .14 I.iclllll, \1. 1'l2 n. LiFe 6T Lizzani,
5bn.,,)I,t)IJ, 101, T17. 12J, 129,143.
,son., 153, ISX, '77,203,2J7,23H Mas;]<:cio 147 n., 185,2 I 7 ~-1asolin" I 8S
c.:
mas{)lIcratie, .H'( IlcrforlTIilncc
JI}!.nbbo 19R Uo)"d, H. '5411. j.odato, N. 19',207 n. Lombardo Ra"icc, T,. 49 Longanesi 111 n., 22 n. Lon~hi, R. q, '7, 185, 10X n., 175,207 n.,
~-1Juri, S. !lo :\,laus, \1. ('4 n. \lchllll:tn,,J. lU n. l\·lcnA·aldo,1'. V. 147 metaphor:
in (iIll'111
22()
Jl.
212,.217,227, 22H-)(), 24.2
look, gaze (orennera) 20X, 20'1-13, 216, 2-B-·h 2.56, 25X-<), 2100, 2H+ n.
Look 61 71 n. love: (:arilas 133 & n., 13+, zH7 in/ li)r the world 21)-30,32 34,4+ 5,52, L'oS.I\':r1)llio]"c f()mallu
7 'I, H1, 100, 1.15, 16+-6, 1(,<), 17 2 , 171),
opposell to reality 2Hz in poctil: h~ur~llioH XX, ()I, y6-·71 125, 1.10, 1.18. 6o, 170 in thenry ot diall''') :1(,'7,38 'lj, (") MCIZ, (:. 57,21.111., HR n., 2.10 n., 23+ 11., .loll, Michclaogdo '12 n .
.\1itr)",,I. 2.1011. ~l()di!iliani, A. 30
1.40-1, 2+!i, 25.l Platonic, -,,',' pedagogy see a/w) dc.t;irc I.ubcs,(i. .p I.Ullcrini, R. ~5 n. LU·l.i, ,\1 ..p n.
~lui,
T 242 n.
:\1ondatlori
J H n.
Mo"do IlUIJHI +9 \\onroe, \1. l27 n. \-Ionralc, E. .H n. 'J.cttera a ~lalvoljo' (/)iilJ"i" dcl
~\i1i1cciflcchi,
\1.;\. 4H, rVlactlon,dd, S. 22 11. 'Vt\cha
4,
245,.!41),25 6 ,25lJ
62
n., 150 n.
M')gnilni,l\. 6211.,126, '54, /1)2 M.agrdli,l':. 229,23+ \1agrini, G. 2] 11. ;'vialapartc, C. 62, (,7 \1anacorda, (j. :;,; I'vlancini, \1. and (i. I'crrclb 21.1 n. \1angandli, (i. 71 n. j\hngano, S. 1)2 n., 1l)2 Mangini, C.: /,a ({ltIlIi,it'lI" mu!"ltll .. 107 n.
'71 Cdd
11., 5-l, :;H, ISH, 151),178,
U
1t}:.!Il.
, I nwntio _,'/lIra (u
till; rclgl~.;:;.:.;im
()J
1\1or;1\'ia):\. 14. z.! & n.,,,,o n., -1211.,5+,55, ~() n.~
,H. 5l), (I.~ 11.,7'.22011.,225 n.,
2i',274 (//I,,.d,.a d"'f'! "dill
~2 11.
I\low, '\. h'l \\01"1"i"ol1c', I':. H)5 n. 11101 her ligure 2X, 7'), I) I, ')ll, ,)8· 'I, 103 n., lOt). 112, 1]<) ·....0, 1421 15], 155 6") r61, Ih3, I(,~ '70, '75-(" IHI 2,Il)lj.23~
'Vhngini, S. 55 M::mguni, I.. 24 manncrisrTI' 14(1-,:\0, 2.d)J 217, 222, 2 ....7,
257- 1i j\hnninfl, V. 1)1) n., 117 \hozoni, A. +I, fIR
';2) (,011. ,',IlII/m ho \lor'1I11c, E. 1.1,
Jl.
/ prolnl.'ssi sllO,H' 225 n.
24 I, Z()lj, ~6(, -7, 27H lllolifs(incinCIll:l) 21417 Sf(: "lw, metaphor \1S1 (.\tovimclllO sodale ilaliallo) vii, (1), qCJn. ~1ulvcy, I .. 212-1), J41
Mao Zcdung 237 Marchesini, i\. IH; n., 217 o. Marclls, /'\'1. H)2 n., 225
:>!.ussolini, D. 24 n., 225 myth lilms, .,(,,' Pasolini, I:"rilpo PI)rrih', and 1~ol't'1Ild
\iarcusc, H. (1+
Ill~lh 7,24,50,65,c'{',75-7,HX,91, 115--16,
/"l',
,Het/ea,
I~DFX
121,124-5,140-1,146-7,150-1,153, 158, IStl, 171, 177, lilo, 200, 202, 208, 240,244, ;!4S-<), 256, 2'1 I ···2 .'U aim hislory, pre-history
N:lltlini, N. 6,12, L5, L7, ]8 .lJ,.'I4 n., IIQ n., liS n., 203 n., 26B n.
n., 30, n., Ilj8,
n,,22
")7
nan.:i~sisn), ~arcisslls 2,5, 15,32,
H8"'Ij, 97, 1:l!!-46, 151, 1<;2, ISol-S, 151),16],168, 174,23lJ national idenlity (in poelry) 121- 3 nillllrali,m, anli-naturalism I'll .-6,207, ~ll,2I4124H,254,275
sa ,d.", \Illl'calilY NCl1l1i, p. 62, 106 11. nco· avan~llanli;l 22,4011.,42,46,55,59 IIco"clpiulism 22,51,64 n., 66, 70, 80-1, 12!!-9, 131, ISR, 173 n., 215, 236, 250, 2(11, 26q, 2B6 lIeo-realism 17-ill, 40,.'11.), 192 & n., '94, 210,211 n., 259 .H'C
als" realism
Nillctto, Sf" Da\'oli, ~. f\;iXIIIl, R. 159 NowcllSl11ith, G. .!Iol 11., 2,p. 202 lVum'" argotlu'"J,: 14 n., 1.J, .~o n., S'~'''()I, 'Ion.
0l/i...irla 3,12,
18, ll), 23, 30 n., 38,40-7, So, 54-5, 61, Jli, 79, 99,102,272 Oldcn1'1l, !\. lIS n. O'Ncill,'\: 35 n. Onolri, S. 106 11. OUonc, 1'. 61\ Olld,lrt, ]'-1'. 2j2,256
6X I',,"",h,.f. (u,77 \';II11)1;1lo11i, ti. 62 n. Pal1aglllis, A. 6:1.,110 P;lI1ella, M. nil 11., 7' 11. Panorama 6H !)(leSt' ,.;('rd
Pa"tlKIJPlt' 17,23 n. ('aris, R. SS PIII';s·,\1a1
3H )
see also brother figure Pasolini, Pier P,lolo: Aaattrmc (film and screenplay) 19,20, 49,1(,7.189,192 n., 194,206,207--<), 213,215,217,223,229--3o,235,23h, 237,245,248 n., 25 6, 25q AJfabul.u.;one SR, 91, 118 n., 176 /llidagiiouhia.zzurri 15,21,148 n., 167, 205,257 n. Amado rnio 15, 130 n., 20! n. An/ologia del/a lirim past'O/ialla 44 n. Appunti per un}ilm sulrIndill 196,20011., 24 8,255 Appunti per un 'OreItitldc ajTiama 20 n., 11)6,201,223,225,245,248,255 'Appumi per UI1 poema sul!crzo mondo' 200&n. Alii impuri 15,130 n., 20t n. Bestill da ..tile 77,202 eaMaotl 19,21,90n., 15A n.,213 n. Cam:.onie,.e itllliauo 14, 1 I; n. Che COS" sono le lIu,.'ole.1 20 n., 1<)2, 202'-J, 215,2H,256 'Coccotlrill,,' 107,109, [6, n., 174"., 176-7 Cm,,;:.;i d'cltnllrl' [97,221 n,,1 Di"ri" (uNS l'Jp) 13,105 n., 12211., I oH-I) I)cstrizilmi tti dt'St.Ti:::'lfmi 67 n., 90 n., 185, 274 n. D"l/'li 1:1, .H, 10S n. Dot· 'r la mill putria 30l filllpo re 20 & n., 57,1<)2,11,15,197--<), 200,201,211 -12,21.4.,224-5,235,236,
24.l-4,246 ,2olH J:'mpiYl!iltW l'''~''-C(J ],19,20, 2T, 22, 2] n.')
51, SI, 74 n., ~i2~ t07 n., J 11 n., q.o n., IX'J, ")f, 1~1, 205, :1.10 '11,21.1 n., 217.-1 H, :I. ")-,22, '227 n., 229''16, 2+0-2,24+, 246.-H, 251-5 J d;al{J.~"; q, 25".,42".,47"-54, :;H 11., 5'! n., (H' 7,7(1, HI, 1()4, 220 n.,:I.1.2 I di.,,'!:/I; qH 11.,22(1 11 (clTl/o jJopo/are T20-L, J..:!+ 11. Ilcapptll""" (or /lid '.j(,.0 .14,201 n. JI D"mmallll 20 n., 5\), ")211., 1(J7--<), 201 l 21] n., 214, 21i, ·224-·;, 244-6,
256 '11 dodi"i diccmbl'c'
Itn n.
lI}wrc delle '·'vIille e I/'h, /lotle'
20
n., 213,
267 /I padre sehaggiu 2011.,77-8,79,170, 214- 1 5,225,245,25<.), I ~~9, 200 11., 202
INDEX
320
Pawlini, Pier Paolo: ((}t/I.) '11 PC! ai giovani!!' 57,58,65,176--7 1I {>lIrtito della mllrle 23 11.,44 n., 47,48, 90 n., 109 n., 272 casu 151 21 ~ 201 n. 11 V(ln~e/" .<econd(} Mallell (film and /IJ()KnlJ di
lala
,crcenplay) 41), lOS, 116, 132, 167, 19 2 n., 1<)3, 195, 1<)6, HJ9, 201, 207-9, 212,214,2[7,222' 4,227,2:\(,,237, 243,245,24 X,255 / piallli 13,34,105 n., 12411.,164 n. I ",<,<w,li di Cant£'Ybllr)' 20 & n., 1<)7 "9, 2'4,224'5,2H--6,25 h
I Tun', tal Fri,iI 34 La tli7'rna mime.<;-, 20 1,57,78,147 n., 152 (1.1167,203 I1.1 237 n., l72'-~h 27l), 280 [." IlI(gli(J gim!l'lllll 17, J(" H7 11., lj2-'5,1)7, 10!!, '14' (6,124 n., 134, 137, qB '42, '44,14.6, 150 n., ((JI-4, (1)6 IAI nutrva giovCllllt 21, ()X, X7 Il., (j·h I (z"13, 12(), (H-7, '42, (48, '49 n., 1(,1 n., '77--'), 181-2,267,2'11 L
1.1 ri,ol/a (filll1 anu screenplay) 20 & n., 91,105,107 n., (J2, '46 n., 148 n., 15S ·6,1<)2], "14'--5, Il)Y, 203, 206, 207,2Ij-14,215.216,217,222-3,23(" 2'14" 5, 25 6 8,273 11. I,a terra "eis/a dafltl /ul/a 20 n" loft n., 19 2 ,202-:1,226. 7
La /ril,,}!.'j" della 1'illl (lilll1' ,md SCI'l'CI1plays) JB, 20 I, 214, 215, 22J, 242, 244, 24X, 249; .'"' 111-,,, finder indjvii/llt1l1dm., / ..(' cau:ri di Grumsci 1 H, 1~, 30 n., 4 z , 49, ~I, H7, 99-101, 106, 112, lIS n., Il<) '26, 127 n., 1211 11.,1)6 n., "17, 148-52,161, 1(,3. 16 5 11 .,1(,(,--.11, "11,
200, 202, 20H
1.<, mur" ifi ;)ll/JU 1')7, '201, 22J, 243, 2+5, 24 X
i ii 12, (] n., 16, 17 & n., IX n., 21,22 n., 27 n., 30 11·,39 n., 41) n., 55"., 5{' n., 57, 5'1, (,0 n., 74 n., 80. IjOn·,()4&11.,99n., 13ll, 146n .• 150n .• 15211., 164n., 17011 ., (93 11., 20311.,224 n., 267
j,ctlere
Ll'lterf IIIft"rllnr 22,24) 50 n., 60, 62,
64 n., (>7-74, 77, Ml, 13(' n., 181,
186-7, 2B 9,2C)1 'L'hohhydelsol1etlo' 21, ,82 '-'"dllre dell'lndill 22.I(n
'Lo sciopero degli spanilli' /In n. 1/1I"~~7lf1ln del/a dlicsa (ulw!iea 14, Ill, 34, 72,81.11711.,95-9,103.104 n., TOX, 114-7, 11<).114 n., 1]0 n., '38,139, I.p n., 142-7, 152 n., 157 11., 161-- (I,
d'7 Mamma Ron", (film and sCTccnpLIY) 20, 49,105,1('7, ")2, Iljl), 206, 207, 20H 11., 210,21.\.215,223,226,2.43, 24H n. ,tl""e" 20 & n., 7H, 111 n., IJI--'2, IS.J. n., 155 n., 167, 177--9, 18211., 192, 1'1:\ n., 11)5,200,201,202,210,2 14, 21 5,216, 223,224,2.\5,245,2+X-t) Orgia 107 n., 117 n., 174 Ost;{/- 76, 167; -'('t' alw S. Cilli IJassiouc c "Il'alogia r H, -1-4 n., 90 n., J()() 11., 115 n., 14+ I1. PClrilli" (or VU". zli8 n) 2, 7. H, 19, 2 I, 57, 68,74.75, 7H, H2, <jI n., 111o, dl7, 173 n., ZOl n., 203 11., 2li7' ()2 Pi/ad, SR, 131 P"ella dia/ellalt· tit! N""/'(c'/I/o 14,44 11. Poe.
H7 n., t)o n., 104--1), Ill, 12~J 124 n., 127 n., 128·-p, l.l.l"., '411 n., 1+7" .. 150 n.) I 54--S, lb. n., If)., 11., IfJ5 n., I (H) 11.,170--5,17<), "1(" zoX, '43, 271". I>",,
Crlsanli r.2., 27 n., 2l} n., ]6, l).b
Ill, If" n.
'l'o~t'l ddl CCllcri' Si! 11, <)02, <)6, lO() 11., I07, Ill, 122 n., [(u n., J70 n.,
177, 206 n. Poy,-iir (film and play)
.l0, 5'J. ISH n .• 19], zoo, 201, 20.!., 201)-- 10,212, 2 q., 210, 225,2.15,245,246 ,248 ,250 'l'oTno-leo .. k"lossal' 202 J, 245,2117 NlIgll:o:oid;T'ila 15.16,17, IH,43, 81,
l(n,20':;:,J.IS It.,2rt)
NOli/a I Cjso. DiMio 15, I '71i!, "4, '46, 161 RotIJJlIs r 5,20 I n. ,)'a/rJ" It! (f'Il/Ol'OIli Kiornale di ,\"Jtioma 2011·,7)-4, I 15 n., 192 n., 11)3 n., 210, 214,215-16,2]5, 245, 2~8, 250, 259-62,2('7,29 1 S,m Paol" 2011.,57,81,116, I 51j n., 201-2,225,245,254
321
INDEX 'Sant'lnfam~'
201
St"rilli corsari 22,37,50 n., 60, 62, 64 11., 67-74,76, !lo, 178.-<),227 n., 286--7, 2H9,291
ScriUori ddla reallt; da 11 'VII I III X IX secn/n q n. Sonctlll primaurlll' 105 n. Snpmll/oxhi il1 Pa":.
124 n., qH, 1 Si! 11.,165 n., 175-6, 222 'li:oremll (film) lO & n., 57, 59, 64, 78, 9', 167, IC)2, ZOO, 201 n., 210, 21 1··-J2,
.2 q,
215, 225,235
Trasuma.uar e organiz::.ar [9, 20,21,59, 65,87 n., 10411., 109-11,124 n., '.11-4,13(',15111.,1511-60,167, 169 n., '70, 171, 174 n., 177-83 tit allaai C/lcallilli (film and screenplay) 20 n., 49, 55 n., 78, 161l, 192, IQH, ")9, 202-3,207,214,215,226,235,236--<), 2-/2, 2-/4, :.qH, 249 lin(t 'vila 7.};lJ/eJJ/a 15, HJ,4(), 149 n., 20~, 2.15 n., 216 /in pacse t/; tcmporllti I·d; pr;mlll,' 13, 14, .~5-40, 6<) n., 201 n. l-'o/~ar'I'lol/llio 50 n., 70, 127 n. p"st 25,26, 4-l), 52, 66, 73, 7+.105. IIn. 20t, ,122,224, 240-50, 277-1l .'0(11:
also history
pastiche 35 in t:incrn ••
It)],
HJ-4, H)S, 107, 108 n.,
216-17, 21(), 222-227, 247 ill Officillll -IJ4. 4(1. 50 in poetry 105. 107. I [I, u<) .10, 153, [5-1 I)aurass!), S. 40 n. PCI (partito comunisla italiallo) 1.1. q, :H-5, ]1), ~o 11., ~2, -/7, (n, 68,11.1. IJ6. 14<) n., 15!), 171, IHo peuagogy 1.1, IS, 31, :U-+, .lH & 11., 47, 4H, 7 2 ,7], is, 77-11. HI'2, 100-[, [03, T06, [45, HJ2, '91),202,-],210,211,
21S,24 H Penna, S. 42 n. Pcpc, G. 69 pcriilrmancc 4-;, H, H2. 2(,0-1,285, 2H7 in poetry f!7--{j, 105. 110,146,154,15<), li5-6, 177, rllo'-I Pcrrella, E.. 142 Pesaro Film Festival 57 n., 234
Pctronius:
Satyriclln 2113 Pelrucciani, M. 40 n. I'hilipps, S. [6911. PiCilsso. P. 123, 147 Picro della FranccsC3 217 Legmd of the True Cross 125, 147 Pino(chio 203 n. Pintor, G. 28 Piovcne, G. 5H Pirona (Friu!an dictionar}') 164 n. Piseopo, C. 40 n. Plato 2[8,275,292 P/ayho.)' 23 n. poetry 85-[86 Pe/rotio as 'poema' 273,275-6,280, 281-2, 28 3 public role of poet 28-{j, 35-7, 40-7, -/9, 50-1,5 2,6-1-5,66-7,75-8,8[-2 see also 'cinema di pocsia' Pontormo 147 n., 217, 222 Pope John XXIII 52 Pope Paul VI 6f1, 203 n. Pope PillS Xll 47.133-4, IH, 15 8
Potere opemlo 6S Pound, E. 275, 2H3 T!/(' A BC (If' Rettding 78 PR (Parlil<> Toldicalc) (,M n. PrandslOlllcr, Cl. P. 46 n . Prarnlini, V.:
Mctello 17 praxis. pragma. 'il tiue' J, 26, 65' ·6, 67, 6l), 72,77,IIH.!)2&n., 132, 160, 176, 177 ·H, 1 Ho,:l.J H, 2J 1,2;\2, 24/)....{), 254, 2(>1
I'rcmio SI rcga (,2 I'rimllto 2-/ I'ropp, V. 275 PrOllS!,
'vI. .19,
1511
pseudo-couple 97, ')S, 201-J. 231), -'48-9,
213 Purdoll,l'\. 201 n., 212 n.
QUIlllemi /""anlim SS Quade",o roman::'1J 34 Cl..uasimodo, S. 62 (~inta\'allc,
u.P. 142 n.
'ragazzi\boy::; rO,7R,9S,4X-9J lOlll03 n., 110. [17-18,120,127, 132. 139-~0, '49, [62, 16S n .. 169, 172, 175, [80-1, 203,208,270,2~4,291 'See a/Jo sons
322
INDEX
RllKionamcTlli 42
Ranvaud, D. 262 realism 1211,153,198-9,214,217,274'5 reality, the Real: incinema 193,195-6, 197,207,208,2Q, 216, 217-11l, 228, 229, 2;10-3, 239,
240-S, 246--S, 254-5, 256,257-R,21i.1 in journalism 3, I 1,2(" 35' -6,39,43,46, 64,75-6 ,82 in Pe/m!io 272,274, 275, 2~3, 2117, 29 0 • 2 92 ill poetry 88,9211.,9.1, 'lX, 99-100, 10H-{), '16, 129, '.\2, 147-11,156-7, 16.1,168, 172, 175
scc ut", hody, love RehoTa.
C. 42 11.
Resistance :n, 65.102,106, l2(" IzH 11., d,] 11.,260, zllS rhetoric 1,4- ("~' 11,22,23,24, z(i, 29···.10, 32 _I, 54, 60, 62, 72, 75 (',!l I, H2, 87, dl], [{il, 20!!, 2$2, 272-3, 2H2' ·H sa ,,{m perlilrnullce Richter, 1\·1. 153 Ric(cur,l'. 88, nX 11. Ridolilli 226 Rimh'llld, A. 28 n., 52 n., 79 n., 141 n. Rillaldi, I~. 6,2] n., 32 n., 7.h S7, 92 n., 97n.,(j(j 11.,101,107 n., 112 n., 12<; 11., 120, qo, qH 11.,142, '44. '4X, '5011., 'S(" 175"., 1Hz n. Ihllllsa/a 2] n., Lt) 11., SI, (,X
Rod""", I': 7 I Romal ..), i\. 40 n., 4' Roman!), M. 46 n., (,'1". Rome 1:\-1(1,22, J+, 42, ~+':15
St Paul '33-4,142, 'Sll--{j, 201-2 H'C a1,'1) Pasolini, San Puo/" Salerno, E. M. 209 Salinari, C. 40 n., 46--7, 49, 128 n. Sanguineti, E. 42,55,<1] n. Sansoni 17 Sa1llato, G. 6,.JX n., 77, 97 n.,'1') n., J 05 n., 112 n., 114-'115, ITS n., IISn.,II(jn., 125 n., IJII n., J.t'l n., ~17 n. Saragat, G. 67 Sartre,J.-P. IHo Saint Gmt'/ !! I Sattini, V 57 n. Sbarharo, C. 42 n. Se'lcci"noce, I.. 1<)<) n. Smlia, (i. 40 n., 41,43,46,6<) n., 74 n. sCllHlal 5, H, .lX, 67, 7l, 74, 77 X2, 1 12-13, 12]. 145 '(', 150-- I, I 58-'1, 16~, 176, 202,243,25 1 -4, 274 n., 2111, ~90-r SchiaHini, A. 18 Schulz,1I. 265 Schw.lrlz, RI). h, 12, 14, Il) 11.,20, 1'5 n., 113 n., 223 n., 224
Sci:Jscia, L. -F n., (i9, 7' n. St:rtrn 252 scrL'Cnplay, theory 0[" 2)()'-Z7 Second Vatican Council 5--' Scgre, C. 2311.,221 n. S"hraw)" M. '37 n. Sercni, E. 40 n. Screni, V. I H n. Ser,.a, R. 41 n. Scrra, L. 12, ')4 n., '.13 n. Scverini, (i. z(JO n.
(1.,
Ho, (jo.
100· l, ] 1!..117· 'Il), 122, 12h, 150,
zoz n., 268, 2hl), 27" ROJ1!:a!(lia, J\, 274 Rondi, B. 42 11. Rosselli, A. S~ Ro"dlini. E 2011. Rossdlini, R.: Ilotlla C;I/" IIpcrtll 101,126, '54 /'1"(l1Iu.,(O, f!,lIIllllrc di /)io 226 1(,7,
Rosso Fiorentillo 217,222 Roversi, R. 12,40 1,42 n., (1) 11.,94 n. Russi, ". 1J "acralita, s;](reuness 1l{',1)8. , 16, '95. 207' ,),2 I 6, 217, 24~, 2"S--<.), 259,275, Z!!3, 287-1! sa als" history, past, reality ST Franeis 711,20.\ & n., 23H
Shakesp<-'arc, W. 130 O/lrd!" 106,245 Shellc)", 1'. I -' I '2, 11)3 Shklovsky, V. 275,2H.l shots (composition and sequence) 20!! --12, 21;1 n., 2 q, 245' ·H, l5e!, 2.14, 256, 257 sa ttlw c(htingSiciliano, E. 6, IJ, ((J, .!2, zH n., 2911., ]0, 40 n., 55, 5H, I/O n., '1811., '11) n., 119 n., d\2 n., 1<)2 n., 22] n., 267, 2611 n. Sillanpoa, \\1. 150 n. Silverman, K. 3,4 n., 2;2, 255, 2114 Siti, W. 55 n., 'I') n., 12.1, 147 n., q!!, 149 n., 20~ n. 'soggctiva in"ircl1:llib"ra' (h'ce indirect ]loint-of-view/subjccti,,;ty) 205,206, 207, 201j, 217, 2.U-4, 247, 254
Soldati, M. 62 11. L" d"'lnll drlj;,mu 17
32 3
J:-.IDEX s(Jlitude 4, 16, 27,29, 31, F, H, 59, 6.1, 7i!, 79,100, [02, 1+3, 167---<), 17.1,257,29/ sons 78-9,112, 157-H, 162-.1, 1(,6, 169, 170 - ' , [74-5, 176-7, [79, IHI, 193, 20',20.1, 2()(), 277,281) .
!In
Solto ifsol"," Rmtlll 16 Sp:ll!II(Jlcrri, G. d! n. spcctator 711, I
n., J~) I. r 94, zoo,
22
''+3 S'acks, S. 221111. SI'llIyhras~, 1'. and A. White 4 Slalllp, '1: "12
222,
24-0 n.)
fI ga U()pttrtio 18 Tolo V>ulId. Anloni .. de Curtis) 57,71l, '54 11., 1<)2, [()3, 202-3, 21 5,237---<), 273 n. TOllr(" S. 15.l translation, translatability 33,36--7, iO, 74 & n., 220, 226-7 & n., 241 P"solini as translator 21,58,93,223 n. Trcnkcr, L.: fI prigionlero de/ill monlagna 225 n. Trcmo, D. [08 n., 175, 185 n. trial, Pasolini on 18,20,34,54,70,9 [, [05, 146 & n., 156,222 n. Trilling, J•. [,8 Trombadori, A. 40 n. Turigliatro, R. 206 n., 221 n., 247 n. Cngarctli, G. 18,27,21) n., 42 n., 119 n. unreali!}' (of cinema) 203,213-14,222,238,
H.
262,276,279
Stllmp" sa" 267 Slarohinski.j. 1)2 n. Slernc, I .. 275, 27S, 2113 Slranicro, M. 42 n. 'slralcl!ia dd'" Icnsillnc' 6,) Slrill"hcr~, A. 6H, ~75
Il11Tccogllizability, illcgibility 4,6,26,74, 75,79, '43,27J-2, 27'1-Il:.!, 283-4,2l):.! V"ler~', i'. 222 V'I\csio, P. 4, 2:; [ Valiani, I .. 7 I
Slmll,.!ilr!'/Il .1.111. .\·lro/i.~111 ", (,/ tlr' i'1I.~1l 33 •.1('
SI,«lcIII III()VC111enls (II)f,1! <)) H, 51-1 11., 62, liS, 'la, 'H, ,ilo, '77, diol, zl,X, zX, SlIC<':CSS, alnhilion f()1" 12 & n., 14, IH. 2.5 n.~ .12,42,53. '04, 10(,. "0, ''ID survi v;.li, d~:llam le or 15, 3(), ()4 ..~, Hz, J 05.
Valli, A. 1<}2 Van Watsoll, W. 711. V.Ulcini, F: /,1/ IlIlIga1Jo(J(' "1'1 '43
22.5
Vazzanil, S. ()l n.
:-;ulurc 200,tOl .. lll,2]S,250,..!S2.}{
Venicc hlnll'csl ival 62, ()3 \,i:II'O, 1....1. .l~, '44 n., 2S'l
Swifl.J. l7S.21!:1
Vi(,,:II, (;. J2fJ
'22. '27, '57,245
1'it' ItII01,'c '03, ~2'}'1.
Tamhlinp;,j. ,)I!
11.,
~·I·;ulj.;"cntopoW
rii, (H)
5(), ()I 7, 2()7 '0,.. HIIJI/","d II/lfl On .. ;V'.~;'IS 2 q Sf .. "/,.,, i'a,,,lilli, IIl;OF(' ,It'III' 'Mill.. C lI11a 14.)0, z.!() 11., 222.,
1/oUt'
Third \V"rl,1 '(',22, '22, Ill). '.\2, 'S7, I()(J, lOO, 202., 2Xq 17 11.,2I,2:2.(J
n.
Thiinc,1-:.-I'''1. 55 n. Tof,mclli, 1\. I", M, TOl!liani, P. 4011., 4H n., 11)'), 23 H 'l"l!nazzi, C. un
Tomasi di Lampcdus'I, G.:
"P" +7 54-. 5S, 56 n.,
()1,
62 n.,
Villoll,l/ 5211.,')+ \,il1)!:c.l .. ,.;I! n. Viscnll1i, I., (r2. It.
'I'calro S'ahik di T"rino si; "i'mpo rl/wolraln 2:3, zS n.) 5H n.,
'j'h()v:)zzi, L.
2",
7 211 ·,77,I!,
TaliJ, lIlJ
6S, 77,
n.
Vallllllcci, S. 101! 11., '+I! n .
I)
,\'em'" '7
Viun.-in;, I': ..11}.46 Vivaldi, C. -l~ 11. ,""'!lilln :I r, .1<1.75- H3, 110, '55,20', 2~ '-·2. 21{7, zliX Volp"lIi, P. 11),4-' n., (().2 11., ".17 11., H)!! \'on Sprcli, 1-.:.-1\1. IIll Villa, I'. 611.
Wagsr,Jll; C. 74 n., 206 n., .22() n., 2;11 lI. Wahl, E -,:;6 n., 262 \V'1I1illgton, \-1. 2211 .• 214 11. Ward. 711.,268 n.
n.
INDF.X
Wellcs,o. 192-3, '99,203,257 Whitman, W. 115 \Vhiltock, T. 228 n., 229, 230 n., 232 n., 236 \Vihlc,o. 5 '\'illemen, P. 6 Wollen, P. H)I n. Wordswonh, W. 152 work ufsubicctivity I-S,]9, 69, llo, 81, 82, H7-S, <}<), 1'7, [74'-5, [84'-5, [90, 199-200,204,211,21Z,219,221)2J4,
231),25 0 ,25 1 ,262,268,2<)1.z
Worton, M. andJ, Still 219 Yevl ushellku, Y. 1<)3 youth, problem of 23-6,28,31,32,52,62 ~jee a/so 'rag,lZ:lj', stuc..len( movements
Zanzolto, A. 38 n., 55 n., 6<) n., 77 Zcti rclli, f 62 n. Zigaina, G. .1311.,34,147, '4811.,167. 192 n., 217 n., 268 n., 2113, 2<)0 ZOl'utti, P. 1{,37
