Pasolini's great debt to [Antonio] Gramsci (a debt he repeatedly acknowledged, defining himself at one point as "gramscian") was by no means an unususal phenomenon among members of his generation: as one historian has noted, the discovery of Gramsci's writings after the war "created a sub-renaissance within the wider reawakening of Italian cultural life." But he may have been unique in that his response to Gramsci was always colored by a deep and complex ambivalence. It is this ambivalence, in fact, and the resulting tensions (which greatly intensified in the course of his career) that lie at the heart of one of his most famous poems, "Le ceneri di Gramsci" ("The Ashes of Gramsci," the title poem in the collection which first won him national recognition as a poet when it appeared in 1954). These tensions have both existential and historical-political roots. On the personal level, Pasolini was torn by a lifelong conflict between ideological awareness, commitment and history (represented by the heroic and martyred figure of Gramsci), and his own attraction (part of his bourgoeis "exquisite" heritage) to the "innocence" and "primitive joy" of an ahistorical, vitalistic, almost mythic workingclass and sub-proletarian world. In the poem he feels himself intellectually—ideologically, rationally—with Gramsci and the hopes for a new society; but he is instinctively, viscerally, passionately attached to a vitalistic and popular world which he cannot renounce for consciousness and "history" (understood as Marxism, ideology and the class struggle). Addressing himself to Gramsci, Pasolini describes this essential inner struggle which renders him incapable of action:

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;

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; e la forza originaria

dell'uomo, che nell'atto s' è perduta,
a darle l'ebbrezza della nostalgia,
una luce poetica …

[The scandal of contradicting myself, of being
with you and against you; with you in my heart,
in the light, against you in my dark entrails.

traitor (in thought, on the rim
of action) to my paternal state,
knowing myself attached to it by the

heat of instincts and esthetic passion;
attracted by a proletarian life
anterior to you. Its joy,

not its age-old struggle, is
religion for me; its nature,
not its consciousness. It is man's

original vigor, lost in acting,
taking on nostalgia's intoxication,
a poetic light … ]

But it is not only this essential existential tension which creates the poem's melancholy tone. Added to Pasolini's inner tensions is a bitter disillusion coming from the historical changes of the preceding decade, from the sense that the revolutionary hopes of the Resistance (hopes embodied in the poem by the figure of Gramsci and by that of the partisans) have been betrayed. With hope dispelled, the poet—caught—between the old bourgeois world and the future, still-to-be-realized society envisioned by Gramsci—is unable to make "choices," "commitments." Summing up this personal and historical dilemma in the final mediation of the poem, Pasolini declares:

… Ma io, con il cuore cosciente

di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai piú con pura passione operare
se so che la nostra storia è finita?

[… as for me, with a heart whose

consciousness lives only in history,
can I ever again act with pure passion,
if I know that our history is finished?]

The sense of personal crisis and historical despair (a despair colored by nostalgia for an earlier time when hope was still alive) which marks this poem would grow deeper and more acute as the years went by. As the decades passed, Pasolini became increasingly convinced that the Gramscian hope that intellectuals might play a vital role in national life, that they might contribute to the creation of a new culture, were doomed to failure. But even as this sense of historical crisis grew ever more urgent and violent—a violence which exploded in his writings of the 1970s—Pasolini never ceased to write under the sign of Gramsci as he attempted to seize and articulate the crucial links between culture and politics….

The mood of historical pessimism adumbrated in "Le ceneri di Gramsci" may have been particularly acute in Pasolini but it also reflected—as was almost always the case with him—important developments in Italian political and intellectual life. Post-war hopes for a new Italian society and culture had been crushed in 1948 by the defeat at the polls of the leftwing Popular Front; and, on the international scene, the swing towards repression came to a head in 1956 with the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. By the early 1950s, neorealism (and the hopes it represented) had petered out, while the belief that intellectuals could help create a new society had grown increasingly suspect and in need of re-evaluation.

It was in this climate that Pasolini and others began to reexamine the immediate artistic past, especially the cultural movement—neorealism—which, a decade earlier, had seemed to embody Gramsci's hope for a national-popular art. As they did so, they explored the possible roles still open to intellectuals, the cultural paths that could still be taken. Many of the most important discussions of these issues were published in the review Officina, which was founded in Bologna in 1955 by Pasolini and a few others….

In his examination of past culture, Pasolini focuses on the two major Italian literary movements of the twentieth century: the hermetic, modernist and formalist literature (influenced by Mallarmé and the French symbolists) of the Fascist period, and the neorrealist reaction to it. Examining the language of both modernist and neorealist literature in terms of their respective social and ideological eras, Pasolini concludes that these two movements represent the two faces of bourgeois culture—and thus both are incapable of a new world vision. Modernist literature uses an irrational, mystical and precious language which, he feels, can deal only with the inner self, with feelings and words. Its incapacity to deal with the outer world, with history or the class struggle, and its "total adaptation to poetry," made it the perfect literature for the Fascist State; its seeming stylistic liberty was merely illusory because

the antidemocratic Fascist involution was the result of the same decadence of liberal and romantic bourgeois ideology that has led to the literary involution of stylistic research done for its own sake, to a formalism filled only with its own esthetic consciousness … In a period of reactionary, centralist State politics, language had achieved a maximum of "fixation" perhaps never before seen in Italy [Passione e ideologia].

Pasolini nevertheless observes, demonstrating his refusal to schematize or simplify, that hermetic language also opposed Fascist values: as a language of the "elite," it resisted the Fascist desire for a language of great clarity accessible to all.

Contradictions and paradoxes also mark, in Pasolini's view, the language of neorealism. He grants, of course, that, in its reaction against the preciosity and rhetoric of modernist literature, neorealism did make important innovations designed to capture everyday reality and express historical events: hence it mixed styles, reproduced the "direct discourse" of the people, and emphasized the social and historical backdrop of events (this last element, Pasolini remarks, lent itself especially well to cinematic expression). Yet, despite these innovations and good intentions, neorealsim did not, and perhaps could not, avoid certain pitfalls since, according to Pasolini, it was undermined by both the lack of a mass base and linguistic factors. In its attempt to find a "prose" language, neorealism fell back on the very language developed during the pre-Fascist period: "One can well ask how the literary embodiments of the notion of 'national-popular' could be realized in such a language, precisely the creation of the conservative bourgeoisie … that gave us Fascism" [Passione e ideologia]. Furthermore, because of its lack of concern with language and stylistics, neorealism was plagued by an involuntary tendency to incorporate some of the metaphorical, romantic and even religious and decadent elements of past literary language. Proceeding as if its literary, ethical and phenomenological vision were not in need of "research," neorealism found that its "will to innovate, stripped of an experimental covering, ended fatally … by readopting a superseded, often perishing, linguistic material" [Passione e ideologia]. In the end, neorealism fell prey to some of the same irrational remnants of past cultures which Pasolini perceived in Marxism itself: "The adoption of Marxist philosophy comes originally from a sentimental and moralistic impetus and is therefore continually permeable to the rising of the religious spirit" [Passione e ideologia].

But—and here we come to the tension and the personal issues at stake underlying Pasolini's analyses of past literature and culture—what implications does all this have for contemporary writers? Clearly, if they are committed and aware they must reject the language of both modernism and neorealism because of the ideologies implicit in them. But what, then, are writers to use in their place? Although Pasolini calls for "authentic experimentalism" and the adoption of a "plurilingual" language (one incorporationg the different dialects of Italy, as opposed to a "monolingual" and abstract literary language) as well as a return to "premodernist" literary modes capable of expressing rationality and historicity, he is, nevertheless, distraught by his inability to finally answer this fundamental question in a satisfactory way, to define exactly what he means by "authentic experimentalism."

Moreover, this inability to envisage a new literature, a new culture, is part of a much greater dilemma. For, how can the writer envision a new literature and language when the society to which they correspond has still to be realized? And—what may be equally difficult—how can bourgeois intellectuals free themselves from the culture which formed them, a culture which, at least in Pasolini's case, was both hated and loved. (He always remained deeply attached to the symbolist, hermetic tradition of language and literature which had marked his youth). A Janus-like creature, he was torn between his nostalgia for the culture of the past he sought to renounce and his longing for a new society and culture not yet in existence. For Pasolini, the crisis of the bourgeois intellectual was lived linguistically—a crisis which an earlier generation, exemplified by Sartre, lived sentimentally. Voicing this crisis repeatedly in the poems and essays of the 1950s, Pasolini grappled with the conflict between his own bourgeois heritage and the awareness that Marxism had changed his perception of the world. The experience of the Resistance and the Liberation, and the discovery of Marx and Gramsci, had awakened in him (and in his generation) a heightened historical sense with the result that

the world which was, at first, a pure source of sensations expressed by means of a ratiocinative and precious irrationalism, has now become an object of ideological, if not philosophical, awareness, and, as such, demands stylistic experiments of a radically new type [Passione e ideologia].

This crisis—the result of an awareness of Marxism and historical realities—had no easy resolution on any level whether ideological, existential or literary. For, unlike Gramsci, Pasolini was tormented by the knowledge that intellectuals like himself could not escape their own class; nor, could they believe any longer in the hopes raised by the Resistance (any fidelity to the "myth if the Resistance would be antihistorical"), or accept any of the "official" ideologies of the Left (i.e., the Communist Party). Writers, then, are trapped in an impasse: barred from both the "inner" poetry of the past and the "socialist realism" favored by "orthodox Marxists", they must also be wary of avantgarde literature which inevitably emphasizes the divorce between the language of the people and that of the elites. Caught in an ideological limbo which renders literary experimentation somewhat gratuitous, the writer can only bear witness, through pain and struggle, to a period of unhappy transition. In an essay written in 1954, the same year as "Le ceneri di Gramsci," the only glimmer of hope Pasolini raises (and even this glimmer was soon extinguished) is that from this very "pain" a new poetry will be born:

Whether we cannot or do not want (it's the same thing) to be communists, the fact of finding ourselves placed in front of this new, important, social and moral measure, in front of this future perspective … acts within us—within us, we who have remained bourgeois with the violence and the inertia of a psychology determined by history … But this situation in which

we live daily—of choices not completed, of dramas unresolved due to hypocrisy or weakness, of false "relaxation," of discontent for every thing that has given a restless fullness to the generations preceding us—seems sufficiently dramatic to produce a new poetry [Passione e ideologia].

It has often been suggested that Pasolini's sense that literature had reached an historical impasse was one of the reasons he began making films. Although he himself refused to separate cinematic and literary experiments (for him, they were "analogous" rather than "antithetical" forms) he did observe that "the desire to express myself through cinema is part of my need to adopt a new, innovating, technique. It also signifies my desire to escape obsession." Later, in a more pessimistic vein, in a poem whose title "Io, poeta delle Ceneri" ("I, Poet of the Ashes") plays on that of "Le Ceneri di Gramsci", he noted that his embrace of cinema was an attempt to escape his "petit-bourgeois" origins:

quante volte rabbiosamente e avventatemente
avevo detto di voler riunciare alla mia cittadinanza italiana!
Ebbene, abbandonando la lingua italiana, e con essa,
un po' alia volta, la letteratura,
io riunciavo alla mia nazionalità.
Dicevo no aile mie origini piccolo borghesi.

[how many times in rage and without thinking
I had said that I wanted to renounce my Italian citizenship!
Well, abbandoning the Italian language and with it,
a little at a time, literature
I renounced my nationality.
I said no to my petit-bourgois origins.]

This attempt to renounce literature or his origins (although, in point of fact, he never stopped writing) did not mean that he could escape the two faces of past culture he had analyzed so lucidly in his Officina essays….

In his eyes, "committed" art, or what was then often called "materialist" criticism … was no less bourgeois than "militant" film. By regarding books and films as "products," he said, such criticism furthers the values of neo-capitalism which values things (or products) more highly than people. Running counter to much left-wing theory and practice of those years, over and over he was to argue that "poetry" (symbolic, perhaps, of all authentic art) was not a "product."

Poetry, in fact, is not produced "in a series": therefore it is not a product. And a reader of poetry can read a poem a thousand times: he will never consume it. Rather, strange to think perhaps, that the thousandth time, the poem might seem more strange, new, and scandalous than the first time [Il Caos].

This insistence on "poetry", on "authentic" art, was part of Pasolini's re-thinking of many of the formal issues first discussed at length in the Officina essays. But now his tone was increasingly desperate, signaling one of the violent swings of the pendulum that would mark his career. Convinced that national-popular literature was no longer possible, that "committed" literature was bourgeois, and that most Marxist critics were simplistic and moralistic, he argued increasingly (and in this perhaps he was closer to Adorno than to Gramsci), that the "protest" embodied in a work of art lay in its "form" rather than its content….

Despite his statements declaring the marginality of intellectuals and his professed disbelief in the possibility of political action, Pasolini by no means refrained from political action. From the late 1960s until his death, he published one "intervento" after another, usually in the mass press, concerning the vital political and social issues of those years. More than any other aspect of his work, it is probably these interventi—still debated hotly years after his death—that earned him the title of" Organic intellectual." …

The first intervention to create a national controversy came in the wake of the 1968 student riots. The intervention, which he qualified and tempered in the course of the coming months and years, took the form of a poem entitled "Il PCI ai giovani." It was to become emblematic of the contradictory, infuriating and yet vital role Pasolini was to play in Italian cultural and political life until his death. In this poem, Pasolini attacked the students because they, sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, pitted themselves against the police, sons of peasants and the poor. The worldwide media, he claimed, favored the students because the media, too, was bourgeois. Furthermore, Pasolini now maintained, despite his long-standing criticisms of the Communist Party, that by rejecting the Party the students were turning away from the only instrument truly dangerous to their parents. The poem's well-known opening lines read:

È triste. La polemica contro
il PCI andava fatta nella prima metà
del decennio passato. Siete in ritardo, figli.
E non ha nessuna importanza se allora non eravate ancora nati …
Adesso i giornalisti di tutto il mondo (compresi quelli della televisione)
vi leccano (come credo ancora si dica nel linguaggio
delle Università) il culo. Io no, amici.
Avete facce di figli di papà.
Buona razza non mente.
Avete lo stesso occhio cattivo.
Siete paurosi, incerti, disperati
(benissimo!) ma sapete anche come essere
prepotenti, ricattatori e sicuri:
prerogative piccolo-borghesi, amici.
Quando ieri a Valle Giulia avete fatto a botte
coi poliziotti,
io simpatizzavo coi poliziotti!

[It's sad. The argument against
the PCI should have been made in the first half
of the past decade. You're late, children.
And it's not important if you weren't born then …
Now the journalists of the whole world (including

those of television)
kiss (as I think they still say in the language
of the University) your ass. Not I, friends.
You have the spoiled faces of your fathers.
A race doesn't lie.
You have the same evil eye.
You're afraid, uncertain desperate
(fine!) but you also know how to be
arrogant, black mailers and confident:
petit-bourgeois perogatives, friends.
Yesterday at the Valle Guilia when it came to blows
with the police,
I sympathized with the police!
Because the police are sons of the poor.]

Again and again throughout the 1970s, Pasolini repeated this role of "provocateur," of devil's advocate, towards the radical Left as he questioned ideologies and assumptions taken for granted. This was the same role that he had played earlier towards the Communist Party which by now, was part of the Establishment, soon to make its "historical compromise" with the Christian Democrats. Characteristically revealing the tensions which always pulled him in different directions, at the same time that Pasolini attacked the various positions taken by "New Left" groups, he also worked with them…. His obvious ambivalence toward these student radicals (and their militant filmmaking) revealed, in a sense, part of the difficulty he experienced in these tense years which were marked by inflation, worker demands and strikes, recession, aggravated political tensions and terrorism.