Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

The clash between the fiction of power and the specter of femininity/femininization is dramatized in "Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna!": this second manifesto of the war against passeism, written in the form of an allegorical tale, proclaims the unleashing of a pure, violent destructive/creative energy ["grandi poeti incendiari," TIF, 14)against tradition (the "moribund populace" of the cities of Paral- ysis and Gout). The goal of the Futurist poets is to revitalize with young blood the world which is "rotten with wisdom" [TIF, 16). To accomplish the great Futurist project [symbolized by the construction of a military railroad to the flanks of the summit of the world), the poets ally themselves with the forces of the irrational: the madmen ("quei Puri, lavati gia di ogni sozzura di logica," TIF, 19), unchained wild beasts, and the unrestrained might of the ocean. Significantly, the climactic moments of the narration are staged in Asia: the Futur- ists, after having launched a first attack against the decrepit European world, enter into the cradle of civilization as if returning to the moth- er's ~omb.~"ere they will finally build the emblems of their new religion, means to the ultimate victory: the Futurist railroad and the airplane. But before this can take place, an insidious, patently feminine threat hidden in the primitive scenario must be exorcised: Ad un tratto, un grido altissimo lacero l'aria; un rumore si propago, tutti accorsero . . . Era un pazzo giovanissimo, dagli occhi di vergine, rimasto fulminato sul Binario. I1 suo cadavere fu subito sollevato. Egli teneva fra le mani un fiore bianco e desioso, il cui pistillo s'agitava come una lingua di donna. Alcuni vollero toccarlo, e fu male, poiche rapidamente, con la facilita di un'aurora che si propaga sul mare, una verdura sin- ghiozzante sorse per prodigio dalla terra increspata di onde inattese. Dal fluttuare azzurro delle praterie, emergevano vaporose chiome d'innu- merevoli nuotatrici, che schiudevano sospirando i petali delle lor0 boc- che e dei lor0 occhi umidi. Allora, nell'inebbriante diluvio dei profumi, vedemmo crescere distesamente intorno a noi una favolosa foresta, i cui fogliami arcuati sembravano spossati da una brezza troppo lenta. [. . .] Ma, mentre ci accanivamo, tutti, a liberar le nostre gambe e le nostre braccia dalle ultime liane affettuose, sentimmo a un tratto la Luna carnale, la Luna dalle belle coscie calde, abbandonarsi languidamente sulle nostre schiene affrante. (TIF, 21-22) Electric light is created to kill the seductive moonlight ["l'antica regina verde degli amori," TIF, 22),that is, to ward off the phantoms of the irrational lurking from the depths of the enticing and terrifying forest, so that the military Railroad can be built and a decisive attack can be launched against the forces that resist progress. This resolution clearly dramatizes the meaning of the Futurist mixture of primitive and technological imagery: the unleashed irrational-a force which can revitalize a decaying world-must be channeled into new protec-
tive and empowering structures-Railroad, airplane, electricity-to exorcise the threats inherent to it. In the description of the battle, linguistic echoes point to a relationship between the fantasies aroused by the moonlit scenario and the passions driving the Futurist avia- tors: the airplanes, in fact, are imaged as "deliziose amanti che nuo- tan0 [. . .] sull'ondeggiare dei fogliami" (TIF, 251, which brings back to mind the seductive swimmers emerging "dal fluttuare azzurro delle praterie." But in the war scene, potentially self-destructive drives are turned into an attack against the enemy, "l'eterno nemico che si dovrebbe inventare se non esistesse" (TIF, 16). The machine provides the model for the new "estetica volitiva della macchina" (TIF, 1911, that aesthetic of "splendore geometric0 e meccanico" and "sensibilita numerica" which Martinetti articu- latd in a 1914 manifesto.24 Far from being reducible to a naive enthu- siasm for the marvels of modern technology, this aesthetic of the machine betrays a deep need for a new model of order, power, and control: the search for a new all-male symbolic structure to restrain the outbreak of the feminine-connoted irrational. The technological wonderworks proposed as new aesthetic models are represented as embodying tremendous energy and superhuman precision, and the mechanical aesthetic denaturalizes man and reality, sublimating the limits of the organic. The Futurist text would be a token of triumph over these limits, in reaction against a culture which is perceived as being infected by decadence and which is constantly associated with images of biological decay. Marinetti's manifestos on the Futurist syntactic revolution loudly proclaim a will to clear the linguistic ground by destroying the bar- riers of traditional syntax and the old, introspective literary "I," in order to open an infinite space for the "multiplied" individual-a man above the limits of nature (time, space, emotions, and desires), able to meet the challenges of modern reality. Woman is consistently co- opted to construct this fiction of power and consistently erasedas sub- ject. Ultimately, however, the representation of the feminine also produces meanings in excess of that power, exposing the anxieties that underwrite it. In fact, virulent misogyny, homophobia, and the eroticization of violence add up to a paranoid self-definition, pointing to the psychoanalytical tale hidden in the folds of the ideological fiction of power: the unexpressed anxieties about the boundaries of iden- tity which recurrently cathect the blurring of gender difference.
Page 1 and 2: Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in
Page 3 and 4: An aesthetic of rupture which subve
Page 5 and 6: contemptuously attacked as a form o
Page 7 and 8: pure clearly displays a religious v
Page 9 and 10: e read as a gloss to the accumulati
Page 11 and 12: cases, the fundamental ideological
Page 13: knowledge (or science) as masculine
Page 17: 'Noi futuristi, barbari raffinatiss

Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?