Gian Maria Annovi,
Faculty Fellow, Columbia University, Universita' di Bologna

abstract

“Content with the desert”: Mapping Pasolini beyond the City and Periphery

In Pasolini’s final, unfinished and probably most complex work, Petrolio, that can also be read as a body of fragmented screenplays, the main character of the book is physically split into two: Polis’s Carlo and Tetis’s Carlo. It is possible to read this split as an image of the dialectic between city and borgata, central in Pasolini’s work from his early novels and films (Accattone and Mamma Roma.) I would like to show that Pasolini’s literary idea of mapping (or, “mappizzare”, in italian, which is a pasolinian neologism) underlying Petrolio, also involves the concepts of the Center and Periphery. City and Outskirts appear to be two very fluid concepts, if examined under the raw light of Petrolio: the initial diaphragm which divided the center of Rome and borgata – which allows us to read the social reality as a result of the difference between middle-class and sub-proletarian world – disappears with the homogenization produced by the anthropologic mutation described by Pasolini in his last essays. The ultimate result of this process is not only the destruction of the body as a singular entity – as we see in Petrolio and Salò – but also the destruction of the City (already present in Porno-Teo-Kolossal’s screenplay) and the appearance of a New Periphery, open to the desert. The desert, as a non-mappable, wide-open space, seems to represent for Pasolini the ideal form that built itself on the informal, the only possible stage for his attempt to create the total work that is Petrolio.

short bio

Gian Maria Annovi holds a Laurea in philosophy from the University of Bologna and is writing his doctoral dissertation in Italian Literature for the same university. Currently, he is a PhD student in the Department of Italian at Columbia University. His main interests concern twentieth-century poetry, gender issues, psychoanalysis and literature. He has published essays on several contemporary authors (among them, Zanzotto, Rosselli, Porta, Sanguineti) and he recently wrote several entries concerning European Literature for U. Eco's Encyclomedia: Il Novecento. He is presently working on the relation between the body and poetry in the 1960s and 1970s.