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

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).