***** Sentimental Acceptance in Futurism
The "futurists" occupy an important place in this trend ["to 'reject' the world symbolically by entering the monastery of art"]. For although a writer like Marinetti never gained wide popularity, he is a concentration point, a summing-up, of movements that occurred in less "efficient" form all about him -- and nearly all of his proposed innovations have since been introduced, in fragments or attenuations, by typical contemporary writers. Nietzsche, a kind of incipient futurist, seems to have forced himself to welcome developments that he did not really like. He saw the world going in a direction basically abhorrent to him -- but his cult of optimism and historicism made him want to salute his times, to be a "yea-sayer," an "answerer," to make his peace with the _Zeitgeist_. The result was a kind of _brutality_ that is also apparent in his disciple, Spengler. We may note a strong ingredient of such brutality in the futurists' frame of "acceptance."
Marinetti became remade, he tells us, during a trip in an airplane, an event that seems to have startled him by a secular vision of "the pit." Since we shall later make much of such symbols, we note that on at least three occasions Marinetti attributes this genesis to his perspective, whereby there would be a violent _break_ in the continuity of culture. Everything preceding futurism would be like Homer -- and with futurism would begin the abruptly new. Zealous in his "liberal" apostasy, he advocated not merely free verse, but _free words_:
"an absolutely free expression of the universe beyond the limits of prosody and syntax -- a new way of feeling and seeing -- a measuring of the universe as the sum of forces in movement."
"The _mot-librists_ orchestrate colors, noises, sounds, they form suggestive combinations with the materials of language and slang, arithmetical and geometric formulae, old words, words distorted and invented, the cries of animals and the roar of motors."
He and his school would "abolish the cult of proportion" -- they would be "drunk in life," a life which they would eagerly depict by the metaphors of "revolution, war, shipwreck, earthquake" -- they would seek for analogies without the restrictions of good taste:
"For instance, some people have compared an animal to man or to other animals, which is almost photography. Others, more advanced, might compare a fox-terrier to a gun. But I compare it to boiling water."
They are for a "maximum of disorder"; a "lyric obsession with matter"; the abolition of sentiment; for the "telegraphic," the "vibratory," the "cult of speed, the new." For the ugly, the "reign of machinery," "imagination unchained," the glorification of industrial and financial nationalism. They are "against the harmonious," against "moonlight, reminiscence, nostalgia, eternity, immortality."
"Instead of humanizing, let us animalize, vegetalize, mineralize, electrify, or liquefy our style."
A recent manifest in glorification of war shows how well the futurist mode of acceptance was adapted for recruiting in the service of Mussolini: The futurist, to praise war, needed only to recite its _horrors_, and call them _beautiful_ (somewhat as the ancient Greeks had considered the left side ill-omened, and had made up the difference euphemistically by calling the left flank of their armies the "well named").
One need not read the statements of Marinetti without making allowance for a certain operatic posturing ("_qu'importe la victime si le geste est beau!_"). Furthermore, Marinetti's manifestoes _promised_ too much. His attempts to embody them in artistic products are necessarily a let-down. Perhaps the most charitable thing we can say is that his manifestoes were themselves the works of art they proposed to herald. Though pleading for syntactical confusions (of the sort that Joyce subsequently perfected?) they were themselves phrased in keeping with the orthodox tenets of syntax. Hence, whatever the "chaos" in their "clear ideas," they conveyed their attitude more forcefully in the planning than in the execution. A call to disorder can be stronger when it can draw upon the cumulative force of order. Thus, the _manifestoes_ could profit by the effectiveness of form (a "public grammar") whereas the works written in response to the manifestoes could not.
Marinetti contrived to attain "yea-saying," at whatever cost. Like a cruel caricature of Whitman, he would be the omnivorous appetite. By a cult of the picturesque, his project categorically silenced objections. To any who might say, "This modern world is disease," it could answer, "But what a _perfect_ example of disease!" Its affinity with the antics of our recent "hard-boiled" schools is apparent. We may also note (unruly thought!) the _sentimental_ aspect of both. Futurism, so cast, could provide the most rudimentary kind of solace. Were the streets noisy? It could counter by advocating an uncritical cult of noise. Might there be stench? It would discuss the "beauties" of stench. _Apparently_ active, it was in essence the most passive of frames, an elaborate method for feeling _assertive_ by a resolve to drift with the current. Its incompleteness, or partiality, as a frame was drastic. A well-rounded frame of acceptance involves constant discrimination. But this was a project for gluttony, a blanket endorsement of historic trends as they were. As a cult of yea, it would say yea to the reigning symbols of authority at all costs. We cite it because of its "chemical" purity. It has exploited a trend so thoroughly that there is no possible step in the same direction beyond it.
(Kenneth Burke, _Attitudes Toward History_ (1st ed. published in 1937), 3rd ed., Berkeley: U of California P, 1984, pp. 30-33) *****
à la recherche du temps perdu,
Yoshie