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Abstract
In Mafarka il futurista, F.T. Marinetti creates his new Futurist body by obscuring the role of the maternal function. By considering the specific aggression against what Marinetti codes as maternal, I offer a new way of thinking about the gender dynamics of the novel and Futurism’s relation to the reproductive female body. I suggest that the maternal function—as the ability to give life—is a necessary capability that the Futurist must acquire. However, as the protagonist approximates maternal reproductivity, the female body takes on Futurist properties, namely virility, pleasure in the risk of death, and the capacity for physical violence. A hypersexualized female body acts as a decoy to obscure the presence of female reproductivity and its potential to undermine Marinetti’s Futurist project. A closer look at Marinetti’s confusion of the reproductive and digestive systems reveals the Futurist’s dependency on an unacknowledged maternal technology of reproduction.
Notes
1 I would like to thank Amy Wyngaard and the reviewers for their careful reading and vital suggestions. Their comments on previous versions of this essay helped enormously to open my project to new directions of thought.
2 Marinetti used this trial as an opportunity to draw attention to the novel and Futurism. Part of this strategy included publishing an account of the trial as an appendix to Distruzione: Poema futurista complete with parentheses marking the crowd’s applause and laughter. The appendix is reprinted in Mondadori’s 2003 publication of the Italian translation. For further details regarding the trial, see Salaris, Marinetti editore 105–11.
3 The novel was originally published in French in 1909 as Mafarka le futuriste: roman africain and translated into Italian the following year by Decio Cinti. All quotes are taken from the Mondadori publication of Cinti’s translation.
4 Adriana Cavarero has written extensively on the association of women with mortality through embodiment and birth. See especially Nonostante Platone, “Per una teoria della differenza sessuale” 43–79, and “Thinking Difference” 120–29. For an introduction to the figure of the mother in Italian feminist thought and philosophy of sexual difference, see Casarino, Another Mother. On the politicization of female reproductivity and the association of women with giving life and death today, see Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures.
5 Much scholarship has examined Marinetti’s misogyny across his texts. For studies on Mafarka, see Blum, The Other Modernism 55–78; Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality 75–92; Spackman, Fascist Virilities 49–76. While these studies likewise emphasize the destructive violence against female bodies, none analyzes its relation to the reproductive female body or the maternal function as its target.
6 For an overview of Marinetti’s Futurist texts and their editorial history, see De Maria’s introduction to Teoria e invenzione futurista xix–lxxi, and Salaris, Storia del futurism 30–35.
7 This quotation inspires the title of this essay. In translating “inaspettati” as “unexpected,” I wish to highlight the unforeseen consequences of the confusion of organ functions in the Futurist body. It is Marinetti’s blindness to the potential of certain organs that allows for a maternal Futurist to appear and threaten the integrity of the male Futurist body.
8 For an incisive reading of Marinetti’s representation of the male body and its relation to modern art, see Poggi 19–43.
9 Foster notes a “double logic of prosthesis” at play in Marinetti’s work. See Foster 109–50, and Schnapp 153–78 for analyses of the body/machine complex in Marinetti.
10 On the intertextuality of Mafarka and other texts by Marinetti as a narcissistic practice, see La Penna 133–63.
11 On the racialization of women's bodies, see Blum, “Incorporating the Exotic” 138–62; Spackman 49–77; Belmonte 165–82. Texts that take up colonial imagery in Italian literature include Caponetto 25–56; Pinkus 180–93; Welch 625–53.
12 As many have noted, the decimation of female bodies calls to mind Theweleit’s study of the Freikorps’ male fantasies, especially those that have to do with turning others into pulp.
13 Spackman’s and Kaplan’s accounts rightly highlight how this passage typifies Marinetti’s depiction of female bodies and his interest in rendering the feminine inert. Neither study, however, takes up the female perspective presented in Biba’s speech. For a literary example with a first-person female perspective, see Marinetti’s and Robert’s Un ventre di donna. For a recent study of female Futurist writings, see Sica, Futurist Women.
14 Terms such as “grembo,” “matrice,” or “utero” leave little doubt as to which organ is in question. While “womb” is an acceptable translation of “ventre” and “viscere,” both terms carry a multiplicity of meanings that additionally relegate the womb to a mere undifferentiated organ of the lower body.
15 On the male appropriation of female reproductivity through consumption, see Sofia, “Exterminating Fetuses” 47–59.
16 Blum’s psychoanalytic reading suggests that the consumption of women and the reduction of female bodies to pieces across Marinetti’s texts “manifests an obsessive wish for absolute control and possession” (Other Modernism 95). As “apotropaic reactions,” consumption and reduction are meant to shore up the male’s identity against anxieties of feminization and “the dissolution of borders sweeping away any possibility of distinction and symbolization” (59). This position, however, does not account for the emergence of masculine Futurist qualities in female characters, Colubbi in particular. It additionally situates women as external, objectified others to a damaged male ego and not as subjects in their own right.
17 The literary figures of consumption and ingestion have varying functions across Marinetti’s texts. See in particular Le Roi Bombance and “Un pranzo che evitò un suicidio” in La cucina futurista 9–20. On the sexualized alimentary imagery and its relation to the temporality of the body in Marinetti’s novellas, see Cesaretti 139–55.
18 On the image of the “gaping mouth,” see Bakhtin; on the inversion and displacement upward of the feminine “other mouth” in Italian poetry, see Spackman, “Inter musam et ursam moritur: Folengo and the Gaping ‘Other’ Mouth” 19–34.
19 For a biographical take on Colubbi’s relationship to Mafarka, see Baldissone 114–26. Of interest in this respect is Marinetti’s “Il fascino dell’Egitto” 963–1000.
20 For example, Marinetti states in “Contro il matrimonio:” “La donna non appartiene a un uomo, ma bensì all’avvenire e allo sviluppo della razza” (319).
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Amanda Recupero
Amanda Recupero is a Ph.D. candidate in the Romance Studies Department of Cornell University. Her current research project examines how different bodies engage with and respond to modern technology in twentieth-century Italian literature.