Daniela Privitera
From I Know to the Prophecy of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Looking back on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work forty years after his death, it seems clear that in the Corsair Writings he had already individuated the characteristics of the modern man: “consumer, conformist, secular, liberal, moderate, hedonistic, tolerant, uprooted.”[1] And yet his talent as an intellectual, more than as a visionary (as some would characterize him),[2] was not limited to that terribly current prophecy that we are currently living out in globalization and the commercialization of bodies in the name of modernity, which Friedrich Nietzsche had already named nihilism. His talent extended, rather, to the foretelling of the Italy of scandals, which would then explode in the Tangentopoli and the Berlusconi era, and also to that message for posterity, to that poetic admonition that can be read in his Prophecy,[3] which foretold the exodus of the exiles, the barges, and the freighters. Similarly, in his subsequent collection Alì of the Blue Eyes, by more than three decades he foresaw the massive exodus of illegal immigrants (the new underprivileged, central engine of the revolution), who at that time were exporting hunger and desperation and today have developed into the sociological concept and political phenomenon called the “Arab Spring,” and not only:
Alì with the blue eyes
One of the many sons of sons,
Will descend from Algeria,
on ships with sails and oars.
With him will be thousands of men
With the little bodies and the poor
dog eyes of their fathers. . . .
They will disembark at Crotone or at Palmi
in millions, dressed in Asiatic rags
and American shirts.
The legacy of the disconcerting intellectual who loved to disturb the public conscience and provoke public opinion, scandalizing the arid conformity of the Italian bourgeoisie, was destined to loom like the prophecy of a sibyl over the society of the day “dominated by homogenization and unified thought.”[4]
Therefore, as to the difference between “development” and “progress”: “Who wants development?”—asked Pasolini in an essay in 1973[5] :
It’s the one who produces; . . . the industrialists who produce superfluous goods. . . . The consumers of superfluous goods are unknowingly agreeing in wanting . . . this development. For them it means social promotion and liberation along with the renouncing of the cultural models that had furnished them with the models of “the poor” . . . therefore the masses are for development . . . but they live by the new values of consumption. . . . And then who wants “progress”? The ones who want it have no immediate interests to satisfy: the workers, the peasants, the leftist intellectuals. Whoever works and is therefore exploited wants it.[6]
To the lucid diagnosis of consumerism:
Consumerism consists of a true and genuine anthropological cataclysm . . . and I live out, existentially, that kind of cataclysm which, at least for now, is pure degradation: I live it in my days, in the forms of my existence, in my body.[7]
To the foresight, as far back as 1963, of that other Italy that Pasolini spoke of in an interview with Alberto Arbasino: “Italy is a marvelous body, but anywhere you touch it or look at it you see writhing the black, twisted coils of a snake. The other Italy.”[8] One must not forget also the piercing political x-ray of I Know, the article written and proclaimed from the columns of that “CORSERA” (il Corriere della Sera),[9] which today with the mouths of some columnists[10] condemns Pasolini as a terrible prophet.
The legacy of the writer from Casarsa burns more than ever in current society with the reality of a degraded and reified Italy that, despite “having the proof,” goes unpunished because—in spite of everything—in the political and social context, “arbitrariness, folly, and mystery” continue to reign.
It is easy today to verify the bitter truth of that anthropological degradation of Italy and the Italians that Pasolini talked about more than forty years ago. This is certainly the case today, in an Italy where there’s no difference between right and left and where the hedonism of consumption has pervaded even politics, which make use of the body to seduce, because, as Pasolini said, “The bourgeois centralism of consumption has created homogenization.” Yet the man who consumes but “pretends that other ideologies other than those of consumption are unthinkable” no longer satisfy; what arguments do we have to the contrary?
If politics are the product of that secular hedonism that is deprived of every human value, why are we amazed at the poisoned politics where Minetti and Ruby each celebrate the body and display it in the marketing of consent and where the image is what brings the greatest reward?
Consumerism becomes a new form of totalitarian regime that projects mass psychology because the “average man is a monster, a dangerous delinquent, a conformist, a colonialist, racist, pro-slave, politically apathetic” (La ricotta) who becomes subservient and inclined to tolerate the hedonistic ideology wanted by Power, which, according to the writer of Casarsa, is one of the worst repressions in human history.
What is the ideology of the middle class today in Italy if not the petit bourgeois belief in identifying with the opinion leader, since in the political elections of 2013 about a third of the voters reconfirmed their faith in a convicted man?
Besides, for the multitude of yes-men, it is important to know how to be “safe, extortionist bullies.” Who are the new revolutionaries? Through a closer look, in the Italy of today, don’t the radical chic of the so-called Left in power seem to have the same faces as the daddy’s boys who protested in the riots of 1968 against the police who were in fact defended by Pasolini?
As the same writer would declare in a lucid analysis in an interview concerning the scandalous film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, deep down, “History” is always the same because “we condemn children because of a cessation of love for them. . . . There is not the least doubt that that occurs because of our error.”[11] And so, in the particulars of Italian history, is it possible to trace back to the guilty parties and ascertain who is responsible for this deviation?
First of all, Pasolini attempted to give meaning back to words, restoring their primary sense. He eliminated political jargon and, without mincing words, accused the guilty parties of what, for him, was the irreparable political and “cultural genocide” to which Italy had been condemned: “I know”—he said—and that was the end. It was 1974. What did Pasolini know, and why, in the face of his “brazen” honesty, did the Italy of idiots raise their shields against him?
He knew; he intuited with the instinct of an intellectual and the clairvoyance of a seer that the Italy of the boom was traveling on the economic-mafioso political platform along with development and the bombs planted by the stragiste: “I know, but I don’t have the proof, I don’t even have clues. I know who carried out the attacks, who planned them, who covered them up and misled, I know because I’m an intellectual, a writer who tries to follow everything that happens.”
It was the radical criticism of a free man, of an “incoherent” intellectual who was allergic to the system of the establishment. Ever since the times of the death of Enrico Mattei he had foretold the completely Italian schizophrenia of that “state” within the state that would eliminate Mauro De Mauro, just as it did Pasolini, Boris Giuliano, and then Falcone and Borsellino. The honesty of Pasolini the man manages to stun the consciences of all Italians when, with scandalous sincerity in August of 1975, he writes in Il Mondo the article titled “The DC Leaders Must Be Tried”:
Andreotti, Fanfani, Rumor and at least a dozen other powerful Christian Democrats (including, to be precise, a few presidents of the Republic) should be, like Nixon, dragged to the defendant’s seat. And there be accused of an endless number of crimes: being unfit, contempt of citizens, manipulation of public funds, wheeling and dealing with oil executives, with industrial giants, with bankers, complicity with the Mafia . . . the urban and environmental destruction of Italy . . . responsibility for the horrendous . . . condition of the schools and the hospitals . . . responsibility for the decline of the Church . . . , a Bourbon distribution of public positions to sycophants.
Is this not perhaps the x-ray of the dishonest nation in which, forty years later, Andreotti would be dragged many times to the defendant’s seat and accused of collusion with the Mafia but never found guilty; in which Marcello Dell’Utri, faithful Berlusconi supporter and senator emeritus of the Italian Republic, found guilty of Mafia association, would be found “particularly dangerous” by the court of appeals because of “prolonged dealings with the Mafia organization . . . and for his constant projection toward the interests of his entrepreneur friend Berlusconi”?[12] The nation in which for the illicit appropriation of public funds, Luigi Lusi, senator and treasurer of the ex “Margherita” Party (which then merged with the PD) would be sentenced to eight years of detention for having appropriated, by means of the law on public finance, 25 million Euros from the party?[13]
It seems to be the ironic fate of that Left that was the heir of the Communist Party, and that Pasolini, despite everything, believed in 1974 when he declared: “I cannot not declare my weak and ideal charge against the entire Italian political class . . . to the opposition, the Communist Party is a clean country in a dirty country, a honest party in a dishonest nation.”[14] And finally, there is Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, that “substantially or naturally poetic” cinema to which Pasolini looked during his last invectives against Power.
We will not know up to what point in the Pasolinian rerelease of the Dantean Inferno along the same lines as the novel by De Sade, the four gentlemen of Power (judiciary, economic, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic) who torment and torture the victims, reaching the apotheosis of contempt for the world, evoke the sequence of that dream Pasolini talked about in reference to cinema. Of course, a dream can be prophetic, and poetry is quintessentially visionary. And in fact, Salò was the last of Pasolini’s prophecies: the representation of Power in all its possible forms.
In Salò there is the metaphor of an apocalypse that today is called Big Brother, Bunga-Bunga, token democracy, or sociocultural homogenization through media standardization. In an interview, he himself declared: “Who could doubt my sincerity when I say that the message of Salò is the condemnation of the anarchy of Power?”[15]
It was 1975.
In 2015 who could doubt the prophet Pasolini?
And what end have the intellectuals come to?
The shared places only congratulate themselves, while it would be appropriate to cultivate the atrocity of doubt. That is how Pasolini expressed himself during a debate shortly before November 2, 1975. Instead of doubt, the Italy of idiots preferred the certainty of forgetting Pasolini, so as not to have to look in the mirror.[16]
Translated by Anne Greeott, University of Arkansas.
On the extraordinary gifts of anticipation and intuition of change of Italian society on the part of Pier Paolo Pasolini, see Lorenzo Vitelli, “Pasolini profeta di un’ era,” L’intellettuale dissidente 2, no. 1 (December 2013), www.l’intellettualedissidente.it.
I refer to the journalist P. L. Battista, who in an article in the Corriere della Sera (“Quel Pasolini da dimenticare,” July 27, 2009) defined the prophecy of I Know as that of the “worst Pasolini, which should be forgotten, for the desperation of his too-numerous imitators, terrible students of a bad master.”
The poem appeared in the volume Poesia in forma di prosa, published in 1964. A second version of the poem is present in a miscellany of stories, screenplays, and projects titled Alì dagli occhi azzurri (Milan: Garzanti, 1964). For this topic cfr. P. Kammerer, Alì dagli occhi azzurri. Una profezia di Pier Paolo Pasolini, www.pasolini.net/saggistica.
Valerio Magrelli, “Pasolini profeta, corsaro, martire. Lo scandalo dell’artista totale,” in “la Repubblica.it,” April 15, 2014.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sviluppo e progresso, in Saggi sulla politica e sulla società, ed. Walter Siti (Meridiani: Mondadori Milano, 1999).
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Sacer replica a Moravia sull’aborto,” in Scritti corsari (Milano: Garzanti, 1990), 107.
Pasolini, “Sacer replica a Moravia sull’aborto,” 107.
Alberto Arbasino, Sessanta posizioni (Milano, Feltrinelli, 1971), 357. For this topic, see also J. M. Gardair, L’orgia critica tra Marx e Sade: Da “Scritti corsari a Lettere luterane,” in Contributi per Pasolini, ed. Giuseppe Savoca (Firenze: Olschki, 2002), 55–62.
As noted, the article came out first in the Corriere della sera, November 14, 1974.
Vitelli, “Pasolini profeta di un’ era.”
Pier Paolo Pasolini, I giovani infelici in Lettere Luterane (postumo) (Torino: Einaudi, 1976), 5–10.
Huffington Post, July 1, 2014.
Repubblica.it, May 2, 2014.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari (Milano, Garzanti, 1990), cit., 91–92.
For this topic, cfr. A. Molteni, Salò o le centoventi giornate di Sodoma, www.pasolini.net/saggistica/approfonSalo.
I conclude my reflections with the title of the contribution of Andrea Meccia to the blog www.pasolini.puntonet. Dimenticare Pasolini. Per non guardarsi allo specchio, November 2, 2010, www.agoravox.it.
Virginia Agostinelli
On March 2, 2010, Italian Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s senior adviser and a well-known bibliophile, announced that he had come into possession of a note (appunto) from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last novel, Petrolio (Oil). The manuscript was left unfinished after the poet’s murder in 1975 and was finally published by Einaudi in 1992 as a series of notes, which very generally outline the plot of the novel. “I have started on a book that will occupy me for years, perhaps for the rest of my life. I don’t want to talk about it; it’s enough to know that it’s a kind of ‘summa’ of all my experiences, all my memories,” Pasolini said in early 1975.[1] The manuscript was found in a folder on the poet’s desk and it consists of 521 pages, about one fourth of the two thousand that were originally intended. It is a work that is not a novel in the traditional historical and linear sense, as Pasolini insisted, but rather a “poem,” a form that consists of “something written.” In a letter to Alberto Moravia that was found together with the manuscript, Pasolini claims that Petrolio represents “a testament, a testimony of the little knowledge that one has accumulated and is completely different from what one expected.”[2] The note that was secretly handed over to Senator Dell’Utri by an unknown source is supposed to unravel secret and controversial information on the Italian multinational oil and gas company Eni, Italy’s largest industrial corporation, partially owned by the government. Many scholars and Pasolini’s close friends had always been convinced about the existence of this excerpt because of the references to it throughout the text. Yet no proof was ever found, and the infamous chapter “Flashes of Light on Eni” remains a blank page.
Both the Italian press and the media showed an exaggerated interest in the news: suddenly, it seemed possible to many that perhaps behind Pasolini’s murder there may have been a more rational motive and that perhaps Pasolini had not been killed because of the inappropriate sexual advances he had made to a young Roman boy—a theory that was never convincing, but that nonetheless remains the official judicial version. It seemed possible and yet not obvious, since the note, which could have (and most likely would have) revealed the truth behind the murder, has already disappeared without anyone having read it, other than Senator Dell’Utri, who defined it “a disquieting text.”[3] If truth be told, Pasolini’s case had already been reopened in May 2005, after an interview released by Pino Pelosi on the national television RAI 3. Thirty years later, Pelosi declared his innocence and accused three “unknown” men of committing the crime.
Literary critic and scholar Carla Benedetti, who has written extensively on Pasolini, noted in an article for the weekly L’Espresso on Mach 29, 2010, that the missing appunto that was never exhibited at the Fiera del Libro Antico in Milan (as Dell’Utri had initially announced) has some similarities to the private letters of the American author J. D. Salinger (1919–2010). In Salinger’s case, however, despite the attention of the media, the letters were displayed at the Morgan Library in New York as promised; “ma in Italia le cose vanno diversamente” (“but in Italy things take different directions”), Benedetti significantly concludes. In recent years, both the figure of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Petrolio have witnessed an increased interest and have become points of reference for a number of contemporary authors. Given the unconventional nature of Petrolio in form and content (a novel that, as quoted in the text itself, “has no beginning” or a narrator to tell a story, but rather an author developing the project of a novel yet to be written), writers of the New Italian Epic (NIE) consider it as a typical example of an “unidentified narrative object” (UNO).[4] In other words, Pasolini’s Petrolio is incorporated in the experimental body of literary works that are “fiction and non-fiction, prosa e poesia, diario e inchiesta, letteratura e scienza, mitologia e pochade” (“fiction and nonfiction, prose and poetry, diary and inquiry, literature and science, mythology and pochade”),[5] a category of experimental narration that the NIE movement also exploits and that eschews every label and refuses to be pigeonholed.
Tiziano Scarpa has suggested that Petrolio can be considered an antecedent of the UNO for all intents and purposes.[6] Scarpa shifts the attention on Petrolio in terms of the linguistic and stylistic narrative innovation that the unfinished novel represents. In this sense, Pasolini’s denunciation against the devastating consequences of neocapitalism is no longer at the core of contemporary literary investigation. In fact, as journalist Davide Oliviero aptly points out in La Repubblica (January 30, 2009), the current generation of writers grew up within that very neocapitalist culture that Pasolini believed would sweep away every hope of a positive regeneration. In the documentary “Pasolini e . . . La Forma della Città” (“Pasolini and . . . the Profile of the City”), which aired on national television on February 7, 1974, Pasolini had made this point clear: The reality that he aimed to capture was rapidly moving toward the neocapitalist homologation (a key word in Scritti Corsari), and it was monstrously transforming into a collective identification. The new consumerist Power,[7] Pasolini continued, was generating a technique of domination that would ultimately destroy the pure and sacred culture of the lower social classes. As Pasolini nervously walked on the dunes of Sabaudia (an ideal fascist town, at least in terms of architecture), he sadly concluded that at that point “non c’ [era] più niente da fare” (“nothing more could be done”).
Pasolini’s apparent pessimism and skepticism toward the future is overturned by Oliviero’s assumption that the New Italian Epic is indeed a direct descendent and a continuation of Pasolini’s intellectual thought. In the aforementioned article in La Repubblica, Oliviero writes:
[Il New Italian Epic] è figlio diretto dell’Io so e di Petrolio di Pier Paolo Pasolini che forse mai avrebbe sperato che una generazione cresciuta in mezzo alla pop-culture—che lui vedeva come una mareggiata che avrebbe lasciato solo macerie—avrebbe invece adottato.
[The New Italian Epic] is the direct son of I Know and of Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who might never have hoped that a generation grown up within pop-culture—which he saw as a sea storm that would leave behind only rubble—would in fact embrace.
Italian contemporary writers, authors of a “nebulosa” (“nebula,” Wu Ming’s definition) of “unidentified narrative objects,” are by no means clones of Pasolini. If anything, they share with Pasolini the constant search for truth, the social commitment and pedagogical task of the writer, as well as the continuous stylistic and linguistic experimentation. As Scarpa makes clear,
Constatare che oggi molti autori si muovono in quella direzione non significa sostenere che si cerchi di riscrivere o di portare a termine Petrolio, né che tra questi autori vi sia un nuovo Pasolini (chissenefrega, poi? Non mi viene in mente concetto tanto inutile quanto “nuovo Pasolini”).[8]
To claim that today many authors are moving in that direction does not mean maintaining that we are trying to rewrite or finish Petrolio, nor [does it mean that] among these authors there is a new Pasolini (who cares? I cannot think about a more futile concept than “new Pasolini”).
Struggling to affirm the originality of their works, contemporary Italian writers do not deny a legacy with the two opposite (and yet complementary) models of postmodern narrative (i.e., Calvino and Pasolini).[9] Yet they maintain that they constantly improve and regenerate those models, ultimately achieving a unique narrative mode, which is more adequate for our days and time. During an interview for the blog “Litteratitudine” by Massimo Maugeri, Wu Ming acknowledged that the symbolic book of the New Italian Epic constitutes the missing pages of Petrolio.[10] In this way, Wu Ming establishes both an inescapable connection with Pasolini and particularly with Petrolio (a work that was directed toward future generations) and the innovative character of the “epic” contemporary narrative. The latter does not merely draw upon Pasolini’s example, but rather it continues (to complete) it. The adjective “epic” that Wu Ming introduced in the well-known “memorandum” is thus explained precisely in relation to Pasolini’s opus:
Un’opera davvero epica non si conchiude, non si esaurisce mai, ci trovi uno scarto ogni volta che rinnovi il contatto, e ogni volta ti perturba, è un gioco tra come ti ricordavi l’opera e come quest’ultima si muove per sorprenderti.[11]
A real epic work does not have a conclusion, it never exhausts itself, you can find a disparity every time you renew contact with it, and every time it perturbs you, it is a game between how you remembered the work and how the latter shifts in order to surprise you.
Given that Petrolio is a fragmented reconstruction of the (hi)story of Italy since the years of the resistance, it constitutes further proof of the incessant necessity to continue to explore the national (hi)story. Past, present, and future converge in this “epic” effort, the goal of which is one that Italians have always struggled to achieve: a national identity. Literature provides a key instrument in this effort, because of its ability to communicate with readers in a way that goes beyond any geographical and historical boundaries. It is in the light of this consideration that Wu Ming can indisputably allege the contemporariness of Pasolini’s Petrolio, a work that must continue to be written, improved, revised, (re)considered by contemporary Italian literature and culture:
Oggi sono passati trentatré anni dalla morte di Pasolini e diciassette dall’uscita di Petrolio. Più passa il tempo e più questo libro ci parla. Più ci addentriamo in questa seconda repubblica (che potrebbe sfociare in una terza ancora peggiore), e più il libro si fa attuale.
Chiunque tentasse di scriverne le parti mancanti per produrre un “oggetto narrativo” complementare, anche fallendo miseramente nel tentativo andrebbe a mettere le mani su una materia ancora viva e pulsante. Il “senno di poi” potrebbe interagire con quell’opera in modi davvero interessanti.[12]
Today, thirty-three years have passed since Pasolini’s death and seventeen since the release of Petrolio. The more time passes, the more this book talks to us. The further we go into this second republic (that could lead to an even worse third one), the more the book becomes current.
Whoever should attempt to write the missing parts [of the book] in order to produce a complementary “narrative object,” even if s/he fails miserably in such an attempt, would touch a matter that is still alive and vibrant. “Hindsight” could interact with [Pasolini’s] work in really interesting ways.
Wu Ming makes it clear that the “narrative objects” currently produced, are “complementary” to Pasolini’s text. What Wu Ming suggests is an open narrative experimentation in form and content. It is only by pushing creativity to the extremes that one can develop an ideal narrative style, while fully embracing the role of the author: the search for (a historical) truth. Because the subjects that Pasolini treated in Petrolio are still “alive and vibrant,” one must continue to question them, even if there seems to be no resolution in sight.
Literature has the advantage of imagination; it is able to instill in the mind of the readers few key hints that will allow each one of them to envision a certain event in different ways. The relation between history and literature becomes one that cannot be set aside inasmuch as “i fatti storici contribuiscono a spiegare una discontinuità nella letteratura italiana” (“historical facts contribute to explaining a certain discontinuity in Italian literature”).[13] As Wu Ming and Scarpa continue their debate on the New Italian Epic and as they focus their attention precisely on the binomial history/literature, they once again take Pasolini’s Petrolio as a case in point. Wu Ming writes:
La letteratura, come il potere, è innervata nel corpo sociale. Non è possibile né auspicabile “scollare” la stesura/pubblicazione di un libro dal contesto in cui essa avviene. . . . Non mi basta sapere che nell’anno X è stato scritto il libro Y: voglio sapere dopo quali complesse sollecitazioni, all’incrocio di quali flussi e per quali motivi quel libro è stato scritto proprio in quel momento. Non mi basta sapere che un libro scritto nel 1972–75 è uscito postumo e incompiuto nel 1992, ha avuto un impatto “sotterraneo” su alcuni scrittori in erba ed è stato compreso nella sua importanza solo nel decennio successivo. Voglio sapere perché, uscendo nel 1992, quel libro ha suscitato quelle reazioni; voglio capire se, uscendo cinque o dieci anni prima, ne avrebbe suscitate di diverse e—ancora una volta—perché.[14]
Literature, like power, is part of the social body. It is not possible or desirable to “detach” the drafting/publication of a book from the context in which it takes place. . . . It is not enough for me to know that in the year X the book Y was written: I want to know after which complex solicitations, at the intersection of which streams and for what reasons that book was written precisely in that moment. It is not enough for me to know that a book written in 1972–75 that came out posthumously in 1992 had an “underground” impact on some budding writers and was understood in its full importance only in the following decade. I want to know why, coming out in 1992, that book caused those reactions, I want to understand if, coming out five or ten years before, it would have caused different reactions and—once again—why.
A book cannot be separated from the context that produced it and from the social and historical reality that receives it. In the case of Petrolio, a text characterized more by what it is absent than by what it is present, the reactions that the book caused had radical consequences in Italy when it came out. The year 1992, in fact, coincided with the judicial investigation of “Mani Pulite” (“Clean Hands”), which led to the end of the First Republic and to a drastic restructuring of the Italian sociopolitical scene. Judge and neonoir writer Giancarlo De Cataldo affirms that through the example of Pasolini and more specifically of Petrolio, present-day Italian writers are fostering
scritture che non hanno timore di interrogarsi sulle cause . . . scritture che, per usare un’espressione di Carlo Lucarelli, si fanno le domande cattive che gli altri tacciono. Dobbiamo prenderne atto (con una certa soddisfazione): queste domande oggi se le pongono in molti. E non solo fra chi fa cultura, ma anche fra chi ne fruisce.[15]
writings that are not afraid to inquire into the causes . . . writings that, to use an expression by Carlo Lucarelli, ask themselves hard questions that others keep silent on. We must take note of this (with a certain satisfaction): today, there are many who ask these questions. And not only those who produce culture, but also those who use/consume culture.
De Cataldo’s invitation to “become conscious” of the changes that have occurred/are occurring in the Italian cultural and social panorama reiterate the fact that an unavoidable shift has happened in Italy since the 1990s, and to paraphrase the writer, it did not happen by chance, but out of necessity:
Chiamiamolo neo-neorealismo. Chiamiamolo New Italian Epic. Le etichette lasciano il tempo che trovano. . . . Le lucciole sono tornate ma sono ancora pochine. Per il momento convivono con le mille luci che ne ostacolano l’accoppiamento, cercano strategie di sopravvivenza, e intanto riprendono il proprio posto nelle notti di fine primavera. Ci sono, e questo conforta. . . . Così come negli scaffali delle librerie fra lividi pamphlet contro tutto e contro tutti, manualistica della seduzione fai-da-te, agiografie di veline e velinari e barzellette sulla castroneria nazionale, da anni ormai campeggia il nucleo “hard-core” di una letteratura “non identificata” che si danna l’anima per afferrare i contorni troppo spesso indecifrabili dell’Italia, il mutamento antropologico del suo presente e le ossessioni del suo eterno e inattaccabile spessore reazionario. La partita è appena cominciata. E l’esito, tutt’altro che scontato.[16]
Let us call it neo-neorealism. Let us call it New Italian Epic. Labels are temporary. . . . The fireflies are back but there are still only a few. For now, they live together with the thousands of lights that block their couplings, they are looking for survival strategies, and in the meantime they take back their own place during the late spring nights. They are here, and this consoles us. . . . Likewise on the bookshops’ shelves, among ashen pamphlets against everything and everybody, the do-it-yourself seduction manuals, the hagiographies of show girls and show girls’ lovers and jokes on national stupidity, for years now there has been the “hard-core” nucleus of an “unidentified” literature that is going crazy in order to grasp the too often indecipherable contours of Italy, the anthropological change of its present and the obsessions of its eternal and unassailable reactionary heft. The game has just begun. And the outcome is anything but given.
In 2009 in Milan, the president of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the Piazza Fontana Bombing. During his speech, Napolitano invited Italians “to continue to look for fragments of truth.” The invitation of President Napolitano, the head of state and most respected institution in Italy, to “look for fragments of truth” sounds unsatisfactory, as poet Gianni D’Elia points out:
Non vorrei apparire sgarbato se vorrei aggiungere che più che frammenti di verità, dopo quarant’anni noi vorremmo il quadro intero. Noi dal potere politico, da quello giudiziario, dalle istituzioni vorremmo l’intero quadro perchè sono passati troppi anni. E allora io ho una piccola richiesta non da poeta ma da cittadino . . . perché infondo chiunque fa il suo mestiere ma tutti noi siamo cittadini . . . come ha detto recentemente Saramago . . . nel discorso per il Nobel: “Io sono uno scrittore e un cittadino.” Ecco, allora da cittadino io chiederei: togliete il segreto di stato.
I don’t want to seem impolite but I would like to add that rather than fragments of truth, after forty years we would like the whole picture. From the political power, from the judiciary and from the institutions, we would like the whole picture because too many years have passed. So, I have a small request not as a poet but as a citizen . . . because, after all, we all have our professions but we all are citizens . . . as recently Saramago pointed out . . . in his speech for the Nobel prize: “I am a writer and a citizen.” Well, then, as a citizen I would like to ask: abolish the State secret.
D’Elia’s modest proposal, in a manner of speaking, was presented during an interview by director Roberto Olla and inserted in the documentary for RAI television titled Nero Petrolio (Black Petrol, 2011). Therein, Olla also attempts to reconstruct Italian history as a sort of jigsaw puzzle: Several mysterious murders (from Matteotti to Mattei, from De Mauro to Pasolini) are drawn together with the purpose of creating a unitary historical portrayal. Once again, the search for a historical truth, that the “citizen” is called on to verify and question, cannot set aside Pasolini’s case. If one wants to achieve a sense of peace (“pacificazione”), D’Elia continues, one must first reach a complete knowledge of the truth.
The adjective “complete” is essential in order to comprehend the role of the New Italian Epic. A complete knowledge of truth can only be such if one understands that there are three different and complementary kinds of truths: literary or journalistic truth, historic truth, and judicial truth. It is up to the citizen to nourish the historic truth with the hope that the judicial truth will be attained, and this can only be done with the cooperation of literary or journalistic truth.[17] It is up the citizens to find the perfect alchemy among those elements, because such knowledge of truth, first and foremost, belongs to them.
NIE in Italy has become the new investigative historiographical instrument, and to this end, it often uses the figure of Pasolini to regenerate a literary and sociopolitical commitment. It is legitimate to affirm, that starting with the publication of Petrolio, Italian literature has embraced the challenge that Pasolini launched with his corsair oeuvre. Italian contemporary writers have successfully reinvented themselves not only as fiction writers (too limiting a category in the current era), but also as investigative journalists and historians.
In a January 2003 episode of Blu Notte and in a follow-up book in 2004 (Nuovi Misteri d’Italia), Carlo Lucarelli explored Pasolini’s case in an attempt to establish a legacy and to pay tribute to the “intellettuale impegnato” (“engaged intellectual”). On March 31, 2010, in the national newspaper La Repubblica, Lucarelli published an article that harshly attacked those who were still skeptical about the motive behind Pasolini’s death. In so doing, Lucarelli offered a sociological analysis of Italian society at large. He writes:
Però so una cosa. Che in Italia, in questa nostra strana Italia, le domande hanno sempre fatto più paura delle risposte. Perché dopo la risposta magari le cose si rimettono a posto come è sempre successo, ma la domanda provoca un sisma che non si sa come andrà a finire. . . . E un omicidio, dalla nostre parti, è sempre stato un segnale molto usato. Insomma, non so se Petrolio, con il suo capitolo scomparso, avrebbe rappresentato un pericolo mortale, ma solo il fatto di scriverlo, di ricevere informazioni da alcuni contro altri, di entrare involontariamente in una guerra segreta combattuta su altri fronti, già sarebbe un buon motivo per essere ammazzato.
If there is one thing that I know, it is that in Italy, in our strange Italy, questions have always terrified us more than answers. Because after an answer, things may fall back into place as has always happened, but the question generates an earthquake whose end we cannot anticipate. . . . And a homicide here has always been a very used signal. In other words, I don’t know if Petrolio with its vanished chapter would have represented a mortal danger, but just the fact that it was written, that information was received by someone against someone else, that a secret war fought on other fronts had been involuntarily entered, would already have been a good reason to get murdered.
Here Lucarelli brings up a sore point. As Leopardi observed, Italians do not know what to do with truth; actually, they even see it as harmful. Therefore, they have always been presented a fragmented reality jarringly at odds with the entire mosaic that the intellectual was supposed to depict, in order to reveal, and eventually denounce, the moral degradation and deterioration into which the society had fallen. Contemporary writers are far from suggesting the idea of a pseudo-innocent intellectual who justifies and attenuates the (hyper)reality she or he depicts.
During the 1970s and early 1980s some—as Gianni D’Elia observes—in Italy believed that “a revolution” would have been possible only by the means of politics; Pasolini intuited that a truly radical change was achievable only through culture. The authors of the so-called “nebulosa,” to use Wu Ming’s term, whose texts date back to the years following the publication of Petrolio, have revised the concept of “lotta” (“struggle”), no longer applicable in such a diverse context, and have made their objective the search for truth and justice, as well as to provide a detailed description of reality. Furthermore, with a revised narrative, the form of which is highly experimental, NIE writers have also taken on Pasolini’s invitation to look at reality in its totality, rather than deconstructing it in disconnected fragments. As D’Elia explains:
Pasolini ha scritto nelle Lettere Luterane e in Scritti Corsari, che noi, per forma mentale, siamo abituati a separare i fenomeni. E lui dice: “Io invece in tutta la mia vita ho lottato contro la separazione dei fenomeni. Cioé,” e spiega, “per esempio voi parlate del palazzo e non parlate del paese. Pensate che sia diverso? Invece palazzo e paese sono legati. Non solo. Parlate del presente e non parlate del passato. Invece passato e presente sono legati.” Allora contro la separazione dei fenomeni significa anche che il delitto Mattei, il delitto De Mauro, il delitto Scaglione, il delitto Pasolini, le stragi sui treni, alla stazione di Bologna dopo anni . . . [sono connessi]. . . . [Si è] voluto impedire che si trovasse una sinstesi di questa opposizione italiana: Hanno ammazzato Moro, hanno ammazzato Pasolini e hanno ammazzato Mattei, cioé hanno ammazzato l’economia, la politica civile e la cultura. Questi sono delitti fondativi; è importante che noi non separiamo i fenomeni, che capiamo che c’è una linea precisa di poteri occulti che ha voluto impedire che l’Italia fosse un Paese normale.
Pasolini wrote in the Luteran Letters and in Corsair Writings, that we, because of our forma mentis, are in the habit of separating phenomena. And he says: “I, instead, have fought all of my life against the separation of phenomena. In other words,” and he explains, “You, for instance, talk about the castle and don’t talk about the town surrounding the caste. You think that it is different? Castle and town are connected instead. What is more, you talk about the present and don’t talk about the past. On the contrary, past and present are connected.” Then against the separation of the phenomena also means that Mattei’s murder, De Mauro’s murder, Scaglione’s murder, Pasolini’s murder, the attacks on the trains, at the train station in Bologna years later . . . [are connected]. . . . People have tried to prevent anyone from finding a synthesis in this: They killed Moro, they killed Pasolini and they killed Mattei, that is they killed the economy, civil politics and culture. Those are foundational murders; it is important that we do not separate phenomena that we understand that there is a precise line of hidden powers that wanted to prevent Italy from becoming a normal Country.
Whereas it is difficult to interpret and define the term “normale” as intended by D’Elia, there is instead an evident connection that he is trying to trace among areas such as economics, civil politics, and culture, that only when looked at with a unitary gaze can possibly provide a consistent depiction of reality. Ultimately, solving the mystery of Pasolini’s death is a matter of national conscience and identity. The interest of NIE writers in Pasolini’s case is an indispensable and necessary step in the process of creating a new cultural and literary national canon. After all, as Robert S. C. Gordon observes: “Canons are formed on the basis of myths, models and figures, and on the penetration of these within the institutions that disseminate literary culture.”[18]
To conclude, I would like to bring attention to a curious yet interesting article by Father Nicola Spadaro that appeared in the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica in April, 1997: “La letteratura dell’orrore estremo tra ‘pulp,’ ‘splatter’ e ‘punk’” (“The literature of extreme horror among ‘pulp,’ ‘splatter’ and ‘punk’”). The long-overdue exculpation of Pasolini’s figure does not only come from the literary, judicial, and public world, but apparently also from more conservative Catholic circles; what is interesting is the relation that is suddenly traced between Pasolini and contemporary young pulp writers. In 1997, the so called “cannibals” had just published their first anthology and the images of extreme horror and violence had initially shocked many critics and readers alike. Father Antonio Spadaro’s reaction is an invitation to the young pulp writers to look back at the Pasolini of Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom (a film that, like Petrolio, was released posthumously on November 22, 1975, a few days after his murder). According to Father Spadaro, in Pasolini’s last film, there is a level of moral tension that seems to be lacking in the young pulp writers’ works:
Viene in mente . . . un paragone spontaneo con la violenza e le aberrazioni descritte da Pasolini nel suo film estremo Salò, o le Centoventi Giornate di Sodoma, e da lì gli autori pulp avrebbero molto da imparare sul livello di tensione morale nella rappresentazione di un cannibalismo estremo. Pasolini ha cercato infatti di rappresentare “il cuore della violenza” con freddezza e lucidità anche maniacali. Quando violenza banalità, orrore, sangue si intrecciano in una folle anarchia del potere da parte di un male dai tratti assoluti, si compone una struttura infernale dantesca, che è grido, in un mondo in cui Dio è proibito, a una umanità umile e sana. Il film di Pasolini si chiude infatti con un’apertura alla speranza che risorge dalle ceneri, con una fiducia nella capacità dell’uomo di ricominciare, affrancata dalla tenerezza, sentimento che gli autori pulp sembrano aver perso di vista.[19]
Here comes to mind . . . a spontaneous comparison with the violence and the aberrations described by Pasolini in his last extreme film Salò, or One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and from there the pulp writers would have a lot to learn on the level of moral tension in the representation of an extreme cannibalism. In fact, Pasolini tried to represent “the heart of violence” with an almost maniacal detachment and lucidity. When banal violence, horrors, and blood intermingle in an insane anarchy of powers thanks to a pure evil [force] with absolute traits, one has an infernal Dantesque structure that is a call, in a world in which God is forbidden, to a humble and healthy humanity. Pasolini’s film ends in fact with an opening toward hope that rises again from the ashes with a trust in the ability of man to begin again, freed by tenderness, a feeling of which the pulp writers seem to have lost track.
Spadaro argues that the pulp writers are creating a vortex of images that “registers” the chaos of contemporary life with all of its violence, “ma alla fine esprim[ono] soltanto un distacco anestetico che ‘gira a vuoto,’ non comunica, non coglie il senso, non dà ragione, lasciando paradossalmente il gusto amaro e leggero dell’artificio retorico” (“but in the end [they] express only an anesthetic detachment that ‘gets nowhere,’ it does not communicate, it does not grasp the sense, it does not prove right, paradoxically leaving the bitter and light taste of the rhetoric artifice”).[20]
But the reevaluation of Pasolini’s oeuvre with its ideal level of moral tension is temporary and, in truth, generic. In fact, during a recent interview on October 12, 2011, when asked if he appreciates Pasolini, Father Spadaro answers:
Ritengo che sia incomprensibile senza San Paolo. Mi riferisco al progetto di Pasolini per un film sull’apostolo, ambientato ai nostri giorni, e che tuttavia doveva restare fedele alla realtà storica, per sostenere che San Paolo è qui oggi. . . . Vi appare tutta l’attenzione dello scrittore per il santo.
I believe that he is incomprehensible without Saint Paul. I am referring to the project that Pasolini had for a film on the apostle, set during our times, and that nonetheless was to remain faithful to the historical reality, in order to argue that Saint Paul is here today. . . . [Therein] all of the attention of the writer for the saint is evident.
If Pasolini’s work is “incomprehensible,” how can it function as a proper model for the pulp writers? Moreover, assuming that Pasolini’s “last extreme film” (Spadaro’s terms) was able to embed a moral tension while contemplating a possibility of salvation (a concept that can be questioned and discussed at length), weren’t the pulp writers since the very beginning attempting to achieve such a salvation with the unhinging of moral codes, forms, and expressions of power?[21] Daniele Brolli, editor of Gioventù Cannibale, opens the anthology with a brief essay that is an attack on all forms of morality as applied to literature: “Le Favole Cambiano” he titled it, literally “fables change/are changing” but the term “fables” can also be given a broader interpretation of “things,” “approaches,” and more generally “literary texts.” Brolli writes:
Il moralismo è quella pulsione sadica che spinge chi ne è vittima a conservare i propri cadaveri negli armadi altrui. Ed è anche l’unica forma di perversione socialmente ammessa, capace di relegare tutte le altre comparse sul palcoscenico degli atti proibiti. . . . [Accusa] gli altri di una volontà nociva per le persone e per l’intero complesso sociale.[22]
Moralism is that sadistic instinct that urges whomever is its victim to keep his/her own skeletons in somebody else’s closets. And it is also the only form of perversion socially accepted, able to relegate all of the other figureheads on the stage of prohibited acts. . . . It accuses the others of a harmful will toward people and toward the entire social group.
Contemporary Italian writers have abolished every kind of pact or implicit contract with the reader and the critic in order to start forging a kind of “laboratory writing” (“scrittura laboratorio”[23] ) that refuses compromises and exceeds the limits of the national collective imagination as Italians knew it. The goal is the creation of a new tendency of the imagination that in the end invites us to rethink and reevaluate the ethics and aesthetics of literature. In the end, one alters the question of whose responsibility it is to search for (historical) truth. “Io so perchè sono uno scrittore” (“I know because I am a writer”), Pasolini argued in the famous article “Che cos’è questo golpe?” (“What is this coup?”).[24] And we, as readers, can no longer hide behind the protective shield of the writer as a mythical figure: “Lo scrittore non è l’albatro di Baudelaire, capace di grandi voli nel cielo, ma goffo, con le sue ali, sul ponte della nave” (“The writer is no longer Baudelaire’s albatross, able to accomplish great flights, but he is clumsy, with his wings, on the deck of the boat”).[25] We all have the responsibility to continue writing and reading the missing pages of Petrolio, a cardinal text for the epic achievement, at last, of a national Italian identity. In the light of this observation, the connection between the literary “nebula” of texts appeared in Italy during the past two decades and the reassessment of Pasolini’s figure that took place concurrently in the country, is finally explained: “Noi siamo i posteri di Pasolini, quelli venuti dopo a cui [Petrolio] era indirizzato, e lo abbiamo ricevuto a brandelli, ma quei brandelli parlano di noi” (“We are Pasolini’s descendents, those who came after those to whom [Petrolio] was addressed, and we have received it in shreds, but those shreds talk about us”).[26]
In 1992, Einaudi opted for an all-white cover for Petrolio, a rather unusual choice due to the fact that “they get dirty and yellow easily,” as writer and literary critic Marco Belpoliti points out.[27] Yet, such a peculiar decision aimed to emphasize the nature itself of Pasolini’s last novel: the book is a(n) (open) space, which one tries to fill with a sketch, an outline with or without a conclusion. Petrolio, which in its turn draws heavily on another text (Questo è Cefis), is a palimpsest or, as Wu Ming 1 simply puts it, an unidentified narrative object. It continues to be re-used and re-elaborated. In the essay “Why Literature?” Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa argues that “literature is always subversive, unsubmissive, rebellious.”[28] Italian literature started embracing precisely those characteristics since the inception of the Second Republic the beginning of which significantly corresponds to the publication of Pasolini’s Petrolio.
Stampa Sera, January 10, 1975, quoted in Robert S. C. Gordon, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 267; or Stampa Sera, January 10, 1975, quoted in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio (Milano: Mondadori Editore, 2005), 617.
Pasolini, Petrolio, xiii.
“Uno scritto inquietante” quoted in Dario Olivero, “Dell’Utri, Pasolini e il giallo di Petrolio,” La Stampa, March 2, 2010.
During a seminar on contemporary Italian literature held at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 2008, Wu Ming 1 (a pseudonym of Italian writer and cultural activist Roberto Bui) suggested the definition of New Italian Epic to describe the body of literary works that had appeared in Italy since the mid-1990s, after the end of the First Republic. It is yet another interesting label that recognizes the drastic shift in Italian narrative, but NIE is an epithet that immediately started being used in conferences, conventions, and newspapers because it encapsulated the epic endeavor of the young authors who challenged mainstream literature and ultimately changed for good the direction in which it was headed.
Wu Ming, New Italian Epic: Letteratura, Sguardo Obliquo, Ritorno al Futuro (Torino: Einaudi, 2009), 42.
In Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” p. 19, accessed November 10, 2011, www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/outtakes/Wu_Ming_Tiziano_Scarpa_Face_Off.pdf.
“I write Power with the capital ‘P’ because I do not know what this new Power is. I simply acknowledge its existence” (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti Corsari [Cles, TN: Mondadori Editore, 1975], 58).
Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” 20.
Cfr. Carla Benedetti et al., Pasolini contro Calvino (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998).
Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” 20.
Wu Ming, New Italian Epic: Letteratura, Sguardo Obliquo, Ritorno al Futuro (Torino: Einaudi, 2009), 73.
Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” 20.
Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” 12.
Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” 13.
Giancarlo De Cataldo, “Raccontare l’Italia senza avere paura di sporcarsi le mani,” La Repubblica, June 8, 2008.
The metaphor of the fireflies is a reference to Pasolini’s article “Il Vuoto del Potere in Italia” (“The Lack of Power in Italy”), which appeared in the Corriere della Sera on February 1, 1975; after the disappearance of fireflies, Pasolini discussed the environmental pollution and the radical industrial changes the country had gone through.
“Esiste una verità storica che noi stiamo ricercando per la storia dell’Italia. . . . Questo e’ legittimo, perchè ci sono un sacco di ombre, un sacco di depistaggi. Questa verità storica, che la dovrebbero cercare gli storici, però è anche dei cittadini, o no? Io credo di si. . . . Da una parte la verità storica. Poi c’è la verità giudiziaria che noi speriamo arrivi. Ora, come può essere nutrita questa verità storica verso una verità giudiziaria? Dalla verità letteraria, che è quella che pratichiamo noi scrittori, anche giornalisti, che non vuol dire letteraria finta, falsa, fasulla, ma vuol dire aderente al vero.”There is a historical truth that we are still looking for in the history of Italy. . . . This is legitimate, because there are many shadows, much sidetracking. But this historical truth, which the historians should be searching for, also belongs to the citizens, doesn’t it? I think so. . . . On one side lies the historical truth. Then there is the judicial truth, which we hope will come. Now, how can this historical truth be nourished towards the achievement of a judicial truth? Thanks to the literary truth, which is the one that we, as writers, practice, as well as the journalists; literary does not mean fake, false, forged, but it means adhering to the truth.
Robert S. C. Gordon, “Pasolini contro Calvino: Culture, the Canon and the Millennium,” Modern Italy 3, no. 1 (1998), 96.
Antonio Spadaro, “La letteratura dell’orrore estremo tra ‘pulp,’ ‘splatter’ e ‘punk,’” La Civiltà Cattolica 2 (1997), 60.
Antonio Spadaro, “La letteratura dell’orrore estremo tra ‘pulp,’ ‘splatter’ e ‘punk,’” La Civiltà Cattolica 2 (1997), 57.
Niccolò Ammaniti and Daniele Brolli et al., Gioventù Cannibale (Torino: Einaudi, 1996), vi.
Ammaniti and Brolli, Gioventù Cannibale, v.
Ammaniti and Brolli, Gioventù Cannibale, viii.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Che cos’è questo golpe,” Corriere della Sera, November 14, 1974.
Wu Ming, New Italian Epic, 194.
Wu Ming 1, “Wu Ming/Tiziano Scarpa: A Face Off,” 20.
Quoted in Angela Molteni, “Il mondo contemporaneo in Petrolio, l’ultima fatica narravita di Pasolini.” Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa collects all of Molteni’s articles in the “Archivio Angela Molteni.”
Mario Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” New Republic 224, no. 20 (2001), 34.