Lennon, Brian. "A 'basso continuo'." Review of Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Boston Book Review 4.2 (March 1997): 46-47.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Outside his native Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) is known principally as a film director. In The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), Oedipus the King (1967), and Medea (1969), Pasolini abandoned Italian neo-realism's subproletarian object for the myth-mediated re-representation of precapitalist cultures. Pasolini's later work, such as the so-called "trilogy of life" (The Decameron [1971], The Canterbury Tales [1972], and A Thousand and One Nights [1974]) and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) more or less directly re-engages the problematic of the bourgeoisie. But Pasolini is also an important figure in Italian postwar literature, with a body of work comprising nearly seventy volumes of fiction, poetry, drama, literary criticism, translations, political journalism, and correspondence[text missing]

Of a work planned at 2,000 pages, Pasolini had completed only 547 by the time of his murder in 1975. These 547 are a mess of skeletal and truncated set-pieces, outlines, planning notes, critical dilations, and journal entries---in other words, 547 very, very unfinished pages. One reviewer of the Italian edition of Petrolio (which appeared in 1992) suggests that its fragments "are highly readable as prose poems," and indeed, this may be the best initial approach to this volume; the longest unbroken piece runs only thirty pages, and many more come in under a page. Reproducing the typographical format of the Einaudi edition, which identifies lacunae, marginal notations, interlinear variations, handwritten typescript marks, and words, sentences or entire passages "crossed out by the author and not replaced but essential for un[text missing]"

When you have half a clue what you're reading, however, it is evident that Pasolini's sensibility---such as it may be---is fully mature: grandly, but calmly, synthetic, in the manner of someone who has thought a great deal and is certain of what he wants to say. Rendered into English, Pasolini's prose carries someting of the intra-fictive philosophical omniscience deployed so well by Musil. Note 55 (each fragment is a numbered appunto), "The field along Via Casilina," is, in its prolonged graphic descriptions of sadistic sexual behavior, the most easily notorious of Petrolio's fragments; but it is also an improbably lyrical piece of writing, shimmering with a situative acuity and a palpable being-in-time:

The immense, irregular expanse of the field, and at the far end a barrier of houses with twinkling lights (apartment buildings on one side, a stretch of small denticulated houses with drystone walls on the other); the sky, with a few clouds lightly brushed across its deep indigo; the red moon, in the middle of the sky, whose light was becoming cool and very clear; and, beside it, just as luminous, the small faithful evening star. The whole scene---where there were no shadings, except perhaps at the phosphorescent edges of the piece of sky illuminated by the moon---was filled with a single, intense fragrance of wild fennel. The whole cosmos was there, in that field, in that sky, in those barely visible urban horizons, and in that intoxicating odor of summer grass.

Ever the gadfly, Pasolini had conceived an infernal exposé of Italian politics and society, naming names and precipitating the grandest possible uproar. Dante presides most explicitly over Petrolio in a 29-Note "Vision"---a kind of film script---following someone named Il Merde ("The Shit") as he walks with his fiancée down a Roman street. But there is more; the clumping of fragments reveals a kind of bifurcated narrative, in which the erotic adventures of Petrolio's protagonist, Carlo, run alongside the political intrigues of his position as a spy-pursued employee of ENI, the state-run petroleum corporation (and here it is impossible not to recall the amorous exploits of Ulrich, Musil's man without qualities, as they are interwoven with the narrative of the "Parallel Campaign").

What might Petrolio have been like, had it been completed? As it stands, nearly half the fragments are devoted to the description and analysis of Carlo's sexual activity. Or rather, that of "Carlo the Second," a Sadean double whom Carlo, wasting no time, acquires no later than Note 4. In a succession of fragments spanning 150 pages, Carlo the Second engages Carlo's mother, his grandmother, his four sisters, the family servant, her 14-year old daughter, "two dozen girls of the same age and even younger," "a dozen women in his mother's 'set'," and then, temporarily transforming himself into a woman, twenty young boys. On those rare occasions when he lacks a partner, he walks around exposing himself to whomever he comes across. Oh, and he masturbates "practically... every time he found himself alone, even in public." (Jacket copy describes such exploits, cauti[text missing]

Nothing to be surprised at, in the work of a man whose film adaptation of Sade was described as "a horrid swamp, stinking slime." But in truth, Pasolini's ambitions, here, are every bit as bibliophilic as they are satyric:

All of Petrolio... should be presented in the form of a critical edition of an unpublished text (considered a monumental work, a modern Satyricon). Four or five versions of that text survive: they correspond in some respects and not in others, some contain certain events while others do not, etc. Hence this edition makes use not only of a comparison between the various surviving manuscripts (of which, for example, two are apocryphal, with variants that are bizarre, exaggerated, ingenuous, or "revised in the manner of" but also of the contribution of other materials: letters from the author (concerning whose identity there is an unresolved philological problem, etc.), letters of friends of the author who know about the manuscript (and disagree among themselves), oral testimony reported in newspapers or elsewhere, songs, etc.... The author of the critical edition will therefore summarize.... ---in a flat, objective, colorless etc. style---long passages of general history to[text missing]

So reads a "Project Note" at the head of this volume. Petrolio will remain a tantalizing puzzle---a work still in the planning stage, interrupted by sudden, violent death, and therefore, as it were, definitively open, perpetual, unfinishable. It is mere raw material, a sort of novel-kit. As such, it may be the ultimate "postmodern" fiction---self-contained, inconsolable, inspiring no imitation.

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