Pasolinis work, however - and this is a special aspect of its structure - is a mimesis of reality that approaches 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 authors 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 Dantes Divine Comedy; 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 Genettes reasoning - is no longer an imitation, but reality itself. And the perfect mimesis must necessarily be divine. Now, if we reduce Pasolinis 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, Pasolinis 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-directors 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 witness 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 Pasolinis 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 humorously 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 readers mind, as he manages to coordinate and place in their real chronological order the clues left behind (in his log book) by the author.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 15:30:55 +0000
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