Modernism by Michael Levenson

Author:Michael Levenson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

WORDS AT LIBERTY: MARINETTI, LOY, STRAMM, AND DADA

In the years just before the war, lyric poets across much of Europe pursued the most extreme forms of aesthetic radicalism. “Free verse” (vers libre) appeared among the French symbolists at the end of the nineteenth century, but the liberation of rhythm was only a first stage of experiment. Futurist poetry began under the inspiration of vers libre; by 1914, Marinetti aimed to extend the freedom of verse to the freedom of individual words. A manifesto of 1914—“Distruzione della sintassi. Immaginazione senza fili. PAROLE IN LIBERTÀ” (Destruction of the Syntax. Wireless Imagination. Words in Freedom)—proclaimed the new dispensation.

With words in freedom we shall have: CONDENSED METAPHOR—MAXIMUM VIBRATION—NODES OF THOUGHTS—CLOSED OR OPEN FANS OF MOVEMENT—SHORTCUTS OF ANALOGIES—BALANCE OF COLOURS—DIMENSIONS, WEIGHT AND SPEED OF SENSATIONS—THE PLUNGE OF THE ESSENTIAL WORD INTO THE WATER OF SENSIBILITY WITHOUT CONCENTRIC CIRCLES PRODUCED BY IT—REPOSE OF INTUITION—MOVEMENTS IN TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE BEATS—ANALYTIC MEANS OF EXPLICATION THAT SUSTAIN THE BUNDLE OF THE INTUITIVE WIRES.90

Beneath the uppercase declamation, the central thought was that poetry was still bound in the snares of syntax. Why should the sentence have supremacy? Why should the structure of grammar claim authority? The “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912) had held that “one must destroy syntax and scatter one’s nouns at random, just as they are born” and “one must abolish the adverb, old belt buckle that holds two words together.”91 Here is a translation of Marinetti’s poem “Bombardamento” (Bombardment).

cattle prods carts pluff plaff rearing

of horses flic flac zing zing shiaaak

hilarious neighing eeeeeee … shuffling of feet clinking 3

Bulgarian battalions marching croooc-craac

(SLOW TWO TEMPI) Shumi Maritza

of Karvarena croooc craaac shouting of

officers slamming like brass plates

pan here paack there ching buuum

cing ciak [PRESTO] ciaciaciaciaciaak

up down here there around up high watch out

above the head chiaak beautiful Flames92

Part of Marinetti’s campaign was linguistic, inspired by a view widely shared in his generation: the sense that language was cluttered, that sentences were bloated with an excess of adjectives and adverbs, and that the rigidity of syntax discouraged speed and immediacy. To set nouns free—“cattle prods carts”—and then to allow other words, including nonsense syllables, to follow motions unconstrained by grammar became a concerted, uproarious assault.

In a similarly vehement polemic Marinetti emphasized a different poetic failure: the “I” of the lyric speaker, another relic that futurist poetry would consign to the past. “Destroy the I in literature,” writes Marinetti, “that is, all psychology. The man sidetracked by the library and the museum, subjected to a logic and wisdom of fear, is of absolutely no interest. We must therefore drive him from literature and put matter in his place.” In place of human psychology, which is exhausted, poetry can substitute the “lyric obsession with matter.” Nouns, set free from other parts of speech, will show the accelerating world beyond the “cold, distracted I, too preoccupied with itself, full of preconceived wisdom and human obsessions.”93 Subjectivity adds nothing to the spectacle of modernity.

Mina Loy made an oblique entrance into this scene of lyric radicalism.

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