Pier Paolo Pasolini

• Born: March 5, 1922
• Birthplace: Bologna, Italy
• Died: November 2, 1975
• Place of death: Ostia, Italy

Other literary forms

Pier Paolo Pasolini (pos-oh-LEE-nee) was a critic, philologist, film director, playwright, translator, and novelist as well as a poet. His first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955; The Ragazzi, 1968), based on rigorous sociological, ethnographic, and linguistic observation, chronicles the street life of shantytown adolescents through dialogue, flashbacks, and direct intrusions by the author; Pasolini makes original and abundant use of slang and street language. Within three months after the book appeared, the prime minister’s office reported it to the public prosecutor in Milan for its “pornographic content,” and Pasolini was brought to trial. Similar controversies recurred throughout Pasolini’s career as a writer and film director.

Achievements

Outside Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini is better known as a director of films than as a poet, and even within Italy, it was not until nearly a decade after his death that his poetic talent was fully appreciated. His poetry is considered the most important in Italy after Giuseppe Ungaretti’s generation and ranks with the work of Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda as among the most powerful political poetry of the twentieth century. At the time of Pasolini’s early education, a triad of nineteenth century poets (Giosuè Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D’Annunzio), fond of artificial language and classical literary convention, ruled Italian letters; they were followed by the Hermetic school of poetry (Umberto Saba, Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale), which emphasized personal expression and symbolic density.

Both schools were disdainful of social commentary in poetry. After the fiasco of Italian fascism, however, the politically responsive neorealist was born in Italy, and it was within the framework of neorealism that Pasolini worked. When The Ashes of Gramsci appeared in 1957, it broke a long line of pure lyric and Hermetic poetry in Italy: The poet described his own inner conflict between reason and instinct, between nostalgia for the past and the need for a new order, using a straightforward Italian diction free of the Latinate loftiness to which his poetic predecessors had necessarily been bound.

Biography

Pier Paolo Pasolini was the first of two sons born to Carlo Alberto Pasolini and Susanna Colussi Pasolini. Pasolini’s father, though from an aristocratic Bolognese family, was reduced to poverty and became a soldier. Until his death in 1958, his life was a dream of military and fascist ideals, and after his discharge from the military, he became an alcoholic. It was with the petite bourgeoisie background of his mother’s family of the Friuli area (in the northeastern corner of Italy, bordered by Austria and Yugoslavia) that the poet identified. Pasolini’s mother, who had inherited her Hebrew name from a great-grandmother who was a Polish Jew, was a schoolteacher and already thirty when she was married.

Pasolini’s family followed his father to wherever he was stationed in Northern Italy. His parents’ marriage was turbulent and marked by frequent temporary separations, and his mother channeled all her love into her relationship with her sons, especially her older son. Indeed, the relationship between Pasolini and his mother, whom he would one day cast as the Virgin Mary in his film Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964; The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964), was animated by an unequivocally incestuous tension. When Pasolini and his mother moved to Rome without his father in 1945, his mother took a position as a maid to support her son’s literary aspirations. The image of his “artless, eternally youthful mother” pervades all the poet’s work.

In high school in Bologna, after Pasolini’s inevitable exposure to the poetry of Carducci, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio, one of his teachers read to him a poem by Arthur Rimbaud. Later, Pasolini claimed that his conversion away from fascism dated from that day; he also wrote that after Rimbaud, poetry was dead. William Shakespeare was another early discovery, and Pasolini’s reading of Niccolò Tommaseo’s compilation, I canti del popolo greco (1943; songs of the Greek people), did much to awaken Pasolini’s appreciation of the folk culture of his mother’s Friuli. Shakespeare, Tommaseo, and Carducci constituted Pasolini’s personal triad, recognized as such in “La religione del mio tempo” (the religion of my time). He came early under the spell of the Provençal trobar clus as well, and he considered himself a disciple of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

In the winter of 1942-1943, Pasolini’s mother moved back to Friuli to avoid the bombings in the larger cities. Most of the following year, which Pasolini called the most beautiful of his life, was spent there with his mother and brother. That September, he was drafted, but a week later, on the day of Italy’s truce with the Allies, he escaped into a canal as his column of recruits was marched to a train en route to Germany. In April, 1944, his brother Guido went to the mountains to join the Osoppo-Friuli partisan division. He and some comrades were captured by the Communist Garibaldi Brigade, politically tied to Marshal Tito’s fighters and favoring the incorporation of Friuli into the emerging nation of Yugoslavia; the comrades were later slain. The death of Guido was deeply traumatic to Pasolini and embarrassing to him as the Communist he would soon become.

Pasolini taught briefly in a private school, became involved in the local politics of Friuli, wrote for the local newspapers, and at length established himself as a Communist. With his maturity in the 1940’s, he began to feel increasing guilt for his homosexuality, guilt he dwelt on in his unpublished diaries (written from 1945 to 1949), from which he later extracted the completed whole of L’usignolo della chiesa cattolica (the nightingale of the Catholic Church). Repeatedly, he writes of “being lost,” of being dominated by the “slave penis.” By 1949, Pasolini’s sexual acts with other men were such that attempts were made to blackmail him, and he was formally charged by the magistrate of San Vito al Tagliamento with corrupting minors and committing lewd acts in public. Before the carabinieri of Casarsa, by whom he was also summoned, he defended himself by invoking the name of André Gide, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947, and by describing his activities as an “erotic and literary experiment.” Although Pasolini was acquitted in 1952, the fact that he did not deny the charge led the executive committee of the Communist Federation of Pordenone to expel him from the Italian Communist Party for moral and political unworthiness. It was a triple blow: Friuli had turned its back on him, his party had rejected him, and he had lost his teaching position. In a letter to a member of the Udine Federation, he declared his intention to remain a Communist and to persist in living for the sake of his mother, although another person might consider suicide. In the winter of 1949, he fled with her to Rome.

Pasolini’s first few years in Rome were difficult, but the eternity and modernity of Rome captivated him, and he thrived on the sexual freedom that the metropolis afforded him. A teaching position was secured for him in 1951, and soon he was writing for Il popolo di Roma, Il giornale of Naples, and Il lavoro of Genoa. He cemented friendships with writers such as Giorgio Bassani,Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Attilio Bertolucci, and Federico Fellini, whom he helped with the Roman dialect of Fellini’s 1956 film Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957). In 1952, Pasolini tied for second place and won 50,000 lire in the Quattro Arti contest in Naples for his article on Ungaretti.

The years from 1953 to 1961 were the most productive of Pasolini’s career. He published two novels, four books of poetry, and the critical essays collected in Passione e ideologia (1960; passion and ideology), and from 1955 to 1959, he directed the literary magazine Officina. He wrote thirteen film scripts, translated the Oresteia of Aeschylus, and directed and scripted his first film, Accattone (1961). Rome was alive in those years with intellectual creativity and political ferment, but as exciting as it was for Pasolini, it also took its toll on him. For the first time, he found himself getting involved with literary projects merely because he needed a public; he was plagued by litigation and by vicious journalistic attacks.

After his debut in the world of filmmaking, Pasolini’s life changed course. His fertile mind seethed with new ideas, and the names of far-flung places began to appear in his work. In 1966, he made his first visit to New York, where he sought out young revolutionary blacks in Harlem and was mightily impressed by the potential he discovered in the United States. Two years later, he was deeply disillusioned by the “tragedy-revolt” of the student riots of 1968; in his view, the youth, who had been cradled by the class struggle, had sold out to the bourgeoisie. Between 1970 and 1975, he made a successful and controversial trilogy of films—Il decamerone (1971; The Decameron, 1975), I racconti di Canterbury (1972; The Canterbury Tales, 1975), and Il fiore belle mille e una notte (1974; The Arabian Nights, 1975)—based on his belief that the “last bastion of reality seemed to be the ’innocent’ bodies, with the archaic, dark, vital violence of their sexual organs.” In the Corriere della Sera of June 5, 1975, however, he repudiated this notion, claiming that “even the ’reality’ of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, tampered with by the power of consumerism.” Pasolini’s polemics against the consumer society had become harangues, and the poet did not seem to have any cures to offer for the ills he so vehemently identified. His output in his last years was increasingly complex and contradictory.

The exact circumstances of Pasolini’s death may never be clearly established. Late on the evening of November 1, 1975, Pasolini set off in his Alfa Romeo GT and picked up a street hustler named Giuseppe Pelosi. On the beach at Ostia, the two of them struggled, Pasolini was struck on the head with a board, and Pelosi subsequently ran over Pasolini with his own car. Because the boy was unmarked, however, and because he gave a confused testimony, there is some reason to believe that Pelosi was merely an agent for others who had more reason than he to eliminate Pasolini.

Analysis

As a writer and as a man, Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most complex figures of twentieth century literature, and his life and work are replete with paradoxes. Despite his belief that his leftist poetry was different from all other poetry being written, he employed the hendecasyllable, the most widely used meter in all Italian verse in all periods, and the terza rima of Dante. He rebelled against Italy’s long-entrenched cultural traditionalism yet declared himself a lover of tradition whom it pained to witness the disappearance of Italian peasant culture. He was a Marxist and at the same time did not abandon the Roman Catholic Church; he condemned abortion and called on the Church to lead the fight away from the materialism that was gaining such a stranglehold on capitalistic societies everywhere. With his romantic spirit of identifying with the outcasts of the earth, Marxism came easily to him, but as a gay man, his Marxism demanded a morality that allowed for the individual. His religion was the liberation of the masses, yet he chose to focus not on their struggle but rather on their vindicated joy. Although he professed to love the common people, such people as individuals figure little in his poetry. His style in both his poetry and his films was stark and unsentimental, yet he could wax fulsome and self-indulgent when writing on the subject of his mother.

Poesie a Casarsa

To some extent, these contradictions were apparent in Pasolini’s earliest, dialect poems. As a result of the breakup of the Roman Empire and the late emergence of Italy as a political entity, Italy inherited a multiplicity of dialects, substantially more varied than the dialects of most other Western European nations. Pasolini by nature felt attracted by the sound of his mother’s dialect, Friulian, and, impressed by Paul Valéry’s “hésitation prolongée entre le sens et le son,” he opted for the sound element. He wrote his first volume of poetry, Poesie a Casarsa (poetry to Casarsa), in Friulian, publishing it privately in Bologna in 1942 and dedicating it to his father. When the slim volume of forty-six pages was reviewed, the review had to be printed in Switzerland, for dialect literature was very much anathema to the fascist regime. In addition to the scandal implicit in using an Italian dialect for a literary endeavor, Pasolini’s medium was a special, less-recognized dialect within Friulian, distinct from the standardized jargon used by Friulian poets Ermes de Colloredo in the seventeenth century and Pietro Zorutti in the nineteenth century.

Pasolini consolidated Poesie a Casarsa with a group of Resistance poems known as Il testamento Coran (the Qur՚ān testament) and with several others written in Friulian, and published La meglio gioventù (the finest youth) in 1954. In all these poems, the poet yearns for a recovery of moral health to be achieved through a reacquaintance with the peasant’s world, and he treats the themes of nature, a boy’s happiness with his mother, and the exhilaration of the company of beautiful young men. In “Il dí la me muàrt” (“The Day of My Death”), for example, the poet tells of one who loved boys and “wrote/ poems of holiness/ believing that in this way/ his heart would become larger.” In 1975, Pasolini made another consolidation and published La nuova gioventù (the new youth), in which he combined the poetry of La meglio gioventù with a reworked version of two parts of that book and with some new Italo-Friulian pieces composed in 1973-1974.

The Ashes of Gramsci

The Ashes of Gramsci contains poems, dated carefully but not arranged in chronological order, that probe the poet’s difficulties with a Marxism that in actual practice seeks to limit the expression of the individual spirit. The title poem, “The Ashes of Gramsci,” takes its name from the words on Antonio Gramsci’s grave in the English cemetery in Rome, not far from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s. Gramsci, the Italian Marxist political philosopher whose works were written while he was imprisoned by the fascists, had made loud charges that Italian literature was run by elitists more interested in eloquence and style than in people.

The first poems in The Ashes of Gramsci, “L’Appennino” (Apennine) and “Il canto popolare” (the popular song), written during the poet’s early days of residence in Rome, compare the grand Italy of the past with present conditions, in which major cities are besieged by hordes of impoverished immigrants from the poorer southern regions. It is in these poor people, however, living in pigsty encampments “between the shining modern churches and skyscrapers,” that the poet’s hope resides. In “Picasso,” the poet focuses on the committed and socially responsive artist amid a decaying society, decreeing that “The way out/ . . . is by remaining/ inside the inferno with the cold/ determination to understand it,” and not in Picasso’s “idyll of white orangutans.” “The Ashes of Gramsci,” the central poem in the collection, probes the contrast between bourgeois society and Marxist commitment, between the ideal of freedom and the imperfect and irrational life as it is. Before Gramsci’s grave and addressing him on a cloudy May day in a “scandal of self-contradiction,” the poet declares himself to be “with you and against you.” The poem is replete with oxymorons which create a mood of excruciating tension.

“Récit” stems from the poet’s outrage at the obscenity charges brought against him for The Ragazzi, while the last three poems in the volume, all written in 1956, in some way reflect the trauma of Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign, the revelation of Joseph Stalin’s crimes, and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Hungary. In “Il pianto della scavatrice” (“The Tears of the Excavator”), the symbolic machine transforms the earth and wails for change. This longest poem in the collection contains bright glimmers of hope, as the poet speaks glowingly of a Rome that taught him the grandeur of little things and taught him how to address another man without trembling—a Rome where the world became for him the subject “no longer of mystery but of history.”

“Una polemica in versi” (a polemic in verse), clearly the result of the news of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, accuses the party of usurping the glory that rightfully belongs to the people and urges a hypothetical militant Communist to declare his error and his guilt. The poem ends with a panorama of the hopeful young characterized by “shameless generosity” against a backdrop of older people, aware of defeat and in various states of drunkenness, uncertainty, and disappointment.

The last poem in the volume, “Land of Work,” stands in contrast to the first poem, “L’Appennino,” in its less sanguine view of the potential of the poor. The Southern Italian peasants that the poet observes here belong more to the realm of the dead than to the living, and their prehistorical condition is underscored by a series of subhuman similes involving dogs, sheep, and other animals. Where there had been a hunger “taking the name of hope,” now “every inner light, every act/ of conscience” seems to be a thing of yesterday. For once, the poet has no compassion to give: “You lose yourself in an inner paradise/ and even your pity is their enemy.”

La religione del mio tempo

La religione del mio tempo appeared the same year (1961) as Pasolini’s first film, Accattone. The poet seems deliberately to abstain from direct political involvement here, but he is humiliated by the corruption of all attempts to renew society. For the first time, Pasolini experiments with epigrams, but often they do not rise above expressing a mere self-pity. Africa, unsullied by the bourgeois taint, comes into view for the first time as the poet’s “only alternative.” There are poems of memory, poems of love for boys, and poems wherein little hope abides. In “To an Unborn Child,” Pasolini grieves not at all for his “first and only child” who can never exist. In “To a Boy,” a poem of praise for the inquisitiveness of young Bernardo Bertolucci, later to become a prominent film director in his own right, Pasolini concludes in the style of Giacomo Leopardi: “Ah, what you wish to know, young man/ will end up unasked, it will be lost unspoken.” In “Sex, Consolation for Misery,” he characterizes sex as “filthy and ferocious as an ancient mother” but concedes that “in the easiness of love/ one who is wretched can feel like a man.” The title poem, “La religione del mio tempo” (“The Religion of My Time”), is the longest in the collection; in it, the poet isolates cowardice and its product, materialism (“All possessions are alike: whether/ industry or pasture, ship or pushcart”), as the disease and symptom plaguing modern society, and points an accusing finger at the “Vile disciples of a corrupted Jesus/ in the Vatican salons . . ./ strong over a people of serfs.”

If there is any light in all this gloom, it shines forth from Pasolini’s mother alone, and in an unusually self-indulgent “Appendice alla ’Religione’: Uno luce” (“Appendix to the ’Religion’: A Light”), Pasolini celebrates her “poor sweet little bones” and longs for the day when they will be together in the Casarsa cemetery, where “passion/ keeps the bones of the other son/ still alive in frozen peace.”

Poesia in forma di rosa

Poesia in forma di rosa (poetry in the form of a rose), which appeared in 1964, is a poetic diary that includes Pasolini’s description of the trial provoked by the episode titled “La Ricotta” in the film Rogopag (1962); Pasolini was charged with insulting the Roman Catholic Church. Another section, “Worldly Poems,” represents the diary he kept during the filming of Mamma Roma (1962); there is also a “Progetto di opere future” (“Plan of Future Works”) and an account of his tours of Israel and Southern Italy while filming The Gospel According to St. Matthew. In the first part of the book, he employs the tercet, but in the rest, he employs the loose hendecasyllable, rhythmic prose, and a geometric arrangement of words on the page. The poetry is imbued with Pasolini’s sense of his own unidentifiable, obsessive error: “I who by the excess of my presence/ have never crossed the border between love/ for life and life.” Ideology is a drug, and the moralists have made socialism as boring as Catholicism. When the poet cries that “only a bloodbath can save the world/ from its bourgeois dreams,” the effect is immediately undone by “This is what a prophet would shout/ who doesn’t have/ the strength to kill a fly.” His insistent pursuit of the consolation of sex with strangers is defended: “Better death/ than to renounce it”; the search, he claims, is for the “enchantment of the species” rather than for the perfect individual. His mother is here as well, the object of his prayer in “Supplica a mia madre” (“Prayer to My Mother”) requesting that she please not die and proclaiming that she is, as his readers well know, irreplaceable to him.

Trasumanar e organizzar

In 1971, Pasolini published Trasumanar e organizzar (to transfigure and to organize). The volume consists of three parts: a private diary; a collection of lyrics written to Maria Callas, with whom Pasolini worked while filming Medea (1969; Medea, 1970), and a section of wholly political poems. The collection also contains Pasolini’s first elaboration in poetry of his frustrated relationship with his father, and his single serene love poem, written in 1969 to Nino Davoli, whom Pasolini had discovered in the Roman slums while preparing for The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Not all the poems are dated, but most of them were written after 1968. The title refers to the polarity between the spiritual ascent and the institutionalization or organization of humankind, the thematic points between which Pasolini moves with alternating sarcasm and heartbreak. The title piece is a polemic against the Italian Communist Party; youth protest, in which he had placed so much hope, is now represented as the irrational behavior of unknowingly bourgeois children. The keynote of the collection is the contradictory, bewildering nature of contemporary reality and the poet’s pathetic awareness that he can neither enter into that reality nor even claim a precise role in it: a fitting note for the conclusion of Pasolini’s turbulent poetic career.

Bibliography

Baranski, Zygmunt G., ed. Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999. A collection of biographical and critical essays on Pasolini. Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Chiesi, Roberto, and Andrea Mancini, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poet of Ashes. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2007. This work is a mixture of poetry in Italian with English translations, essays, and interviews. Provides information on his life and critical analysis of his works.

Gordon, Robert S. C. Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Gordon analyzes Pasolini’s intensely charged, experimental essays, poetry, cinema, and narrative, and their shifting perspectives of subjectivity.

Lawton, Ben, and Maura Bergonzoni, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: In Living Memory. Washington, D.C.: New Academia, 2009. This work examines the legacy of Pasolini and his influence on art in Italy and abroad.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. The Letters of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Edited by Nico Naldini. London: Quartet Books, 1992. A collection of Pasolini’s correspondence translated into English that provides invaluable insight into his life and work.

Rohdie, Sam. The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. A critical study that is primarily concerned with Pasolini’s work in film but also provides valuable biographical information.

Rumble, Patrick, and Bart Testa, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1994. A collection of essays that explore the work of Pasolini and his time with the Communist Party. From the 1990 conference “Pier Paolo Pasolini: Heretical Imperatives” held in Toronto.