In lavishing gratis copies upon an unsuspecting world Marinetti was violating one of the cardinal principles of the publishing trade, that of profit. But his real goal was to see the book distributed as rapidly as possible, attempting to augment its value with a maximum of commitment to advertising and promotion. Such techniques horrified Giuseppe Prezzolini, who, though hardly a commercial publisher, liked to think of himself as a cultural impresario with experience in the techniques of organizing intellectual activities, and on these grounds offered a defense for the laws of the marketplace:
A Futurist book is no longer worth a penny...who would ever be such an imbecile as to buy a Futurist volume when everyone knows that all one has to do is send a greeting card to F. T. Marinetti, Corso Venezia, 61, Milan, to have the mail disgorging a large packet full of books upon one's doorstep--and to know that one will regularly receive all the others that the factory of Futurism will publish in the future?...Something that is given away has less value than something bought.... 24
Prezzolini's judgment is quite plainly and quite wholly negative. Marinetti is not a cultural organizer, but a "disorganizer." Yet his analysis fails to take into account the situation in which Marinetti was operating: that of the avant-garde, which by its very nature tends to violate every received law, placing itself in a polemical relation to reigning rules and protocols. Marinetti, in fact, privileged the immediate diffusion of the creative product, imposing it upon the public with rules and rhythms of his own making: the gratis copy, on closed analysis, is an expedient for rapidly and indeed almost immediately making contact with the right people, for eliminating the mediation of distributors and bookstores. Though a portion of a press run might be reserved for the normal channels of sales and distribution, it was always a minor one.
Oddly, this publishing system did not prevent some books from selling quite well, such as the collectively authored volume I poeti futuristi (The Futurist poets; 1912), which, with a "real press run of 20,000 copies," 25 soon proved a remunerative enterprise. Exulting in his triumph, Marinetti announces his promotion of it to Palazzeschi: "It will be distributed in Europe and America, with more than American vigor. I will place two to three hundred copies at the disposition of each contributing poet." 26 His project proved successful and the anthology sold well; Marinetti, evidently satisfied, informed Palazzeschi that booksellers were repeatedly placing orders for more copies:
This one is selling in a truly exceptional way.... To think of it! Some booksellers, such as Baldini and Castoldi, for example, have requested additional copies seven times, which means that we have already sold roughly two hundred copies through each principal bookseller....Even if the newspapers are exclusively filled with stories about the war, the volume of Poeti futuristi is competing with the war for space. 27
One more example might be the pamphlet "Sintesi futurista della guerra" (Futurist synthesis of the war; 1914), printed in the climate of the interventionist campaign, which had a press run of "more than 20,000 copies." 28 It depicts the World War through the graphic image of a wedge, with the word "Futurism" written in the center, the top of which touches a curve representing "Passéism," a composition anticipating that of the famous Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919-20) by El Lissitzky.
Already these res suggest that Marinetti, far from being solely the "disorganizer" indicted by Prezzolini, was in reality an "organizer" of an entirely new type, the inventor of the artistic avant-garde as a cultural enterprise and shaper of public opinion. This was a dialectical phenomenon composed of two opposing factors: destruction and construction. In Futurist theory and practice the nihilistic aspects are united with the constructive ones in a mixture of spontaneity and rationality, a mixture characteristic of Marinetti's own personality, in which the absolute love of poetry "was accompanied by exceptional organizational and propagandistic gifts, in which, in a Nietzschean manner, a sultry heart coexisted with a cool mind." 29
Marinetti, moreover, was an artisan of great stature. If his objectives were grandiose, his enterprise for realizing them was remarkably small. In the "heroic" period of the "words-in-freedom," one of his followers (Cesare Cavanna) collaborated closely with a trusted typographer (working for Angelo Taveggia) under directions furnished by Marinetti during every stage of printing, from the rough sketch to the completed volume. Busying himself with every detail, from the selection of paper to the design of the cover, all the way up to the launching of publicity and press relations, Marinetti displayed an uncommon degree of skill and mastery of detail. And yet the editorial committee of Futurism was extremely modest, composed of Marinetti and his secretary Decio Cinti, his two servants Marietta and Nina Angelini, and one or more Futurist volunteers (Boccioni, Buzzi, Russolo), with its headquarters always located in his house in Milan, until 1912 at Via Senato, 2, and then until 1924 in Corso Venezia, 61.
Yet if the institutional structure in which Marinetti's publishing activities unfolded was essentially artisanal in nature, his editions pursued goals that might well be termed industrial, goals expressed both in the publicity systems that he used and in the substantial press runs that he printed, typically ranging from one to two thousand copies, with an occasional run of twenty thousand. The first edition of Palazzeschi's L'Incendiario (Arsonist; 1910) was roughly a thousand copies, the second surpassed two thousand. Nearly always, however, Marinetti announced press runs that were far above the real res: on the cover of Luciano Folgore's Il canto dei motori (The song of motors; 1912), for example, he reports that the edition comprises "eight thousand copies." But in private he wrote to Folgore, "I have had 2,000 copies of your volume printed, so there should be some left over. For the others, naturally, the press run is at least seven or eight thousand copies." 30
Yet whatever the res, they are considerably higher than the one hundred copies of the first books of Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob, published by the art dealer and publisher Kahnweiler, or the three to six hundred copies of the works of Mayakovsky, also published in the Futurist series though outside of the official publishing house. Yet such large press runs, notable for a publishing firm as small as Marinetti's really was, responded to a self-conscious decision: Marinetti was opposed to the rare and precious volume, printed in a limited quantity of numbered copies and destined for a wealthy public, for bibliophiles or art collectors, and instead he viewed the book as a militant product aimed at wide usage. In this respect his editions differed both from those of the Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists--almost always in limited editions ornamented with engravings and designs--and from those of the Russian Futurists, self-published with duplicating machines and artisanal decorations. Marinetti, in other words, genuinely believed in the possibility of an avant-garde publishing venture that would extend far beyond purely literary and artistic circles to reach the man in the street.
One of the most interesting editorial goals that he pursued was represented by the so-called "typographic revolution" theorized in the manifestos on literature. Through a subversion of the rules of composition, Marinetti proposed to regenerate the book by means of a new compositional and graphic language. The page, no longer viewed as passive screen conditioned by rules of symmetry and harmony, becomes a dynamic field that is open to the games of free and expressive orthography, to the visual values of letters themselves, to the sounds and noises represented typographically, and to graphic components and designed analogies. Typography, no longer considered the humble maidservant of writing, is called upon to play an essential role in the process of the work's creation: for the first time within the Gutenbeg Galaxy one witnesses a hot fusion of technology and poetry. The book is transformed into a living organism that implies the involvment of the reader, to whom is assigned the task of interpreting and decoding the message, now constructed of linguistic, verbal, phonetic, and visual materials. If the Futurist painters sought to place the spectator at the center of the canvas, Marinetti, with his creation of "words-in-freedom," pursued a similar goal: to place the reader at the center of the book and the page. Such a program destroys the traditional role of illustration as something posterior that has been tied on to the text; all the visual aspects of the work are now resolved within the ambience of free-word writing. 31
The precedent for this utilization of typography for its expressive functions, as is well known, was set by Mallarmé in his poem "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard," which for the first time had introduced into poetry the use of typographical characters in a manner that had hitherto been reserved for newspapers and posters. 32 But Marinetti's "words-in-freedom" codified this new expressiveness and made it correspond to the perceptual simultaneity that typified the new man shaped by technology. Marinetti's theories unleashed a flood of "words-in-freedom" writing in Futurist journals, newspapers, and books, and those that were issued by his own publishing firm included a number of modern classics: Luciano Folgore's Ponti sull'Oceano (Bridges on the ocean; 1914), which had a cover designed by Sant'Elia; Corrado Govoni's extraordinary pictographs and typographical experiments in Rarefazioni e Parole in Libertà (Rarefactions and words-in-freedom; 1915); Paolo Buzzi's L'Elisse e la Spirale (The helix and the spiral; 1915); Francesco Cangiullo's Piedigrotta ; and Marinetti's own masterpieces, Zang Tumb Tuum and Les mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist words-in-freedom; 1919). In addition to these there were the three major theoretical works that would prove of great importance for the future of the avant-garde: Boccioni's Pittura Scultura Futuriste (Futurist painting scupture; 1914); Carrà's Guerrapittura (Warpainting; 1915), and Russolo's L'arte dei rumori (The art of noises; 1916). 33
The period dominated by the "free-word" works represented the most significant moment in the trajectory of Marinetti's editorial activities, a trajectory that encompassed two distinct phases: one centered in Milan, the other in Rome. The first includes the period generally referred to as the moment of "heroic" futurism, from 1909 to 1914, as well as the years of the Great War and the early 1920s. The second begins in 1925, the year when Marinetti moved to Rome to an apartment on Piazza Adriana, 30, and continues until 1943, the year of Mussolini's fall. The later stage was marked by a drop in the level of production and a change in the criteria that guided Marinetti's operations as a publisher. After 1925 or thereabouts, Marinetti no longer availed himself of the kinds of publicity and advertising systems that he had used so effectively before: the pamphelts and "puffs" that had been prepared for the press disappeared, and even the name "Futurist Editions of Poesia" was reduced to a trademark that was frequently ceded to authors who paid their own costs of publication. Nor was there a favored typographer who executed complex works under Marinetti's close supervision; now each author would usually follow his own publication through whatever press was located most conveniently for him. Marinetti, it should be added, also found himself in a period when his financial resources were severely reduced. The changed circumstances meant that books of exceptional quality now became a rarity, though there were still the two extraordinary books of "litho-tin," which is to say, books made entirely of tin with full-color serigraphs. They constitute the farthest point that Marinetti reached in his experiments with the book as object: one was titled L'anguria lirica (The lyrical watermelon; 1934) by Tullio d'Albisola, with designs by Bruno Munari; the other, Parole in libertà futuriste tattili termiche olfattive (Futurist words-in-freedom, tactile thermic olfactory; 1932), by Marinetti with graphics by Tullio d'Albisola. 34
Writing in 1916, Terenzio Grandi argued that there was a deep consonance between the aesthetic principles of the Futurists and what he called "the art of typography." a common ground that had a double aspect. 35 On the one hand, Marinetti's "words-in-freedom" used certain expressive modules plainly derived from the lettering of contemporary advertisements, while on the other it was becoming increasingly evident that more advanced and modern advertisements were drawing upon styles and designs that had been pioneered by Futurism. Marinetti was aware of these later developments and did much to encourage them, and by the later 1930s, when advertising graphics were being rapidly developed in Italy under the influence of Futurism, "elementary typography," and Bauhaus, Marinetti could justly claim that much of the most recent advertising was drawing upon ideas that stemmed from the grammar and aesthetics of his movement:
Commercial firms were increasingly demanding a maximum of clarity without any possible equivocation concerning their product or their location and in wall posters this produced a sudden revolution of words-in-freedom with its plastic typography in multiple perspectives reliefs planes depths with its free orthography its alogical shifts in time of words outside of syntax and literary habits. Words in freedom were found running luminously across the fronts of buildings and the terraces of houses climbing everywhere stripped of syntax and ready to say everything because they had become plastic in their isolation and their percussive throbbing. 36
Through the vehicle of advertising the avant-garde had invaded the great cities and so realized one of the Futurist ambitions: to leave the museum and extend art into the streets and public spaces, as Mayakovsky had so famously announced. When an austerity program prompted the fascist regime to threaten abolishing electric signs in the center of Milan, Marinetti swiftly wrote an open letter to Mussolini in their defense, arguing that they created a "childish" and "illusory nocturnal jewelry" that constituted the modern decoration of the metropolis, a viewpoint that had already been implicitly formulated by Sant'Elia in his designs for the "new city" in 1914. 37 Especially during the 1920s and 1930s many Futurists, and chiefly Fortunato Depero, worked actively in the world of advertising, designing billboards, graphics, booths and pavilions for commercial fairs, shopwindows, and theoretical texts. The great example of the collective contribution of the group was supposed to be the Almanacco dell' Italia veloce (Almanac of quickening Italy), a volume that was announced on several occasions but never actually issued; a single specimen of it has survived, rich in original graphic formulations by Balla, Prampolini, and others, and preceded by a theoretical essay by Marinetti that urges the necessity of advertising that is multimedia and many faceted in its expressiveness. 38 The urge to combine art and advertising found curious expression in two of Marinetti's late books: one, Il poema del vestito di latte (The poem of the clothing made of milk; 1937), which is a hymn to the wool-like synthetic "lanital," extracted from the chemical caseine, and Il poema di torre viscosa (The poem of the viscose tower; 1938), which treats the production of cellulose. Both were published by the National Italian Company for Viscose, and neither is valued very highly today. 39
What these productions Marinetti had essentially come full circle, from the publicity of art to the art of publicity, always in search of a new lexicon with which to attract the public, always seeking news ways to transmit and popularize the products of Futurism. Whereas earlier he had sought to employ the tools of publicity within the environment of art, now he sought to employ art and artists in the world of advertising. And yet throughout the long course of his career he displayed the same exceptional gift for inventing strategies and tactics in order to market the objects that he considered to be of value. Rarely have the poet and the entrepreneur been so combined in a single re. Yet as one critic has observed, the scales were never evenly weighted; Marinetti always remained "more responsive to the exciting odor of talents waiting to be picked just at the moment of birth than faithful to the dogmas that he himself had proposed." 40
Claudia Salariis is a noted scholar on the history and literature of Futurism and the avant-garde. Among other books, she has published Storia del Futurismo (History of Futurism; 1985, 1992), Il Futurismo e la pubblicità (Futurism and advertising; 1986), Bibliografia del Futurismo (Bibliography of Futurism; 1988), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with essays by Maurizio Calvesi and Luce Marinetti . Marinetti Editore (Marinetti as publisher; 1990), and Artecrazia: l'avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo (Artocracy: the Futurist avant-garde under fascism; 1992.)
1. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Sohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-51.
2. The original reads: "comme les simples mortels," "tout semblable à vous, comme vous voyez!" Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975), 1:352.
3. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," in R. W. Flint, ed., Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), 48-49. hereafter abbreviated LMM. The original reads:
Oh! materno fossato, quasi pieno di un'acqua fangosa! Bel fossato d'officina! Io gustai avidamente la tua melma fortificante, che mi ricordò la santa mammella nera della mia nutrice sudanese...Quando mi sollevai--cencio sozzo e puzzolente--di sotto la macchina capovolta, mi sentii attraversare il cuore, deliziosamente, dal ferro arroventato della gioia.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo," in F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1991), 9, hereafter abbreviated TIF.
4. The original reads:
Marinetti aveva capito fino da allora il potere della pubblicità che doveva raggiungere fatti e persone a tutte le profondità e a tutte le altezze, nessuno escluso della compagine sociale...usarla per i problemi dello spirito era ritenuta dai benpensanti tale ignominia per cui nessun vocabolario possedeva una parola infamante per poterla degnamente qualificare.
Aldo Palazzeschi, "Prefazione," TIF, xxi.
5. See, for example, Giuseppe Prezzolini, L'arte di persuadere (Florence: Lunachi, 1907).
6. The original reads:
Per lui tutto è uguale, purché sia della sua ditta. Bravissimo a lanciar l'articolo, non bada se vende roba fine o grossolana: per lui è tutta roba di prima qualità.
Giuseppe Prezzolini, La coltura italiana (Florence: Società anonima La Voce, 1923), 254.
7. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista. Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1969), 92.
8. The original reads:
Noi siamo pochi domatori in una gabbia di belve ruggenti ma impaurite. Uscirete di qui domati portando in voi un'ammirazione involontaria che non saprete reprimere.... Siete seimila mediocrità contro otto artisti dei quali non potete negare il formidabile ingegno!
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Grande Serata Futurista. Firenze--Teatro Verdi--12 Dicembre 1913. Resoconto sintetico (fisico e spirituale) della battaglia," in Lacerba (15 December 1913): 282.
9. For a historical account of Marinetti's activities as a publisher see Claudia Salaris, Marinetti editore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), on which I also draw in the discussion to follow (hereafter abbreviated ME).
10. Cf. ME, 31-53. A reprint of the journal Poesia has recently been edited by Françoise Livi, Poesia (1905-1909) (Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1992). For other discussions of Marinetti's publishing see: Mario Verdone, Prosa e critica futurista (Milan; Feltrinelli, 1973), 14-17; Pablo Echaurren, Le edizione futuriste di "Poesia" (Rome: Quaderni di Futilità, 1981); and Giovanni Lista, Le Livre futuriste (Modena: Panini, 1984).
11. Enquête internationale sur le vers libre et Manifeste du Futurisme par F. T. Marinetti (Milan: Editions of Poesia, 1909).
12. For a complete bibliography see Claudia Salaris, Bibliografia del futurismo (Rome: Biblioteca del Vascello/Stampa alternativa, 1988) and idem Storia del futurismo, 2nd rev. ed. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992).
13. The original reads: "ventimila copie," "era diffusa per i quattro quinti tra gli operai." Antonio Gramsci, letter to Lev Trotsky, September 1922, in Antonio Gramsci, 2000 pagine di Gramsci, ed. Giansiro Ferrata, vol. 1, Nel tempo della lotta (Milan: Saggiatore, 1964), 633-35; cited in G. Battista Nazzaro, Introduzione al Futurismo (Naples: Guida editori, 1984), 14, n. 4.
14. The original reads: "Sono convinto che una volta sparita la censura, si potrebbe superare le massime tirature di Lacerba cioè le 18.000 copie." Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, letter to Mario Carli, 20 January 1919, in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Mario Carli, Lettere futuriste tra arte e politica, ed. Claudia Salaris (Rome: Officina, 1989), 68.
15. The original reads: "Diecimila copie." Quoted in Siro Ferrone, Aldo Palazzeschi. Mostra biobibliografica (Florence: Palazzo Strozzi, 1976): 19. The second original reads: "'Lacerba' va a ruba. Grandi discussioni--e conversioni. Il numero è piaciuto molto e delle 8.000 copie ne rimangono poche." Giovanni Papini, letter to Aldo Palazzeschi, 24 March 1913, in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Aldo Palazzeschi, Carteggio, ed. Paolo Prestigiacomo (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1978), 129, hereafter abbreviated C.
16. The original reads:
Oggi s'è finito di stampare L[acerba] e avrai subito le 3000 copie. Troverai in principio un articolo mio che ho voluto intitolare Contro il Futurismo. Non ti spaventare. L'ho fatto apposta per attirare l'attenzione e la curiosità della gente. È una apologia dei Fut[uristi].... Non ti avere a male se ripeto un paio di volte che non sono futurista. È necessario per la tattica.
Giovanni Papini, letter to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 18 March 1913; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Marinetti Papers; cited in ME, 144.
17. Marinetti, La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, 284.
18. The original reads:
Ebbi la fortuna di ereditare da mio padre una discreta sostanza, ma non me ne sono mai servito in modo basso e banale. Mi sono avvalso, anzi della mia posizione indipendente per attuare un mio vasto e audace progetto di rinovamento intellettuale e artistico in Italia: quello di proteggere, incoraggiare ed aiutare materialmente i giovani ingegni novatori e ribelli che quotidianamente vengono soffocati dall'indifferenza, dall'avarizia o dalla miopia degli editori.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Interrogatorio di F. T. Marinetti," in "Il processo e l'assoluzione di Mafarka il futurista," appendix to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Distruzione. Poema futurista (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1922), 4.
19. F. T. Marinetti, Mafarka il futurista, trans. Decio Cinti (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1910).
20. The original reads:
Causa la mia povertà e la necessità che ebbi di conquistarmi un posto con studi antideali, le mie tendenze letterarie sarebbero morte chissà da quanto, se non avessi incontrato il faro elettrico di che sai. E, venuto a contatto con gli editori anche grandi, mi avvidi subito della cattiva mediocrità e del bottegaismo feroce che li anima: cosicché il tornare, con una opera di poesia disinteressata, all'antica fucina folle, mi diede sempre un fremito d'entusiasmo e, quel che più conta, un po' di coraggio, di fede verso l'avvenire.
Paolo Buzzi, letter to Aldo Palazzeschi, 15 March 1914, in appendix to C, 103-04.
21. F. T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tuuum (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1914).
22. The original reads: "Noi riserviamo le Edizioni futuriste di 'Poesia' a quelle opere assolutamente futuriste che per la violenza e l'estremismo del pensiero e per le difficoltà tipografiche non possono essere pubblicate dagli editori." Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Le parole in libertà di Armando Mazza," in Armando Mazza, Firmamento (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di Poesia, 1920), 11.
23. The original reads:
Non appena in mille copie fu stampato il libro, trattandosi di consegnare i consueti omaggi alla stampa e a qualche amico, Marinetti a tale proposito mi consegnò un grosso scartafaccio che presi a sfogliare con progessivo sgomento. Si trattava di settecento e più nominativi con relativo indirizzo e ai quali con tanto di dedica si doveva mandarlo. Le poche e sparute copie rimaste sarebbero state dispensate ad alcuni librai delle principali città senza un minimo di fretta come fatto di nessuna importanza dopo quel tutto esaurito che lo aveva preceduto.
Aldo Palazzeschi, "Prefazione," in TIF, xxii-xxiii.
24. The original reads:
Il libro futurista non vale più nulla...Chi è mai stato così imbecille da comprare un libro futurista, quando sa che inviando un semplice biglietto da visita a F. T. Marinetti, Corso Venezia, 61, Milano, se ne vedrà scaraventar dalla posta un intero pacco, e, più tardi, riceverà regolarmente tutti quegli altri che l'officina futurista va pubblicando? ...la roba regalata val meno di quella pagata..."
Giovanni Prezzolini, "Marinetti disorganizzatore," in La Voce 7 (30 March 1915): 510-17, here 511-12.
25. Libero Altomare, Mario Bètuda, Paolo Buzzi, et al., I Poeti Futuristi (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1912); the original reads: "una prima tiratura reale di 20.000 copie." F. T. Marinetti, letter to Palazzeschi [June 1912]. C, 70.
26. The original reads: "Sarà diffuso in Europa e in America, con uno slancio più che americano. Metterò a disposizione di ognuno dei poeti del gruppo due o trecento copie," Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, letter to Aldo Palazzeschi [June 1912], C, 70.
27. The original reads:
Questo si vende in modo veramente eccezionale.... Pensa che alcuni librai, come per esempio Baldini e Castoldi, ne hanno ridomandato copie sette volte, il che vuol dire una vendita già avvenuta di circa duecento copie da ogni principale libraio.... Malgrado che i giornali siano pieni soltanto della guerra, il volume dei Poeti futuristi contende alla guerra la spazio.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, letter to Aldo Palazzeschi [October 1912], C, 71.
28. "Sintesi futurista della guerra," pamphlet issued by the Direction of the Futurist Movement in Milan in 1914. The original reads: "più di 20.000 copie." F. T. Marinetti, letter to Luciano Folgore. 5 November [1914], in Luciano Folgore and F. T. Marinetti, Carteggio futurista, ed. Francesco Muzzioli (Rome: Officina, 1987), 70.
29. The original reads: "s'accompagnava a eccezionali doti organizzative e propagandistiche, in cui, nietzscheanamente, un cuore afoso coesisteva con una testa fredda." Luciano De Maria, "Marinetti costruttore," in his La nascita dell'avanguardia (Venice: Marsilio, 1986), 13.
30. Aldo Palazzeschi, L'Incendiario (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1910); Luciano Folgore, Il canto dei motori (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1912). The original reads: "ottavo migliaio," "Ho fatto tirare 2.000 copie del tuo volume, quindi ne resteranno. Naturalmente, per gli altri, la tiratura è almeno di sette o ottomila copie." Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, letter to Luciano Folgore, [April 1912], in Folgore and Marinetti, Carteggio futurista, 46.
31. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" (11 May 1912), in LMM, 92-97; and in Italian, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista," TIF, 46-54. See also his "Risposta alle obiezioni" (11 August 1912), in TIF, 55-62; and his "Destruction of Syntax-- Imagination Without Strings--Words-in-Freedom" (11 May 1913), in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umberto Apollonio (New York: Viking, 1973), 95-106; and in Italian, "Distruzione della sintassi-- Immaginazione senza fili--parole in libertà," in TIF, 65-80. See also his "Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility" (18 March 1914) in LMM, 103-111, and in Italian, "Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica," in TIF, 98-107.
32. The poem first appeared in the journal Cosmopolis in May 1897, but remained little known until published as an independent volume in 1914. For Marinetti's use of this text see Noëmi Blumenkranz-Onimus, La Poésie futuriste italienne (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), 34-35.
33. Luciano Folgore, Ponti sull'Oceano (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1914); Corrado Govoni, Rarefazioni e Parole in Libertà (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1915); Paolo Buzzi, L'Elisse e la Spirale (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1915); Francesco Cangiullo, Piedigrotta (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1916); F. T. Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tuuum; idem, Les mots en liberté futuristes (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1919); Umberto Boccioni, Pittura scultura futuriste (Dinamismo plastico) (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1914); Carlo Carrà, Guerrapittura (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1915); Luigi Russolo, L'Arte dei rumori (Milan, Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1916).
34. Tullio d'Albisola, L'anguria lirica (Milan: Futurist editions of Poesia, 1934); F. T. Marinetti, Parole in libertà futuriste tattili termiche olfattive (Milan: Futurist Editions of Poesia, 1932); see cover illustration of this journal.
35. "Arte tipografica," is discussed by Terenzio Grandi, "Futurismo tipografico," extract from L'Arte tipografica (Turin: R. Scuola, 1916). See also Claudia Salaris, Il futurismo e la pubblicità (Milan: Lupetti, 1986), hereafter abbreviated as FP; Giovanni Fanelli-Ezio Godoli, Il futurismo e la grafica (Milan: Comunità, 1988); Claudia Salaris, "Le futurisme et la publicité," in Art et publicité 1890-1990 (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1990), 180-90.
36. The original reads:
Le ditte d'altra parte esigevano sempre più la massima chiarezza senza equivoco possibile di indicazioni sulla specialità o il recapito e ciò induceva di colpo negli avvisi murali la rivoluzione delle parole in libertà con la sua plastica tipografica a prospettive rilievi piani diversi profondità con una sua ortografia libera il suo movimento alogico di tempi di verbi fuori dalla sintassi e dalle abitudini letterarie. Le parole in libertà si videro anche correre luminosamente sui frontoni e sulle terrazze delle case si arrampicarono dovunque ognuna svestita dal suo periodo pronta a dire tutto perché divenuta plastica nel suo isolamento e nel suo palpito tempista.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Estetica della pubblicità," in Artecrazia 6 (11 February 1938); cited in Salaris, FP, 123.
37. The original reads: "Infantile" and "illusoria gioielleria notturna," F. T. Marinetti, "Gli avvisi luminosi. Lettera aperta a S. E. Mussolini," in L'Impero 5 (12 February 1927); cited in FP, 121.
38. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, "Programma Almanacco Italia veloce," in Almanacco dell'Italia veloce (Milan: Edizioni Metropoli, 1930).
39. F. T. Marinetti, Il poema del vestito di latte (Milan: Edition of the Propaganda Office of Snia Viscosa, 1937); idem, Gli aeropoeti futuristi dedicano al Duce Il Poema di Torre Viscosa (Milan: Edition of the Propaganda Office of Snia Viscosa, 1938).
40. Luciano Anceschi, "E Marinetti liberò il verso," in Il Resto del Carlino (Bologna), 5 June 1982; reprinted in Alfabeta/La quinzaine littéraire 8 (May 1986): 5.
It pleases me to scrutinize and ascertain that which I truly possess in the propeller myth, and thus also the nature of the propeller's impulsion or propulsion. One thing seems clear: that the propeller cannot be just "any old myth."
--Carlo Emilio Gadda 1
Driven by the propeller myth of Carlo Emilio Gadda, this essay derives its title from the opening paragraph of Marinetti's 1912 "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature": to be precise, from its famous description of how the poet, seated on the fuel tank of a soaring biplane, first felt the need to free language from the prison house of traditional syntactical form. You will recall that this exordium is pronounced by a re well known to readers of La Conquête des étoiles , Mafarka le futuriste , and the early Futurist manifestos: Marinetti's boastful and boisterous first-person narrator/orator persona. The phrase "io sentii l'inanità ridicola della vecchia sintassi ereditata da Omero" (I felt the ridiculous inanity of the old syntax inherited from Homer) thus has a familiar ring to it, linked as it is with Marinetti's usual claims of clairvoyance and prophetic urgency. By the paragraph's end, however, this "I" has been recast in a less customary role, that of taking dictation...from a propeller.
"Ecco che cosa mi disse l'elica turbinante, mentre filavo a duecento metri sopra i possenti fumaiuoli di Milano. E l'elica soggiunse...." (This is what the swirling propeller told me as I sped along at two hundred meters above the powerful smokestacks of Milan. And the propeller added....) 2 Dictation taken from an object. A cutting-edge object, to be sure, but a mere object, all the same, and one that is infringing on the place usually reserved for Marinetti's blunt-edged egocentric muse. Yet the manifesto is unambiguous: a propeller, not a poet, will do the talking; a propeller will dictate from on high the laws that are to govern modern poetic discourse and define the desublimated forms of individuality and subjectivity attached thereto.
It might be objected that, despite this opening gambit, the poet-scribe's silence does not last for very long. By article 7 of the manifesto his voice is cutting back into the propeller's chatter, merging with its modernist whir as if to enact the manifesto's closing dream of a fusion of motor and man, metal and flesh. 3 The takeover is complete once the properly "technical" portion of the argument has concluded, whereupon dictation ceases and the poet reasserts total control: "looking at objects from a new point of view," he proclaims, "I have been able to demolish the old logical fetters and the leaden wires of ancient understanding." 4 So, the "Technical Manifesto" animates the voice of a propeller only in order to absorb it within the poet's own voice, and to remake that voice in the image of the new mechanical kingdom that Futurist poetry is called upon at once to presage and reproduce. The object world represented by the propeller is only a pretext, the true goal being the modernization and expansion of the poet's subjectivity. But if such is an adequate account of the overall trajectory of the manifesto, I would like to return to and interrogate Marinetti's opening fiction a bit further. For example, why is it desirable that this particular mechanical muse should propel the discourse of the "Technical Manifesto"? Why should a propeller stand in for the animated objects, courageous metals, and capricious motors that make up the manifesto's redeemed material world? In what ways does Marinetti's propeller prosopopeia regulate the manifesto's argument and form? In the following remarks I will be addressing questions such as these through close scrutiny of the manifesto itself and by means of a lateral sectioning of the airspace in and around the manifesto's propeller screw.
What I am especially interested in is the multiplicity of simultaneous semiotic chains, institutions, technologies, and historical circumstances whose determinations interconnect in the 1912 "Technical Manifesto". Of particular concern to me, for example, will be emerging links among various apparently unrelated technologies developed during the second industrial revolution, the cognitive possibilities opened up by the experience of flight, and the way in which certain modes of organization and coordination that first arose during the early years of aviation (and, especially, military aviation) rendered "thinkable" forms of literary expression like those prophesied and practiced by Marinetti. I am therefore unconcerned with establishing an argument founded primarily on notions of causal explanation or genealogical development, although I remain committed to the philological reconstruction of certain aspects of Marinetti's text, and take for granted the inaugural role that the "Technical Manifesto" played with respect to Futurism's later aerial formulations of fascist modernism. My deeper concern, rather, lies with sampling the vintage 1912 air breathed by Marinetti's mechanical muse. And, in so doing, I will be operating in a speculative middle zone somewhere in between the sharply polarized assessments of Marinetti offered by, among others. Edoardo Sanguineti and Luciano De Maria: that is, between the former's version of Marinetti as the hack recycler of contemporary commonplaces, and the latter's depiction of Marinetti the revolutionary and founding father of cultural modernity. 5
I begin with a grammatical detail that is easily overlooked--the passati remoti (past absolute) 6 mentioned above, featured in the preface to the manifesto: "sentii l'inanità ridicola" and "ecco che cosa mi disse l'elica." Although a standard rhetorical feature of the manifesto form, the temporal disjunction signaled here corresponds to an actual chronological gap of nearly two years. The "Technical Manifesto" was composed between January and May 1912, in the period after Marinetti's return from the Battle of Tripoli where he participated "in all the most violent, most virile, and most heroic actions" of that colonial war. 7 The months in question were times of relative glory for Futurist art, but of crisis for Futurist poetry. In the words of the poet Aldo Palazzeschi, author of L'incendiario : "Do you [Marinetti] know that no one talks about Futurist poetry any longer? About painting yes, but poetry seems to have drowned in everyone's eyes. Hardly surprising given that the poets are dead silent! Foremost among them the chief!" 8 In response to pleadings of this sort, Marinetti had promised "to dedicate himself exclusively to [the triumph of] Futurist literature" and the "Technical Manifesto" was the device by means of which he hoped to relaunch the movement's literary wing. 9 The Futurist leader had first climbed aboard an aircraft some two and one-half years before sitting down to pen the 1912 manifesto: in September 1909, to be precise, during the first international air meet at Brescia ( 1). 10 The Brescia event was of momentous importance; not only did it launch the aviation craze in Italy, but it also introduced the muses into an Italian aerodrome for the first time. During ten days of accident-prone races, which included a competition for slancio--a key Futurist term (best translated as élan)--Marinetti had been only one among a number of poets to hitch rides, however brief, around the field before an audience that included the young Franz Kafka. 11 Foremost among the aspiring poet-aviators was Gabriele D'Annunzio, who alone was honored with a full eight-minute flight by the aerial luminary of the moment, the American pilot Glenn Curtiss ( 2). D'Annunzio's ascent was, like every act of aviation first accomplished during this era, copiously chronicled in the contemporary press by means of a combination of image and industrial print technologies (multiple typefaces, parallel columns, boldfacing, etc.), as well by means of wireless telegraphy. A photograph of and full-length interview with Luigi Barzini were, for instance, featured on page 3 of the Corriere della Sera on the following day, in the course of which D'Annunzio had proclaimed the birth of no less than "a new sensation...a new necessity, a new passion." 12 The terza pagina ("third page"--the standard cultural/intellectual page in Italian newspapers) was (and remains) the standard forum for cultural debate within the new public sphere constituted by daily mass circulation newspapers; this specifically "cultural" collocation of aviation was the rule from 1909 through the early 1930s. Aviation poems; the stories of feats accomplished by individual flyers, their accidents and falls, their biographies and photographs; accounts of rival nations' attempts to gain aerial supremacy; international flight meets; flight trophies; and even technical developments in flight technology were featured on terza pagine under the rubric of "The Conquest of the Air" alongside more conventional cultural fare and in addition to front-page headlines trumpeting such media events as Louis Blériot's English Channel crossing and the not infrequent breaking of altitude and distance records. 13
Nor was the relation between daily newspapers and aviation one of mere reflection, for the medium itself had assumed an active role right from the start. Aviation was one of the era's defining forms of spectacle so, like its British and French counterparts, the Corriere had provided the prize monies for the Brescia air meet in return for special coverage rights, as well as offering third-page coverage of the event's cultural ramifications. Among the latter would be D'Annuncio's Forse che sì, forse che no (Perhaps yes, perhaps no), the first true aviation novel, as well as an influential oration, also dating from the following year, entitled "Per il dominio dei cieli" (For the dominance of the skies). 14 Less well known, however, is the flood of other literary artifacts with para-Futurist resonances produced in the immediate wake of the Brescia meet by minor poets such as Alberto Alberti and Giovanni Bertacchi. 15 In the former's All'età ventura (For the coming era), for instance, within the arc of a poetic cycle that leads its reader through a sequence of chapters entitled "La macchina" (The machine), "Il passato" (The past), "L'avvenire" (The future), "Gli uomini nuovi" (The new men), and "Il pensiero e l'infinito" (Thought and the infinite), Alberti sings of a winged contraption that with its "leading edge exposed / plunges into battle / with machine-gun fire." 16 Bertacchi's "Canto d'aerea vita" (The song of aerial life) similarly celebrates the ability of the new ethos of flight to descend from the supreme hero of modern times--the pilot/athlete--down into the hearts of the masses "where the new conquest will live again translated into life's everyday rhythms." 17 And this new aerial, quotidian reality is then identified with the familiar Marinettian theme of the passage via technology out of legend into a transred daily life: "I see history peopled with heroes and new exploits in continents of air; I see the city of Icaria with its free children, moving from myth into reality." 18
Many other examples could be cited in order to show just how widespread was Bertacchi's conviction that in the age of industry and the masses--an era, in the words of Edmond Rostand, "without inebriation and where the soul lay idle"--aviation alone could resuscitate art, the individual, and an ethos of heroism. (Rostand's own 1911 Le Cantique de l'aile, for instance, sings of how, thanks to the discovery of flight, "Daring is reborn as well as Exploit!" and how "the Hero, long retired beneath his tent like the Greek hero, has now ripped down the pulsing cloth and flown away with it!") 19 But beyond wishing to point to aviation's key place in the early twentieth-century imagination, my concern here is to underscore one of the 1912 manifesto's essential frame conditions: namely, the existence of a network binding aviation to contemporary literary forms, to the news media, to industrial typography and image technologies, and to new technologically inflected redefinitions of both heroism and everyday life--a network that was already solidly in place when Marinetti embarked on his first true flight nearly one year after the events of Brescia. In other words, Futurism was less ahead of the trend line than alongside it when, in September 1910 at the Milan International Air Week, Marinetti stepped up onto the wing of Giovanni Bielovucic's biplane to set off on the overflight of industrial Milan described a full year and a half later in the opening paragraph of the "Technical Manifesto". 20 The flight in question, "two hundred meters above Milan's powerful smokestacks," was one of the earliest such passenger flights in northern Italy, since only one week earlier Germano Ruggerone had been the first Italian to overfly the Madonnina of the Milanese Duomo ( 3). 21 It occurred, moreover, under the shadow cast by the era's most recent aerial exploit, Juan Chavez's crossing of the Alps, which ended in a fatal crash landing on 23 September--an event coordinated by wireless telegraphy, greeted by daily banner headlines, mourned by millions, and commemorated in terza pagina poems by Giovanni Pascoli ("Ode a Chavez" [Ode to Chavez]), Cesco Tomaselli ("Il prodigio fatale" [The fatal feat]), and E. A. Butti ("L'elegia del volo mortale" [Elegy on a mortal flight]). 22 If such background considerations may help to explain the "Technical Manifesto's" definition of art as "a [heroic] need for self-destruction and dispersal" through innovation, and its promise to "free [mechanical] man from the idea of death," it is only by turning to certain technical features of Marinetti's flight that the opening paragraph locks into focus. 23
The Voisin biplane on which the poet-scribe took his dictation--apparently the same as that imagined back in April 1909 in the manifesto in which he had first imagined himself as an aviator-bombadier, "Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna" (Let's kill the moonshine)--was already of outmoded design ( 4). 24 Its pilot, a young Peruvian like Chavez, was seated on the lower wing with his feet extending forward into a short cockpit equipped with lateral ailerons. To his sides extended a double set of wings (around six feet apart, six feet deep, and forty feet in total wingspan) joined together by vertical struts and by four vertical panels, which combined to form symmetrical cells on each end of the wing with a broad rectangular "window" at their center. The tail took the form of a box kite. Above and behind the pilot, atop the fuel tank, there was space enough for a single passenger, whose lower body, as indicated in the manifesto, 25 would have been partially shielded from the airflow by the aviator's head. Directly behind the passenger was a noisy fifty-horsepower E.N.V. engine with the propeller screw facing backwards, pushing rather than pulling the airship. (Bielovucic's airplane was, in other words, what contemporaries called a "pusher.")
This design bears a number of perceptual-symbolic consequences that may help account for the "Technical Manifesto's" constant oscillation between a poetics of agitated matter associated with aviation's links to the more "intuitive" senses of touch, smell, and hearing, and a poetics of image streams associated instead with aviation's impact on the faculty of sight. I begin with the first. The Voisin's design is such that, as was typical of early aircraft, the poet-passenger's body, rather than that of the pilot, forms a single physical unit with the engine, fuel system, and propeller chassis ( 5). Unable to communicate with the pilot because of the deafening din, he participates instead in the mechanical rhythms and physical vibrations emanating from the engine/propeller complex--the noises, weights, and odors exalted at the manifesto's midpoint. 26 But most of all what he hears is the roar that constitutes the propeller screw's "dictation." 27 Reaching him from behind, "roared" into his ear and relayed directly to his body by the pulsating motor and chassis, the propeller's talk is identified with the principal mystery of flight as then conceived: the fact that masses of metal, wood, and cloth loaded down with human bodies could become airborne, which is to say "dematerialized" and "spiritualized," simply by means of the acceleration produced by an internal combustion engine. Advances in engine design such as the advent of rotary cylinder layouts had more than doubled the speed and duration of flights by 1911. But with increased power came increased danger and unreliability.
All three attributes--power, danger, and unreliability--are advantageous from Marinetti's viewpoint, since they permit the development of a body/machine complex founded on notions of struggle, sacrifice, feverish effort, and expenditure: an aesthetic (i.e. non-productivist) body/machine complex that runs counter to the complexes being devised within the domains of scientific management (Taylor)and the "science of work," which were founded instead on notions of body/machine harmony, energy conservation, and freedom from fatigue. 28 Let me clarify. If motors were to become fully reliable and peril-free, as was the dream of turn-of-the-century mechanical and social engineers, they would embody earthbound and library-bound rationalism and promote the attenuation of instinct in the name of predictability, standardization, and the leveling of human differences. For Marinetti, to the contrary, it was imperative that motors remain quite literal motori a scatto (internal combustion motors), mechanisms that, no matter how technically perfect, are always capable of lunging, sputtering, or exploding due to their capricious, excessive, individualistic nature. This because motors were meant to function as adversaries, as enemy doubles of a human subject who, in the process of taming the always menacing machine, was called upon to metallize himself and to transform his own distinctive vital scatti, his own "breathing, sensibility, and instincts," into those of "metals, minerals, and wood." 29 Hence, the new visionary will be a man like Arturo Mercanti, the organizer of the 1910 Transalpine crossing and of other celebrated aerial exploits; a man who, according to one reporter from the Corriere della Sera, generates not a stable output, but an always-about-to-double horsepower:
He knows that when his ideas strike, they sting and stun; and his first task is to shatter this initial mental wall of dark diffidence. He propagates his ideas with brutal candor: brusquely demolishing, discussing, dismantling. Someone resists him? He attacks furiously, convinces him, enthralls him....There exist, evidently, men cast in the same mold as internal combustion motors. In ordinary circumstances they can produce fifty horsepower, but when push comes to shove they can yield even one hundred. 30
Within the setting of this "surplus-only" model of production, the engine of Bielovucic's biplane may be said to contribute in a twofold manner to the "Technical Manifesto's" own distinctively Futurist (and, in most regards, protofascist) body/ machine complex. 31 In the first place, it is a producer of power, noise, and rapid mechanical rhythms, which are themselves source materials for the words-in-freedom poet. In the second place, this motor is also necessarily a producer of surprises, surprises that, in turn, generate acts of heroism, improvisation, and innovation on the part of its human counterpart, who, abhorring earthbound logic and laws, is obliged to exercise his "higher" instinctual faculties while faced with the imminent prospect of injury or death. 32 "Without poetry's uninterrupted succession of new images," the "Technical Manifesto" proclaims, "there is nothing but anemia and chlorosis," and, in keeping with this polarity, the Futurist body/machine complex is designed to produce an infinite proliferation of novelties and to forestall the onset of repetition (identified with a return to the "dark diffidence," effeminacy, and decay of the fin de siècle). 33
The motor jutting out behind the poet-passenger's back on Bielovucic's Voisin would of course be grounded were it not for the presence of a propeller screw. And whereas the former was made of metal, the latter had to be made of laminated lacquered wood. At the time of Marinetti's 1910 flight, experiments were underway with other surface treatments (copper, lacquer-impregnated linen) and technologies (cast metal) in order to reduce propeller torsion and skin friction. But the problem with metal was excessive weight, so in order to balance the need for lightness and strength, wood became the material of choice. The wood propeller's intermediate position between the weightlessness associated with the airplane's sail-like wings 34 and the weight associated instead with the engine (in other words, between the aerial and metallic aspects of an aircraft's identity), corresponded to its location at a symbolic crossroads: right at the center of the cross formed by the airplane's wings and its perpendicular fuselage. 35 Symbolic considerations such as these, bolstered by the propeller's crucial role as the translator of an engine's power into actual physical thrust, led the contemporary imagination to transform it into the very emblem of that material dematerialization of matter in which the miracle of flight was thought to consist. I employ the word "miracle" because it suggests just how thoroughly the already secularized romantic language of transcendence and sublimity was grafted onto the technology of flight during these early years, even within the domains of aeronautic science and engineering. 36 The airplane, or "aeroplane" as it was oftentimes denoted, was thus imagined as a crucifix, and the pilot as a self-sacrificing god; its propeller or wings became the "wingèd oarage" employed by Virgil in the remigium alarum topos to describe Daedalus's flight, 37 by Church Fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine to represent the human soul's flight from the body's fallen materiality, and by Dante to deepen the tragedy of Ulysses's folle volo (mad flight) in the pursuit of secular knowledge. 38 In the specific case of the propeller screw I offer as a first example of Futurism's contribution an unpublished Marinettian text entitled "L'elica e il paesaggio" (probably dating from the 1920s), in which the female protagonist, a "propeller, halo of the new divinity, the machine," vanquishes the universe by streaming triumphantly up into the sky in five-hundred-meter leaps and bounds. 39 Similarly, throughout the "Technical Manifesto's" immediate predecessor, Le Monoplan du Pape , the propeller is at once delicate and fierce. A fearsome borer of the heavens driven by the poet's pulsing motor/heart, it slaps the aviator in the face with indefatigable gusts of wind. 40 Nonetheless, Le Monoplan's propeller is less a shrew than a floral screw: a "purring" or "swirling rose"; a "vast African rose, drunk with flirtatious insects" that can be offered up as a gift to the rising sun by the poet's motor/heart. 41
Such conceits are ubiquitous not just in Marinetti's writings, but also within the period as a whole. To cite but one example, a technical aeronautics text from the immediate post-World War I ear does not hesitate to describe the motor as the airplane's heart and the propeller as its soul:
Isn't [the propeller] soul-like in its infinite smallness with respect to the whole airplane, in its imponderability when twirling at high speeds, in its invisibility as it traverses the ether's azure? A soul in its makeup, since even a slight tap can cause it to exhale its last breath; so often a mere caress will prompt it to expire. 42
Here, as in the prior propeller-halo equation and in Le Monoplan's propeller-rose, the screw is unambiguously female. So too, I would submit, in the propeller prologue to the "Technical Manifesto" and in numerous other Futurist aviatory works extending from Marinetti's Danza dell'aviatrice (Dance of the aviatrix; 1916) 43 through aeropoems like Giovanni Rotiroti's Eliche sul cuore (Propellers on the heart; 1939) and aeropaintings like Sante Monachesi's Desiderio di eliche (Propeller desire) and Tullio d'Albissola's ceramic designs (both from the late 1930s) (. 6 and 7). (I note in passing the names of Giacomo Balla's two daughters: Elica and Ala ("Propeller" and "Wing"). Whether she assumes the guise of an aureole forming over the motor or of a fragile soul attached to a masculine body/motor, or merely functions as a mechanical muse, the propeller behind the motor is always the little woman behind the big man: a thrust device just like the woman celebrated decades later by Benedetta as "apex and propeller of the spiritual-aesthetic expansion of the great fascist Italy" led by il Duce. 44 In the specific case of the "Technical Manifesto," the woman in question--be she mistress or muse--is implicitly identified with the materiality of wood. 45 Not unlike the linguistic material available to the words-in-freedom poet nor unlike the cloth that makes up the airplane's wings, this wood can be freed from the chains that keep it bound to Mother Earth--the chains that bind matter to death and to the "fatally corrosive effects of time" (la fatale corrosione del tempo [TIF, 42]), the chains that shackle words within the laws of logic, syntax, punctuation, spelling, verb tense, and decorum. All of these life-sapping, leaden fetters constitute a tragic reality that can be momentarily overcome through the activation of a higher potentiality that lies dormant within matter (but is nonetheless an integral component): that inner agitation and drive toward "greater ardor, greater movement, a greater subdivision of itself sung in the 1912 manifesto. 46 What is needed to effect this transformation, to get matter airborne, to recover its secret life, and release it into the plenitude of the eternal present, is a masculine force: a motor and a pilot, a poet-flyer endowed with a wireless imagination, an aerodynamic phallus.
There would be much to be said here about the virile subject over whose head looms the propeller-aureole and out of whose body the aircraft's wings obtrude. Identified at the close of the manifesto with Futurism's ideal "mechanical man composed of interchangeable parts," this cyborg-like creature takes to the air in the pursuit of freedom from "death itself, [the] supreme definition of logical intelligence." 47 And, as was earlier implied with regard to the Futurist body/machine complex, his flight from the logic of death often entails a flight from those aspects of female anatomy and sexuality that seem too closely allied with earthbound forms of reproduction. Hence, for instance, in Le Monoplan du Pape, the poet-aviator's claim that "flying at full speed beyond history and anatomy, / on vacation, on vacation, / far from the vulva, gloomy mandatory school!" he becomes "the artist," a "great and abundant being" because endowed with limitless self-generative powers. 48 Likewise, in the conclusion of "Against Love and Parliamentarianism," the dream of creating "a mechanical son, engendered by willpower alone" is invoked as the inebriating spectacle of a Blériot's takeoff causes "strong Futurists" to "feel detached from woman, who has suddenly become...the symbol of the earth that must be left behind." 49 Given the importance of the propeller-myth analyzed above, the larger meaning of these fantasies of self-creation and of escape from the routines imposed by history, woman, work, and school cannot be detachment from the world. Rather it is reattachment, but reattachment under conditions wherein the aviator is free to dictate his law of infinite novelty (against monogamy, monotony, and other principles of repetition and decay). For Marinetti, in other words, flight is less an evasion of sexuality or labor, than a form of hypersexuality that removes prohibitions and multiplies desires. When the Futurist flyer touches down, and touch down he must, he is a changed man. Revirilized, still propped up by his propeller and wings (which have now become an integral part of his body), he springs from his craft "with an ultralight elastic leap" because he has conquered Mother Earth and overturned the iron-clad law that once "obliged man to crawl." 50
It is under the aegis of this mechanized human type, a subject whose anticontemplative mode of apperception Futurist words-in-freedom poetry would aim to transcribe, that I now wish to turn away from the 1912 manifesto's musings on the transration of matter towards what was earlier defined as their visual counterpart, a poetics of image-streams associated with aviation's impact on the faculty of sight. Once again, I take as my point of departure the physical conration of Bielovucic's Voisin. The poet-passenger on such a biplane, elevated as he is above the pilot and his cockpit, has before him an entirely unencumbered, "transparent" visual field, a visual field unavailable in propellerforward monoplane designs even after 1911 (when monoplane wings were set back and the observer's seat raised for purposes of military reconnaissance). The resulting sense of unrestricted vision and direct bodily exposure to the airstream surely must have strengthened in Marinetti the conviction that aerial vision constituted an unmediated, accelerated, and synthetic mode of apprehending the real that would infinitely expand the poet's powers of vision and permit "literature to enter directly into the universe and to form but a single body with it." 51 The single universal body thereby constituted is conceived within the "Technical Manifesto" as an aesthetic totality emanating from and under the control of a poet who is also a conqueror, bombardier, orchestra conductor, and campaign coordinator, much like the re of Arturo Mercanti. But whereas the latter's "totality" consisted of the staging of unprecedented aerial feats over ever new landscapes, of what, one might ask, might the Futurist poet's emanations consist; and just how might the Futurist poet achieve his territorial conquests and acts of coordination? Typically, Marinetti's answer mixes technical-scientific notions with metaphors of late symbolist derivation. The poet's body, by virtue of its being airborne, is hollowed out:
When I flew for the first time with the aviator Bielovucic, I felt my chest open up like a great hole through which, smooth, fresh, and torrential, all the blue of the sky plunged exquisitely. Instead of the slow watered-down sensuality of walks under the sun and amidst flowers, one ought to prefer the ferocious and blood-tingling massage of the raging wind. 52
The "great hole" stands for a momentary effemination whose overall effect is virilizing. It marks the site where earthbound forms of sentimentality and sensuality have been evacuated or vomited forth so as to make room for aerial passions and sensations. 53 Opened up, reinvigorated by the wind's fierce massage, the poet's body is unchained. It can flow out and take possession of the universe by means of networks of perceptual and/or intuitive strings that, woven together, form invisible aerial nets, "invisible" either because they are mental constructs or are envisaged according to a double analogy with flight paths and wireless telegrams, "aerial" because no longer weighed down by the "leaden" ballast of logic or syntax. So light and rapid that the poet's "expansionist gesture can cast them afar...out over a vast ocean," "the mysterious sea of phenomena," these nets yield an ever more bountiful and renewable catch of images that would be unavailable, or so Marinetti implies, were it not for the advent of an imagination that, freed from wires or syntactical strings, is endowed with wings: "words in freedom, the imagination with outspread wings, analogical synthesis of the earth embraced by a single gaze and wholly gathered together in essential words." 54
Several points need to be made with regard to the rhizome that informs the imagist poetics dependent upon airborne sight and according to which the airplane functions as a mechanical intensifier of poetry's "work of analogy." 55 First of all, the link established in the 1912 manifesto between the visual perspectives made available by flight, the aerial communication of synthetic or mechanized messages, and the conquest of abundant "oceans" by a sovereign subject was not of Marinetti's devising. On the contrary, it might be said that between 1910 and 1915 it was very much "in the air." Two examples from quite different contexts, both involving the use of aerial bombardment, come to mind. In November 1911, the Cinzano company began its first experiments with aerial publicity campaigns, launching disk-shaped tricolor flyers bearing an image of the earth surrounded and embraced by a ring representing its world-famous brand of vermouth. 56 In March 1912, this form of intrusion into the everyday lives of city dwellers was extended into the domain of political propaganda by the newly founded Lega Aerea Nazionale, an ultranationalist aviator association that counted D'Annunzio among its staunchest supporters. In order to spread its nationalist gospel of the air, the Lega scattered tricolor manifestos over numerous Italian cities, calling upon the masses to found "the legion of eagles of the skies dedicated to defending borders, wherever there is danger, wherever Italy's flag and name are at stake." 57
Such uses of the airways for purposes of mass persuasion and national mobilization corresponded in turn to two key areas of experimentation within the domain of military aviation with which Marinetti was well familiar: first, the ongoing race among industrialized nations to forge wireless links between aircraft and the ground (Guglielmo Marconi was pursuing such research) and second, the contemporaneous effort to develop aircraft for scouting, gunning, and bombardment purposes. As early as 1910, wireless telegraphy and aviation had become indissociable not just due to the prominence granted to flight by mass circulation newspapers, but also in the minds of contemporary scientists and their sponsors in various European ministries of defense ( 8). Ground-to-air links, it was rightly believed, would greatly enhance the reconnaissance value of aircraft. They would facilitate the rapid deployment of troops and artillery and disperse the "fog of war," giving rise to a battlefield upon which face-to-face combat would be replaced by increasingly "clean" forms of mechanized firepower arriving via the air and coordinated by a central command located far from the theater of battle. 58 It may be worth noting that on a battlefield of this kind there exists an absolute split between the earthbound perspective afforded the ordinary foot soldier and the aerial or overhead perspective available to the commander, a split that may, in turn, help to explain how, in the "Technical Manifesto," the proposed "destruction of the literary I" 59 might engender an even more sovereign literary subject. For the foot soldier, war's violence is experienced as agentless, random, and catastrophic; for the commander (and his Futurist poet counterpart) it is simply the expression of a greatly expanded sense of individual agency: "greatly expanded" because, through the eyes and bodies of his aviators, he can now see the enemy from the air, penetrate his airspace, and be simultaneously present at every point along the front. 60
Now it just so happens that the first testing ground for these concepts was the 1911 Battle of Tripoli, the conflict between the Italian and Turkish armies that Marinetti later described as "the most beautiful aesthetic spectacle of my existence." 61 The spectacle in question involved aerial surveillance, aerial photography, aerial gunning, and even crude experiments with bombardment. (Air-to-ground communications were not yet in use.) And its aesthetic potential would have seemed all the greater due to the presence on the battle front of the documentary filmmaker Luca Comerio. Comerio was perhaps the earliest Italian film journalist; he can be credited with inaugurating the transformation, recently examined by Paul Virilio, of the camera eye into modern warfare's most conspicuous weapon:
On board an airplane, the camera's peep-hole served as an indirect sighting device complementing those attached to the weapons of mass destruction. It thus prered a symptomatic shift in target-location and a growing derealization of military engagement. For in industrialized warfare, where the representation of events outstripped the presentation of facts, the image was starting to gain sway over the object, time over space. 62
Comerio experimented with footage shot from the air, from moving vehicles, and after dark, in coverage that he hoped would both permit civilians to participate in the war's most glorious actions and "remap the world and uncover new visual and representational rhythms and meters." 63 His efforts made the Battle of Tripoli a doubly appropriate incubator for Futurism's new poetics. It permitted words in freedom to be hatched as a literary analog both of the newly mechanized, transparent battlefield and of a montage-based aesthetic or reportage emerging from within the primitive documentary cinema.
Marinetti was the war correspondent in Libya for the French daily L'Intransigeant. The war dispatches that he contributed from the front were soon reshaped into La battaglia di Tripoli, the reportage that provided, in turn, the raw material for his first words-in-freedom poem and the first implementation of the 1912 manifesto's laws: "Battaglia Peso + Odore" (Battle weight + smell) (printed as a supplement to the August 1912 "Risposta alle obiezioni" [Response to objections]). 64 From his earliest accounts, it was the battlefield's aerial dimension that most attracted Marinetti's interest (though in this regard he was no different from the rest of the international press corps). 65 Accordingly, the climactic chapters of La battaglia propel the poet's palpitating but earthbound heart up into the air alongside that of the aerial scout Carlo Piazza, who from this point on becomes the sole narrator. As is the case with all of Marinetti's airplanes, Piazza's Blériot monoplane functions as a kind of celestial writing table from which the aviator can skywrite and leave his mark on the territory to be surveyed and subdued. 66 Carving "at will circles of death through the dangerous waters of the enemy army," Piazza emits a rapid-fire sequence of discontinuous paragraphs variously addressed to comrades, the enemy, the landscape, the reader, all within the framework of what amounts to a crude allegory of arousal, followed by violent penetration and renewal. 67 Saharan Africa's barren womb, plowed by artillery shells, bombs, and airpower--Marinetti's principal alter egos--is delivered from savagery and rendered fruitful through the civilizing violence of Italy's new war technologies. The closing paragraph speaks for itself:
It was in order that lovely salad greens and rose-bushes be born that a grenade carved out that gaping pit...and we will carve out many, many others. We will plant more palm trees, advance sentinels, arranged strategically, to shield new barleys, new cloverbeds, against the swirling sands of the torrid ghibli. 68
The rape of Africa was needed, deserved, and overdue. Every bomb is a smart bomb that, by destroying, plants the seeds of renewal.
I have lingered over La battaglia di Tripoli not because it somehow reveals the darker, "truer" nature of the "Technical Manifesto," but rather because it conjoins two themes that crisscross within the 1912 airspace and with them this essay reaches its close: that of the conquest of the air and the conquest of colonial ground. By the beginning of the second decade of our century, just as a certain secularized rhetoric of transcendence had been grafted onto the technology of flight, so too the related discourses of exploration and colonization had been fully projected onto what was referred to as the "aerial continent." 69 For reasons of brevity, I cite only two illustrations: one from Walter Wellman's The Aerial Age and another from an early debate on aerial law. First Wellman: "For a century or more man has had two great aspirations in the field of progress--one to conquer the unknown parts of the earth, and other to conquer the air. He had already possessed himself of most of the surface of the globe, and now he wished to take possession of the remainder." 70 Irrespective of whether the conqueror was an individual, a collectivity, or a nation, the remainder of the globe here described was to be vanquished through a combination of technological intelligence and reckless adventurism. (Hence Wellman's self-designation as a scientific adventurer.) Instinct and science, violence and civilization, technical progress and the return to primordial forces and values, nationalism and internationalism...all of these binary oppositions could be harmonized within an airspace that remained, for the moment, at once law-bound and above the law. I quote from the jurist Edouard Rollin: "The air is still something unknown to us, and the drawing up of a body of rules in regard to it is of yet premature....[It is like] the center of the African continent some fifty years ago, when the maps indicated it by a great white space vaguely described by geographers as terra incognita." 71 Pronounced in 1906 during the Institut de Droit International's drafting of the legal corpus that would govern flight and wireless telegraphy, these remarks testify to the sometimes willful hesitancy with which international organizations undertook the task of fully regulating the air. Even four years later, years during which the law of the air had been far more exhaustively codified, the inaugural 1910 issue of the Revue Juridique Internationale de la Locomotion Aérienne would still show traces of this reluctance, defining aerial law as "an act of faith in the glorious destiny of aviation" and defining its purpose as that of "favoring the soaring impetus of the individual emancipated from the earth" in "a century of scientific and industrial miracles." 72 If the lyrical tone here seems out of keeping with the prosaic occasion, it points, as do the cases of Rollin and Wellman, to a deeper paradox which resonates within the 1912 manifesto. Whether viewed by those who would regulate and rationalize it, or by those who would survey and conquer it by technological means, the continent of the air was seen by all as humankind's final frontier: a last remaining source of mystery, miracles, novelty, and the unknown; a last refuge for the individual from the humdrum world of work; a last place of transcendence in a resolutely secular age. Something to be preserved, therefore, in its "savage" natural state even as it is conquered and absorbed within earthbound laws and institutions. This is precisely the same paradoxical airspace traversed in the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature." An airspace where literature's future can be legislated through a body of laws above and against all prior literary laws. An airspace where new sovereign forms of individuality can be forged and outdated ones discarded in the face of physical groundlessness and peril. An airspace where nations can compete in the name of international progress. But most of all, an airspace in which metal and flesh, technology and instinct, mind and matter can be pressed together in the pursuit of that vertiginous feeling of outer fullness and inner emptiness that, Marinetti tells us, results when an inspired authorial hand takes to the skies:
[The hand that] separates from the body as it writes, and freely leaves behind a brain that, itself detached and airborne, looks down from on high with terrible lucidity upon the unforeseen phrases emitted by the pen.
Does this domineering brain look on passively or does it instead direct the leaps of fantasy that excite the hand? Impossible to know. In such moments I have observed, from a physiological standpoint, little more than a great void in the stomach. 73
This is what the propeller said.
Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford University and chair of Stanford's Department of Comparative Literature. He is author of Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses (forthcoming) and The Transration of History at the Center of Dante's Paradise .
* This essay was originally written for the March 1993 UCLA celebration of the eightieth anniversary of the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature." It has benefited from the wisdom of numerous friends and colleagues, but I would like to single out Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Timothy Lenoir, with whom, at the time of the essay's composition, I was co-teaching a seminar on "Cultural and Technological Incubations of Fascism." This essay is dedicated to the students and colleagues who participated in that memorable event.
** Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
1. The original reads: "mi piace scrutare e discernere che cosa io detenga veramente nel mito-elica, e però di che qualità sia la impulsione o propulsione del propeller. Mi par proprio d'intravedere che il propeller 'non può essere un mito qualunque.'" Carlo Emilio Gadda, I miti del somaro, ed. Alba Andreini (Milan: Scheiwiller, 1988), 29. Gadda is, of course, concerned not with the propeller as myth, but with the propelling power of myths, such as the infallibility of Mussolini.
2. F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1968); hereafter abbreviated TIF.
3. For example, "gli scrittori si sono abbandonati finora all'analogia immediata" (TIF, 42).
4. The original reads: "guardando gli oggetti da un nuovo punto di vista io ho potuto spezzare le vecchie pastoie logiche e i fili a piombo della comprensione antica: (TIF, 46).
5. For Luciano De Maria see his introduction to TIF, xix-lxxi; for Edoardo Sanguineti, see Ideologia e linguaggio, 2nd ed. (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1970). Sanguineti's critique has been most recently and effectively taken up by Rinaldo Rinaldi in Miracoli della stupidità: Discorso su Marinetti (Turin: Tirrenia, 1986).
6. The "past absolute" is the verb used in narrating distant events; i.e., it suggests a gap between present and past, hence the "temporal disjunction."
7. The full passage reads: "Ho lasciato Tripoli con profondo dolore, poichè vi ho passato i due mesi più belli dellla mia vita. Ho assistito e partecipato a ciò che si è fatto laggiù di più violento, di più virile e di più eroico." Marinetti to Palazzeschi, January 1912, in F. T. Marinetti-Aldo Palazzeschi: Carteggio, ed. Paolo Prestigiacomo (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1978), 61; hereafter abbreviated MPC. Marinetti continues by describing the special thrill of killing three Arab soldiers with his own hands.
8. The original reads: "Ma sapete che di poesia futurista non se ne parla più? Adesso tutti di pittura ma la poesia sembra naufragata agli occhi di tutti. Si capisce, tutti i poeti tacciono! Compreso il capo!" Palazzesche to Marinetti, March 1912 in MPC, 65.
9. The full passage reads: "La situazione, per noi, in Italia migliora di giorno in giorno. Il trionfo della pittura futurista essendo ormai quasi assicurato, mi dedico interamente a quello della letteratura futurists." Marinetti to Palazzeschi, April 1912 in MPC, 65.
10. A detailed description of the Brescia meet can be found in Mario Cobianchi, Pionieri dell'aviazione in Italia (Rome: Editoriale Aeronautico, 1943), 20-33; hereafter abbreviated PAI. For a comprehensive account of the Brescia air meet and its impact on literary history, see Felix Philipp Ingold, Literatur und Aviatik: Europäische Flugdichtung 1909-1927 (Basel and Stuttgart: Birkhäuser, 1978), 20-49.
11. Kafka would later describe his experiences in "Die Aeroplane in Brescia," Bohemia, 29 September 1909, 1-3; translated by G. Humphreys Roberts as "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" in The Penal Colony: Stoeies and Short Pieces, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 297-309.
12. The passage reads: "È una cosa divina. Divina e per ora inesprimibile. Il momento in cui si lascia la terra è di una dolcezza infinita. Si sente allora il nascere di una sensazione nuova.... È un nuovo bisogno, una nuova passione." Gabriele D'Annunzio, cited in Il volo in Italia, ed. Federico Valli and Antonino Foschini (Rome: Editoriale Aeronautica, 1939), 164.
13. In 1909 the French daily L'Intransigeant, for instance, began running a column by Jean Aicard entitled "Aviation et Poésie," in which happenings in the domain of aviation were commented upon in verse.
14. Portions of this speech are reproduced in Il volo in Italia, ed. Valli and Foschini, 165.
15. Some of these poems are reproduced in PAI, 34-37.
16. The original reads: "avanguardia in scoperta / con la fitta mitraglia / si getta alla battaglia" (PAI, 34).
17. The original reads: "[dove] rivivrà composta in consueti ritmi di vita la conquista nuova" (PAI, 36).
18. The original reads: "vedo la storia popolar di eroi / a nuove imprese in continenti d'aria, / e uscir dal mito a realtà, co' suoi / liberi i, la città d'Icaria" (PAI, 36).
19. The original reads:
Donc, c'est lorsqu'on disait le Siècle sans ivresse
Et l'âme sans emploi
Qu'on voit ressusciter tout d'un coup la Prouesse
Et renaître l'Exploit!
Le Héros, qui s'était retiré sous sa tente
Comme le héros grec,
Vient d'arracher soudain la toile palpitante
Pour s'envoler avec!
Edmond Rostand, Le Cantique de l'aile (Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1922), 1. I am indebted to my friend Robert Wohl for this and several other bibliographical references.
20. In his biography of the Futurist poet, Gino Agnese claims that
il vero battesimo dell'aria Marinetti lo ricevette due anni più tardi, alla fine del 1911, quando sorvolò Milano per oltre una mezz'ora sull'aereo di Giovanni Bielovucic, un aviatore giovanissimo, di appena ventidue anni, peruviano di nascita e francese di passaporto, che già l'anno prima era finito nelle pagine dei giornali per essere stato protagonista del raid Parigi-Bordeaux.
Gino Agnese, Marinetti: Una vita esplosiva (Milan: Camunia, 1990), 257. During late 1911, Marinetti was actually on the Libyan front, as indicated by the conclusion of Le Monoplan: "achevé le 29 Novembre 1911, dans les tranchées de Sidi-Messri, près de Tripoli" (F. T. Marinetti, Le Monoplan du Pape: Roman Politique en vers libres [Paris: Sansot, 1912], 348; hereafter abbreviated MP). It is obvious that despite the shift from a biplane to a monoplane indicated in the work's title, Le Monoplan's first chapter functions as a sort of dress rehearsal for the "Technical Manifesto." Just as in the 1912 manifesto's proem, the propeller whirs ("mon hélice épanouit son ronflement" [MP, 7]); earthbound stances are overcome ("mes deux pieds végétaux / ne pompent plus le suc conservateur de la peur / dans la terre prudente!" [MP, 9]); a bird's-eye view of the industrial metropolis is achieved ("me voici suspendu à pic sur la ville" [MP, 9]); and the smoke emanating from factory smokestacks becomes the medium of flight ("je saute de branche en branche / sur la forêt énorme, illusoire des fumées / qui montent des usines: [MP, 10]).
21. Ruggerone's feat was accomplished on 18 September 1910 and received detailed coverage in the Milanese press.
22. These three poems are reproduced in PAI, 99-101, but I have encountered others in French and Italian daily newspapers. The tone of the event may be gauged by the following headline, which graced the front page of Il Corriere della Sera on 24 September 1910: "Il prodigio è avverato. Il gran sogno, la magnifica utopia di ieri è divenuta realtà. L'uomo ha vinto." (A prodigy has been confirmed. The grand dream, yesterday's magical utopia, has become a reality. Man has triumphed.)
23. The original quotes read: "un bisogno di distruggersi e di sparpagliarsi" and "lo libereremo dall'idea della morte" (TIF, 47).
24. "Ecco: il mio biplano multicellulare a coda direttiva: 100 HP, 8 cilindri, 80 chilogrammi.... Ho fra i piedi una minuscola mitragliatrice, che posso scaricare premendo un bottone d'acciaio." (TIF, 22) The Voisin appears to have been based on a Farman design that, though slow and clumsy, was fairly reliable (at least judged by the standards of early aviation). Monoplanes like the Blériot XI, however, were already outdistancing and outflying most biplane designs by late 1910, so Marinetti's choice of a monoplane for his Le Monoplan du Pape indicates the monoplane's greater potential as a Futurist myth.
25. The manifesto reads: "scaldato il ventre dalla testa dell'aviatore" (TIF, 40).
26. As noted later, one of the principal odors and tactile sensations that early pilots and passengers reported (aside from engine vibrations and buffets by the wind), was that of castor oil being burned and/or spattered on their bodies by the aircraft's engine. At the time, castor oil was the best engine lubricant available and its use in racing cars and airplanes, conjoined with its traditional medicinal use as a purgative, made it a particularly apt symbol of the cultural-political purgation carried out, first, by Futurism and, subsequently, by fascism.
27. In the words of Kafka, "One doesn't hear a word, only the noise of the screw seems to give orders, eight hands release the machine, which rolls a long way over the waving ground like a clumsy man on a polished floor" (Kafka, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," 305).
28. On Taylorism and the "science of work" see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); on their cultural ramifications see Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), to whom I am indebted for the concept of "body/machine complexes." A body/machine complex is made up of
the relays between the natural and the technological...relays articulated between the life process and the machine process: the invention of systematic and scientific management and the work of human engineering, and the practices and discourses that manage to "coordinate" the body and the machine...the practices of seeing, controlling, and managing and also the new technologies of writing and information that carry these processes.
Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 3-4.
29. The original reads: "la respirazione, la sensibilità e gli istinti dei metalli, delle pietre, del legno" (TIF, 44). Cf.
l'uomo rubò l'elettricità dello spazio e i carburanti, per crearsi dei nuovi alleati nei motori. L'uomo costrinse i metalli vinti e resi flessibili mediante il fuoco, ad allearsi coi carburanti e l'elettricità. Formò così un esercito di schiavi, ostili e pericolosi ma sufficientemente addomesticati, che lo trasportano velocemente sulle curve della terra. (TIF, 111-12)
On the metaphor of metallization see my "18 BL: Fascist Mass Spectacle," Representations 43 (summer 1993): 89-125.
30. The original reads:
Sa che le sue idee, di colpo, producono uno sbalordimento quasi pauroso, e il suo primo lavoro è di abbattere questa prima siepe mentale di diffidenza oscura. Nella propagazione delle sue idee ha una schiettezza brutale: procede abbattendo, discutendo, smontando, bruscamente. Qualcuno gli resiste? Lo investe rabbioso, lo convince, lo trascina.... Ci sono evidentemente degli uomini sul tipo dei motori a scatto. La loro potenzialità normale è di cinquanta, ma nel momento del bisogno possono rendere anche cento.
"L'organizzatore e l'organizzazione del raid Parigi-Roma-Torino," Corriere della Sera, 3 June 1911, 2.
31. On "metallization" and fascist body/machine complexes see my "18 BL: Fascist Mass Spectacle."
32. It was in this spirit that Marinetti had insisted in his 1910 manifesto Contro i professori that "noi oggi non troviamo altro d'interessante, sulla terra, che le belle morti, continue e disinvolte, degli aviatori. Blériot ebbe ragione di gridare: "Occorrono ancora molti e molti cadaveri, al progresso...!'" (today we find nothing on Earth more interesting than the beautiful deaths of aviators, their continuous and uninhibited deaths. Blériot was right to cry out, "Progress demands many many more cadavers...!" [TIF, 265])
Similarly, in his 1916 "La nuova religione-morale della velocità," he recalls his first flight in the following context: "Correre correre correre volare volare. Pericolo pericolo pericolo pericolo a destra a sinistra sotto sopra dentro fuori fiutare respirare bere la morte" (Speed speed speed fly fly. Danger danger danger danger to the left to the right beneath above within without to smell breathe drink death) [TIF, 116]).
33. The original reads: "La poesia deve essere un seguito ininterotto di immagini nuovo senza di che non è altro che anemia e clorosi" (TIF, 42).
34. This identification was reinforced by the term that D'Annunzio had selected as the Italian translation of the French aeroplane: "Ora v'è un vocabolo di aurea latinità--velivolus, velivolo--consacrato da Ovidio, da Virgilio, registrato anche nel nostro dizionario; il quale ne spiega così la significazione: 'che va e par volare con le vele.'" (Now there is a noble Latin word--velivolus or, in modern Italian, velivolo--consecrated by Ovid and Virgil, and registered in our dictionary, which gives the following definition: "that which is propelled and seems to soar with sails.") Gabriele D'Annunzio, cited in Il volo in Italia, ed. Valli and Foschini, 164.
Cf. Marinetti: "Noi ritagliammo i nostri aeroplani futuristi nella tela color d'ocra dei velieri" (We cut our Futurist airplanes out of the ochre-colored fabric of sailboats [TIF, 22]).
35. The notion that the airplane forms a crucifix can be traced back to the beginnings of aviation. It already appears to have become a commonplace notion by the time of the 1911 Paris Aviation Salon, where the sculptor Roger Bloche proposed that a monument to fallen aviators be constructed in the form of a pilot-Christ re attached to an airplane-cross. It would reach its highest expression in D'Annunzio's famous World War I oration "L'ombra delle ali e l'ombra della croce" (The shadow of wings and the shadow of the cross).
36. On this subject see Ingold, Literatur und Aviatik, 337-69.
37. P. Vergili Maronis, Aneis, bk. 6, l.19, in Opera, vol. 1, ed. T. L. Papillon and A. E. Haigh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892).
38. Dante Alighieri, Inferno, bk. 26, l.125 in La Divina Commedia, vol. 1, ed. Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979). The iconographic links are actually far more complex. Patristic tradition had already identified Christ on the cross with Ulysses bound to the mast of his ship in book 12 of the Odyssey so as to endure the Sirens' song. Topoi involving "airborne" oarage or sails are not infrequent in ancient Greek and Roman texts and can be found in such authors as Virgil, Ovid, and Propertius. They conflate rapid sailing with the flight of birds, both of which were invested with allegorical meanings by Christian Neoplatonists familiar to later authors such as Dante and D'Annunzio. On this subject see Hugo Rahner, Greichische Mythen in christlicher Deutung (Zürich: Rhein Verlag, 1957) and Pierre Courcelle, "Quelques symboles funéraires du néo-platonisme latin: Le vol de Dédale-Ulysse et les Sirènes," Revue des Études Anciennes 46. : 65-93.
39. The original reads: "l'elica, aureola della nuova divinità, la macchina." "L'elica e il paesaggio," n. d. Folder 64, p. 4, Marinetti Archive, Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities. The propeller-protagonist is later referred to as "rosa immateriale fiorita per l'azzurro" , in a context within which Marinetti invokes the topos of the airplane as cross: "I raggi del sole l'hanno orlata di un'iride rosa rossa blu vista mentre parallelamente corre sui campi boschi acque l'ombra a croce iridata dell'aeroplano" . Cf. "nous voyons...Une hélice, en plein ciel, / Monter en tournoyant comme une de ces roues / Que vit Ezéchiel" (Rostand, Le Cantique de l'aile, 15).
40. The original reads: "l'infatigable gifle que le vent de l'hélice / me donne en plein visage" (MP, 250). In chapter 1, the propeller had been referred to as a "tournoyante hélice epouvantable" and as "forte hélice de mon coeur monoplan, / formidable vrille enthousiaste et volontaire" (MP, 20, 21). As for heart-motor and poet-aircraft equations, they are sustained throughout: "c'est lui [mon coeur], qui me soulève e qui m'emporte" (MP, 20); "Je suis le futuriste invincible et puissant / emporté par son coeur au vol infatigable" (MP, 30); "mon coeur-moteur m'entraîne avec l'élan / de trois cent fox-terriers tenus en laisse. / Mon coeur-moteur, quel renard flaires-tu dans le vent?" (MP, 67); "moteur, tu es mon frère, mon compagnon, / mon allié, autant qu'un bon cheval de guerre!..." (MP, 263); "elle [ma libre volonté] est donc identique / à la loi qui gouverne ce beau moteur vivant!" (MP, 265).
41. The original quotes read: "rose ronflante" (MP, 67), "rose tourbillonnante" (MP, 107), and "vaste rose africaine / ivre d'insectes flirtants!" (MP, 282). Some further propeller references include "la fièvre cérébrale / de mon hélice épanouit son ronflement" (MP, 7); "mon hélice délivrante" (MP, 293); and "le prisme de mon hélice" (MP, 319).
42. The original reads:
N'est-ce pas une âme en effet cet infiniment petit par rapport à l'ensemble de l'avion, par son imponderabilité même quand elle tourne à des folles vitesses, par sa fonction quand elle passe invisible dans l'éther azuré? Âme par sa contexture même, car elle exhale souvent sa vie dans un heurt délicat, maintes fois elle expire dans une caresse.
Lucien Chauvière, "La Construction de l'hélice" in his L'Aéronautique pendant la Guerre Mondiale (Paris: De Brunoff, 1919), 198. The author continues, insisting on the propeller's erotic potential:
un léger mouchoir essayant d'arrêter sa course furibonde est quelquefois suffisant pour l'ébrécher, voire même la briser; un objet de quelques centigrammes y laisse des sillons profonds et peut la blesser mortellement, cependant qu'elle subit des forces considérables que l'on peut évaluer à 6000 kilogrammes sur chaque pale, dans les cas actuels.
43. Marinetti seems to have hesitated over the title of this work, which first appeared as Danza dell'aviatore (Dance of the aviator), then as Danza dell'aviatrice (Dance of the aviatrix), attached to the Manifesto della danza futurista (Manifesto of futurist dance) of 1917 (TIF, 129-30), and at some later time was revised into the Pantomima dell'aviatrice (Pantomime of the avaiatrix), with the role of the dancer being taken over by a mime. The latter may be found in folder 53, Marinetti Archive, Getty Center.
44. The original reads: "vertice e propulitrice della espansione spirituale, artistica della grande Italia fascista." This is from a collection of speeches and writings on women, folder 152B, p. 25, Marinetti Archive, Getty Center.
45. On the etymological links between wood, matter, and motherhood, see Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27-28.
46. The full passage reads: "L'uomo tende a insudiciare della sua gioia giovane o del suo dolore vecchio la materia, che possiede una ammirabile continuità di slancio verso un maggiore ardore, un maggior movimento, una maggiore suddivisione di sé stessa" (TIF, 45).
47. The original quotes read: "l'uomo meccanico dalle parti cambiabili" and "lo libereremo... dalla morte stessa, suprema definizione dell'intelligenza logica" (TIF, 48).
48. The original reads:
volant à tire-d'aile hors de l'histoire et de l'anatomie,
en vacance, en vacance,
loin de la vulve, morne collège obligatoire!...
Je suis l'artiste!, l'être nombreux et fourmillant....
(MP, 253-54)
The classic Futurist narrative of autogenesis is of course Marinetti's Mafarka le futuriste, on which subject see Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 75-92.
49. The full passage reads:
Voi avrete certamente assistito alla partenza di un Blériot, ansimante e ancora imbrigliato dai meccanici, fra i terribili schiaffi di vento che dà un'elica ai suoi primi giri. Ebbene: vi
confesso che noi forti futuristi, davanti a uno spettacolo tanto inebbriante, ci siamo sentiti subitamente staccati dalla donna, divenuta a un tratto troppo terrestre, o, per dir meglio, divenuta il simbolo della terra che si deve abbandonare. Abbiamo finanche sognato di poter creare, un giorno, un nostro io meccanico, frutto di pura volontà, sintesi di tutte le leggi di cui la scienza sta per precipitare la scoperta. (TIF, 254)
50. The original quotes read: "con uno scatto leggerissimo ed elastico" and "la legge che impone all'uomo di strisciare" (TIF, 116). Also cf. Kaplan:
It is not that Marinetti's discourse on technology brings him down to earth, but rather that the airplane allows him to remain a distant poet, while "seizing" the earth all the better from his total perspective. We might say here that, with the help of the airplane, Marinetti has forged a total aesthetic practice from Bergson's dynamic intuitions and their politicization in Sorel. He is recapturing the spirit of engineering for the world of art. In the sense that the air view gives him a powerful new perspective, he feels paradoxically quite earth-intimate.
Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 86.
51. The original reads: "perchè la letteratura entri direttamente nell'universo e faccia corpo con esso" (TIF, 47).
52. The original reads:
Quando volai per la prima volta coll'aviatore Bielovucic, io sentii il petto aprirsi come un gran buco ove tutto l'azzurro del cielo deliziosamente s'ingolfava liscio fresco e torrenziale. Alla sensualità lenta stemperata, delle passeggiate nel sole e nei fiori, dovete preferire il massaggio feroce e colorante del vento impazzito. (TIF, 116)
This passage is a self-quotation from the opening of Le Monoplan:
Je sens ma poitrine s'ouvrir comme un grand trou
où tout l'azur du ciel, lisse, frais et torrentiel s'engouffre avec délices.
Je suis une fenêtre ouverte, éprise de soleil
et qui s'envole vers lui!
(MP, 8-9)
53. As indicated earlier, castor oil was still the lubricant of choice for airplane engines. So the link that Marinetti establishes between the sky's penetrating motion and its purgative effect may imply (as a suppressed third term) the presence of castor oil.
54. The original quotes read: "perchè il vostro gesto immensificato possa lanciarle lontano, spiegate sopra un oceano più vasto" (TIF, 46); "il mare misterioso dei fenomeni" (TIF, 43); and "Liberazione delle parole, ali spiegate dell'immaginazione, sintesi analogica della terra abbracciata da un solo sguardo e raccolta tutta intera in parole essenziali." (TIF, 47)
55. Cf. Marinetti, La nuova religione-morale della velocità:
una grande velocità d'automobile o d'aeroplano consente di abbracciare e di confrontare rapidamente diversi punti lontani della terra, cioè di fare meccanicamente il lavoro dell'analogia. Chi viaggia molto acquista meccanicamente dell'ingegno, avvicina le cose distanti guardandole sinteticamente e paragonandole l'una all'altra e ne scopre le simpatie profonde. Una grande velocità è una riproduzione artificiale dell'intuizione analogica dell'artista. (The experience of high speeds in an automobile or an airplane makes it possible for one to embrace and to confront multiple distant places on the surface of the earth, which is to say it performs the work of analogy by mechanical means. He who travels frequently accumulates genius in this mechanical fashion. He brings together distant things by looking at them synthetically and by comparing them, and he thus uncovers their deeper sympathies. High speed reproduces artificially the analogical intuitions of artists.) (TIF, 114-15)
56. The event is described by Cobianchi:
L'aeroplano, utilizzato per la pubblicità industriale, ebbe il suo battesimo il 18 novembre, 1911, a Milano. La Casa Cinzano di Torino volle essere la prima ad adottare questo mezzo e si valse dell'aviatore milanese Angelo Bigliani. Nella mattinata il monoplano di questi venne caricato di ben diecimila gettoni in cartoncino sottile coi tre colori nazionali e con la scritta, da un lato "Reclame aerea-Novembre 1911" e un disegno rafrante la terra, con un anello di Saturno, simboleggiante il Vermouth Cinzano, che abbraccia il mondo....I gettoni, a forma di dischetto, vennero lanciati dall'aviatore durante la sua passeggiata aerea sulla città. La gente dava loro la caccia, come a preziosi documenti. (PAI, 144-45)
57. The original reads: "La legione delle aquile per i cieli in difesa delle frontiere, dovunque sia un pericolo, dovunque si cimenti la bandiera e il nome d'Italia" (PAI, 228). Note that this practice was mimed by the Futurists' distribution of the manifesto "Contro Venezia passatista" from atop the Torre dell'Orologio in July 1910.
58. On the command and control implications of aerial surveillance and new communications technologies, see Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 148-88.
59. The phrase is taken from article 11 of the manifesto: "Distruggere nella letteratura l"io'" (TIF, 44). In the 1913 "Destruction of Syntax Manifesto" the phrase is reshaped as "[la] Morte dell'io letterario" (the death of the literary I [TIF, 64]).
60. "The use of well-trained corps of military airmen will revolutionise the tactics of war. No longer will two Commanders-in-Chief grope in the dark. They will sit, so to speak, on either side of the chess-board, which will represent the battlefield. Each will watch each other's moves; nothing will be concealed. From a blundering, scrambling moving about of masses of men, modern warfare will become--through the advent of the airplane--an intellectual process." Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper, The Aeroplane in War (London: Laurie, 1912), vi.
61. The original reads: "il più bello spettacolo estetico della mia vita" (MPC, 73).
62. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1989, I.
63. The phrase is Gian Piero Brunetta's:
il Futurismo trova i suoi ideali interpreti e interlocutori in operatori come Luca Comerio che, fin dal 1911, vanno a registrare le immagini della guerra di Libia o installano la loro macchina su un aeroplano e si librano con il loro occhio meccanico...con l'intenzione di rimisurare il mondo e scoprire nuovi metri e nuovi ritmi visivi e di rappresentazione.
"Filogenesi artistica e letteraria del primo cinema italiano," in Sperduti nel buio: Il cinema muto italiano e il suo tempo (1905-1930), ed. Renzo Renzi (Bologna: Cappelli, 1991), 18. Brunetta continues:
Prima di cantare le luci e i ritmi delle città, il cinema scopre, grazie ai suoi operatori, la bellezza dello spettacolo notturno dei fuochi della mitragliatrice o dei lampi dei colpi di cannone e con ogni probabilità, quando Marinetti effettua il suo primo volo sul fronte della Libia nel 1912, le sue emozioni e la sua immaginazione trovano una perfetta consonanza con il gesto dell'operatore Comerio che aziona la sua manovella, nello stesso peeriodo, nel più alto dei cieli della Libia.
Brunetta, "Filogenesi artistica," 20.
64. The work's full title is La battaglia di Tripoli (26 Ottobre 1911) vissuta e cantata da F. T. Marinetti (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di "Poesia," 1912); hereafter abbreviated BT. Originally composed in French, as was Marinetti's usual practice, it appeared simultaneously as La Bataille de Tripoli with the same publishing house. The procedure of reworking eyewitness battlefront reports into full-fledged experimental narratives was one that Marinetti would also follow in the composition of Zang Tumb Tuuum.
65. The Parisian daily Le Matin was particularly enthusiastic in its coverage, as were such British newspapers as The Times and The Central News, though they were hardly to be outdone by more specialized journals (see W. E. de B. Whittaker, "Aviation in the Italian Army," The Aeroplane [4 January 1912]: 12, and see "L'Emploi de l'aéroplane dans la guerre italo-turque," Revue Internationale de la Loc omotion Aérienne 3 [1912]: 14). Much of the coverage is jingoistic, motivated by a concern about who is ahead in the international race to develop viable air forces.
66. Cf. "Les rats peuvent gaiement ronger nos manuscrits, / car nos moteurs écrivent en plein ciel / les strophes claires d'acier et d'or définitives!" (MP, 25).
67. The original reads: "Facendo a piacer suo dei cerchi di morte nell'acqua precipitosa dell'esercito nemico" (BT, 46).
It is surely noteworthy that Piazza was not only the first aviator ever to embark on a scouting mission (on 23 October 1911), but was also one of the several aviators who were involved in experiments with aerial bombardment. The fact was reported by the aviation press: "Le capitaine Piazza, lui, attache ses bombes à l'extrémité d'un fil métallique de onze mètres de longueur; mais parfois ce fil s'enroule autour des organes de l'aéroplane, ce qui risque de provoquer une terrible chute" ("L'Emploi de l'aéroplane dans la guerre italo-turque," 14).
68. The original reads: "Fu per farvi nascere belle insalate e gloriosi rosai, che una granata scavò quell'ampia buca...E altre, e altre ne scaveremo noi. Pianteremo altri palmizi, sentinelle avanzate che difenderanno i nuovi orzi, i nuovi trifogli disposti strategicamente contro le sabbie sollevate dal torrido ghibli." (BT, 61)
69. The phrase was employed by Marinetti in Le Monoplan: "Enfin je fais escale dans les golfes pourprés / de ce grand continent aérien!" (MP, 12).
70. Walter Wellman, The Aerial Age: A Thousand Miles by Airship Over the Atlantic Ocean (New York: Keller and Co., 1911), 13.
71. Quoted from Harold D. Hazeltine, The Law of the Air (London: University of London Press, 1911), 8.
72. The passage reads:
Notre oeuvre est un acte de foi en l'avenir immense de l'aviation. Il émane pourtant d'hommes peu enclins aux illusions.... Mais l'histoire d'un siècle de miracles scientifiques et industriels les a convaincus que tout progrès a une force de pénétration irrésistible.... Être hardis et sages, se garder de laisser masquer par la vue colorée du présent la vision indistincte de l'avenir, favoriser l'essor de l'individu libéré de la terre, et discerner des prérogatives abandonnées par l'autorité les droits essentiels de contrôle social sans lesquels périrait la société elle-même, telle doit être leur tâche dont un avenir, prochain peut-être, leur précisera les occasions, les difficultés et la redoutable grandeur.
Cited from Edouard d'Hooghe, "Notre Oeuvre" in Revue Juridique Internationale de la Locomotion Aérienne 1 : 3.
73. The original reads:
La mano che scrive sembra staccarsi dal corpo e si prolunga in libertà assai lungi dal cervello, che, anch'esso in qualche modo staccato dal corpo e divenuto aereo, guarda dall'alto, con una terribile lucidità, le frasi inattese che escono dalla penna.
Questo cervello dominatore contempla impassibile o dirige, in realtà, i balzi della fantasia che agitano la mano? È impossibile rendersene conto. In quei momenti, io non ho potuto notare, dal punto di vista fisiologico, che un gran vuoto allo stomaco. (TIF, 49)
Interestingly enough, the passage is cited by Virilio with reference to Pastrone's film Cabiria and to how "at the turn of the century, cinema and aviation seemed to form a single moment" (Virilio, War and Cinema, 17). Yet Virilio mistakenly attributes the quotation to La Bataille de Tripoli and seems unaware of Luca Comerio's aerial camerawork.
A tale of rape, carnage, and Futurist declamation set in Africa, Marinetti's 1909 Mafarka le Futuriste takes as its theme the generation of a mechanical son born of male parthenogenesis. In the opening scene its protagonist Mafarka-el-Bar, an Arabian king with imperial ambitions to conquer all of Africa, has recently defeated an army of black Africans and dethroned his uncle, King Boubassa. Those ambitions, both imperial and Futurist, will finally be satisfied, however, not by Mafarka but by the son he constructs without the aid of what the text refers to as the "vulva." The novel thus combines a number of elements that might be called fascist: a rhetoric of virility, imperial fantasies tied to the colonization of Africa, misogyny, a reproductive project, and an obsession with self-sufficiency. Grounding itself on the notion that the ideological specificity of a discourse or text is to be found not in the single ideas that circulate within it, but rather in the relations and articulations among elements, my project in this essay is to map out the ideo-logic that binds together the elements above, and to suggest a parallel articulation of elements in fascist discourse. 1
If Mafarka is a Futurist text that looks ahead to fascism, it also looks back to nineteenth-century orientalism. Like Flaubert's Salammbô, to which it is often disparagingly compared, Mafarka is a novel immersed in an orientalist world into which no self-identified Western narrator intrudes. 2 The only "Western" voice to be heard is that of Marinetti in the preface, where he identifies himself with his "barbarian" theme: "Am I not a barbarian, at least for those false devotees of progress?" 3 Within the novel itself, the perspective camouflages itself as non-Western, even producing a reverse orientalism in which the West, and Western women, are the source of exoticism. But unlike Salammbô, a novel resolutely without a future, Mafarka ends both with the obliteration of the earth and with the birth of a superhuman creature who will rule over a new world. The orientalist notion that the West will be reborn, revitalized, by returning to the East, a notion that appears in the narrative setting of the "founding manifesto" and "Let's Kill the Moonlight" as well, thus informs the narrative structure of the novel. 4 As Liz Constable has noted, at least one of the functions of the African setting is to invert the ration of the Eastern/African other as belonging to a time period different from that occupied by the West. 5 The notion that African peoples are "primitive," that they presently occupy a place in the West's past, is simply overturned so that they now occupy the place of the West's future, with all the orientalist notions about atrociously "primitive" qualities still intact. 6
Into this setting is introduced a reproductive fantasy: the novel's project, in its own terms, is to bypass the vulva and impregnate the ovary that is the male spirit: "the spirit of man," proclaims Marinetti in the preface, "is an unused ovary...It is we who will fertilize it for the first time [la première fois]!" 7 The narrative impetus for this fantasy is provided by the death of Mafarka's beloved brother Magamal, who contracts rabies and dies after ripping his bride to shreds and reducing her to what the text pleasantly refers to as "scarlet mud" (M, 134). Gazourmah, the mechanical son, is to be the immortal substitute for the dead brother.  The transplant of the ovary to the male spirit is necessitated by the unabashedly misogynist desire for procreation without procreative sex: in his "discours futuriste" (M, 163), Mafarka jubilantly announces that "it is possible to procreate an immortal giant from one's own flesh, without concourse and stinking complicity with woman's womb." 8
Of course this is not really "la première fois" that such a fantasy has been conceived; my use of the term autarchy is meant, in fact, not only to anticipate its later fascist use but also to evoke its much earlier classical sources--the Greek autarkeia was used to refer to Jason's desire for self-sufficiency in a world without women. Marinetti's claim to originality may seem at least partially justified by the form that the son assumes, for Gazourmah takes shape as an airplane, and, as part human flesh and part mechanical structure, qualifies as an early cyborg: "With my very own hands I sculpted my son in the wood of a young oak...I found a mixture/formula that transforms vegetable fibres into living flesh and firm muscles." 9 But unlike the cyborgs theorized by Donna Haraway--the transgressive, oppositional creatures who conjure up visions of a postmodern, postgender world--Marinetti's Gazourmah is born of a dream of male parthenogenesis that rests on philosophical foundations that are not quite so shiny and new. 10 Jean-Joseph Goux nicely encapsulates those foundations when he writes of philosophical idealism that is "is first of all a conception of conception." 11 That conception is one in which woman supplies matter, and man supplies form; its progeny is the philosophical opposition between matter and spirit; and its dream is that of immaculate conception or, as Goux also puts it, "scissiparous reproduction, sexless procreation" in which value reproduces itself, concepts spawn concepts, and fathers create sons, all without "mother" or "labor," "out of desire and form alone" (SE, 199). 12
Goux's formulation points to the way in which the sexual and the economic are necessarily intertwined in the fantasy of male autarchy. But in acting out the fantasy of male autarchy that underlies this project, an additional factor emerges, for the novel finds itself in the bonds--the double bonds--of the "homesexual panic" theorized by Eve Sedgwick. 13 Sedgwick has analyzed this double bind, and resultant panic, as a product of the prescription of homosocial behavior (male bonding) and equally strong proscription of homosexual behavior that characterizes all patriarchal, heterosexual culture. Within such cultures, the boundaries between the homosocial and the homosexual are unstable, and that instability works to regulate, in more or less terroristic fashion, all bonds between men. In Mafarka, as in the manifestos, the elimination of woman brings into view this boundary dispute and its attendant panic. In Mafarka, woman is to be eliminated not only as matrice, mater, empty receptacle, but also as "vulva," as object of sexual desire. Indeed, the part of woman to be bypassed is more often referred to as "vulve" than as matrice" or womb, thereby underscoring the sexual relation and producing the repeated, odd formulation "I gave birth to my son without the aid of the vulva!" 14 As we shall see, the form that the "homosexual panic" assumes in this novel is somewhat different from the form it takes in the manifestos, where the question of the correct proximity of man to man is red as a question of the correct proximity of man to woman. 15 In Mafarka, instead, it is the question of the correct proximity between male mother and son that causes panic, and requires the reintroduction of the woman as mother. What does remain constant, however, is the question of proximity itself, now overcoded so that it is not only a question of the correct proximity of man to woman, but also of the proximity of Futurist Europe to its once and future colonies. In both cases, what is at stake is the transfer of properties: from women to men (a transfer red in the "male ovary"), and from Africa to a (linguistically) Franco-Italian West. Not surprisingly, this latter transfer is red on the model of the dominant pair: Africa is introduced metonymically in the first chapter, "Le viol des Négresses" (The violation of negresses) as the racialized, sexualized body to be raped.
Here in his African novel the "lyrical obsession with matter" 16 of Marinetti's later "Technical Manifesto" appears instead as a lyrical obsession with mater--both with deanimating whatever is animate and gendered female, turning mother into matter, and with becoming a male mother. Both transformations are already internal to the project of idealism, as Goux describes it in his chapter on "Sexual Difference and History": the role of the mother is that of lifeless, formless matter, and the father's role, insofar as it is the purely ideological (as opposed to physiological) one of "cultural gestation," is that of "social mother" (SE, 224). It is as though Mafarka were the literalization of its philosophical underpinnings: Mafarka's own beloved mother, Langourama, is a mummy--lifeless flesh preserved as object of veneration--while Mafarka himself becomes the "social mother" and cultural gestator of Futurism when he pronounces his "discours futuriste." As I have suggested, in Mafarka these transformations are bound up with "homosexual panic": we might say, in fact, that becoming a male mother is the (however baffling) solution to the problem at the heart of the novel: How can one remain a heterosexual male once sexual relations with women have been eliminated? As it turns out, of course, all mothers, including Mafarka himself, end up deanimated, and all mothers, including Mafarka himself, end up having sexual relations with men. But the logic of this exchange of question (how to remain heterosexual) and answer (become a male mother) is the structuring (and unconscious) ideo-logic of the novel.
The deanimation of female matter does not, however, imply its elimination from the text. One of the conditions of being able to procreate without the complicity of the "vulva" appears to be that the "vulva" must paradoxically be everywhere present; as Kaplan has noted, "femininity" is attributed to almost everything in the novel: landscape, objects, Mafarka's brother Magamal, even Mafarka himself by the end, after he has embraced his mummified mother and become a mother himself. 17 Mafarka finds himself immersed in what Edward Said has called the "deep rich fund of female sexuality" characteristic of a certain orientalism which here functions to make his repeated refusals of women's propositions seem all the more heroic. 18 More importantly, though Mafarka rails against the debilitating effect of sexual relations with women, he is everywhere surrounded by scenes of rape. The "vulva" must not only be everywhere present but also always open to violence: the relation to matter is almost always red as heterosexual rape, as sexual violence against feminized matter or against female characters.  My analysis of the rhetoric of virility in the manifestos has suggested why this should be: in the homophobic logic of the text, female matter must always be open to violence in order to maintain the border between virility and what Marinetti slurringly refers to as "pederasty."  The novel gives us two examples of possible relations between mother and son: Mafarka's own relation to his mummy, and the relation of (the hallucinated?) Coloubbi, Mafarka's abruptly introduced ex-girlfriend, to Gazourmah.  Langourama is the only female character in the novel not to be presented as a body to be raped, but it should be noted that she is already inert matter. This might suggest not that the mother is exempt from the sexual relation, but that it has already taken place (at least phantasmatically), and had the consequence consistent with the logic of the text. This suggestion is shored up by Langourama's literary precedents (in Gautier's Pied de Momie, for example, it is the object of desire who is mummified) and borne out by Mafarka's reaction to Coloubbi's attempt at seduction, which Mafarka rebuffs because it reminds him of mom: "With a very slow movement of her soft and terrible arm, Coloubbi again drew Mafarka's mouth to her breast...Suddenly he started, horrified, and cried: Oh! Don't make the gesture of my mother!...Your breasts are cursed and exhausted!...Go away!" 20 Coloubbi's own claim to be Gazourmah's mother provides further confirmation of the sexual nature of the relation between mother and son. Thus, while in relation to the "Futurist discourse" of the novel, Coloubbi clearly stands for the passatist nostalgia for amour and clair de lune that the Futurist Mafarka must overcome in order to give birth to his son, in relation to the economy outlined here, her importance lies in her sudden appearance as competing mother.
Kaplan has noted that both Mafarka and the narrative break down at this point: Coloubbi's claim causes Mafarka to dissolve into tears, and sends the narrative off onto a detour. 22 Kaplan argues that the breakdown signals an involuntary return to the maternal, occasioned by the threat of total feminization; I would argue that the narrative stalls as it attempts to re out a way to re the male mother's incestuous relation with the son as heterosexual. After all, according to the heterosexual imperative of the text, Gazourmah should rape his mother, should rape Mafarka; the homophobic ideologic of the text cannot permit this, however, because Gazourmah's "mother" is his "father": father-son incest cannot be staged. This conundrum occasions the return to the maternal, which takes place in the form of Mafarka's search for his "momie maternelle" (maternal mummy [M, 218]), Langourama, who then issues an order: "Mafarka! Kiss your son for me too, on the mouth!...Don't forget!" The order is clearly a relief to Mafarka: "Then a cry of joy relieved Mafarka's breast. He leapt toward his son, like the gush of a fountain." Made the bearer of an incestuous, but heterosexually incestuous, kiss, Mafarka can return to his son as a man turns from a wife to a lover; the rhetoric of justification is that of the supposedly unwilling adulterer, pushed into the arms of the "other woman": "Oh caressing breath of my mother!...You push me into the arms of my son!...You command me to annihilate my own body, giving him life!" It is at this moment in the novel that Mafarka is most clearly, and culturally, a mother, at the same time as he most clearly exhibits the forbearance marked as virile: "Oh my son! Oh my lord!...I have given everything, for you! By dint of fasts and bloody sacrifices and prayers, I saved my will from dependence on drink or on a fascinating color or on the perfume of a woman."  24 But the second half ("By dint of fasts...") introduces a rather different element, for this is a rhetoric of virility that quite specifically marks this mother as a male who can withstand the distraction women's perfume can cause to the "olfactory imagination of the male." 25 In other words, Mafarka is both the sacrificing, devoted mother who gives all to her child and the male who succeeds in maintaining both will and virility, for as we know from the later manifesto "Contro il lusso femminile" (Against feminine excess) a mere whiff of a woman's perfume, a touch of a fine fabric, may sometimes lead to "pederasty." And by bearing the mother's kiss, Mafarka is able to give life to his son not through the lips of the vulva, but through those of his own mouth.  Immediately the formidable body of Gazourmah started violently, and his powerful wings sprung open." 26 A page later, of course, Mafarka meets the fate of all that is feminine in the text, as he, too, is reduced to inert matter. But here the homoerotic kiss is stolen under cover of familial relations, through the mother's interposed kiss, and as a same-sex version of Pygmalion, who, like Mafarka, was driven to sculpt out of scorn for women. As in Come si seducono le donne (How to seduce women), where the Futurist male can inculare neutralists' wives while ting for the nation's borders, here the homoerotic fantasy is smuggled in as heterosexual.
The narrative introduction of a competing incestuous mother (Coloubbi) and its detour to Mafarka's own mother (who gives permission to commit incest) were thus motivated by a requirement of what Luce Irigary has called the male hom(m)o-sexual economy. By male hom(m)o-sexual economy, Irigaray means the patriarchal, exogamic economy in which women are exchanged among, and serve as the mediation and alibi for relations (economic as well as sexual) between, men. It is important to distinguish this double-m-ed hom(m)o-sexuality from homosexuality, which refers instead to male same-sex relations that are at once required by and yet subversive of that economy. This is a familiar formulation, for it recalls Eve Sedgwick's notion of the double bind whereby male homosociality is prescribed but male homosexuality proscribed. For Irigaray, male same-sex relations are subversive insofar as they forgo the prescribed mediation through women and put into circulation the phallus that serves as (excluded) universal equivalent, and thus deprive the economy of its "money." In other words, male same-sex relations would bankrupt the hom(m)o-sexual economy. Within that economy, then, neither male homosexuality nor father-son incest may be openly avowed, for, as Irigaray writes, "they openly interpret the law according to which society operates." 27 In Mafarka, the evocation of mother-son incest is thus the displacement of the alibi for father-son incest, of the pederastic relation (and at this point I take "pederasty" out of the quotation marks that contained it as Marinetti's slur on all male same-sex relations). Within the economy of the text, the openness of this particular scene is paid for in the final pages of the novel, where the mediation through women is less than delicately restored in the dialogue between Gazourmah and the (linguistically feminine) "Mocking Breezes." I quote at length to show how "costly" the scene has been:
The Mocking Breezes: But you won't be able to fly, handsome and too heavy lover!
Gazourmah: Do I seem too heavy to you?...Ha! Ha!...You'd like to sweep me along at your will, like a light feather?...Well, forget it! By force I will open a passage between your soft thighs and my weight will allow me to keep my balance under your rough caresses!...[ellipses mine] To catch a whiff of my male odor you will all be cast down into the void that I will leave behind me as I cleave your lustful crowd. And I will fly against the current in the wave of your nudity, and it will be your own arms that will embrace my body and make it spurt farther.

 The by now tedious insistence upon rape as the basis of even the superhuman Gazourmah's relation to feminized matter serves both to reaffirm the heterosexual imperative, and to throw into high relief the anomaly of the tender kiss exchanged between Mafarka and son. The "cost" of this reaffirmation is the success of Mafarka's project, for this is the relation to the "vulva" that Mafarka has railed against throughout the novel, and that Gazourmah's vulva-less birth was meant to bypass. The narrative, however, plays itself out in triumphant Futurist mode as though oblivious to the loop in which its own project is caught. This is no send up of idealism, but rather a rehearsal of its foundations.