When discussing those who perhaps most influenced the thought of the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, critic and filmmaker, one critic recently spoke of 'il suo Gramsci." Implied in this possessive is the highly personal interpretation that Pasolini attached to the example and writings of Antonio Gramsci, revolutionary political theorist whose famous notebooks survived their author's death in 1937 after eleven years of Fascist imprisonment. What follows attempts to qualify this implication through a survey of Pasolini's writings directly linked to a reading of Gramsci. Demonstration should emerge to bolster those claims of a subjective interpretation whose ultimate complexity can best be described generally as a curious admixture of confraternity and contradiction.

The closing section of L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, containing verse composed between 1943 and 1949, carries the subtitle, La scoperta di Marx. War and the Italian Partisan response had transformed Pasolini, leading him to the conviction that life demands "qualcos'altro che amore / per il proprio destino." For the young Pasolini, that "something other" prompted a probe into an alternative world view, grounded in reason, synthesized in Marx, and calling for a commitment to popular political struggle. Within a short period of time, this newly explored world view began to intrude upon the sentimental universe of the poet's earlier verse, linguistically and thematically circumscribed by his maternal Friuli.

Pasolini's idiolect thus evolved into the idiom of a wider historical and class perspective, but without ever causing the poet to dismiss his previous experience. Pasolini's topocentric perspective widened, that is, and allowed the peasant world of Friuli, a world of primitive innocence and religious fatality, to assume even greater mythic proportions in the course of this investigation of a Marxist rationalism. During these years, first as a witness to Partisan struggles, and then as a sympathizer to the uprisings of Friulan day laborers, Pasolini participated in the local politics of the Italian Communist Party. But also in these years, he helped found, together with other young Friulans, the Academiuta de lengua furlana, a small circle dedicated to the philological study and social diffusion of Friulan language and culture. Thus Pasolini's early formation joined a sentimental attachment to the linguistic and cultural environment of his adolescence to an examination of Marxist rationalism and political ideology.

Pasolini says his introduction to Marx took place early: "In Friuli ho letto Gramsci e Marx." This particular pairing suggests, however, that his introduction was only nominally Marxist. Paolo Volponi reports, in fact, that Pasolini himself once confessed: "Sono un marxista che ha letto poco Marx. Ho letto di più Gramsci." Moreover, the Gramsci read during this period in Friuli must have been the Gramsci of the Lettere dal carcere, for, with the sole exception of Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, it wasn't until 1949 (when Pasolini had already been in Rome for a year) that the first of the other major texts of the Quaderni del carcere began appearing in print. This observation contends that this Marxist formation was really a Gramscian one, and it underscores the special character of the Gramsci first encountered by Pasolini. To a great degree this Gramsci was, and essentially continued to be, the pathetic hero of the prison letters, only in part counterbalanced by the figure of the revolutionary theorist of political and cultural praxis.

Nevertheless, in 1948 Pasolini was forced to abandon his region and his people under personal and political circumstances that left deep scars. Amid the disinherited of Rome's shantytowns (borgate), he felt painfully torn from the world of his youth. That emotional and ethical energy previously nourished through his contact with Friuli was thus diverted to these emarginated urban poor who, lured by the promises of postwar industrial reconstruction, were leaving behind their Southern agrarian communities to find themselves amid the wretched conditions of those inhabiting the periphery of many large Italian cities. The poet's myth of an a-temporal and a-rational Friuli was hence transferred to the neo-primitive and socially incohesive topography of Rome's dispossessed. Pasolini's presence among these poor of the Roman borgate, his passion for their dialect and street-wise slang, his fascination with their desperate vitalism and what he considered their pre-political rebelliousness, supplanted his poeticized concept of Friuli. Ragazzi di vita, Pasolini's celebrated novel begun in 1950 and published in 1955, emerged from this newly uncovered social and linguistic reality.

At the same time, some of the verse Pasolini composed while in Rome marked the survival of his passionate attachment to the locus amoenus of his youth, through memories populated by farm hands and shepherd boys at ease in the fields, mountains and wind-washed village squares of his mythic Friuli. Once removed from his native setting and confronted with the back-street humanity of Rome's periphery, however, Pasolini found it difficult to reconcile the poetic concepts of his earlier work to the expressive demands of his present writings. While Friuli quite often appeared in his verse as a natural utopia, by contrast, the Roman borgate of his novels Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta seem an inferno of degradation and disassociation. In his esthetic treatment of the socially downtrodden, Pasolini nonetheless tempered this hellish world with residues of primitive purity and adolescent innocence present beneath the coarse language and brutal(ized) faces of its inhabitants. In the end, death triumphs over the instinctual guile and bruised grace of these ragazzi di vita, as the novelist underscores the social and political pathos of this cast-off race and class. But, as just stated, Pasolini never dismissed the primordial virtues of a simpler world, and so it is in Rome during the early 1950's that he came to believe his primitive innocents the victims of a Neocapitalism that he claimed would eventually destroy the very humanity of these people as it swept away time-honored linguistic and social patterns.

In truth, that afore-mentionedrupture in Pasolini's poetry had already manifested itself to some extent at the time of his "discovery of Marx." One such example can be found in "Testament Coran," a part of the verse in dialect written between 1947 and 1952. Here Pasolini depicts a young peasant in Friuli who joins the Partisans and is then captured and hung by the Nazis. While dying, the boy-soldier commits his image to the conscience of the rich, as he sadly salutes the courage, pain, and innocence of the poor.

Similarly, the underlying evangelism of Poesie a Casarsa gradually replaced a traditional peasant demand for an avenging afterlife with a here-and-now vindication. In one poem, now part of La meglio gioventù containing all of Pasolini's verse in dialect, the peasants' figure of Christ crucified, index of a future retribution, takes on the workclothes and identity of a laborer who promises more than an atonement to come.

To repeat, the passage of Pasolini's rhapsodized race from a natural-religious state to an historical-political one was greatly influenced by the catalytic intrusion of external events. The esthetic and sensual aura of a poeticized Friuli gave way to the cruel incandescence of the War and Resistance and stirred the poet's ethical consciousness. The Resistance, above all, deeply affected Pasolini (as it did an entire generation), modifying his poetic sensibility. In 1957, when censuring what he considered the political quietism of many writers during Fascism, Pasolini remarked:

La Resistenza ha soprattutto insegnato a credere nuovamente nella storia, dopo le introversioni evasive ed estetizzanti di un ventennio di poesia.

One must then see this 'historical lesson' in conjunction with the poet's turn to Gramsci, for throughout the 1950's, the example of the Sardinian revolutionary played an important role in defining Pasolini's pronounced conflict between the pull of a visceral and esthetic passion and a call to rational, ideological exactitude. It was precisely this conflict that became the ferment of much of Pasolini's later works.

Although the volume's title poem was actually composed in 1954, Le ceneri di Gramsci was published in 1957. These poems, written in Italian (and not in dialect) occupy a special place in postwar Italian literature, for they signal a significant departure from pre- (and post-) war Hermeticism.

Contesting the Hermetics' mystique of the word, Pasolini models his verse on a rejuvenation of certain traditional stylistic modes (e.g., adjectivization; the terzina, reminiscent of post-Dantean didactic and satirical verse; the poemetto, evoking the Romantic-patriotic poetry of the Risorgimento), motivated by the desire for a return to a 'civil' poetry that might effectively challenge the Hermetic postulates of absolute self-expression and pure lyricism. At the same time, Pasolini's 'civil' poetry shares little with various strains of postwar prose à thèse, nor does it confuse reportage with poetic expression. Instead, his verse proceeds from a conflict experienced between public commitment and poetic predilection—instinct and reason. Within a context based on seemingly irreconcilable antitheses Gramsci represents a world of reason and ideological precision both guiding and goading the poet. This world clashes with Pasolini's visceral-irrational feelings that ultimately precede his ideology. Thus, Le ceneri di Gramsci records a struggle between reason (Gramsci) and passion (Pasolini).

A note to the text establishes Rome as the location of the collection's title poem: specifically, the Testaccio (working-class) quarter; the English cemetery; Gramsci's grave. It is an "autunnale / maggio" in the mid-1950's, a decade once anticipated with hope by the Resistance: "la fine del decennio in cui ci appare / tra la macerie finito il profondo / e ingenuo sforzo di rifare la vita." The poet, "capitato / per caso" into Rome's cemetery for non-Catholics, finds there a "mortale / pace" that shuts out the industrious clatter of the nearby proletarian neighborhood, providing a proper situation for his colloquy with Gramsci. This setting lends an immediate air of elegy that reduces all color and contour to an achromatic grey in a meeting of the living dead: "e noi morti ugualmente, con te, nell'umido / giardino."

From the beginning, then, the poem's metaphoric progression rests on a series of contrasts. The juxtaposition of the cemetery's quiet to the frenzy of the surrounding neighborhood is the first in succeeding analogical contrasts that culminate in the poet's self-reflexion and refraction in his hero—who is simultaneously his antagonist. Attraction and repulsion result from Pasolini's thirst for vitalistic passion and Gramsci's somber reminder of the need for rational articulation:

       con la tua magra mano
       delineavi l'ideale che illumina
       (…)
                            questo silenzio.
       (…)
       Lo scandalo del contraddirmi, dell'essere
       con te e contro te; con te nel cuore,
       in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere;
       del mio paterno stato traditore
       —nel pensiero, in un'ombra di azione—
       mi so ad esso attaccato nel calore
 
       degli istinti, dell'estetica passione

For Pasolini, Gramsci's "rigore" denoting the antithesis of his own "violento / e ingenuo amore sensuale," has "scisso / (…) il mondo" into opposing poles. Nonetheless, it soon becomes clear that despite the poet's insistence on living "nel non volere / del tramontato dopoguerra," of surviving through a refusal to choose between passion and reason ("sussisto / perché non scelgo"), a decision has really already been made:

       Mi chiederai tu, morto disadorno
       d'abbandonare questa disperata
       passione di essere nel mondo?

Elegy renders Pasolini's evocation of Gramsci the commemoration of a lost ideal, for Gramsci, as person and precept, undergoes a figurative transformation. The force of "Le ceneri di Gramsci" is discharged through an extension of personal conflict ("con te nel cuore, / in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere") to a general, and generational, crisis ("e noi / morti ugualmente, con te"). In bemoaning the loss of the hopes and ideals of the Resistance, Pasolini indirectly censures the pis-aller of the 1950's, while implying that the 'committed' poet and critic of his times must paradoxically operate within and without conventional political structures. Gramsci, meanwhile, must necessarily remain a luminary ("in luce"), iconically remote and ideally distant from the poet's inner torment: "Lì tu stai, bandito e con dura eleganza / non cattolica, elencato tra estranei / morti: Le ceneri di Gramsci." Thus Pasolini's Gramsci lives only insofar as he is 'ashes'; insofar as his presence is experienced emblematically and at a defining distance. Without this figure, Pasolini's visceral passion would have no ballast. Gramsci is thus made to assume the role of an ideological counterpoise, keeping in check the grip of the poet's "calore / degli istinti" and "estetica passione."

As for the torment that lies outside, Pasolini identifies with the humble poor:

       Come i poveri povero, mi attacco
       come loro a umilianti speranze
       come loro per vivere mi batto
       ogni giorno.

But the poet's poor are the poor of a pre-proletarian state championed for their inbred and sacred vitalism: "come / d'un popolo di animali, nel cui arcano / orgasmo non ci sia altra passione / che per l'operare quotidiano." Hence, again addressing Gramsci, Pasolini declares himself:

       attratto da una vita proletaria
       a te anteriore, è per me religione
 
       la sua allegria, non la millenaria
       sua lotta: la sua natura, non la sua
       coscienza

Moreover, Pasolini's apostrophe here is to a "giovane,"… "non padre, ma umile / fratello." One should note that in an article of 1957, the year of the publication of Le ceneri di Gramsci, Pasolini called the Sardinian a "maestro." But here the emphasis on Gramsci's 'youth', his evocation as 'brother', and the strange erotic attraction that takes hold of the poet at graveside ("ebbra simbiosi / d'adolescente di sesso con la morte") suggest a commutation of Pasolini's emblem. In effect, it appears that the poet is impressing on Gramsci the figure and force of his own dead brother, tragic youthful martyr to the Resistance. This commutation gives rise to a fundamental ambiguity surrounding the image of Gramsci as master and luminary and as shadow of the poet's dead young brother. Meanwhile, it should be observed that the one clear bibliographical allusion to Gramsci focuses on the latter's presumed stoic character:

                                          sento quale torto
       —qui nella quiete delle tombe—e insieme
       quale ragione—nell'inquieta sorte
       nostra—tu avessi stilando le supreme
       pagine nei giorni del tuo assassinio.

From the above it appears that pathos insures Gramsci's longevity. In fact, in yet another essay published the same year as the poem, Pasolini asserted that:

(…) su qualsiasi altro, domina nella nostra vita politica lo spirito di Gramsci: del Gramsci 'carcerato', tanto più libero quanto più segregato dal mondo, fuori dal mondo, in una situazione suo malgrado leopardiana, ridotto a puro ed eroico pensiero.

Here, as in the poem, Pasolini elevates Gramsci to a symbolic, and hence metahistorical, plane. What he terms a reduction to "puro ed eroico pensiero" is really a dilation of the human and historical Gramsci (political revolutionary, jailed party leader, and philosopher of praxis) to an ideal interlocutor and rational censor. Pasolini's search to construct a 'civil' poetry requires this sort of Gramsci responding to the poet's existential and cognitive needs for such an ideal and exacting interlocutor, by necessity remote and at odds with his own inner feelings.

At the same time, however, Pasolini's 'sanctified' Gramsci shared little with official hagiographies, such as those of Togliatti and other PCI ideologues of the 1950's. Pasolini's 'saint' is to be debated, even cursed, with no intent of making his "puro ed eroico pensiero" conform to the immediate dictates of party tactics. In addition, when reflecting on the extra-literary dimension of the Gramsci-Pasolinirelationship, one should consider what the Sardinian revolutionary must have meant to the young poet. When expelled from his beloved region to find himself practically friendless amidst the depressing reality of the Roman borgate, that is, Pasolini must have seen Gramsci—the jailed Gramsci, suspected by party leaders in the 1930's for his poiemically unorthodox views and scorned even by fellow Communist inmates for his refusal to adhere uncritically to Togliatti's official line—as a kindred spirit, as well as a beacon to his banishment and bewilderment ("con te nel cuore / in luce").

Together with his central presence to this collection of poetry, Gramsci likewise appears later throughout Pasolini's critical writings. He is cited frequently in the essays of Passione e ideologia (1948–1958) and Empirismo eretico (1964–1971), while his influence can be felt in many of the polemics of Scritti corsari (1973–1975).

A look at Pasolini's literary and cultural criticism calls for a distinction, nevertheless, between what Gramsci continues to represent, and how extracts from the latter's writings serve as supports or counterpoints to Pasolini's analysis. Without such a distinction, a reading of Pasolini's treatment of Gramsci could result in the annotation of contradictions, on the surface devoid of any internal connection or (ideo-)logic.

"Non posso accettare nulla del mondo dove vivo," Pasolini once claimed in a newspaper interview. This held true for all cultural and literary, as well as social and political, questions. The one constant in Pasolini's criticism is its refusal to adhere for any length of time to solicited or self-imposed canons. As Dario Bellezza notes: "La sua voglia di contraddire e contraddirsi era l'unica sua folle coerenza." And Gianni Scalia, who collaborated with Pasolini during the years of the review, "Officina," often referred to him as an "intellettuale disorganico,"—in contrast to Gramsci's celebrated notion of the "intellettuale organico"—, while dubbing him a "poeta civile, etico-politico, in contraddizione perenne (…) tra irrazionalità esistenziale e razionalità storica, impegno e autonomia, cuore e critica."

As for Gramsci's influence, Pasolini's essays provide ample testimony of a constantly shifting critical attitude that never abandons, however, an appeal to the lessons of the "maestro." When not discussing specific authors and works, Passione e ideologia (the title itself evinces a continuation of the conflict expressed poetically in "Le ceneri di Gramsci") studies the problem of language (dialect and standard Italian), the 'questione della lingua' in Italian literature, and a whole area of sociolinguistics. Working from a methodological framework at times defined as "gramscismo-stilistico." Pasolini, almost alone among contemporary critics, staunchly defended spoken and literary dialect against the assaults of an imposed national idiom that he believed came more and more to serve the ends of Neocapitalism. Those assaults, he contended, were masked as the needs for a progressive national unity to be forged through modern technological and social channels (e.g., compulsory education; the mass media; etc.).

In Passione e ideologia's "Un secolo di studi sulla poesia popolare" (a part of his acclaimed philological anthology, "La poesia popolare italiana"), Pasolini often summons Gramsci's Letteratura e vita nazionale from the Quaderni del carcere, while nevertheless declaring foreign to his own linguistic and poetic beliefs the Gramscian notion of a national-popular literature. That is, although he basically agrees with Gramsci's demand for a popular literature, Pasolini cannot reconcile that Sardinian's analytical model with his own ideas on literature. Gramsci's examination of feuilletons, popular melodrama, detective and adventure stories, etc., says Pasolini, corresponds to what "oggi si definisce 'cultura di massa'," which he in turn excoriates as consumer society's manipulation of taste to the detriment of authentic popular (i.e., dialect) culture. For want of adequate means of research, and despite his "passione e chiarezza innevativa," Gramsci "sfiora appena" the problem of popular-dialectical poetry. Thus, to no small degree, Gramsci is to be held responsible for the "inopia di studi marxisti postgramsciani sull'argomento," Pasolini concludes.

In "La confusione degli stili," Pasolini maintains that Gramsci "non spiega quale dovrebbe essere la ricerca di uno scrittore che volesse celare in un'opera l'ideale nazional-popolare." Addressing himself to the problem of literature's language, he raises the point after having asked how it is ever possible to think that "le concrezioni letterarie del concetto di 'nazional-popolare' si debbano realizzare in una simile lingua, creazione appunto deila borghesia conservatrice." But in addition to all this, he does concede that all of Letteratura e vita nazionale hinges positively on the axiom that every time the language question arises, in one way or another, a whole spectrum of other problems are about to surface.

This paraphrase of Gramsci seems exactly the issue that distinguishes Gramsci's position from that of Pasolini. The Sardinian's argument is motivated by a holistic (i.e., political) overview since problems of language, literature, etc., are studied and analyzed as integral parts of a complex of sociopolitical factors and functions. Pasolini, on the other hand, regards socio-political and cultural problems as reflections of the gradual surrender of that mythicized social and linguistic universe that he desires to defend. Gramsci sees socio-cultural problems through politics; his analysis is of the cultural institutions and structures 'materially' at work in Western industrial civilization, and how these can be used politically to promote a revolutionary new cultural hegemony. For Pasolini, (Neo-) capitalist society is a moral category—a malum—to be rejected tout court in the name of a purer (pre-industrial) one threatened with extinction.

Just the same, Pasolini is not given to simple nostalgia. In later writings, his attachment to a pre-proletarian cosmos evolved into a complex longing nourished on the trenchant criticism that his particular brand of 'Marxism' elicited: "Rimpiango l'immenso universo contadino e operaio prima dello Sviluppo: universo transnazionale nella cultura, internazionale nella scelta marxista." Despite admitting the difficulty in defining this new and corrupting power that has "manipolato e radicalmente (antropologicamente) cambiato le grandi masse contadine e proletarie italiane," Pasolini's scorn for contemporary reality ("io considero peggiore il totalitarismo del capitalismo del consumo che il totalitarismo del vecchio potere") is never presented as a politically scientific measure: "L'ordine in cui elenco questi mondi riguarda l'importanza della mia esperienza personale, non la loro importanza oggettiva."

For Gramsci, meanwhile, the intellectual who 'goes to the people' seeking contact and inspiration for a new literature to emerge from the "humus della cultura popolare cosi come è, coi suoi gusti, le sue tendenze ecc., col suo mondo morale e intellettuale sia pure arretrato e convenzionale," does so with the aim of articulating moral and intellectual needs for an eventual emancipation of the masses from just such a "humus." Hence, over all, Gramsci appears to advocate education, while Pasolini seems to demand a 'preservation' of the subaltern classes.

Pasolini is operating, nevertheless, in an artistic and cultural climate very different from that of Gramsci. His defense of a waning popular-dialectical culture is thus a polemical response to both contemporary mass culture and the elitism he considered inherent in present-day literary avant-gardes. In "La libertà stilistica," he examined his own poetic which a year earlier, on the pages of "Officina," he had defined as "neo-sperimentalismo." His position, he maintained, stood midway between an adulation of tradition and an untempered celebration of novelty, animated by a "spirito filologico (…) strumento di una diversa cultura (…) che non può accettare nessuna forma storica e pratica di ideologia" in the spirit of the imprisoned Gramsci, "tanto più libero quanto più segregato dal mondo (…), ridotto a puro ed eroico pensiero." Pasolini then advances his "neo-sperimentalismo" as the stylistic and thematic countertype to the "poetare (…) mistico, irrazionale e squisito" of 'pure poetry', as well as to an opposing tendency which he claims lowers all expressive language to the "livello della prosa, ossia del razionale, del logico, dello storico."

In terms of stylistic appraisal, Pasolini appears correct in his critique of the literary (but also, politico-cultural) shortcomings of any rigid 'hermeticism' or codified 'neorealism'. But as regards the political role assigned by Gramsci to the intellectual, he seems to bypass the significance of a proposed interaction bent on destroying 'una tradizione di casta, che non è mai stata rotta da un forte movimento politico o nazionale dal basso." Gramsci's comprehensive definition of 'political' suggests that this 'coming from below' be concerned primarily with the genesis and destination of any literary-cultural reform, and how such might foster an active co-participation, while Pasolini appears to treat the writer-public relationship in a conventionally vertical manner. Although Pasolini would agree with Gramsci that a 'new art' cannot be created "dall'esterno (pretendendo un'arte didascalica, a tesi, moralistica), ma dall'intimo, perché si modifica tutto l'uomo in quanto si modificano i suoi sentimenti, le sue concezioni e i rapporti di cui l'uomo è l'espressione necessaria," he presents an excessively internalized premise for the realization of any 'new culture' that might give rise to a 'new art':

Oggi una nuova cultura, ossia una nuova interpretazione intera della realtà, esiste, e non certamente nei nostri estremi tentativi di borghesi d'avanguardia (…) esiste, in potenza, nel pensiero marxista; in potenza ché l'attuazione è da prospettare nei giorni in cui il pensiero marxista sarà (se è questo il destino) prassi marxista (…). Ma benché in forma potenziale, esiste, agisce, già oggi, se quel pensiero marxista determina, nei nostri paesi occidentali, una lotta politica e quindi una crisi nella società e nell'individuo: esiste dentro di noi, sia che aderiamo, sia che la neghiamo; e proprio in questo nostro impotente aderirvi, e in questo nostro impotente negarla.

Pasolini's preference for a methodology based on antitheses—an extension of the passion-ideology dichotomy—is manifest in the essays of Empirismo eretico. Here Pasolini stresses the incompatibility of Neocapitalism's "linguaggio tecnocratico" with its attendant "prevalere del fine comunicativo sul fine espressivo," and the poetic demands of literary expression. Chances for a possible "lingua nazionale attraverso operazioni letterarie" have been undermined by a politico-linguistic levelling to the degree that, at present, shaping language is not "letteratura, ma la tecnica." The sweeping power of technological and consumer society, says Pasolini, is actually affecting "mutazioni antropologiche" threatening to flatten Italian linguistic and social civilization into a sterile conformity. For him, "la cultura tecnocratica-tecnologica (…) contesta e si accinge a mettere fuori gioco, tutto il passato classico e classicistico dell'uomo: ossia l'umanesimo." Marxism, while exploiting certain positive contributions of Neocapitalism's neo-language, "come 'parte' specializzata e ellittica (…) contiene in sé evidentemente un futuro umanistico e espressivo." To define Marxism in terms of a poetic prolepsis and simultaneous guardianship of popular speech and culture appears to underscore further Pasolini's mythic conception of a pre-industrial artist/public relationship.

Then again using Gramsci as theoretical support, Pasolini argues the necessity of bringing together in harmony two contrasting linguistic modes: "irrazionalismo contadino piccolo-borghese del Terzo mondo (ivi compreso il Sud italiano) e razionalismo capitalistico liberale." He advances this notion as the possible cure for a current anomaly whereby "il discorso di un comunista, in quanto espressione di una profonda e vasta spinta dal basso, e in quanto improntato da uno spirito fondamentalmente scientifico, tende a una sintesi dell'italiano, e si pone come fondamentalmente comunicativo." According to this critique, today's Italian Marxists function more as technical 'administrators' than as popular 'humanists.'

For the Marxist writer, instead, a genuine linguistic synthesis should thus be realized by applying to literature the Gramscian notion of the national-popular; i.e., the concomitance of two linguistic ways of being in the world: that of the committed intellectual, and that of the 'common man', in a "'contaminatio' di 'stile sublime' e di 'stile umile'." One is led to wonder to what degree Pasolini would endorse Gramsci's idea of the national-popular as only the first step towards an ultimate emancipation from conventional linguistic and cultural hierarchies. At the same time, one must again admit that the situation from which Gramsci's analysis proceeds differs greatly from the one that Pasolini contests. Gramsci was interested in the entry of the Italian agricultural and proletarian masses into the mainstream of Western thought and culture: in a radical democratization of culture. Pasolini, instead, champions a refusal by these same masses of a society grounded in the false values of consumerism and conformity qua liberation. After, in the mid and late 1960's, Pasolini took stock of the actual situation of his chosen people and realized to what an extent those "anthropological mutations" so long prophesized had taken place. The result of his awareness was a bitter anguish, an intensified attack on all causes of such "mutations," and a turn to the Third World as final possible repository for his mythic primitive purity.

"Dal laboratorio," meanwhile, deals almost exclusively with the question of oral and written expression in Gramsci. For Pasolini, Gramsci's language underwent a profound transformation in "falsa liberazione" (i.e., from a native Sardinian) in the slow acquisition of an Italian passing from an initial "enfasi espressivo-umanitaria," through a "fase francesizzante" in Turin, and arriving at true maturity at the time of the "Ordine Nuovo." Such a transformation was due to a "lungo e quasi religioso tirocinio di razionalità." "Tutte le pagine giovanili di Gramsci sono scritte in un brutto italiano," charges Pasolini. And even after Gramsci's acquisition of a mature and exact rational prose, maintains Pasolini in a contradictory manner, such language, "analizzata freddamente (…) può apparire ancora (…) 'brutta': cioè umiliata dal grigiore manualistico, dal gergo politico, dalla lingua delle traduzioni, da un incancellabile fondo professionale e francesizzante. Ma tutto ciò è reso irrilevante dalla sua funzionalià che la rende, in qualche modo, assoluta."

Then Pasolini passes to a (hypothetical?) discussion of Gramsci's oral expression. He points to the three fundamental characteristics of Gramsci's pronunciation (i.e., Sardinian-dialectical, Piedmontese-dialectical, and bureacratic-professional petty bourgeoise) as "tutti elementi immensamente inferiori di livello alla 'lingua scritta'." For this reason, "l'incertezza, la povertà, la miseria, la genericità della lingua orale di Gramsci (…) non è proporzionata alla sicurezza, alla richezza, all'assolutezza di molte sue pagine scritte."

In truth, it is impossible to pinpoint with any great accuracy the linguistic criteria guiding Pasolini's contradictory critique of Gramsci. Nonetheless, it would appear that behind his observations stand those antithetical poles of expressive versus communicative language found throughout the essays of Empirismo eretico. If this be the case, then Pasolini errs through excess in regard to Gramsci whose sole aim was notional (self-) clarification, and not connotational, or polysemous, (self-) expression.

In fact, these two contrasting voices in Gramsci: one a determined and self-conscious appropriation of rational-scientific discourse; the other, an ever-present, however submerged, irrational (or better, pre-rational) dialectical expressiveness, are reconciled in extremis, claims Pasolini, through a syncretic correlation that unites Gramsci's two linguistic and experiential situations:

Solo nelle lettere dal carcere, verso la fine della sua vita, egli riesce a far coincidere irrazionalismo e esercizio della ragione: ma non si tratta però dell'irrazionalismo che alona o segue, come per impeto sentimentale o rabbia polemica, la ragione del pensiero politico.(…) Si tratta, piuttosto, verso la fine della sua vita, di dar voce di racconto o evocazione anche a fatti più umili e casuali della vita, a quel tanto di misterioso e di irrazionale che ogni vita ha in abbondanza, e che è la 'poeticità naturale' della vita. Allora l'abitudine razionalistica che ha dominato la lingua (…) a contatto con quell'elemento irrazionale dominato (…) si colora di una pateticità (…)

This passage could lead to the observation that though every poet be an ideologue despite claims to the contrary, the opposite is not necessarily true. It does, in any event, substantiate the initially made contention that the Gramsci of Pasolini remained first and foremost the pathetic hero of the prison letters. Complexity arises, however, from the fact that, in effect, this Gramsci functioned as an emblematic composite: Gramsci victim and hero of the Lettere dal carcere merging with Gramsci the author of the Quaderni, iconic symbol of reason urging the poet's self-proclaimed "ossessivo bisogno di tornare al marxismo—ossia all'unica ideologia che mi protegga dalla perdita della realtà." And these two aspects of Pasolini's Gramsci coincide with the poet's problematic inner conflict of reason with passion.

Thus, in his tireless attack on Neocapitalism's damage to popular speech and culture, together with his diffidence for what he considered the verbal pyrotechnics of much of the 1960's neo-avantgarde, Pasolini deliberately planted his criticism in contradiction and controversy. Throughout, Gramsci remained a preferential point of confrontation between the demands of a visceral estheticism and objectively formulated dissent. Pasolini's unorthodox interpretation of Gramsci, based on a positive heresy, has nonetheless guaranteed the revolutionary theorist of praxis a place in contemporary Italian culture beyond the schematic exegesis of many official tacticians. Since his death, moreover, that culture is in want of a poet-polemicist as uniquely uncompromising and authentically ambivalent as was Pasolini.