La maestà della vita: Testori polemista (1977-1982)

In the period from 1977 to 1982, Giovanni Testori collected a certain number of articles of a civic and polemical nature – which appeared in the «Corriere della Sera» and the weekly «Il Sabato» – and printed them under the title The majesty of life. With these anthological pages a second and intense creative season opens for the writer, but at the same time the confrontation with a polemicist of rank like Pasolini, recently assassinated in Ostia, begins. Although originally aligned, almost syntonic in the name
of a heated populism, the path of the two writers seems to have reached
a crossroads. It is therefore appropriate to examine two of the major aspects
of tangency, of the Testorian particularity; two aspects that are connected:
1 – the strategies of authoritativeness that underlie his speeches
(a theme usually little treated but nodal) and 2 – the reconsecration of the
expressive word, of the literary verb, a program that Testori explicitly pursues
and following which he shows that he clearly distances himself from
the main stream of his time.