2011-2012 - The Italian Academy - Columbia University

Lorenza Miretti
The main object of my research at the Italian Academy (which I’m
going to publish) was to highlight the role played by Futurist literature
in the establishment of contemporary society from a scientific
point of view.
I studied Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first novel, Mafarka the
Futurist (1909), which brought a charge of “offense against decency”
against the author because of some erotic passages. The novel tells
the story of the African prince Mafarka-el-Bar who, after bringing
down his usurper uncle, renounces everything to create a son of his
own, the mechanical and immortal Gazourmah, the prototype of
the Futurist hero.
In 2005, I had already proved that Mafarka the Futurist is a
deeply camouflaged transposition of the Ulysses myth, and that
Marinetti built Futurism on the myth of Ulysses, despite his proclaimed
condemnation of tradition. I also proved that the events
common to both the story of Mafarka and the story of Ulysses are
concentrated for the most part in chapters I to IX (the remaining
chapters, X-XII, tell of Gazurmah’s birth), and that the number and
type of the similarities make it impossible to attribute to chance the
use of the Ulysses myth in Mafarka.
On the basis of an interview with a journalist for the Petit Marseillais
in 1904, in which Marinetti mentioned that his African novel
was nearly finished, some might object that he wrote the chapters
connected with Ulysses’ story before founding Futurism (with the
publication in 1909 of the Futurist Manifesto), and then he reused
those chapters by including them in a new Futurist novel.
This would be possible if the last chapters were completely free
of classical references. But—during my stay at the Italian Academy—I
was able to find the philological evidence of the presence of classical
traces in the final chapters, and to conclude that the whole novel is
characterized by a reutilization of classical myths: there is not a clear
division between some pre-Futuristic chapters clearly devoted to the
Ulysses myth and the final ones in which the author abandons the
classical hero in favor of the modern Futurist hero, Gazourmah.
Given that Marinetti set his novel against the mores of his time
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