Thomas E. Peterson 437 PIER PAOLO PASOLINI BESTEMMIA

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PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
BESTEMMIA. TUTTE LE POESIE.
A cura di Graziella Chiarcossi e Walter Siti.
Prefazione di Giovanni Giudici.
Milano: Garzanti, 1993. 2 voll. 1233 pp.
The first four volumes of Pasolini's complete verse include his major
published collections arranged in chronological order: La meglio
gioventù, La ceneri di Gramsci, L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, La
religione del mio tempo, Poesia in forme di rosa, Trasumanar e
organizzar, and La nuova gioventù. The paperback edition allows access
to an opus too often broken up, anthologized, periodized, and otherwise
delimited or reduced. Seeing the entirety of the major volumes together
— in dialect and Italian, early and late — frees one from the
understandable temptation to appropriate the author in pieces, in
polemical or personal fragments, or for a cause. As the disillusioned
poet tells us: "I partiti presi son destinati e diventare partiti perduti"
(977). Among the many causes evident in this panoramic and
kaleidoscopic series of works from the 1940s through the 1970s, that
which emerges as the single unifying force is poetry.
Pasolini's title, Bestemmia, was the name of an unfinished "poema
in forma di sceneggiatura, per gran parte inedito, di circa duemila versi"
(from which selections will appear in Volume IV), but also the title he
indicated to Livio Garzanti for his collected poems. The "blasphemy"
in question — like the "scandal" concentrated on by Giovanni Giudici
in his introduction — is legible on many levels: political, religious,
sexual, linguistic, and historical (the author insists he is a "forza del
passato"). Yet of course it was Pasolini's gift — as it was Leopardi's —
to know that the true seed of the modern lay in the archaic. This is the
reason, I believe, that Giudici begins his introduction by citing these
lines from "Il canto popolare": "Improvviso il mille novecento /
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cinquanta due passa sull'Italia: / solo il popolo ne ha un sentimento /
vero: mai tolto al tempo, non l'abbaglia / la modernità, benché sempre
il più / moderno sia esso [...]" (ix). The main point that Giudici makes
concerns Pasolini's incomparable breadth and depth: his epic-Dantesque
project and his precociously refined literary gifts, his protagonistic
bursting ("irrompere") on the Italian scene, his refusal to be denied a
public, though (or perhaps because) the proletarian class he defended
remained outside the consciousness of historical process.
Pasolini's intimate bond to the proletarian and sub-proletarian
classes is fleshed out in Bestemmia, because the continuity of his
commitment is so undeniably present in all its multiplicities. In the
commitment is a collective passion, painfully pursued as an individual,
against the very institutions that would satisfy it. And in the continuity
is the coherence, the coordination of meaning, extending from poem to
poem, collection to collection, genre to genre. The coherence is
expressed in terms of an ethos — the custom and conduct of life —
which is guided and driven by an ethics that is never abandoned.
Scanning the totality of this work, one sees a "tapestry" as well as
a sort of "encyclopedia" of knowledge and learning. I use these terms
advisedly to point, on the one hand to the aesthetic, pictorial, cinematic,
and gestural Pasolini; and, on the other to the scholar, of Marxism,
linguistics, dialect studies, and ethnography. The "tapestry" is an
ostensive, physicalist medium and mode, aided in countless poems by
the poet's physical movement, usually by walking, but also in
automobiles, trains, and airplanes. The peripatetic Pasolini leads us from
Italian province to metropolis and beyond the national boundaries to
sopralluoghi for films and tours of run-down quarters of Third World
countries.
In La meglio gioventù (1954) ma L'usignolo (poems from 1943-49,
only published in 1958), one sees the "tapestry" in terms of the religious
drama of peasant Christianity, in which there is already a sexual
connotation and identification, "Cristo, il tuo corpo / di giovinetta"
(291). Christianity here is a given, a reality suffused with the sounds of
the liturgy and the sights of Friuli: "Dietro di Cristo / sui monti morti
/ il cielo fugge, / è un cielo fiume" (295). Here too there is a stifling
Oedipal component: "il sogno in cui tua madre / infila i tuoi calzoni
[...]" (325); "Il mondo è nell'ombra / del tuo tiepido riso / di madre
giovinetta. / Ah, non so nulla e tutto / della tua floridezza, / le tue vesti
fragranti / di mode impure e timide, / la tua bianca gola, / simile
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all'eroine / dell'epoca [...]" (367-68). The "encyclopedic" Pasolini is
displayed here in his incipient Marxism, but is primarily formal in
nature. The style is highly developed, in a fusion of Pascolian,
stilnovist, naif and contemporary motifs that lead Giudici again to speak
of "la struggente liricità romanza delle poesie friuliane" (xii), a
description ("consuming lyricism") I would extend to the entire opus.
Le ceneri di Gramsci is the best known of Pasolini's works. Once
again, the reader has the opportunity to read the classic poemetti of
Pasolini's great season of poesia civile with reference to the earlier and
later work. What endures in terms of the "tapestry" in the 1957
collection is the attempt at envisioning one Italy, variously situated, in
the agrarian epochs, in the Appenines, in the Roman borgate, at the
tomb of Gramsci. The dominance of the albeit irregular hendecasyllable,
often in terzine dantesche, reinforces this unitive and altogether
controlled and "classical" attempt at vatic vision. But the attempt is
compromised by the "enclopedic" force of the poet's rational
meanderings. The light of the political reality exposed in the Ceneri is
at times paralyzingly lucid, also with reference to the author's
experiences of persecution, notably in the Italian courts.
If the poems of Ceneri embrace a "creatural realism" and "mingling
of styles," two phrases Pasolini borrowed from Auerbach, the longer (as
well as the shorter, epigrammatic) works of La religione del mio tempo
engage a prosaics, that is, a more discursive mode and frequently a
clashing of styles. The ethos is now, I would submit, that of several
"Italys" — the elegiac, the intellectual, the ecclesiastical, etc. — which
the author does not intend or wish to represent as one, but strongly
indicts, also in terms of the unity offered by Catholicism, here in "Alla
mia nazione": "E solo perché sei cattolica, non puoi pensare / che il tuo
male è tutto il male: colpa di ogni male" (555). The blasphemy or
scandal of Pasolini's verse has grown more intimately psychological: the
combination of self-indulgence and suffering with social reason is
inimitable (and inimical to those who would assess it in terms of the
dominant ideologies). The "mio" of the collection's title declares the
project to deliver, like Whitman, a personal testament and epic summary
— A history of an "I" — a child, an adolescent, an ephemeral soldier and
mourning brother, the son of a divided couple and nation, the
homosexual and atheist and communist — all reductive labels for this
avid and restless spirit. In the course of probing his identity, as an
Italian and cultural catholic, Pasolini prepares indictment against
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conformism, nationalism, moralism, and (especially northern)
regionalism.
Volume II begins with the 1964 Poesia in forma di rosa, and with
it the overtly offending and offended voice of a wholly disillusioned
author, free to describe his sexual itineraries, "Fu un'ennesima amicizia,
/ una di quelle che durando una sera, / straziano poi tutta la vita" (798),
or to lambaste politicians or clerics for hypocrisy. The geography
extends to extra-Italian sites and dimensions, just as the "tapestry"
undertaken is cinematic in nature, subsequent to Pasolini's directional
debut in 1960. Here too the "encyclopedia" commences its intensely
rhetorical and self-consciously ironic focus on poetry: "non mi resta /
che fare oggetto della mia poesia la poesia, / — se tutto il resto è ormai
sotto la sfera / di una brutta morte. La carne vuole sangue" (807). With
it comes the idea of mental slips of the pen that one can go back and
correct, or rewrite. The end note of the collection refers to "questo libro
di poesie e poemi — di Temi, Treni e Profezie, di Diari, e Interviste e
Reportages e Progetti in versi" (844). It is thus the processual, and ever
peripatetic Pasolini that steps forward, exposing his personal and public
contradictions, often making little distinction between them. The title
and title poem are of Dantean inspiration, as is the important La divina
mimesis written in the same years (and studied in my Paraphrase of an
Imaginary Dialogue). Despite the polemical violence of Poesia in forma
di rosa, there are moments of a classical lyricism: "La primavera porta
una coltre / di erba dura tenerella, di primule [...] / e l'atonia dei sensi
mista alla libidine" (630).
The 1971 collection Trasumanar e organizzare continues and
expands on the rhetorical experiments: guided by the "uselessness" of
poetry, he mocks his own notoriety, writing and proposing poems "on
commission." One is left with a magmatic intellectual diary of the
myriad events and personalities that populate Pasolini's world, as
director, essayist, and bête noir. Here he addresses the totality of his
knowledge, "tutto ciò che io so": "La ecolalia sarebbe dunque la sua
forma / (dice l'Angelo) // E cosi vado verso il balbettio / — che
contiene ogni lingua — ridendo. // Il ridere di Maria sul Mar Rosso, /
e poi, là, la scrivania schifosa // Là tra carte svalutate e spregiate / Tutto
ciò che so s'identifichi / disonestamente, per partito preso, // in una
scienza di luce" (906-7). Concerning his evening wanderings he
concludes, "Il sesso un pretesto" (959). And regarding the "heretical"
makeup of his history of contestations, he writes, "L'eretico, dunque,
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non cercò con disinteressato amore l'eresia: / non se lo sognò
nemmeno! / Oppose serietà a serietà; / ricercò la purezza originaria del
pensiero. / Lottò, in realtà, per la vera ortodossia. / Si battè contro le
abitudini e le loro deviazioni" (1009). Particularly moving is "Patmos,"
the poem memorializing those killed in the 1966 bombing at Piazza
Fontana in Milan.
The 1975 volume, La nuova gioventù (1975) is a comprehensive
attempt at "rewriting," in a dark, satirical, and pessimistic light, the
poems of La meglio gioventù (1941-53). The author finds himself at the
end of a relentless and consuming cycle, yet as indicated by the title of
the final section (which includes material in Italian), "Il tetro
entusiasmo," he maintains a spiritual coherence and rigor, as confirmed
by the end of the final poem (here translated): "E io camminerò leggero,
andando avanti, scegliendo per sempre / la vita, la gioventù" (1200). As
throughout the volumes, the editors have presented this complex
collection in exemplary fashion, inviting future studies of its thirty-year
historical stratification, including its variants.
In conclusion, let us remember, with Giudici, the folly of looking
at a poet's personal life for a passe-partout. This holds true particularly
now for all interpreters of Pasolini's work, a work that must be
organized under the sign of poetry.
THOMAS E. PETERSON
University of Georgia,
Athens, Georgia