| Pasolini's civil poetry develops in parallel with the scholarly essays, criticism, polemics, fiction, theater and film. Social matrices in each are integrated with an autonomous sense of esthetic pattern, integrity and value. Historically, ideological and stylistic approaches have proven limited in assessing the author's ranging concerns and milieu as it relates to his poetics. A philosophical approach is thus deemed essential in "decoding" either the totality or the particularity of his opus.There is no denying Pasolini has become a symbol for out times: a myth. But what is essential is the use of myth, for example those of Oedipus and Orestes, or the particular significance accruing around the figures of Gramsci, Dante and Christ, or the myths perhaps adopted unknowingly or reversed or negated. Literary sources also gain mythic stature in the form of "totems" (Leopardi, Rimbaud, Picasso), or figures, like that of Narcissus, which are not embodied so much as transcribed, translated. This activity is complicated by the author's extra-literary endeavours, and his identity as public figure. Issues of literary concern rapidly become more than that, as the will to freedom "reprocesses" existing myths and forces their reduction into ideological emblems. This "organization" becomes obsessive due to the poet's sensed inability to describe reality fully, or to generate humor, or erotic sentiment. It exacts of him a sacrifice which is and remains analogous to Gramsci's sacrifice, out of a higher and altruistic love, and in pursuit, via intellectual action, of what Whitehead has called the "high grade perception."Pasolini's claimed ingenuousness in the face of diverse specializations allows for such complexity- or tendentiousness-within the unified "civil" poem. At the same time he is successful in combining divergent scientific perspectives, such as those of Marxism and psychoanalysis. His esthetic is highly derivative of other artists, while remaining dedicated to the economical expression of a single idea. A noetic and historical approach eventually locates in the "generic obsession" a means to achieve its end: thus texts must be considered in their entirety to avoid what Pasolini himself believed to be the obscurantism inherent to the technicians of any era, and their dominant ideology. In this light the incursion into the political sector, the combination of "passion" and "ideology", or the subscription to a personal mythology, are inadequate keys to interpretation. |
