SOURCE: "A Postscript to Transgression," in Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 188-228.

In the following excerpt, Bongie observes the importance of the "authentic experience" in Pasolini's poems.

One cannot … speak of Pasolini during the early 1960's without taking into account the twenty-year path that led him to embrace the Third World as a radical solution to the problem of decadence…. If we consider his earlier (and without question most important) literary production, we find that the "outside" that will eventually become so necessary for Pasolini is anything but present there; it proves, in fact, irremediably absent. For the decadentist-tinged poetry of his first literary decade, the 1940's, this should come as no surprise. The young Pasolini was careful to situate himself firmly within Italian literary tradition: if this poetry—much of it indebted to the hermetic school that flourished...