Jing Li

Position Paper Week 10

F. T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”

 

 

As the airplane can be seen as among the highest-level representatives of modern mechanical aesthetics, Marinetti relates his literary ideal—futurist literature—to the mechanical aspects of an airplane. His adoration of mechanism seems to have endowed him with the idea of developing the futurist literature to be a mechanical one. He states that his ideas were brought by the propeller. At this point futurist literature is a modern form that is associated with speed. Moreover, by raising his radical opinions about what a futurist literature should be like, Marinetti is advocating radical ruptures in almost every dimension of literature. He advocates ruptures from the traditional syntax and grammar, from the decoration of language, from stillness, from the “I,” from order, from logic, from being understood, from intelligence, and finally, from the cultural heritage, for he says he taught the futurist poets to hate libraries and museums. He is against all of these things above; they are of no use to him. He uses words such as “destroy” and “abolish,” which indicates a strong gesture of abjuration.

 

While Marinetti is decisively against something, he is upholding others. First he advocates analogies frenetically in the sense that “analogy is nothing but the immense love that connects distant, seemingly different, and hostile things,” which implies that there is no order in analogies. Second, he emphasizes images, and he advocates a kind of writing that is a closely woven net of images or analogies. Liberation of words also takes an important place among things he adores. When this liberation goes to an extremity, Marinetti begins to celebrate the “ugliness” in literature, which may be a “mechanical beauty” for him. He tries to persuade the futurists to bring into literature three elements, sound, weight, and smell, which are all in the realm of physicology, and at the same time, to bring them without an “I.” According to him, art is a need to destroy and disperse oneself. Therefore we may be able to conclude that he is advocating a mechanical kingdom built on images and analogies, as he cheers, “after the animal kingdom, the mechanical kingdom begins.”

 

From what Marinetti opposes and what he proposes, I see his efforts to bring a new form of “life,” the life of engine, or say, modern technologies, into literature. However, when he immerses himself in analogies such as “sweet machine gun, you are a charming lady, and sinister, and divine,” does he really considers the gun a lady? I wonder what an ideology was behind this but there might be no wonder why this aesthetics could collaborate with Fascism and why the futurist literary movement was doomed to die out.