This article examines the poetry of ambivalence in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s verse plays Affabulazione (Fabulation, written 1966-69), Orgia (Orgy, written 1966-1969) and Porcile (Pigsty, written 1967-1969). Pasolini began writing these plays, along with three others – Bestia da stile (Beast of Style, written 1966-1974), Pilade (Pylades, written 1966-1968) and Calderón (written 1967-1973) – after his ulcer attack in 1966. He continually revised the texts until 1974, finalizing only Calderón for publication in a volume in 1973 before his assassination two years later. His plays are “bourgeois tragedies”. “Bourgeois”, because he writes them about and for this class: the «addressee is my enemy, it is the bourgeoisie that goes to the theater». By the mid-1960s, imborghesimento, or “bourgeoisification” – advanced capitalism’s triggering of the peasantry’s, subproletariat’s and proletariat’s assimilations to the petite bourgeoisie – had become too pervasive for Pasolini, making his critique of it even more pressing. For him, modernity in Italy, and in the West more generally, was not the dawn of what Wolfgang Welsch describes as a progressive “transculturality”, or mutual hybridization of different cultures, but one of petit-bourgeois homogenization or globalization, in which bourgeois cultural hegemony forces minoritarian cultures into crude assimilation. Pasolini could no longer indirectly critique bourgeoisification through his Gramscian “national-popular” art, but had to do it head-on, through his “unresolved” art at the theater – Italy’s bourgeois artistic institution par excellence since the Renaissance. Continua a leggere Pasolini’s Ambivalent Love-Hate Poetry in “Fabulation”, “Orgy” and “Pigsty”
(fasc. 44, 25 maggio 2022, vol. I)
