Re-Writing the Myth, Rereading the Life: The Universalizing Game in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo Re

In the nineteenth century, the Romantic artist, as exemplified in Byron or Wordsworth in England and Friedrich Schlegel in Germany, preferred to see himself as a self-defining microcosm who could build worlds out of his infinite creative possibilities.1 In the twentieth century, the nineteenth century image of the Romantic artist-creator underwent a transition in virtually all Western cultures, producing a new image: the charismatic figure known as the European intellectual, who in his alienation from the realities of the common world, offered an image of the writer as creator of many kinds of writing, often in more than one medium or genre. These European intellectuals followed in the tradition of modernism, to stress the ways in which an individual's mind created representations that could supplant traditional forms of perceiving the world. The European intellectual cut from this pattern thus has produced a generation of writing on writing, stressing how the artist's agency reconstructs the words and symbols of culture, often in ways that show absences and gaps in the traditional, dominant representations of the world. The twentieth century, European intellectual was therefore less the creator than the critic and recreator of meanings for his culture. The exemplars of this image in France were, for instance, Jean Paul Sartre or Michael Foucault; in Germany, Günter Grass; in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel; and in Italy, Pier Paolo Pasolini.

As a poet, novelist, essayist, film-maker, playwright, and altogether a highly controversial political figure, Pasolini was a particularly visible example of this type of intellectual, one of the consciences of post-war Italian society. He offered reflections on his own writing, on his sexuality, and on his society, leaving as his legacy not only an unparalleled body of films,