Oltre il limite. "Petrolio" di Pasolini tra contaminazione e ridefinizione dello spazio letterario

In Pasolini’s career the year 1961 is a very important watershed because it represents his beginning as director of the movie Accattone. After this turning point and through all the ’60s, Pasolini arrives at some semiotic considerations which help us for developing a critical approach to his so named ‘not finished’ poetry. The ‘new filmmaker’ progressively acquires the cinematographic medium as well as bringing more prestige to the script, that is generally considered as preparatory step without artistic dignity. In Pasolini’s opinion, a work should be constantly 'in progress' in order to reflect the magma of life. The 'novel' Petrolio is based on a fragmentary writing: this work juxtaposes a lot of fragments which are very different from each other on a stylistic level and represents, above and beyond the cinematographic experiments, the extreme case of Pasolinian need of magmatic vitality. Pasolini imagines Petrolio like an unfinished and neverending work in opposition to the conventional canonical forms of Literature: thanks to a lot of quotations, the contamination of styles and heterogeneous languages, the Friulian writer exceeds the margins of the written page and redefines the literary space. In this way, Pasolini aims at developing an artistic structure raising itself on a level of radical otherness compared to the products of neocapitalistic society. Ultimately, through his literary will, Pasolini would like to transcend the limits of his age and to establish a dialogue with the reader in a future space, corresponding to a limbo between life and death.