Between Passion and Ideology. Forms of free indirect speech in Pasolini

Abstract

The article analyses the relevance of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s free indirect style through the analysis of his unorthodox reading of Antonio Gramsci’s writings. It focuses in particular on Gramsci’s notes on the concept of “sentimental connexion”, developed in his Prison notebooks to describe the relationship between intellectuals and popular classes. The hypothesis I propose to demonstrate is that Pasolini’s literary style features the elements apt to define the relationship between his expressive forms and ideology as exposed in his volume titled Empirismo eretico (although with some inconsistencies). Additionally, the article proposes a contrastive comparison between Michail Bachtin’s polyphony theory and Pasolini’s free indirect speech, to demonstrate the originality of the latter. The corpus of this research will include both Pasolini’s literary and critical works, paying particular attention to two moments in his artistic and intellectual production: the novels Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta; the writings, published between 1964 and 1971 and later collected in Empirismo eretico.