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

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sence of matter. The sexual overtones of these passages cast the Fu- turist epistemological and aesthetic model into a gendered situation, which sets up an aggressive, virile subject against a feminized reality to be conquered or destroyed. Throughout Marinetti's writing we find various instances of this ideological construction which I call a "fiction of power". The Futur- ist manifestos, for example, valorize avant-garde artistic practices, technology, war, and virility, and concomitantly devaluate passeism, pacifism, and femininity. Marinetti thereby produces a fiction of the subject's power as a violent, compensatory response to the sense of crisis widespread in the modernist era. Gender plays a key role in this ideological construction and is afun- damental aspect of Futurist writing which has hitherto received scant attention.A critical perspective focusing on gender issues offers pow- erful analytical leverage to the purpose of evaluating the ideological valences of the Futurist revolution. In particular, the mapping out of femininity in Marinetti's manifestos provides a sort of blueprint for the Futurist male-centered project. Such a project involves three log- ically successive steps: 1/ marlzing boundaries and setting up objec- tives to be destroyed; 2)constructing the text as a site for violent ac- tion; 31 creating new myths. In the first step-the staging of barricades-the feminine principle is associated with everything Futurism is supposed to fight against: all past traditions in art (particularly sentimental poetry], the parlia- mentary system, pacifism, as well as constrictive mores and institu- tions that lead to the country's decadence while stifling virile energy and courage. For instance, in "Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna! ", Marinetti writes: Si i nostri nervi esigono la guerra e disprezzano la donna, poiche noi te- miamo che le braccia supplici s'intreccino alle nostre ginocchia, la mat- tina della partenza! . . . Che mai pretendono le donne, i sedentari, gli invalidi, gli ammalati e tutti i consiglieri prudenti! ITIF, 1.5) The manifesto relies crucially on a rhetorical strategy that brings gender into relation with political and aesthetic issues, a strategy in which femininity worlzs as a mark of impotence, disease, and frag- mentation attached to those mental attitudes that contradict Futurist hubris. In fact, the glorification of the Futurist artistic power is shored up with a polemical discourse which is the ground for figures of sexual degeneration: impotence, castration, and effeminacy are frequently used as critical categories to dismiss peremptorily other artistic and political tendencies. For example, Proustian introspective writing ("Psicologismo semi-futurista alla parigina") is stigmatized as "fram- mentario, effeminato, ambiguo" (TIF, 1731; pacifist sentiments are
contemptuously attacked as a form of "castration" of the race;' and academic culture is deplored as "castration" of genius.8 This kind of rhetoric also recurs in the writings of Marinetti's fol- lowers. Mario Carli's "Arte vile e arte virile," in particular, is entirely constructed around the topos of sexual degeneration. Encamped in a fortress of "healthy virility" ("sana e rumorosa vitalita futurista"), the Futurist artist launches a virulent attack against the pathological, effeminate "other": ". . . l'artista immerso nella donnesca aristocra- zia del suo ingegno, sdegnoso di rimboccarsi le maniche per una par- tita di boxe, e preoccupato solo della delicata sottigliezza delle sue im- magini, fragili come ricami di nuvole." According to Carli's diagnosis, almost all of the non-Futurist artists are wretched or sex- ually degenerate: "Se non sono linfatici, sono acidi; se non sono acidi, sono nevrotici; se non sono nevrotici, sono pedera~ti."~ The obsessive preoccupation with gender distinction which lies beneath the Futurist fiction of virile power is most explicitly ex- pressed in Francesco Cangiullo's "La scoperta del sostantivo ana- tomic~o del sesso in esso," a text which foregrounds the relation of language to sexuality. Cangiullo's declared concern is "femminiliz- zare la Donna e maschilizzare il Maschio." The fundamental argu- ment is that sexual perversion may result from linguistic perversion, that is from the practice of naming parts of female anatomy with masculine nouns and vice versa: Insomma, si pub sapere che razza di giuoco buffo e codesto delle cose femminili che debbono avere sostantivi maschili e, diciamo, dei cosi maschili che debbono avere sostantivi femminili! [. . .] Gli uomini di sensibilita normale-e saranno sempre piu-a furia di chiamare a1 maschile quelle parti del corpo umano femminile, possono suggestionarsi a1 punto da non sentire piu la donna. E viceversa per le donne dalla istessa sensibilita, le quali, continuando a chiamare a1 femminile quelle parti del corpo umano maschile, un giorno non avvertiranno piu l'u~rno.~~ (Author's emphases) Cangiullo's solution is to straighten out the ambiguities of grammatical gender, to close the "arbitrary gap" between signifier and signi- fied, so as to exorcise sexual deviance. Although other linguistic rules can and must be subverted in the name of artistic freedom, or rather, of the artist's power, grammatical gender is the object of reactionary, homophobic concerns, of an effort to restore the oldest conception of language-that of the intrinsic relation between signifier and signi- fied. This is one of a number of strategies aimed at a sharply dichoto- mized, proscriptive definition of gender distinction. In particular, Marinetti advocated the masculinization of social ethos through
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Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

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