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Images of Narcissus: Figuring Identity in José LezamaLima and Pier Paolo Pasolini

Damiano Benvegnù

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 52, Number 4, 2015, pp. 818-842(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

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comparative literature studies, vol. 52, no. 4, 2015. Copyright © 2015. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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images of narcissus: figuring identity in josé lezama lima and pier paolo pasolini

Damiano Benvegnù

abstractThe figure of Narcissus has always exerted an uncanny power of attraction. The story of the beautiful boy, who falls in love with his own reflected imago and then dies in the moment of recognition, seems in fact to concern every subject in his own process of identification. Many writers have thus reused Narcissus as a metaphor for the artistic subject, where the mirror image and the death of the boy display the intrinsic tragic duplicity of every work of literature. This article explores differences and similarities between the works of two poets—José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975)—who have explicitly used Narcissus in their poems. Particularly, it focuses on Lezama Lima’s earliest published production, the poem Muerte de Narciso (1937) (Death of Narcissus), and on Pasolini’s overarching double collection of poetry in Friulian, La meglio gioventù (1954) (The Best Youth) and La nuova gioventù (The New Youth) (1975). The comparison demonstrates how both Pasolini and Lezama, albeit the differences between Italian and Cuban approach to modernity and modernism, have used the figure of Narcissus as an image of the poetic subject in order to define a double dialectics of identity and dissemination.

keywords: José Lezama Lima, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Narcissus, poetic subjectivity, poetics

The figure of Narcissus has always exerted—from his first appearance in the third book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—a strong, uncanny, power of attraction.1 The story of the beautiful boy who falls in love with his own reflected imago, and then dies when he finally recognizes himself, has not only fascinated

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artists for centuries, but also seems to concern the process of identifica-tion of each individual as well. In fact, Sigmund Freud decided to use the term “Narzissismus” to describe a fundamental stage in the psychological maturation of the self,2 while Jacques Lacan, reworking Freud’s theory, stated that Narcissism places us “in an arena where the power of language brings psychoanalysis and literature into the closest proximity.”3 It is not a coincidence, then, that many writers have reused Narcissus as a metaphor for the artistic subject, where the mirror image as a simulacrum of identity results from a double moment of reflection and misrecognition. Indeed Narcissus and his various double-images—“as statue, as phantom, and as automaton”4—have been a way to display the intrinsic tragic duplicity of every work of literature in which what is at stake is the possible recognition—and the consequent symbolic death—of the creating subject.

This article explores differences and similarities between the works of two authors—José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975)—who have explicitly used Narcissus in their poems. Particularly, it focuses on Lezama Lima’s earliest published production, the poem Muerte de Narciso (1937) (Death of Narcissus), and on what we might call Pasolini’s “alpha and omega,”5 that is to say, his overarching double collection of poetry in Friulian,6 La meglio gioventù (1954) (The Best Youth) and its “seconda forma” (“second shape”), La nuova gioventù (1975) (The New Youth). La nuova gioventù is in fact not only Pasolini’s last organized work before his tragic death, but also the partial rewriting of both his first book of poetry, Poesie a Casarsa (1942), and some other early poems.

The purpose of this comparison is twofold but intertwined. Pedro Correa Rodriguez has written that Lezama Lima’s “Muerte de Narciso es una meta final y un principio”7 (“. . . is a final goal and a beginning”), because this poem gathers in its lines life and death, poetry and metapoetry, the past and the future. As for Lezama, so too for Pasolini, the figure of Narcissus becomes in fact a double or ambivalent device capable of leading the original unity of the Latin “corpus”—in the myth both absent and present, “real” and “imaginary”—into the very modern linguistic split between “body” and (poetic) “work” as a “realización pratica”8 (“practical realization”). This split has been noticed on different levels and by several scholars, who have under-lined for example how Lezama’s Narcissus seems “to be both alive and dead simultaneously,”9 or how Pasolini’s usage of the same figure in two apparently divaricated ways records “a fracture between history as ideal cycle and history as material progress.”10 I agree with most of the recent scholarship on this topic and with its new focus on this split or fracture. However, even these recent readings do not acknowledge how both Pasolini and Lezama have

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used the figure of Narcissus as image of the poetic subject in order to describe what I believe is a double dialectics of death and resurrection. This dialectics is made possible only through the inscription and the dissemination of the “body” into the text, that is to say through a literary camouflage, in which the corpus delicti lies as a void, at the same time obscured and revealed by the dense complexity of the text in itself. The different but objectively difficult poetic languages of both Pasolini and Lezama Lima are in fact a device meant to locate the subject (and his double-images as Narcissus) within a larger historical, cultural, and socio-political frame that aims to integrate him into its own continuum. My reading shows how both our poets resist such dialectical incorporation precisely through the structural exhibition of a poetic and subjective fissure, which, insisting on the very (im)possibility of its difference and otherness, challenges the homogenizing power of history.

Preliminary Inquiries

Before moving to a close analysis of both Lezama’s Muerte de Narciso and Pasolini’s La nuova gioventù, we must, however, ask whether these two poets have anything in common besides the use of the same mythical reference. Probably unaware of the other’s existence and coming from two different cultural frames, they actually share some features that might help us to make a fruitful comparison.

First, as (poetic) subjects they share a special connection with a particular landscape, felt almost as direct manifestation both of the self and of the community in which the subject places his, more or less mythical, “origin.” This landscape links the synchronic, horizontal image of the self, located in a definite time and space and within a determinate community, with a diachronic, vertical image, that ties the subject to his previous generations and the whole communal tradition throughout history. This double tie creates, therefore, a precise and somehow alternative, “minor” and circular, tradition, often but not always contrasting the continuum of the hegemonic or prominent culture. For instance, it has been pointed out that in Lezama’s work the subject “interpreta el paisaje para constituir la imagen cultural del grupo humano que habita ese paisaje”11 (“interprets the landscape in order to constitute the cultural image of the human group who lives in this landscape”). However, that same subject also relates this image with all the other elements of his universe in order to create, through a retrospective process, “la visión histórica de ese grupo”12 (“the historical vision of this group”). Similarly, Pasolini’s choice to write in the peripheral Friulian–Ladin


dialect of his mothers’ birthplace creates and legitimates the myth of his so-called “piccola patria” (“little fatherland”), in which the poetic subject is the one who gathers a specific community, its culture, and the landscape that surrounds them.13

Second, both Pasolini and Lezama forge styles that are both regressive, namely an attempt to regress “lungo i gradi dell’essere”14 (“along the stages of being”), and creative, that is to say, capable of producing original ways of expression. Despite the fact that Pasolini wrote in a very minor regional language and Lezama in Spanish, in both poets we can in fact observe a searching for a somehow original word (at the same time before and beyond history and modernity), linked to the literary experience of French and Spanish Symbolists. This search insists on a purification of the discursive elements of language and an extreme use of the signifier in its evocative form, without, however, renouncing the intellectual exhibition of the artificial (and anti-Romantic) features of their poetic idioms. This is evident, for example, in how Pasolini explains his own poetic dialect: a never-written language, as immaculate as the mythical Provençal of the origins of Western poetry, but also an artificial new idiom that does not coincide completely with the contemporary, and therefore historic, Friulian.15 Such an idiom can therefore be used as a meta-historical language of poetry, “un linguaggio poetico senza tempo, senza luogo”16 (“a timeless, placeless poetic language”) in opposition to those languages that have been corrupted by the linear progression of bourgeois history and thus are not poetic anymore (such as Italian or other, more hegemonic, regional languages).17

Third, both authors cultivated varieties of “neo-Baroque” poetry. In his introduction to an important anthology of contemporary Spanish-American poetry, poet and critic Néstor Perlongher posits Lezama Lima as the starting point of the new trend of so-called “poesía neobarroca.” Perlongher states that one of the fundamental peculiarities of the Baroque in general—but particularly within the Spanish-American tradition—is the “saturación (. . .) del lenguaje ‘comunicativo’” (“saturation [. . .] of ‘communicative’ language”), and the complementary intensification of the “función poética” (“poetic function”).18 Although Pasolini’s poetics is certainly distinct from Lezama Lima’s neo-baroque, in his dialect poems the former displays a similar poetic hierarchy in which what has been called the “Canto” (i.e., singing, lyric function, corresponding to the signifier) has more importance than the “Discorso” (discourse, communicative function, corresponding to the signified). According to Stefano Agosti, one observes in Pasolini’s work a “parola fuori di sé”19 (“word outside/beyond itself ”), which redundantly grows over itself and fills the whole of the communicative and informative


space (the discourse) to the point of contradiction or “falsetto.” Franco Fortini has then spoken of a “fondamentale manierismo di Pasolini”20 (“fundamental mannerism of Pasolini”), in which the “manner” is a redundant mix of refined literary artifice and impulse to voice the truth.21

Lastly, two short biographical coincidences, even though what is at stake here is the poetic subject and not necessarily the biographical one. The first concerns the figure of the father. In an interview with Pedro Simón, Lezama Lima himself maintains that “la muerte de mi padre me alucinó desde niño, esa ausencia me hizo hipersensible a la presencia de la imagen”22 (“my father’s death entranced me since I was a child; his absence made me hypersensitive to the presence of the image”). His father’s death links a traumatic absence to the immediate and hallucinatory presence of images, and thus originates the (more or less conscious) discovery of the supplementary power of language, despite its inevitable shortcomings.23 We can also read Pasolini’s early works as a way to cope with the absence of his father, Alberto, who was in fact imprisoned in Kenya in the same years in which Pier Paolo was writing Poesie a Casarsa. Alberto, then, remained a sort of a perpetual absence that the poet tried to ambivalently sublimate through literature, using the dialect that was absolutely forbidden in his father’s home in Bologna, but also dedicating to his father his 1942 book of poetry (and then dedicating La meglio gioventù to his “intellectual” father, the literary critic Gianfranco Contini).24

Secondly, it is well known that both Pasolini and Lezama dealt with homosexual desire in their books. For both of them, homoerotism assumed not just a (more or less hidden) relevance in their biographies, but a specific importance in the autobiographical rewriting of their entire oeuvres, that is to say, in their poetics. Although a lengthy discussion of sexual articulation in Lezama and Pasolini would be out of place here,25 it is relevant to remember that both consider homosexual desire as a drive for an image which is at once always the same and always different, always the same and always the other. In this process, both authors exclude any feminine manifestation except for the maternal, and reveal instead the threatening and excessive presence of Nothing, of Nada,26 perhaps death itself, as in the story of Narcissus.

Duplications of Desire: Lezama Lima’s Muerte de Narciso

From its very first appearance in the second issue of the Cuban magazine Verbum in 1937,27 Muerte de Narciso was seen as a “revelación”28 (“revelation”)


of a pure poetic talent, in spite of the unquestionable semantic difficulties that stymied interpretations. It is still today infrequently translated.29

As for poetic structure, this complex poem is divided into seventeen stanzas of eight lines each of unequal length. Such an apparently strong frame, however, works in opposition to what Emilio Bejel calls “una tendencia antigramatical”30 (“anti-grammatical tendency”), which disrupts every unity both at the syntactic and at the thematic/semantic level. Both these levels work in fact together to make it impossible to recognize a single point of view. As Ben Heller has pointed out, “the complex point of view seems to see Narciso as a disjointed collection of fragments, never as a whole. (. . .) The poetic fragmentation of Narciso continues throughout the poem, with frequent references to lips, hands, forehead, ears, hair and hips.”31 The enigma of this poem, then, arises from the reader’s inability to localize both a precise narrative structure and the identity of Narcissus. The narcissistic world of Muerte de Narciso is in fact composed of mirrors and (often partial) reflections: the main character—whose death is declared in the title—is embodied almost every time by a metonymic sliding (as in the case of his body parts), and this progression of images creates an incessant substitution.

As Morales Saravia has noticed, in one of the most important met-onymic series of the whole poem there is actually an analogy between the basic activities of hunting, fishing, and gathering described in Muerte de Narciso and the characteristic action of Narcissus, that of looking at himself:32 indeed Lezama’s Narcissus seems to stand for the whole of humanity in its more original, prehistorical, means of subsistence. Moreover, in this series he is from time to time a different incarnation of himself within an elemental common world, both the generic subject of some actions (el cazador, el pescador, el colector, el joyero) and the object (la garza, el airón, el ciervo, el pez, las valvas, etc.). This reversibility and exchange between images character-izes also the mirroring. Contrary to the classical myth, in which Narcissus sees only his own image in a pond, in Lezama’s myth he “is identified with all that shows through the imperfectly reflective surface of the river.”33 The river symbolizes the flowing of time through history, and nameless but easily identifiable images of other figures—Orpheus, Icarus, Perseus, and Christ34—flicker by. Fundamentally, there is also Echo, if only in a negative way: in the same stanza in which for the first time we find an overlapping of the voice of the extra-diegetic poet and Narcissus himself, we have a “mano sin eco,” a clear mention of the nymph and a metaphor for writing:

Antorchas como peces, flaco garzón trabaja noche y cielo,arco y castillo y sierpes encendidos, carámbano y lebrel.


Pluma morada, no mojada, pez mirándome, sepulcro.Ecuestres faisanes ya no advierten mano sin eco, pulso desdoblado:los dedos en inmóvil calendario y el hastio en su trono cejijunto.Lenta se forma ola en la marmórea cavidad que miraPor espaldas que nunca me preguntan, en venenoque nunca se pervierte y en su escudo ni potros ni faisanes.

(Torches as fishes, skinny youth works night and sky / bow and castle and snakes alit [lit up], icicle and hound. / Purple feather, not soaked, fish looking at me, tomb. / Equestrian pheasants do not notice hand without echo, redoubled pulse: / the fingers in motionless calendar and boredom in its throne of close-set eyebrows. / Slowly a wave forms in the marble cavity that looks / for backs that never ask me, in venom / that never corrupts itself and in its shield neither foals nor pheasants.)

The appearance of the poetic subject (“mirándome,” “me preguntan” [my emphasis]) seems to give a particular importance to this stanza. Firstly, it is the first time we have what seems to be a precise reference to Narcissus (“flaco garzón que trabaja noche y cielo”). We also understand that here the game of mirrors becomes more complex: as in the story of Narcissus as presented in Ovid’s myth, the nymph’s pure voice is the necessary complement to the young boy, in this stanza the writing image does not appear without echo. This duplicity is bound by Lezama to a deep organic corporality, the unfold-ing or redoubling of the pulse (“pulso desdoblado”), which seems to be both another double-image of the writing subject and an ambiguous metaphor for coupling, and as such an ambivalent apparition of (homoerotic?) desire.

This is not, however, the only passage in which we can read the whole of Muerte de Narciso as a reflection on the work of writing in its double link to orality on the one hand and to corporality on the other. Rather, a prelimi-nary and partial manifestation of this ambiguous desire suspended between writing and something “other,” between writing and its double, can be found already in the first stanza, which undoubtedly sets the scene for the entire poem.35 Here, Lezama relates a first image of writing (“la seda” [“silk”] that was “mano (. . .) sin sangre” [“hand . . . without blood”]) with the power to erase “la perfección que muere de rodillas” (“perfection that dies kneeling”). The whole process is also mirrored in the last line of this stanza, “y en su celo se esconde e se divierte.” Although the conjunction allows Lezama Lima to establish an ambiguity about who is performing the double action, if we actually read the erasing hand as the real subject we must acknowledge


that “mano sin sangre” is presented in a structure in which we have not only a reference to its fervor (“celo”), but this ardor is also the very place of a duplication, whereas hiding (“esconde”) is doubled by amusement or, if we take “divertirse” in its etymological meaning, by splitting or “taking another direction.” Nevertheless, whether the hand or rather the “perfección” is the subject, it is not clear yet what this “perfección que muere de rodillas” is, and therefore what the hand/writing is erasing. My reading is that this perfec-tion that dies kneeling is actually connected to the real body of Narcissus, the veiled eroticization of his real beauty which indeed dies kneeling down over the water. In his poetic theory, Lezama himself relates the idea of the duplication of the subject to the body’s impossibility to express itself. Only three years after the publication of Muerte de Narciso, he wrote that:

Si en el reino de la poesía no hay bien, no hay mal. ¿Cómo justificar nuestras preferencias? El arpón y la responsabilidad extendiéndose por el cuerpo. Cuerpo de total contaminación y la imposibilidad de dar un paso. Total mudez y por eso nuestra fuerza es la alabanza. Cuerpo lastimero y por eso la escala, avisos, signos, estaciones. El que tenga oídos, el que tenga ojos.

(If in the kingdom of poetry there is no good, there is no evil [either]. How do we justify our preferences? The harpoon and the responsibil-ity extending through [over] the body. Body of total contamination and the impossibility of taking a step. Total muteness, and therefore praise is our strength. Pitiful body and for this the ladder, warnings, signs, stations. He who has ears, he who has eyes.)

In this passage, Lezama not only connects (literally “harpoons”) the ethics of poetry with the reality of the body, he even says that the body is dumb, its reign of contaminations is barred from expression, and therefore it needs a series of devices (“escala, avisos, signos, estaciones”) in order to supply this muteness. Lezama becomes more precise in Las imagenes posibles, where he theorizes that desire “siempre se ha sentido como cuerpo”36 (“always felt itself as body”). Nevertheless, the body is again dumb and “lastimero,” and thus

todo lo que el hombre testifica lo hace en cuanto imagen y el mismo testimonio corporal se ve obligado a irse al pozo donde la imagen despereza soltando sus larvas. (. . .) De ese mismo testimonio, el desdoblamiento del cuerpo y ser se sitúa en esa interposición de la imagen. (. . .) Pero tanto el nacimiento de ese ser dentro del cuerpo


como sus vicisitudes, o en ocasiones su oscuro desenvolvimiento, sólo puede ser testificado por la imagen.

(everything to which man testifies he does in terms of image and the same corporal testimony is forced to go to the well where the image stretches out emitting its larvae. [. . .] Of this very testimony, the unfolding, the splitting between body and being lies in the interpola-tion of the image. [. . .] However, both the birth of this being within the body as well as its difficulties, or at times its obscure developments, can be testified to only by the image.)

For Lezama, then, the dialectics between the body and the being of the subject—the birth of this being as well as its death as body—can only be testified by images (“sólo puede ser testificado por la imagen”), which replace this mute duplication in body and being, and, to some extent, cover the distance between the two with their own content. This understanding of the work of images evokes what Jacques Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” where the image of the other, introjected, is able to support the (mis)recognition of the self, covering up the disjuncture between being and body. Narcissus, in this way, becomes the perfect representation of this apparently paradisiacal moment, in which the subject finds (or seems to find) in himself the object of his desire. Ben Heller has correctly noticed that it is indeed a tantalizing temporal coincidence that “Lacan’s initial formulation of the mirror stage neatly frames the publication date of Muerte de Narciso,”37 because the two thinkers seem somehow to share the same understanding of how images work in the development of the subject. Nevertheless, the comparison between the two has to be carried even further. Just as for Lacan “man can no longer even sustain himself in the position of Narcissus,”38 Lezama presents not only the immobile image of the beautiful boy reflected in the water, but also his death. If in fact the first word of the poem, “Dánae,” seems to frame the whole composition within a mythical time,39 Lezama also writes that “Desde ayer las preguntas se divierten o se cierran” (“from yesterday questions amuse themselves or close themselves”), offering therefore a different temporal reference (“ayer”) that not only implies a linear continuum but also alerts the reader that something has drastically changed. We thus have two different times, an immobile static time—the time of the myth—and a linear one, that runs between the moment in which Narcissus sees the image in the water (“Rostro absoluto, firmeza mentida del espejo”) and


the time of the recognition that also coincides with the time of his death. This dialectics between two times, as well as between life and death, is the dialectics that for Lezama inaugurates what he calls “tiempo poemático, forma sutil de resistir sin hacer historia”40 (“poematic time, subtle form of resistance without producing history”). Emilio Bejel has written that for Lezama Lima the time of poetry is composed by “la comparación de términos desiguales y la elaboración de la polisemia y entropía del len-guaje”41 (“the comparison of different terms and the elaboration of the polysemy and entropy of language”). We may add now that the time of his poetry becomes actual time because it accepts and resists the simple assimilation into the mythical time of images, showing how the fracture between body and being finds another echo in the articulation between the impossible circularity of the myth and the irruption of the actual history of the body.

Nonetheless, if it is true that what is lost—in this case “ese tiempo absoluto de la imagen”—is first and foremost something found (again), then the particular time of Muerte de Narciso in all its dialectics hides in its heart an absence.42 This absence or lack is what we have called the fissure, the hiatus between body and being, and in a wider sense every other failure that the subject covers up in order to build and reinforce his orthopedic identity. Moving back to the lines with which we began our analysis—“Mano era sin sangre la seda que borraba / la perfección que muere de rodillas / y en su celo se esconde y se divierte”—we can now maintain that here Lezama Lima is implying that poetry works as an anamorphosis, that is to say as a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image as a unity. As Lacan reminds us, the function of anamorphosis goes beyond the pure amusement of the images—although it implies it—because its work is actually “instauré dans un certain rapport avec la Chose qui est fait à la fois pour cerner, pour presentifier, et pour absentifier”43 (“established in a certain relationship with the Thing that is designed at the same time to encircle, to presentify, and to absentify”). This is the reason why Lezama can say that “en su celo se esconde y se divierte,” where the images created by the very poetry of Muerte de Narciso at the same time show, multiply, and hide “la perfección que muere de rodillas.” However, if this perfection and therefore Narcissus both function as the equivalent of the Lacanian Chose, establishing a relation that is also a perspectival illusion, it is still unclear why such perfection has to die. Moreover, if Narcissus dies, what does Lezama Lima mean when he writes at the end of his poem that actually Narcissus “fugó sin alas” (“fled without wings”)?


The Double Death of an Honest Lie: Narcissus in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Friulian Poetry

Franco Fortini, one of the best critics of Pasolini’s literary oeuvre, asserts that the principle element common to both La meglio gioventù and La nuova gioventù, i.e., Friulian, does not have for an Italian audience the relative transparency of the standard national language, but is rather used as a

sistema secondario complessivo, costituito al fine di nascondere. Il significante si fa latore di alcunché di irriducibile, una massa linguis-tica proposta a chi deve sentirla come straniera o semistraniera. (. . .) Ancora una volta la sapienza di Pasolini vince le attese del lettore.44

(a secondary comprehensive system, constituted in order to hide. The signifier bears something that cannot be reduced, a linguistic mass proposed to whomever is supposed to perceive it as foreign or semi-foreign. [. . .] Again the wisdom of Pasolini conquers the reader’s expectations.)

The persistent presence of Narcissus in Pasolini’s dialect poetry, then, must have a relationship with his use of the local language instead of Italian on the one hand, and on the other with the same dialectics that runs between the first “forma” of La meglio gioventù and his late rewriting.

La meglio gioventù is divided into several subdivisions. A substantial portion of the earliest one, Poesie a Casarsa, was written between 1941 and 1943, and partially published for the first time in the homonymous book in 1942. In the theoretical essays of the same years, Pasolini tries to create a new myth based on the trans-European and specifically Romance roots of Friulian, maintaining that the specific idiom of his mother’s town, Casarsa della Delizia, not only belongs to the same group of Catalan and Provençal, but also has never before been put into writing. The poet who uses it for the first time, then, becomes félibre, from the Latin term felebris and the verb fellare, “to suck” from the breast of the Mother, meaning in direct contact with the beginning of human expression.45 Despite the undoubted charm of Pasolini’s linguistic myth, scholars have proved that the majority of these poems were actually written first in Italian and then translated into the Friulian of Casarsa.46 Moreover, Pasolini writes that the Italian version, placed as a footnote on every page of La meglio gioventù, is not simply a work-ing translation made by the author to help the reader, but “parte integrante


del testo poetico”47 (“integral part of the poetic text”). The connection that Pasolini establishes with what modern linguistics calls Muttersprache is therefore very ambiguous and based on an ambivalent but deliberate desire of identification with a type of poet and a specific, but idealized, community. It is not surprising, then, that Gianfranco Contini, in his famous first review of Poesie a Casarsa, called Pasolini’s dialect a “lingua marmorea”48 (“marble language”), good for statues and panegyrics rather than a natural manifesta-tion of the speakers.

Nevertheless, the fiction of the poete félibre seems to work. The subject, sucking from the breast of Friulian, can present himself as both one (singular) and general (universal), in a poetic frame in which the ego and the other, the individual and the community share a pervasive game of exchanges and reflections. The one who is speaking can identify himself with each mani-festation of Casarsa, from human beings to landscape, and his device is in fact the mirror. The myth of Narcissus is therefore always present, even in the titles (Dansa de Narcis, Pastorela de Narcis, etc.): enchanted through the dialect in a world without linear progression where “da la Domènia al Lunis / no è gambiàt un fil / di erba tal dols mond”49 (“from Sunday to Monday not a single blade of grass changed in the sweet world”), the subject can recognize only “fratelli couterini”50 (“co-uterine brothers”), images of the self. Death, in La meglio gioventù, is then omnipresent but not so threatening, because Narcissus lives in all his masks, in all his figures, and is at the same time object and subject of a double love that cannot really die. As Jean Michel Gardair has written, “saper leggere nello specchio di Casarsa l’immagine del proprio dire, sarà quella appunto l’ ‘invenzione di Narciso’ de La meglio gioventù”51 (“to be able to read in the mirror of Casarsa the image of his own saying, such will be the ‘invention of Narcissus’ of La meglio gioventù”). This invention creates not simply a paradisiacal and homogeneous space without apparent discrepancies, but also a mythical and cyclical time, where the burden of history does not appear, at least explicitly.

Only in what has been called the countermelody of La meglio gioventù,52 L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica, written in Italian during more or less the same years as the first dialect production, the mask of Narcissus seems to encounter difficulties. In the section just before the last chapter, significantly entitled La scoperta di Marx (and with Marx, the discovery of History), the last poem, Ballata del delirio, tells us that the one who was once “dentro le specchio muto” (“inside the mute mirror”) realizes that (maybe) the mirror is broken (“lo specchio in frantumi / i sensi liberi nel reale ec /comi al mondo”53 [“the mirror broken into fragments / the senses free in the real he /re I am in the world”]). As the fragmentation of language, as exemplified by the


strong enjambement on “eccomi,” also the subject loses his homogeneity but gains in reality: this is the last apparition of Narcissus, his immobile myth apparently defeated by the continuum of History.

Paradoxically, History will force Narcissus to come back onto the stage. We have to wait twenty-one years before Pasolini decides to write in Friulan again; this time, as he swears, for the last time. In 1975, he publishes La nuova gioventù: a book with a very complex structure, in which we have not only the original 1951 version of La meglio gioventù, but also the fundamental partial rewriting of Poesie a Casarsa (and some other early poems), plus a final section, Tetro entusiasmo, with poems mixing Friulian and standard Italian. Particularly in the Seconda forma della meglio gioventù (the rewriting), the same language that once was a means to connect the fictional subject with his mythical world, now is used in order to invert all the old semantemes, to destroy the paradisiacal unity of the old Casarsa. Already in the inaugural poem, Dedica, we can observe some characteristics of this process:

Fontana di aga dal me paìs.A no è aga pì fres-cia che tal me paìs.Fontana di rustic amòur.

Fontana di aga di un paìs no me.A no è aga pi vecia che tal chel paìs.Fontana di amòur par nissun.

Dedica in La meglio gioventù Dedica in La nuova gioventù

(Fountain of water of my country.There is no fresher water than in my country.

(Fountain of water of a country that is not mine.There is no older water than in that country.

Fountain of rustic love.) Fountain of love for nobody.)

What was one of the mirror-metaphors of the subject, i.e., the fountain, is now dried up. As Jean-Michel Gardair rightly observes, the three lines of Dedica highlight three modalities of transformation, from the first to the second form of La meglio gioventù: “per negazione (me paìs / paìs no me), per inversione, o espressione del contrario (agua fres-cia / vecia), infine attra-verso un testo ‘altro’ (rustic amòur / amòur par nissun)”54 (“by negation [me paìs / paìs no me], by inversion or expression of the opposite [agua fres-cia / vecia], finally by an ‘other’ text [rustic amòur / amòur par nissun]”). The separation that now the subject establishes between himself and Casarsa (from “me paìs” to “chel paìs”) and the overall rejection of what was previously expressed, not only increases the anguish of an unresolved ambivalence and the disappointment of being mistaken,55 but also recognizes that time has passed and the forever young Casarsa has become painfully different,


almost unrecognizable. Finally, the alteration from “rustic” to “par nissun” reveals the otherness hidden or repressed in the artificially primitive text and, according to Gardair, “lo libera, lo schiude a sorprendenti fioriture”56 (“it frees it, it unfolds it towards surprising flourishing”).

The first Narcissus too undergoes the same transformation. The young man of the poem O me donzel (Oh, myself young man), for example, in the first book showed the birth of Narcissus in the mirror of Casarsa; now the poem with the same title reveals the dialectics of desire and repression on which the identity of the subject was built:

I volevi essi mi marich’a mi amava, mai no volevi amà me stes.E alora i fevi fenta daEssi un zovin puarét.

(I wanted to be my mother /who loved me, but / I did not want to love myself. / So I pretended to be a poor young man.)

For Pasolini such recognition means also to destroy all the masks of that false paradise. His “abiura”57 (“abjuration”) involves every subject that in “that” Casarsa was an image of Narcissus: those who were once beautiful bodies are now ghosts, shadows, “siun di un cuarp”58 (“dream of a body”), and their beautiful faces are then faces “di merda e mèil (. . .) di pis e feil”59 (“of shit and honey [. . .] of piss and gall”). Everywhere we look there is only a ravaged world in which the old Narcissus from Casarsa, now also an old poet, displays the death of his previous identification, this time called for what it was: a lie.

Yet, a structural ambivalence remains: why did Pasolini reuse Friulian to kill Narcissus and his world? I think there are two fundamental reasons.

First, the Friulian dialect of Casarsa is conceived as a “dead language” capable of leading both the writer and the reader—as Agosti writes—“verso gli stessi effetti di eccedenza formale ottenuti attraverso l’assunzione e l’elaborazione squisita degli schemi della stanza di canzone”60 (“toward the same effects of formal excess obtained by the use and the refined elabora-tion of the stanza di canzone’s patterns”). Pasolini’s Friulian becomes, thus, both a testamentary tie with a “zòvin (ch’a no’l tornarà mai pì al mond)”61 (“a young man [who will come into the world nevermore]”), and a parodis-tic and posthumous lyric language that is actually unspoken, and in which therefore there is no actual space for any subject/speaker.62 This double


testamentary tie also implies a finally outspoken but already posthumous relationship with an image of the poet himself that has been destroyed by the irruption of history.

This destructive history, then, and particularly the economic progress without development that occurred in Italy after the Second World War, is what—according to Angela Meekins—Pasolini actually rejects in and through La nuova gioventù.63 Yet, the peculiar choice of rewriting in the almost dead language of Casarsa establishes a connection between the two polarized times, between the old and the new Casarsa, the old and the new Narcissus. This tangle between continuity and polarization disturbs the very dialectical machine of modernity, troubling the synthesis, that is to say the core progressive moment in which two diverged elements finds pacification. The use of Friulian in a book written two times, lived and relived, (“libri scrit dos voltis, vivút e rivivút”64) is then—and paradoxically—its real novelty, what Pasolini calls “obediensa e disobediensa, insièmit”65 (“obedience and disobedience, together”). Through Friulian the poetic subject pays the price of reality to himself, to his linguistic laceration, without, however, surrendering to historical progress and its dialectics. Casarsa and its old subject are depicted as dead as their local language, subtracted from the Aufhebung of history and in a future perfect of total otherness without compromise: the fissure between two impossibilities (one dead but formally present: the mythical dialect; the other implicit but only in content: the historical Italian) is displayed by the poet in order to say that tertium non datur, there is no alternative.

Consequently, the second reason for Pasolini’s reutilization of Friulian lies in that process of concealment underlined by Franco Fortini, which also plays the Signifier as pure repetition, as jouissance. In the last poem of the Seconda forma de La meglio gioventù, entitled Il dí da la me muàrt (The day of my death), the subject, now openly a “Diàul Zujadòur”66 (a Devil who plays), stages his own death, but this time on eine andere Schauplatz (another stage):

Ta ‘na sitàt, Trièst o Udin, ju par un viàl di tèjs,di vierta, quan’ ch’a múdin il colòur li fuèjs . . . un al à vivút,cu’ la fuàrsa di un zòvin omp tal còur dal mond,e al ghi deva, a chej pucsòmis ch’al cognosseva, dut.Po’, par amòur po’ di chej ch’a erin zuviníns


cu’l suf tal sornelicoma lui fin a puc prin che tal so ciaf li stelis a cambiàssin la so lus –al varès vulút dà la so vita par dut il mond scunussút,lui, scunussút, píssul sant,gragnèl pierdút tal ciamp.

E invessi al à scrit poesiis de santitàtcrodínt che cussí il còur al doventàs pí grand. I dis a son passàsa un lavoru ch’al à ruvinàt la santitàt dal so còur:il gragnèl a no’l è muarte lui al è restàt bessòul.

(In a city, Trieste or Udine, along an avenue of lindens, when the leaves change their color... one has lived, with his young man strength, in the heart of the world, and he gave, to the few he knew, everything.

Then, for the love of the young men with their forelock, as he was—before the stars changed their color over his head—he would have given his life for the whole of the unknown world—he, unknown, little saint, grain of wheat fallen into the ground.

And instead he has written poems of holiness, thinking that in such a way his heart got bigger. Days are passed doing a work that has ruined the holiness of his heart: the grain of wheat did not die, and he has remained alone.)

The biblical epigraph of this poem (“Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit”67) reiterates the main content of the lyric: only the death of the grain of wheat, i.e., Narcissus, gives meaning to its/his existence. Or, in Pasolini’s more explicit terms, “solo grazie alla morte, la nostra vita ci serve ad esprimerci”68 (“only in death, does our life serve to express our-selves”). The sacrifice of the image of himself as young félibre poet from Casarsa, it is indeed what Pasolini does in La nuova gioventù, but this process reactivates also the ambivalent, dangerous, and elusive, desire that


was the core of the prima forma. This desire is what gives meaning to the whole operation, and it is possible because of the death of Narcissus: the fracture signified by his inscription as corpse, as a dead image, within the symbolic order destroys the continuum of the imaginary identity and gives back to the subject his fruitful power of difference. In La nuova gioventù, therefore, Pasolini accomplishes what was his last precept before his murder: “continuare a essere voi stessi: il che significa a essere continuamente irriconoscibili”69 (“continue simply to be yourselves; which means to be constantly unrecognizable”).

The Impossible Narcissus: Sacrifice and Dissemination

As for Pasolini, so too for Lezama, thinking about poetry also means reflecting upon the first (but always repeated) difference between the real body, its desire, and its image. This difference splits the poetic subject, who not only receives his identity from the specular image of the self, but is also forced to leave the trace of this meta-poetic (and meta-psychological) process in his own writing.

In Pasolini, the symbolic death of Narcissus is necessary to create an empty space from whence the subject speaks with “una voce che mente onestamente”70 (“a voice that lies honestly”). This honest lie that is the poetry of La nuova gioventù is the only way to say the truth about the real constitution of the subject and his identity failure. As Morales Saravia has pointed out about Muerte de Narciso, even for Pasolini’s last work, “al terminar la lectura del poema se produce un paso que lleva al desenmascaramiento de la mentira”71 (“at the end of our reading, we are a step further toward the unmasking of the lie”). In Lezama Lima’s first published poem, this lie does not manifest itself as something that seems to be a lie but it is actually not (because it is the true poetical identity of the subject), but rather as an actual lie, “una falsedad.” Therefore, according to Morales Saravia, the poem investigates through its own structure “la constitución falsa de la mentira, de la identidad del sujeto”72 (“the false constitution of the lie, of the identity of the subject”). This thought is valid for La nuova gioventù as well, although in Lezama’s case we have examined just one (relatively long) poem, while for Pasolini this double tie is instead achieved over several years and two books of poetry. We will return shortly to this important difference between the two poets. Here I want rather to underline how both in Pasolini and in Lezama we also witness another, specific, movement that concerns final unification.


In the same years of his new dialect poetry, Pasolini directly faces the issue of split subjectivity in Bestia da stile, writing that “tutto ciò che era stato superato dalla Dissociazione ritorna umilmente Unico. (. . .) Lo specchio che ora ti riflette degradato sei tu”73 (“everything which was overcome by Dissociation humbly becomes One again. [. . .] The mirror that now reflects yourself degraded is you”). As Ben Heller has pointed out, in Lezama’s Muerte de Narciso there is also a “general movement toward unification,”74 in spite of both its disguise as masquerade and “the contradictory existence, from the beginning, of a subject-as-fragments and an illusory (artificial) unified subject.”75 But what kind of One, of unification, are these two poets proposing? I argue that, through what Agosti calls “una dizione totale della realtà”76 (“a total diction of the reality”), that is to say through an abnormal poetic discourse that tries to express the inarticulacy of the Real, Pasolini and Lezama inscribe the (dead) body inside the poetic text. The death of Narcissus and his perfected body is in fact staged in order to crack the imaginary homogeneity of the text and therefore reveal an absence (the dead body of Narcissus) around which “la desaparición de Narciso dentro del poema y la indiferenciación”77 (“the disappearance of Narcissus within the poem and its indifferenceness”) can be organized. Thus, the resurrection of Narcissus as a (different) whole and a new unity is given by a process of semantic dissemination around that void that only his very sacrifice could create. Yet, this sacrifice of the poet/Narcissus—according to Lezama, the only “ser que crea la nueva causalidad de la resurreción”78 (“being who creates the new causality of resurrection”)—must have a peculiar double structure. Only this duplicity assures that the resurrection happens: in the linear con-tinuum of the imaginary, we attend the death of Narcissus; in the ring of Moebius of the symbolic, we see instead the dissemination/resurrection of desire, where the truth of the subject flickers as revelation (aletheia)79 and the bodily identity of Narcissus is as manifest and still invisible as the famous sky of Hölderlin80 because it is one with the text in itself.

This is why Narcissus, in Muerte de Narciso, “en pleamar fugò sin alas.” Borrowing Jacques Derrida’s words on Bataille, we can say that

la destruction du discours [the discourse of the subject] n’est-elle pas une simple neutralization d’effacement. [. . .] Non pas la réserve ou le retrait, le murmure infini d’une parole blanche effaçant les traces du discours classique mais une sorte de potlatch des signes, brûlant, consumant, gaspillant les mots dans l’affirmation gaie de la mort: un sacrifice et un défi.81


(the destruction of discourse is not simply an erasing neutralization. [. . .] Not a reserve or a withdrawal, not the infinite murmur of a blank speech erasing the traces of classical discourse, but a kind of potlatch of signs that burns, consumes, and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death: a sacrifice and a challenge.)

Only the poetic strategy of excessive reflection and total diction of reality adopted by Lezama and Pasolini, then, provides both a linguistic dissemi-nation and an image of Narcissus in his double death that opens a new, different space of sacrifice, difference, and challenge. In this empty and full space, always the same and always different, the subject organizes the void he creates in the other scene by his mortal inscription. This new organiza-tion allows him to recognize himself, that is to say he recognizes, in an act of extreme affirmation, the impossibility of his own total recognition.

This subjective configuration is thus the main feature shared by both Muerte de Narciso and La nuova gioventù. Nonetheless, and in spite of other smaller similarities, there are still differences running between the two poets. For instance, for Lezama we have focused mainly on one poem, while for Pasolini we have had to consider a much larger production in order to under-stand the trajectory of his Narcissus. Therefore, we may say that Lezama reaches this poetic position of dissemination and positive impossibility from the very beginning of his public career, while Pasolini produces it by staging a double drama between the old and the new Casarsa, the old and the new Narcissus: a drama that requires an almost complete remake, and is thus quite a unique case in the European poetry of the twentieth century. There is, then, a consistent difference in the timing of the subjective process expressed by our two poets. On the one hand, this different subjective timing is inevitably linked to the geographical and historical landscape in which the poets locate themselves and their poetic agents. On the other hand, this difference tells us something about both the dissimilar literary developments which occurred in Italy and in Cuba during the twentieth century, and how Lezama and Pasolini reacted to this very process. Needless to say, another study altogether would be necessary to develop properly all the implications of this difference in timing, but at least I would like to end outlining briefly what I think is the main one.

In Pasolini the inaugural imaginary myth, on which the use of dialect is grounded, seems to create an autonomous, homogeneous space able to resist the external pressure of history, until the moment when history breaks in and the poet decides to expose the sacrifice of the old Narcissus. In Lezama, the myth is implicitly facing history from the very beginning. As we have seen, for Lezama the same poetic structure in which the subject is already


fragmented and disseminated is in fact a way to create a poetic time capable of resisting any external pressure without producing history (or, as Lezama writes, “sin hacer historia”). Thus, in Muerte de Narciso, the death and resur-rection of Narcissus happen in the same composition, in the absolute time of images produced by the very structure of the poem. In Pasolini’s poetry, instead, the story of his Narcissus articulates itself through a double ring and an historical gap in which the only way to resist the pervasive continuum of bourgeois time is through a language considered to be already dead. The Friulian language of La nuova gioventù is therefore the linguistic device which preserves, outside the Aufhebung of history, the original Casarsa as ultimate but also degraded, humilis, poetic alterity. In this way, though, the old Narcissus of Casarsa has to be disseminated as corpus in the new text, through a double process that in Lezama is present from the beginning because it represents and inaugurates the only possible existence of the fragmented and overlapped American landscape theorized by the Cuban poet. Finally, this also means that for Lezama the “subjecto metaforico”82 and the peripheral community or culture he expressed, are necessarily linked to a process of incorporation and dissemination, of sacrifice and death. This process transforms and syn-thesizes different sources in order to create that space of challenge and excess in which the new entity, i.e., its expresión Americana, can rise like a phoenix. For Pasolini and his Casarsa, this dialectical possibility is denied. Pasolini’s Friulian Narcissus is in fact wiped out and crushed by the trajectory of Italian modernity. If he survives outside history but in the text, it is only because the poet creates around his absence the double ring of estrangement and lies we have described in this article. Even this survival, however, is somehow dubious and definitely tragic. Although some features of La nuova gioventù can actually be found in the new wave of Italian dialect poetry that begun at the end of the seventies, we cannot in fact forget what Franco Fortini wrote about Pasolini’s last dialect book: “con la chiusura di quell’anello, è come se si assistesse ad un suicidio”83 (with the closure of that ring, it is as if we were watching a suicide).

Dartmouth College

Notes

The author would like to thank Ben Heller for his critical insights and kind support; Hailey LaVoy and Laurence Hooper for their generous editorial wisdom; Gustavo Pellón for helping with the translation of Muerte de Narciso; and the two anonymous reviewers for their com-ments and suggestions.

1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, III: 339–510. For a survey of the overall influence of Ovid’s Narcissus in Western literature and culture, see at least Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western


European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967) and the more recent Maurizio Bettini and Ezio Pellizer, Il mito di Narciso: immagini e racconti dalla Grecia ad oggi [The myth of Narcissus: Images and Stories from Greece to the present] (Torino: Einaudi, 2003).

2. The term narcissism makes an appearance in several of Freud’s works and was strongly influenced by Otto Rank’s famous Der Doppelganger, written in 1914 but published only nine years later. It is in fact in Freud’s 1914 short essay On Narcissism that this term finds its first and maybe most satisfying definition: see Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An introduction (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991), 3–4: “Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature”; also p. 5: “The libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism.” For a general discussion, of Freud’s use of narcissism between psychoanalysis and literary criticism, see Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Narcissus Transformed. The Textual Subject in Psychoanalysis and Literature (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993).

3. Quoted in Kochhar-Lindgren, Narcissus Transformed, 18.4. Kochhar-Lindgren, Narcissus Transformed, 42.5. For a similar interpretation of Lezama Lima’s Muerte de Narciso as “alpha & omega,” see

Remedios Mataix, La escritura de lo posible. El sistema poético de José Lezama Lima [The writing of the possible. José Lezama Lima’s poetic system] (Lleida: Edicions de la Universidat de Lleida, 2000), 143: “El poema [Muerte de Narciso] es uno de esos ‘fragmentos imantados’ de la obra de Lezama, una paradójica culminación inicial que al vez cierra y abre: resuelve los tanteos anteriores del autor y apunta una cosmovisión poética y una teoría del arte que preludian la evolución de su obra futura.”

6. Friuli is an area of northeastern Italy and Friulian is the language (along with Italian) spoken mainly in the provinces of Udine, Gorizia, and Pordenone. Although Friulian is rec-ognized as a proper minority language by both the Italian State (State Law n. 482 of 1999) and UNESCO (see, for example, the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger), I will still occasionally use the expressions “dialect poetry” and “dialect poems” to distinguish Pasolini’s production in Friulian from his poems in standard Italian. For a recent overview of the significance of Friulian from different scholarly perspectives, see Rosa Mucignat, ed., The Friulan Language: Identity, Migration, Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

7. Pedro Correa Rodriguez, La poetica de Lezama Lima: Muerte de Narciso [Lezama Lima’s poetics: Death of Narcissus] (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1994), 12.

8. Ibid., 168: “Lezama trata de devolver a la palabra su función primaria en la costitución sustancial de lo poético y de la poesía, del poema como realización pratica.”

9. Ben Heller, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection: Contrapuntal Readings in the Poetry of José Lezama Lima (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1997), 41.

10. Robert Gordon, Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996), 137.11. Emilio Bejel, Literatura de nuestra America [Literature of our America] (México: Instituto

de Investigaciones Humanísticas, Universidad Veracruzana, 1983), 25.12. Loc. cit.13. Pasolini’s entire activity as public intellectual and editor in the forties (and the con-

sequent journals Stroligut di ca da l’aga, 1944; Il stroligut, 1945–1946; and Quaderno romanzo, 1947) promotes the linguistic, cultural, and social coherence of his local community of Casarsa della Delizia as a “piccola patria.” A facsimile of the journals appeared as Nico Naldini, ed., L’academiuta friulana e le sue riviste [The “academiuta friulana” and its journals] (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1994).

14. Pier Paolo Pasolini, La poesia dialettale del novecento [Dialect Poetry of the Twentieth Century] (1952); now in Pier Paolo Pasolini, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte [Essays on Literature and Art], ed. Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (Milano: Mondadori, 1999), I: 856.

15. Pasolini offers fundamental accounts of the reasons behind his early linguistic choices both in the introduction to his anthology Poesia dialettale del Novecento mentioned above and


in an essay entitled Dal laboratorio (appunti en poète per una linguistica marxista), in Empirismo eretico [Heretical Empiricism], ed. Pier Paolo Pasolini (Milano: Garzanti, 1972 [1991]), 58ff.

16. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Volontà poetica ed evoluzione della lingua,” in Un paese di temporali e primule [A Country of Storms and Primulas], ed. Nico Naldini (Parma: Guanda, 1993), 208. On this topic, see also Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Storia della lingua italiana. Il Novecento [History of Italian Language. The Twentieth Century] (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 234: “un elemento comune ai migliori dialettali è un uso del dialetto che lo purifichi dai suoi tratti vernacolari che è quanto dire, secondo una formula fortunata, far passare il dialetto da lingua della realtà a lingua della poesia [my emphasis], dai caratteri, quindi, lirici anzi endofasici”. On the relationships between poetic language and history in Pasolini, see Rosa Mucignat, “Language and Time in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il sogno di una cosa,” in The Friulan Language: Identity, Migration, Culture, ed. Rosa Mucignat (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 150–70. For an interpretation of Pasolini’s Provençal, see instead Massimo Cacciari, “Pasolini “Provençal”?, SubStance 16, no. 2, Issue 53: Contemporary Italian Thought (1987), 67–73.

17. For an overview of the uses of “dialects” as languages of poetry in modern northeastern Italy, see Damiano Benvegnù, “Uno sguardo dalla periferia: appunti per una storia novecentesca della poesia in dialetto nel Triveneto” [“A Glance from the Periphery: Notes for a Twentieth-century History of Dialect Poetry in the ‘Triveneto’”], Modern Language Notes (MLN) 126, no. 1 (January, 2011): 74–97.

18. Néstor Perlongher, Prologo to Medusario. Muestra de poesía latino americana [Medusario: Exhibition of Latin-American Poetry] (México: Fondo de cultura economica 1996), 22.

19. Stefano Agosti, La parola fuori di sé. Scritti su Pasolini [The Word Outside Itself. Essays on Pasolini] (Lecce: Manni, 2004).

20. Franco Fortini, Attraverso Pasolini [Through Pasolini] (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 231.21. Other authors, beyond Ovid, may represent a common reference for both Lezama Lima

and Pasolini, and in fact have invited comparisons. For instance, Paul Valéry’s influence on Lezama has been explored by several scholars, and it is not so unlikely that Pasolini knew at least Valery’s “Narcisse parle” (1891) and “Fragments du Narcisse” (1926). Given the neo-baroque voice of the two poets, a most probable mutual reading was also Calderón de la Barca’s drama Eco y Narciso (1661), whose influences on our two poets deserve future investigations.

22. See the whole passage in Pedro Simón, “Interrogando Lezama Lima,” in Recompilación de textos sobre José Lezama Lima [Collection of texts on José Lezama Lima] (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1970), 12–13.

23. Cf. the entries Imagen, Poiesis, Potencia and Metáfora e Imagen in Carmen Berenger Hernández—Víctor Fowler Calzada, José Lezama Lima. Diccionario de citas [José Lezama Lima. Dictionary of Citation] (La Habana: Casa Editoria Abril, 2000).

24. Pasolini’s brother, Guido, died tragically in 1945, and part of the loss was indeed carried into his poetry. Pier Paolo wrote and published in 1945 in his magazine, the Stroligut, a poem entitled Corus in morte di Guido in order to commemorate the death of his brother. Nevertheless, the Corus was not published in his two official collections of dialect poems, and therefore it cannot change my reading. Moreover, the peculiar “riscrittura” of La nuova gioventù is circum-scribed to Pasolini’s very early production, the one that almost entirely appeared for the first time in Poesie a Casarsa, a book that was published three years before 1945. If it is true, then, that Pasolini also rewrote part of Suite Furlana (1944–1949), at least half of the poems included in his riscrittura cannot have anything to do with Guido’s death.

25. For Lezama Lima and the theme of homosexuality in Paradiso, see at least Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Descent into ‘Paradiso’: A study of Heaven and Homosexuality,” in Hispania, 59, no. 2 (May, 1976), 247–57; Enrique Lihn, “‘Paradiso’, novela y homosexualidad” [“‘Paradiso’, novel and homosexuality”], in Hispamérica, 8, no. 22 (Apr., 1979), 3–21; and, more important for a precise reference to Narcissus, the third chapter (entitled The ethics of Androgyny) of Gustavo Pellón, José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989). Moreover, for an interesting interpretation, still in Lezama, of the relationship between homosexual-ity and his use of the Cuban poetic tradition, see Patrick O’Connor, “The Anxiety of the


Avunculate: Lezama reads the Fin-De-Siecle,” in Latin American Literary Review, 33, no. 66 (July–Dec., 2005), 145–74. For Pasolini, besides Francesca Cadel’s La lingua dei desideri [The Language of Desires] (Lecce: Manni, 2002), see also Stefano Casi, Desiderio di Pasolini: omosessualità, arte e impegno intellettuale [Pasolini’s Desire: Homosexuality, Art, and Intellectual Engagement] (Torino: Sonda, 1990); for a general survey, see instead Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Italian Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), in particular chapter 4, “The Little Boys’ Room: Pasolini’s Approach to Homosexuality.”

26. In Paradiso, the suicidal homosexual Foción says about his little bronze statue of Narcissus that it is “la imagen de la imagen, la nada,” see José Lezama Lima, Paradiso, ed. Cintio Vitier (Paris: ALLCA/UNESCO, 1988), 291. For an investigation of the function of the mother in Lezama Lima, see instead Aída Beaupied, “La madre y el nacimiento del poeta en la obra de José Lezama Lima” [“The Mother and the Birth of the Poet in Lezama Lima’s work”], in Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, 21, no. 2 (Nov. 1992), 53–64.

27. For an historical reconstruction and the kind of influences and connection there were between Lezama Lima and other writers attached to Verbum in those same years, see Gema Areta Marigó, “La ficción de los mitos: el Narciso de José Lezama Lima” [“ The Fiction of Myths: Lezama Lima’s Narcissus”], in Literatura Cubana del Siglo XX: lo que se ganó (Actas del Seminario de Literatura celbrado en la Diputación de Córdoba del 16 al 17 de octubre de 1998) [Twentieth-century Cuban Literature: What We Gained] (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2003), 63–70.

28. Virgilio López Lemus, La imagen y el cuerpo: Lezama y Sarduy [The Image and the Body: Lezama and Sarduy] (La Habana: Ediciones Unión, 1997), 12.

29. As far as I know, there are no official English translations of Muerte de Narciso. As regards Pasolini’s poetry, although we have some dialect poems translated in some anthologies of his poetic production, there is no published English translation of La meglio gioventù and La nuova gioventù. Therefore, unless otherwise stated, all the translations are mine.

30. Cf. Bejel, Literatura de nuestra America, 44.31. Heller, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection, 39.32. José Morales Saravia, “Muerte de Narciso de José Lezama Lima: El secreto de la subje-

tividad desenmascarada” [“José Lezama Lima’s Death of Narcissus: the Secret of the Unmasked Subjectivity”], in Neue Romania; Veröffentlichungsreihe des Studienbereiches Neue Romania des Istituts für Romanische Philologie der FU Berlin, 16 (1995): 94.

33. Heller, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection, 48.34. For an analysis of these characters in Muerte de Narciso, see Morales Saravia, 91–93.35. Morales Saravia writes that the first stanza actually “da el eje de un destino y evoca su

realización, sintetiza el proyecto del poema” [gives the axis of a destiny and evokes its fulfill-ment, synthetizing the project of the whole poem], 88.

36. Lezama Lima, El reino de la imagen [The Kingdom of the Image] (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1981), 218.

37. Heller, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection, 52; but cfr. the whole paragraph entitled “Narciso, Moi, and Primary Narcissism,” 52–56.

38. Jacques Lacan, On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis, in Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton & Company, 1977), 195.

39. See, for example, what Mataix writes in La escritura de lo posible, 143: “desde el primero verso, mítica coordenada temporal en que ‘Danae teje el tiempo dorado por el Nilo’, el poema despliega sus enlaces ocultos sobre el imaginario cultural y nos sumerge en un mundo fabuloso donde el poeta (como Danae) va tejiendo asociaciones, imágenes, juicios, metáforas, lecturas, en una ‘cantidad hechizada’ de venticinco estrofas que tienen ya ese carácter monumental típico del la obra de Lezama (. . .).”

40. Lezama Lima, El reino de la imágen, 277.41. Emilio Bejel, “Imagen y posibilidad en Lezama Lima” [“Image and Possibility in Lezama

Lima”], in Coloquio Internacional sobre la Obra de José Lezama Lima [International Conference on José Lezama Lima’s Work], eds. Cristina Vizcaíno and Eugenio Suarez Galbán (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1984), 136–37.


42. Bejel comes to a similar conclusion when he writes that there is “una ausencia, carencia o falta que se manifiesta en todos los niveles del lenguaje y de la teoría poética de Lezama” (137) [an absence, lack, or a fault that manifests itself both in all the linguistic levels and in Lezama’s poetic theory].

43. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre VII, L’éthique de la psychanalyse [The Seminar. Book 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis] (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 169.

44. Fortini, Attraverso Pasolini, 231, my emphasis.45. Needless to say, the Félibrige was originally a literary and cultural association founded

by Frédéric Mistral and other Provençal writers in the middle of the nineteenth century to defend and promote Occitan language and literature. Pasolini was obviously referring to that experience in his own writing.

46. Some of these poems, in fact, appeared first in Italian, in Pasolini’s correspondence with friends, long before Poesie a Casarsa. For more information, see Giulio Santato, Pier Paolo Pasolini. L’opera [Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Work] (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980), 37 and ff.

47. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Tutte le poesie [The Entire Poetry] (Milano: Mondadori (“I Meridiani”), 2003), 159.

48. Gianfranco Contini, Al limite della poesia dialettale [At the Edge of Dialect Poetry], “Corriere del Ticino,” April 24, 1943.

49. Aleluja, in Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 24.50. Andrea Zanzotto, Aure e disincanti del Novecento italiano [Aurae and Disenchantments of

Italian “Novecento”] (Milano: Mondadori, 1994), 155.51. Jean Michel Gardair, Narciso e il suo doppio. Saggio su La nuova gioventù di Pasolini

[Narcissus and His Double. Essay on Pasolini “La nuova gioventù”] (Roma: Bulzoni, 1996), 155.52. Cf. Cadel, La lingua dei desideri, 106: “è la voce dell’usignolo che ci rivela in lingua e in

controcanto le chiavi di quel codice-lingua” [it is the voice of the nightingale that reveals in language and in countermelody the keys of that codex-tongue].

53. Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 494.54. Gardair, Narciso e il suo doppio, 46.55. Ibid.56. Loc. cit.57. See also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Abiura della trilogia della vita, in Lettere luterane [Lutheran

letters] (Torino: Einaudi, 1976).58. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Dili, in La nuova gioventù. Poesie friulane (1941–1974) [The New Youth.

Friulian poems 1941–1971] (Torino: Einaudi, 2002), 170.59. Pasolini, Ploja fòur de dut, in La nuova gioventù, 169.60. Agosti, La parola fuori di sé, 39.61. Introduzione a La seconda forma de “La meglio gioventù,” in Pasolini, La nuova gioventù, 162.62. Cf. Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz. L’archivio e il testimone (Torino: Bollati

Boringhieri, 1998), 149: “Quando, nel soggetto parlante, il rapporto tra norma e anomia, fra il dicibile e il non dicibile si spezza, si ha la morte della lingua e l'emergere alla coscienza di una nuova identità linguistica. Una lingua morta è, cioè, quella in cui non si può opporre norma e anomia, innovazione e conservazione. Di una tale lingua si dice a ragione che essa non è più parlata, cioè che in essa è impossibile assegnare la posizione di soggetto.” [English version: Remnants of Auschwitz: the witness and the archive (New York: Zone books, 2000), 160: “When the relation between norm and anomia, the sayable and the unsayable, is broken in the subject, language dies and a new linguistic identity emerges. A dead language is thus a language in which it is no longer possible to oppose norm and anomia, innovation and preservation. We thus say of a dead language that is no longer spoken, that is, that in it is impossible to assign the position of a subject.”].

63. Cf. A.G. Meekins, “Narcís tal Friúl,” in Pasolini Old and New. Surveys and Studies, ed. Zygmunt Baranski (Dublin: Fourt Court Press, 1999), 237: “His real rejection is of modern society, not his early poetry.”

64. Pasolini, La nuova gioventù, 162.65. Loc. cit.


66. Pasolini, Li letanis dal biel fí III, in La nuova gioventù, 174.67. Holy Bible, King James version, Gospel of St. John, 12:24.68. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Osservazioni sul piano sequenza,” in Empirismo eretico, 241.69. Pasolini, “Intervento al congresso del Partito Radicale,” in Lettere luterane, 195. The

English translation is taken from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters (Manchester-Dublin: Carcanet/Raven Art, 1983), 126.

70. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bestia da stile, in Teatro (Milano: Garzanti, 1988), 599.71. Morales Saravia, “Muerte de Narciso de José Lezama,” 101.72. Ibid.73. Pasolini, Bestia da stile, 672. It is worth noticing that here the adverb ‘umilmente’ comes

from the term humus and expresses a bond to the ground, the soil, and, as we will see, ulti-mately to death.

74. Heller, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection, 55. Although in his essay Heller points toward a different direction, it is important to recall here what he writes at p. 56: “Thus in Paradiso, the figure of Narcissus is an image, as it was to some extent for Freud, of the homosexual, but in Muerte de Narciso that possible aspect of the figure is largely repressed. As with most instances of repression, traces of that which is repressed show through, and it is possible to read much of Muerte de Narciso as a veiled allegory of homosexual love (. . .).”

75. Loc. cit.76. Agosti, La parola fuori di sé, 18.77. Aída Beaupied, Narciso hermético: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y José Lezama Lima [Hermetic

Narcissus: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and José Lezama Lima] (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 146.

78. Lezama Lima, Imagen y posibilidad, 135: “Superación de la frase de Heidegger: el hombre es un ser para la muerte. Y el poeta? Es el ser que crea la nueva causalidad de la resurreción.”

79. A long explanation of this concept is available in Martin Heidegger, Alétheia (Heraklit, Fragment 16).2000. Written in 1951, first edition in: Vortrage und Aufsätze 1954 (Essays 1936–1953) GA7. 2000. pp. 249–74. Translated as: Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16) in: Early Greek Thinking, translated by David F. Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 102–23.

80. See Friedrich Hölderlin, “In lovely blueness” (In lieblicher Blaue). See also Heidegger’s comment on this poem, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971), 213–29.

81. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 403. [English translation: Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 274].

82. We have not a final and clear definition of such “sujeto metafórico,” probably because Lezama Lima did not aim to this lexical clearness. However, we might consider what Lezama writes in Mitos y cansancio clásico about the particular “duty” of this subject, when he says that “nuestro ente de análogo cultural presupone la participación, sobre uno espacio contrapuntado, del sujeto metafórico. Pudiéramos tal vez decir que ese sujeto metafórico actúa como el factor temporal, que se impide quel las entidades naturales o culturales imaginarias se queden gelée en su estéril llanura.” Vd José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana [The American Expression], [edición de Irlemar Chiampi, con el texto establecido] (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 54.

83. Fortini, Attraverso Pasolini, 231.