Chapter 7 - The Arrogance of Reason and the ‘Disappearance of the Fireflies’: Pilade (Pylades)

Summary

The Idea of the Tragic: Between Structure of the Human and Historical Transformation

The idea of the tragic is elaborated with great intellectual commitment and elevated poetry in Pier Paolo Pasolini's writings for the stage. His work follows a distinctive and original path which we can rightly include in the map of fundamental twentieth-century developments in the genre.

In Pasolini it is not so much philosophical culture as literary (in this case ancient Greek drama) and anthropological culture that constitute the matrix of the work in consideration and provide the basic ideas with which the universal experiences of the limit and necessity are reinterpreted. The tragic action is presented as an arrogant and absolute affirmation of one-dimensional man, that of abstract standardized reason, which overwhelms all individual differences, cultures and desires. But it also represents the other side: bloody revolution followed by solitude incapable of mediation and reciprocity.

The Theatre as ‘Cultural Ritual’

In the mid-sixties, when the Italian avant-garde gathered at the Conference in Ivrea and the ‘new theatre’ was established in Europe by the journal Nuovi Argomenti, Pasolini launched a provocation, hotly controversial in its tones but prophetic in its lucidity: the ‘Manifesto per un nuovo teatro’. He had already produced his theatrical corpus.