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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 346-350 F.T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose. Ed. Luce Marinetti; trans. Elizabeth R. Napier & Barbara R. Studholme; with an essay by Paolo Valesio. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2002; xix+250 pp.; ISBN: 0300041039 (pbk.); LC call no.: PQ4829.A78 A255; US$50.00 In his contribution to this very important anthology of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s poetry in English translation, Paolo Valesio makes an observation that has profound implications for an understanding of the theorist of futurism: “Futurism,” Valesio writes, “was the cultural movement whose affirmation, ironically, has been the strongest obstacle to an adequate recognition of the artistic and intellectual achievement of its founder” (149). The reception of Marinetti as a poet and artist among scholars of modernism outside the field of Italian Studies could not be described better: though he remains for the most part unread except for a handful of carefully selected manifestoes, Marinetti is nevertheless trotted out whenever a facile and unexamined connection between modernism and fascism or misogyny or the fetishization of technology needs to be established. Blissfully uninterested in the temporal and ideological differences between Marinetti’s early manifestoes and the fascist cultural program, or of the complex and contradictory relationship between the poet and the regime, some still seem to see in him little more than a convenient cipher for “fascist modernism,” especially useful in view of the fact that, within the English canon, even Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis can no longer be disposed of quite so cavalierly.[1] Of course, the relative paucity of works by Marinetti in translation does not help (they include two novels, Mafarka the Futurist and The Untameables, an all-too-rare collection of creative texts edited by Richard Pioli, and a number of manifestoes collected by R.W. Flint, a select few of which have been reprinted in innumerable anthologies). This volume should begin to rectify the situation, and at least force scholars to confront Marinetti’s works, and not only the commonplaces that make up his legend. The editor of the volume, Marinetti’s daughter Luce, has made a judicious choice of poetic texts that spans the whole of the writer’s career, from the 1898 “The Old Sailors” to Poems to Beny, a series of poems written for his wife Benedetta between 1920 and 1938, and published only posthumously in 1971. This makes it possible to chart in some detail the evolution of Marinetti’s career, starting with his beginnings as a late symbolist poet influenced by Gustave Kahn in his choice of free verse, and by Stéphane Mallarmé in his view of poetic language as a means to allude, in an always shifting and elusive way, to the ineffable beyond material and sensory experience (indeed, Marinetti declared Mallarmé, the [end page 346] future object of futurist scorn in the manifesto “We Repudiate Our Symbolist Masters, Last Lovers of the Moon” of 1911, as his favourite non-living poet in an enquête for L’Ermitage in 1902). In the three major works of the first decade of the new century – The Conquest of the Stars (1902), Destruction (1904) and The Sensual City (1908) – Marinetti developed a personal symbology that reverberated throughout his œuvre, from the association of the stars with the stalest tropes and figures of the poetic tradition and, by extension, with the stifling and pervasive influence of the past (an articulation of a Nietzschean theme common to much turn-of-the-century modernism), to the identification of a series of images signifying modernity and linked by the common element of energy and dynamism (initially the sea and the sun and then, with The Sensual City, the machine). These works, however, also demonstrate a progressive departure from the themes of fin-de-siècle symbolism and the search for a language that might best articulate poetically the experience of the modern metropolis. The 1912 “political novel in free verse,” The Monoplane of the Pope, is a transitional work in several respects. The tension between its patriotic and nationalist content on the one hand and the continued use of French as the main language of artistic expression on the other is paralleled by that between the articulation of a futurist program with the 1909 manifesto of foundation and several subsequent pronouncements and the recourse to the substantially traditionalist scheme of verse libre in the poem. At this point literary futurism is very much a movement in search of a poetics (the painters were much more à l’avant-garde in that respect). The true revolution comes with the theory of words in freedom and the production of a series of works that reject the stability of traditional syntax and develop a variety of new communicative strategies in which the word functions not only as a linguistic sign but also as a visual one – both iconically and indexically – to construct an unprecedented type of communicative environment. Generous selections from Zong Toomb Toomb (1912-13), Marinetti’s “reportage” of the siege of Adrianople during the first Balkan war, and of “words-in-freedom” tables from Les Mots en liberté futuristes (1919) exemplify the radical nature of Marinetti’s poetic experiments. One of the more interesting documents, published for the first time in this anthology, is the draft for a manifesto theorizing “fusedwords in freedom” (motsfondus en liberté), from the mostly unpublished Marinetti archives at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. Indeed, this text might well mark the furthest point in the poet’s linguistic and typographical revolution. The volume is the only anthology of Marinetti’s poetry of this scope in any language (it is quite remarkable that nothing comparable exists either [end page 347] in Italian or French). What emerges from this diachronic perspective on Marinetti’s poetry is its coherence: the volume maps the poet’s continued engagement with and eventual demolition of poetic language, showing how at the core of his experimentalism lies the desire to find a solution to the problem of the distance between language and world that had come forth with all its disruptive power with symbolism. Initially seduced by a Mallarméan poetics of indirection and suggestion of the isolated word that suddenly shines forth in its essential nature and denies the arbitrariness of common speech, Marinetti then gradually comes to recognize that it is precisely that arbitrariness that constitutes language in all its forms, including poetry. The task of the poet thus becomes that of struggling with words and with their materiality, to construct networks of images (linguistic and visual) and sounds by means of the most diverse procedures, in order to give momentary shape to fragments of an always shifting and changing reality (hence, also, his insistence on movement and dynamism). The work of art is not what endures, but rather what accepts the ephemeral nature of any communicative situation, and the poem becomes something akin to a musical score (Marinetti was well-known for his poetic readings) that must be activated each time in the act of its performance. The volume is usefully complemented by a prefatory essay by Luce Marinetti that provides a concise introduction to the poet’s life and works, as well as by extensive notes to the individual poems and an appendix with the original texts. The most important contribution to the critical apparatus, however, is Valesio’s essay mentioned above “‘The Most Enduring and Most Honored Name.’ Marinetti as Poet,” which brings to the fore, in an insightful and provocative way, a number of the more complex aspects of Marinetti’s poetry and of futurism. From the beginning futurism holds within itself the tensions and aporias – historicism vs. antihistoricism, mass appeal versus elitism, order versus chaos, desecration versus exaltation of art – that characterize the historical avant-garde as a whole, and as such it sets the pattern for the other cultural formations grouped under the label of “historical avant-garde.” In this context, Marinetti’s great contribution as a poet is the re-invention of the lyrical tradition. He is, in Valesio’s words, “a displaced lyricist; he gives his lyrical best in a variety of media and genres that are not primarily lyrical […]. In this sense, Marinetti is the pertinent figure for contemporary poetry: he reconstructs the lyric by assaulting lyricism” (156). Valesio’s essay is particularly insightful in pointing out how Marinetti’s futurist discourse, for all its apodictical statements, is in fact characterized by a continuous blurring of distinctions and boundaries (of genres, of disciplines, of discourses), so that for example the rejection of aesthetics in favour of technology, exemplified by the famous statement from the first manifesto that “a roaring automobile which seems to run on [end page 348] machine-gun fire is more beautiful that the Victory of Samothrace” (qtd. 157) entails a broad-ranging re-articulation of received notions on both aesthetics and technology. Likewise, by renouncing traditional modes of poetic composition, Marinetti weaved a lyrical strain within the other genres that he practiced and the other media with which he was engaged. And there is finally a radical otherness to certain of his works such as Zong Toomb Toomb that seems to make them still capable of delivering the kind of shock that other now “normalized” foundational texts of modernism – The Waste Land, for one – no longer convey. But Zong Toomb Toomb also remains one of the ideologically more problematic and even disturbing texts of futurism, because, as Valesio notes, its philosophical challenge lies in “the presentation of war as a quickening of life rather than as a process of death and destruction” (160). What this anthology makes possible is a discussion of all these aspects of futurism that is informed by an actual engagement with the text rather than by a foregone moral(istic) condemnation.
[1]. For instance, in a recent work on fascism and modernism, Laura Frost writes: The fascist modernists also give voice to fascism’s rhetoric of eroticized antagonism, glorified violence and masculine virility, as well as its fear and oppression of women and homosexuals. For example, Marinetti’s sexualized paeans to power in Let’s Murder the Moonshine (“See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred by the friction of courage, [the] shapeless vulva that spreads to offer itself to the terrific spasm of final victory”) reiterate the violently sexualized discourse of Mussolini, Hitler, and other fascist propagandists. (Sex Drives. Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2002: 4) The problem here, it seems to me, is that Marinetti’s text cannot quite reiterate any sort of fascist discourse because the manifesto “Let’s Murder the Moonshine” was published in 1909, well before any such thing as fascism existed. Of course, fascist ideology itself is the result of the coming together of a series of ideologemes already present in different forms in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century culture, modernist and otherwise, and it is quite legitimate to point out the common elements linking futurism and fascism. However, the inversion of the historical [end page 349] relation between them makes it possible to assign the former to the cultural space of the latter (Marinetti’s rhetoric of sexualized violence, in other words, merely exemplifies a broader fascist discourse), and this in turn allows for the quick dismissal of Marinetti’s movement and works. On the contrary, one might perhaps more usefully pose a series of questions that are too often evaded in favor of generalizations. Such questions might include: to what extent did fascist rhetoric adopt and adapt futurist strategies and ideas, and how did it transform them for its own purposes? (the relative positions of futurism and fascism on such things as women’s sexuality and social roles were quite different, for instance); to what extent did futurism reflect broader modernist trends that may have flowed into fascist ideology but may have also developed in different directions? (the question of the relationship between futurism and anarchism, for example, remains to this day relatively unexplored); or how did the rhetoric of sexualized violence in futurism compare and relate to that of less ideologically suspect movements such as surrealism? For two balanced and unprejudiced readings, in English, of the ideological contradictions of Marinetti and futurism, see Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism. Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993; and Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism. F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. On futurism and women, Lucia Re’s essay “Futurism and Feminism” (Annali d’Italianistica 7 [1989]: 253-72) remains fundamental.
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