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

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gender lines between a virile self and a feminine or feminized other-a structuring of reality which sets up an enemy to be ostracized and fought. We are thus led to another fundamental strategy of the manifesto-the second step of the Futurist project: the construction of the text as a site for violence, in which woman often figures as a target. Violence with its derivatives-strife, war, destruction-is a crucial thematic focus and a most exploited semantic field in Marinetti's writing. War, in particular, is celebrated as a natural phenomenon- elan vital, "world's hygiene," a necessary regenerating, purifyingpro- cess, and is aestheticized as spectacle-an exhilarating expenditure of energies. In the representation of war, the spectacle of human suf- fering is upstaged by the beautiful performance of the machine: "No- tai [. . .] come la volata lucente e aggressiva di un cannone arroventato dal sole e dal fuoco accelerato renda quasi trascurabile lo spettacolo della carne umana straziata e morente" (TIF, l0l].l4Furthermore, pain is replaced by orgasmic pleasure: in fact, war is repeatedly fan- tasized as violent defloration or forceful and fecund copulation. The following, which appears at the end of "Uccidiamo il Chiaro di Luna!", is one of the most disturbing erotic scenarios evoked by the theme of battle: "Ecco la furibonda copula della battaglia, vulva gigantesca irritata dalla foia del coraggio, vulva informe che si squarcia per offrirsi meglio a1 terrific0 spasimo della vittoria immi- nente! E nostra la vittoria . . ." (TIF,221. But we have already seen that as the crucible for the molding of the omnipotent "uomo d'acciaio" war is generally pitched against woman (TIF, 15).If war means man's liberation from woman's enfee- bling, enthralling influence and from the obsession with lust, how do we explain the fact that the feminine body is also conjured up to per- sonify war in scenes of sexual violence? One possible answer is that such imagery, by pairing fighting and sex, death and pleasure, con- structs a picture of war as desirable, thus performing a propagandistic function.'" A more interesting line of discussion is one that aims at identifying the common ground upon which the equation woman- war is posited. The attribute "informe" provides a clue to a less ob- vious link between the vehicle and the tenor of the metaphor, point- ing to an unarticulated vision of war as shapeless chaos: lack of form is the negative property shared by woman and battle. Three journal entries in Marinetti's recently published Taccuini lend support to this interpretation. One passage defines battle as a "bordello," a term which means brothel, and also mess, chaos: "Sen- sazioni di bordello. Zeppo e confuso. Rumore. Andirivieni. Tutto il non previsto. Tutto il disordine e tutta la fretta. Vince il disordine piu energico che contiene un'aggressiva piu forte."'"his passage may
e read as a gloss to the accumulation of fragmentary, chaotic perceptions in Marinetti's representations of battle." The products of the brothel-like chaos of war-rubble, refuse, excrement, decomposition-are explicitly linked with femininity in another entry, in which Marinetti records his impressions at the sight of his female dog, Gaby, and of a young girl searching mountains of putrescent refuse and carrion: "Gaby e felice di dare l'assalto a quelle montagne di fetori. S'incontra lassh con una bambina goriziana che passa anche lei le giornate a frugare nel letame sterco fango e immondizie. Cosa cerca? Cio che le donne cercano nella vita, i detriti i frantumi" (61).The feminine, often identified with passivity, pacifism, and romantic love, is here associated with war and its products in a relationship predicated by verbs that connote activity ("frugare," "cercare") and aggression ("dare l'assalto"). The fragmented, decaying matter linked with the feminine may be viewed as the abject matter, to use Kristeva's term, that traverses the boundary of the self, both defining its margins and undermining its integrity. Woman appears as the bearer of the sign of castration in another emblematic moment of the Taccuini, in which Marinetti recounts the episode of a young girl exposing her genitals at the beach: her "piccola vulva" is described as a "semiaperta ferita perpendicolare dalle labbra cicatrizzate" (272).From a psychoanalytical perspective, one may argue that woman, as the image of formlessness, or "lack," is cathected by existential anxieties which are sustained by castration anxieties. In other words, the feminine threat stands for the disempowerment of modern man in a rapidly changing world which baffles existing ethical and epistemological codes. In order to exorcize this threat and flesh out the Futurist fiction of male power, the manifesto repeatedly displays the feminine body in a violent act of sexual/verbal subjugation. Returning to the erotic metaphor of battle, we can assert that sexual violence provides a model for a wished-for relationship between the subject and his world: the subjugation of a "shapeless" (feminine) object by a powerful (male) subject. These considerations can also be extended to the manifesto's aesthetic of violent rupture. Marinetti's texts are a locus of aggression and violence, not merely on the thematic, but also on the syntactic level: his poetics of distruzione della sintassi, paroliberismo, immaginazione senza fili, aeropoesia attack linguistic conventions to produce syntactic violence. The ultimate target is the old "I" of traditional literature, "sottoposto a una logica e a una saggezza spaventose" (TIF, 50): "Noi distruggiamo sistematicamente 1'10 letterario perche si sparpagli nella vibrazione universale, e giungiamo ad esprimere l'infinitamente piccolo e le agitazioni molecolari" (TIF, 100).
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
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Page 11 and 12: cases, the fundamental ideological
Page 13 and 14: knowledge (or science) as masculine
Page 15 and 16: tive and empowering structures-Rail
Page 17: 'Noi futuristi, barbari raffinatiss

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