The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts - UCLA Department ...

DAPA\Tinter 1987
on the cross for the salvation of mankind is compared by D'Annunzio to the
death of so many soldiers for the sake of Italy But in the ambivalence of his
nocturnal prose, there is also a sense ofboth the uselessness ofthis sacrifice
and the arbrtrary nature of "heroic" writing which continually undoes and deconstructs
the body of its discourse-a body deliberately as mutilated and
shattered as the bodies of the fallen soldiers. The use of religious metaphors
was not new in D'Annunzio's work, which had always sought to assimilate the
sacred to esthetic experience; for D'Annunzio, only the latter could successfully
oppose the ever more secular nature of modern life, which he considered
r.rrlgar and vacuous. "In the peace/ of the mournful cities" D'Annunzio found
"that
atrocious atmosphere, / when the conlulsed mouth, suffocated/ by the ash
of dreams, / no longer has a voice"; he also described "souls like empty sacks/
orhers like worn-out beds" (Maia,VersiIl,ll7,I73), The war appeared to him
as an esthetic and religious experience that would restore a sacred dimension
to contemporary sociery
InIl Notturno, D'Annunzio's meditation on the dissolution of the body, on suffering,
and on death turns into a spiritual exercise through writing. In this spiritual
exercise there appear several of the traditional themes of religious meditation,
of the imitatio Cbristi, and of Medieval and Baroque mystical asceticism.
The traces of D'Annunzio's religiosity are highly visible at Il Vittoriale, although
this religiosiry does not ever, in fact, take the form of a specific religious "faith"
(figs. 3 and 4).It corresponds instead to his attempt to abolish the arbitrary
nature of signs and of language by reorienting them in terms of a rituttl. Ritual
repetition, and the formal organization of signs which are the icons of a collective
psychic investment, suggest that precisely through signs it is possible to
gain access to an absolute meaning. D'Annunzio's poetic discourse, fromll
Rtoco andMain on, is "religious" insofar as it uses the evocative and epiphanic
po$/er of signs and words to suggest a means to transcend their arbitrary nature.
It suggests, moreove! that the remnants of the past are not scattered and
lost over the course of time, but are instead to be integrated into an overall design
that poetry prophetically announces. The "nocturnal" D'Annunzio, though,
was troubled by his own awareness of the arbitrary nature of the myhs that he
continued to create and undo in his writing. "To face the enigma of the world,
does the interpreter have any other path except the error-riddled one of his
own labyrinth?" (ProseI,756). The war, combat, and his speeches to soldiers
between 7917 andlglSallwere meant to serve ways out of the labyrinth.
D Annunzio's participation in the war was marked by many theatrical scenes
which immediately became legendary and contributed enormously to the popularity
of the poet-soldier. The enthusiasm and consensus of the public was
what later allowed him to lead an army of "legionnaires" to the conquest of
Fiume. During the night between February 10 and February 1 1, 1918, after having
penetrated with his comrades into the mined harbor of Buccari, in the Gulf
of Carnaro, on board an anti-submarine patrol boat-now at Il Vittoriale in a
specially constructed pavillion, still armed with its torpedoes and machine
guns-D'Annunzio left floating in the water of the harbor three bottles
crowned with the colors of the Italian flagand containing a mocking message
about the Austrians, since he could find no Austrian warships to sink. Similar
patriotic messages, in the form of thousands of printed flyers, were dropped
on Vienna by D'Annunzio from an airplane (also now at Il Vittoriale) after a
flight of six hours and forry minutes from Fadua, in what was perhaps the single
most spectacular gesture of his life.
D'Annunzio's obsession with the "mutilatedvictorv" of 1918 was closelv