Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) – whose 100th birth anniversary occurred in 2022 – is considered a brilliant character, one of the revolutionaries of twentieth-century literature, poetry, art and cinema. This does not prevent us from underlining and examining – in front of the often uncritical chorus of praisers that we particularly listened to on the aforementioned anniversary of 2022 – its dogmatic and retrograde positions: someone is called to do it, too if it costs a bit to go against the tide…
Massimo Recalcati, a well-known Lacanian psychoanalyst, helps us in this test, who in a concise essay published by Feltrinelli, “Pasolini – the ghost of the origin” (Milan, 2022) presents Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) thus: «The contradictions that run through Pasolini’s life and work are various and well-known: an individualist, he courageously bears witness to the civil and collective commitment of the intellectual; anti-clerical, he stands resolutely against abortion; militant communist, he suffers expulsion from the PCI with which he will enter into an increasingly bitter conflictual relationship over the years; an atheist and Marxist, he remains profoundly Christian in spirit; nonconformist, he hates nonconformity; a bitter critic of television and of the world of media, he is surprisingly at ease in that world; a vigorous protester of the ‘system’, he takes sides against the young protesters of 1968; anti-paternalistic, he does not spare himself in pointing out the risk of the father’s decline in our time; an experimenter of the language and its most refined grammars, he remains an irreducible critic of all avant-gardism; extraordinary civil poet, he remains faithful to a poetry that does not at all exclude his most secret and unspeakable dramas; libertarian pedagogue, he recognizes the figure of the teacher as insurmountable; homosexual and rebel, he is a conservative of the values of tradition and of the peasant world; ruthless critic of the bourgeoisie and its codes of conduct, he writes in the “Corriere della Sera” and in other newspapers that they are the most typical expression of that world».
Among these contradictions – «in a subject so divided» – there will be no stable reconciliation or possible synthesis, is Recalcati’s diagnosis. On Pasolini’s work, two issues in particular deserve attention here for the dogmatic and retrograde aspects mentioned above.
1) His having been – albeit unstable – a Marxist and a communist is especially surprising. I visited the Pasolini Study Center in Casarsa in Friuli. Of that visit I keep the memory of the youthful photo of Guido Pasolini, which stands out in one of the rooms. That beloved brother had been a very young militant of the Action Party and partisan of the Osoppo brigade: he was killed at the age of 19 by the Italian communist partisans of the Garibaldi brigade. The latter – pro-Yugoslavs – could not bear the fact that there were partisans, such as those of Osoppo, who declared “with a high head that they were Italian and that they were fighting for the Italian flag, not for the “Russian rag””: expressly written declarations by Guido in a letter dated November 27, 1944 to his brother Pier Paolo, asking him to intervene “as soon as possible” with articles denouncing the abuses of the Garibaldi brigade, which “unfairly” made Slovenian-communist propaganda in the territory defended by the Osoppo brigade. We can all read in full the entire heartfelt letter of denunciation against the pro-Titonese Italian communists: just look for it on the web under the heading “Guidoalberto Pasolini known as Guido, nom de guerre Ermes”. There we will understand the hateful position taken by the PCI partisans, which will lead them to cowardly slaughter their comrades in the anti-fascist struggle of Osoppo: for those pro-Titonese communists, the red flag had to excel above everything. Guido Pasolini, who had managed to escape the initial ambush at Malga Porzûs, was then chased and coldly killed by those depraved Red Brigade members.
Well, Pier Paolo Pasolini at the end of the war, at first remained close to the Action Party in which his brother had fought, but then he joined the Communist Party from which the organizers of his brother’s assassination came. Possible? It is too powerful a contradiction, which not even the psychoanalyst Recalcati is able to explain, who in fact does not talk about it in his essay, perhaps too brief to go so far. Even more burning dismay is the learning that in those years Pasolini assumed extremely hypocritical positions and aligned with the pro-Soviet propaganda during his militancy in the PCI. A letter which is kept and exhibited in the Pasolini Study Center bears witness to this: as secretary of a section of the Friulian PCI, he dictated to his companions the text of a defamatory manifesto against the Hungarian cardinal Mindszenty, imprisoned and tortured between 1948 and 1949 by the new pro-Soviet regime. The manifesto would like to explain “what is happening in Hungary”, but to counter the complaints of what was a real persecution against the Magyar Catholic Church, Pasolini limits himself to declaring that “It is false!”. In short, the cardinal would have been legitimately “condemned by a Magyar court for anti-national activity” and in any case one must think “rather than of a cardinal… of the millions of men who suffer from hunger”. Do you understand the ‘benaltrista’ artifice of the official communist rhetoric? A drama of humanity – hunger in the world – is used to cover up another drama, that of repression throughout Eastern Europe: but the latter is made to appear as a trifle, indeed the courts of Eastern Europe legitimately work against the anti-national subversives! Desolating Pasolini, clinging to the propaganda of the executioners which induced him to remove – certainly not intimately, but in public projection – the dishonest fate suffered by his brother…
In the picture of Pasolini’s contradictions presented by Professor Recalcati, it is noted that Pasolini subsequently «suffers expulsion from the PCI». It happened during the same 1949, when he was disbarred for “moral unworthiness” connected to his homosexuality, having emerged that he had frequented him at night – during a village festival – with young boys repaid with a few coins. “I am amazed at your inhumanity” he replied to the leaders of the PCI, declaring in any case: “I am staying and will remain a communist” (news taken from the archive of the newspaper “la Repubblica”, recorded on 30 October 2015). Possible so much self-harm?
2) Inexplicable. At least on a par with the magnification of the «values of tradition and of the peasant world», another theme – like his communist militancy – really contradictory in Pasolini. He goes so far as to consider the countryside “a perfect world” as opposed to the “degradation of the city hypnotized by the myth of ‘development'”. For Pasolini, the civilization of consumption has led to real anthropological devastation, «to the disappearance of the fireflies» – as he wrote in the Corriere della Sera on 1 February 1975, which symbolized the mystery of an ancient time in «continuity with the origins of the human world“. But the sweetening of this bucolic world appears similar to the technique with which the pain and melancholy of the human condition have been alleviated since the time of Virgil, to face the adversity and stress of real life. Pasolini updates this methodology, contrasting the uncontaminated countryside with urban development. But fortunately – we observe – that this development has taken place! Pasolini doesn’t seem to understand what he’s referring to: he talks about a peasant world that he hasn’t experienced on his own skin, the son of a soldier and an elementary school teacher. The countryside – that of Friuli, so similar to that of other pre-Alpine regions – has trampled it, but without feeling its harshness; he imagined that rural universe but without scrutinizing its backwardness. Michel Serres (1930-2019) – the French academic son of a country laborer with whom he periodically accompanied himself, interspersing his severe studies – described that world well, reported crudely in the essay “Against the good old days”. He was referring to the years between the two world wars, the time of Pasolini’s youth. The work – says Serres – literally broke my back; the “perfume” of the stable lingered in schools and churches crowded with people who lived with livestock; and nutrition, how scarce and unhealthy it was… Infant mortality was incessant: how many children did one have to bring into the world to keep two or three? Let’s not talk about running drinking water, toilets, electricity, social protection, hospitals, pensions… Ah, these results of development and technology that will gradually extend into European societies and countryside in the thirty years 1950-1980, for Pasolini they are the fruit of the «post-fireflies time, the time of New Fascism, or, better, of “techno-fascism”, which by offering new consumer objects – superfluous and hedonistic, which satisfy artificial and useless needs – configures a new type of humanity and a new type of social relations. He digressed from reality. We are in the early seventies, in Italy and in Europe we are recovering from the damage and misery of the second post-war period, there was beginning to be a bit of well-being for everyone, after the travails and achievements of what economic historians define the “Glorious Thirty Years”. Pasolini lives in another world, he ignores the access of so many people to a less tiring and more paid job, to a more inclusive education and to a welfare previously unknown; he almost feels resentment and contempt for the new, timidly generalized satisfactions of life: he considers them trivial and hedonistic. But we – I speak as any progressive – what can we share with this Pasolinian argument, as elitist as it is unreal?