Unhappy Youth [I giovanni infelici], by Pier Paolo Pasolini

One of the most mysterious themes of tragic Greek theater is the predestination of the children to pay for the guilt of their parents.

It doesn’t matter if the kids are good, innocent, pious-- if their parents are guilty, the children must be punished.

It’s the chorus-- a democratic chorus-- that is declared the depository of such truth, and it sets it forth without introducing it and without illustrating it, as if it seemed natural.

I confess that I always accepted this theme in Greek theater as something foreign to my knowledge, happening “somewhere else” and in “another time.” Not without a certain scholastic ingenuity, I always considered such themes as absurd and, in turn, ingenuous, “anthropologically” ingenuous.

But now the moment has arrived in my life in which I’ve had to admit to belonging inescapably to the generation of parents. Inescapably, because the children are not only born, they are not only grown up, but they have joined the age of reason and their destiny, therefore, begins to be uneludably that which it must be, rendering them adults.

[...]

I have something general, immense, obscure to rebuke the children for. Something that remains outside of the verbal, manifesting itself irrationally, in existence, in a “test of sentiments.” Now since I-- ideal father, historical father-- condemn the children, it’s natural that, consequently, I accepted, in some way the idea of their punishment.

For the first time in my life, it turns out thus to liberate in my conscience, by means of an intimate and personal mechanism, that terrible, abstract fatality of the Athenian chorus that reconfirms as natural the “punishment of the children.”

Only that the chorus, gifted with so much immemorial and profound wisdom, added that the children were punished for the “guilt of their parents.”

Well then, neither exists a moment to admit it, to accept, that is, personally such a guilt. If I condemn the children (because of a cessation of love for them) and therefore presume their punishment, I don’t have the least doubt that it is all my fault. In the father. [In quanto padre.] Insofar as I’m one of the parents. One of the parents that has turned out to be responsible, first of fascism, then of a clerico-fascist regime pretending to be democratic, and, in the end, have accepted the new power, the power of consumers, the last of the ruins, the ruin of ruins.

The guilt of the parents that the children must pay for is thus [that of] “fascism,” be it in its archaic forms or in its absolutely new forms-- new without possible equivalents in the past?

It is difficult for me to admit that the “guilt” might be this. Maybe also for private and subjective reasons. I, personally, have always been antifascist, and I have never accepted the new power which in reality Marx used to write about, prophetically, in the [Communist] Manifesto, believing he spoke of the capitalism of his time. It seems to me that there might be something conformistic and too logical-- that is, unhistorical-- to identify with this guilt.

[...]

So, the kids that we see around us are “punished” kids, “punished,” for one thing, by their unhappiness, and then, in the future, by who knows what, by which slaughters (this is our irrepressible feeling).

But they are children “punished” for our guilt, that is for the guilt of the parents. Is it fair? It was this, really, for a modern reader, the question, without an answer, of the dominant motive for Greek theater.

Well yes, it is fair. The modern reader has seen in fact an experience that renders it finally, and tragically, comprehensible in the affirmative-- that which used to seem so blindly irrational and cruel-- of the democratic chorus of ancient Athens: that is, that the children must pay for the guilt of their parents. In fact the children that aren’t freed of the guilt of the parents are unhappy, and there is no more decisive and imponderable sign of culpability than unhappiness. It would be too easy and, in a historical and political sense, immoral, if the children were to be exonerated [guistificati] of that which there is in them that’s ugly, repellent, inhuman-- from the fact that their parents have been mistaken. The hereditary negative paternity can half justify it, but for the other half they themselves are responsible. They are not innocent children. Sad and culpable, but so are the children. And it’s fair that they should also be punished for that half of the guilt they cannot otherwise free themselves from.

But the problem always remains of what might be in reality such “guilt” of the parents.

It’s this that substantially, in the end, matters here. It’s much more important than, having provoked such an atrocious condition for the children, and consequently such an atrocious punishment, it must be treated as a grave sin. Maybe the gravest sin committed by parents in all of human history. And these parents are us. Something that seems incredible to us.

As I have already emphasized, moreover, we must free ourselves of the idea that such guilt might be identified with fascism old and new, that is with effective capitalist power. The children that are being punished so cruelly by their mode of being (and in the future, certainly, by something more objective and more terrible), are also children of antifascists and communists.

Thus fascists and antifascists, bosses and revolutionaries, have a common guilt. We all do. As much as we all [tutti quanti noi], in fact, down to today, with subconscious racism, when we have spoken specifically of parents and children, have always intended to speak of bourgeois parents and children.

History is their history.

The people, according to us, have their own history apart, archaic, in which the children, simply, as anthropological study of ancient cultures has learned, reincarnate and repeat the parents.

Today, all that has changed: when we speak of parents and children, if for parents we continue always to mean bourgeois parents, for children we might mean bourgeois children or proletarian children. The apocalyptic picture that I have outlined above, of the kids, means [the] bourgeoisie and [the] people.

The two histories are thus united: and this is the first time that this has happened in the history of humanity.

Such unification has come about under the sign and by the will of consumer society, of “development.” It cannot be said that the antifascists in general and in particular the communists had really opposed themselves [si siano veramente opposti] to a similar unification, whose character is totalitarian-- even if its repressivity is not archaically police-based (and if it never resorts to a false permissiveness).

The guilt of the parents is not therefore the violence of power, fascism. It’s also this: first, the removal of conscience, on the part of we antifascists, of old fascism, the convenient self-liberation from our profound intimacy (Panella) with [fascism] (having considered the fascists “our cretin brothers,” as it’s put in a phrase by Sforza recorded by Fortini); second, and overall, the acceptance-- so much guiltier than it is incomprehensible-- of the degrading violence and of the true, immense genocides of the new fascism.

Why so much complicity with old fascism and why so much acceptance of the new fascism?

Because it is-- and here we are at the point-- a guiding idea sincerely or insincerely common to all, the idea that the worst bad thing in the world were poverty and that therefore the culture of the poor classes should be substituted with the culture of the dominant class.

In other words our parental guilt would consist in this: in the belief that history were not and may not be able to be other than bourgeois history.


by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Lettere luterane, 8th ed. (Trento: Einaudi, 2007 [1976]), 5-12.
Translation by Daniel Frontino Elash, February-March 2010, NYC.