To make it clear who Pasolini was, suppose a digital native who by chance wanted to know him, we could start with an aspect that distinguishes him from all the intellectuals of his time (and ours). He was a man who never tired of challenging limits and breaking down fences, he was never satisfied with himself for this reason he continued to experiment with different ways of living and communicating: cultural promoter, inventor of magazines, pedagogue, author of poems, novels, short stories, theater, songs, studies on popular culture, critical and linguistic essays, polemics and interventions in newspapers, anthologist, rewriter of classics (the Comedy), translator, traveler and author of reportage, screenwriter, film director, painter. If that were not enough, it could be specified that within each of these activities he experimented with mixed forms, genres, languages and styles. For example, he was a realistic novelist, politician and visionary, poet in dialect and in language, and he was a lyric, diaristic, civil poet, in his own way religious, aphoristic-sententious, always adopting very varied metrics, with measures ranging from very short to short to poem. He kept looking for different ways for the simple fact that more than literature, cinema, theater he was interested in living life, making it triumph. That said, one might think of a soul in pain. It was, but it was also the opposite: Walter Siti emphasized his vital fullness, physical strength, which was linked to sexual voracity.
Nothing was enough for him to contain or represent life, so he improvised himself in ever new and almost always fatally unsuccessful or unfinished solutions. The desperate vitality to which he entitled an important poem by Poem in the form of a rose also the awareness of impossibility that forces him to repeated abjurations to always start over. It is impressive to think that everything has developed in just thirty years of youth activity Poems in Casarsa up to the projects and titles that crowd furiously in the last year of life: the Corsair writingsthe poetic collection The new youththe last movie Shallthe unfinished monstrous Petroleum. Perhaps no Italian writer has handled and mixed so many artistic forms (the only possible comparison perhaps Dante, who if he had lived in the twentieth century perhaps would have been attracted to cinema). Not even remotely comparable with the variety of his production are the experiments of the Neo-avant-garde, which also made its manifesto of the infringement. No work is more open than that of Pasolini, even if the theorists of the open work were those of Group 63 whom he did not love and who did not love him. The fact that his was a work that remained open spontaneously, due to excessive force of nature, while that of Eco had to be open by definition of method.
The apotheosis of the mixture and the unfinished Petroleuma magmatic and shapeless summa to which he immolated himself and in which the motives for his murder are recognized. Not even Italo Calvino, his opponent on many fronts, called the squirrel for his unpredictable tendency to flee towards new goals, has never revealed so much anxiety and desire to take new paths. Indeed, a scholar like Carla Benedetti, in 1998, compared the two most representative authors of the second half of the twentieth century, to side with Pasolini’s impure literature against Calvino’s composure. That forced antithesis had the virtue of dramatizing a literary landscape usually described as a field of tepid and somewhat artificial tensions.
When we talk about Pasolini, we are talking about a unicum in Italian culture. As an intellectual and writer he had some fathers but few brothers. Children, very few. Among the fathers there is certainly Gramsci on the ideological level, there is Gadda for the mixed linguistic option, there is his teacher Contini for the critical-philological side.. Then there are the poets, older brothers, of the previous generation: Penna, Bertolucci, Caproni… he loves them but is careful not to make them models to follow. Moravia was a friend of him but he wasn’t a model either and neither was Elsa Morante, who harshly criticized when he came out History. The brothers-brothers can be found in the group of Officina magazine, shared with Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi and Franco Fortini then.
Nobody really looked like himand Fortini in particular, despite being close to him, did not spare him fierce criticism, considering him a moralist enemy of the people and all in all a man sold to the capitalist industry in a cinematographic guise, the same industry that Pasolini abhorred in the name of primitive innocence. His sworn enemy, Edoardo Sanguineti, branded him as a nostalgic for the rural Italy of fascism (How green our valley was, though! He laughed). But declaring oneself a Marxist and being against progress was only an apparent contradiction, if progress was the wild development of the Italian boom whose harmful effects still persist today.
The fact is that in addition to being a man of contradiction, Pasolini was a courageous man because he was contradictory, that is in order to assert his contradictions he did not spare himself, he shouted and hurt the sensibilities and the privileges of his time: hurl himself without too much caution against political power (the Palace and the DC of the new hierarchs and mafia), economic power (Eni, Cefis), widespread conformity (from consumption and TV) . For Pasolini, all this led back to a new fascism, which according to him continued the Mussolini regime, presenting itself in a perhaps softer but winning guise.
Nobody looked like him, it took (and takes) too much courage to look like him, too much poetry, too much scandal, too much narcissism, too much contempt for respectability and consistency: and the famous director who was both a flogger of capitalism and entertainment, the anticonsumer who paid the kids for his dangerous nights was brazenly in the fire of the contradiction. Just as the punishing corsair of the bourgeoisie who wrote in the Corriere della Sera was in the fire of contradiction.
One of his quasi-biological contradictions was that he was surrounded by a lot of people, essentially remaining a block. If you look at the letters (just republished in a new Garzanti edition), you get the immediate impression of a personality that was always at the center, a crossroads of his time. There is no contemporary intellectual who has not been in contact with him, but the impression remains that of a radical loneliness albeit very (too?) Noisy (one must be very strong / to love loneliness, he wrote).
The scandal, sometimes deliberate and conscious, accompanied him throughout his lifestarting from the early years with the accusation in ’49 (later declassified) of corruption of minors in Casarsa, to continue with the trial for obscenity against Life boys, without forgetting the numerous complaints and judicial problems experienced by the films up to the posthumous ones. Another irreducible and inevitable contradiction that this scandal, which was the reason for his success, was also his persecution: the same scandal was at the origin of the marginalization on both sides of the magnetic attraction he still enjoys. today the public figure is more than the writer, who knows how well known he is. When it is said that today we lack a Pasolini, it should be understood which Pasolini we are talking about, but on the other hand it would be impossible to separate the self-styled communist from the apocalyptic, the luminosity from nihilism, the progressive from the nostalgic. Would we really be able to endure his generosity and his unpredictability today? It is legitimate to doubt it: if anything, sooner or later someone will come up with the idea of correcting it or shredding it here and there. So, rather than invoke it, finally we just have to read it.
Necklace. The work of the author: 21 twenty-one with the Corriere
A series created by Corriere della Sera in collaboration with Garzanti and Guanda, which offers on newsstands – once a week, from today – 21 works by Pier Paolo Pasolini (each issue at e 8.90 plus the cost of the newspaper). The Pasolini library opens today with the first volume, the novel Life boys, with a text by Emanuele Trevi and a preface by Vincenzo Cerami. And continue proposing every week, until July 23, many works of Pasolini’s production, including novels (March 12 will be on newsstandsA violent life), collections of editorials on customs and politics (March 19 will be released Corsair writings), famous travel diaries (on the 26th it will be on newsstandsThe smell of India) as well as review collections (Lutheran letterson newsstands April 2), poetic syllogs (The ashes of Gramsciwill be released on April 16). And then theater, collections of reviews, political essays, and more. All with important prefaces and with the original covers created by Studio Xxy.
March 4, 2022 (change March 4, 2022 | 20:49)
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