Page 38 - Studio International - April 1973

the vintage under the iron-shod his 'vagabond and warrior Idea', his 'images', colonial policy was in this way ennobled and
hooves, the trampled flesh, bear no resemblance to them. 'My Ideas do not coloured with justice, and wore the face of
split skulls, brains look like you at all, my dear Citrulli. While you righteousness.
spouting, the usual horror stagger about as though you're drunk, the Ideas, D'Annunzio, too, was naturally converted to
of defeated revolt my Ideas, dance voluptuously on the summits of war, expressed in a mixture of populist and
broken on the grey stone; the world like heroes after the battle.' It is the imperial rhetoric. 'So will you one day see the
but among the blood awing intact, same concept as D'Annunzio's, despite certain Latin sea cover itself/with massacres in your
aflame that keeps alive the idea. inventions and appearances which would seem war . . . Italy, Italy/sacred to the new dawn/with
It was D'Annunzio who three years before had to demonstrate the contrary. What D'Annunzio the plough and the prow.' This is the Canto
written Canto di festa di Calendimaggio (Song of had written on Nietzsche in 1892 was, all things augurale per la nazione eletta (Augural song
May Day), published in Avanti ! Rome, i May considered, a conviction he never abandoned chosen for the nation), written only three years
1900, and who had been a socialist candidate in definitively, not even when he felt destiny called after the Canto di festa per Calendimaggio and
Florence in the elections that year. him to incarnate in his own person the figure of only months after Laus Vitae. Then in 1906
Gramsci, on more than one occasion, the people's representative. 'The plebeians he devoted his tragedy Piu che l'amore (More
underlined the need to analyse, in the light of remain slaves for ever, condemned to suffer as than love) to the 'African passion'. The hero,
the peculiar characteristics of the intellectual much in the shadows of feudal towers as in the Corrado Brando, obsessed by a dream in which
situation then, D'Annunzio's 'populist shadows of feudal smokestacks of modem he leads an expedition into the land of the Galla,
moment'.1 What is really at the heart of it ? factories. They will never have in them the tries to gain the necessary money by gambling.
One can derive an explanation by examining feeling for liberty.' Losing everything, he kills and robs the greedy,
his first political tragedy, La gloria, written in It should not, therefore, be difficult to discern useless old man who won, so as to have the
1899, in which the young agitator, Ruggero why so much anarchism, so much libertarian means of achieving his desire for risk and glory.
Flamma, prepares for revolt, surrounded by socialism and so much Nietzscheanism could be The crime committed, Corrado Brando,
other daring young men ready to carry armed transmuted into bellicism, the substitution of superman in the exalted service of imperialism,
struggle into the streets of Rome : 'The peasant war for revolution. In some ways, the very exclaims, 'If this be a crime, I wish all my
bands' of Flamma 'will be the scourge of the ambiguity of some anarchist sources could virtues to kneel before my crime.'
action. After a first resistance, the army will seem to authorize such a transposition. They Nor did Marinetti want to do anything less.
dissolve . . .' The real stuff of D'Annunzio's were sources, especially the French ones, at In the same year that Piu che l'amore was
revolutionism can be seen undisguised in an which bands of intellectual rebels drank, sent produced, in his retreat at Viggiu, he conceived
interview he gave to the correspondent of Le there by the nausea felt for their middle and Mafarka le futuriste, also on an African theme.
Temps after his defeat in the Florence elections. petty bourgeois class, the very cliques Marinetti This novel allowed Marinetti to pillage the
`You believe I am a socialist ? I am ever the frequented so assiduously during his French entire wardrobe of the symbolists and decadents,
same; between those people and me there is a sojourn. Even the stirring and fanciful and coming out after the first manifesto it still
barrier. I am and remain an individualist to the eloquence of some passages from these anarchist carried the clear stamp of the 'African passion'
last, a ferocious individualist. I like to go for a writers calls to mind the exalting Marinettian that boiled over in the years of the first Italian
moment into the lions' den, but I was pushed rhetoric. This passage from Courderoy, for adventures on the black continent. In particular,
there by disgust for all the other parties. example : 'Forward ! Forward ! War is every motif is carried to an extreme and
Socialism in Italy is an absurdity. Among us Redemption. God desires it . . . Forward in Marinetti's theses appear in no way veiled. The
there is no possible political action other than great human oceans, in great masses of bronze allegories are wholly transparent. Exoticism,
destruction. All that now exists is nothing, scum, and of iron, accompanied by the great music of eroticism, sadism are all there in profusion with
death opposed to life. First of all one must ideas . . . Let the earth tremble under your feet. notable doses of bad taste. Devices exploited
despoil everything. One day I will go down into Forward! War is life'.3 The fundamental lack of without measure by writers like Paul Adam are
the streets.' faith and diffidence in popular forces as the amplified and multiplied. But it is not so much
Here, then, under the temporary guise of a engine of revolution could only be resolved by a this that interests us as its meaning as a novel.
socialist, stands the aristocratic decadent, with substitute for revolution: precisely, war. Little, Mafarka is a sort of hero-slaver, concentrated
his Nietzschean nimbus and the vanities of his liberal Italy, provincial, bureaucratic, petty and sex and violence, who gives rein to every
anarchizing extremism. Even La gloria, in corrupt, was certainly not made to assuage the barbaric instinct in the creation of a personal
many passages, anticipates Marinetti as a anxiety and disquiet felt by the young men when empire, constraining a crowd of slaves to build
playwright, destructive in inspiration. they realized how miserably the ideals of the him 'a gigantic invincible bird', a sailplane in
Marinetti's satirical tragedy, Roi Bombace (Re Risorgimento had finished. To restore fact, on which to set off for great new
Baldoria in the Italian translation, King Rowdy) momentum and energy to those ideals appeared, adventures. In such fashion was decadent
was in fact written in 1905. Its anti-socialist therefore, an action worthy of the attempt, a exoticism married to the African dream with all
intentions are explicit in the ironic dedication means to discover something in which to the futurist enthusiasm for technique. From
to the Italian edition : 'To the great cooks of believe and to attach themselves. But how this climate of motifs, of psychologically
Universal Happiness — Filippo Turati — Enrico could one put anarchism, socialism and irritant states of mind and different ideologies,
Ferri — Arturo Labriola'. The characters are the Nietzscheanism together with the 'national all superimposed one on the other, come the
anarchist Famone, and the artistic innovator idea' ? slogans of the first manifesto, gaining prestige by
Poeta-Idiota. The grotesque distortions of the Even in this respect, Marinetti's first bringing together such diffuse and diversified
satire are, above all, directed against manifesto was not without precedent. First of material in a definitive programme. Thus the
parliamentarianism. Here, too, there is a revolt all, Pascoli, from the beginning of the African dazzling flashes — libertarian, anarchistic,
of the masses, ending with a great banquet, at war, provided a justification by elaborating an socialistic — are now drawn into and made part
which everyone vomits, and the return of Roi ideology of 'patriotic socialism'; he gave it a of the general outlook of the Italian bourgeoisie
Bombace to power. A basic opportunism runs definitive formulation in the oration of Una as it reached out to conquer overseas territories.
through the whole work along with an Sagra, 1900, where he proposed shifting the If any hesitations still remained, they were
irredeemable pessimism or basic disdain for the class struggle from internal politics to foreign, dissipated in 1911 by the Libyan war, for which
`plebs'. Not for nothing are the inhabitants of from classes to nations. No longer the struggle of all the nationalistic forces were mobilized in an
Roi Bombace's kingdom called `Citrulli' (oafs, the exploited against their exploiters but of the intense press campaign, aimed at presenting
dunderheads), and Poeta-Idiota can exclaim that poor peoples against the rich ones. The new imperialist aggression in the trappings of

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