A Postscript to Transgression
One cannot … speak of Pasolini during the early 1960's without taking into account the twenty-year path that led him to embrace the Third World as a radical solution to the problem of decadence…. If we consider his earlier (and without question most important) literary production, we find that the "outside" that will eventually become so necessary for Pasolini is anything but present there; it proves, in fact, irremediably absent. For the decadentist-tinged poetry of his first literary decade, the 1940's, this should come as no surprise. The young Pasolini was careful to situate himself firmly within Italian literary tradition: if this poetry—much of it indebted to the hermetic school that flourished during the fascist ventennio—succeeds, it is, quite clearly, only at the level of "a perfect stylistic success." There is no question of an "outside" in this work (or, rather, the motif is raised in the traditional and non-secular terms of religious transcendence).
One point about the early poetry does, however, need to be brought out before we examine some of the works written during the next decade—works that form the more immediate genealogy of Pasolini's tiers-mondisme. The novelty of this poetry resides in Pasolini's decision to write not only in Italian but also in the dialect of his mother's home region, the Friuli (to the northeast of Venice). In these poems—most of which were subsequently collected in 1954 as La meglio gioventú—Pasolini gives literary form to what might well be considered the sheer orality of dialect, a dialect that he himself had to learn as an anthropologist would that of a culture under study. Far from being a mimetic attempt at re-presenting this language, however, his written dialect, in its extreme literariness, places itself at a clear remove from the dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Friuli. Pasolini's Friulan, in other words, turns out to be a metaphor of "real" Friulan; as Rinaldo Rinaldi, the author of far and away the most compelling account of Pasolini's work as a whole, puts it, "His dialect is a register of writing used as a metaphor for the negation of writing." By writing in dialect, Pasolini refers, metaphorically, to what is prior to that writing: to engage this spoken language is, inevitably, to put oneself at a distance from it, to evoke it in the form of what it is not—namely, writing.
Given its inevitably metaphorical form, the content of Pasolini's dialect poetry is also, of necessity, at a distance from what it purports to say; his "exotic" attachment to the Friuli—the identification of it as "my country," me país, as he calls it in the epigraph to La meglío gioventú—must, for this reason, be read as a conceit, a rhetorical artifice. It is the artificiality of such identification with the Other that Pasolini's tiers-mondisme will fruitlessly contest—a contestation that is, indeed, anticipated during Pasolini's last years in the Friuli when he will attempt, in the wake of what he called his "discovery of Marx," to use dialect as the vehicle for his new political activism. This move toward a language of immanence is, however, abruptly curtailed when, in 1949, Pasolini is expelled from the local Communist party on moral grounds (having to do with his homosexuality). Forced to leave the Friuli, he relocates in Rome and, after several years of intense poverty, emerges as one of the most prominent, and scandalous, figures on the Italian cultural scene….
The poemetti of Le ceneri...
(This entire section contains 2652 words.)
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di Gramsci (written from 1951 to 1956 and published in 1957) are of more immediate interest to us than the novels because of their obsession with a phantasmic past—not Gramsci himself but the ashes of Gramsci, the traces of an authentic experience. Poetry here turns away from a modernity to which it nonetheless remains attached: it assumes a memorial stature, setting itself the task of remembering a heroic world that has no place in our own. As such, it falls somewhere in between what Agamben, following Freud, has identified as the two related strategies of mourning and melancholy….
The melancholic confers reality on an object that never was, mourning it, and thereby in a way giving life to its unreality. This is the essence of mourning itself since the real object, once it has ceased to exist, proves equally phantasmic, equally "unappropriable."
We can see this laceration of self and (real/unreal) object, one that history effects and writing records, at work in a poem like "Canto popolare" (1952), where an absolute distance is established between us ("noi")—the subjects of history—and the people ("popolo")—those who ingenuously repeat the past and who are not "blinded" ("abbagliato") by modernity because they are not exposed to its harsh light. These "people" are never drawn up ("tolto"), as it were, by the dialectic of enlightenment:
… non abbiamo nozione
vera di chi è partecipe alla storia
solo per orale, magica esperienza;
e vive puro, non oltre la memoria
della generazione in cui presenza
della vita è la sua vita perentoria.
(… we have no true
notion of who participates in history
only through oral, magic experience;
and lives pure, not beyond the memory
of the generation in which presence
of life is his peremptory life.)
The world of "oral, magic experience" is at a painful remove from the subject who desires its "presence." For all that he longs to come into contact with this other world, Pasolini un-realizes it, placing it at an insuperable distance from his own. He remembers it at the cost of a laceration: historical man "non ha più che la violenza / delle memorie, non la libera memoria" ("now has only the violence / of memories, not memory's freedom"). In Le ceneri what makes up for this absence is the belief that "our" world is not merely one of mourning but of hope: against the loss of this "libera memoria," this peremptory ground of experience, we can hope for a very different, redemptory sort of liberty.
The poet of Le ceneri is not, however, very interested in considering this future, which at once attracts and "repulses" him; the ethos of these poems is melancholic, directed toward a world anterior to "ours," one that has come before and yet remains with us, but only as trace—unreachable, if not in its absence. In "Le ceneri di Gramsci" (1954), Pasolini calls this trace "la forza originaria / dell' uomo, che nell'atto s'è perduta" ("the originary force / of man, which has been lost in the act")—a lost force that provokes both "l'ebbrezza della nostalgia" ("the rapture of nostalgia") and "una luce poetica" ("a poetic light"). Poetry and nostalgia unite, as they always have, to reveal/conceal what is hidden to "us." This insight is presented less compactly in an exemplary stanza from a poem written the same year, "L'umile Italia":
Più è sacro dov'è più animale
il mondo: ma senza tradire
la poeticità, l'originaria
forza, a noi tocca esaurire
il suo mistero in bene e in male,
umano. Questa è l'Italia e
non è questa l'Italia: insieme
la preistoria e la storia che
in essa sono convivano, se
la luce è frutto di un buio seme.
(The world is more sacred where it is
more animal: but without betraying
the poeticity, the originary
force, we must exhaust
its mystery in human good and
evil. This is Italy and
this is not Italy: together
the prehistory and the history, which
are in it, live—if
light is the fruit of a dark seed.)
Here, "prehistory" differs considerably from what it will soon become for Pasolini in its Third World incarnation; the realm of the sacred, of animal nature, is lost to "us" as darkness is to light, as something that we can have no "true notion" about. Its "cohabitation" (convivenza) with history is nothing more than a phantasmic one, an imaginary relation between the real and the unreal.
We must not turn away from what has come before us, yet neither can we re-present its originary force. To deliver that force over to the present would be to betray its "poeticity." The light of poetry grounds itself in an unrepresentable absence of light that is anterior to it; the poet looks back upon this absence, interrogating it with what Pasolini would so often refer to as an amor da lonh, a love from afar. The poet through commemoration, seeks access to an origin that is always-already inaccessible: it might well be argued that this is the essential(izing) project of the European poetic tradition. Whatever one's definition of poetry, however, this is the central project in Pasolini's Ceneri. With an approximating language that simultaneously draws near and pushes back, Pasolini's overwhelming impulse in these poems is to articulate an unbridgeable gap: between the sacred, animal world of nature and a secular, human world; between a heroic people whose metonym is Gramsci and the ashen inferno of modernity.
A potential ambiguity inhabits Pasolini's idea of convivenza, however. For the poet of Le ceneri, the prehistoric is present only as phantasm, as an object to be mourned in the world of light and history; to bestow upon the prehistoric a real content would be to betray its originary force. It would, we can add, be to grasp (fetishistically) what is by essence ungraspable. But it is precisely this reality that Pasolini—increasingly unhappy with the prospect of mourning and equally uncomfortable with that extension of mourning we identified as modernism (a position that takes the absence of experience for granted)—will attempt to embrace, at the cost, as he had foreseen, of betraying "la poeticità." The glas of melancholy, as it were, has sounded too early for Pasolini's liking, and he will seize upon the apparent possibilities of mutual presence that a word like convivenza opens up despite the nostalgic intentions of (his) poetry. A period of relative optimism begins, in which his work attempts to conjure up first historical, and then prehistorical, alternatives to capitalism—openings of the sort that he had already theoretically envisioned in some of the essays of Passione e ideologia. During his brief tiers-mondiste period (roughly, 1958-63), Pasolini is buoyed up by the possibility of political and literary transgression, on both the domestic and the international front. He begins to explore the futural dimension that was almost entirely absent from the world of the Ceneri—a world where, as he puts it in "Picasso" (1953), remaining "inside the inferno with a marmoreal / will to understand it" appeared to offer the only chance of "salvation."
On the one hand, he adopts, or re-adopts, the traditional terms of the class struggle when speaking about the possibility of political change within Italy: modernity, he will claim, can be surpassed through a qualitative leap forward—as we see, for instance, in his account of the difference between "dissent" and "revolution." Dissent, he explains to the readers of Vie nuove (30 November 1961), is essentially religious, irrational, caught up within what it contests; however, all moments of dissent(and here he identifies three types: the heretical, the anarchical, and the humanitarian) prepare the way for the "qualitative leap," the "betrayal," of Marxism: "With this leap 'religiosity' loses every historical characteristic—irrationalism, individualism, metaphysical prospectivism—and acquires entirely new characteristics: rationalism, socialism, laical prospectivism." This epochal shift will establish "another culture," "another and entirely new point of view" ("un'altra cultura," "un altro punto di vista totalmente nuovo"), from which the ills of modern society will have disappeared….
[Although] the first years of the 1960's are marked by one announcement after another of various novelistic projects, by the middle of the decade Pasolini is forced to admit that he has "renounced" the novel.
By this time, his poetic vein is also temporarily exhausted—arriving, although from a rather different direction, at the same neo-capitalist dead end. If his next collection of poetry is in many ways an extension of Le ceneri (just as Una vita violenta grows out of Ragazzi di vita), one fundamental difference resides in Pasolini's efforts to figure what had hitherto been the object of his melancholy as really present. Reworking the material of the previous collection, La religione del mio tempo (1961), establishes a direct contact between the poet and the "prehistoric" world that he had previously contemplated da lonh: Pasolini separates himself from the alienated historical subject of the Ceneri ("noi") in an attempt at opening up another point of view from a trans-or extrahistorical perspective. The individual subject, it now transpires, can come into contact with Other worlds: in "La ricchezza" (1955-59), for instance, Pasolini the dandy ("il raffinato") assimilates himself to the urban "subproletariat," because they are
entrambi fuori dalla storia,
in un mondo che non ha altri varchi
che verso il sesso e il cuore,
altra profondità che nei sensi.
In cui la gioia è gioia, il dolore dolore.
(Both outside of history
in a world whose only passageways lead
toward sex and the heart,
whose only depth comes from the senses.
In which joy is joy, and sadness sadness.)
This alliance with the "frutti / d'una storia tanto diversa" ("fruit / of such a different story") is what Pasolini will seek to effect in the coming years, trying to operate outside the historical framework in and by which he nonetheless still feels himself engaged.
But in his earlier poetry he had already so effectually buried Italy's peasantry (contadini) and subproletariat under the ground of an unattainable "prehistory" that his literary efforts to recuperate a convivenza on the domestic front inevitably fall short of their goal, striking the reader as a painfully awkward projection of reality onto some phantasmic object—in other words, as essentially rhetorical. And it is precisely this sense of rhetoric that Pasolini most wants to avoid. Dissatisfiedwith these results and yet wishing to elaborate his vision of an alternative present, Pasolini extends his gaze beyond the boundaries of Italy to the emerging Third World and comes to the conclusion (in "Alla Francia" [1958]—an epigram inspired by Sékou Touré, then-president of Guinea):
Forse a chi è nato nella selva, da pura madre,
a essere solo, a nutrire solo gioia,
tocca rendersi conto della vita reale.
(Perhaps he who is born in the forest, of a pure mother,
born to be alone, to nourish joy alone,
will be the one to take real life into account.)
Pasolini turns away from Europe and the all-embracing world of neo-capitalism, in search of the once and future alternative—a poetic program that he announces at the end of one of the closing poems in La religione del mio tempo, the "Frammento alla morte" (1960):
Sono stato razionale e sono stato
irrazionale: fino in fondo.
E ora … ah, il deserto assordato
dal vento, lo stupendo e immondo
sole dell' Africa che illumina il mondo.
Africa! Unica mia
alternativa….
(I have been rational and I have been
irrational: right to the end.
And now … ah, the desert deafened
by the wind, the wonderful and filthy
sun of Africa that illuminates the world.
Africa! My only
alternative….)
That this fragmentary invocation to the new world is couched in a self-consciously Romantic style; that Pasolini must produce his alternative vision in a language that reeks of nineteenth-century exoticism; that he must ignore the clichéd nature of his project if he is to invest it with any degree of "authenticity": these are obvious ironies, signaling the a priori sterility of his neo-exoticist undertaking. It is this hopeless vacancy that Pasolini will discover in his literary and existential encounter with the Third World. This vacancy, we might add, is itself inscribed in the poem's final ellipsis: the future that would complete the present cannot be uttered; the words that would heal the poet's male incurabile are irretrievably absent from the discursive realm, covered over by a set of periods, each of which marks the same thing. That same thing is the end of the line.
