Giovani e gioventù tra ‘forma’ e ‘omologazione’: Gombrowicz e Pasolini intorno al ’68

Abstract

The article is a parallel reading of some literary and nonfictional works of Witold Gombrowicz and Pier Paolo Pasolini, concerning ‘youth’ and ‘young people’ in the 1960s, particularly around 1968. In spite of the substantial difference between the youth movements in the West and in Eastern Europe, as well as despite the immense diversity between the ways of life and world views of the two authors, it is still possible to notice astonishing similarities in their ideas. Their analyses of the contemporary mass-society, of the relationship between the individual (notably, the young person), Power and the community also reveal surprising points in common. All things considered, the pessimistic vision of both authors is based on general concepts, like Gombrowicz’s ‘Form’ and Pasolini’s ‘Homologation’, of different origin (i.e. psychosociological and socio-political), but apparently not so distant from each other from today’s standpoint. The article stresses other surprising similarities, such as the constant interest in Dante in the whole production of both writers, especially in the mid-60s, as well as a kind of ‘thematic intertextuality’ in some of their major texts from that period, as the novel Pornografia and the drama Fabrication on the one side, and the tragicomedy History (An Operetta) and the play Calderon on the other one: these works all centre on the relationship between grown-ups and young people.