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Cristina Savettieri
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Between
Masculinity
Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti
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2022-11-24
2022-04-11
2022-11-30
2022-12-11
461-482
1
Cristina Savettieri
2022/11/24
10.13125/2039-6597/5192
461
2039-6597
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Masculinity
482
urn:nbn:it:unica-28860
Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti
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12
           Hybrid Bodies between Utopia
            and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti

                               Cristina Savettieri



Abstract
     This article analyses a small selection of texts by Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti with the aim of shedding new light on the role that the experience
of combat during the First World War played in the evolution of the narrative
of the body in Marinetti’s imagination. Different pre-war narratives of the
body will be analysed first and then placed against the backdrop of the
cultural production of the war years. Specific attention will be paid to the
images of the prosthetic body with a wider look into other social discourses
(medical science, politics, propaganda). The article will argue that Marinetti
re-writes and adjusts his earlier narratives of the body, and highlight the
ambivalences and social fantasies, mostly relevant to gender and sexuality,
underlying them.

Keywords
    Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; First World War; Simulacrum; Trauma;
Masculinity; Prosthetic body




Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)
issn: 2039-6597
doi: 10.13125/2039-6597/5192
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti




          Hybrid Bodies between Utopia
           and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti

                                  Cristina Savettieri



                                      Introduction
     In this article, I will analyse a small selection of texts by Filippo Tom-
maso Marinetti with a twofold aim: firstly, I will try to shed new light on
the role that the experience of combat during the First World War played in
the evolution of the narrative of the body in Marinetti’s imagination, with a
view to briefly expanding this enquiry into a more general reflection on the
dynamics of resettlement that a fantastic imagination nurtured by techno-
logical fantasies undergoes as soon as those very fantasies turn, even only
partially, into actual reality. I will not consider the symbolic function of
the machine as such, but rather, more specifically, I will analyse different
narratives of the body as emerging in some manifestos and earlier writings
by Marinetti. Secondly, I will then locate them against the backdrop of the
cultural productions of the war years and with a wider look into social dis-
courses on actual hybrid, prosthetic bodies of soldiers disfigured during
the war. I will then discuss the way Marinetti re-writes and adjusts his
earlier imaginations and highlight the ambivalences and social fantasies,
mostly relevant to gender and sexuality, underlying them.
     Given this main aim, I will try to answer the following questions:
what is the difference between the mechanic, metallized body imagined
in the works and manifestos Marinetti wrote in the early 1910s and the
dismembered and reassembled flesh-and-metal bodies that surface in the
writings directly related to the war? On a more general level, what hap-
pens when a whole imagination of the future or, better, one of its primary
roots is overpowered by the violence of history? What’s left of a symbol-
ic construction when the imagined, utopic future underpinning it comes
out from the darkness of hypothetical posterity and materializes in the
blinding, traumatic light of the present?




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                          Narratives of the body
      The hybrid body is one of the seminal constructs of Marinetti’s futur-
ist imagination, a symbolic device at work from the very first manifesto
of Futurism (1909). In the narrative prologue of the Manifesto, a symbolic
rebirth to a new artistic practice, Marinetti stages himself as undergoing a
car accident that leaves him alive and ready to pronounce his eleven futur-
ist claims:

        Oh! materno fossato, quasi pieno di un’acqua fangosa! Bel fossato
     d’officina! Io gustai avidamente la tua melma fortificante, che mi
     ricordò la santa mammella nera della mia nutrice sudanese… Quando
     mi sollevai – cencio sozzo e puzzolente – di sotto la macchina capovolta,
     io mi sentii attraversare il cuore, deliziosamente, dal ferro arroventato
     della gioia!
        Una folla di pescatori armati di lenza e di naturalisti podagrosi
     tumultuava già intorno al prodigio. Con cura paziente e meticolosa,
     quella gente dispose alte armature ed enormi reti di ferro per pescare
     il mio automobile, simile ad un gran pescecane arenato. La macchina
     emerse lentamente dal fosso, abbandonando nel fondo, come squame,
     la sua pesante carrozzeria di buon senso e le sue morbide imbottiture
     di comodità.
        Credevano che fosse morto il mio bel pescecane, ma una mia
     carezza bastò a rianimarlo, ed eccolo risuscitato, eccolo in corsa, di
     nuovo, sulle sue pinne possenti!
        Allora col volto coperto della buona melma delle officine – impasto
     di scorie metalliche, di sudori inutili, di fuliggini celesti – noi, contusi
     e fasciate le braccia ma impavidi, dettammo le nostre prime volontà a
     tutti gli uomini vivi della terra. (Marinetti 1983: 9-10)

     Two complementary rhetorical processes are at work in this passage:
on the one hand, natural organic elements are literally and metaphorically
mingled with artificial items; on the other, artificial inorganic objects are
naturalized and given the appearance and features of life. In the ‘maternal’
ditch – a uterine space – mud and metallic waste mix (a literal amalgam): a
metaphor turns this blend of organic and inorganic matter into a primordi-
al empowering nourishment, linked with the memory of the ‘sacred’ black
breast of Marinetti’s wet nurse – a metaphoric milk proper, which he avidly
tastes. The excitement provoked by the accident and the violent encounter
with the hybrid fluids in the ditch is, in turn, metaphorized through a mas-
ochistic image – the heart penetrated by a red-hot iron – similarly based on



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Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



the combination of the organic with the inorganic, flesh and metal. Liter-
ally covered with this double-nature scum, the human body euphorically
hybridizes with a matter alien to it. Other inorganic tenors are signified by
organic vehicles: a simile comparing the car to a shark turns into a meta-
phor proper, amplified by the detail of the chassis and car seats as scales
and then again by the reference to fins.
      Both the level of reality represented and that of metaphors shaping
it converge towards a semantics of hybridization, displaying one of the
fundamental engines of Marinetti’s imagination. If nature means first and
foremost degradation and fragility, but also unruly, destructive forces1,
naturalizing metaphors express an ambivalence: natural vehicles (the milk,
the shark) work as containment structures channeling the anxiety that the
inorganic produces in human subjects (the accident is very close to a death
scene)2. Consistently, organic objects (the heart, the body) are complement-
ed by images of artificial and/or inorganic matter. Building on the idea that
metaphors play a role of containment as much as they let the repressed
re-surface, one might say that both the natural and the artificial, the biolog-
ical and the inorganic embody shifting values and call for hybridization as
the only condition whereby both the former and the latter stop threatening
the subject. It is worth noting that the body of Marinetti is wounded but
bandaged: the internal matter of the body is sealed, while the mud covers
just the face, with no actual transgression of the binary distinction between
the organic and the inorganic, which in fact takes place metaphorically.
      The Manifesto L’uomo moltiplicato e il Regno della Macchina (1910) starts
with a claim on the need to rework the idea of beauty, detaching it from the
romantic narrative of the aggressive man assaulting the tower of feminine
beauty. In literature and the arts, mechanical beauty and the almost erotic
relationship that bounds together humans and machines should replace
the old imagery of love and conquest:

             Bisogna dunque preparare l’imminente e inevitabile identificazione
          dell’uomo col motore, facilitando e perfezionando uno scambio
          incessante d’intuizione, di ritmo, d’istinto e di disciplina metallica
          ignorato dalla maggioranza e soltanto indovinato dagli spiriti più lucidi.
             Certo è che ammettendo l’ipotesi trasformistica di Lamarck, si deve
          riconoscere che noi aspiriamo alla creazione di un tipo non umano nel


      1
        See Sartini Blum 1996: 29-54.
      2
        A most persuasive Freudian reading of the first futurist manifesto is Fo-
ster (2004: 118-120).


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     quale saranno aboliti il dolore morale, la bontà, l’affetto e l’amore, soli
     veleni corrosivi dell’inesauribile energia vitale, soli interruttori della
     nostra possente elettricità fisiologica.
        Noi crediamo alla possibilità di un numero incalcolabile di
     trasformazioni umane, e dichiariamo senza sorridere che nella carne
     dell’uomo dormono delle ali. […]
        Il tipo non umano e meccanico, costruito per una velocità
     onnipresente, sarà naturalmente crudele, onnisciente e combattivo.
     (Marinetti 1983: 299)

      Even if embodied in the image of a loving engine driver caressing his
locomotive, the new pattern of a human-machine relationship should rely
on the removal of all human feelings. Some ambiguities haunt this pas-
sage: it is not made clear whether the new non-human type will stem from
replacement (machines will substitute men and women) and its body will
be entirely made of mechanical pieces or it will result from a ‘natural’ pro-
cess of physical enhancement, a phylogenetic step triggered by will, giving
birth to a new superior winged being. Two ideas of the body emerge: the
first is entirely mechanized, the second implies an organic metamorpho-
sis. Neither case implies hybridization: the human flesh is either replaced
by inorganic engines or transformed from within, with no actual blend of
different types of matters and no transgression of the body’s boundaries.
Sexuality will be radically reduced to a corporal function purged from any
sentimental implications and even from the experience of pleasure:

        Noi possiamo dunque attivare o ritardare il movimento dell’umanità
     verso questa forma di vita liberata dal sentimentalismo e dalla lussuria.
     A dispetto del nostro determinismo scettico, che dobbiamo uccidere
     quotidianamente, noi crediamo nell’utilità di una propaganda artistica
     contro la concezione apologetica del dongiovanni e quella divertente
     del cornuto. […]
        L’immenso amore romantico è ridotto unicamente alla
     conservazione della specie, e l’attrito delle epidermidi è finalmente
     liberato da ogni mistero stuzzicante, da ogni pepe appetitoso e da ogni
     vanità dongiovannesca: semplice funzione corporale, come il bere e il
     mangiare.
        L’uomo moltiplicato che noi sogniamo, non conoscerà la tragedia
     della vecchiaia! (Marinetti 1983: 300-301)

     Sexuality is then implicitly considered as a devouring force, a tragic
ageing factor to be contained, an experience liminal to death, inconsistent



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Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



with the evolution towards a superior being.
     Accordingly, in the Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (1912) the
subject and its inward life are to be erased:

             Distruggere nella letteratura l’«io», cioè tutta la psicologia. L’uomo
          completamente avariato dalla biblioteca e dal museo, sottoposto ad
          una logica e ad una saggezza spaventose, non offre assolutamente
          più interesse alcuno. Dunque, dobbiamo abolirlo nella letteratura, e
          sostituirlo finalmente colla materia, di cui si deve afferrare l’essenza
          a colpi d’intuizione, la quale cosa non potranno mai fare i fisici né i
          chimici. (Marinetti 1983: 50)

      The radical erasure of psychology and the self from literature leaves
room for the matter as such to take centre stage, but whether organic or
inorganic matter, it remains unclear. In the following paragraphs of the
Manifesto, the fantasy of self-destruction is evoked – «L’arte è un bisogno
di distruggersi e di sparpagliarsi» (Marinetti 1983: 54) – while it becomes
evident that not only the self is to be destroyed but also the human body as
mortal: to free humans from death means to replace them with machines:
«Dopo il regno animale, ecco iniziarsi il regno meccanico […] noi prepari-
amo la creazione dell’uomo meccanico dalle parti intercambiabili. Noi
lo libereremo dall’idea della morte, e quindi dalla morte stessa, suprema
definizione dell’intelligenza logica» (Marinetti 1983: 54).
      Notwithstanding recurrent themes, images, and claims, the three man-
ifestos do not simply overlap with each other. Rather, they open up a space
of unstable meanings: the first leans towards a hybridized imagination; the
second oscillates between the fantasy of replacement and that of phylogene-
sis, thus excluding the encounter and mixture of different matters; the third
foresees again, at least in the realm of literary creation, an entirely mechanic
being, devoid of an organic body and finally freed from mortality.
      The first futurist novel by Marinetti, Mafarka il futurista, first published
in French in 1909 and then translated into Italian by Decio Cinti in 1910,
is haunted by these conflicting narratives of the human body. A pastiche
combining racist exotism, adventure, war, and misogynist rape, Mafarka is a
tale of grief and regeneration culminating in a parthenogenetic male fanta-
sy3. The novel begins with the graphic description of a repulsive mass rape

      3
       Paramount readings of the novel are Spackman 1996 (49-76) and Sarti-
ni Blum 1996 (55-78), both employing psychoanalytic tools to interpret gender
structures.


466
                                        Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



taking place after a triumphal battle won by Mafarka, the leader of an Arab
army. The rape, perpetrated against black women, is harshly condemned
by Mafarka but at the same time victims are represented as both suffering
and enjoying the violence. Building on this ambivalent female depiction,
the novel delves into the interplay between sexuality and mortality, desire
and loss, feminine organic decay and masculine transcendence. The plot is
loosely conceived, while strong symbolic ties link characters and episodes
through an overabundant metaphoric style. At the core of the novel lies the
death of Mafarka’s beloved brother Magamal, bitten by a rabid dog and
then horribly turned into a monster – half slug, half night bird – devouring
itself after ravaging the body of his own fiancée. Before this metamorphosis,
Magamal appears feminine and delicate4, a reversed double of the manly
warrior Mafarka – possibly his unconscious double – who dangerously ig-
nites homoerotic and incestuous desires in him. Mafarka weeps desperately
over the disfigured body of his dying brother, longing for an impossible
last kiss from him, which emphasizes the troubled nature of the gendered
undersides of their relationship. Consequently, the death of his feminine
Other prompts Mafarka to reject sexuality and the numerous female bodies
at his disposal, while fostering his death drive. A journey to the afterlife
to meet his parents and give them back the body of his brother amplifies
Mafarka’s guilt complex and the psychoanalytic resonances of the plot: his
mother Langurama refuses Magamal’s body, implicitly accusing Mafarka
of his death; hence, Mafarka promises his mother that he will bring her
another son generated by himself and made immortal. The promise un-
settles the parental relationship, making the son a father to his substitute
brother5 and, even more disturbingly, a chaste groom to his own mother.
To grant immortality to his creature, Mafarka will construct/generate him
with no encounter with the «vulva malefica» (Marinetti 2011: 209), violently


    4
        In his first appearance Magamal’s feminine characterization is immediately
made clear through the words of his own brother Mafarka. See Marinetti 2011: 19:
«Ho in orrore questa tua ridicola sensibilità femminea che ti lancia talvolta in folli
esaltazioni e ti schiaccia, poco dopo, sotto debolezze infantili… […] Ad onta di tutti
gli sforzi della tua volontà, il tuo corpo è rimasto tenero e fragile come un corpo
succoso di fanciulla». Sartini Blum (1996: 60) convincingly argues that Magamal
«straddles the dangerous boundary between masculinity and femininity».
     5
        Mafarka acts as a loving mother to Magamal: «a quando a quando egli si
voltava verso il fratello, e stringendone dolcemente il capo fra le larghe mani, lo
guardava in fondo agli occhi, con la tenerezza soave di una madre», Marinetti
2011: 19.


                                                                                    467
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



identified with decay, evil, and death. The only female being accepted, the
mother, is the one whose body is forbidden.
      Recalling a long-standing mythical and literary tradition6, Gazurmah
– the name of Mafarka’s son – is a giant creature, a simulacrum7 prop-
er, carved from oak wood and covered with a plant mixture transforming
wood fibers into flesh; his body, provided with palm-tree-fabric wings,
iron ribs, and spring hands, will be given life by means of a kiss that will
pass from Langurama’s lips to Mafarka’s mouth and then from Mafarka’s
to Gazurmah’s mouth. The tales of Frankenstein’s Creature and Pinocchio8
apparently meet in Gazurmah’s birth; yet no revolt against the creator takes
place, nor is the creature defective, in need of change and improvement or,
worse, repulsive and stigmatized by his own creator and the whole social
community. On the contrary, Gazurmah is an enhanced, perfect hybrid
ultra-human body made of organic and inorganic matter, whose life is tied
to the death of his own creator. In dying while giving birth to his child, Ma-
farka identifies with a woman («morirò miserevolmente, come una donna,
nel dar la luce al mio figliolo», Marinetti 2011: 201), as if he were a «male
mother» (Spackman 1996: 58), literally delivering Gazurmah. This simile
places Gazurmah’s birth at the crossroads between construction and gen-
eration, artistic creation and male parthenogenesis.
      Appropriately interpreted as an allegoric apologue on artistic creativ-
ity and the birth of Futurism9, Mafarka is also an attempt to give narrative
shape to one of the most controversial outcomes of early-twentieth-century
literary imagination, as pinpointed by Spackman (1996): the fantasy of a
world inhabited just by men who generate their own sons by construct-
ing them and thus appropriate the exclusive female dominion over hu-
man generation – a world in which the mineral, absolute, creative male
principle overpowers nature. As brilliantly argued by Sartini Blum (1996
and 2015), in early Futurism the identification of the feminine with nature,
decay, and the abject expresses a sense of threat experienced by the male


      6
       Other mythical genealogies (Achilles, Icarus, Ulysses and others) are di-
scussed in Meazzi 2003.
    7
       For the notion of simulacrum, I mainly rely on Stoichita 2008. A broad and
detailed discussion on definitions and examples of simulacra is in Micali (2019:
121-174).
    8
       Spackman (1996: 54) appropriately defines Mafarka «a sort of futurist
Geppetto» and Meazzi (2003: 313) identifies in Pinocchio one of the models un-
derpinning Gazurmah.
    9
       See De Maria 1983 and Meazzi 2003.


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                                       Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



self and nurtures misogynistic homosocial fantasies. As a posthuman sim-
ulacrum, Gazurmah, whose life is not really told, is an uncanny utopic
body created so that his too human creator may be destroyed. The plot
does not proceed further and the novel ends because the perfect creature
cannot be the subject of a story – it has no narrative potential – and Mari-
netti’s primary interest dysphoricly lies in the destructive process leading
to the end of the human.
      In comparison with the conflicting narratives of the body suggested
by the three manifestos analyzed above, Mafarka – contemporaneous to the
foundation manifesto – seems to synthesize them all and thus amplifies
their inconsistencies and instabilities: hybridization underlies the image
of Gazurmah’s wooden body insufflated by Mafarka and partially turned
into flesh; his mechanical limbs recall the interchangeable pieces of the ma-
chine-human and his wings are literally quoted as the wings ‘sleeping’ in
the human body in L’uomo moltiplicato e il Regno della macchina. Yet, self-de-
struction and the repulsion for the human flesh prevail – Mafarka must
die – and shape the whole novel as a dark utopia with no human left alive.

                             Prosthetic bodies
      With the outbreak of the First World War, an unprecedented biologi-
cal event in the words of Antonio Gibelli (1998: 7), European public space
suddenly becomes populated with violently disfigured bodies, whose
wounds, deformations, and mutilations had never been seen before in his-
tory. In the paradoxical symbolic economy of the war, the wound is what
defines both the use and the exchange value of a male body: a wounded
body that has been close to its own destruction is worthier than an intact
body in that it appears more heroic, virile, and hence sexually attractive10.
Representations of wounded soldiers in popular culture and propagan-
distic products of the time converge towards this narrative that eroticizes
the main byproduct of war violence, making it palatable. The powerful
framing of the wound as the worthiest sign of masculinity11 emerges even
in personal writings by officers and soldiers fighting at the front, thus
demonstrating to what extent this was a hegemonic social narrative.
      Yet, mutilations compel a stronger semantic effort12, especially when


    10
         See Bourke 1996 and 1999.
    11
         See Mosse 1996, Banti 2005 and 2011.
    12
         See Bracco 2012.


                                                                                   469
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



they imply a radical re-shaping of the body through prostheses, which
make the organic and the inorganic co-exist and re-codify the human soma
as comprehending what is alien to it. Mutilated bodies are damaged matter,
hard to heal and repair but also to invest with positive meanings and re-in-
clude within the wider social body; bodies on which politics, science, and
war propaganda conjure up narratives and exert power; bodies to which
popular culture attributes conflicting values, experiences, and representa-
tions: abjection and monstrosity, virile courage, emasculation, psychic ab-
normality.
      It is possible to single out at least three main narratives framing the pros-
thetic body: the discourse of medical science, which conceives the mutilated
as a ground for pioneering experimentations and, accordingly, the prosthetic
body as a progress of civilization; the discourse of politics, which needs to
re-integrate mutilated men into the fabric of society by normalizing them; the
discourse of the nation at war, which uses mutilation as either a stigma to de-
monize the image of the enemy or a mark of extreme heroic supererogation,
if referred to home soldiers. I will briefly discuss specific examples of each
narrative – in some cases overlapping with each other – to re-locate futurist
imagination against the backdrop of dominant social discourses.
      If medical research on cinematic prostheses had already started in the
late nineteenth century thanks to the pioneering work of Giuliano Vanghetti,
today considered a precursor of bionic surgery13, it is only with the world
war that the attempts to design and implement more functional artificial
limbs multiply, along with experiments on new surgery techniques able to
cinematize mechanic prostheses. At the core of these cinematic applications
lies the idea of exploiting the natural movement of tendons and muscles still
attached to the wounded area in order to make the prosthesis move: from
simple static interpolation, prostheses become fully functional dynamic in-
tegrations of the body14. With a singular lexical choice, Vanghetti and other
scientists used to describe the prostheses as depending on the will, directly
connected to the brain «in una telegrafia di strumento trasmettitore e stru-
mento ricevente», as explained by surgeon Giovanni Franceschini (quoted
in Plaitano 2019: 354). Cinematic prostheses, then, prospected an integration
of flesh and mechanic tools, nervous impulse and lifeless matter. The hybrid
body made of organic and inorganic matter was no longer a literary specula-
tion, being rather the signpost of scientific progress.


      13
           See Tropea et al. 2017.
      14
           See Plaitano 2019.


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                                       Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



      Notwithstanding these groundbreaking scientific developments, it
was extremely difficult to make sense of the mutilated and their deformed
body in the wider social community. Psychiatrists and psychologists were
committed to identifying possible mental illnesses affecting mutilated vet-
erans and surgeons debated on whether the worst cases were to be oper-
ated (Bracco 2012: 97-108). The mutilated body, with no limbs or eyes or
recognizable facial lineaments, is unfit for combat and as such undermines
the symbolic economy of the war wound: mutilation undoes the associa-
tion between masculine value and suffered violence and suspiciously blurs
gender boundaries. In some propagandistic materials, such as photographic
postcards, mutilated soldiers are depicted while sewing, a typical womanly
domestic activity: if, on the one hand, these are normalizing images, aimed
at demonstrating that the mutilated is still functioning and ready to be re-in-
tegrated into the family and the wider social body as a worker, on the other,
this apparent normalcy diverges dramatically from hegemonic social imag-
es of masculinity, especially from the ideal type of the warrior. The mutilat-
ed body is, at the very same time, re-functionalized and diminished, made
familiar and normal yet de-virilized and childlike (see Bracco 2012: 101).
      Gender anxieties emerging from the prosthetic body are strikingly at
work in comics and illustrations of trench newspapers. In parallel with
the transnational tendency of war cultures to make a monster of the ene-
my15, German and Austro-Hungarian mutilated soldiers are the object of
violent deformation and harsh ridiculing, as demonstrated in a disturbing
series of strips published in “La Tradotta”16 (fig. 1). It is the story of a man
marrying a beautiful woman who, on the first wedding night, starts dis-
assembling her own body, almost entirely made of prostheses: one of her
legs, the breasts, her hair, and even her eyes are artificial objects mechan-
ically fixed to a meager, mutilated male trunk. The meaning of this tale is
clear: Austrians are as crafty and dishonest as puppets disguising broken,
useless men. On a deeper level, the prosthetic body is perceived as an un-
canny object threatening gender boundaries and inclining mutilated men
towards abnormal sexuality outside the limits of heteronormative bour-
geois respectability.
      The very same propaganda, though, especially in the last year of war,
sanctifies the dismembered body of the heroic soldier as a pledge to the
homeland and an emblem of supererogation, as some posters promoting


    15
         See Audoin-Rouzeau and Becker 2000.
    16
         The strips appear in «La Tradotta», 6, 1918. The author is unknown.


                                                                                   471
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti




                            Fig. 1: La Tradotta, 6 (1918): 4-5, detail.

the sale of war bonds demonstrate (Bracco 2012: 220-231): instead of the
canonical female figure representing the motherland, the blind and the
maimed ask the viewer for support, thus establishing a total identification
between the sacred body of the nation and the male bodies bearing the
marks of sacrifice. The body of the soldier is expropriated matter, an object
at the disposal of the nation at war, as all European national pedagogies
of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century demonstrate17. On the
literary side, the novel Pinocchio alla guerra (1917) by Paolo Lorenzini un-
cannily celebrates the destruction of Pinocchio’s flesh-and-bone body in
the name of the homeland. A former wooden puppet, Pinocchio joins the
army as a human kid that, repeatedly wounded and mutilated, is turned
into metallic pieces concealing a still beating heart. Put in a small wooden
box, similar to a coffin proper, Pinocchio is returned to Geppetto, who is

      17
           See Mosse 1996; Banti 2005; Blom-Hagemann-Hall 2000; Horne 2004.


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                                        Between, vol. XII, n. 24 (novembre/November 2022)



aghast at the sight of his son’s body: the path towards humanization that
Pinocchio has undergone in the original novel by Carlo Collodi is reversed
and his own soma re-codified as an experimental ground within which
the loss of organic matter and its substitution with prostheses testify to an
absolute devotion to the national cause18.
      While at the front, in May 1917, Marinetti gets seriously wounded.
His war notebooks do not particularly emphasize this event and the fol-
lowing long stay in hospital (see Marinetti 1987: 98-113) and, more gener-
ally, showcase a cold gaze in the description of wounded bodies, in fact not
frequently represented. Lacerated flesh, burns, and scattered pieces of or-
ganic matter are usually depicted through nominal style and rapid sketch-
es accumulating details with no pathos19. While the actual byproducts of
perpetrated and suffered violence on the battlefield are marginalized in
Marinetti’s personal writings, some of his books directly relating to his war
experience leave significant room to the prosthetic body. This cannot be ex-
plained just as an outcome of the increasing public pressure to frame and
re-locate the bodies of mutilated soldiers: I rather argue that this is a late,
ambiguous attempt to re-write early futurist imaginations and narratives
of the body, urged by the appalling bio-political impact of the war20.
      In 1916 Marinetti publishes in L’Italia futurista a singular plea directed
to Italian women, inviting them to have sexual intercourse with mutilated
veterans. The text, entitled Donne, dovete preferire i gloriosi mutilati!, was lat-
er collected in the ‘handbook’ Come si seducono le donne (1917), co-authored
with Bruno Corra, and can be considered as both a collection of propagan-
distic topoi and an involuntary deconstruction of them:

        Donne, avete l’onore di vivere in un tempo virile e futurista di
     nazioni cancellate, di città rase al suolo, di popoli migranti, di squadre
     affondate, di montagne esplose e di eserciti catturati.
        In questo meraviglioso tempo infedele, veloce, dissonante,
     asimmetrico e squilibrato, crolla e muore finalmente l’idiotissima


    18
        See Savettieri 2017.
    19
        See, for instance, Marinetti 1987: 125: «Il legno la carne le ossa il grasso e
l’aluminio bruciato. Una gamba senza piede ancora colle fasce è già tutta carbo-
nizzata e mezza in cenere. Il braccio stringe un ferro mostra un gomito arrostito
color di mogano verniciato. Il gomito mi fa pensare a l’osso d’una coscia di mon-
tone bene cotto allo spiedo».
     20
        According to Sartini Blum (2015: 97), in L’alcova d’acciaio the impact of in-
dustrial warfare «is exorcized through an excessive display of sexual prowess».


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Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



      armonia del corpo umano. […]
         L’asimmetria dinamica dell’alpino scolpito e cesellato dal fuoco
      deve imporsi al vostro cuore e ai vostri sensi rinnovatori.
         Donne, dovete preferire ai maschi intatti più o meno sospetti
      di vigliaccheria, i gloriosi mutilati! Amateli ardentemente! I loro
      baci futuristi vi daranno dei figli di acciaio, precisi, veloci, carichi
      di elettricità celeste, ispirati come il fulmine nel colpire e abbattere
      uomini, alberi e ruderi secolari.
         Il proiettile è come un secondo padre del ferito. Gli impone il suo
      carattere. Gli insinua nelle fibre un atavismo di violenza feroce e di
      velocità incendiaria.
         Gloria alla pelle umana straziata dalla mitraglia! Scopritene lo
      splendore scabro!
         Sappiate ammirare un volto sul quale si è schiacciata una stella!...
      […]
         La chirurgia ha già iniziato la grande trasformazione. Dopo Carrel
      la guerra chirurgica compie fulmineamente la rivoluzione fisiologica.
      Fusione dell’Acciaio e della Carne. Umanizzazione dell’acciaio e
      metallizzazione della carne nell’uomo moltiplicato. Corpo motore
      dalle diverse parti intercambiabili e sostituibili. Immortalità dell’uomo!
         Donne, amate i gloriosi mutilati e imitateli partecipando alla guerra.
      (Marinetti 1916)

      If, on the one hand, Marinetti is apparently just retrieving the national
propaganda celebrating heroic mutilated soldiers, on the other, he is revis-
iting one of the fundamental sites of his imagination: he explicitly quotes
his earlier manifesto L’uomo moltiplicato e il Regno della macchina and calls
for a hybridization between flesh and metal, in which the steel metallizes
the flesh and the flesh, in turn, humanizes the steel, as if only the bal-
ance between the elements could neutralize the sense of threat engendered
by the ‘too organic’ as much as by the ‘too inorganic’. It is the very same
process underpinning metaphorical strategies in the manifestos: natural
tenors activate metallic vehicles and vice versa. Yet, there are some ineludi-
ble differences: first, Marinetti is now referring to actual prosthetic bodies
whereby metaphors have become literal; second, these bodies are now ex-
plicitly gendered and eroticized and the multiplied man, far from repelling
the contaminating effects of the feminine, does need (hetero)sexuality to
contain the anxiety of devirilization. Marinetti, then, re-writes the symbolic
stigma over the feminine, culminating in the homosocial self-destructive
fantasy of Mafarka, and tries to reverse one of the dominant social images
of the mutilated: from helpless, childlike, and, worse, sexually abnormal,



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to heroic, vigorous, and empowered man. It is not by chance that women
are invited to join men at the front: they are included in the new social proj-
ect pivoting around the enhanced man that war surgery seems to design.
      In L’alcova d’acciaio (1921), romanzo vissuto in which Marinetti goes
back over the last months of war, from the catastrophic rout in Caporetto
to the final battle in Vittorio Veneto, the path towards victory of the Italian
army is accompanied by the numerous sexual performances of the nar-
rating self and his comrades. The novel begins in June 1918 with a merry
dinner in a barrack of bombardiers, followed by a group visit to a brothel.
Topic narrative situations in war memoirs and diaries, these scenes set out
the fundamental themes and tones of the novel: war and love are euphori-
cally intertwined through sexual metaphors employed in the descriptions
of fighting and war metaphors surfacing in love scenes (see Sartini Blum
1996: 99-104). Tenors and vehicles become interchangeable: war is still a
form of masculine mastering of nature, as in Mafarka, but love is no longer
just a devouring, self-destructive force that threatens the subject by making
him passive and close to decay. A traumatic core underpins this interplay
of conflicting yet contiguous drives, as demonstrated by a self-represen-
tation depicted after the joyful prologue of the novel: Marinetti’s limping
pace, probably caused by the accident at the front we are aware of from the
notebooks, is directly connected to the metaphorical ulcer of Caporetto:

        Ho il passo indeciso, malfermo ondeggiante, ferito, che ripete sulla
     terra le punture dilanianti d’una piaga infame e assillante aperta nel
     mio fianco. Piaga di Caporetto, piaga enorme che sento vivere soffrire,
     imputridire e che presto bisogna, ad ogni costo bisogna colmare,
     colmare con nuovo ultravermiglio generosissimo sangue a fiotti
     bollenti, a torrenti nel suo centro e sugli orli il cui viola sinistro ricorda
     le botti sventrate dai fuggiaschi ubriachi, le schifose avvinazzate bombe
     incendiarie su Cervignano e il putrido violaceo fuggente tramonto del
     27 ottobre. Guarire, guarire quella piaga! La guariremo. Già domino il
     mio passo e lo cadenzo. (Marinetti 1921: 18)

     In this hypertrophic metaphor, the purple center and the borders of
Caporetto’s ulceration are compared to ripped open barrels alluding to
drunk defectors, incendiary bombs, and the dark sunset of the day of the
rout, thus implicitly establishing a puzzling identity between the agents
provoking the wound and the wound itself. Coming full circle, towards
the end of the novel Caporetto’s ulcer is recalled again as in the process of
being sutured by means of copulation:



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Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



          La razza ha urgente bisogno di riprendere contatto con la razza.
       Aderire, aderire l’uno all’altra. Il giardino è pieno di bisbigli. Amplessi
       nel buio. Ogni amplesso è un punto chirurgico dato con frenesia per
       saldare le labbra dell’immensa ferita. Ah! Ah! Bisogna che presto
       questo punto della carne della Patria si ricongiunga con quest’altro
       punto corrispondente della stessa carne. (Marinetti 1921: 260)

      The association between lacerated flesh and sexuality is the key to
understanding the imagination nurturing the novel, no longer oriented to-
wards the ascetic overcoming of sexuality and the decaying human body,
but, on the contrary, refiguring the relationship with the feminine as essen-
tial to keeping the male self together and coping with the trauma of war.
As in Donne, dovete preferire i gloriosi mutilati!, at the core of this rewriting
lies the prosthetic body21. In the chapter entitled Gli equipaggi della luna
sbarcano a Rapallo, a long scene is entirely devoted to the description of the
erotic encounters between a group of mutilated veterans and some women
against the backdrop of a beautiful full moon on the seaside:

          Coppie strane dove un agile corpo di donna giovane è accarezzato
       un attimo, ma preferisce accarezzare un corpo maschio infranto che
       zoppica, ondeggia. Questi tende una mano sola, e non può tender la
       bocca per baciare.
          Il gesto della donna diventa materno per accarezzare un mento
       d’argento, che la luna subito con dolce meccanico furore salda alla carne.
       Ride il sangue del mutilato in questa bizzarra officina improvvisata di
       metalli innamorati e carni che sognano di metallizzarsi. Il torso di quel
       tenente bersagliere si rizza con forza nella pienezza della sua virilità.
       (Marinetti 1921: 85)

     The semantics of hybridization underlies this passage: metal and flesh
are in fact blended in the bodies of these fragile and yet virile veterans. As
such, they attract women, who are half mothers, half lovers. The body,
haunted by the lost limbs and muscles (the missing mouth, hand, and
arms), is described as a patchwork of distinct parts (the chin, the hand, the


      21
        Referring to L’alcova d’acciaio, Martire (2011) interprets mutilation in futu-
rist imagination as a means to work out the problem of the integrity of the Italian
body politic. While acknowledging the importance of such political-allegorical
reading, I rather explore the proximity of futurist mutilation to the actual war
experience and the social discourses making sense of it.


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trunk, the blood) and different materials (silver, flesh, metal). Even more
sexually explicit is the following passage:

        Fuori sulla terrazza, uno più ebbro degli altri, sull’altalena,
     abbracciato con una donna seminuda volava volava inargentandosi
     in alto di luna tra i fogliami. Certo un soprannaturale sciampagna li
     esaltava. Anche le donne erano impazzite. Una vergine bellissima si
     spalancò così a pochi metri di distanza, fra due rosai, al desiderio feroce
     d’un alpino, che, mutilato delle due braccia, realmente le mangiava di
     baci il viso, imprimendole il suo amore fra le poppe coi colpi reiterati
     del suo petto. (Marinetti 1921: 94)

      The anguish of lost virility turns into the fantasy of the dismembered
and re-assembled flesh-and-metal body that proves more virile than the
intact body. As Stefano Bragato (2018: 186-189) has convincingly demon-
strated, this chapter relies on a thick web of intertextual references to La
pioggia nel pineto by Gabriele d’Annunzio: not only is Marinetti quoting
with no parodying aims one of the most famous poems of his controver-
sial literary rival; he is also turning upside down his own radical critique
of romantic love and giving new value to its most indulgent symbol, the
full moon, which was harshly attacked in one of the earliest manifestos,
Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!. At the center of this estranged marine landscape
lies a twofold re-writing of a crucial locus of imagination of early Futur-
ism: first, the cultural code of romantic love is at work in this passage only
because it frames an abnormal and fetishistic sexual desire22, activated by
the fantasy of a body whose unity is lost; second, the rigid separation be-
tween the masculine and the feminine is undermined because the broken
male body compels Marinetti to re-think the relationship with nature and
the feminine. Even if instrumentally refigured, the feminine turns from a
foreclosed element into a psychic prosthesis that encapsulates the fear of
destruction and helps cope with the trauma of the battleground23.
      In another scene of the novel, mutilated veterans reappear: celebrated
during an upper-class party, they look still and silent, frozen in elegant seats
and dramatically incongruous with the frivolous atmosphere around them:



    22
       According to Foster (2004: 124), Marinetti conceives technology (and pro-
stheses) not as a violation of nature, but rather as a fetishistic reconfiguration of it.
    23
       In more general terms, Daly (2016: 80-87) talks about «futurist coping»
with reference to letter writing and the artistic practice of parole in libertà.


                                                                                      477
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



          Tutto in vetrina, anche i gloriosi mutilati da festeggiare. Sono seduti
      immobili nelle poltrone rosso e oro del grande salone. Visi rudi cotti e
      riplasmati dalle carezze ferree corrosive delle rose granate. Visi scabri,
      tipici come il Carso. Pezzi di sole ancora fumanti e vibranti. Ora sono
      un po’ pacificati, ma vi passa sopra il brivido di una irritazione. Perla
      il sudore su quella fronte. Sentono il peso insopportabile di quel lusso
      sfarzoso ammucchiato con boria. Nei loro occhi oscilla l’anima tra
      le preoccupazioni di denaro e il piacere inusitato dei ricchi omaggi
      mondani. Intorno accaparranti fastidiosi tutti i brusii mormorii delle
      donne che vorrebbero essere materne e invece urtano sbadatamente tutti
      gli spigoli doloranti di quelle sensibilità troncate. (Marinetti 1921: 141)

      A topos of war literature, the harsh contrast between civil and military
life – the former effeminate, the latter manly – and the polemic against
bourgeois laxness and luxury conceal here a less evident traumatic core:
childlike, fragile, and unsettled, the mutilated are no longer the object of
sexual attentions, as rather of distracted maternal gestures. A cautious, al-
most embarrassed, euphemistic rhetoric is in place to describe them: «cot-
ti e riplasmati» alludes to burns and disfigured facial lineaments; «ferree
carezze» are bombs and explosions; «sensibilità troncate» is both a meta-
phor of their psychic vulnerability and an accurate depiction of their trunk
with no limbs. This dystonic setting co-exists with the sexual euphoria of
the previous scene: both can be interpreted as reactions to the trauma of
the scattered body, the former as a means of compensation boosted by the
pleasure principle, the latter as a somber return to the reality principle.
      The homosocial fantasies dominating early futurist imagination are
to be revised because they are fantasies no more: the trench is indeed a
nightmarish all-men world, a highly technologized and primordial ‘ditch’,
entirely artificial but at the same time ultra-organic, saturated with mud,
human bodies, and their waste matter. Steel and flesh mingle in the hybrid
bodies of the mutilated, but prostheses are not the signs of enhancement
foreshadowing the birth of an immortal creature. The narrative of the per-
fect, over-human simulacrum is contradicted by the patchwork of real pros-
thetic bodies. Marinetti will not explicity acknowledge the need to re-write
his seminal feats of the imagination; he rather tailors them to new meanings
and undersides, in accordance with his absolute ideological support to the
war and his full, vitalist enjoyment of the experience of combat.
      It is only relatively important to establish whether he is fully aware of
the discontinuity between his earlier avant-gardist narratives of the body
and the adjustments and reconfigurations of some of his later war writ-



478
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ings. Rather, one should see in this a striking example of the ambiguous
workings between the literary imagination and historical reality, involving
ideological blindness, delusion, partial repression of traumatic contents,
assimilation of dominant social discourses and a reaction to them. To an-
swer the second question that I posed at the beginning of this article, noth-
ing apparently happens – stylistic homogeneity testifying to it – when the
violence of history makes Marinetti’s earlier narratives of the body sud-
denly turn real, except that Futurism – at least Marinetti’s – has destroyed
the future. It has, in fact, destroyed itself.




                                                                                479
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



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                                The author
     Cristina Savettieri

     Cristina Savettieri is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Italian



                                                                                 481
Cristina Savettieri, Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in F.T. Marinetti



Literature at the University of Pisa. She previously worked at Freie Uni-
versität Berlin as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow (2011-13)
and at the University of Edinburgh as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow
(2015‑17). Among her main research interests are: Carlo Emilio Gadda,
Italian Modernism, the culture of the First World War, the theories and
practices of the modern tragic.

      Email: cristina.savettieri@unipi.it



                                        The article
      Date sent: 31/03/2022
      Date accepted: 31/07/2022
      Date published: 30/11/2022



                              How to cite this article
      Savettieri, Cristina, “Hybrid Bodies between Utopia and Trauma in
F.T. Marinetti”, Entering the Simulacra World, Eds. A. Ghezzani - L. Giovan-
nelli - F. Rossi - C. Savettieri, Between, XII.24 (2022): 461-482, www.between-
journal.it




482
