Dissolution of power creates identity through repetition

Pire Paolo Pasolini was an Italian artist who plied the domains of poetry, intellectualism and film and literature. Pasolini was notably distinguishable as a journalist, linguist and philosopher among a host other art domains that he pursued in the long yet drastically ended course of his art career. Pasolini was also a newspaper and magazine columnist as well as painter and renowned political figure. Eloit Audrene (2004) notes that Pasolini illustrated a unique and uncommon cultural dynamism in his course towards turning into a highly controversial figure evident through a closer assessment of his works of art. Pasolini was marked by outright disdain for the Bourgeoisie culture and social system. His ideologies tended towards the conceptual tenets and thrust of communism. On the 26th of 1947, the author wrote a contentious declaration published on the front page of newspaper entitled Liberta, “In our opinion, we think that currently only Communism is able to provide a new culture”.
What heightened the controversy with regard to his political ideological inclinations is that whilst it was evident in his art works that he disdained Feudalism Pasolini was still not a member the Country’s Community Party (PCI) which embraced ideas akin to his. This was contrary to common expectations given his public denouncements of the Bourgeoisie and the entirety of the feudalist social and societal conventions. Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini is text loaded with literary meaning and import; the text saddled with dissolution, dissociation and identity thematic concerns has been appropriately conferred the monumental tag.
The text is incomplete and serves as a fragmented representation of Pasolini’s endeavors. The fragmentation and the ensuing imbroglio enunciated in the text are anecdotally climaxed by the chaotic death of the author which dashed out the possibility of bringing the work to completion. The identity and dissolution as well the dissociation thematic developments tied to the protagonist, Carlo, are central to the propagation of authorial persuasions and literary substance in the monumental text. Frisch, Anette notes (2006), “The experiences captured in the book; particularly that of Carlo are tremendously powerful, episodic, erotic and effectually aggressively oedipal in its sexuality and politics.” He further adds that the thematic substance built around the life of the text’s protagonist, Carlo is particularly indispensable to the core of the textual and authorial substance and intent. Anette (2006) observes that the character (Carlo) is lost who functions as private individual, is secluded in his own environs, in a sphere too big for him; secluded by inevitable travels from the society to those of his own faced by odds associated with traveling to the destination exacerbated by potential death. The scholar further outlines that Carlo is sustained by his love of and faithfulness to his partner and his god, the two elements become critical constituents of his identity. “From these he derives private happiness and his central identify”.
Insights on how that author assembles the thematic elements of the identity making use of repetition will draw much from the consideration of certain extra-textual nuances on the author and his authorial intent coming to his last work, Petrolio. Pasolini announced in January 1975 that he was intending to put together an art piece would occupy his writing career for the year to come. In his terms, the work would be a composite of the entirety of his experiences and memories. What was noted from his unsent letter to Alberto Moravia is that Pasolini had spelt out that the work would be a novel authored in no conventional manner. Rosario Ferreri (2008) cites that the letter quotes, “In the text the chronicler normally disappears, leaving room for a conventional character who seems to be the only one who can foster a meaningful relationship with reader… Now in these pages I purport to address the reader as in a face to face encounter and not conventionally. I have addressed the reader in my own right, in flesh and bone, as I write this letter to you.”
The representations of disorganisation as well as the fragmentary status also typified by the unfinished manuscript contribute to the building of the themes of dissolution yet there is a particulate leveraging of the style of repetition to foster an authorial emphasis on the aspect of the creation of an identity through dissolution. The unfinished work is expectedly devoid of cohesion which runs in tandem with the author’s intention of propagating meaning intended for subjective interpretation. The text is in utter defiance of any literary convention. Particularly worth delving into, is the way the author has made use of repetition to reinforce his thematic progressions. This is particularly notable on the aspects of how the representation of dissolution of power creates identity through repetition.
The thrust of the paper is focused on taking a multidimensional exploration of the importance of the themes accumulated by the aspect of repetition. The sexuality aspect of the author who is homosexual is threaded in the composition of the novel by Pasolini Aichele, George (2002) notes, “Coming after the other great classical; works of literature, the novel by Pasolini can be said to be one of central art works in the stable of Italian fictional work to portray sexuality in a graphically overt manner”. The scholar enlikened the novel to other English novels such as Fanny Hill or Lady Chatterley’s Lover in English owing to its sexuality thematic thrust described by the scholar as giving the text notoriety in Italy akin to some English works like the ones mentioned above. Notably particularly for the scope and focus of this paper is the way the subject of sex and the author’s sexuality is repeated right through the novel. The repetitions play to the build up of the themes of dissolution typifying the Political dispensation in 1975 In Italy. The repetitions highlight the authors’ intent to carve subjective characters who interpretation must defy literary conventions.
Authors employ various literary objects, concepts and phenomena among things to build and carve their thematic thrusts and arrive at meaningful authorial persuasions. The writer use imagery and symbols with which they launch their attacks or celebration of particulate aspects of society. It can not be argued that the pervading use of sex and the sexuality element of the Petrolio was born of the author’s intent to celebrate sexual pleasure through his artistry art. The import of the text by Pasolini must be evaluated and regarded as a canonical contribution of much more worth that just a mere presentation and caricaturing of the celebrated and perverted pleasure of sex.
Pugh, Tison (2004) concurs, “I can not believe that it can be true that it was part of the author’s desire to glorify the pleasure of sex as well as that the sexual acts that are blatantly described by the author which have gotten the novel to remarkable recognition in Italian and of course world art; are intended”. The scholar enunciates that in a metaphorical drive the writer has manipulated the sex imagery and acts to attack the object of the ungoverned sexual practices. The author through a presentation of sexuality thrust articulates his unmistakable contempt for those who indulge in the illicit sexual practice. This sends ramifications to the entirety of the Italian society dogged with a socio-political and economic malaise. The author has manipulated the sexual themes to present how denigrated the society is as he also leverages on this to caricature the paradigm of patriarchy which has marginalized and trivialized women resultantly regarding them as those of second fiddle to their masculine counterparts. Pugh, Tison (2004) notes that “The realms of sexual, economic and political aggrandizement are metaphorically juxtaposed and correlated in the text in such a way that the measured shock worth of the sexual descriptions protrude into spheres and elements of reader’s reaction and relation to them .” Sex and sexuality have thus been used in text to present an expanded metaphor to achieve an authorial degrading of the human nature and the human nature’s disposition to sex and sexuality.
The copious detailing of grotesque sexual conduct corresponds that with the writer’s disdain for the ills and malaise plaguing the society from the political, social and economic paradigms. “In the perspective of the salient role of the sexual symbol in the novel a as well as the immediate cause of the themes of death reinforced by repetitions of body, corpus, death and consumption create an ambience; it is decipherable that the narrative thrust on its own must be elaborately suggestive of the recurrence of tumescence as well as ‘detumescence'” (Forni Kathleen, 2002). The caricaturing of the male’s stimulated phallus descried as swelling depicts the author’s artistic acumen and thematic intent. Forni Kathleen (2003) argues that from another angle, Pasolini’s representation of women in Petrolia is acutely an artistic thrust designed to achieve a particular ideological end, namely the conceptualisation and representation of a cultural germane for the progression of the Italian society.
In the salient theme of sex and sexuality The author presents sex as joyful, beautiful and natural yet in the bourgeois society which he attacks and disdains profoundly, the primordial compel is elevated way yonder the precincts of social conventions. In the bourgeois society, sex is represented as something terrifying and fearsome imminently leading to moral decadence and mortification. The author presents and correlation between the concept and of economic and sexual ‘profligacy’. The illicit and transactional sexual practices committed in the attitude of ‘getting and spending’ play much to the negative characterization of both men and women. These in turn become symbolic representations of the decadence of the entire society. The concept of overspending is presented in the existent or surmised correlation between money on economic front and seamen on the sexual front. Women are represented as the enervating element of society reinforcing the propagation that a feasible way around tapping the merits of sexual life is to nourish oneself with sex and not indulge. This runs parallel to the theme of economic profligacy awash in the course of the plot of the novel.
There is a pervading use of the figurative use of the body that is intertwined with a consistent correlation between sexual imagery and politics. The denigrated state of the society presented through the portrayal of extreme sexual indulgencies archives the literary effect through a persistent correlation between the sexual imagery to the economy. The bodily blockages are used as a metaphor to represent the accumulation of wealth in the capital, causing destruction whilst the depletion of human body resources is analogous to the rich needless spending of the country’s resources. The pervading societal decadence is presented as a significant form of implicating heavenly punishment as a result of overindulgence in sex. The novel is marked at the end by the inevitable demise of the working class.
The author has employed a repetition of key terms that are central denotations and connotation to the articulation of thematic substance. The juxtapositions of the uses of the words cannibalism and carnival are used to drive in the messages on the ills of consumer society that have culminated in the death of the working class. The death of the working class is further elucidated but the repetitions of the death and consumption lexical items that add to the authorial persuasion substance. In all his works the author has maintained protracted denouncements of the bourgeois typical consumer society. Pasolini represented his celebration of the diminishing part of the society which in his term was a world of ferocity, instinctive goodness and an entire linguistic context full of vitality proper to the working as well as rural classes”. He mourned that, “The society had transgressed from the innate cycle of the seasons to the sequence of industrial production and consumption”. (Green, Martin, 2006) The presentation of main character with a split personality is used together with various form of repetition to illuminate themes of identify through dissolution, the presentation of fragmenting society which is effective in portraying a society at a historic and crucial turning point. The disintegration I presented through various repetitive forms as a process of mutation in the society and individual’s creation and establishment of identity.