The Politics of Zealotry: St Paul and Pier Paolo Pasolini

• In Event: Epistolary Politics

Abstract

In his crime novel Lucky You (1991) Carl Hiaasen invents a relationship that illuminates the way right wing zealotry can emerge as a collective sensibility. Early in the story he describes, with cinematic detail, two men (who ultimately hatch a plan to rob a lottery winner) getting out of a Dodge Ram truck and entering a convenience store. What helps me initiate my analysis of the media through which zealotry spreads its world view is the ideational symbiosis that takes place once Hiaasen has them (Gazzer a poacher and Chub a counterfeiter, whose bonding is based on a shared contempt for “government, taxes, homosexuals, minorities, gun laws, assertive women and honest work”) in conversation: “Chub never thought of himself as having a political agenda until he met Bode Gazzer, who helped organize Chub's multitude of hatreds into a single venomous philosophy….[e. g. the conspiracy theory Gazzer imparts] ‘Oklahoma,’ Bode Gazzer said sharply, ‘and that was the government did it, to frame those two white boys. No, I'm talking 'bout a militia. Armed, disciplined and well-regulated. Like it says in the Second Amendment’."
The influence of Gazzer on Chub is well captured in Jean Paul Sartre’s remark, “Words wreck havoc when they happen to name something that is experienced but is not yet named.” However Sartre’s insight needs a supplement, a specification of the ideational susceptibilities, historical situations and media genres within which words generate their effects. Hiaasen framed the reactionary political allegiance shared and interpersonally enhanced in the relationship between his characters in 1991 before the internet (the contemporary ecumene) had become a medium for generating and spreading far wider and more rapidly their conspiracy-susceptible mindset - the organization of a “multitude of hatreds into a single venomous philosophy” that his novel describes so well.
In what follows I reach back historically to an older media genre, the letter and reorder the motivation from hatred to love and from reaction to revolution to analyze and contextualize Saint Paul’s revolutionary political theology, which emerged to initiate an inchoate Christian ecumene, struggling to survive in the one over which Rome ruled. In so doing I focus on the significance of encounters on the road where Paul’s epistles met their recipients. Situating Paul as a carrier of the will to believe, as he has become present through commentary and translation, my approach conceptualizes his symbolic and physical journey with resort to M. M. Bakhtin’s literary genre, the “chronotope of the road.” Conceiving Paul’s revolutionary road show in this way opens my analysis to a genre shift in which I frame his story as a “road movie,” which is a project that Pier Paolo Pasolini attempted (in a never produced screenplay), and which, with elaborate reference to his effort, I want to restage.

Author

• Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawaii, Manoa