Pasolini Discovers Love Outside

Abstract

During a brief period in the late 1940s, when he is in his mid-twenties, Pier Paolo Pa solini finds satisfaction for his quest for love in the world of peasants and their political struggles. Although at first this love seems possible only outside, fleeing the dominant structures of Italian society, his encounter with class struggle, particularly the peasant re bellions of 1948, allows him to recognize a political form of love that can develop within a history-making process. Through the discovery of Marx he is able to reinterpret his aesthetic and erotic desires in such a way that they become an essential part of his politi cal project. The novels and poetry Pasolini produces during these years, however, are not among his finest. In fact, the major projects are all in his estimation failures, either abandoned completely or published only a decade later with substantial revisions. Failure, though, is often more interesting than success. And Pasolini's disappointment and dissatisfaction with his writing during this period is directly linked to his political accomplishments and ideological transformation. One remarkable achievement is his articulation of a multifac eted concept of the outside, which he identifies as a space of freedom and liberation at once erotic, aesthetic, and political. Specifically, he manages to construct in social and subjective terms a space of erotic desire outside of the norms of homophobic society that is animated by noncapitalist or anticapitalist social practices. Communism is the name of that free space outside and, for a brief period, it appears to Pasolini to be inseparable from love, a red love. Together with the peasants he discovers a nexus between love and struggle, poetry and history, and this experience, although short lived, powerfully influ ences the remainder of his career, setting a standard against which all subsequent experi ences of love, political and erotic, fall short.