ABSTRACT
Known primarily as a filmmaker in the United States, Pier Paolo Pasolini was regarded by Italians as an equally important poet, “first and foremost a poet” (Ryan-Scheutz 2007, 4), “a great civic poet” (Volponi 2007 [1976], 124), “our greatest poet of the postwar period” (Moravia 2007 [1978], 109). He was also a novelist, theoretician, journalist, translator, playwright, actor, painter, songwriter, and illustrator (Schwenk and Semff 2005, 19; Gordon 1996, 21; Welle 1999, 93; Borgna 2007, 140). Pasolini was probably “the most polemical figure in Italian cultural and political life” (Greene 1990, 3). As Italy’s “major post-war intellectual” (Barański 1999a, 7), “probably Italy’s major intellectual of the twentieth century” (Duncan 2006, 83), Pasolini was “relentlessly introspective and restlessly experimental” (Gordon 1996, 1). One of the founders of the review Officina,1 he engaged the Italian public through regular columns in a wide range of newspapers (Barański 1999c, 255). More than thirty years after his death, Pasolini “continues to exert [influence] over the cultural and emotional sensibilities of his compatriots” (Barański 1999b, 14). His oeuvre continues to generate a “rich and steady” stream of scholarship worldwide; the field of Pasolini studies is “vast” (Ryan-Scheutz 2007, 9). In the field of Italian Studies, Pasolini’s literary and cinematic oeuvre is “quietly becoming canonical” (Viano 1993, vii). “Pasolini is dead,” Ben Lawton (2005a, x) points out, “but he has not been silenced.”Pasolini was born on March 5 or 6, 1922 in Bologna. A native of Ravenna, his father was a career officer in the Italian military; his mother, of peasant origins, was an elementary schoolteacher from Friuli. During his early years, the family lived in various northern Italian cities where his father was stationed (Snyder 1980). Pasolini completed high school in Bologna. There he read Rimbaud, the French symbolists, and Gungaretti’s Sentimento del tempo (Chiesi and Mancini 2007, 83); he developed friendships with other
young intellectuals, friendships that would last for decades. “And there,” Pasolini recalled, “is where my Marxism began, materially, poetically, and physically” (quoted in Chiesi and Mancini 2007, 84). Each summer the family returned to Pasolini’s mother’s home in Casarsa della Delizia in the province of Udine. In Casarsa-along with his mother and older brother Guido-he spent most of the years of the war. In 1942, Pasolini registered in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bologna, where he discovered psychoanalysis, poetry, painting, and soccer (Schwartz, 1992, 41). Also in 1942, he published his first book of poems, Poesie di Casarsa, composed in the Friulian dialect, praised by renowned philologist Gianfranco Contini (Ryan-Scheutz 2007, 233 n. 16) whose influence on Pasolini was “singular” (Welle 1999, 98; De Mauro 1999, 89 n. 17). His “mother’s tongue,” Friulian was an acquired language for Pasolini (Rohdie 1995, 28).In 1943, Pasolini was inducted into the army. Like Sartre and Althusser, Pasolini was captured by the Germans but, in contrast to those famous French prisoners of war, Pasolini managed to escape. The war was a catastrophe for his family. During resistance fighting, the elder son Guido was “traitorously murdered by rival communist partisans” (Ahern 1983/1984, 104). His father was also a prisoner of war, from which he never recovered psychologically; he drank himself to death during the postwar years. One consequence of the war experience-coupled with his reading as a high-school student (noted earlier: see Chiesi and Mancini 2007, 83-84; Ryan-Scheutz 2007, 233 n. 24)—was Pasolini’s lifelong and passionate opposition to fascism. Indeed, Pasolini’s anti-fascism was a major motive in all that he did (Greene 1990).Pasolini received his Laurea in 1945 with a thesis on Pascoli.2 He had written part of an earlier thesis on twentieth-century Italian painting, directed by art historian Roberto Longhi3 (Schwartz 1992, 120), but it was lost during the war. Turning 24 in March 1946, Pasolini looked forward to a respectable and secure career as a local schoolteacher. He held an excellent degree, something rare enough for schoolteachers in Friuli, and even had classroom experience to his credit, having taught peasant children in 1945 (Viano 1993, xvi; Schwartz 1992, 165). During this period-May 1946 to August 8, 1947-Pasolini kept a diary “against my will (maybe this, and nothing else, is divine punishment)”; he had decided, however, that he must write about himself as part of a project of self-study (Schwartz 1992, 166).4Pasolini became a member of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Communista Italiana: PCI) in 1947; soon after he was appointed secretary of the local section of the Party. At this time, he taught in the middle school at Valvasone. He made the daily commute of six kilometers roundtrip by bicycle in the company of a fellow teacher, Sergio Vacher. Years later, Vacher recalled spending long hours with him every day, utterly unaware of his “tendencies” (Schwartz 1992, 191). It was years later, too, that Pasolini’s two short novels-composed during this period-were published: They constitute “confessions of his own homosexuality” (Ward 1995, 28).
