Marinetti Dines with the - David Moratto · Marinetti Dines with the High Command • A MANIFESTO AND FIVE AEROPOEMS ESSENTIAL DRAMA SERIES 35 GUERNICA TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY

Marinetti Dines with the

High Command•

A MANIFESTO AND FIVE AEROPOEMS

Marinetti Dines with the

High Command•

A MANIFESTO AND FIVE AEROPOEMS ESSENTIAL DRAMA SERIES 35

GUERNICATORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY • LANCASTER (U.K.)

2014

With An AfterwordMarinetti and the Invention of the Future

•

R I C H A R D C AV E L L

Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Councilfor the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council

is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canadathrough the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

in memory ofLuigi Cavallo

•

Copyright © 2014 Richard Cavell and Guernica Editions Inc.All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,

reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored

in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

The poem-in-liberty, Une assemblée tumultueuse (sensibilité numérique),translated by Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme, in F.T.

Marinetti’s Selected Poems and Related Prose, selected by Luce Marinetti (New Haven, 2002), pp. 122-3, is reprinted by permission of Yale University.

Press Performance inquiries should be directed to the author: [email protected]

Michael Mirolla, general editorDavid Moratto, interior designer

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Legal Deposit – Third QuarterLibrary of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2014934789

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Cavell, Richard, 1949-, author Marinetti dines with the High Command / Richard Cavell.

(Essential drama series ; 35)Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55071-864-5 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55071-865-2 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55071-866-9 (mobi)

1. Marinetti, F. T., 1876-1944--Drama. I. Title. II. Series: Drama series ; 35

PS8605.A919M37 2014 C812’.6 C2014-900230-0 C2014-900231-9

N o t e

This is a work of fiction. Although historical figuresand situations are represented, the content and context

of this work is a product of the author’s imagination.

•

Contents

:

Characters in the performance . . . . . . . xi The Scenes of the Performance . . . . . . . xiiiThe Sound . . . . . . . xvA Note on Staging . . . . . . . xviiPrologue . . . . . . . xixThe Manifesto . . . . . . . 1AeroPoem #1: Tumultuous Assembly /

Numerical Sensibility . . . . . . . 9AeroPoem #2: Moonshine Ices . . . . . . . 17AeroPoem #3: The Futurist Artocracy . . . . . . . 25AeroPoem #4: ElectroSexRobots . . . . . . . 31AeroPoem #5: Zang Tumb Tuuum . . . . . . . 43Afterword: . . . . . . . 51Inventing the Future . . . . . . . 55Inventing the Performance Piece . . . . . . . 69Illustrations . . . . . . . 81Notes . . . . . . . 83Acknowledgements . . . . . . . 95About The Author . . . . . . . 97About The Book . . . . . . . 99

The Manifesto

:

My dear colleagues, chères collègues, this evening I was out driving in my motorcar when suddenly I saw two cyclists. I swerved, and the next thing I knew, the car’s wheels were in the air and we were in the ditch, covered in muddy water.

Oh maternal womb filled with amniotic f luid! Your darkness reminded me of the breast of my Sudanese nursemaid!

Fished out of the water we regained our upright status and come to you now to sing the love of danger.Courage, audacity and rebellion will be the elements of our poetry from this point on.

Literature up to now has exalted stultified thought and the ecstasy of somnolence. We exalt aggressive activity, feverish insomnia, the salto mortale, and fistfights. We

Marinetti Dines with the High Command 5•

[Lights up on Marinetti, stage left]

The Futurist Manifesto caused a scandal, which is how I planned it. I published it in France because French was the language of culture, and it was the encrusted culture of the past that I wanted to attack. French was spoken by the cultured classes in Prague, Krakow, Bucharest, London, Athens, Naples, Berlin, St. Petersburg and so the Manifesto was read around the world. Within the week there were articles about Marinetti in The Daily Telegraph, the New York Sun, the Kölnische Zeitung, the Athenai, El Liberal and La Nación. I became known as “the caffeine of Europe.” But that wasn’t enough for me. So in the spring of 1909 I staged a version of my novel Le Roi Bombance in Paris. Everyone came to the opening night: Fyodor Chaliapin cancelled an appearance at the Opéra and arrived with Ida Rubinstein; Ravel and Satie were there; Cocteau came with Anna de Noailles and the Princesse de Polignac; Odilon Redon was there along with Marcel Proust. And they all hated the play! It was through that experience that I learned the pleasure of being booed. To enhance the evening even further, the critic Hirsch told everyone during the intermission that I had plagiarized the play from Alfred Jarry.

6 R i c h a r d C a v e l l•

A Tumultuous Assembly (Numerical Sensibility).

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I was in Sarah Bernhardt’s box after the play was over when Hirsch came to pay his respects to the diva. With-out hesitation, I planted myself in front of him and knocked him out cold. From that point on, my notoriety was assured. No one remembered the play, but that punch — that punch was talked about for months! And it didn’t end there. Hirsch challenged me to a duel, choosing a sword as his weapon. We met at the Bois de Boulogne, assumed the en garde, and the action began. At the 9th lunge, Hirsch’s sword broke; at the eleventh, I struck his sword arm, and the victory was mine. ... Oddly, there were 11 points in the Manifesto, too. ... One cartoonist depicted me as a locomotive in his vignette of the duel; this didn’t hurt either. Isadora Duncan of-fered herself to me that very evening, and who was I to refuse? But, infine, it was time to return to Milan and take up my life there; I bid Isadora adieu and went off to stage my first Futurist event in Italy: a demonstration of Futurist poetry by il dottor poeta Marinetti. Just for fun, I staged it at the Teatro Lirico, that bastion of trad-itionalism.

A e r o P o e m # 1 :

Tumultuous Assembly / Numerical Sensibility

:

[Lights dimmed on stage of Teatro Lirico; plush curtain is down so we cannot see the stage at all; curtains are lettered with “T” and “L” surrounded by the gilded laurel leaves that embodied for Marinetti the encrustations of a worn-out cultural tradition. Marinetti appears alone on stage, in a plum-coloured smoking jacket. Members of the audi-ence begin shouting his name: “Marinetti! Viva Marinetti!” Police are evident among the audience. There is an easel on stage on which has been posed, as if it were a work of art, Marinetti’s “poem in liberty.” As Marinetti declaims his manifesto, he points (perhaps with a walking stick) to the poem on the easel. The audience howls at certain points, whistles at others; fistfights break out from time to time as Marinetti speaks, unfazed.]

Cari amici futuristi, my dear Futurist friends, while in Adrianopolis to report on the battle there, I was taken up in an aeroplane and, seated over the gas tank, I suddenly realized the ridiculous inanity of the outdated syntax



analogies. For example: man-torpedoboat; woman-gulf; piazza-funnel.

6. All punctuation must be eliminated to be substi-tuted by mathematical symbols and musical notes.

7. There must be an ever broader use of analogy. While some might compare a fox terrier to a thoroughbred horse, others, more advanced, might compare the terrier to a Morse code transmitter. I, however, would compare the terrier to boiling water! Thus we cleanse language of stereotyped images and colour-less metaphors.

8. Images should not be categorized; all images, wheth-er noble or gross, are acceptable to art.

9. Images must be employed in networks of analogy.

10. Images must be used with a maximum of disorder.

11. The first person pronoun must be eliminated at all costs, which is to say that all pretence to psychol-ogy must end. Instead, we must cultivate a lyrical obsession with matter. The heat of a piece of iron thrills us more than the smile of a woman. Literature

we have inherited from Homer. That syntax had a head, like all imbeciles, a big gut, two legs and two flat feet, but it would never have wings. So it could walk, run a bit, and stop, almost out of breath, but it couldn’t f ly! And there I was, listening to the whirring of the propellers, two hundred metres in the air, and that is when I wrote my AeroPoem, “Tumultuous Assembly / Numerical Sens-ibility,” in order to demonstrate the following points:

1. It is necessary to destroy all syntax and allow nouns to run the risk of their birth. [Here Marinetti uses his pointer, or perhaps his walking-stick, to gesture toward the poem.]

2. It is necessary to use verbs in the infinitive only.

3. It is necessary to abolish the adjective. The adjective carries with it the threat of nuance and thus does not comport with our dynamic vision.

4. It is necessary to destroy the adverb and its fastidious unity of tone.

5. Each noun must be given a double, which is to say that it must be followed immediately by another noun, because air travel has speeded up our perception of



My first ride in an aeroplane also revealed to me that culture had a pattern and that art must be total to be art at all. Futurism must embrace all aspects of culture, all manifestations of life. The discovery of the Absolute did not mean a move away from life but a move deeper into it.

We must live, sleep and even eat Futuristically. ... It was at that point that I conceived of the Futurist cookbook. ... In it I would attack Italy precisely where it held every-thing most dear to it — its stomach.

The futurist cookbook would create a harmony between people’s palates and their daily lives. Up to now, people had nourished themselves as if they were ants, mice, cats, oxen. The futurist cookbook would change that; eating would become an art. Like all art, it would exalt creative originality.

It is no accident that this cookbook was published dur-ing a world economic crisis. To this crisis we opposed la cucina futurista, that is to say, an optimism of the table. That is why I subtitled my book How a futurist dinner can save your life.

must now represent the life of a motorcar and the dance of a player piano. We must invent a wireless imagination!

You will yell at me [this is ironic, because that is what the audience is already doing] that “Your literature will be ugly! It won’t have those harmonious curves, those tran-quil cadences!” And you will be right. Instead, we will use all the brutal sounds, all the rending cries of the violent life that surrounds us. After free verse, here, finally, are free words!

The merely animate kingdom has ended. We bring you the mechanical kingdom. With our knowledge of mat-ter — a knowledge unavailable to physics and chem-istry — we are preparing the creation of a mechanical man who will have interchangeable parts. We liberate this man from the idea of death, which is the ultimate definition of the intelligence granted by logic.

[At this last salvo, the audience erupts in pandemonium. Marinetti, oblivious, bows and moves to stage left as the lights go down and the easel is removed, with one spot only on Marinetti.]

A e r o P o e m # 5 :

Zang Tumb Tuuum

:

[Lights down on Marinetti; lights up on stage. The scene is the formal dining room of Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, a stone’s throw from the Reichstag. The table is horseshoe-shaped, with the arms of the table extending outwards towards the audience. The table is heavily laden with dishes, glasses, bottles, candelabra, vases filled with f lowers. The meal has finished, but people are still drinking, though in a desultory way. On each side of the table sit members of the High Command, in full uniform, including Goebbels, Goer-ing, Hess and Röhm. The Futurists’ colourful and outland-ish clothing contrasts markedly with the SS uniforms. As lights come up, Marinetti, at the centre curve of the table, stands up, swaying somewhat, his face purple and stony, as if sculpted.]

Illustri signori; berühmt Herren Goebbels, Goering, Hess, Röhm:



breeze throbbinglike viscera

enteritisdysentery

trembling of a bony handbringing to lipsa bottle of milk

putrid fever of microbesin the gutrotten...commotion of departureclack clack clack clack screeeeeeeeeeechhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...change locomotivespull the train by the cabooseand the sick men by the shouldersfacing backwards

To express my gratitude for the unique opportunity we have been given to show our Futurist art here, I must thank the great, courageous, high-spirited people of Berlin, and for them I will recite my AeroPoem in Lib-erty, “Zang Tumb Tuuum”:

[There is polite applause.]

[Marinetti’s recitation will become increasingly agitated, increasingly frenetic, increasingly louder. From time to time he will pick up a glass or other object and dash it on the floor. At the end of the recitation, exhausted, hardly able to speak any longer, he throws himself upon the table, and drags down the tablecloth such that the contents of the table pour into the laps of the gathered dignitaries. At the end of this action, he will slowly get to his feet, raise himself to his full height, bow to the stunned guests, turn sharply, and leave.]

banging of train doorsopen at each end of the wagons

doctors nurses medical officersstretchers bearers


Afterword:Marinetti and the Invention of the Future

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Benedetto Record, until the Record Pressure Cooker Company forced me to give that one up. And as a soldier I was dubbed Eugenio Rottomondo, which, I have to confess, was my favourite.

On a trip to Argentina in 1926 with Benedetta I met Jorge Luis Borges. He showed me a story he had written about Shakespeare, who fears he shall lose his identity to all the characters he has created. At the end of the story, God speaks out of a whirlwind to the dying Shake-speare, telling the poet that, like Him, he is everything ... and nothing.

Perhaps my life was like that too, everything and nothing ...

It is said that fascism aestheticizes politics, and that Marxism politicizes aesthetics.

But perhaps the aesthetic was political to begin with ...

And perhaps it was the future that invented me ...

BLACKOUT

The Prampolini Portrait of Marinetti in its original state.

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Inventing the Future

:

Futurism was not only a part of the Fascist movement, it was also an aesthetic anticipation of the failure

of the Fascist movement.• Boris Groys1

The life of F.T. Marinetti emblematizes the enormous creativity unleashed by the electric age, and its dystopian elements as well. The Futurist Manifesto was published in 1909, and what strikes me most is that, despite the immense distance we have travelled in those hundred years, the Manifesto still speaks to the present moment — perhaps uncomfortably so.2 Renato Poggioli has mem-orably written in The Theory of the Avant-Garde that:

[T]he futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes and not only to the one named for it. ... [T]he so-named movement was only a significant symp-tom of a broader and deeper state of mind. ... [T]he futurist manifestation represents ... a prophetic



that “the official version of art history dismisses from the international panorama Italian art of 1920 to 1958 because it was directly related to the Fascist regime; whether it was for or against the regime is unimpor-tant.”7 This scanting of Futurist art coincided with a period when critical theory was dominated by a Marx-ism that took as its cri de coeur Walter Benjamin’s com-ment on Marinetti that the “logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life” and that “Communism responds by politicizing art.”8 This com-ment was prominently cited in 1968 when Eduardo San-guineti, then Italy’s leading neo-avant-garde writer, is-sued his cautionary review of the Marinetti anthology.9

A turning point came in 1986, not quite coinciding with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Marinetti, when the massive exhibition, Futurismo e futurismi 10 (Futurism and Futurisms) was held at the newly re-stored Palazzo Grassi in Venice — an ironic venue, of course, given Marinetti’s disdain for Venice, that “im-mense sewer of the past” (cloaca massima del passatis-mo).11 Yet it wasn’t ironic at all that Palazzo Grassi had been restored through funding provided by the Fiat motorcar company — the car that gave us the Manifesto 12

— and that the first object you saw as you passed

and utopian phase, the arena of agitation and preparation for the announced revolution, if not the revolution itself. 3

Yet, despite Marinetti’s immense influence on the world of art and of cultural theory,4 Futurism has remained on the margins of the history of modernism, with Dada and Surrealism taking the fore. Although Robert Motherwell sought to rectify this with his groundbreaking postwar anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), the result was to create a renewed interest in the Dadaists and Surrealists, but not the Futurists.5

The legacy of the war was precisely the reason for this marginalization of Marinetti and Futurism. Marinetti’s endorsement of Fascism clouded his achievements6 at least until the 1968 publication in Italy of a large selec-tion of Marinetti’s writings, when many readers discov-ered him for the first time, though it wasn’t until 1983 that Marinetti’s written legacy was admitted to the pantheon of I Meridiani, the Italian equivalent of France’s Pléiade editions, and it was only in 1986 that a major exhibition of Futurist art was held in Italy. Yet in 1989 we could still find a major Italian art historian and organizer of exhibitions, Germano Celant, complaining

Notes

:

1. Boris Groys, in Groys and Claire Bishop, “Bring the Noise,” Tate Etc. 16 (May 2009) web, a discussion on the occasion of the Futurist exhibition at Tate Modern (12 June to 20 September 2009).

2. A prime example is Rachel Kushner’s novel The Fla-methrowers (New York: Scribner, 2013), in which Futurism becomes the historical other of avant-gardism in 1970s New York.

3. Renato Poggioli is quoted by Marjorie Perloff in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1986), p. xvii. Poggioli’s comment is also cited by Luciano De Maria in his landmark edition of Marinetti’s Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milano: Mondadori, 1968; 1983), p. xxx, and is alluded to by Paolo Valesio in “‘The Most Enduring and Most Honoured Name’: Marinetti as Poet,” his afterword to F.T. Marinetti: Selected Poems and Related Prose (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), p. 149, selected by Luce Marinetti and



comment about Communism and these comments are italicized in the German text: “So steht es um die Aesthetisierung der Politik, welche der Faschismus betreibt. Der Kommunismus antwortet ihm mit der Politisierung der Kunst.” Quoted from the Gesam-melte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, 5 vols. (Frankfurt, 1974-82), 1 (1972), p. 508.

9. See R.W. Flint’s “Introduction” to Marinetti’s Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), p. 7 and De Maria’s “Postfazione” to Teoria e inven-zione futurista, p. 1212 n.1.

10. See the catalogue (English version), Futurism and Futurisms (New York: Abbeville, 1986).

11. F.T. Marinetti, “Contro Venezia passatista,” in Teoria e invenzione futurista, p. 34.

12. Though not without irony. As Didier Ottinger notes, “overturning his expensive car in a Milanese ditch in the preamble to the Manifesto of Futurism ... slyly undermined [Marinetti’s] own boundless enthusiasm for modern technology.” See Ottinger’s preface to Futurism, ed. Esther Cohen, Matthew Gale, Ottinger, and Giovanni Lista (Paris: Pompidou, 2009), p. 15.

13. As noted by Gino Agnese in his biographical study, Marinetti: una vita esplosiva (Milano: Camunia,

translated by Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme.

4. Friedrich Kittler suggests that The Technical Mani-festo of Futurist Literature articulates the antinomies of the 20th century discourse network. See Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens; foreword by David E. Wellbery (Stan-ford: Stanford UP, 1990), p. 363.

5. Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (N.Y.: Wittenborn, Shultz, 1951). It was in this volume that I first read the account of Mari-netti’s dinner with the National Socialist High Com-mand; the Paul Rand design of the volume is itself an homage to Marinetti’s typographical experiments.

6. See Enrico Crispolti, “The Dynamics of Futurism’s Historiography,” in Italian Futurism 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, ed. Vivien Greene (N.Y.: Guggenheim, 2014), pp. 50-57.

7. Germano Celant, “A Mosaic of Identity” in Italian Art 1900-1945, ed. Pontus Hulten and Celant (Milano: Bompiani,1989), p. 20.

8. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1985), pp. 241-2; towards the end of the essay, Benjamin repeats the point about Fascism before adding his

Acknowledgements

:

First and foremost: Peter Dickinson, as always, for his support and for his example.

Gilian and Eugenio Cucchini, for their hospitality in Venice over many years.

Catherine Curnow, for friendship since our days at the Istituto di Anglistica in Padova.

Robert Gardiner, theatrician par excellence, for reading the manuscript.

Michael Mirolla and Connie McParland, for supporting this project through the auspices

of Guernica Editions.Günter Berghaus, for his suggestions about

the manuscript and its illustrations.Henry Daniel, for introducing me to Günter Berghaus.

Marjorie Perloff, for signing my copy of The Futurist Moment.

Robert Brain, for his insights into Marinetti’s aesthetic technologies.

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, for correcting my German.


About The Author

:

Richard Cavell is a Canadian of Italian heritage whose academic career has explored Italian culture through a number of vantage points, from the novels of Verga, to McLuhan’s debt to Futurism, to the Italian element in Canadian literature. The first Canadian to teach our literature at the University of Padua (1979-81), Richard was instrumental to the success of Canadian Literature as an academic field in Italy. Founder of the Internation-al Canadian Studies Centre at UBC, Richard has devoted his career to an integrative approach to the study of culture. He is the author of McLuhan in Space: A Cul-tural Geography (2002), editor of Love, Hate and Fear in Canada’s Cold War (2004), and co-editor of Sexing the Maple: A Canadian Sourcebook (2006), as well as more than 70 chapters, articles and reviews. He is currently Professor of English at UBC.

The passage from Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality (1950; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1969), is reprinted by courtesy of MIT Press.

About The Book

:

Marinetti Dines with the High Command is a work that dramatizes the turbulent life and times of F.T. Marinetti, founder of Futurism, the first global art movement. Marinetti’s artistic career raises enduring questions about art and politics because of his association with Fascism, and the second part of this play is an essay which explores the implications of this association. What makes Marinetti unique is that it is the first work that assesses Marinetti’s life in the context of a command performance he gave for the German High Command in January of 1934 — and the spectacular conclusion to that performance. Structurally, the work can be divided into two halves, before and after Marinetti’s encounter with Mussolini. Before his encounter with Fascism we find an exuberant Marinetti whose polemics range from linguistic to culinary reform, and who believes it possible that Fas-cism will permit him to found an “artocracy.” But he is


quickly disillusioned with Mussolini, and the robots he deploys in one of his plays take on a darkly political overtone, the sexual politics of the play mirrored by the increasingly robotic activities of the political right wing. The two strands of the play — art and politics — merge in the last scene, when, at Mussolini’s ironic instigation, Marinetti is invited to perform his poetry for the German High Command, in a Berlin where freedom of expres-sion— especially for so-called “decadent” artists — has all but disappeared. Given at a dinner (which mirrors the insouciant one in the first half of the play) Marinetti’s performance — retold here for the first time — can only be called heroic, but it is the heroism of an artist pro-foundly disillusioned with politics.

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Marinetti Dines with the - David Moratto · Marinetti Dines with the High Command • A MANIFESTO AND FIVE AEROPOEMS ESSENTIAL DRAMA SERIES 35 GUERNICA TORONTO • BUFFALO • BERKELEY