Against Jesters who Defame and Insult by John Mulligan
On the thirteenth of October of this year, 2016, Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, died aged 90. Nineteen years earlier he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is perhaps most famous for writing Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico (The Accidental Death of an Anarchist). It was written in 1970 and has been performed ever since. Before the play was written Foe gives us some insight how he first conceived of writing this work. In the postscript to the play he writes the following:
"During the spring of 1970 the comrades who were coming to see our shows - workers, students and progressives - were asking us to write a full-length piece on the Milan bombings and the murder of Pinelli, a piece which would discuss the political motives and consequences of these events. The reason for their request was the terrible shortage of information on the subject. Once the press had got over the initial shock, they were silent. The newspapers of the official Left parties - with L'Unità at their head - refused to take sides.
Despite the provocations: the usual phone calls from unnamed callers telling us there was a bomb in the theatre; the interventions of the flying squad; the way the bosses’ press highlighted the incident"
Guiseppe Pinelli was born in 1928 in Milan; he was born into poverty, and took low-paid work. He was an anarchist, a rail worker at the time of his death. Pinelli was also an activist, working on a number of issues. His death in December 1969 is highly suspicious. What is astonishing about the play was the information presented in it is all true. It is all true apart from the names that had been evidently changed and the role of the maniac was clearly an invention of Foe’s. He had gone some way to gain access of the large amount of information on the case. But Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, were dissidents and subversives of course, the usual, middle-class bourgeois theatre-goers were becoming a bore for them, the influence of Brecht and Gramsci persuaded the pair to take their skills - they were both actors - to grass roots organisations such as the work place and in communist groups.
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian neo-Marxist theorist, intellectual and founder of the Italian communist party, most famous for his prison note books, founded the phrase ‘cultural hegemony,' it can easily be defined. Cultural hegemony is in many ways identical to Herbert Marcus’ repressive tolerance. The term is relevant more today than it perhaps was in 1926, when he coined the term, which, oddly enough, is the same year Fo was born. Cultural hegemony then, is the doctrine that a society is dominated by one elite group, who seek to rule over others, using measures to induce the populace by whatever means to think, behave and evolve the same way. Popular culture, for example, is a good modern example of this: follow the trends or the rest of “civilised” society will seek to isolate you. Well, Fo and Rame were very much influenced by him. The reason why Fo stands out in this respect is because few were and are like him. Very few dare to challenge the hegemony of state power and the procedures of parliament. But this does come at a cost.
On the ninth of March,1973 Franca Rame was abducted by five men; consequently, she was beaten, tortured and raped. When the ordeal was over they left her in the park. Two months later Rame was working again. In 1975 she wrote and performed a monologue inspired from the ordeal called Lo Stupro (The Rape). One may ask, as terrible as this is, what is its relevance in its current context; well, that is the shocking element, as if rape and torture was not shocking enough.. It was not until 25 years later when this information was revealed. It took Rame five years to speak about the experience. A captain in the Pastrengo division of the police department, Niccolo Bozzo commented, “The news that Franca Rame had been raped was received as though someone had done the division a great favour.” The police had organised the abduction and rape carried out by fascists. A few years before the abduction Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico was written and performed. It is the Italian police that are being lampooned, ridiculed and satirised in the play.
The plot of the play is simple enough. A “maniac” is brought into the police station and questioned, but the police here are presented rather stupidly in broad farce, later on in the play this same maniac, in his disguise, claims to be a judge, he induces the police officers present to believe he is opening the case of the death of an anarchist, who, so it was believed, threw himself out of the window in this very police station. As the play moves along, it gets all the more absurd, nonsensical even and hilarious. The play is clever because it allows Fo, in the form of the Maniac, to reveal factual information about the real-life Pinelli case, about the collusion of the Italian police with fascist terrorist groups and the corruption which is present throughout the play.
Inspector Bertozzo, at the beginning of the play, during his so-called interrogation of the Maniac, reading from a sheet of paper, remarks “It says here ‘pyschiatrist’". then the following exchange occurs
Well done – but after the full stop! Are you familiar with the rules of grammar and punctuation? Read it properly: Professor Antonio Rabbi. Full stop. Then there's a capital P. Psychiatrist! Now look, you can't tell me it's going under false pretences to say: 'psychiatrist.' I presume you're familiar with the grammar of the Italian language? Yes? Well in that case you should know that if a person writes 'archaeologist' it doesn't mean he's studied – it's like saying 'stamp collector','vegetarian', 'arthritis sufferer'…
INSPECTOR BERTOZZO: Yes, but what about this: 'Formerly lecturer at the University of Padova'?
MANIAC: I'm sorry, now you're the one trading under false pretences: you just told me that you knew the rules of grammar and punctuation, and now it turns out that you can't even read properly…
INSPECTOR BERTOZZO: I can't even what...?!
MANIAC: Didn't you see the comma after the 'formerly?'
When approaching this play, one should be aware of the political climate Italy was facing at the time. There were 173 terrorist attacks, mostly from extremist fascist groups in Italy of a period of just over a year before the play was written, that is quite a shock for people to learn but that is nothing compared to the number of terrorist attacks from 1969 to 1980 in Italy. They stand at 4,298. It is unclear how many of these attacks the police colluded with them or knew about in advance. The astonishing facts go on, and the second half of Foe’s play touches on these issues. Maria Feletti, is a journalist in the play, the Maniac, who I shall speak about more in moment, along with the journalist, draw out information which present factual information in this fictional play.
I suppose nobody's told you either that out of a total of 173 bomb attacks that have happened in the past year and a bit, at a rate of twelve a month, one every three days – out of 173 attacks, as I was saying [She reads from a report] at least 102 have been proved to have been organised by fascist organisations, aided or abetted by the police, with the explicit intention of putting the blame on Left-wing political groups.
When Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, many said he did not deserve it for different reasons of course, but few can name authors who unravel unpleasant truths on such a grand scale and dedicate their life to unveiling and revealing these facts; when any author does this it is not a comfortable life they are living. They are declared enemies in their own country, constantly attacked at every corner they turn their gaze; Fo revitalised theatre, as Harold Pinter did in his own country, and was demonised and vilified even more so than Fo. In fact Fo was nominated for the prize in the 1970s, but they gave it to Saul Bellow. In a marvellous piece of buffoonery and farce in Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico , we again, see fact in this play, this time discussing the fateful last moments of the anarchist, at this point the Maniac is dressed as a judge, while he observes the police officers squirming and panicking:
here we are, at midnight, in the middle of December, and the window was still wide open. In other words, it couldn't have been cold...And if it wasn't cold, that can only mean that the sun hadn't gone down... Or maybe it went down later than usual – one o'clock, perhaps, like Norway in July.
SUPERINTENDENT: Not at all. We'd just opened it to get a bit of fresh air in, hadn't we?
SPORTS JACKET: Yes, there was a lot of smoke.
CONSTABLE: The anarchist smoked a lot, you know!
MANIAC: So you opened the windows. And the shutters too?
SPORTS JACKET: Yes.
MANIAC: In December? At midnight, with the thermometer sub-zero, and a freezing fog...? 'Open the windows – who cares if we all die of pneumonia!'
Evidently, it is clear what happened to Pinelli that day, Fo does not need to say it, the evidence he shows in the play is overwhelming, which is why, in many respects, the artist can do more, a lot more than political power in altering people’s view of the world; but more than that it makes people think, anything that provokes thought of this kind is clearly progression of some kind. The incident of course, which is why Pinelli was in the police station to begin with was because of a bomb attack. On the twelfth of December, 1969, there was a terrorist attack which killed sixteen people in Milan. Pinelli was innocent of course but that did not matter; it is one of those things which people have forgotten about, it is Fo’s role to make sure people do not forget these things. Memory, in this Orwellian world may serve well for Beckett even.
In 1997, when Dario Fo won the Nobel prize for Literature, he addressed the academy under the title of “Against Jesters who Defame and Insult”. On receiving the prestigious award the Nobel committee gave it to Fo who “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden". In the speech itself he addresses a number of important issues, but aside from his most famous play there are many, many other works. Misero Buffo (Mystery Play), which was performed around 5,000 times, was a monologue discussing the Medieval theatre and scenes which were wonderfully written. The Vatican condemned it, which is not too surprising for its blasphemy - their favourite word. One, thinks, once again of Gramsci when he says the following in his Nobel-winning speech:
Young people easily succumb to the bombardment of gratuitous banalities and obscenities that each day is served to them by the mass media: heartless TV action films where in the space of ten minutes they are treated to three rapes, two assassinations, one beating and a serial crash involving ten cars on a bridge that then collapses, whereupon everything-cars, drivers and passengers - precipitates into the sea...only one person survives the fall, but he doesn't know how to swim and so drowns, to the cheers of the crowd of curious onlookers that suddenly has appeared on the scene.
At the very last sentence of the speech he ends it perfectly by saying “Believe me, this prize belongs to both of us.” He was referring to his wife; he, of course is probably right.
On the thirteenth of October of this year, 2016, Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, died aged 90. Nineteen years earlier he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is perhaps most famous for writing Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico (The Accidental Death of an Anarchist). It was written in 1970 and has been performed ever since. Before the play was written Foe gives us some insight how he first conceived of writing this work. In the postscript to the play he writes the following:
"During the spring of 1970 the comrades who were coming to see our shows - workers, students and progressives - were asking us to write a full-length piece on the Milan bombings and the murder of Pinelli, a piece which would discuss the political motives and consequences of these events. The reason for their request was the terrible shortage of information on the subject. Once the press had got over the initial shock, they were silent. The newspapers of the official Left parties - with L'Unità at their head - refused to take sides.
Despite the provocations: the usual phone calls from unnamed callers telling us there was a bomb in the theatre; the interventions of the flying squad; the way the bosses’ press highlighted the incident"
Guiseppe Pinelli was born in 1928 in Milan; he was born into poverty, and took low-paid work. He was an anarchist, a rail worker at the time of his death. Pinelli was also an activist, working on a number of issues. His death in December 1969 is highly suspicious. What is astonishing about the play was the information presented in it is all true. It is all true apart from the names that had been evidently changed and the role of the maniac was clearly an invention of Foe’s. He had gone some way to gain access of the large amount of information on the case. But Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, were dissidents and subversives of course, the usual, middle-class bourgeois theatre-goers were becoming a bore for them, the influence of Brecht and Gramsci persuaded the pair to take their skills - they were both actors - to grass roots organisations such as the work place and in communist groups.
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian neo-Marxist theorist, intellectual and founder of the Italian communist party, most famous for his prison note books, founded the phrase ‘cultural hegemony,' it can easily be defined. Cultural hegemony is in many ways identical to Herbert Marcus’ repressive tolerance. The term is relevant more today than it perhaps was in 1926, when he coined the term, which, oddly enough, is the same year Fo was born. Cultural hegemony then, is the doctrine that a society is dominated by one elite group, who seek to rule over others, using measures to induce the populace by whatever means to think, behave and evolve the same way. Popular culture, for example, is a good modern example of this: follow the trends or the rest of “civilised” society will seek to isolate you. Well, Fo and Rame were very much influenced by him. The reason why Fo stands out in this respect is because few were and are like him. Very few dare to challenge the hegemony of state power and the procedures of parliament. But this does come at a cost.
On the ninth of March,1973 Franca Rame was abducted by five men; consequently, she was beaten, tortured and raped. When the ordeal was over they left her in the park. Two months later Rame was working again. In 1975 she wrote and performed a monologue inspired from the ordeal called Lo Stupro (The Rape). One may ask, as terrible as this is, what is its relevance in its current context; well, that is the shocking element, as if rape and torture was not shocking enough.. It was not until 25 years later when this information was revealed. It took Rame five years to speak about the experience. A captain in the Pastrengo division of the police department, Niccolo Bozzo commented, “The news that Franca Rame had been raped was received as though someone had done the division a great favour.” The police had organised the abduction and rape carried out by fascists. A few years before the abduction Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico was written and performed. It is the Italian police that are being lampooned, ridiculed and satirised in the play.
The plot of the play is simple enough. A “maniac” is brought into the police station and questioned, but the police here are presented rather stupidly in broad farce, later on in the play this same maniac, in his disguise, claims to be a judge, he induces the police officers present to believe he is opening the case of the death of an anarchist, who, so it was believed, threw himself out of the window in this very police station. As the play moves along, it gets all the more absurd, nonsensical even and hilarious. The play is clever because it allows Fo, in the form of the Maniac, to reveal factual information about the real-life Pinelli case, about the collusion of the Italian police with fascist terrorist groups and the corruption which is present throughout the play.
Inspector Bertozzo, at the beginning of the play, during his so-called interrogation of the Maniac, reading from a sheet of paper, remarks “It says here ‘pyschiatrist’". then the following exchange occurs
Well done – but after the full stop! Are you familiar with the rules of grammar and punctuation? Read it properly: Professor Antonio Rabbi. Full stop. Then there's a capital P. Psychiatrist! Now look, you can't tell me it's going under false pretences to say: 'psychiatrist.' I presume you're familiar with the grammar of the Italian language? Yes? Well in that case you should know that if a person writes 'archaeologist' it doesn't mean he's studied – it's like saying 'stamp collector','vegetarian', 'arthritis sufferer'…
INSPECTOR BERTOZZO: Yes, but what about this: 'Formerly lecturer at the University of Padova'?
MANIAC: I'm sorry, now you're the one trading under false pretences: you just told me that you knew the rules of grammar and punctuation, and now it turns out that you can't even read properly…
INSPECTOR BERTOZZO: I can't even what...?!
MANIAC: Didn't you see the comma after the 'formerly?'
When approaching this play, one should be aware of the political climate Italy was facing at the time. There were 173 terrorist attacks, mostly from extremist fascist groups in Italy of a period of just over a year before the play was written, that is quite a shock for people to learn but that is nothing compared to the number of terrorist attacks from 1969 to 1980 in Italy. They stand at 4,298. It is unclear how many of these attacks the police colluded with them or knew about in advance. The astonishing facts go on, and the second half of Foe’s play touches on these issues. Maria Feletti, is a journalist in the play, the Maniac, who I shall speak about more in moment, along with the journalist, draw out information which present factual information in this fictional play.
I suppose nobody's told you either that out of a total of 173 bomb attacks that have happened in the past year and a bit, at a rate of twelve a month, one every three days – out of 173 attacks, as I was saying [She reads from a report] at least 102 have been proved to have been organised by fascist organisations, aided or abetted by the police, with the explicit intention of putting the blame on Left-wing political groups.
When Dario Fo won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, many said he did not deserve it for different reasons of course, but few can name authors who unravel unpleasant truths on such a grand scale and dedicate their life to unveiling and revealing these facts; when any author does this it is not a comfortable life they are living. They are declared enemies in their own country, constantly attacked at every corner they turn their gaze; Fo revitalised theatre, as Harold Pinter did in his own country, and was demonised and vilified even more so than Fo. In fact Fo was nominated for the prize in the 1970s, but they gave it to Saul Bellow. In a marvellous piece of buffoonery and farce in Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico , we again, see fact in this play, this time discussing the fateful last moments of the anarchist, at this point the Maniac is dressed as a judge, while he observes the police officers squirming and panicking:
here we are, at midnight, in the middle of December, and the window was still wide open. In other words, it couldn't have been cold...And if it wasn't cold, that can only mean that the sun hadn't gone down... Or maybe it went down later than usual – one o'clock, perhaps, like Norway in July.
SUPERINTENDENT: Not at all. We'd just opened it to get a bit of fresh air in, hadn't we?
SPORTS JACKET: Yes, there was a lot of smoke.
CONSTABLE: The anarchist smoked a lot, you know!
MANIAC: So you opened the windows. And the shutters too?
SPORTS JACKET: Yes.
MANIAC: In December? At midnight, with the thermometer sub-zero, and a freezing fog...? 'Open the windows – who cares if we all die of pneumonia!'
Evidently, it is clear what happened to Pinelli that day, Fo does not need to say it, the evidence he shows in the play is overwhelming, which is why, in many respects, the artist can do more, a lot more than political power in altering people’s view of the world; but more than that it makes people think, anything that provokes thought of this kind is clearly progression of some kind. The incident of course, which is why Pinelli was in the police station to begin with was because of a bomb attack. On the twelfth of December, 1969, there was a terrorist attack which killed sixteen people in Milan. Pinelli was innocent of course but that did not matter; it is one of those things which people have forgotten about, it is Fo’s role to make sure people do not forget these things. Memory, in this Orwellian world may serve well for Beckett even.
In 1997, when Dario Fo won the Nobel prize for Literature, he addressed the academy under the title of “Against Jesters who Defame and Insult”. On receiving the prestigious award the Nobel committee gave it to Fo who “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden". In the speech itself he addresses a number of important issues, but aside from his most famous play there are many, many other works. Misero Buffo (Mystery Play), which was performed around 5,000 times, was a monologue discussing the Medieval theatre and scenes which were wonderfully written. The Vatican condemned it, which is not too surprising for its blasphemy - their favourite word. One, thinks, once again of Gramsci when he says the following in his Nobel-winning speech:
Young people easily succumb to the bombardment of gratuitous banalities and obscenities that each day is served to them by the mass media: heartless TV action films where in the space of ten minutes they are treated to three rapes, two assassinations, one beating and a serial crash involving ten cars on a bridge that then collapses, whereupon everything-cars, drivers and passengers - precipitates into the sea...only one person survives the fall, but he doesn't know how to swim and so drowns, to the cheers of the crowd of curious onlookers that suddenly has appeared on the scene.
At the very last sentence of the speech he ends it perfectly by saying “Believe me, this prize belongs to both of us.” He was referring to his wife; he, of course is probably right.