Claudio Magris’s proposal: among the dates to commemorate the writer one hundred years after his birth, we choose June 16 in which the poem on the 1968 clashes between protesters and police came out. The verses about those moments of struggle caused a scandal
Next year marks the centenary of Pasolini’s birth. Among the possible dates to remember him, without too much respect for the registry office, one could choose a few particularly significant days of his life and work. For example, June 16, because on that date, in 1968, Pasolini published the famous poem about the clashes in Valle Giulia, in Rome, among the young protesters of 1968 and the police officers of the Celere. Poetry caused a scandal – which was not uncommon when it came to Pasolini’s stances on great epochal issues. The marchers were approved above all by the right-thinking, convinced, like the students themselves in the procession, that they were progressive and culturally advanced and unaware – the poet was among the first to realize it – to put themselves at the service of Capital, of a form of capitalism, a habit English and French joke.
One can march for a variety of reasons. In that march to Valle Giulia the sixty-eight children with the faces of father’s children – the same evil eye […] bullies, blackmailers, confident and brazen, good breed that does not lie, writes the poet – they fight with policemen. I sympathized with the policemen, he writes, because they are children of the poor. Paradoxically, they are the policemen who seem humanly similar to the people who marched to occupy not universities but rather factories, at a time when the Communist Party had not yet begun to transform itself into a mass radicalizing movement, concerned with defending the right to suck one’s thumb – which is also sacrosanct, of course – more than work and conditions of workers. I remember that many years ago Sister Carmelo, the janitor of the building in via del Ronco 6 in Trieste, where I lived, on May Day put on a decent suit, jacket and tie, to join the party procession. A lesson in respect – of that respect which, in a civilized country, should characterize even a tough political struggle.
Over the years and in different forms Pasolini and d’Annunzio have lived, denounced and made their own – in the body, in their sweats, in their often narcissistic and degraded impulses – the radical transformation of man occurred in their time and is happening and will happen with increasing violence, a violence often unnoticed because it is experienced as a natural reaction.
With a lacerating contradiction Pasolini realizes that those policemen children of poor people who feel humanly close are historically wrong, because they are opposed to what, at that moment, is the course of the world to which, without realizing it, the 1968 march cooperates and promotes. A new form of capitalism and the society of consumption, which the protesters believe they are fighting against and of which they are the vanguard, helping to destroy or weaken the institutions and values that could be a small barrier to its global triumph. At that moment Pasolini knows that those students represent the new and that, regardless of his dislike for that new, opposing the Course of the world is also a blindness to change. But a change, according to Pasolini, which destroys any sense of the sacred.
Think of the positions taken by Pasolini, which surprised his radical friends, on the referendum on divorce and above all on abortion. Pasolini, after the outcome of the referendum on divorce, rejoices in the defeat of Fanfani and his political party and that the divorce has not been repealed, but he captures and rejects the tone of the majority of the victorious majority, who voted like him but substantially for other reasons that is not to free many people from unsustainable or absurd situations but to downgrade even fundamental feelings and bonds – love, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood – to replaceable goods like any consumer good. it was television – he writes – that in fact convinced Italians to vote “no” in the referendum.
E in his words on abortion Pasolini certainly does not ignore the drama and suffering of women, moreover, unfairly considered by the old law to be solely responsible – reason in itself more than enough to consider the law that only affected them unjust – but also knows that the individual exists in every instant of his life, always he or she in every phase of his parable.
Little did I know Pasolini, basically when we were working together on the anthology The no time of the sea by Biagio Marin, this ten-year-old blessed seventy-year-old, as Pasolini said. At that time, those years of Marin’s age, contradicted by his vitality, seemed to me many; now much less.
Those students from Valle Giulia who Pasolini did not like challenged the rules, not only those of the world and the school in which they grew up, but the rules themselves. They did not reflect that the rules, contrary to what they say, are left-wing; it is no coincidence that the frontal attack on the welfare state and workers’ rights won with the destruction of the rules deregulation Reagan’s or Thatcher’s policy. A fitting praise of Pasolini was formulated by Sciascia, defining him out of time, that is, non-ideological. Today it seems at least incorrect to wish a Merry Christmas; but perhaps it is still legitimate to complain, with a verse from Biagio Marin, it is only and always evening / and never, never again Nadal.
The Garzanti volume. The letters found.
The letters of Pier Paolo Pasolini, for the first time in complete form. The volume collects it The letters
, edited by Antonella Giordano and Nico Naldini (who passed away in 2020), just released by Garzanti in the I libri della Spiga series (pp. 1,500, euro 60). The book integrates the corpus known so far with over 300 unpublished letters, found in the archives of foundations, libraries and cultural institutes, and among the recipients and their heirs. Among the unpublished, letters to Elsa Morante, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Attilio Bertolucci, Giorgio Bassani.
December 12, 2021 (change December 12, 2021 | 16:59)
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