Trial of Ragazzi di vita: Free Indirect Speech Enters the Courtroom

In the trial of Ragazzi di vita, the novel accused of obscene language in 1955, the legal discussion in the courtroom was turned into a literary discourse: Pier Paolo Pasolini transformed the judicial case into a literary event; the law became a genre of literature. In his testimony, Pasolini explained to the judges the theory of free indirect discourse which he developed for the first time during the trial and published ten years later in the linguistic essays of Heretical Empiricism. Pasolini was acquitted because of the technique of free indirect discourse: by showing that there was no linguistic and psychological separation between the characters and the narrator, the writer justified his choice of a language that was not his own but belonged to the 'ragazzi di vita.' Pasolini succeeded in shifting the discourse of criminal responsibility from the legal sphere to the literary sphere, asking judges to respect literature and its conventions even before legal prescriptions. The trial ended in 1956 with a favorable sentence for the author and his editor, Livio Garzanti. Despite the positive conclusion of the trial, the sentence did not mention the historical background or the social and philosophical message of the book, which are essential to understand Pasolini's choice of free indirect discourse: the judges did not understand his social aim to give voice to the historically voiceless lower-classes, and include a linguistic minority within a literary community. The essay builds on studies of 'law and literature' and, more specifically, of 'law as literature' or the interpretation of legal language and thought through the methods of literary criticism.