Pasolini's Gramsci Wallace P. Sillanpoa MLN, Vol. 96, No. 1, Italian Issue. (Jan., 1981), pp. 120-137.

Pasolini's Gramsci

Wallace P. Sillanpoa

When discussing those who perhaps most influenced the thought of the late Pier Paolo Pasolini, poet, novelist, critic and filmaker, one critic recently spoke of 'il suo Gramsci."' Implied in this possessive is the highly personal interpretation that Pasolini attached to the example and writings of Antonio Gramsci, revolutionary political theorist whose famous notebooks survived their author's death in 1937 after eleven years of Fascist imprisonment. What follows attempts to qualify this implication through a survey of Pasolini's writings directly linked to a reading of Gramsci. Demonstration should emerge to bolster those claims of a subjective interpretation whose ultimate complexity can best be described generally as a curious admixture of confraternity and contradiction. T h e closing section of L'usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (1958), containing verse composed between 1943 and 1949, carries the subtitle, La scoperta di Marx. War and the Italian Partisan response had transformed Pasolini, leading him to the conviction that life ~ the For demands "qualcos'altro che amorelper il proprio d e ~ t i n o . " young Pasolini, that "something other" prompted a probe into an

' Mariella Bettinari, "Pasolini, le culture e noi" in Perche' Pasolini (Firenze: Guaraldi editore, 1978), p. 217. Quoted by Alberto Asor Rosa in Scrittori e papolo (Roma: Edizioni Samona e Savelli, 1972), p. 374. Ferretti maintains, that as far as Pasolini's "discovery of Marx" is concerned, "tutto il precedente travaglio interiore e la stessa proposta finale, si muovevano nell'ambito di un irrazionalismo religioso-passionale, di un mondo astorico, (mentre) qui Pasolini formula per la prima volta la sua 'scoperta' di un mondo razionale e storico emblematizzato in Marx." Gian Carlo Ferretti, Letteratura e zdeologza (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1964; 1976), p. 185.
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alternative world view, grounded in reason, synthesized in Marx, and calling for a commitment to popular political struggle. Within a short period of time, this newly explored world view began to intrude upon the sentimental universe of the poet's earlier verse, linguistically and thematically circumscribed by his maternal Friuli. Pasolini's idiolect thus evolved into the idiom of a wider historical and class perspective, but without ever causing the poet to dismiss his previous experience. Pasolini's topocentric perspective widened, that is, and allowed the peasant world of Friuli, a world of primitive innocence and religious fatality, to assume even greater mythic proportions in the course of this investigation of a Marxist rationalism. During these years, first as a witness to Partisan struggles, and then as a sympathizer to the uprisings of Friulan day laborers, Pasolini participated in the local politics of the Italian Communist Party. But also in these years, he helped found, together with other young Friulans, the Academiuta de lengua furlana, a small circle dedicated to the philological study and social diffusion of Friulan language and culture. Thus Pasolini's early formation joined a sentimental attachment to the linguistic and cultural environment of his adolescence to an examination of Marxist rationalism and political ideology. Pasolini says his introduction to Marx took place early: "In Friuli ho letto Gramsci e mar^."^ This particular pairing suggests, however, that his introduction was only nominally Marxist. Paolo Volponi reports, in fact, that Pasolini himself once confessed: "Sono u n marxista che ha letto poco Marx. Ho letto di piu the Gramsci read during this period in Friuli G r a m ~ c i . Moreover, "~ must have been the Gramsci of the Lettere dal carcere, for, with the sole exception of I1 materialismo storico e lafilosofia di Benedetto Croce, it wasn't until 1949 (when Pasolini had already been in Rome for a year) that the first of the other major texts of the Quaderni del carcere began appearing in print. This observation contends that this Marxist formation was really a Gramscian one, and it underscores the special character of the Gramsci first encountered by Pasolini. T o a great degree this Gramsci was, and essentially continued to be, the pathetic hero of the prison letters, only in part counterbalanced by the figure of the revolutionary theorist of political and cultural praxis. Nevertheless, in 1948 Pasolini was forced to abandon his region
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari (Milano: Garzanti, 1975), p. 148.
Paolo Volponi, "Pasolini maestro e amico" in Perchi Pasolini, o f . cit., p. 27.

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and his people under personal and political circumstances that left deep scars.5Amid the disinherited of Rome's shantytowns (borgate), he felt painfully torn from the world of his youth. That emotional and ethical energy previously nourished through his contact with Friuli was thus diverted to these emarginated urban poor who, lured by the promises of postwar industrial reconstruction, were leaving behind their Southern agrarian communities to find themselves amid the wretched conditions of those inhabiting the periphery of many large Italian cities. The poet's myth of an atemporal and a-rational Friuli was hence transferred to the neoprimitive and socially incohesive topography of Rome's dispossessed. Pasolini's presence among these poor of the Roman borgate, his passion for their dialect and street-wise slang, his fascination with their desperate vitalism and what he considered their prepolitical rebelliousness, supplanted his poeticized concept of Friuli. Ragazzi di vita, Pasolini's celebrated novel begun in 1950 and published in 1955, emerged from this newly uncovered social and linguistic reality. At the same time, some of the verse Pasolini composed while in Rome marked the survival of his passionate attachment to the locus amoenus of his youth, through memories populated by farm hands and shepherd boys at ease in the fields, mountains and windwashed village squares of his mythic Friuli. Once removed from his native setting and confronted with the back-street humanity of Rome's periphery, however, Pasolini found it difficult to reconcile the poetic concepts of his earlier work to the expressive demands of his present writings. While Friuli quite often appeared in his verse as a natural utopia, by contrast, the Roman borgate of his novels Ragazzi di vita and Una vita uiolenta (1959) seem an inferno of degradation and disassociation. In his esthetic treatment of the socially downtrodden, Pasolini nonetheless tempered this hellish world with residues of primitive purity and adolescent innocence present beneath the coarse language and brutal(ized) faces of its inhabitants. In the end, death triumphs over the instinctual guile and bruised grace of these ragazzi di vita, as the novelist underscores the
O n the eve of the 1948 national political elections, a boy of Casarsa, the Friulan town of Pasolini's mother, reported to the local parish priest of having engaged in sexual relations with the young poet and schoolteacher. T h e entire community rose against Pasolini, he lost his teaching post, was expelled from the local section of the PCI, and was thus forced by public opinion to leave the area. Volponi calls this episode "il dramma della sua vita." P. Volponi, ibid., p. 15.

social and political pathos of this cast-off race and class. But, as just stated, Pasolini never dismissed the primordial virtues of a simpler world, and so it is in Rome during the early 1950's that he came to believe his primitive innocents the victims of a Neocapitalism that he claimed would eventually destroy the very humanity of these people as it swept away time-honored linguistic and social patterns. In truth, that afore-mentioned rupture in Pasolini's poetry had already manifested itself to some extent at the time of his "discovery of Marx." One such example can be found in "Testament Coran," a part of the verse in dialect written between 1947 and 1952. Here Pasolini depicts a young peasant in Friuli who joins the Partisans and is then captured and hung by the Nazis. While dying, the boy-soldier commits his image to the conscience of the rich, as he sadly salutes the courage, pain, and innocence of the poor.6 Similarly, the underlying evangelism of Poesie a Casarsa ( 194 11943) gradually replaced a traditional peasant demand for an avenging afterlife with a here-and-now vindication. In one poem, now part of La meglio gioventu containing all of Pasolini's verse in dialect, the peasants' figure of Christ crucified, index of a future retribution, takes on the workclothes and identity of a laborer who promises more than an atonement to come.7 T o repeat, the passage of Pasolini's rhapsodized race from a natural-religious state to an historical-political one was greatly influenced by the catalytic intrusion of external events. T h e esthetic and sensual aura of a poeticized Friuli gave way to the cruel incandescence of the War and Resistance and stirred the poet's ethical consciousness. The Resistance, above all, deeply affected Pasolini (as it did an entire generation), modifying his poetic sensibility. In 1957, when censuring what he considered the political quietism of many writers during Fascism, Pasolini remarked:
Lassi in reditat la me imadin te la cosientha dai sors. Coi todescs no ai vut timour de lassa la me doventha. Viva el coragiu, el dolour e la nothentha dei puareth! P. P. Pasolini, La meglio gzoventu (Firenze: Sansoni, 1954), p. 114.
El jera un fiol ch'el veva sogni,
un fiol blu come la tuta.
Vegnera el vero Cristo, operajo,
a insegnarte a ver veri sogni.
P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 108.
(. . .)

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La Resistenza ha soprattutto insegnato a credere nuovamente nella storia, dopo le introversioni evasive ed estetizzanti di un ventennio di poe~ia.~

One must then see this 'historical lesson' in conjunction with the poet's turn to Gramsci, for throughout the 1950's, the example of the Sardinian revolutionary played an important role in defining Pasolini's pronounced conflict between the pull of a visceral and esthetic passion and a call to rational, ideological exactitude. It was precisely this conflict that became the ferment of much of Pasolini's later works.

Le Ceneri di Gramsci
Although the volume's title poem was actually composed in 1954, Le ceneri di Gramsci was published in 1957. These poems, written in Italian (and not in dialect) occupy a special place in postwar Italian literature, for they signal a significant departure from pre- (and post-) war Hermeticism. Contesting the Hermetics' mystique of the word, Pasolini models his verse on a rejuvenation of certain traditional stylistic modes (e.g., adjectivization; the terzina, reminiscent of post-Dantean didactic and satirical verse; the poemetto, evoking the Romantic-patriotic poetry of the Risorgimento), motivated by the desire for a return to a 'civil' poetry that might effectively challenge the Hermetic postulates of absolute self-expression and pure lyricism. At the same time, Pasolini's 'civil' poetry shares little with various strains of postwar prose a thise, nor does it confuse reportage with poetic expression. Instead, his verse proceeds from a conflict experienced between public commitment and poetic predilection-instinct and reason. Within a context based on seemingly irreconcilable antis P. P. Pasolini, "Fine dell'engagement" in Passione e ideologza (Milano: Garzanti, 1957; 1975), p. 458. Thus, the Resistance was instrumental in delivering harsh historical realities to "il mito di un Friuli patriarcale e favoloso, il mito di una fanciullezza vergine e pura, il mito di un pop010 sano e primitivo, tutto senso e fantasia nei rapporti sociali come nei suoi sentimenti religiosi." Giuliano Manacorda, Storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea (1940-1975) (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1977), p. 275. But that myth was never abandoned, for as Pasolini explained years later: "I'd chosen it (Friuli) as a kind of ideal site for my poetry and my aestheticizing, mystic fantasies. However, it was important for me and, in particular, it was there that I became a marxist, in a rather unusual way (. . .). I discovered the Friulan peasants objectively through the utterly subjective use of their dialect." P. P. Pasolini as quoted by Oswald Stack in Pasolini (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 18-19.

theses, Gramsci represents a world of reason and ideological precision both guiding and goading the poet. This world clashes with Pasolini's visceral-irrational feelings that ultimately precede his ideology. Thus, Le ceneri di Gramsci records a struggle between reason (Gramsci) and passion (Pasolini).
"Le Ceneri di Gramsci"

A note to the text establishes Rome as the location of the collection's title poem: specifically, the Testaccio (working-class) quarter; the English cemetery; Gramsci's grave. It is an "autunnale/maggio"s in the mid-1950's, a decade once anticipated with hope by the Resistance: "la fine del decennio in cui ci appareltra la macerie finito il profondole i n g e n u o sforzo di r i f a r e la vita." T h e p o e t , "capitatolper caso" into Rome's cemetery for non-Catholics, finds there a "mortale/pace" that shuts out the industrious clatter of the nearby proletarian neighborhood, providing a proper situation for his colloquy with Gramsci. This setting lends an immediate air of elegy that reduces all color and contour to an achromatic grey in a meeting of the living dead: "e noi morti ugualmente, con te, nell'umido/giardino." From the beginning, then, the poem's metaphoric progression rests on a series of contrasts. The juxtaposition of the cemetery's quiet to the frenzy of the surrounding neighborhood is the first in succeeding analogical contrasts that culminate in the poet's selfreflexion and refraction in his hero-who is simultaneously his antagonist. Attraction and repulsion result from Pasolini's thirst for vitalistic passion and Gramsci's somber reminder of the need for rational articulation:
con la tua magra mano delineavi l'ideale che illumina
(. . .)

questo silenzio.
(. . .)

Lo scandalo del contraddirmi, dell'essere con te e contro te; con te nel cuore, in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere;

All poetic passages are taken from "Le ceneri di Gramsci" in Le ceneri di Gramrci (Milano: Garzanti, 1957; 1975), pp. 71-84.

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del mio paterno stato traditore -nel pensiero, in un'ombra di azionemi so ad esso attaccato nel calore degli istinti, dell'estetica passione

For Pasolini, Gramsci's "rigore" denoting the antithesis of his own "violentole ingenuo amore sensuale," has "scissol (. . .) il mondo" into opposing poles. Nonetheless, it soon becomes clear that despite the poet's insistence on living "nel non volereldel tramontato dopoguerra," of surviving through a refusal to choose between passion and reason ("sussistolperche non scelgo"), a decision has really already been made:
Mi chiederai tu, morto disadorno d'abbandonare questa disperata passione di essere nel mondo?

Elegy renders Pasolini's evocation of Gramsci the commemoration of a lost ideal, for Gramsci, as person and precept, undergoes a figurative transformation. The force of "Le ceneri di Gramsci" is discharged through an extension of personal conflict ("con te nel cuore,/in luce, contro te nelle buie viscere") to a general, and generational, crisis ("e noilmorti ugualmente, con te"). In bemoaning the loss of the hopes and ideals of the Resistance, Pasolini indirectly censures the pis-aller of the 1950's, while implying that the 'committed' poet and critic of his times must paradoxically operate within and without conventional political structures. Gramsci, meanwhile, must necessarily remain a luminary ("in luce"), iconically remote and ideally distant from the poet's inner torment: "Li tu stai, bandito e con dura eleganzalnon cattolica, elencato tra estraneilmorti: Le ceneri di Gramsci." Thus Pasolini's Gramsci lives only insofar as he is 'ashes'; insofar as his presence is experienced emblematically and at a defining distance. Without this figure, Pasolini's visceral passion would have no ballast. Gramsci is thus made to assume the role of an ideological counterpoise, keeping in check the grip of the poet's "caloreldegli istinti" and "estetica passione." As for the torment that lies outside, Pasolini identifies with the humble poor:
Come i poveri povero, mi attacco come lor0 a umilianti speranze come lor0 per vivere mi batto ogni giorno.

But the poet's poor are the poor of a pre-proletarian state championed for their inbred and sacred vitalism: "come/d'un pop010 di animali, nel cui arcanotorgasmo non ci sia altra passionetche per l'operare quotidiano." Hence, again addressing Gramsci, Pasolini declares himself:
attratto da una vita proletaria a te anteriore, e per me religione la sua allegria, non la millenaria sua lotta: la sua natura, non la sua coscienza

Moreover, Pasolini's apostrophe here is to a "giovane," . . . "non padre, ma umile/fratello." One should note that in an article of 1957, the year of the publication of Le ceneri di Gramsci, Pasolini called the Sardinian a " m a e ~ t r o . "But ~ ~ here the emphasis on Gramsci's 'youth', his evocation as 'brother', and the strange erotic attraction that takes hold of the poet at graveside ("ebbra simbiosi/d'adolescente di sesso con la morte") suggest a commutation of Pasolini's emblem. In effect, it appears that the poet is impressing on Gramsci the figure and force of his own dead brother, tragic youthful martyr to the Resistance." This commutation gives rise to a fundamental ambiguity surrounding the image of Gramsci as master and luminary and as shadow of the poet's dead young brother. Meanwhile, it should be observed that the one clear biobibliographical allusion to Gramsci focusses on the latter's presumed stoic character:
sento quale torto --qui nella quiete delle tombe-4 insieme quale ragione-nell'inquieta sorte nostra-tu avessi stilando le supreme pagine nei giorni del tuo assassinio.

From the above it appears that pathos insures Gramsci's longevity. In fact, in yet another essay published the same year as the poem, Pasolini asserted that:
lo P. P. Pasolini in an interview with Elio Accrocca, "Dieci domande a Pier Paolo Pasolini," La Fiera Letteraria, June 30, 1957, p. 2. l 1 Pasolini's brother, Guido, was killed in 1945 at the age of nineteen in one of those obscure internal conflicts of the Resistance that occurred at the ItalianJugoslavian border. Despite the special circumstances of his death, Pasolini always considered him a Resistance martyr. In fact, through this tragedy Pasolini experienced the Resistance, first as direct impact, and then as enduring remembrance.

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(. . .) su qualsiasi altro, domina nella nostra vita politica lo spirit0 di Gramsci: del Gramsci 'carcerato', tanto pih libero quanto pih segregato dal mondo, fuori dal mondo, in una situazione suo malgrado leopardiana, ridotto a puro ed eroico pensiero.I2

Here, as in the poem, Pasolini elevates Gramsci to a symbolic, and hence metahistorical, plane. What he terms a reduction to "puro ed eroico pensiero" is really a dilation of the human and historical Gramsci (political revolutionary, jailed party leader, and philosopher of praxis) to an ideal interlocutor and rational censor. Pasolini's search to construct a 'civil' poetry requires this sort of Gramsci responding to the poet's existential and cognitive needs for such an ideal and exacting interlocutor, by necessity remote and at odds with his own inner feelings. At the same time, however, Pasolini's 'sanctified' Gramsci shared little with official hagiographies, such as those of Togliatti and other PC1 ideologues of the 1950's.13 Pasolini's 'saint' is to be debated, even cursed, with no intent of making his "puro ed eroico pensiero" conform to the immediate dictates of party tactics. In addition, when reflecting on the extra-literary dimension of the Gramsci-Pasolini relationship, one should consider what the Sardinian revolutionary must have meant to the young poet. When expelled from his beloved region to find himself practically friendless amidst the depressing reality of the Roman borgate, that is, Pasolini must have seen Gramsci-the jailed Gramsci, suspected by party leaders in the 1930's for his polemically unorthodox views and scorned even by fellow Communist inmates for his refusal to adhere uncritically to Togliatti's official line14-as a kindred spirit, as well as a beacon to his banishment and bewilderment ("con te nel cuorelin luce"). Together with his central presence to this collection of poetry, Gramsci likewise appears later throughout Pasolini's critical writings. He is cited frequently in the essays of Passione e zdeologia (1948-1958) and Empirismo eretico (1964- 197l ) , while his influence can be felt in many of the polemics of Scritti corsari (1973-1975). A look at Pasolini's literary and cultural criticism calls for a disP. P. Pasolini, "La liberta stilistica" in Passione e ideologia, op. cit., p. 487. For a full account of this situation, see: Gian Carlo Jocteau, Leggere Gramsci (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975), pp. 5-95. I* Although official documentation on these two aspects of Gramsci's prison experience are only now coming to full light, rumor of them circulated throughout the 'Stalinist' period of the PC1 in the late 1940's and 1950's. For a full account, see: Paolo Spriano, Gramsci in carcere e ilpartito (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1977), pp. 9- 123.
l2
l3

tinction, nevertheless, between what Gramsci continues to represent, and how extracts from the latter's writings serve as supports or counterpoints to Pasolini's analysis. Without such a distinction, a reading of Pasolini's treatment of Gramsci could result in the annotation of contradictions, on the surface devoid of any internal connection or (ideo-) logic. "Non posso accettare nulla del mondo dove vivo," Pasolini once claimed in a newspaper interview.15This held true for all cultural and literary, as well as social and political, questions. The one constant in Pasolini's criticism is its refusal to adhere for any length of time to solicited or self-imposed canons. As Dario Bellezza notes: "La sua voglia di contraddire e contraddirsi era l'unica sua folle coerenza."16 And Gianni Scalia, who collaborated with Pasolini during the years of the review, "Officina," often referred to him as an "intellettuale disorganico,"--in contrast to Gramsci's celebrated notion of the "intellettuale organico"--, while dubbing him a "poeta civile, etico-politico, in contraddizione perenne (. . .) tra irrazionalita esistenziale e razionalita storica, impegno e autonomia, cuore e critica."" As for Gramsci's influence, Pasolini's essays provide ample testimony of a constantly shifting critical attitude that never abandons, however, an appeal to the lessons of the "maestro." When not discussing specific authors and works, Passione e ideologia (the title itself evinces a continuation of the conflict expressed poetically in "Le ceneri di Gramsci") studies the problem of language (dialect and standard Italian), the 'questione della lingua' in Italian literature, and a whole area of sociolinguistics. Working from a methodological framework at times defined as "gramscismo-stilistico,"ls
l5 P. P. Pasolini, in "Paese Sera," 18 novembre, 1966, now in Empirismo eretico (Milano: Garzanti, 1977), p. 150. l6 Dario Bellezza, "Poesia della vita" in PerchC Pasolini, op. cit., p. 33. l 7 Gianni Scalia, "Pasolini vivo" in Perch6 Pasolini, p. 67. In reference to the 1950's committed intellectual, one critic underscores the positive aspects of contradiction and ambivalence. With Pasolini in mind, she writes: "(. . .) il letterato, se voleva porsi storicamente, non poteva che essere marxisant: essere cioi. 'dentro-fuori' dal marxismo, nutrirsi di questa dialettica, caricarsi della contraddizione ad essa interna, assumerla a carica eversiva e riprodurla." Donatella Marchi, "Sperimentalismo 'marxisant' nell' 'Officina' di Pasolini" in Perche' Pasolini, p. 77. l 8 Donatella Marchi, ibid., p. 73. Ferretti speaks of a 'metodologia critica che Pasolini veniva elaborando nei suoi saggi, attraverso l'assunzione del gramscismo e della stilistica (sulla linea Spitzer-Contini) in funzione d i un'analisi socio-politicolinguistica." Gian Carlo Ferretti, Pasolini l'universo orrendo (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1976), p. 12. In fact, in that afore-mentioned interview with E. Accrocca, Pasolini admitted to having two "maestri": "considero (io praticamente non crociano) due i

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Pasolini, almost alone among contemporary critics, staunchly defended spoken and literary dialect against the assaults of an imposed national idiom that he believed came more and more to serve the ends of Neocapitalism. Those assaults, he contended, were masked as the needs for a progressive national unity to be forged through modern technological and social channels (e.g., compulsory education; the mass media; etc.). In Passione e ideologia's "Un secolo di studi sulla poesia popolare" (a part of his acclaimed philological anthology, "La poesia popolare italiana"), Pasolini often summons Gramsci's Letteratura e vita nazionale from the Qmderni del carcere, while nevertheless declaring foreign to his own linguistic and poetic beliefs the Gramscian notion of a national-popular literature. That is, although he basically agrees with Gramsci's demand for a popular literature, Pasolini cannot reconcile that Sardinian's analytical model with his own ideas on literature. Gramsci's examination of feuilletons, popular melodrama, detective and adventure stories, etc., says Pasolini, corresponds to what "oggi si definisce 'cultura di massa',"lg which he in turn excoriates as consumer society's manipulation of taste to the detriment of authentic popular (i.e., dialect) culture. For want of adequate means of research, and despite his "passione e chiarezza innovativa," Gramsci "sfiora appena" the problem of popular-dialectical poetry. Thus, to no small degree, Gramsci is to be held responsible for the "inopia di studi marxisti postPasolini concludes. gramsciani sull'arg~mento,"~~ In "La confusione degli stili," Pasolini maintains that Gramsci "non spiega quale dovrebbe essere la ricerca di uno scrittore che volesse celare in un'opera l'ideale nazional-popolare.w Addressing himself to the problem of literature's language, he raises the point after having asked how it is ever possible to think that "le concrezioni letterarie del concetto di 'nazional-popolare' si debbano realizzare in una simile lingua, creazionq appunto della borghesia But in addition to all this, he does concede that all con~ervatrice."~~
miei maestri: Gianfranco Contini e Antonio Gramsci." P. P. Pasolini in La Fiera Letteraria, p. 2. lg P. P. Pasolini, Passione e i d e o l o p , p. 154. Pasolini distinguishes between his concerns with popular (dialect) poetry, and what he calls concerns with 'popularlike' (popolareggiante) poetry in Gramsci. 20 P. P. Pasolini, Passione e ideologia, p. 156. 21 P. P. Pasolini, ibid., p. 330. 22 P. P. Pasolini, ibid., pp. 329-330. 0.Stack points out that Pasolini "lays increasing stress on the need to restore an epic and mythological dimension to life, a sense of awe and reverence to the world: a sense which, he believes, the peasantry still

of Letteratura e vita nazionale hinges positively on the axiom that every time the language question arises, in one way or another, a whole spectrum of other problems are about to surface. This paraphrase of Gramsci seems exactly the issue that distinguishes Gramsci's position from that of Pasolini. The Sardinian's argument is motivated by a holistic (i.e., political) overview since problems of language, literature, etc., are studied and analyzed as integral parts of a complex of socio-political factors and functions.23 Pasolini, on the other hand, regards socio-political and cultural problems as reflections of the gradual surrender of that mythicized social and linguistic universe that he desires to defend. Gramsci sees socio-cultural problems through politics; his analysis is of the cultural institutions and structures 'materially' at work in Western industrial civilization, and how these can be used politically to promote a revolutionary new cultural hegemony. For Pasolini, (Neo-) capitalist society is a moral category-a malum-to be rejected tout court in the name of a purer (pre-industrial) one threatened with extinction. Just the same, Pasolini is not given to simple nostalgia. In later writings, his attachment to a pre-proletarian cosmos evolved into a complex longing nourished on the trenchant criticism that his particular brand of 'Marxism' elicited: "Rimpiango l'immenso universo contadino e operaio prima dello Sviluppo: universo transnazionale nella cultura, internazionale nella scelta m a r x i ~ t a . "Despite ~~ admitting the difficulty in defining this new and corrupting power that has "manipolato e radicalmente (antropologicamente) cambiato le grandi masse contadine e proletarie italiane,"25 Pasolini's scorn for contemporary reality ("io consider0 peggiore il totalitarismo del capitalism0 del consumo che il totalitarismo del vecchio p ~ t e r e " is ~~ ) never presented as a politically scientific measustain, though the bourgeoisie has done everything in its power to destroy it." 0. Stack, op. cit., p. 9. 23 In truth, Pasolini did in part share Gramsci's asseveration that a "new art" could only emerge from a "new culture" which, in turn, postulated a new society. In 1964, in fact, Pasolini stated: "Mai come oggi il problema della poesia e un problema culturale, e mai come oggi la letteratura ha richiesto un mod0 di conoscenza scientific~ e razionale, cioe politico." P. P. Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, p. 24. As for Pasolini, however, this awareness did not signal a surrender of his 'irrational' attachment to the mythopoesis of a pre-proletarian primitive innocence, but was, instead, greatly in polemical response, I feel, to poetry then emerging from the avant-garde G r u f l o '63 with whom Pasolini engaged in a long and oftentimes bitter debate. 24 P. P. Pasolini, Scritti corsari, op, cit., p . 79. 25 P. P. Pasolini, ibid., p. 72. 26 P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 80.

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sure: "L'ordine in cui elenco questi mondi riguarda l'importanza della mia esperienza personale, non la lor0 importanza oggettiva.'j2' For Gramsci, meanwhile, the intellectual who 'goes to the people' seeking contact and inspiration for a new literature to emerge from the "humus della cultura popolare cosi come e, coi suoi gusti, le sue tendenze ecc., col suo mondo morale e intellettuale sia pure arretdoes so with the aim of articulating moral rat0 e conven~ionale,"~~ and intellectual needs for an eventual emancipation of the masses from just such a "humus."29 Hence, over all, Gramsci appears to advocate education, while Pasolini seems to demand a 'preservation' of the subaltern classes. Pasolini is operating, nevertheless, in an artistic and cultural climate very different from that of Gramsci. His defense of a waning popular-dialectical culture is thus a polemical response to both contemporary mass culture and the elitism he considered inherent in present-day literary avant-gardes. In "La liberta stilistica" (1957), he examined his own poetic which a year earlier, on the pages of His posi"Officina," he had defined as "neo-sperirnentalism~."~~ tion, he maintained, stood midway between an adulation of tradition and an untempered celebration of novelty, animated by a "spirit0 filologico (. . .) strumento di una diversa cultura (. . .) che non pub accettare nessuna forma storica e pratica di ideologia" in the spirit of the imprisoned Gramsci, "tanto piu libero quanto piu segregato dal mondo (. . .), ridotto a puro ed eroico p e n ~ i e r o . " ~ ~ Pasolini then advances his "neo-sperimentalismo" as the stylistic and thematic countertype to the "poetare (. . .) mistico, irrazionale
P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 66. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Torino: Einaudi, 1975), p. 1822. 29 Even as early as 192 1 , the young Gramsci had been quick to point out that the destruction of capitalist culture in the struggle to bring about a new socialist culture involved not the objects of traditional value, but the social relations and cultural hierarchies both defining and controlling the organization of culture under capitalism: "Cosa resta a fare? Niente altro che distruggere la presente forma di civilta. (. . .) significa distruggere gerarchie spirituali, pregiudizi, idoli, tradizioni irrigidite, significa non aver paura delle novita e delle audacie, non aver paura dei mostri, non credere che il mondo caschi se un operaio fa errori di grammatica, se una poesia zoppica, se un quadro assomiglia a un cartellone, se la gioventu fa tanto di naso alla senilita accademica e rimbambita." Antonio Gramsci, "Marinetti rivoluzionario?" in Socialismo efascismo. L'Ordine Nuouo 1921 -1922 (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), p. 22. 30 P. P. Pasolini, "I1 Neo-sperimentalismo" in Passime e ideologia, p. 479. 31 P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 487.
27

e squisito" of 'pure poetry',32 as well as to an opposing tendency which he claims lowers all expressive language to the "live110 della p-osa, ossia del razionale, del logico, dello ~ t o r i c o . " ~ ~ In terms of stylistic appraisal, Pasolini appears correct in his critique of the literary (but also, politico-cultural) shortcomings of any rigid 'hermeticism' or codified ' n e o r e a l i ~ m ' .But ~ ~ as regards the political role assigned by Gramsci to the intellectual, he seems to bypass the significance of a proposed interaction bent on destroying 'una tradizione di casta, che non e mai stata rotta da un forte movimento politico o nazionale dal basso."35 Gramsci's comprehensive definition of 'political' suggests that this 'coming from below' be concerned primarily with the genesis and destination of any literary-cultural reform, and how such might foster an active co-participation, while Pasolini appears to treat the writer-public relationship in a conventionally vertical manner. Although Pasolini would agree with Gramsci that a 'new art' cannot be created "dall'esterno (pretendendo un'arte didascalica, a tesi, moralistica), ma dall'intimo, perche si modifica tutto l'uomo in quanto si modificano i suoi sentimenti, le sue concezioni e i rapporti di cui l'uomo e l'espressione n e c e ~ s a r i a , " he ~~ presents an excessively internalized premise for the realization of any 'new culture' that might give rise to a 'new art':
Oggi una nuova cultura, ossia una nuova interpretazione intera della realta, esiste, e non certamente nei nostri estremi tentativi di borghesi d'avanguardia (. . .) esiste, in potenza, nel pensiero marxista; in potenza che l'attuazione e da prospettare nei giorni in cui il pensiero marxista sara (se e questo il destino) prassi marxista (. . .). Ma benche in forma potenziale, esiste, agisce, gia oggi, se quel pensiero marxista determina, nei nostri paesi occidentali, una lotta politica e quindi una crisi nella societa e nell'individuo: esiste dentro di noi, sia che aderiamo, sia che la neghiamo; e proprio in questo nostro impotente aderirvi, e in questo nostro impotente negarla.37
P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 483. P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 485. 34 A basic ambiguity nonetheless arises when Pasolini, while addressing himself to the question of Neorealism in general, seems to describe his own poetic concept: "Then I also criticized it (neorealism) for remaining subjective and lyricizing, which was another feature of the cultural epoch before the Resistance. So, neo-realism is a cultural product of the Resistance as regards content and message, but stylistically it is still tied to pre-Resistance culture. P. P. Pasolini as quoted by 0.Stack, op. cit., p. 42. 42. 35 A. Gramsci, Quuderni, p. 2 116. 36 A. Gramsci, ibid., p. 2109. 37 P. P. Pasolini, Passione e i d e o l o p , p. 326.
32
33

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WALLACE P. SILLANPOA

Pasolini's preference for a methodology based on antitheses-an extension of the passion-ideology dichotomy-is manifest in the essays of Empirkmo eretico. Here Pasolini stresses the incompatibility with its attendant of Neocapitalism's "linguaggio tecno~ratico"~~ and "prevalere del fine comunicativo sul fine e s p r e s ~ i v o , " ~ ~ the poetic demands of literary expression. Chances for a possible "lingua nazionale attraverso operazioni letterarieH40 have been undermined by a politico-linguistic levelling to the degree that, at present, shaping language is not "letteratura, ma la te~nica."~' The sweeping power of technological and consumer society, says Pasolini, is actually affecting "mutazioni a n t r o p ~ l o g i c h e " ~~ threatening to flatten Italian linguistic and social civilization into a sterile conformity. For him, "la cultura tecnocratica-tecnologica (. . .) contesta e si accinge a mettere fuori gioco, tutto il passato classic0 e classicistico dell'uomo: ossia l ' u m a n e ~ i m o . "Marxism, ~~ while exploiting certain positive contributions of Neocapitalism's neo-language, "come 'parte' specializzata e ellittica (. . .) contiene in se evidentemente un futuro umanistico e e ~ p r e s s i v o . " T~ o~define Marxism in terms of a poetic prolepsis and simultaneous guardianship of popular speech and culture appears to underscore further Pasolini's mythic conception of a pre-industrial artistlpublic relationship. Then again using Gramsci as theoretical support, Pasolini argues the necessity of bringing together in harmony two contrasting linguistic modes: "irrazionalismo contadino piccolo-borghese del Terzo mondo (ivi compreso il Sud italiano) e razionalismo capitalistic0 liberale."45He advances this notion as the possible cure for a current anomaly whereby "il discorso di un comunista, in quanto espressione di una profonda e vasta spinta dal basso, e in quanto improntato da uno spirito fondamentalmente scientifico, tende a una sintesi dell'italiano, e si pone come fondamentalmente comuni~ativo."~~ According to this critique, today's Italian Marxists function more as technical 'administrators' than as popular 'humanists'.
P. P. P. P. 40 P. P. 41 P. P. 42 P. P. 43 P. P. 44 P. P. 45 P. P. 46 P. P.
38

39

Pasolini, Empirismo eretico, p. 20

Pasolini, ibid., p. 22.
Pasolini, ibid., p. 10.
Pasolini, ibzd., p. 22.
Pasolini, ibid., p. 66.
Pasolini, ibd., p. 32.
Pasolini, ibid., p. 37.
Pasolini, ibid., pp. 46-47.
Pasolini, ibid., p. 45.

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135

For the Marxist writer, instead, a genuine linguistic synthesis

should thus be realized by applying to literature the Gramscian
notion of the national-popular; i.e., the concomitance of two lin-
guistic ways of being ii the world: that of the committed intellec-
tual, and that of the 'common man', in a " 'contaminatio' di 'stile
sublime' e di 'stile mile'."^' One is led to wonder to what degree
Pasolini would endorse Gramsci's idea of the national-popular as
only the first step towards an ultimate emancipation from conven-
tional linguistic and cultural h i e r a r c h i e ~ . ~ ~the
same time, one At must again admit that the situation from which Gramsci's analysis proceeds differs greatly from the one that Pasolini contests. Gramsci was interested in the entry of the Italian agricultural and proletarian masses into the mainstream of Western thought and culture: in a radical democratization of culture. Pasolini, instead, champions a refusal by these same masses of a society grounded in the false values of consumerism and conformity qua l i b e r a t i ~ n . ~ ~ After, in the mid and late 1960's, Pasolini took stock of the actual situation of his chosen people and realized to what an extent those "anthropological mutations" so long prophesized had taken place. The result of his awareness was a bitter anguish, an intensified attack on all causes of such "mutations," and a turn to the Third World as final possible repository for his mythic primitive purity.50 "Dal laboratorio," meanwhile, deals almost exclusively with the question of oral and written expression in Gramsci. For Pasolini, ~ramsci's language underwent aeprofound transformation in "falsa 1iberazi0ne"~l( i.e., from a native Sardinian) in the slow acquisition of an Italian passing from an initial "enfasi espressivo-umanitaria,"
P. P. Pasolini, i M . , p. 44. In fact, Gramsci maintained that: "Chi parla solo il dialetto o comprende la lingua nazionale in gradi diversi, partecipa necessariamente di una intuizione del mondo piu o meno ristretta e provinciale, fossilizzata, anacronistica in confront0 alle mandi correnti di pensiero che dominano la storia mondiale." A. Gramsci, ~uaduerni, p . 1377. 49 In all fairness. one must admit that Pasolini's resvonses to Gramsci's demands for such a democratization were most likely tempereh by his polemic with the PC1 which he felt were abusing many of the revolutionary's ideas through accommodation to the national political and culturalstatw quo. For a discussion of all these problems, see: Romano Luperini, Gli intellettuali di sinistra e l'ideologia della ricostruzione nel dopogwrra. Roma: Edizioni di Ideologie, 197 1. 50 Pasolini's fascination with Third-World African societies as last repositories of primitive purity is grounded in ambiguity. Those societies, that is, were at the time of Pasolini's investigation facing their own historical task of a rapid transformation from tribal to technological organization. One is thus led to ask how Pasolini could have considered them remaining examples of a purer 'agricultural' state. 51 P. P. Pasolini, Empirirmo eretico, p. 5 1 .
47 48

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through a "fase francesizzante" in Turin, and arriving at true maturity at the time of the "Ordine N U O V O .Such " ~ ~ a transformation was due to a "lungo e quasi religioso tirocinio di ra~ionalita."~~ "Tutte le pagine giovanili di Gramsci sono scritte in un brutto italiano," charges P a ~ o l i n i And . ~ ~ even after Gramsci's acquisition of a mature and exact rational prose, maintains Pasolini in a contradictory manner, such language, "analizzata freddamente (. . .) pub apparire ancora (. . .) 'brutta': cioe umiliata dal grigiore manualistico, dal gergo politico, dalla lingua delle traduzioni, da un incancellabile fondo professionale e francesizzante. Ma tutto cib e reso irrilevante dalla sua funzionalia che la rende, in qualche modo, a~soluta."~~ Then Pasolini passes to a (hypothetical?)discussion of Gramsci's oral expression. He points to the three fundamental characteristics of Gramsci's p r o n u n c i a t i o n (i.e., Sardinian-dialectical, Piedmontese-dialectical, and bureacratic-professional petty bourgeoise) as "tutti elementi immensamente inferiori di live110 alla 'lingua ~ c r i t t a ' . " ~ ~ this reason, "l'incertezza, la poverta, la misFor eria, la genericita della lingua orale di Gramsci (. . .) non e proporzionata alla sicurezza, alla richezza, all'assolutezza di molte sue pagine ~critte."~' In truth, it is impossible to pinpoint with any great accuracy the linguistic criteria guiding Pasolini's contradictory critique of Gramsci. Nonetheless, it would appear that behind his observations stand those antithetical poles of expressive versus communicative language found throughout the essays of Empirismo eretico. If this be the case, then Pasolini errs through excess in regard to Gramsci whose sole aim was notional (self-) clarification, and not connotational, or polysemous, (self-) expression. In fact, these two contrasting voices in Gramsci: one a determined and self-conscious appropriation of rational-scientific discourse; the other, an ever-present, however submerged, irrational (or better, pre-rational) dialectical expressiveness, are reconciled in extremis, claims Pasolini, through a syncretic correlation that unites Gramsci's two linguistic and experiential situations:
P. P. P. P. 54 P. P. 55 P. P. 56 P. P. P. P.
52 53

Pasolini, ibzd., p. Pasolini, ibid., p. Pasolini, ibid., p. Pasolini, ibid., p. Pasolini, ibid., p. Pasolini. ibidem.

52. 53. 51. 53. 55.

Solo nelle lettere dal carcere, verso la fine della sua vita, egli riesce a far coincidere irrazionalismo e esercizio della ragione: ma non si tratta per0 dell'irrazionalismo che alona o segue, come per impeto sentimentale o rabbia polemica, la ragione del pensiero politico. (. . .) Si tratta, piuttosto, verso la fine della sua vita, di dar voce di racconto o evocazione anche a fatti piu umili e casuali della vita, a quel tanto di misterioso e di irrazionale che ogni vita ha in abbondanza, e che e la 'poeticita' naturale' della vita. Allora l'abitudine razionalistica che ha dominato la lingua (. . .) a contatto con quell'elemento irrazionale dominato (. . .) si colora di una pateticita (. . .)j8

This passage could lead to the observation that though every poet be an ideologue despite claims to the contrary, the opposite is not necessarily true. It does, in any event, substantiate the initially made contention that the Gramsci of Pasolini remained first and foremost the pathetic hero of the prison letters. Complexity arises, however, from the fact that, in effect, this Gramsci functioned as an emblematic composite: Gramsci victim and hero of the Lettere dal carcere merging with Gramsci the author of the Quaderni, iconic symbol of reason urging the poet's self-proclaimed "ossessivo bisogno di tornare a1 marxismo-ossia all'unica ideologia che mi protegga dalla perdita della realta."59 And these two aspects of Pasolini's Gramsci coincide with the poet's problematic inner conflict of reason with passion. Thus, in his tireless attack on Neocapitalism's damage to popular speech and culture, together with his diffidence for what he considered the verbal pyrotechnics of much of the 1960's neo-avantgarde, Pasolini deliberately planted his criticism in contradiction and controv'ersy. Throughout, Gramsci remained a preferential point of confrontation between the demands of a visceral estheticism and objectively formulated dissent. Pasolini's unorthodox interpretation of Gramsci, based on a positive heresy, has nonetheless guaranteed the revolutionary theorist of praxis a place in contemporary Italian culture beyond the schematic exegesis of many official tacticians. Since his death, moreover, that culture is in want of a poet-polemicist as uniquely uncompromising and authentically ambivalent as was Pasolini.
University of New Hampshire

58

59

P. P. Pasolini, ibzd., p. 53.

P. P. Pasolini, ibd., p. 75.