Proto-Futurist Stirrings in Italy



The earliest stages of cultural trends often go unrecognized until after the fact, having already receded into history; and such is how Vladimir Jabotinsky, future leader of Revisionist Zionism, recalls a developing sensibility he witnessed taking shape during the period he spent in Italy as a student around the turn of the century. In his 1936 memoir, Story of My Life, he writes: 
If my memory has retained signs that already then foretold some psychological change [in the Italian people], they did not yet announce Mussolini, but [F.T.] Marinetti: that literary and philosophical tendency that only several years later went by the name of “futurism” – a tendency whose historical mission consisted perhaps in paving the road for Mussolini’s movement.


Among my fellow students I knew already a few who protested with bitter wrath against foreign tourists who insisted that Italy was a museum that contained mere relics of past beauty, a memorial to past glory, and treated the modern Italian as if he were only part of the paysage (landscape): a respectable part if it is the lazzarone, clad in patched rags and playing the mandolin; an unnecessary and troublesome one if he tries to erect factories damaging the impression of the pittoresco of the ancient ruins. From these few people I already heard: “The day will come when we shall send those tourists to hell. Yes, precisely our new life, precisely the smoking chimneys – this is the real Italy. It is perhaps better that we burn all the paintings from Botticelli to Leonardo, smash all the statues, and instead of the Colosseum build a factory to produce sausages!” In these days, one can hear a sort of anticipated echo of Marinetti’s theories: the humming of the airplane is more beautiful than the modulations of a Neapolitan melody; the future is more beautiful than the past; Italy is a country of industry, the land of automobiles and electricity; she isn’t at all a walking ground for the world’s loafers searching for aesthetic pleasure. Modern Italian is an efficient organizer, strict in the keeping of account books; a builder and conqueror, obstinate and cruel. This is fascism’s first source. But in my time we did not even know Marinetti.


 What of today, in America? What impressions from conversations seem to form themselves into threads, hinting at trends yet unrealized? Who or what is our Marinetti, if we are to have one? As factories shut down, falling silent, can something else distantly be heard rousing itself into life and motion?


 Rainer Chlodwig von K.


 Rainer is the author of, most recently, Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

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