One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he was most religiously devoted to might have been the idea of being of his time. His writing—whether in the form of poetry, fiction or polemic, among which he passionately blurred the distinctions—staked a great deal on immediacy. In this sense it was close to speech: an intervention in the moment as much as a message for futurity.
In Italy, it was Pasolini’s words that succeeded in cutting into the times like a knife. His seemingly insatiable need to play a public role through his art as well as beyond it was viewed with suspicion by many of his contemporaries, who saw a dangerous parallel with the early twentieth-century career of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the self-promoting inventor of a cult of action that prized immediacy. After the First World War, D’Annunzio organized a group of Italian nationalists and seized Fiume, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and wrote a city charter that prefigured fascism. Pasolini was a declared Communist, though ejected from the party, and an anti-nationalist, prizing local dialects over the cultivated vernacular and unassimilated local cultures over the homogenized bourgeois culture of the republic. Although he always preferred to be a group of one, he did have a D’Annunzian hunger to make an impact and the rhetorical brilliance to achieve it.
Outside of Italy, Pasolini was recognized first and foremost as a filmmaker. It is astonishing to realize in retrospect that in the English-speaking world only one of his books, his first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), appeared before his murder in 1975. And yet Pasolini’s writings are vast, no less than ten volumes, around a thousand pages each, in the collected Meridiani edition that Mondadori published between 1998 and 2003. It’s more than anyone should realistically have been able to produce in only about three decades of work, even without also having put much of his time into making more than a dozen feature-length films and several shorts.
To Pasolini, this belated reception in the anglophone world would have represented not a triumph but rather proof that his work had missed the chance of being properly understood. In criticizing E.M. Forster’s decision to hold back his novel Maurice for posthumous publication, Pasolini declared that books can only “take and hold their place in literary history” if they arrive at the right time, adding that “masterworks discovered or published after a delay may never succeed in acting as such.” He cited, too, the case of Osip Mandelstam, whose work was suppressed under Stalin, speculating that “even though he is probably a greater poet than Mayakovsky and Esenin, [he] may never become accepted as such, that is, become one of those mythic names that become part of the indiscriminate list of masters who form the cornerstones of our children’s naive literary information.”
The scathing irony of that passage does not succeed in obscuring Pasolini’s faith that the destiny, or perhaps even the duty, of a great writer was to become a myth, and promptly. Perhaps he would have been cheered to learn that the myth of Mandelstam is now greater than that of Mayakovsky, while Esenin is half forgotten. Even so, the case of Pasolini is different: thanks in part to his films, but also because of the horrible and still mysterious circumstance of his death, he is a mythic figure even among those who know nothing of his writing. Can his literary reputation match up to the myth?
On the one hand, it’s doubtful if he will ever appear “whole” in English. Most of what fills those ten Meridiani volumes will remain forever untranslated, surely. On the other hand, more of his writing has continued to appear little by little, and some texts are even being retranslated—a sure sign of their staying power. Nevertheless, the question remains: In the long run, will Pasolini the novelist ever attain the canonical status accorded to Pasolini the filmmaker? Could it be that, if we read the novels at all, we mostly do so to better understand the cineaste—just as the photographs of Andrei Tarkovsky or Wim Wenders belong more to the history of cinema than of photography?
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That the novelist can’t be discounted is suggested by the recent reappearance of two of Pasolini’s novels. Ragazzi di vita, in fact, has now been translated for the third time. But the very question of what to call it in English suggests that the book is still a problem. The original 1968 translation appeared as The Ragazzi—as though the translator, Emile Capouya, had just thrown up his hands as to how the title should be rendered in our language. The second version, by Ann Goldstein, was published in 2016 as The Street Kids—a title that not only falls flat but is also, as Paul Bailey complained in his Guardian review, too redolent of “those very popular Hollywood B-movies of the 1930s, 40s and 50s: starring a group of young actors known as the Dead End Kids or the Bowery Boys.” And now we have Boys Alive, a new version by the novelist Tim Parks, an experienced translator of, among others, Fleur Jaeggy and Antonio Tabucchi. If Goldstein’s choice of title is even less felicitous than Capouya’s, what is one to say of Parks’s? The less the better, perhaps. Like Goldstein’s, Parks’s rendering has unfortunate resonances, in his case with the old-timey interjection expressing surprise, “man alive!”
But alright, let’s for the moment resign ourselves to calling the book Boys Alive. Its setting is the physically and spiritually damaged Rome of the period immediately following World War II, a city whose impoverished inhabitants the Fascists “had made grow up as savages: illiterate and delinquent,” in Pasolini’s view, though this historical framing is never made explicit in the novel itself. As he warned his publisher, “I never denounce directly the Fascist responsibility for those concentration camps which are the Roman borgate”—peripheral working-class neighborhoods—“or the present responsibility of the government which has done nothing to solve the problem. Everything is implicit.”
But the novel hardly conveys the scathing attitude toward its subjects that Pasolini told his publisher he’d meant to imply. As Parks acknowledges, “Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalid world he so lavishly and energetically evokes,” as the book follows the desultory doings of a bunch of aimless and ostentatiously foulmouthed young men as they drift in and out of situations with no hope of exiting from their poverty and social marginality, except through death. The close-up focus and lack of context encourages the reader to see the ragazzi from their own perspective, though the book’s tone is mostly quite objective and external. Ever on the lookout for food, cash, sex and distraction, their bravado belies their vulnerability, but there is something valiant in their sheer drive to live.
I don’t envy any translator brave or foolhardy enough to try to render Pasolini’s mix of slang, dialect and standard Italian into any other language. Those of us whose Italian is limited to what’s taught in schools have to take on faith his mastery in interweaving so many linguistic registers that—as Franco Fortini observed when reviewing the book on its first publication—begin in naturalism and end in lyricism. How to catch the turbulent amalgam of tones and overtones and synthesize a voice that commands conviction and carries the reader forward through a sequence of episodes that can otherwise seem random? In this effort, Parks does not improve on his predecessors. His phrasing can even be, sometimes, downright prissy. Or maybe it’s just Parks’s British style that, no matter how many “fucks” are used, sounds that way to an American ear? In any case, “Damn, what a lively lot they are” doesn’t quite sound like lowlife lingo.
In Italian literature, Boys Alive has no real forerunner that I know of, but it does have forerunners (and then stylistic cousins) elsewhere: the novels of ghetto life by Black American writers, starting with Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and continuing in films like Boyz n the Hood (1991) and gangsta rap, all of which try to forge a new vernacular in which the experience of a scorned and marginalized group might find articulate form. (My suggestion for the title of a future fourth translation of Pasolini’s first novel would be Boyz n the Life.) And one can say of Pasolini’s protagonist Riccetto something like what James Baldwin said of Wright’s Bigger Thomas: “his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth.” In Pasolini’s case, it’s the myth of vitalism, which is to say, unchecked libido. It was a myth he lived by: “I believe only in my own vitality.”
In Boys Alive, as in Pasolini’s next novels, A Violent Life (1959) and A Dream of Something (1962), as well as his early films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), the mythic dimension was tacit, one might even say secreted within a structure that was still influenced by the neorealism that dominated postwar Italian fiction and cinema. That movement had to have elicited Pasolini’s sympathy, as it was in great part an effort to rediscover the multiplicity of an Italy that had been buried by the nationalist project and had merely become more fanatical under fascism. A turning point was his 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which elements inherited from neorealism, such as the use of nonprofessional actors, are worked into a stylized and intensified presentation of a narrative that transcends naturalism. One might think of Caravaggio, or even of Erich Auerbach’s analysis of the style of Genesis: a stark manifestation of the inexpressible “permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’”
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It was with cinema more than fiction that Pasolini would discover a completely satisfactory poetry of presence. The dreamlike intensity of a cinematic image was, he believed, “profoundly poetic; a tree photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. Because who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself.” Already in reviewing Ragazzi di vita, Fortini had perceived “a Cinerama”—that is, an ultra-widescreen film projection—“meant to convey an illusion of physicality, of truthfulness.” It’s remarkable that, at a time when linguistics, semiotics and structuralism were claiming to demystify language, Pasolini sought a way to use sign and system to reveal the transcendent. And it’s noteworthy, as well, that he take as his example of the cinematic image something as static as a tree; it’s a reminder that his cinema is one of icons more than of actions.
Theorem—Teorema in Italian—is the title of Pasolini’s sixth feature film and his fourth novel, both released in 1968. The new English paperback edition of the novel is a republication of the translation by Stuart Hood, which first appeared in 1992. This was a wise decision. Theorem does not present the translator with the difficulties—I might even say impossibilities—posed by Pasolini’s debut novel, and Hood, a Scottish novelist, BBC executive, political activist (Communist, then Trotskyist) and translator of many other books from both Italian and German, has rendered it with great sympathy.
According to Hood, novel and film “appear to have come to maturity together—in parallel—so that it would be a deep misunderstanding to call the novel ‘the book of the film’; which did not prevent some critics of the day from dismissing it as little more than a film treatment.” In fact, the two works don’t track each other closely, though they are based on the same premise: a mysterious guest arrives at a wealthy family’s villa in the countryside around Milan—in other words, in a milieu entirely antithetical to the Roman borgate of Boys Alive. These were not characters with whom Pasolini could have a natural sympathy, and he spoke of them in tones that make his interest sound more dutiful than deep: they were “people who were not particularly odious, people who elicited a certain sympathy—they are typical of the bourgeoisie, but not the very worst bourgeoisie.” He had to remind himself that “it is only right that I should feel something for all individuals, including bourgeois individuals.”
In fact, the family—parents, son and daughter—are not individuals but types, mere inflections of the limited possibilities Pasolini could perceive in the Italian bourgeoisie. As for the guest, he is a sort of unquestionable apparition. Like the tree that Pasolini imagined as the exemplary cinematic image, the guest is mysterious, ambiguous, polyvalent; and like the tree, he is a manifestation of divinity. Each member of the household, including the peasant maid, has a sexual encounter with the guest, and each one is somehow changed: the father, for instance, becomes a kind of convalescent and in the end decides to donate his factory to its workers. A journalist questions the political efficacy of the gift: “Would you not have preferred to obtain your right to power over the factory by means of an action taken by yourselves?” he asks the workers. “Has he not somehow cut you off from your revolutionary future?” The maid’s fate is one answer: she returns to her village, where she is recognized as a saint and ascends to the sky.
Rereading the novel and rewatching the film of Theorem, it becomes clear that Pasolini is the best illustration of D.H. Lawrence’s dictum about trusting the tale, not the artist. There’s no reason for me to take on the task he demanded of the critic—“to save the tale from the artist who created it”—because Pasolini did this himself in making the film. But what’s clear is that, in the novel, Pasolini the narrator gets in the way of his images because he knows too much, or rather, because he believes he knows more than he really can; he is always editorializing. In the film, his judgment can be tacit, embodied by the images themselves.
For this reason, as Ara H. Merjian and Alessandro Giammei wrote in their introduction to Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, “his cinema would intermittently sideline the verbal in favour of pure physicality” in “the form of bodily inflections and eruptions, paralinguistic gestures, all of which fell felicitously short of oral articulation. To that end, Pasolini drew upon another, more fitful, locus of his life: painting.” Indeed, he painted in fits and starts all his life—the striking Matissean Two Youths reproduced on the cover of Boys Alive is from his hand—and one of the few people he venerated was the art historian Roberto Longhi, whom he never stopped considering his “true teacher” and “a bona fide man,” one who embodied that “culture” which “places upon the face of man a mask that he incarnates and which cannot be removed: a mysterious mask, as mysterious as humanity when it expresses itself.”
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Given Pasolini’s insistence that the writer’s role is to intervene in the present, it’s unfortunate that his work as a critic and polemicist is insufficiently available in English. A translation of the important 1972 collection Heretical Empiricism was published in 1988 and republished in 2005, but neither edition remained in print for long, and both are now hard to come by. While his writings on cinema, literature and politics might on the face of it be more urgently needed, Merjian and Giammei have rendered an important service in gathering together some three decades’ worth of Pasolini’s writings on visual art, including poetry as well as reviews and essays, for they bring us back to what really counted for him: “the technical sacrality of seeing itself.” All of his thinking and feeling seems to be bound up in that oxymoron, “technical sacrality.” Many of the modern painters Pasolini wrote about (Toti Scialoja, Renato Guttuso, Lorenzo Tornabuoni) are little known outside Italy, and probably some of them are half-forgotten even there (Giuseppe Zigaina, Renzo Vespignani). But the once and always student of Longhi had insight into classics like Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio too.
That said, Pasolini’s art writings are perhaps most interesting for the light they shed on his hostility to artistic avant-gardism and even to abstraction as merely “an arbitrary and approximate destruction,” for which his disdain could take forms that are nearly indistinguishable from philistinism. We can see this in his visceral reaction to the work that Gino De Dominicis exhibited at the 1972 Venice Biennale, and which was immediately shut down following a public outcry; the work, titled Second Solution of Immortality (The Universe is Immobile), consisted of three conceptual sculptures (a stone, a ball and a square drawn out on the floor), all watched over by young man sitting in a chair in the corner, Paolo Rosa, who had Down syndrome. In a piece first published in the weekly Tempo, “The Mongoloide at the Biennale Is a Product of Italy’s Subculture,” Pasolini raged against the Italian literary avant-garde for its “absolute experimentalism, literariness to the point of illegibility and inaccessibility,” charging it with “the habitual, total critical incapacity characteristic of any subculture; that is, given in to the extortions of actuality and fashion.” Only in his conclusion does he cite de Dominicis as “the typical product of such monstrous confusion,” saying that what “the handicapped young man [De Dominicis] has exhibited is the living symbol of the idea of the work of art, which at the moment establishes the parameters of Italian cultural (and subcultural) life.”
It was De Dominicis who got the better of the dispute, remarking in an interview, “I never exhibited a mongoloid man. I created a work … that consisted of some works placed in front of Mr. Paolo Rosa (whom everyone crassly called ‘the mongoloid man,’ which is like calling someone who wears glasses ‘the shortsighted man’ instead of using his name). Rosa, from within the work itself, observed these works from his particular and unique standpoint, which was the opposite of the viewers.’” In other words, Pasolini had reacted to a ready-made scandal without actually inquiring into the work that had caused it, judging on the basis of biased descriptions; worse yet, he had accepted at face value and participated in the dehumanizing categorization of the man whom the artist had engaged to participate in his work. The point is not to defend the work of De Dominicis, but that Pasolini, in his passion to respond to the event in its immediacy, had not thought deeply enough to frame a convincing critique of the piece.
It is unfortunate that Heretical Aesthetics does not include one of Pasolini’s most salient considerations of painting in his own time, the chapter in Theorem titled “Vocation and Skills.” Pietro, the scion of the wealthy Lombard family, is intent on becoming a painter. He draws profusely but hates the results. Naturally, the subject Pietro is trying to capture in his art is the mysterious guest his family has taken in. Eventually he lays out a huge sheet of paper in the garden and starts working on it with a brush rather than a pencil—in short, painting. He is full of ambition and equally filled with self-doubt. “To draw, to paint, to become an author—this after all is merely to put oneself on show,” Pietro reflects, “to risk coming into contact with a world that must learn everything about the person who presents himself and learns it without any regard for him—almost as if he were predestined, a messenger from heaven.” And that means, in turn, “to live publicly, in a place where (justly in this case) there is no pity.”
Pasolini attributes to Pietro his own sense of the artist’s (writer’s, filmmaker’s) vocation: it is not primarily something that takes form in the enclosed space of the desk or the studio but a role played out in public. Even Pasolini’s poetry was rhetoric, in Yeats’s sense of the word—a quarrel with others rather than with oneself—and its originality lay precisely in his ability to make rhetoric a vehicle for poetry after all. Pietro, obviously, understands none of this. And what Pasolini does not add is that it is possible to counter the pitilessness of the judging public with an even more severe judgment on it—which was always Pasolini’s own.
Pietro, still frustrated with his efforts, becomes what Pasolini in his essays calls a neo-avant-garde artist, that is, one who, precisely because he has no technique, values technical experiment above content. He is “trying out new techniques to try to overcome the shame of normal techniques”—that is, his inability to wield the normal techniques adequately. No matter. Pietro suddenly feels inspired, works assiduously, enjoys what he is doing. Why? Because with unheard-of techniques enabling the creation of “a world of one’s own with which no comparisons are possible,” the artist can no longer be criticized; he is no longer revealed naked before a world with the terrifying capacity to judge. No one can be sure “that this is not a case of the expedient of someone lacking in skill, of someone who is impotent—but that on the contrary it is a case of a sure, undaunted decision that is haughty and almost overweening: a newly invented and already irreplaceable technique.” In the end, Pasolini’s critique of the neo-avant-garde is indistinguishable from that of the reactionary who thinks that because Paul Cézanne lacked the painterly facility of a William-Adolphe Bouguereau, or Jackson Pollock that of an Andrew Wyeth (which was certainly the case), their art must have been a cheat, a way of disguising their own inadequacy.
Which inadequacy did Pasolini need to disguise? He defined the painter as “a poet who is never forced by circumstances to write in prose.” A comparison of the cinematic and novelistic versions of Theorem would show how much was gained by the elimination of prose, and by the elimination of the editorializing narrator. Nobody was ever so much of his time by being so much against it. But in English, at least, it’s still only Pasolini’s films that are part of the permanent present.
One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he was most religiously devoted to might have been the idea of being of his time. His writing—whether in the form of poetry, fiction or polemic, among which he passionately blurred the distinctions—staked a great deal on immediacy. In this sense it was close to speech: an intervention in the moment as much as a message for futurity.
In Italy, it was Pasolini’s words that succeeded in cutting into the times like a knife. His seemingly insatiable need to play a public role through his art as well as beyond it was viewed with suspicion by many of his contemporaries, who saw a dangerous parallel with the early twentieth-century career of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the self-promoting inventor of a cult of action that prized immediacy. After the First World War, D’Annunzio organized a group of Italian nationalists and seized Fiume, formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and wrote a city charter that prefigured fascism. Pasolini was a declared Communist, though ejected from the party, and an anti-nationalist, prizing local dialects over the cultivated vernacular and unassimilated local cultures over the homogenized bourgeois culture of the republic. Although he always preferred to be a group of one, he did have a D’Annunzian hunger to make an impact and the rhetorical brilliance to achieve it.
Outside of Italy, Pasolini was recognized first and foremost as a filmmaker. It is astonishing to realize in retrospect that in the English-speaking world only one of his books, his first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1955), appeared before his murder in 1975. And yet Pasolini’s writings are vast, no less than ten volumes, around a thousand pages each, in the collected Meridiani edition that Mondadori published between 1998 and 2003. It’s more than anyone should realistically have been able to produce in only about three decades of work, even without also having put much of his time into making more than a dozen feature-length films and several shorts.
To Pasolini, this belated reception in the anglophone world would have represented not a triumph but rather proof that his work had missed the chance of being properly understood. In criticizing E.M. Forster’s decision to hold back his novel Maurice for posthumous publication, Pasolini declared that books can only “take and hold their place in literary history” if they arrive at the right time, adding that “masterworks discovered or published after a delay may never succeed in acting as such.” He cited, too, the case of Osip Mandelstam, whose work was suppressed under Stalin, speculating that “even though he is probably a greater poet than Mayakovsky and Esenin, [he] may never become accepted as such, that is, become one of those mythic names that become part of the indiscriminate list of masters who form the cornerstones of our children’s naive literary information.”
The scathing irony of that passage does not succeed in obscuring Pasolini’s faith that the destiny, or perhaps even the duty, of a great writer was to become a myth, and promptly. Perhaps he would have been cheered to learn that the myth of Mandelstam is now greater than that of Mayakovsky, while Esenin is half forgotten. Even so, the case of Pasolini is different: thanks in part to his films, but also because of the horrible and still mysterious circumstance of his death, he is a mythic figure even among those who know nothing of his writing. Can his literary reputation match up to the myth?
On the one hand, it’s doubtful if he will ever appear “whole” in English. Most of what fills those ten Meridiani volumes will remain forever untranslated, surely. On the other hand, more of his writing has continued to appear little by little, and some texts are even being retranslated—a sure sign of their staying power. Nevertheless, the question remains: In the long run, will Pasolini the novelist ever attain the canonical status accorded to Pasolini the filmmaker? Could it be that, if we read the novels at all, we mostly do so to better understand the cineaste—just as the photographs of Andrei Tarkovsky or Wim Wenders belong more to the history of cinema than of photography?
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That the novelist can’t be discounted is suggested by the recent reappearance of two of Pasolini’s novels. Ragazzi di vita, in fact, has now been translated for the third time. But the very question of what to call it in English suggests that the book is still a problem. The original 1968 translation appeared as The Ragazzi—as though the translator, Emile Capouya, had just thrown up his hands as to how the title should be rendered in our language. The second version, by Ann Goldstein, was published in 2016 as The Street Kids—a title that not only falls flat but is also, as Paul Bailey complained in his Guardian review, too redolent of “those very popular Hollywood B-movies of the 1930s, 40s and 50s: starring a group of young actors known as the Dead End Kids or the Bowery Boys.” And now we have Boys Alive, a new version by the novelist Tim Parks, an experienced translator of, among others, Fleur Jaeggy and Antonio Tabucchi. If Goldstein’s choice of title is even less felicitous than Capouya’s, what is one to say of Parks’s? The less the better, perhaps. Like Goldstein’s, Parks’s rendering has unfortunate resonances, in his case with the old-timey interjection expressing surprise, “man alive!”
But alright, let’s for the moment resign ourselves to calling the book Boys Alive. Its setting is the physically and spiritually damaged Rome of the period immediately following World War II, a city whose impoverished inhabitants the Fascists “had made grow up as savages: illiterate and delinquent,” in Pasolini’s view, though this historical framing is never made explicit in the novel itself. As he warned his publisher, “I never denounce directly the Fascist responsibility for those concentration camps which are the Roman borgate”—peripheral working-class neighborhoods—“or the present responsibility of the government which has done nothing to solve the problem. Everything is implicit.”
But the novel hardly conveys the scathing attitude toward its subjects that Pasolini told his publisher he’d meant to imply. As Parks acknowledges, “Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalid world he so lavishly and energetically evokes,” as the book follows the desultory doings of a bunch of aimless and ostentatiously foulmouthed young men as they drift in and out of situations with no hope of exiting from their poverty and social marginality, except through death. The close-up focus and lack of context encourages the reader to see the ragazzi from their own perspective, though the book’s tone is mostly quite objective and external. Ever on the lookout for food, cash, sex and distraction, their bravado belies their vulnerability, but there is something valiant in their sheer drive to live.
I don’t envy any translator brave or foolhardy enough to try to render Pasolini’s mix of slang, dialect and standard Italian into any other language. Those of us whose Italian is limited to what’s taught in schools have to take on faith his mastery in interweaving so many linguistic registers that—as Franco Fortini observed when reviewing the book on its first publication—begin in naturalism and end in lyricism. How to catch the turbulent amalgam of tones and overtones and synthesize a voice that commands conviction and carries the reader forward through a sequence of episodes that can otherwise seem random? In this effort, Parks does not improve on his predecessors. His phrasing can even be, sometimes, downright prissy. Or maybe it’s just Parks’s British style that, no matter how many “fucks” are used, sounds that way to an American ear? In any case, “Damn, what a lively lot they are” doesn’t quite sound like lowlife lingo.
In Italian literature, Boys Alive has no real forerunner that I know of, but it does have forerunners (and then stylistic cousins) elsewhere: the novels of ghetto life by Black American writers, starting with Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and continuing in films like Boyz n the Hood (1991) and gangsta rap, all of which try to forge a new vernacular in which the experience of a scorned and marginalized group might find articulate form. (My suggestion for the title of a future fourth translation of Pasolini’s first novel would be Boyz n the Life.) And one can say of Pasolini’s protagonist Riccetto something like what James Baldwin said of Wright’s Bigger Thomas: “his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth.” In Pasolini’s case, it’s the myth of vitalism, which is to say, unchecked libido. It was a myth he lived by: “I believe only in my own vitality.”
In Boys Alive, as in Pasolini’s next novels, A Violent Life (1959) and A Dream of Something (1962), as well as his early films, Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962), the mythic dimension was tacit, one might even say secreted within a structure that was still influenced by the neorealism that dominated postwar Italian fiction and cinema. That movement had to have elicited Pasolini’s sympathy, as it was in great part an effort to rediscover the multiplicity of an Italy that had been buried by the nationalist project and had merely become more fanatical under fascism. A turning point was his 1964 film The Gospel According to St. Matthew, in which elements inherited from neorealism, such as the use of nonprofessional actors, are worked into a stylized and intensified presentation of a narrative that transcends naturalism. One might think of Caravaggio, or even of Erich Auerbach’s analysis of the style of Genesis: a stark manifestation of the inexpressible “permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’”
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It was with cinema more than fiction that Pasolini would discover a completely satisfactory poetry of presence. The dreamlike intensity of a cinematic image was, he believed, “profoundly poetic; a tree photographed is poetic because physicality is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. Because who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself.” Already in reviewing Ragazzi di vita, Fortini had perceived “a Cinerama”—that is, an ultra-widescreen film projection—“meant to convey an illusion of physicality, of truthfulness.” It’s remarkable that, at a time when linguistics, semiotics and structuralism were claiming to demystify language, Pasolini sought a way to use sign and system to reveal the transcendent. And it’s noteworthy, as well, that he take as his example of the cinematic image something as static as a tree; it’s a reminder that his cinema is one of icons more than of actions.
Theorem—Teorema in Italian—is the title of Pasolini’s sixth feature film and his fourth novel, both released in 1968. The new English paperback edition of the novel is a republication of the translation by Stuart Hood, which first appeared in 1992. This was a wise decision. Theorem does not present the translator with the difficulties—I might even say impossibilities—posed by Pasolini’s debut novel, and Hood, a Scottish novelist, BBC executive, political activist (Communist, then Trotskyist) and translator of many other books from both Italian and German, has rendered it with great sympathy.
According to Hood, novel and film “appear to have come to maturity together—in parallel—so that it would be a deep misunderstanding to call the novel ‘the book of the film’; which did not prevent some critics of the day from dismissing it as little more than a film treatment.” In fact, the two works don’t track each other closely, though they are based on the same premise: a mysterious guest arrives at a wealthy family’s villa in the countryside around Milan—in other words, in a milieu entirely antithetical to the Roman borgate of Boys Alive. These were not characters with whom Pasolini could have a natural sympathy, and he spoke of them in tones that make his interest sound more dutiful than deep: they were “people who were not particularly odious, people who elicited a certain sympathy—they are typical of the bourgeoisie, but not the very worst bourgeoisie.” He had to remind himself that “it is only right that I should feel something for all individuals, including bourgeois individuals.”
In fact, the family—parents, son and daughter—are not individuals but types, mere inflections of the limited possibilities Pasolini could perceive in the Italian bourgeoisie. As for the guest, he is a sort of unquestionable apparition. Like the tree that Pasolini imagined as the exemplary cinematic image, the guest is mysterious, ambiguous, polyvalent; and like the tree, he is a manifestation of divinity. Each member of the household, including the peasant maid, has a sexual encounter with the guest, and each one is somehow changed: the father, for instance, becomes a kind of convalescent and in the end decides to donate his factory to its workers. A journalist questions the political efficacy of the gift: “Would you not have preferred to obtain your right to power over the factory by means of an action taken by yourselves?” he asks the workers. “Has he not somehow cut you off from your revolutionary future?” The maid’s fate is one answer: she returns to her village, where she is recognized as a saint and ascends to the sky.
Rereading the novel and rewatching the film of Theorem, it becomes clear that Pasolini is the best illustration of D.H. Lawrence’s dictum about trusting the tale, not the artist. There’s no reason for me to take on the task he demanded of the critic—“to save the tale from the artist who created it”—because Pasolini did this himself in making the film. But what’s clear is that, in the novel, Pasolini the narrator gets in the way of his images because he knows too much, or rather, because he believes he knows more than he really can; he is always editorializing. In the film, his judgment can be tacit, embodied by the images themselves.
For this reason, as Ara H. Merjian and Alessandro Giammei wrote in their introduction to Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, “his cinema would intermittently sideline the verbal in favour of pure physicality” in “the form of bodily inflections and eruptions, paralinguistic gestures, all of which fell felicitously short of oral articulation. To that end, Pasolini drew upon another, more fitful, locus of his life: painting.” Indeed, he painted in fits and starts all his life—the striking Matissean Two Youths reproduced on the cover of Boys Alive is from his hand—and one of the few people he venerated was the art historian Roberto Longhi, whom he never stopped considering his “true teacher” and “a bona fide man,” one who embodied that “culture” which “places upon the face of man a mask that he incarnates and which cannot be removed: a mysterious mask, as mysterious as humanity when it expresses itself.”
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Given Pasolini’s insistence that the writer’s role is to intervene in the present, it’s unfortunate that his work as a critic and polemicist is insufficiently available in English. A translation of the important 1972 collection Heretical Empiricism was published in 1988 and republished in 2005, but neither edition remained in print for long, and both are now hard to come by. While his writings on cinema, literature and politics might on the face of it be more urgently needed, Merjian and Giammei have rendered an important service in gathering together some three decades’ worth of Pasolini’s writings on visual art, including poetry as well as reviews and essays, for they bring us back to what really counted for him: “the technical sacrality of seeing itself.” All of his thinking and feeling seems to be bound up in that oxymoron, “technical sacrality.” Many of the modern painters Pasolini wrote about (Toti Scialoja, Renato Guttuso, Lorenzo Tornabuoni) are little known outside Italy, and probably some of them are half-forgotten even there (Giuseppe Zigaina, Renzo Vespignani). But the once and always student of Longhi had insight into classics like Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio too.
That said, Pasolini’s art writings are perhaps most interesting for the light they shed on his hostility to artistic avant-gardism and even to abstraction as merely “an arbitrary and approximate destruction,” for which his disdain could take forms that are nearly indistinguishable from philistinism. We can see this in his visceral reaction to the work that Gino De Dominicis exhibited at the 1972 Venice Biennale, and which was immediately shut down following a public outcry; the work, titled Second Solution of Immortality (The Universe is Immobile), consisted of three conceptual sculptures (a stone, a ball and a square drawn out on the floor), all watched over by young man sitting in a chair in the corner, Paolo Rosa, who had Down syndrome. In a piece first published in the weekly Tempo, “The Mongoloide at the Biennale Is a Product of Italy’s Subculture,” Pasolini raged against the Italian literary avant-garde for its “absolute experimentalism, literariness to the point of illegibility and inaccessibility,” charging it with “the habitual, total critical incapacity characteristic of any subculture; that is, given in to the extortions of actuality and fashion.” Only in his conclusion does he cite de Dominicis as “the typical product of such monstrous confusion,” saying that what “the handicapped young man [De Dominicis] has exhibited is the living symbol of the idea of the work of art, which at the moment establishes the parameters of Italian cultural (and subcultural) life.”
It was De Dominicis who got the better of the dispute, remarking in an interview, “I never exhibited a mongoloid man. I created a work … that consisted of some works placed in front of Mr. Paolo Rosa (whom everyone crassly called ‘the mongoloid man,’ which is like calling someone who wears glasses ‘the shortsighted man’ instead of using his name). Rosa, from within the work itself, observed these works from his particular and unique standpoint, which was the opposite of the viewers.’” In other words, Pasolini had reacted to a ready-made scandal without actually inquiring into the work that had caused it, judging on the basis of biased descriptions; worse yet, he had accepted at face value and participated in the dehumanizing categorization of the man whom the artist had engaged to participate in his work. The point is not to defend the work of De Dominicis, but that Pasolini, in his passion to respond to the event in its immediacy, had not thought deeply enough to frame a convincing critique of the piece.
It is unfortunate that Heretical Aesthetics does not include one of Pasolini’s most salient considerations of painting in his own time, the chapter in Theorem titled “Vocation and Skills.” Pietro, the scion of the wealthy Lombard family, is intent on becoming a painter. He draws profusely but hates the results. Naturally, the subject Pietro is trying to capture in his art is the mysterious guest his family has taken in. Eventually he lays out a huge sheet of paper in the garden and starts working on it with a brush rather than a pencil—in short, painting. He is full of ambition and equally filled with self-doubt. “To draw, to paint, to become an author—this after all is merely to put oneself on show,” Pietro reflects, “to risk coming into contact with a world that must learn everything about the person who presents himself and learns it without any regard for him—almost as if he were predestined, a messenger from heaven.” And that means, in turn, “to live publicly, in a place where (justly in this case) there is no pity.”
Pasolini attributes to Pietro his own sense of the artist’s (writer’s, filmmaker’s) vocation: it is not primarily something that takes form in the enclosed space of the desk or the studio but a role played out in public. Even Pasolini’s poetry was rhetoric, in Yeats’s sense of the word—a quarrel with others rather than with oneself—and its originality lay precisely in his ability to make rhetoric a vehicle for poetry after all. Pietro, obviously, understands none of this. And what Pasolini does not add is that it is possible to counter the pitilessness of the judging public with an even more severe judgment on it—which was always Pasolini’s own.
Pietro, still frustrated with his efforts, becomes what Pasolini in his essays calls a neo-avant-garde artist, that is, one who, precisely because he has no technique, values technical experiment above content. He is “trying out new techniques to try to overcome the shame of normal techniques”—that is, his inability to wield the normal techniques adequately. No matter. Pietro suddenly feels inspired, works assiduously, enjoys what he is doing. Why? Because with unheard-of techniques enabling the creation of “a world of one’s own with which no comparisons are possible,” the artist can no longer be criticized; he is no longer revealed naked before a world with the terrifying capacity to judge. No one can be sure “that this is not a case of the expedient of someone lacking in skill, of someone who is impotent—but that on the contrary it is a case of a sure, undaunted decision that is haughty and almost overweening: a newly invented and already irreplaceable technique.” In the end, Pasolini’s critique of the neo-avant-garde is indistinguishable from that of the reactionary who thinks that because Paul Cézanne lacked the painterly facility of a William-Adolphe Bouguereau, or Jackson Pollock that of an Andrew Wyeth (which was certainly the case), their art must have been a cheat, a way of disguising their own inadequacy.
Which inadequacy did Pasolini need to disguise? He defined the painter as “a poet who is never forced by circumstances to write in prose.” A comparison of the cinematic and novelistic versions of Theorem would show how much was gained by the elimination of prose, and by the elimination of the editorializing narrator. Nobody was ever so much of his time by being so much against it. But in English, at least, it’s still only Pasolini’s films that are part of the permanent present.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.