"Squarci di notti romane": Pasolini's Early Authorial Confessions

Pier Paolo Pasolini's first piece of Roman prose, the novella "Squarci di notti romane," deserves more critical attention than it has received thus far. Written in 1950 following the author's relocation from the Friulian town of Casarsa to Rome, and first appearing in the 1965 Garzanti collection Alì dagli occhi azzurri, "Squarci" presents one of Pasolini's earliest articulations of the ragazzo di vita, a figure that became known with the 1955 publication of his first novel, Ragazzi di vita, and more so in 1961 with his first film, Accattone. A young man of the Roman sub-proletariat who makes a living through illicit means, such as petty thievery, pimping, and male prostitution, the ragazzo embodies Pasolini's concept of an innocent, amoral class that remains unspoiled by bourgeois values. Aloof to the ideology of Italy's postwar "economic miracle" and new consumer culture, the ragazzo is central to the ideological critique that informs Pasolini's Roman prose of the 1950s.

What makes "Squarci" unique, however, with respect to Pasolini's other Roman works, is its self-reflexivity. The protagonist of the novella, a poet in search of nocturnal encounters with Rome's ragazzi, represents Pasolini himself. The novella's most distinct feature is that Pasolini gives his protagonist numerous names - Delatore, Autore, Pygmalion, Villon, Cacarella, Je, Lautréamont, Proust, and more - all of which point, as we will see, to the act of writing. With these alter egos, Pasolini advertizes his own role as the aesthetic interpreter of his adored underclass, more than as its objective observer, emphasizing the literary craft at the basis of the diegesis and especially those ragazzi qualities that allow him to remold the youths into erotic objects. This ensemble of names, which represents diverse aspects of Pasolini's authorial figure, constitutes a self-portrait, Pasolini's definition of his identity as an author - one wishing to display his presence and ability to blur the boundaries between politics and Eros, objectivity and subjectivity, truth and discourse. This complex self-portrait, which Pasolini drew so early in his career, will inform, explicitly or implicitly, the rest of his work. One recalls the 1971 film Decameron, where Pasolini plays the artist who represents in frescoes those Boccaccio tales that we subsequently watch unfold on the screen. Indeed, one may think of "Squarci" as a manifesto of Pasolini's poetics. By highlighting the ways in which Pasolini parades his authorial control in "Squarci," I hope to inspire further critical discussion of this rarely studied work, which deserves to become, I believe, a central point of reference in Pasolini studies.

By and large, Pasolini's 1950s prose may be characterized as a form of realism, a variant of the 1940s Neorealist movement in literature, with a special focus on Rome's sub-proletariat. Many elements certainly afford "Squarci" a realist dimension. The protagonist encounters the ragazzi along the Tiber in the vicinity of Ponte Garibaldi, the bridge that connects the city's historical center to Piazza Belli in Trastevere, not far from Piazza Costaguti in the Jewish ghetto, where Pasolini resided during the first phase of his life in Rome (Pierangeli 119; Siciliano 152-57). In his first piece of Roman prose, Pasolini is eager to recount the enthralling experiences of his newly discovered metropolis, the same ones that he had recounted to his cousin Nico Naldini (Pierangeli 120). The events are told with obsessive historical and geographical specificity. The narrator often states the year, season, and month in which an event unfolds, while he names the exact locations - streets, bridges, piazzas, and monuments - where the characters linger. The ragazzi speak a version of Roman dialect characteristic of their social milieu. Fabio Pierangeli notes that the nearby statue of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, Rome's major nineteenth-century dialect poet, which looks over the piazza named after him, has both symbolic and realist functions. While paying tribute to Belli, Pasolini also diversifies his characters' dialect and characterizes Belli as giallognolo (jaundiced), because the older poet's dialect is now mixed with different accents in a city that absorbs many races and personalities (Pierangeli 123...