Re-Writing the Myth, Rereading the Life: The Universalizing Game in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo Re

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, the Romantic artist, as exemplified in Byron or Wordsworth in England and Friedrich Schlegel in Germany, preferred to see himself as a self-defining microcosm who could build worlds out of his infinite creative possibilities.1 In the twentieth century, the nineteenth century image of the Romantic artist-creator underwent a transition in virtually all Western cultures, producing a new image: the charismatic figure known as the European intellectual, who in his alienation from the realities of the common world, offered an image of the writer as creator of many kinds of writing, often in more than one medium or genre. These European intellectuals followed in the tradition of modernism, to stress the ways in which an individual's mind created representations that could supplant traditional forms of perceiving the world. The European intellectual cut from this pattern thus has produced a generation of writing on writing, stressing how the artist's agency reconstructs the words and symbols of culture, often in ways that show absences and gaps in the traditional, dominant representations of the world. Using the example of writing an autobiography through the lenses of a film adaptation of a myth, this article examines such a connection within European intellectual history.