The Politics of Zealotry: Pier Paolo Pasolini's "St. Paul"

Prelude

A large room in Barcelona. Interior. (Night.)

Isn't he a fascist?

A collaborator with the SS?

Isn't he and didn't he declare himself the most zealous of the most zealous promoters of traditions?…

Paul looks around and begins to speak (he has a mysterious smile, unbelievable in that face distorted by fanaticism), and looking around humbly, he says in a deep voice in the way the first words of a hymn are uttered: 'Christ has liberated us for freedom.'

—Pier Paolo Pasolini St. Paul: A Screenplay

Zealotries on the Road

In his crime novel Lucky You (1997), Carl Hiaasen invents an encounter that illuminates the way right wing zealotry can become a collective sensibility. Early in the story he describes, with cinematic detail, two men (who ultimately hatch a plan to rob a lottery winner) getting out of a Dodge Ram truck after coming off the road and entering a convenience store: "Bode Gazzer was five feet six and had never forgiven his parents for it. He wore three-inch snakeskin shitkickers and walked with a swagger that suggested not brawn so much as hemorrhoidal tribulation. Chub was a beer-gutted six two, moist-eyed, ponytailed and unshaven. He carried a loaded gun at all times and was Bode Gazzer's best and only friend. They had known each other two months." ¹ What helps me initiate my analysis of the media through which zealotry spreads its world view is the ideational symbiosis that takes place once Hiaasen has Gazzer, a poacher, and Chub, a counterfeiter in conversation. "Chub never thought of himself as having a political agenda until he met Bode Gazzer, who helped organize Chub's multitude of hatreds into a single venomous philosophy…[e.g.] 'Oklahoma,' Bode Gazzer said sharply, 'and that was the government did it, to frame those two white boys. No, I'm talking 'bout a militia. Armed, disciplined and well-regulated, like it says in the Second Amendment'." ²

The Gazzer-Chub shared sensibility that Hiaasen invents has counterparts in other historical periods in which zealous mentalities have been amplified in encounters. One is captured in Leonardo Padura's novelistic biography of Leon Trotsky's assassin, Ramón Mercader. Mercader is recruited and radicalized during a number of encounters in disparate national venues. ³ Among those that prepare him for his leap into history is one with Africa de las Heras:

Her parents named her Africa, like the patron saint of Ceuta, where she had been born, and rarely had a name fit someone so well: because she was vigorous, unfathomable, and wild, like the continent to whom she owed her name. Ever since the day he met her, at a meeting of the Young Communists of Cataluña, Ramón felt absorbed by the young woman's beauty, but above all, it was her rock-solid ideas and her telluric drive that ensnared him: Africa de las Heras was like an erupting volcano who roared a permanent clamor for revolution. ⁴

Like the apostle Paul's addressees, whom he tells to wait expectantly for Christ's return, Ramón experiences a "tense environment, in which everyone was expecting something to happen very soon…it was as if his life and history had been lying in wait for each other." ⁵ Once he becomes known as a political zealot, he's selected by Stalin's agents to be Trotsky's assassin. During his training he takes "theoretical classes" in the Soviet Union and is turned into "soldier 13…a man of marble, convinced of the need to carry out whatever mission was asked of him," which turns out to be the mission that brought him to Mexico for the planned assassination (accomplished in August 1940). ⁶

The influence of Gazzer on Chub and de las Heras and others on Mercader is captured in Jean Paul Sartre's remark, "Words wreck havoc when they happen to name something that is experienced but is not yet named." ⁷ However Sartre's remark needs a supplement, a specification of the ideational susceptibilities, historical situations, and...