It is probable (it is, at least in part, already an established fact) that an attempt at historical collocation of Pier Paolo Pasolini's poetry—considered in terms of its most significant and most striking achievements: Le ceneri di Grantsci, 1957; La religione del mio tempo, 1961; some sections of L'usignolo delta Chiesa cattolica, published in 1958 but containing work of the period 1943-1949—would lead to its finding itself firmly placed on the side of experiences that might be termed conservative as opposed to innovative or "eversive" experiences in twentieth-century literature; nor need this imply any doubt of its intrinsic worth if one admits that a considerable part of significant twentieth-century Italian literature (the perfect example, the prose of Cardarelli) falls into just this perspective, whereas the revolutionary landscape all too often houses products of uncertain alloy when they are not outright vulgar (a no less paradigmatic example of this, Marinetti and, in general, the Italian brand of Futurism). That Pasolini should be so placed two macroscopic immanent aspects of his poetic production might seem to justify: (1) its openly (indeed ostentatiously) discursive and egocentric dimension, which means that the experiment must be referred back to pre-twentieth-century, we might even say with suitable caution, to "romantic" positions; (2) its use of an outmoded metrical framework, e.g., the terzina, the distich a rima baciata, and even the stanza of the medieval canzone as used in particular by Dante. Critics have insisted, and from the outset, on just these aspects, going on to define them and investigate their relationships. Thus, where the discursive and egocentric dimension is concerned, it has proved possible to define more sharply its specific nature, expressible—macroscopically—in terms of an unceasing contradiction or antinomy—present explicitly and constantly at a thematic level throughout the text—between reason and passion (or rationality and visceral participation), history and nature, human and sub-human, and which comes to embrace more specifically ideological oppositions like Marxism and Catholicism, or psychological oppositions like perversion and innocence. (These latter are found essentially in work earlier than Le ceneritli Gramsci, i.e., in the collection of verses in Friuli dialect, Poesie a Casarsa, 1942, which from 1954 forms part of La meglio gioventù, and, particularly, in L'usignolo della Chiesa cattolica.) As for the outmoded metrical forms, some degree of critical awareness has shown that it is no merely passive appropriation when such forms are subjected to an incessant process of erosion of their integrity (or of calling in question of their normativity): rhyme almost constantly precipitates in an assonance which is often merely visual, or at the very least in striking irregularities; the rhythmical measure opens out or contracts with respect to the rule; while stanza composition frequently breaks free of the schemata fixed by the model. Inthe light of this, it has proved possible to postulate a relationship between two planes, so that "transgressions" met with on the formal, or more precisely metrical, plane, to the extent to which they represent a tension between norm and freedom, order and disorder, etc., would merely reproduce the state of antinomy existing on the content plane. Both planes of the manifestation are thus found to be mutually homologous within a typology of substantially expressive kind, where the nature of content conditions configuration on the formal plane.

Now, if the phenomenology of Pasolini's poetic experience is, in general terms, more or less that sketched out above, it may also lend itself to a totally different interpretation: one that would admit of its collocation historio-graphically in a perspective that is directly opposed to that in which the findings so far adduced would place it; it would then find itself on the side of innovative experiment, or, at least, of an experimentation characterized by exceptional cultural receptivity.

Let us look again at the data earlier referred to, for there are further qualifications which must at once be added.

The collocation of the experiment in a distinctively, ostentatiously discursive dimension, entirely centered on the Subject's consciousness as seen from close up, certainly removes it from the mainstream of twentieth- and late nineteenth-century experience, which was not experience of "discourse" but experience of "language." From Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and not from them alone but even from Pascoli (from Pascoli Pasolini derives the not unimportant notion of stylistically plural linguistic experimentation, though he remains unaware of the astonishing material elaboration of his text thanks to which Pascoli stands beside the most advanced of twentieth-century innovators, others who might flank him being found outside poetry in experiences like those of Dubuffet, of Fautrier) down to other key figures of the twentieth century, creators of concentrated, or even highly concentrated, works (Ungaretti), but also of linguistically diffuse works (Eliot), poetry has come progressively to recognize as central a linguistic or, better, "verbal" dimension. So that, even in cases where it inclines, let us say, towards narration and the tale, it is elaboration of language that will be found determinate and dominant with respect to elaboration of meaning and concept (of discourse). If an example is called for we might think of the similar cases of Gozzano and Francis Jammes—usually designated as repositories of a "realistic" tradition in opposition to the practitioners of so-called "pure" poetry—where contents of humble-rural kind (Jammes) or intimistic-bourgeois-provincial kind (Gozzano), articulated as elementary patterns of récit, build up constructions of precise and weighty formal architecture identifiable, in the case of Jammes, with phenomena of iteration, and, in the case of Gozzano, with closed metrical form, to which are added significant techniques of quotation, which effect inside the composition striking phenomena of textual stratification, i.e., of language elaborating language.

The metrical-formal aspect in Pasolini, too, seen as a recuperation of archaic forms, and rightly interpreted by the critics as separable from the discourse, harks back to techniques no longer in vogue, though the resulting metrical aspect cannot be isolated from the experiment as a whole. In this case too, any contention that Pasolini's poetic experience is outdated would find support in the distinction proposed above regarding the central dimension of the "linguistic" (of the "verbal") aspect in twentieth-century poetry. To put it in other words, a privileged role is accorded the signifier (in its phonic, timbric, rhythmic, syntactic, lexematic aspects) seen as the "stage" whereon the poetic, the expressive, experience unfolds. So that what might be called the purely metrical aspect would fall into this order of things, and participate (conspicuously) in the complex typology of the signifier.

In substance, it might be affirmed that whereas the great narrative prose of the twentieth century, in its most revolutionary and innovative aspects, those typified by a Gadda or a Joyce, lends itself to ready collocation under the aegis of the experience of a Dante, of the Dante of the Commedia in particular, the great poetry concomitant with it finds more than one motive for taking its place appropriately, if not absolutely, within the ideal perimeter which the Petrarchan experience defines. It is not our intention here to reduce to partitions so drastic the multiplicity (in the last resort, indeed, irreducibility) of the phenomena. But there do come to mind—at least on a qualitative plane—poetical experiences deriving from an Ungaretti or a Valéry, a Montale or a Salinas, a Guillen, or those that may be made collectively to derive from more recent avant-garde (neo-avant-garde) experiences, French in particular, not to mention certain individual, and highly significant, experiences of the middle generation—those of a Bonnefoy, of a Du Bouchet, a Zanzotto, a Celan—all of which may serve to give an idea of the extent to which the notion of a verbal absolute, in sovereign fashion scaling down the totality of experience—an absolute of just the kind on which the Petrarchan practice in the Ccmzoniere is founded— can lend itself to form a common basis for phenomena otherwise so dissimilar.

By developing a celebrated model proposed by Contini we might say, then, that in opposition to the extrovert, centrifugal, excessive plurilinguism of the (inimitable) pattern of Dante if assumed as protector and patron of twentieth-century experiences in prose, there stands, magnetically drawing the poetry to itself, the introvert, centripetal, absolutizing monolinguism of the (inimitable) pattern Petrarch provides. It was this pattern, moreover, that had already presided, magnificently though implicitly, over the greatest revolution ever effected in the history of poetry: that of Mallarmé.

At this point in our demonstration we might be strongly tempted to try to get beyond the notion of "outdatedness" which dogs Pasolini's poetry by proposing the hypothesis of an interpénétration of genres, which are, in our case, no less than the primary categories of expression: poetry, prose. In reality, other avenues are offering to lead us beyond this "outdatedness," and they are much more complex. It is a fact that the example of Dante persists in the background not only of Pasolini's poetic practice (with its experimentality within the genre, to say nothing of the explicit reference of the metrical schemes adopted, the terzina and the canzone stanza) but of his entire activity as well (experimentality of genres) and also, perhaps, of his "existential" itinerary of which traces are to be found in the preparatory sketches and the fragments of the recently published La Divina Mimesis; this does not, though, resolve the problem posed by the "discourse," by the use made of the "discourse." Pasolini's Dantism, in terms of this problem, which is no less than the central problem, appears, on the best hypothesis, as a fact of style (and, as such, always subordinate, even if "style" is to be understood to extend beyond its normal literary sense to include the living, or the existing).

If what we have termed language exercises are to be defined in terms of their meaning-constructing activity, or, better, of their deconstruction of meaning and construction (production) of sense, discourse will, for its part, be defined as the place wherein are manifested (or performed) meanings given from the outset, pre-existent and even, in extreme cases, hypostatic. By means of discursive performance, a world of natural or cultural, historical or individual meanings is taken over by the Subject, who thereby becomes their custodian, custodian of just so many meaning-truths. The meaning-truth, on the one hand, the Subject on the other, are the two constituent poles of discourse structure. This shows, in its poetic manifestation as well, the same series of characteristics that mark its manifestation in prose, most markedly (a) the univocal character of the meanings manifested (meaning-truths do not tolerate, by definition, ambiguity or semantic multivalency: insofar as they are "true" they must be recognized as self-identical); (b) the progressive unfolding of the sequences, which presupposes the existence of a principle or of a beginning of sense (arch) and, symmetrically, of a finality (telos); (c) the "property" of meaningful production, where the term is to be taken in its twofold value of "pertinence" and of "belongingness": "pertinence" in relation to the object, i.e., to the manifestation of the discourse, which cannot but be semantically senseful in virtue of the role of custodian exercised by the Meaning-Truth (by the Meaning-Origin) over hierarchically inferior orders; "belongingness" in relation to the Subject, who sees himself at one and the same time as proprietor of the discourse (énonciation exigencies) and as effect of the discourse (énoncé exigencies). The "meaningful" nature of the discourse, in fact, allows the Subject to circumscribe, through the act of uttering, the entire discursive production. This, on the other hand, since it is guaranteed in its "truth" by the Meaning of its meanings, will include among its sense effects the Subject as well. From this point of view, the Discourse plays, where the Subject is concerned, the same role of doubling and recognition played by the mirror for the child during the famous mirror phase ("le stade du miroir") studied by Lacan.

Thus the "metaphysical" character of discourse in general (and in se) is stressed, not only in those cases where convention so predisposes it, e.g., in manifestations of philosophical, religious, juridical, political discourse and so forth, manifestations that, on the whole, do no more than exploit, in specific "senses," this fundamental character; but also in other cases where usage seems radically alien, as, for example, in all manifestations of instrumental or communicative discourse.

On the other hand, there is no way of doing without discourse. There exists no "direct" access to reality. Reality—one knows—is nothing less than the sum of infinite universes of discourse (of ideologies), each of which represents the actuation of a determined system of meanings. Giving verbal expression to reality means speaking inside, (from inside) one of these systems actuated in discourse: it means, in short, uttering a determined discourse-universe, i.e., a determined ideology, whose meanings are confirmed as just so many truth objects or values.

It is more or less on the basis of such considerations that, most particularly over the last twenty years and in France especially, a systematic "critical" investigation of institutionalized knowledge has been undertaken, knowledge that has coalesced to form the various universes of discourse. Such investigation finds its most striking and radical exemplification in the brilliant process of deconstruction of Western metaphysical discourse initiated by Jacques Derrida. Derrida's investigations go back, on the one hand, to the analyses of Freud—insofar as they are the construction of "other" texts by deconstruction of the texts manifested—and, on the other, to Nietzsche—insofar as they are knowingly "symptomatic" thought, the meeting place of "other" mental itineraries.

Now, the main current of late nineteenth-century and of twentieth-century poetry, the current that derives from Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and for which we have adopted the term "language exercises,"operates in the same direction; indeed, it exemplifies—according to what we might call the best possible techniques—that process of ideological (and metaphysical) deconstruction of the meaning to which the actual work of constructing the text corresponds: for the construction is without foundations, mobile, and fluctuating, and construction of the text is the process of producing its sense.

But just as for the pre-eminently discursive poetry contemporary with these experiences it is possible to speak of language effects of the same kind as those described above (our observations regarding the narrative-realistic current represented primarily by the work of Jammes and Gozzano), in identical fashion, or, at least, with the use of similar argumentation, it might be maintained that all poetry, and not merely poetry subscribing to a primarily formalistic tradition, operates (it may be unintentionally) in virtue of the fact that it is in opposition to discourse. It is sufficient to cite in this sense the non-rationalizable senses that are superimposed on the rational (discursive) semanticity of the utterances, senses that are represented by the elaboration of rhythms, timbres, and, more mysteriously, by the writing itself (formal and informal messages), an aspect earlier work of ours has dealt with.

Now Pasolini cannot be assimilated to any of the positions here formulated. Though far removed from what we have called "language exercises," the use he makes of the discourse does not involve either the corrective of modern experiments with language (which the Italian neo-avantgarde might exemplify) nor the "traditional" corrective of a non-rational and non-rationalizable supplement of sense, which is obtained through formal elaboration (metrical patterns, as we have pointed out, offering themselves in isolation from the discourse—they are not incorporated into it); hence its distance from the "actual" and present-day "language exercises" and linguistic experimentation within the discourse, which is, at one and the same time, distance from the "non-actual" as well, when these are represented by various currents of realistic, and what we might very approximately term "post-romantic," poetry.

If we now go on to foreground the phenomenon and bring it into focus, we might say that the use Pasolini makes of the discourse is a use "carried to extremes" in the sense that discourse seems here to be employed in its absolute state; secondly, that this poetically abnormal use of discourse, which is in the last analysis "unpoetical"—corresponds to a desire a parte subjecti for a total diction of reality. Where by "diction" is meant both what is said (niveau de l'énoncé) and the act of its saying (niveau de renonciation), and where "total" means likewise both a phenomenology of the utmost range of contents (niveau de l'énoncé) and also the full involvement of the Subject in its own discourse (niveau de renonciation). In our case, where the utterance is concerned we will have a "reality" that moves from the world of the proletariat and the Lumpenproletariat of technological civilization to the archaic and prehistoric world of peasant and of primitive societies (the Veneto, Southern Italy, Africa, India); from biographical experience (caught, at one extreme, in its elegiac variant: Friuli and tender; at the other, in its "comic" variant: Rome and violent) to intellectual experience represented by an ideological and cultural discourse (this too embraced in its fullest range: popular ideology and culture—"decadent" ideology and culture) down to perfectly inward experience, recording both confessions of the most intimate nature and the most intimate lacerations of the personality, and also tranquil states of mind inclined to recollection and contemplation, with other more abrupt conscious states of lyrical-evocative kind or exclamation and interjection. Whereas, where the utterance act is concerned, first-person involvement in his own discourse on the part of the subject compels him to have recourse, in concomitance with the contents chosen, to a whole range of discursive typologies which bring into play, at one extreme—let us say at the "upper" extreme—the subordinate structures of logical-demonstrative discourse; and, at the "lower" extreme, the "grammatical" violence of lyrical concentration; while, in what we might call the middle zone, phenomena of evocative and contemplative parataxis are found and, generally, all the features of coordinative syntax relative to narrative expansions, to descriptions, to enumerations, and so forth.

Obviously the need to embrace all is not only to be found at an all-encompassing level, i.e., with regard to the sum total of the work or of its single components, where the different discursive typologies dealt with in the first person arrange themselves in terms of positionings foreseen and circumscribed by the contents treated; for it persists also, though not continuously, in the very texture of the text itself, where it is already active within the range of the single syntactical or rhythmical units. This is the phenomenon known as "stylistic expressivity" manifested in form of an interpénétration, or overlapping or coexistence side by side, of typologies of different kind or even reciprocally incompatible. A rapid survey, purely exemplificatory in scope, of several incipit should suffice—they are taken, almost in the order in which they appear, from the volume Le ceneri di Gramsci, and their range—macroscopic within the microscopic character of the samples—is expressed as an oscillation (or compresence) of "poetic" diction and "unpoetic" ("prosastic") diction: Senza cappotto ["impoetic" expression, of "humble" genre] nell'aha di gelsomino ["poetic" syntagm, given the ellipsis of the adjective]; Non è di maggio [syntagm, or locution, of humble-ordinary genre] questa impura aria ["poetic" syntagm, given the anticipation of the epithet]; Solo Vamare, solo il conoscere [proverb-like statement, but of "ordinary communicative" genre] / conta, non I'aver amato; / non l'aver conosciuto [… ] [highly elaborated sentence structure, thus "poetic," with double iteration of its elements and with variants of the negation and elements distributed into individual rhythmical units].

The desire for a total diction of the real actuated in the first-person discourse seems to find expression in more sophisticated forms as well. Not only, that is, through the plurality of the contents expressed and of the discursive typologies employed, both experimented to their most farflung extremes, but also by means of processes of homologation (of mimesis) between discourse structures and the structures of reality. One of the most frequent processes of this type involves the setting up of a correspondence (of an equivalence) between the temporal aspect of the discourse and the temporal aspect of the real. See, for example, the opening of "La ricchezza" in La religione del mio tempo, where discourse time, segmented on the basis of alternations of narrative durations and meditative durations, seems to take the impress of the duration and bivalence of the physical time in terms of which the real story unfolds. A sort of total rendering of the event is thus effected (with results that are almost cinematographic, for it is the film sequence that can coincide point by point with a real sequence).

If this technique develops a type of correspondence between discourse and reality founded on what we might call a normal temporality, and aims at cinematographic effects of referential duration, there also exist other types of discursive homologation that involve what we might term "viewing time," and in particular "long-distance viewing" (here too there is fairly evident reference, or it may be a prelude, to the cinema). Here the discourse follows (reproduces) the movement of a hypothetical eye which dominates the real and whose temporality seems to take the form of the product of two different temporalities: cosmic time and memory time, i.e., an external, distant, neutral time, and a more intimate, closer, more secret time. Examples of this type of homologation are found in a score of Pasolini's most effective compositions, like "L'Appennino" (in Le ceneri di Gramsci), or "L'ltalia" (from L'usignolo della Chiesa cattolica).

On the whole, though, mimesis of temporal duration and of spatial continuity (viewing time), insofar as these are structures underpinning perceived reality, is entrusted to the setting up of a syntactic continuum, achieved through a variety of expedients. In the specimen quoted, for example, it is obtained by referring to a simple object, at first given in a subordinate clause (the bianchi litorali), a series of attributes (in the order: scuri, fragranti, sconvolti), whose task it is to govern the respective noun clauses. Here, then, is the splendid passage from Le ceneri di Gramsci which we give in full from the point of view of the phenomenon described.

[ … ] Come capisco il vortice
dei sentimenti, il capriccio (greco
nel cuore del patrizio, nordico

villeggiante) che lo inghiotti nel cieco
celeste del Tirreno; la carnale
gioid dell'avventura, estetica

e puerile: mentre prostrata l'ltalia
come dentro il ventre di un'enorme
cicala, spalanca bianchi litorali,

sparsi nel Lazio di velate torme
di pini, barocchi, di giallognole
radure di ruchetta, dove dorme

col membro gonfio tra gli stracci un sogno
goethiano, il giovincello ciociaro …
Nella Maremma, scuri, di stupende fogne
d'erbasaetta in cui si stampa chiaro
il nocciôlo, pei viottoli che il buttero
della sua gioventù ricolma ignaro.

Ciecamente fragranti nelle asciutte
curve della Versifia, che sul mare
aggrovigliato, cieco, i tersi stucchi,

le tarsie lievi della sua pasquale
campagna interamente umana,
espone, incupita sul Cinquale,

dipanata sotto le torride Apuane,
i blu vitrei sul rosa … Di scogli,
frane, sconvolti, come per un panico

di fragranza, nella Riviera, molle,
erta, dove il sole lotta con la brezza
a dar suprema soavità agli olii

del mare [ … ]

… How well I understand the vortex
of feelings, the whim (Greek
in the heart of the patrician, Nordic
holidaying) which swallowed him up in the blind
sky-blue of the Tyrrenian; the carnal
joy of adventure, ecstatic

and puerile; while prostrate Italy
as within the stomach of an enormous
cicala, opens out white beaches

scattered in Latium with its veiled herds
of pines, baroque, of yellowish
clearings of ruchetta, wherein sleeps

his member swollen in the rags a neoclassical
dream, the young lad of Ciociaria …
In the Maremma, dark, with its amazing trenches

of erbasaetta where stands out clear
the nut-tree, through tracks that the herdsman
fills unwittingly with his youth.

Blindly fragrant in the dry
curves of Versilia, which on the sea
tangled and blind, the clear stuccos,

the light inlay of its eastertide
countryside completely human,
spreads out, darkling on Cinquale

unwound under the torrid Apuane,
glassy blue on rose … With reefs,
landslides, disarrayed, as in a panic

of fragrance, in the Riviera, soft,
steep, where the sun struggles with the breeze
to give supreme lightness to the oil

of the sea [ … ]

The spatial continuum of the vision (imagined—recollected) thus influences—in this and in the other compositions quoted—the syntactic continuum. So that the discourse seems to offer itself outright as an analogon of the real whose basic structures are reproduced: i.e., the continuous structures of space and time. It is this that represents the point of maximum extension of "total diction" as Pasolini experiments it: the real is expressed not only to the point of the "unpoetical," but right down to its most general and non-meaningful structures.

Now it is at just this point, i.e., where the total diction might seem to coincide, reinforcing it to the limits of its potential, with the metaphysical character of the discourse, transforming the desire for (the will to) expressive totality into a total metaphysics of expression, it is at just this point that it becomes possible to bring to the surface of Pasolini's operation, as we have so far exemplified and described it, an impressive active criticism of discourse.

The example given above, in fact, as well as a syntactic continuum as mimesis of the continuum of viewing (of spatial-temporal reality) further offers a phenomenon of exactly opposite value: i.e., the suspension, the disorientation of the meaning brought about by the difficulty of seizing at once upon any agreement between the attributes of the object (scuri, fragranti, etc.)—whose function is to govern the single noun clauses—and the object itself (the bianchi litorali) whose outline recedes progressively to the point of disappearing behind the accumulation of the propositions, which thereby give the appearance of being acephalous. This indecisiveness, immediate enough, of the meaning calls into question the primary characteristic of the discourse, in virtue of which it presents itself as custodian of the "truth": of the univocal character of the meaning, its self-identity, non-ambiguity, etc.

Keeping back examples of this till later, we can at once insert under this heading the substantial thematic antinomy of Pasolini's poetry. Without insisting excessively on the aspect most treated of exegetically, it will be enough for us to observe that entire constellations of meanings, or vast and complex systems of meaning, seem to be contested by constellations of meaning (systems of meaning) of opposite value, so that the discourse can no longer act as depository of one single truth. Certain compositions (the short poem "Le ceneri di Gramsci" comes to mind, for example) are entirely based on, and articulated around, a macroscopic antinomy, which branches out capillary fashion to touch on all points of the text, not permitting it to settle on any one definition, on any one definite meaning.

But the second characteristic of the discourse, too, that relative to the progress of the sequences with their immanent exigencies of origin and finality, will be found to be called into question by the manner in which Pasolini's discourse is actuated. Here too, the relevant examples can easily enough be deduced from the occurrences of syntactic continuity themselves, for it is they that witness to the most advanced point reached by Pasolini in his will to total diction—examples whose significance here is twofold, in that the syntactic continuum seems to be nothing less than the progression itself. If, then, we go back to the first of the examples mentioned in this regard, and precisely to the first part of the poem "La ricchezza," it is readily enough established that on the temporal (narrative) continuum of which the text is effectively made up there is superimposed a different process which is perfectly antithetical: the iteration, or the recurrence, of determined elements that function as points of demarcation within the composition (as "semantic rhymes" as it were) so that, in addition to the forward movement (the movement prorsus of the "prose," of the "discourse") there is a further, and contrary movement, the movement, the ebb, à rebours, typical of the "poetic" (of the "verses," or versus). We refer to the métonymie pair sguardo-luce, further lexicalized on the basis of a narrow range of synonyms (occhio-i, guardare, etc., for sguardo; the archaic, and Dantesque, lume for luce), and then filtered down, once more metonymically, Schiuma è questo sguardo), in the word-image of schiuma and its derivatives Schiuma gli sciami / di borghesi; Schiuma [ … ] gli stanchi rumori; Schiuma [ … ] questo fermento; Schiumeggia innocente I'ardore; [ … ] questo schiumeggiare della vita). Here, as a demonstration, is a survey of the lexicalizations: [… ] lancia sospetti sguardi / di animale; [ … ] quegli occhi / scrutano intimoriti; [ … ] aifiotti / del lume divino; un altro lume; quella pura / luce; I'umiliato sguardo; I'occhio cala; quei / poveri occhi; É una luce [ … ] che si spande; [E una luce] Che si spande; Schiuma è questo sguardo [to these the occurrences of "schiuma" quoted above must be related]; se ti guardi intorno. We might further point out that the two verses that sum up this first part of the poem contain the word cieco, which is, admittedly, a word of very high frequency in Pasolini's poetry, though it is significant that in this case it is associated, however negatively, both with sguardo and also with luce. E più cieco il sensuale rimpianto / di non essere senso altrui, sua ebrezza antica.

If this demonstration is to be carried forward to the sections that follow in this same poem, where the progressive structures are in all respects analogous to those of the first part, the confirmation of a concomitant and oppositive process of iteration of elements will be seen to be striking.

Such iterations break up the progression of the discourse so that its movement, turning back upon itself, scanned by identical elements, is deprived of goal (of finality) and cut off from any hypothetical origin; while the complexity of the syntactic articulation, equally involved in the constitution of that mimetic continuum of which we have spoken, ends up rendering the meaning fluctuating, hindering a movement that would fix it on foreseen or foreseeable elements of the phrase. The "total diction" Pasolini seeks through his use of discourse is thereby revealed as, contemporaneously, a criticism of discourse; for the moment we might call it a criticism of discourse relative to the first two characteristics we have pointed out in it: criticism, that is, of meaning, and criticism of structures (linear, progressive, teleological structures).

Now, criticism of meaning and criticism of structures are no more than the consequence, observable respectively at the level of the utterance and at the level of the overall organization of the discourse, of a generalized process of expropriation-falsification of the linguistic modulation. If Pasolini's poetic discourse is modulated, grammatically, inside the voice of the Subject (shown in violent close-up), setting out from Meaning-Truths ("meanings" of history and biography; "truths" of ideology and culture, etc.), in fact, i.e., semantically, it will be found to be phase-displaced, built over a fracture: non-correspondence of the voice of the Subject and of the meanings it utters. The voice of the subject is rendered extraneous to the meaning by the interposing of a formal pattern (the outdated metrical and rhythmical patterns referred to already), and it is this pattern that breaks up the fundamental articulation on which the structure of the Discourse itself is built: the Voice of the Subject-Meaning.

It is a schema, in fact, that does not offer itself either as a catalyzing element that would serve as a starting-point for unified definition of the discourse meanings and for the voice that expresses them insofar as they are "language" (see the discursive kind of poetic experiences earlier quoted: Gozzano, Jammes); nor is it the carrier of a supplement of sense thanks to which musical, material "authentication" can be attributed to the meanings borne by, "incarnated in," the sequences (as is the case, for example, in Romantic poetry. Compare, in this regard, the "murmuring" of Lamartine's poetry). In Pasolini's case, the formal pattern acts from outside with respect to the discourse, which it constrains to a movement, a torsion, not at one with its cursus, while, in its turn, it operates on the pattern to the point of disfiguring it under the pressure of its own exigencies (exigencies of syntax, of meaning positions, etc.).

Thus arise two reciprocally correlated complexities, which both remain unresolved: a syntactic complexity (the complexity of the "torsion" to which the discourse is subjected) which achieves no solution into "meaning"; and a formal complexity (the complexity of the metrical patterns, deformed and altered by the pressure of the discourse) which is never resolved into that higher effect of the sense which is "song." To define more narrowly still: on the one hand, we find a syntactic complexity which the constriction of formal patterns provokes acting on the meaning to the point of de-constructing it, of undoing it, through the multiplication of the connections and the complication of the structures, or through the increase (redundancy) of elements lexematically pressed into service to fill out the patterns; on the other, the formal lay-out, compromised and disfigured by discursive pressure, finds itself in no position to produce that semantic over determination of the discourse into which the sense of the text can be made to flow.

Dissipated "meanings" and unrealized "songs" thus represent the point from which the Voice of the Subject sets out to express its own particular linguistic modulation, a modulation that, as we have said, assumes a dual, overlapping and reciprocal phase-difference (non-fulfillment) of meaning and of song insofar as this is a state of defamiliarization and falsification (of expropriation), in virtue of which the discourse (the totality of the diction effected through the discourse) becomes susceptible of moving from the Same to the Other as to the sole condition of its authenticity and identity.

This is the situation that characterizes Pasolini's poetry in its most striking achievements, in the central collections (Le ceneri di Gramsci and La religione del mio tempo) as well as some of the compositions of L'usignolo della Chiesa cattolica (like, for example, the already mentioned "L'ltalia," and the whole section "Lingua"). So that the examples that might be called on as proof of our contentions would coincide with all the texts and collections named. As the criterion so far adopted is one of economy (of space, of course) we shall continue in a rapid confirmatory glance by looking again at the lengthy quotation of Le ceneri di Gramsci given above.

Over and above what has already been arrived at in our investigation (instability and indecisive character of the meaning) the passage in question shows very clearly, in more general terms, that phase-difference and appropriation of the sense already referred to, in this case ascribable to the rigid segmentation into subordinated structures of single sentential blocks, wherein different grammatical subjects, the almost desinential collocation of lexematic elements (substantives, epithets), dislocation or elimination of verbs, all of which bring to a standstill any normal semantic itinerary. The itinerary is diffracted into a myriad of sense nuclei which cannot be immediately connected up, given that any kind of connection other than semantic connection is to be excluded—e.g., one effected by the melodic line—since there also exists an analogous, parallel disorientation of the formal framework. As a more precise verification, see the final verse quoted above and here, for the reader's convenience, reproduced:

1 … Di scogli,
2 frane, sconvolti, come per un panico
3 di fragranza nella Riviera, molle,
4 erta, dove il sole lotta con la brezza
5 a dar suprema soavità agli olii
6 del mare …

1 … with reefs
2 landslides, disarrayed, as in a panic
3 of fragrance, in the Riviera, soft,
4 steep, where the sun struggles with the breeze
5 to give supreme lightness to the oil
6 of the sea …

where units that are regular in formal terms (there are only two cases of hypermetric verses but they fall correctly into the hendecasyllabic computation, for the first—our verse 2—has a double unstressed syllabic termination, in consonance, in fact, with Apuane; while the second—our verse 4—elides its first syllable by synaloepha with the preceding molle at the end of verse 3) are in reality segmented into microsequences that undermine the overall rhythmical structures. The structures do not even find support in the demarcation points of timbric relations, when they present as here the paradigm scogli: molle: olii, aberrant from a grammatical and visual point of view and not merely phonetically (see, though, the further pattern Apuane: panicd). Now, it if is allowed that such disorder, such formal disarray, is the product of the oppositive violence of the discourse which the metrical and rhythmical schemata should have, let us say, "interiorized" (or "rendered melodic"), there also exists—and it is a fact we have already pointed out—a quite opposite effect: i.e., a dismemberment of the discourse on the part of just these schemata, which appear as impregnably external to the discourse. Hence, the sentence no longer seems linear, but is broken up minutely to form a close network of propositional segments, whose constituent elements are custodians of different, contrasting or mutually opposed values. Thus we have only a nominal governance exercised by the adjective sconvolti over the now far-removed litorali, deferred with respect to its complements (the scogli-frane pair, whose elements are articulated around a masculine-feminine opposition, aided by violent enjambement; two circumstantials in adjoining succession though their value is different: a circumstantial of manner (come per un panico, etc.) and a circumstantial of place (nella Riviera), to whose substantive Riviera the desinential divarication of the pair of epithets is singularly well adapted, for they too are separated by enjambement; a successive proposition introduced by dove, where the presence of the verb gives the impression of opening a phrase which, though, it closes: thus it is that the whole sentence constitutes as it were an exemplum of éclatement of linearity and, thus, of the meaning of the discourse, whose formal framework, as we have seen, offers no solution of a hypersemantic order.

This double movement, this double and reciprocal complexity of Pasolini's text, which determines its structure in point of semantic displacement, in point of expropriation of meaning with respect to the voice that administers the discourse, so that the Subject's word ends up being, in a certain sense, beside itself, in a diction that is at once total and suspended, entirely involved and critically deferred, this double movement, this double complexity, is present even where one might think the formal dimension absent, in eclipse. For it persists, deguisèe though it be, even in the most free compositions like, for example, the poem "La ricchezza," which is arranged, it would seem, as an uninterrupted flux of "free verse," though each of its sequences involves timbric links which tie together all its rhythmic units.

At times, the secret formal tie that constrains the continual flux of the discourse is characterized by an inflexible normativity. This is the case in the third part of "La ricchezza," where the sumptuous, overwhelming, baroque "apparition" of Rome in the morning is linked in each of its rhythmic units to other units, while it is, at one and the same time, regulated in these relationships, and throughout the whole extension of the laisse (41 verses), by the submerged pattern of the terzina itself.

The same phenomenon is to be found for the "Poesie incivili," the last section of La religione del mio tempo, where frank revelation of the Subject and more direct syllabation (with consequently accentuated manifestation of the discourse) are found side by side with the rigorous schemata—subtly disguised, however—of the fourteenth-century canzone. Were it not for the fact that, in this case, we have already gone beyond the bounds of the phenomenon so far defined and described. In fact, the adoption of the formal pattern no longer acts on the discourse to suspend its meaning, impeding and interrupting its structural continuity; nor, on the other hand, does the complex elaboration of the schema seem to derive from the pressure brought to bear by the discourse. The reciprocal interaction of the two dimensions (the discursive and the formal dimensions) does not take place here where the discourse exists in its bare linearity, and where complexity of metrical-timbric elaboration must be ascribed simply to autonomous requirements of variation. The reactivation of the meaning is thus accompanied by adoption of what is in effect formalism; metrical forms that are refined in the sense that they are but scarcely functional. In Pasolini's next collection, Poesia informa di rosa, the further step will be taken of inserting the discourse into the framework of an unrelated iconicity, sanctioning in the most striking fashion the reciprocal independence of the two structure. (Weakening of formal structure, in some parts of the book, will open the way for a brute inflow of meaning, for its "metaphysical" character—an aspect we have defined above—while preparing the way for the successive, and substantially unsuccessful, Trasumanar e organizzar.)

And so it is at this point that our demonstration may end, at its natural point of rest: internally, its tasks are done; externally, the demonstranda coincide with the bounds of the object. Bounds which, while they bring one experience to a close, do so in order to open another: the experience of an intense civil "presence" (or civil "pedagogics") carried on through the most widely varied means of communication: cinema and interviews, articles in the official press (Corriere della Sera) and "civil" poetry, as their author terms it, though it might just as well be called "uncivil."

The only thing that remains to be done is to furnish, or attempt to furnish, a cumulative interpretation of the phenomenon that works itself out with the "Poesie incivili": this is its concluding section; nevertheless, it joins up, circlewise, with what had constituted the beginning: the poems in Friuli dialect, where use of dialect, looked at as the equivalent of a "dead language," strives towards exactly the same ends of formal excess reached by taking over, and refinedly elaborating, the patterns of canzone stanzas.

Well then, if twentieth-century poetry seems intent on transforming "discourse" into "language," aiming at the attainment of a pre-discursive position, which might be defined as no less than the verbal character in itself, in Pasolini's case, on the contrary, we are faced with an operation that tends in exactly the opposite direction. In a striving after totality he takes over the entire configuration of the discourse with its inherent specific characteristics (of meaning, of linearity, of "property") while articulating it in the complex and defamiliarizing terms of a structural antinomy—whence the semantic displacement that runs through the text, and that the voice of the Subject is called upon to "make his own"—so that he thereby sets in act an experiment that carries the entire expressive situation beyond the discourse, placing it after the discourse. In the first case, the poet, occupied with the de-construction of the discourse, moves towards the "atemporal" or towards the "origin," it may well be with the aim of experiencing its absence or its continual "deferment"; in Pasolini's case, the operator, while he keeps the discourse intact, while overdetermining it critically, seems to hint at the possibility of some "posthumous" dimension, where the effects of truth (of history, of temporality, of melodic centralization of lived experience) collapse into the defamiliarized sense, into the unformulated song of a word that has come to the point of circumscribing its own otherness: sheer mortality.