Book Chapter

Body

Annovi, Gian Maria

2017

Overview

The epilogue explores the idea of the author’s corporeal performance in Pasolini’s unfinished novel Petrolio. This book is an example of the metalinguistic interdisciplinary work that Pasolini was experimenting with in the last phase of his career. Through endless reworking and rewriting, Pasolini creates a close-knit web of intertextual and transtextual references. In particular, I examine the construction of what Pasolini describes as an “in the flesh” character-author. I also provide a performative reading of Dino Pedriali’s nude portraits of Pasolini, which were produced for Petrolio, but ultimately not included. In Pedriali’s photographs, Pasolini performs his authorship as a Barthesian erotic encounter with the reader, in which he fictitiously assumes a passive role, a queer position that perverts the conventional notion of the author as the powerful, male principle that controls the making of text. A different exposition of the author’s body to his audience is analyzed through Fabio Mauri performance piece entitled Intellettuale (Intellectual). In 1974, Mauri projected Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 1964) directly onto the director’s body, who sat at the end of a dark hallway. By turning himself into a corporeal screen, Pasolini uses Mauri’s work to affirm the centrality of the author in our experience of his own work, revealing at the same time that his authorship is ultimately the result of a poetics of performance.

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Subject: Body / Corporeality / Fabio Mauri / Literary Studies (20th Century onwards) / Petrolio / Photography
• ISBN: 0231180306, 9780231180306