FOR THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY OF PIER PAOLO PASOLINI’S BIRTH
Alice Lambertelli graduated in Humanities at the University of Bologna with a research on the relationship between fathers and sons in twentieth-century literature, with reference to the work of Federigo Tozzi, Italo Svevo and Pier Paolo Pasolini. She is currently completing his master’s degree in Italian Studies at the same university, studying the relationship among Pasolini, Amelia Rosselli and the poets of the “neoavanguardia”. She has always cultivated an interest in the psychoanalytical and sociological interpretation of the authors closest to her heart, with Massimo Recalcati as her first reference. She is also interested in the didactics of Italian literature.
In the first half of 1966, forced to bed by a severe stomach ulcer, Pier Paolo Pasolini read Plato’s Dialogues and wrote the six manifesto tragedies of his dramaturgy (Calderòn, Affabulazione, Pilade, Porcile, Orgia, Bestia da stile). The tragedies are rooted in anger and inadequacy towards the social model of his time, in line with his reflections on the “anthropological mutation” (an original formulation exclusively by Pasolini: it is one of the most tragic phenomena of contemporary life, which consists in the destruction of all individual character in favour of the homologising model proposed by the new capitalist bourgeois society) that so tormented the pen of the Friulian author.
Pasolini’s theatre is here read in dialogue with the discipline of psychoanalysis, a symptomatic representation of bourgeois and consumerist society. Already in 1959, the American sociologist Charles Wright Mills, in his essay The Sociological Imagination, had proposed tracing the personal unease of individuals back to the objective disturbances of society, as a key to understanding the alienation of contemporary man. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s operation does not differ much from Mills’ proposal. His tragedies, and Affabulazione in particular, are the staging of a man who amplifies the historical and social changes of a society enslaved to capitalist hedonism.
The nucleus of the tragedy Affabulazione is the dramatic relationship between the generation of fathers and that of sons, a subject later analysed with ruthless lucidity in the 1975 Lettera Luterana, I giovani infelici. Affabulation is, in fact, a drama about the Laius complex (i.e. the syndrome of the generational transition between father and son that occurs when the father refuses to recognise an autonomous and independent role for his son, perceiving him as a rival). In fact, it stages the upheaval of father-son roles, in the historical period that psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati defines as the era of the ‘decline of the father’.
This tragedy deals with the theme of the breakdown of all educational discourse characteristic of our time, marked by a profound alteration of the processes of filiation between generations. As in an inverted Oedipus, it is the fathers who symbolically (and not) kill their children. The acute examination of the psyche of Father and Son that Pasolini conducts takes on the connotations of an analysis of a generational malaise that has never been healed: the faults of fathers and sons contaminate each other until they reach an irremediable rupture that still characterises the sphere of social relations today. Pasolini’s drama tells a story with ancestral connotations in which to recognise oneself right from the first pages: a cry for help from two generations in search of an identity lost in the magma of history.
FATHER: But don’t you know that the greatest joy of fathers is to see their children as equals?
Episode II
SON: I know, it seems that fathers don’t ask anything else from life. Well, if you really want us to be equal, you be like me!
FATHER: Haven’t we joked enough?
Why? Dad, realise that the more paternal the wrongs, the more filial the reason: the more you persecute me, the more I feel the pride and lightness of not giving a damn about you, of being free.
This contamination of roles, emblematic of contemporary society, has an unexpected outcome: it is the Father, lost in the face of the evanescence of his role, who kills the Son. This is revealed by the character’s last monologue in the play’s epilogue, the delirious confession of a father who tries to hide, behind a instable mental alibi, the story of a murder that is not a simple moment of madness, but the inevitable outcome of a historical and anthropological change. The choice of this ending reveals Pasolini’s intention to free himself from the exclusivity of the terms of the Oedipal complex, as if to denounce the need for new keys for psychoanalysis to interpret the discomforts of the new consumerist society that has deprived social categories of their authority, to the point of making inapplicable diagnoses based on models that can no longer be found in reality.
The author’s intention becomes even clearer when reading the seventh episode of the play: the Father goes to a Necromancer to find out where his son is hiding, and the dialogue with the woman presents an open criticism of the fathers of psychoanalysis. When the Necromancer in her glass ball sees only a ‘crowd of fathers’, she accuses Freud and Jung of neglecting the fathers in favour of a ruthless analysis of the psyche of the sons. She says, in fact, that the two dealt with these fathers ‘when these fathers were sons’. The father’s reply is very interesting because it suggests that by now his regression to the ontological status of son is irretrievable, he says, in fact: ‘it is true that I am for my son, father. But I for myself am son’. But the Necromancer’s urgent question is another: ‘is there nothing further analysable, other than jealousy and regret?’. She does not give us an answer, she merely confronts us with the fact that there is always something else in human relationships, something beyond the behavioural paradigms proposed by classical psychoanalysis.
Oedipus alone can no longer explain the bond between father and son because this is no longer the century of sons, it is the century of the tragedy of fathers. Therefore Pasolini tells us about the generational relationship seen from the point of view of the father, the two protagonists do not have a name: they are the archetypes of father and son in the century of anthropological mutation, freed from the models of psychoanalysis and abandoned to their desert. The story portrayed by Pasolini is thus a denunciation of the need for a new perspective through which to look at a society on the verge of decline.
The reflection conducted is not to be understood as a hoped-for return to a past in which the rigidity of the roles of father and son resulted in a deafening silence, but rather as an invitation to be able to read with different eyes a reality that has changed in all its social components. Affabulazione, in fact, does not propose anything decisive, but opens the door to a new perspective on the ties that most intimately concern man. The father told to us by Pasolini is a man who refuses to delegate, to accept that life takes its course. This is the story of a father who asks to be the protagonist of his drama again and perhaps for the last time, the story of two generations that have made dialogue a mere vague pride. In the digital age, in which affective communication has been spoilt even more by the physical and emotional isolation caused by the pandemic situation, the contribution of Pasolinian theatre is essential to bring the urgency of this generational syndrome to the attention of the wider public, delivering into our hands as readers and spectators the possibility of writing a different ending to those words with which the author concludes his work:
What am I telling you, my poor Cacarella?
Epilogue
My life? One father’s story?
Ah no, this is not the story of a single father.