The Divine Mimesis
Pasolini's work, however - and this is a special aspect of its structure - is a mimesis of reality that appraches ever more closely to reality itself, as if it were an imitation in movement with the rhythm of the days and hours. And this mimesis of a violent death (described with the code of imagined reality) is so obsessive that when it happened in the soccer field of Ostia everybody thought they had already seen or dreamed it. In short, the author's work could be defined - thus revealing the core of meaning in the title - as La Divina Mimesis (The Divine Mimesis) of the second half of his life: the one that is "furious, [unwilling], [dying]" (note, here too, the parentheses that suspend the meaning. While writing, Pasolini is thinking of his death, but he is still alive).
But why Divine and why Mimesis?
Let us begin by noting that the little voume, which is composed of only about sixty pages and twenty-five photographic reproductions, immediately reminds one of Dante's Divine Commedy; there are, to be sure, only a few verbal traces deliberately left by the author, such as "inferno," "forest," "she-wolf," and the paragraphs indicated by the term "cantos," which, together with the adjective "divine" in the title, recall the famous Comedy by Alighieri. There is nothing more, but these few verbal echoes are enough to make the meaning of the title ambiguous. In short, there is everywhere in these few pages, in the preface, in the notes (in one of which Pasolini announces that he will be beaten to death), in the photos (which seem to pretend to sum up a life, while avoiding the most precious images), something strange that the reader feels with a sense of discomfort, and that the "unfinished" nature of the material to be printed mysteriously highlights. Yet it was Pasolini himself who vouched for its completeness when he delivered the text in person to the publisher in October 1975.
The title should be analyzed further. One avenue of approach to it is indicated by the signpost "mimesis," which takes us at once back to the essay by Gerard Genette, Le frontiere del racconto [Frontiers of Narrative] (which Pasolini read in the original edition published by du Seuil in 1966). In his essay the French linguist, examining the relation between mimesis and diegesis, makes this simple observation: "Plato opposed mimesis to diegesis as a perfect imitation to an imperfect one." But the perfect imitation of reality - and it is from this point that Pasolini extends further Genette's reasoning - is no longer an imitation, but reality itself. And the perfect mimesis must necessarily be divine.
Now, if we reduce Pasolini's discourse process to its simplest terms, we may say that in his works he did nothing else but represent his sacrifice by means of the iconic and verbal signs of his characters, who (when their end is described) inevitably die a violent death: from Accattone to Christ, from the Man-Woman of Orgia (Orgy) to Julian in Porcile (Pigsty), from the Crow of Uccellacci e uccellini (Bad Birds and Little Birds) to Jan in Bestia da stile (Stylish Beast). Even the protagonist of Medea - unlike what happens in Euripides' text - dies of her own hand after setting fire to her own house. Nor is this all; it is precisely in this film that Pasolini, in realistically describing ("as in an ethnographic documentary") the ritual of human sacrifice celebrated by the ancient farmers, reveals the archetype of his own martyrdom.
But, as we have said, the representation of this reality by Pasolini is what the ancients called mimesis, which Plato opposed to diegesis. Therefore, Pasolini's mythical tale can be defined as a mimesis of reality, that is, a linguistic structure - a huge spaceship wandering in space - that comes closer and closer to the reality it is representing, and with which, owing to an intrinsic will of the structure, it must eventually coincide. In fact, the mimesis carried out by Pasolini of what was to be the final reality of his life ceased to be imitation when it coincided perfectly with the reality, in the last cultural rite.
From that moment on (i.e., from the appearance of La Divina Mimesis [The Divine Mimesis], even as a publishing event) one can no longer speak of the poet-director's works as being a "romantic courting of death," nor of that "base whining of which Marx spoke," but only of bearing witness (witness = martyr).
In the stage version of Porcile (Pigsty), Spinoza says to Julian-Pasolini: "You have been called to bear witess to/ this kind of language, which no Reason can/ explain, not even by contradicting itself."
But Genette, continuing in his reasoning, suggests a new and interesting distinction that Pasolini, in the spirit of his very special alchemy, immediately adopts in La ricerca del relativo (The Search for the Relative), a poem written in 1969 that is full of precious hints.
Genette states that, within diegesis, which is the literary representation (of the story), there are two different kinds of representations: a) that of actions and events; b) that of objects and characters. The former is narrative proper, while the latter is "what today the modern literary awareness calls description" (hence Pasolini's title Descrizioni di descrizioni [Descriptions of descriptions]).
Pasolini, therefore, accelerating his step in this direction, declares in a note to the poem La ricerca del relativo (The Search for the Relative) that, for him, diegesis is story and mimesis is description. And referring to his death in the soccer field of Ostia, he even speaks humourously about himself. "Diegesis," he writes, "loses ground with respect to mimesis," by which he means that diegesis qua the story of his literary and human affairs, as well as of his linguistic and expressive strategies, loses more and more ground with respect to the importance that mimesis acquires. Mimesis, qua the description of the physical nature of his "true" sacrificial death, becomes increasingly precise, detailed, and particularized; in short, every day it comes closer to perfection.
This approach to a ritually fixed place and day seems to us, today, to be a diachronic revelation of the holy, that is to say, the appearance of a sacred event observed from the point of view of its development through time.
Since Pasolini died on Sunday, November 2nd, 1975, at Ostia (and the spaceship wandering through space has added its being to its reflected image in the cosmic mirror), this diachronic development can be reconstructed only in the reader's mind, as he manages to coordinate and place in their real chronological order the clues left behind (in his log book) by the author.
A Desperate Vitality
Having almost come to the end of this incomplete and uneven summary of Pasolini's mythical tale (in which there are also unexpected but necessary expansions), let me extrapolate, from the poem on the first six cantos of the Purgatory, two important messages left by the author: two of the infinite "clues" of which I spoke.
But let us take a look at this "document."
VIII
(
Funereal conclusion: with a synoptic table - for
use by the performer of the "piece" - of my
career as a poet, and a prophetic look at the
sea of future millennia.)
"I came into the world at the time
of the Analogical.
I worked
in that field, as an apprentice.
Then came the Resistance
and I
fought with weapons and poetry.
I restored Logic, and was
a civic poet.
Now is the time
of the Psychagogical.
I can write only by prophesying
in the rapture of Music
from an excess of seed or pity."
*
"If now the Analogical survives
and Logic is no more in fashion
(and neither am I:
no one asks for my poems anymore),
the Psychagogical
exists
(despite the Demagogy
that more and more
rules the world).
And so
I can write Exempla and Threnodies
and even Prophecies;
as a civic poet, of course, forever!"
*
"As for the future, listen:
its Fascist children
will sail away
to the worlds of the New Prehistory.
I will stay put there,
like one who dreams his damage
on the shores of the sea
where life starts anew.
Alone, or nearly so, on the old coast
among the remains of ancient civilizations,
Ravenna
Ostia, or Bombay - it's all the same -
with Gods in disrepair, old problems
- such as the class struggle -
which
disappear....
Like a partisan
who died before May 1945,
I shall slowly begin to decompose,
in the harrowing light of that sea,
as poet and as citizen forgotten."
The Meaning of What Does Not Exist
I have given the reader the eighth section of Una disperata vitalità (A desperate vitality) to read in order to highlight Pasolini's special use of language that I would call iconic, which supplements the written and verbal language; however, it is iconic in a negative sense, because the "speaking" is done by a few words that are strikingly missing from the text. However, this meaningful gap can be grasped only by a reader who has already been alerted by certain peculiarities of the stylistic system: by the prophetic tone and the "funereal" character of the composition, and by the unusual arrangement of the verses on the page: all these are clues that an expression such as the highly declarative assertion "I restored Logic" brings to the attention of the reader to warn him, in a sense, that the poetic-narrative structure is underpinned by a rationality that can also include, and thus dominate, the irrational elements understood by the gap I mentioned above.
The gap as a negative verbal element appears in the first and fourth editions of the collection Poesia in forma di rosa (Poem in the Form of a Rose), where the right-hand part of the thirty-third verse of the eighth section of Una disperata vitalità (A Desperate Vitality) - arranged as it is around a central axis - is clearly missing.
Is this a typographical error, or is it all part of the author's plan?
One can answer this question only after having carefully examined the text. We should say at once that Una disperata vitalità (A desperate vitality) is at the heart of Pasolini's poetics. It is the very paradigm of it. And Pasolini himself tells us as much in a letter he wrote to Francesco Leonetti in April 1964; in rejecting what Leonetti had written for the inside cover of the book, he says of the collection in question: "this time my text is important, for me, and dangerous." And it is right on the jacket flap of this first edition (Garzanti) that Pasolini starts to reveal the contents of the book, indicating with capital letters the main points of his Project and Mystery: "It is certain that this whole book of short and long poems - of Exempla, Threnodies and Prophecies, of Diaries, and Interviews and Reportages and Projects in Verse - leads toward the idea born on the last page" (my italics).
And the idea is the following: "And yet this [day of death] is a day of victory." This phrase seals and concludes the Poesia in forma di rosa (Poem in the Form of a Rose).
On account of the series of clues mentioned earlier, which we shall examine below, I can anticipate that Pasolini, with the "meaningful non-existence" of the verse that has three words missing, repeats the funeral rite described in the Kalevala, putting himself in the place of the Finnish hero Väinämöinen. He evokes this rite, together with the ancient Mediterranean one, with the words that we already know: "Now is the time/ of the Psychagogical." Indeed, by comparing the two funeral ceremonies - the one described in the Scandinavian saga and the one performed (for example) in Egypt, we discover the contamination between these two rites that Pasolini makes "with faith in the efficacy and reality of myth." Convinced that "everything that is mythical is realistic and viceversa," he is concerned to repeat a ritual that, as a magical and religious technique, is designed to gain control over those natural forces that elude domination by reason. But this rite, once it is performed, that is, "shown" - as Eliade says - made visible to all in a book, was taken by critics as a typographical error.
The Verse with Three Words Missing
Pasolini, however, "taking part in the farce" that followed publication of the book, continued to manipulate his "verse" with desperate cheerfulness.
The clues to be found in the eighth section can be summed up as follows:
1) the italics in brackets, where the author announces the funereal conclusion of the poem (and of life) with a "summary of his career as a poet and a prophetic look at the sea of future millennia";
2) the arrangement of the verses around a central axis, as in a funeral inscription;
3) the term "Psychagogical";
4) the statement, "And so/ I can write Exempla and Threnodies/ and even Prophecies";
5) the triadic and sacred form of the anticipation of his death at Ostia;
6) the ironic expression with which he rejects the definition of "civic poet" forced upon him by Moravia ("as a civic poet, of course, forever!");
7) the verse left half-finished that we have just mentioned.
When the reader "who loves and feels rapture" sets his eyes on the incomplete verse we are discussing, he cannot help but start on a quest, guided by his common sense. He must wonder: "How many errors of similar seriousness have not been seen by Pasolini in the proofs he re-read a thousand times?" Then, on examining the collection of poems in the Garzanti editions, he realizes that this is the only "typographical imperfection." Furthermore, continuing the research so often called for by the author ("research whose theory is logic," as Dewey says), the reader also comes to discover: a) that out of 875 poems, only four have their verses arranged around a central axis; in all four of them, as in the eighth section of Una disperata vitalità (A Desperate Vitality), the subject is death: of the poet himself, and of persons dear to him (his brother, his grandmother and an ideal goldfinch, who in the poem Aleluja (Hallelujah) represents and stands for them all; b) that the verse with the missing words appears in the first and fourth editions of the collection, while in the second the initial word "come" is restored to the original reading of Dante, "qual'è", and again becomes "come" in the third edition: c) that for reasons we shall discuss below the verse in question is not by Pasolini but by Dante, and is therefore one of those "quotations" (see Progetto di opere future [Plan for Future Works]), or formulas, or kernels of meaning, by which Pasolini communicates the major facts of his life.
Now, still following the logic of our research, let us try to understand three things: l) why the verse lacking a "hemistich" (in the right part with respect to the central axis) is by Dante and not by Pasolini; 2) what common element unites the funeral rite of the Nordic saga with that of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations; 3) why the editors of the two Garzanti volumes of Bestemmia (Anathema), published in 1993 with all of Pasolini's poems, took the trouble to add to the eighth section a long explanatory note to account for what they call a "typographical lacuna."
As regards the first point, whenever Pasolini "prophesies" about himself, he uses expressions taken from another author. In this case he makes Dante speak with a verse from Canto XXX of the Inferno: "qual'è colui che suo dannaggio sogna." And he ritually cuts off the last "three" words of the verse.
But why choose a universally known verse? This is what we must ask ourselves. The reason is simple: only in this way would poeple come to know that the missing words are three in number. If the verse had been written by Pasolini himself, the unpublished words - organized in accordance with a free arrangement of the verses - could have been two, four or five, or could even have been "illegible," as in L'ottobre del 1969 (October 1969). And thus the rite, with its sacred and mythical repetition of the number three, could not have been performed.
To answer question number 2, I shall remind the reader (at the cost of repeating myself) that when Pasolini announces that "Now is the time of the Psychagogical," he means that it is time for him to think of death, and hence to organize his transhumanizing. How? First of all, by beginning to show forth the Project, and then, like all Heroes, to explore the Mystery with a symbolic descent to the underworld. In fact, by omitting three words from the verse, letting others worry about supplying them, he re-performs the funeral rite of the mythical hero Väinämöinen. But he does not re-perform it by means of a lyrical evocation, but by way of the same "obligation" by which archaic man had to know in its entirety his personal history. And Pasolini, "a force of the past [and] more modern than any modern," not only felt this obligation, but manifested it in a sacral fashion by conserving the "story of the becoming" of every work of his, even in the sequence of titles that he dreamed up for them (in this sense, note no. 1 of La Divina Mimesis [The Divine Mimesis], dated November 1st, 1964 - and hence contemporaneous with Poesia in forma di rosa [Poem in the Form of a Rose] - is exhaustive).
The Myth of Väinämöinen
But let us finally take a look at how the myth of Väinämöinen, completing the "Psychagogy" of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, clearly shares its mythopoeic origin with it.
The mythical Finnish hero is using magic, by singing - that is to say, making poetry - to create a boat; but he cannot manage to finish it because he lacks three words. To learn them, he goes to see the giant Antero who, while speaking with him, sucks him up into his wide-open mouth. But, once he has fallen into the giant's jaws, the hero Väinämöinen makes himself an "iron costume," and threatens to remain in Antero's stomach until he tells him the three magic words he needs to finish the boat. The giant tells him, and the hero manages to finish the boat.
The psychagogic ceremonies of antiquity consisted in transporting the departed from the city of the living to the city of the dead, generally by means of a ceremonial boat going to the other side of a river or a swamp. In this case the boat is the emblem that combines two different rites - which are both culturally and geographically distant - into the emblem of a single descent to the underworld.
And so now we have to answer the third question we posed earier. But first let us read the note by the editors of Bestemmia (Anathema), added to clarify what they consider a "typographical lacuna": a note that will become ever more clearly in the years to come an example of the reductive and limited way of reading of Pasolini carried out by those who did not want, or were not able, perhaps, to believe in the "Project and Mystery" so humbly expounded by the author in Petrolio (Petroleum). Here is the note.
"In the magazine edition and in the book edition of April [1964] the verse was reduced to the first hemistich "come colui che" ("like one who"); realizing the typographical lacuna, in June [on the occasion of the second edition] the author completed it, restoring the authentic Dantesque reading ["qual'è colui che"]; in preparing his own selection from his works in 1970 he evidently used the corrupt reading and completed it from memory: "come colui che suo dannaggio sogna" ("like one who dreams his own injury"); we have therefore preferred to keep the exact reading of June 1964."
For my part, I would like to point out that in 1975, right after the death of Pasolini, Garzanti published Le poesie (The Poems): the volume remained in the bookstores for fifteen years and no one ever thought of justifying the "typographical lacuna" or, more drastically, forcing the publisher to withdraw the entire edition.
But then they speak of a "magazine edition." Which one? In Nuovi argomenti? And how long before the book edition did it appear? One day would have been sufficient for Pasolini to ask Garzanti to account for the mangling of a poem that he had called important and dangerous; a poem he had checked and rechecked, revised, emended, about which he felt enthusiasm and doubt, and even had nightmares about.
In Battute sul cinema (Remarks on the Cinema) (Winter 1966), still immersed in the overwhelming reading of Eliade - for it is from him that Pasolini came to know of the myth of Väinämöinen - the poet-director asks: "Will I be called to account, in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, for the weakness of my conscience before the attractions (which are identical) of technique and myth?"
The attractions of the myth (of death and rebirth) and of the ritual technique of prophesying it in his works during the long "approaches to the sacred enclosure" - attractions that for Pasolini are identified, because, in dying, he expresses himself - are actually revealed by the prophecy that he makes of his death at Ostia. Even today no one has noticed this prophecy, or people have pretended not to notice it - just as no one was scandalized when, in the catalogues of the big cultural events dedicated to Pasolini, as also in the translations into French, English and Spanish, Temi and Treni were translated as "class compositions" and "inter-city trains"....
The editors of Bestemmia (Anathema) should have based their restoration of the text on the distortion of meaning caused by the completion of Dante's verse. To them I dedicate this unheeded warning of the author's: "The literal identification of a scene or an episode with its archetype [e.g., the myth of Väinämöinen] which, as the word itself indicates, is necessarily very much earlier, can be stupefying and above all unreliable."
At this point, we have only to meditate on Pasolini's "first true idea of death":
Death lies not
in not being able to communicate
but in no longer being able to be understood.
translated by Gerald Parks
