Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Canzoniere italiano and the People Without History

This article examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s anthology of popular poetry, Canzoniere italiano (1955). Deeply connected to its author’s well-known passion for dialects and regional, lower-class cultures first evidenced in his Friulian poetry, Canzoniere represents a key moment in Pasolini's thought. The collection exemplifies his theorization of language and power, the role of the popular in national culture before the ravages of neocapitalistic growth, and the aesthetic significance of dialect traditions. This project, intended to preserve dialect traditions after the fall of Fascism, also echoes the work of the nineteenth-century folklorists who sought document and disseminate folk cultures as a testament to national popular traditions of a newly-unified Italy. Pasolini’s methodological approach, especially, connects him to these previous folklorists. His dependence on written anthologies rather than ethnographic research, his valorization of popular poetry as a literary tradition, and his insistence on the archaic and ahistorical nature of the lowest classes all contrast sharply with the emerging discourse in the 1950s—promoted in particular by the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino—that working-class people participated in history and expressed forms of political consciousness through their cultural practices. I argue that Pasolini’s own understanding of popular poetry, as articulated in the introduction to the Canzoniere, betrays the radical promise of the work itself and reveals it to be an inherently conservative project. When taken in the context of other theories of folklore in the postwar, it embodies a late gesture of a traditional aesthetic and literary approach to working-class people and their culture.