Rome in 1947) were traumatic and by no means his own doing, by the 1970s it seemed that he needed to take unpopular positions for reasons that were psychological (his need to be a victim and to remain in the public eye) as well as ideological (he was always to maintain that any position taken by the majority, even the left-wing majority, had to be questioned).

Nonetheless, even those readers who might be disturbed by the tone and emphasis of Siciliano's book should, I think, be grateful for the wealth of details it offers us concerning both Pasolini's life and the various cultural/political contexts in which he found himself: the postwar years in Friuli, his ins and outs with the Communist Party, his position in the literary and cinematic circles of Rome. Without a knowledge of much of the material presented by Siciliano it would be hard to fully understand, for example, Zanzotto's more abstract reading, or decoding, of Pasolini's life which, for him, revolves about a pedagogical drive: not only did Pasolini begin as a teacher, but in his writings he assumed the role of the public "praeceptor." Even a film like Salò, in Zanzotto's words, "gravitates … around the problem of a 'genealogy of morals.'" And, finally, Zanzotto gives a pedagogical reading of Pasolini's death, remarking that: "But this death has burned every halo of guilt (real or imaginary) that surrounded Pasolini. Stripped of everything, made a victim and nothing but a victim, even he, in the most barbarically 'distracted,' or most barbarically cynical way, even he appears to us in the horrible showdown to which he would have wished to summon people so that they could confront themselves. In his death there existed a situation in which all are obliged to 'know,' and also to recognize themselves; there was pedagogy: true pedagogy, which is always an event and not a word." And if this reading seems too symbolic, just as that of Siciliano seems too preoccupied with the theme of conspiracy, it may be because both men, like so many who admired or loved Pasolini, feel pressed by the desire to make this death mean something: otherwise, its existential absurdity is too overwhelming.

If, for the most part, Italian critics are inexorably drawn towards Pasolini the man, and the role he played in Italian life, foreign critics, understandably more removed from these concerns, tend to focus on his films and on some of the principal theoretical and political issues raised by his work. This is true, by and large, of the British critics (represented in the BFI booklet on Pasolini) who seem particularly concerned with the political and semiological issues raised by Pasolini's films and writings. Given Pasolini's urge to attack majority opinion at the cost of taking extreme positions, it hardly comes as a surprise that many of the political positions he took—especially in the late 1960s and 1970s—were deeply problematical. Hence, in those years, when leftist ideology had, in some sense, become "official" in Italy, when the economic boom of the 1960s had changed the face of the country, his rejection of modern consumer society and his hatred of neocapitalism made him turn toward the Third World, toward the peasantry, toward mythic and archaic civilizations. Just when others ardently embraced political filmmaking, Pasolini turned his back on the contemporary world in films like Teorema, Medea, Porcile and Edipo Re. Not surprisingly, he became the target of leftists who labeled his behavior "nostalgic" and "regressive." And this is the view shared by at least half of the British critics who qualify Pasolini's attitude with terms such as "right-wing anarchism," "anachronistic" and "regressive fixations."

However tempting and somehow justified such terms may be, I do not think they provide an adequate measure of the complexity of Pasolini's thought. To begin with, they ignore, or gloss over the fact that no one was more aware of such problems, of his own inner contradictions, than Pasolini himself: again and again, he was to describe the pull within him between what he called "reason" (rational thought, history, Marxism) and "passion" (a visceral attraction to myth, to archaic or peasant civilizations, to the irrational). Nor do they acknowledge that the extreme positions he struck often had the salutary function of questioning accepted modes of thought, on the left as well as on the right. Certainly, his despair at contemporary civilization, his conviction that real change was impossible in a world dominated by technology and mass consumerism, are far more widely shared today than in the political climate of the late 1960s. And his deep distrust of any "power" or "ideology" has become one of the dominant themes in the work of another great iconoclast, Michel Foucault. Lastly, as Zanzotto remarks, can we even take all the attitudes he struck at face value: "Absurd to think of a Pasolini dreaming of the return to a peasant civilization taken as a block, or even taken as a preeminent indication; much further back than any antiquity was that which he 'remembered' via peasant or third-world civilization, a 'then' that was enough to justify his idea of a 'revolutionary force which is in the past' (an idea misunderstood, as were other of his themes outside the manuals in fashion, as being reactionary). It was a simple matter of a past understood as a metaphor for the first dawn. Infinitely far back and always in the future."

Equally as provocative as his politics were Pasolini's theoretical writings on cinema in which, again and again, in opposition to Metz and other semiologists, he voiced his conviction that cinema was not, as they claimed, a linguistic system but rather, the "language of reality." This attitude, too, has let him in for several severe remarks on the part of some of the critics in the BFI booklet: one calls his essentially anti-semiological stance the "latest incarnation of his regressive series of subversions of the institution of language." To be fair, some of the critics do point out that Pasolini's attempt somehow to capture reality through both verbal language and cinema must be seen as a poet's attempt to embrace a desperately loved reality. (In this respect, Pasolini was very close to the Rimbaud he so loved in his youth, the Rimbaud who wrote ecstatically "J'ai embrassé l'aube.") But above and beyond his personal needs, it also seems that as semiology has given way to and/or incorporated the multiple readings of a Derrida or the psychoanalysis of a Lacan, Pasolini's investigation and espousal of the poetic, oneric quality of cinema appears that much more interesting and less easily dismissable.

The essays in the BFI booklet are at their best, I think, not when they somehow judge, or seek to disprove, the extreme stands taken by Pasolini, but when they analyze—at times with acute sensitivity—the films themselves or Pasolini's cinematic style. One reads with pleasure Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's analysis of the ways in which Pasolini breaks with what could be called "classical" narrative or Noel Purdon's analysis of how geometric structures and color operate within Pasolini's films. Of great polemical interest are the opposing positions taken by Nowell-Smith and Richard Dyer on the images of homosexuality within Pasolini's films. While Nowell-Smith feels that Pasolini's films are radically different from most cinema in that "there is no privileged role attributed to the male heterosexual vision," Richard Dyer argues that the erotic depiction of attractive young men is essentially a self-oppressive view of gayness which "reinforces the image of male-sexuality-as-activity, just as relentlessly as the standard images of women enforce the concept of female-sexuality-as-passivity."

Whereas the BFI essays are devoted essentially to Pasolini's films, the essays found in the more recent volume, published after Pasolini's death, entitled The Poetics of Heresy (edited by Beverly Allen who has also done a number of the translations) range over the whole of Pasolini's work and, for the most part, are informed by current theoretical preoccupations inspired by Derrida, Lacan, narratology, etc. This often means that many of the most problematical issues raised by Pasolini's work are given radically new readings. This is the case, for example, of Pasolini's desire—given such short shrift by the British critics—to create a poetics, and later a cinema, able to encompass reality. Here, in a piece entitled "The Word Beside itself," Stefano Agosti analyzes the way this desire informs Pasolini's poetics. Beginning with the dialectic, if you will, between the Subject and Discourse, he notes that the desire to encompass reality meant that Pasolini ranged over the "utmost range of contents (niveau de l'énoncé)" as well as "the full involvement of the Subject in its own discourse (niveau de l'énonciation)." And, in addition to the "plurality of the contents expressed and of the discursive typologies employed," his efforts to capture reality as much as possible led Pasolini to "processes of homologation (of mimesis) between discourse structures and the structures of reality" through, for example, "mimesis of temporal duration and of spatial continuity (viewing time)." Although Agosti's analysis of these mimetic structures principally bears upon Pasolini's poetry, a number of his remarks concerning Pasolini's cinema are highly suggestive and certainly offer a way out of the narrow arena of semiotics which, for Pasolini, can constitute only a dead end.

Probably the greatest percentage of articles in this anthology (some of them written by Italian men of letters such as Italo Calvino and Leonardo Scasia) attempt to come to terms with Pasolini's last film, Salò (based on Sade's 120 Days in Sodom) whose cold-blooded scenes of cruelty and horror distressed many of Pasolini's most ardent admirers. One of the most disturbing aspects of the film was probably, as Calvino puts it, the explicit analogy between Sadian sadism and the historical phenomenon of Italian Fascism. (The film takes place in Salò, the last stronghold of Italian Fascism, while its frightful torturers are clearly Fascists.) In Calvino's eyes, the horror of Fascism was so great, and is still so vivid in the minds of those who lived it, that "it cannot serve as background to a symbolic and imaginary horror constantly outside the probable such as is present in Sade's work." Roland Barthes agrees with this, but goes even further, objecting to Pasolini's mimetic depiction of Fascism (he believes that "Fascism is a coercive object [which] forces us to think it accurately, analytically, philosophically" and, as such, should be treated in a Brechtian manner) and to his literal transcription of Sade. This last objection is hardly surprising given the fact that much of Barthes' own work on Sade revolves about his passionate conviction that the only reality for Sade was "écriture"; hence, any depiction of his libertinage, which is essentially a "fact of language," can only betray it.

The most complex reading of this film is probably that of Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit who limit themselves to the film, excluding both historical factors as well as extra-textual ones (i.e., the relationship between Sade's text and Pasolini's film). In their effort to see how violence works within the textual system, they begin by examining the relationship between representation and sadism ("Sexual excitement must be represented before it can be felt; or, more exactly, it is the representation of an alienated commotion") and then proceed to analyze the relationship between sadism and narration asserting that Sade's "calculation, preparation and control of climaxes" is also a narrative strategy in that "the climactic significances of narrative are made possible by a rigidly hierarchical organization of people and events into major and minor roles." But whereas most narrative tends to "sequester" violence, a sequestration which endows it with fascination at the same time that it allows us to reject it, Pasolini refuses such strategies with the result that he "deprives us of the narrative luxury of isolating the obscene or violent act and rejecting it." And here they come to the crux of the unease created in the spectator by the film, for once violence is no longer sequestered, but rather, theatricalized and surrounded by verbal narratives, it becomes an entertaining spectacle, such that a complicity is established between the viewer and the Fascist libertines. At this point, it would seem that the spectator is right to feel uneasy. But Bersani and Dutoit do not let matters rest here: proceeding with their complex argument, they seem to conclude that, paradoxically, "the morality of the scene consists in our having been compelled to see the nonmoral nature of our interest in violence." Subtle and intricate as their argument is, I'm not sure that their conclusion is entirely borne out by the reactions of most spectators who, appalled by the violence of the film they are viewing, are not likely to question their own interest in violence.

Whether or not one agrees with the piece by Bersani and Dutoit, like most of the articles in The Poetics of Heresy (which also contains a good bibliography), it is highly intelligent—brilliant at times—intent on seeing Pasolini in a new critical light, removed from the arena of moralistic judgments which have plagued his work from the beginning. And the challenge of the critical pieces in this anthology is matched by a number of Pasolini's own articles made accessible here for the first time in English. The Poetics of Heresy opens, in fact, with an essay entitled "The End of the Avant-Garde" which shows Pasolini at his maddening best, making us re-think assumptions taken for granted. Here is Pasolini, in 1966 and hence at the heyday of Structuralism, taking on both Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes for being essentially content-oriented in their notion of literary structure; here, too, at a time when the left-wing avant-garde lionized Brecht and eschewed realism, is Pasolini arguing paradoxically that the avant-garde really represented a new Classicism ("from an avant-garde text I learn nothing of the author who composed it, except precisely, that he is an author. And this is how Italian literature's ancient, incurable classicism is perpetuated") and that its "terror" of naturalism was really a "terror, taboo and obsession for reality." But perhaps the most provocative part of this essay, which characteristically interweaves literature, culture, and politics, resides in the way he groups together some very disparate forces which, in his eyes, contradict "both Marxist rationalism and bourgeois rationalism." For here, he includes not only the growing revolt within the bosom of the bourgeoisie (and here, as so often, he was prophetic since this revolt was to erupt two years later), the presence of the Third World, but also "the uninterrupted presence of Nazism as the only true bourgeois ideology (for instance, rural America, Dallas, etc. etc.)."

The provocations in this essay of the 1960s have a force, a vitality which contrasts—a bit sadly, I think—with the more disillusioned and bitter tone of his writings of the 1970s. Having lost all belief—for both personal and political reasons—in the possibility of real change, he seemed to feel it necessary to question those measures of reform which the left hailed as a victory. Two of his most important "interventions" of the 1970s—which voice his reactions to the passage, first, of a political bill granting divorce and to a later one allowing abortion—are included in The Poetics of Heresy. Although he based his objections on ideological grounds—for him, the passage of the divorce bill indicated a new consensus of power as clerical and paleo-industrial Italy gave way before the "hedonistic ideology of consumerism," while the bill granting abortion suggested a "false tolerance" which still did not permit sexual diversity—one wonders if his ire didn't stem as much from his need to hold the spotlight as from his conviction that all these liberalized laws were made by, and for, the heterosexual world from which he was forever excluded.

Although the tone of these pieces seems bitter, Pasolini's most personal despair is reserved for his poems. And it is in his poems—those interspersed throughout the volume of The Poetics of Heresy, as well as those selected and translated by Norman MacAfee, that Pasolini's most intimate voice is found. But—as befits his pre-romantic conception of the poet as a public figure—Pasolini's intimacy is deeply embedded in a web of political and social allusions; like his "interventions," many of the poems were written in response to precise events. Happily, the notes provided by Norman MacAfee clarify many of these allusions which would otherwise remain mysterious for the Anglo-Saxon reader. Lastly, as one who knows firsthand the immense difficulty of translating Pasolini's poetry, I have nothing but admiration for the high literary quality of the translations in these two collections. Together with his other writings, they constitute a valuable addition to the corpus of Pasolini's work now available in English.