The Death of Realism (1960)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
I am here to bury Italian realism
not to pay it respects. What ails a style
often survives it, but the good is
often buried with its memory.
And so it will be with realism.
The elect Cassola vivaciously certifies
that it was ambitious: if it were so
this would be a great demerit, equaling as such
its end. If he might concede it
- and Cassola is a respectable writer:
all neo-purists are respectable writers -
I have come here to address the death
of Italian realism: its style was mixed,
difficult, vulgar ... But Cassola believes
that it was ambitious: and Cassola
is a respectable writer ... That style
gave language an infinite number of words,
that filled the senile emptiness of Erario
with new contributions to reality: was this maybe
the ambition of Italian realism?
It expressed the pain of the proletariat,
weeping with its tears: I would say that,
on the contrary, ambitious are those who
extinguish and humble themselves in the lyricism
of internal prose, of white socialism ...


But Cassola says that it was ambitious:
and Cassola is a respectable writer.
You all know how that style
born to express reality
rejected every official honour:
was this ambition? But Cassola says so:
and certainly Cassola is a respectable writer.
Oh, I am not here to disagree with Cassola,
but to say that which I know.
You all loved that style back in the days of hope:
and not without reason.
What reason keeps you now from mourning it?
Ah, Reason! lost again in the obscure
meandering of irrationality! Evasion,
reduction, stylistic choice: all acts
of surrender before reaction!
Excuse me ... my heart is there, in the casket,
with that style ... I would like to be quiet, that’s all.


Only yesterday, the vulgar dialogue
of mimetic and objective style
- the great ideology of the real -
astonished you ... And now there it is,
on the ground: and no-one now feels
so unworthy as to give it respect.
If I were to try to make you feel unworthy,
gentlemen, I would be doing a wrong
to Cassola and the other neo-purists,
all of whom, we know, are respectable writers.
No, I do not want to wrong them: better,
to wrong the one that was killed, me,
you, rather than upset
all these respectable writers.
But I have jotted down some notes on that style:
you may consider it a will.
If you really knew it - and wanted in fact
to finally understand it - you would kneel down
to kiss this corpse, wound by wound,
and dip your handkerchiefs in its blood!


But I worry about telling you of the value it holds:
maybe it’s best that you did not know
how much that style really expressed!
You are not made of wood, you are not made of stone:
you are men: and as men,
finally knowing what Realism was,
what it sought to be,
even if babelic and mimetic,
might anger you, you might even call for
a revolution ... It may be best if you did not know that
that style wanted to give you to history:
because if you did know you might burn down
your State and your Church ...


Ah, maybe I should not have given in and talked!
It is a disservice I do to respectable writers who,
with articles, conferences, and investigations
ended up restoring the language
and obtained that which they had wanted:
to reduce it to the grayness of the State.
But, if you wish to gather here,
around this corpse, I might dare describe it
to your eyes as they did not see ...


And, if you have tears, shed them!
You all know the form taken
by that great, if still uncertain, ideology.
I remember the first days
it came into use, still in the light of
the Resistance. Fascism had been won,
it seemed that Capital had also been defeated.
Instead, this form slashed by Tomasi’s knife,
then there was the angry tear of
the neo-experimentalists, then Cassola’s
cutting blow - who was a friend.
When he extracted the sacrilegious blade,
the blood followed it,
almost as to verify that it was he, Cassola,
to strike in such a manner, without shame ...
Because, as you know, Cassola is a Socialist:
he acted from the heart of the realist idea;
and his blow was the most brutal.
Realism lowered its head in surrender
to that ungratefulness, rather than to the wound.
And, unwanted within the great stylemes,
the great hypothesis staggered exhausted.
Ah, citizens, what a fall it was!
You and I, all of us, fell:
and the stylistic reaction that now levels
everything ... You grow pale now (or do I dream):
you feel the weight of complicity
on your conscience: you are not free of grace,
even if bourgeois or with the bourgeoisie ...
Therefore, sensitive souls, tremble:
and you have only seen the wound to the form:
look here, at him, Realism - the ideological body -
wounded to the heart, his great
structural heart.


Dear friends, sweet friends ... I do not want to turn you
against the official ideology:
those who serve its restoration
in their style, they are respectable writers.
I do not know what depraved rancours lead them
to such actions ... I only know that they are proper,
and respectable: and they will certainly have
an answer for you that will justify them.
I have not come, dear friends,
with the pretext of stealing away your heart.
I am not an orator, like Cassola:
I am - as everyone knows - compromised,
by passion, with that massacred style:
and those who have given me the opportunity
to speak of him in public know it well ...
I am not Tuscan, therefore I cannot warm the blood
of those who listen with my words:
I speak as I know how: and I show you
the tormented words of realist Ideology
- poor, poor dumb-struck lips! -
leaving them to speak for me:
but if I were Cassola, and Cassola Pasolini,
now you would have before you a Pasolini
capable of sweeping you away with his words,
and of moving even the stones to tears,
in this Rome re-taken by the Pope
against a State that is pure hypocrisy.


However, even though treacherously stabbed
and now defunct, that impure Realism
- sealed with partisan blood
and the passion of Marxists -
leaves to every single individual,
“seventy-five lire” of a renewed sense
of history: it isn’t much, nothing,
compared to the millions of meta-history
and of capital: but it’s something just the same.
In addition, it leaves you Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,
stupendous prefiguration of every
creative mimetism: it also leaves you
Moravia’s good and ruthless diagnosis,
Levi’s sociological sweetness,
Bassani’s golden history, the creatures of
Arthur’s Island, the odd youngster
who hopes in a non servile future,
and a small Officina in Bologna ...
And it leaves you Calvino. His prose,
more French than Tuscan,
his inspiration, more Volterrian than
compatriot: his non-gray simplicity,
his non-tedious measure,
his non-presumptuous clarity.
His splendid love for the world
leavened and contorted by fables.
The neo-purists, the white socialists
- well regarded by the Vatican - will never
be able to deprive you of this inheritance.
The works and the acts that Realism leaves you
will survive it. Such is its power ...
But may Heaven guard against this being
a bitter Shakespearean trick on my part ...

Pier Paolo Pasolini

translated by Pasquale Verdicchio