UNHAPPY YOUTH

UNHAPPY YOUTH

One of the most mysterious themes in Greek tragic theatre is the way that sons are predestined to pay for the sins of the fathers. It does not matter if the sons are good, innocent, pious; if their fathers have sinned the sons must be punished. It is the chorus a democratic chorus - which claims to be the depository of this truth, which it pronounces without introduction and without illustration, so natural does it find it. I confess that I have always accepted this theme of Greek theatre as something outside my knowledge, something that happens 'somewhere else' and 'in another time'. Not without a certain scholastic ingenuousness I have always considered such a theme to be absurd and, in its turn, ingenuous, 'anthropologically' ingenuous. 

But then a moment came in my life when I had to admit that I belonged inescapably to the generation of the fathers. Inescapably because the sons are not only born; they have grown up, and they have reached the age of reason; their fate, therefore, begins ineluctably to be what it must be by turning them into adults. These last years I have studied these sons for a long time. In the end my judgment, however unjust and pitiless it may seem, even to myself, is one of condemnation. I have tried to understand, to pretend not to understand, to rely on exceptions, to hope for some change, to consider the reality young people represent historically that is to say beyond subjective judgments of good or evil. But it has been useless. My feeling is condemnatory. Feelings cannot change: they are historical. It is what one feels that is true (in spite of all the insincerities we may have within us). In the end that is today, at the beginning of 1975- my feeling, I repeat, is one of condemnation. But since perhaps 'condemnation' is a wrong word to use (dictated perhaps by the initial reference to the context of the Greek theatre) I shall have to define it: more than a condemnation my feeling in fact is a 'ceasing to love' which precisely does not produce 'hatred' but 'condemnation'. 

I have something general, immense and obscure with which to reproach the sons. Something which remains this side of speech - which manifests itself irrationally, in existence, in 'having feelings'. Now since I- ideal father, historical father- condemn the sons, it is natural that I should in consequence accept in some sense the idea of their punishment. For the first time in my life by means of an intimate and personal mechanism I am able to free myself from the terrible, abstract, fatal necessity of the Athenian chorus, which confirms as natural 'the punishment of the sons'. Except that the chorus, endowed as it was with such immemorial and profound wisdom, added that what the sons were punished for was 'the sins of the fathers'. 

Well, I do not hesitate for a minute to admit it- that is to say, to accept those sins personally. If I condemn the sons- because of ceasing to love them - and therefore presuppose their punishment, I have not the least doubt that this is all my fault. As a father. As one of the fathers. One of the fathers who were responsible, first for Fascism, then for a falsely democratic clerico-Fascist regime, and who in the end have accepted the new form of power, the power of consumer goods, the final ruin, the ruin of ruins. 

So are the sins of the fathers, for which the sons must pay, 'Fascism', whether in its archaic form or in its completely new forms, new and without possible equivalents in the past? I find it difficult to admit that this is 'the sin'. Perhaps also for private and subjective reasons. I personally have always been antiFascist and have never accepted the new power of which Marx was in fact speaking prophetically in the Manifesto while thinking he was speaking of the capitalism of his own time. It seems to me that there is something conformist and too logical that is ahistorical - about identifying this as the sin. I can hear all around me the outrage of pedants (followed by their blackmail) at what I am about to say. I can hear their arguments already: it is backward, reactionary, antagonistic to the common people, who are incapable of understanding the elements of novelty, which are admittedly dramatic and which are there in the sons, and who are incapable of understanding that they too are life. Well, I think that I too have a right to life because while being a father I do not for that reason cease to be a son. Moreover for me life can manifest itself magnificently: for instance, by having the courage to reveal to the new sons what I really feel about them. Life consists in the fearless exercise of reason and certainly not in fixed attitudes and even less in fixed attitudes to life, which is the pure philosophy of 'the little man'.lt is better to be an enemy of the people than an enemy of reality. The sons who surround us, especially the younger ones, the adolescents, are almost all monsters. Their physical aspect is almost terrifying and when not terrifying is fastidiously unhappy. Horrible coverings, caricatures of hair-styles, pallid complexions, dull eyes. These are the masks of some squalidly barbaric initiation. Or else they are the masks of a thorough and unconscious integration, which does not move one to pity. Having raised barriers against the fathers, which tend to relegate them to the ghetto, the sons have found themselves shut up in the opposing ghetto. In the best of cases they stand clustered at the barbed wire of that ghetto, looking towards us, who are after all like desperate beggars who ask for something with their eyes because they lack the courage or perhaps the capacity to speak. In what are neither the best nor the worst of cases there are millions of them - they have no expression of any kind; they are ambiguity made flesh. Their eyes are elusive; their thoughts are perpetually elsewhere; they have at one and the same time too much respect or too much contempt, too much patience or too much impatience. They have learned something more than their peers of ten or twenty years ago, but not enough. Integration is no longer a moral problem; revolt has become part of a code. In the worst cases they are real criminals. How many of these criminals are there? In truth it could be almost all of them. There is no group of boys one meets in the street which might not be a group of criminals. They have a light in their eyes; their features are copies of the features of automatons with nothing personal to give them character from within. The stereotype makes them treacherous. Their silence can precede a timid request for help (what help?) or can precede the thrust of a knife. They are no longer masters of their own actions; one might almost say of their own muscles. They do not know clearly the distance between cause and effect. They have regressed- behind the outward appearance of more advanced education and a higher standard of living - to primitive crudeness. If on the one hand they speak better - that is to say, have assimilated the degrading average version of Italian- on the other they are almost aphasic; they talk old, incomprehensible dialects or are simply silent, every so often emitting guttural howls and other interjections, all of an obscene nature. They do not know how to smile or laugh: they can only grin or grimace. In this enormous mass - which is typical above all (once again) of the defenceless centre and south of Italy - there are noble elites, to which the children of my readers naturally belong. But these readers of mine will not wish to maintain that their children are happy (uninhibited or dependent) - as some imbecile journalists believe and keep repeating, behaving like Fascist emissaries in a concentration camp. They are in general personally bitter; they are living, in fact, through a moment of tension, of liberation, of conquest (even if it is in an illusory manner). But in the overall picture their function ends up by being regressive. In fact a liberty which is freely given naturally cannot overcome in them the age-old habits of · submission to rules. 

Certainly the groups of cultured young people (incidentally very much more numerous than once upon a time) are adorable because they are heart-breaking. Owing to circumstances which for the great masses of people have up to now been only negative, and atrociously so, they are more advanced, more subtle, more informed than were similar groups ten or twenty years ago. But what can they do with their subtlety or their culture? So the sons we see around us are 'punished' sons- punished now by their unhappiness and in the future by goodness knows what hecatombs (this is my irrepressible feeling). But these sons are 'punished' for our sins, that is to say, for the sins of the fathers. Is that fair? For a modern reader this, in fact, is the unanswered question, the Greek theatre's dominant theme. Well, yes, it is fair. The modern reader has lived through an experience which makes finally and tragically comprehensible to him the statement of the democratic chorus of ancient Athens, which seemed so blindly irrational and cruel: that the sons must pay for the sins of the fathers. In fact the sons who do not shed the sins of the fathers are unhappy - and there is no more decisive and unpardonable sign of guilt than unhappiness. It would be too easy and, in a historical and political sense, immoral, if the sons were excused - excused in what is ugly, repellent, inhuman in
 them - by the fact that the fathers erred. The negative paternal legacy may half explain them but for the other half they are themselves responsible. These are no innocent children. Thyestes1 is guilty but so are his children. And it is just that they should be punished even for that half of the guilt of others from which they have been incapable of freeing themselves. Yet there remains the problem of what in fact the 'sin' of the fathers is. In the end this is what really matters. And it is all the more important because, as it has provoked such an atrocious condition in the sons and therefore an atrocious punishment, the sin must be a grave one. Perhaps the gravest sin committed by fathers in the whole of human history. And we are these fathers. This seems incredible. 

As I have indicated, we must free ourselves from the idea that this sin can be identified with Fascism, old or new, that is to say with the effective power of capitalism. The children who today are so cruelly punished for their way of life (and in future certainly by something more objective and more terrible) are also children of anti-Fascists and Communists. Therefore Fascists and anti-Fascists, bosses and revolutionaries, have a sin in common. Until today, in fact, when we spoke specifically of fathers and sons we have always meant with unconscious racism bourgeois fathers and sons. History was their history. 

In my opinion the people had a separate history, an archaic one, in which the sons simply - as the anthropology of ancient cultures teaches us - reincarnated and duplicated the fathers. Today when we talk about fathers and sons everything is changed: if by fathers we continue to mean bourgeois fathers, by sons we mean both bourgeois and proletarian sons. The apocalyptic picture I have sketched above includes the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. So the two factors have come together: and it is the first time in human history that this has happened. This unification has taken place under the sign and by the will of the civilization of consumer goods- 'of progress'. It cannot be said that anti-Fascists in general and Communists in particular really opposed a unification of this kind, which is totalitarian in character - truly totalitarian for the first time - even if its repressiveness is not police repression in the archaic manner (if anything it resorts to a false permissiveness). 

The sin of the fathers is not only the violence of power, Fascism. It is also this: the dismissal from our consciousness by us anti-Fascists of the old Fascism, the fact that we comfortably freed ourselves from our deep intimacy with it (the fact that we considered the Fascists 'our idiot brothers'; secondly and above all, the acceptance (all the more guilty because unconscious) of the degrading violence, of the real, immense genocides of the new Fascism. 

Why is there such complicity with the old Fascism and why such an acceptance of the new Fascism? Because there is - and this is the point - a guiding principle common to both, sincerely or insincerely: that is the idea that the greatest ill in the world is poverty and that therefore the culture of the poorer classes must be replaced by the culture of the ruling class. In other words, our guilt as fathers could be said to consist in this: that we believe that history is not and cannot be other than bourgeois history.

LETTERE LUTERANE, PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, 1975