Abstract
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The hype around Pier Paolo Pasolini’s masterpieces has hit its peak for him as a writer, film maker and poet to put into consideration his written magnum opuses which include “A Violent Life”, “Roman Stories”, “The Ragazzi” and many more. A great film director he was in the “The De Cameron” and “The Gospel according to St. Matthew” to name a few. Audiences are filled with morbid fascination around the stratagem of his momentous designs.
But in the midst of his conviction on the novel PETROLIO which others believed to be just the working title, Pasolini on 1975 was murdered outside Rome leaving PETROLIO unfinished and incomplete. On 1992, after 17 years of his untimely demise, his significant output was published in Italy which spurred opinions and emotional predictions on factors, issues and concerns brought about by the tilted balance of the story. The novel obtained communal indignation which only strengthened Pasolini’s dominant attribute to inflame anger and exasperation, flabbergast readers and dread mystery to spectators on the grounds of Identity, Dissociation and Dissolution.
Identity, dissociation, and dissolution in Petrolio
PETROLIO is constructed by succession of Appunti (Notes) that surrogate able-bodied Chapters. Comprised by broaden sequence of events, further, there are enigmatic messages of few words addressed to himself. A letter to Moravia was included in the 1992 publication of PETROLIO, in which Pasolini elucidated his venture and solicited for suggestion. He wrote that he wishes to shun formal conclusion to the story thus he covet to speak to the reader straightforwardly. This was recapitulated well in Robert S.C. Gordon’s brilliant book, Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity:
in these pages I have addressed the reader directly and not though conventions [. . .] in flesh and blood [. . .]. I have turned the novel into an object, not only for the reader but also for me: I have placed that object between the reader and me, and discussed it with him/her. (p. 271)
Identity
The events of the novel took place in 1950s, in the postwar Italy. Carlo Valletti, the main character of the novel, is a young Turinese bourgeois from a liberal family who experiences a split personality disorder.
The first–Carlo I or Carlo di Polis–dedicates himself to the pursuit of power through his work for the petrochemical giant ENI and its shadowy connections with Christian Democrat and neo-fascist politics. The second Carlo-Carlo II, Carlo di Tetis or Karl– dedicates himself entirely to the pursuit of sexual pleasure. (Gordon, 1996, p. 268-269)
The storyteller deems also to be dual in nature. One is the author who peripherally contours the novel and interjects the notes to point out on its technicalities and connotation. The other one is the narrator, who mocks contemptuous viewpoints contained by PETROLIO’s illusory surroundings.
Pasolini bring about in his novel the sense of identity crafted with the help of images on realism and utopian veracity combined with the intrinsic instability of Carlo’s vision to generate a complex scheme that ultimately hangs suspended indeterminately between a satire of contemporary reality and a parody of life. Pasolini seems to be telling readers, the very notion of utopia that must be treated with a heavy dose of irony and skepticism. “Every great writer loves centos above all else” (Pasolini 1997, p. 87). Pasolini portrays that the rulers of the state actively seek to enforce complete conformity and to suppress individualism of any kind. They are particularly concerned with exerting control over those aspects of human life that might lead to strong emotions and thus disrupt the rational tranquility of life. For example, sexual relations are not discouraged: “free” sex is openly approved, though strictly regulated by society. Meanwhile, bureaucratic techniques for the implementation of this vision are well developed: citizens are carefully examined in state laboratories to determine the level of their sexual needs.
Identity crisis is prevalent in all generations. Evidently, Pasolini depicted the predicament through Carlo. This quandary rolls down from adolescence to adulthood in pursuit of proper venue to reveal one’s existent sexual orientation. Identity defines a person’s exclusive union of what is irreversibly given to include gender, body type and even disposition.
Carlo’s I distinctiveness is a prejudiced sagacity as well as discernible eminence of personal stability and power through elevated social status. Carlo II on the other hand, is a persona who lives only to please his wicked and obstinate sexual desires.
A sexual identity crisis is broadly addressed in the novel as Carlo II strongly ascertained with people of the other sex. With regard to this, a person bearing a sexual identity crisis may correlate with people of the opposite sex resiliently that the person perceives himself to be fenced in the wrong body.
Carlo II in Rome undergoes an epiphany on seeing young communists parading near Termini Station. He turns into a woman and performs fellatio and intercourse with twenty subproletarian boys in a ‘borgata’ field. (Gordon, 1996, p. 269)
The idea of deeming one’s self to be confined in the mistaken carcass instigates severe anxiety and unhappiness with one’s own sexual category. A person experiencing relentless sexual identity catastrophe even leads to a sex-change operation. People experiencing sexual identity disorder often encounter difficulty in social populace. On the other hand, Carlo II who at his will become a woman engages in activities by and large do so for sexual gratification, and out of a need to escape from his own gender.
Carlo’s inception of the sexual identity crisis succeeded when even Carlo I redefines Carlo’s II pleasure and neurosis when he also had an encounter with another man, Carmelo. This manifests that the sexual identity crisis recurrently takes place in line with the changing world that stipulates people to incessantly redefine themselves. People encounter identity crisis when evasion of personal uniformity and similitude fails to continue.
Dissociation
In the novel, the sense of dissociation is created with the help of underclass description and life grievances experienced by the main character. Carlo’s condition exhibits multiple distinct characteristics each with its own prototype of recognizing and intermingling with the environment. His state portrays two personalities that habitually becomes in command of his behavior. This “culture” is achieved by a radical melting-pot ideology through which planned miscegenation gradually erases all gender differences among individual citizens. Moreover, absolute cultural values are not established and maintained. In addition, Pasolini’s presentation of his reality is complicated by a number of other features, including detailed descriptions of past life, a life that the main character involves rather unfortunate encounters with ideologies like Nazism. Meanwhile, Carlo’s story is revealed through his self-description and representation of his views. Carlo desires to possess and to be possessed. The book depicts that Carlo I tries to isolate from his past and reject his bourgeois origin.
Even Carlo I, who seems to step outside his bourgeois origin in his scandalous transgressions, is unable to arrive at the simple, mythicized, ahistorical unconsciousness of figures such as Salvatore Dulcimascolo, Carmelo, and the twenty ‘ragazzi’ of ‘Il pratone della Casilina’. (Gordon, 1996, p. 291)
Similarly, understanding the pattern throws light on the element of over elaborateness, of slightly false posturing, poeticizing and self-conscious symbol making in some of Carlo’s I framework speeches, especially towards the end.
The presence of Carlo I and Carlo II with its own qualified continuing precedent of distinguishing, conveying and deeming about the environment and self highly illustrates dissociation. Indeed, both of Carlo’s personality disparate to act into a solitary functioning of a single person. Dissolution
The sense of dissolution is created with the help of sexual practices exercised by Carlo II somewhat to be sort of delirium. The overall perception of the novel is an urge behind this work in Pasolini’s allusion to it as a summa.
I have begun a book that will occupy me for years, perhaps for the rest of my life. I don’t want to talk about it . . .; suffice it to say that it is a sort of ‘summa’ of all my experiences, all my memories (Gordon, 1996, p. 267)
Pasolini incorporates the things he personally experience as both elegiac and visionary. A lament to which his belief as viewed had exceeded perpetually from realism of vigorous agrarian Italy as it was before the irremediable changes, the innate feature of environment, the expected sexuality, to put into consideration the conventional forms of prose and the successful community intellect.
Carlo’s II public display of nudity and parts of the body reflects his inner self and identity. Undeniably, the personality has great respect for the power, comparing its attempts to harness poetry to its high-tech ability to generate strong emotional experience and feelings. But in point of fact strict control has stripped emotions of any real power. Carlo’s II treatment of the opposition between rationality and emotion clearly participates in a widespread modern anxiety over the potential dehumanizing effects of increasing regimentation in the modern world. At the same time, Carlo I is anything but an unequivocal opponent of free sexual relations. The revolutionary PETROLIO is not strict irrationalize novel which rejects all truck with sexual freedom. Carlo I goes on to identify militarism, socialized morality, industrialization, technology, and commercialized popular culture as central ingredients in the dehumanization of modern life. For instance, he notes that sexual freedom provides an important tool for the enforcement of official morality, giving the government the ability to use drugs, selection, conditioning to manufacture people. In short, Carlo’s view of modern morality and sexual power (though sharpened by a specifically perspective) is very representative of that expressed in many fictions.
The game of PETROLIO is a game of concealment and revelation, a sort of hide-and seek between the said and the non-said, between the text and reality and the text and the self. It represents an oblique, flawed and rhetorical attempt to evoke another Scene by interweaving and over mapping form, self and reality to make them unrecognizable and dissolute. (Gordon, 1996, p. 283-284)
CONCLUSION
Hasty growth and development in technology, financial system, economy and dynamics in local and world politics, more commonly cause identity crisis, dissociation and dissolution disorders to a person. This was extensively embarked upon on PETROLIO.
Pasolini creates vivid and impressive images of moral power and social problems, sexuality and its impact on modern men. This opposition took on special political intonations in revolutionary Italy, as Pasolini sought to transform society through the application of the moral principles and traditions. Carlo’s vision clearly comments on the politicization of sociality in the early days of the postwar Italy, and his treatment of issues like sexuality, religion, and culture responds quite directly to debates over those issues in modern society. And his concern over the potential decay of the social values and morality into oppression gains a special poignancy from its striking anticipation of the coming abuses of power. Drastically, the novel also transforms into a lavish delving journey to the male libido. It literally builds the founding prowess of the covetousness for power and the power of lust and sexual desire
The tremendous crisis in the Italian social order and prose had ignited Pasolini’s gallant effort to endow a literary retort in PETROLIO. The predicament also significantly defines Pasolini as well, with regard to the dilemma of his partisanship envisioned in the personality disorders of characters and the gender transformations. Overall, though incomplete, the purpose was lucratively served to the public clearly and magnificently presented in an atypical but great literary piece.
References
Pasolini, P. P. 1997, Petrolio. Pantheon.
Gordon, Robert S.C. (1996) Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity. Oxford Publication.
