Marinetti's Manifesto (link)

The Futurist Manifesto, by F. T. Marinetti, is online!




Marinetti wrote this baby in 1909 to announce a break with traditional artistic conventions. Here are the Manifesto's bullet points:

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.



11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds. 

Sounds a wee bit fascistic, yes? But then, Marinetti was one of the early supporters of Mussolini.

For me, this document's significance--beyond historical value-rests in its influence on Pound, Lewis, et. al. who created Vorticism as a response to/variation on Futurism. This work also influenced L'arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noises), by Luigi Russolo, which, in turn, had a profound influence on 20th century music (more on that another time--when I have the time and energy to laud Pierre Henry, Steve Reich, et al).

Anyway, just sharing.

Pierre Henry

I love this man. Genius of Musique Concrete and grumpy old guy. There is a great documentary out on him, Pierre Henry: The Art of Sounds, which is quite entertaining. I recommend it if you're intrigued by the post-war avant garde or just interested in how an innovator of mashups/sampling/electronica/noise continues to do his thing in his 80s.

Wyndham Lewis Gets His Exhibition

The long-neglected* Wyndham Lewis finally gets a showing at a celebrated London gallery. The National Portrait Gallery's special exhibition of Lewis's portraits has officially begun. You can view the NPG's Lewis collection here.

As high modernism's centenary approaches (I'm calling it at 2022), we'll soon encounter a barrage of major exhibitions and conferences, etc. dedicated to the folks involved. Ya think?

* Some argue that neglecting Lewis is appropriate considering his often shockingly offensive views. See my comments here on that matter.

(Perhaps hard to believe, but my interests do extend beyond American politics and yellow journalism. Occasionally, at any rate).

Wyndham Lewis, Revisited

At The Guardian’s books page, Nigel Beale notes The National Portrait Gallery’s decision to present a retrospective of Wyndham Lewis’s portraits. In an article, “Wyndham Lewis: overlooked scourge of mediocrity,” Beale reviews Lewis’s reputation as a class-A jerk because he vocalized his scorn (loudly) at the art world’s increasing collaboration with the business world (he also supported Hitler in the 1920s. Lewis rejected fascism in the 1930s). As a result of his hostile commentary on the “commercialisation of literature” and his tendency to burn economic bridges, Lewis, one of the early architects of Modernism, the co-creator of Vorticism, the editor of the journal BLAST, died penniless. As Beale writes:

His life is proof that prodigious, widely recognised talent isn't enough to secure reputation: ass-kissing and fib-telling, flattery and tongue-biting are often required to make careers. The alternative, for those incapable of sycophancy is squalor: the kind in which he lived, blind, during the final years [. . . .] Lewis's range of knowledge and intellectual vitality, his gale-force energy and daring honesty, his vigorous experimentation and fighting spirit, his caustic wit and analytic ingenuity, his whip-cracking prose and astonishing invention are unmatched in the twentieth century." National Gallery [retrospective] notwithstanding, it seems if you want to tell the truth without compromising, you have to die poor and have your literary immortality postponed for at least 50 years.

It's true that Lewis maintained some egregious socio-political views (see his early support for Hitler), but the man was, indeed, gifted (see his 1915 novel Tarr). This new retrospective will, no doubt, reignite the contentious debate that pits an artist’s views against his or her product (e.g., should we read the work of an anti-Semite? Should we applaud that of a misogynist?). So be it. At the very least, Lewis will be introduced to a new audience, one that, I hope, will consider and evaluate his work judiciously. A fresh look at Lewis would further inform our understanding of “modernism” in both its aesthetic and historical sense, thereby adding to our understanding of English (and by extension) American culture in the early twentieth century.

Cole Porter--Modernist?

Possibly.

While residing in Paris in 1923, the all-American songwriter noted for such pop standards as “Let’s Do It,” “Too Darn Hot,” and (my favorite) “In the Still of the Night” composed Within the Quota, a “jazz ballet” (or “ballet-sketch” according to the Yale online catalog of Porter material), for the avant-garde dance company, Les Ballet Suedois (apparently, second only to the Ballets Russe). A “comic tale about a Swedish immigrant to America” (Anderson), the ballet was a hit in Paris, but on Broadway—not so much.

The cubist painter Gerald Murphy (another American expat) designed Within the Quota’s décor and costumes and, according to some notes, wrote the libretto (The New Yorker ran an intriguing article on Murphy and his wife, Sara, in the magazine’s August 6, 2007 edition). Jean Borlin, Les Ballet Suedois’s principal dancer, choreographed the piece.

Porter premiered his jazz ballet on October 25, 1923--four months before George Gershwin premiered Rhapsody in Blue (February 1924). Apparently, Porter considered Within the Quota as his “legitimate” work, his “one effort to be respectable” (qtd. in Kisselgoff)

Alas, I’ve not seen Within the Quota, and I’ve yet to read anything that considers it within a “modernist” context (although many commentators do link Porter to the “Lost Generation,” but, collectively, that group’s status as “modernist” is often queried). The question of Cole Porter as Modernist invites investigation--and a little re-tooling of the great lyricist’s creative biography. Sadly, I’m still up to my neck in another expat modernist (or two), so Cole Porter must wait.

Wyndham Lewis: forgotten man

Miles Johnson, in The Guardian's arts blog, notes that the 50th anniversary of Wyndham Lewis's passed recently. It did so without television specials or special anniversary editions of Lewis's work. Apparently, we've forgotten the man, the (ahem) seminal figure, behind some of the early twentieth century's most vibrant, vigourous, and unconventional art. The avant-garde's master at arms.

The silence might well be due to Lewis's regrettable, abhorrent fascism and racism. But if we can recover and "rehabilitate" Yeats and Eliot, for example, why not "recover" Lewis? Let's investigate how his fascism seeps into his aesthetic, and how that aesthetic seeps into "high" modernism.

I wonder, however, what would happen if we excised all of the modernists with fascist inclinations? How many great Anglo-American writers of 1900-1940 would we have left (that, surely, is telling)?

Addendum 5/3/08
And months later, I discover another tribute to Lewis that questions his status as "forgotten modernist"; the blogger also includes a poem he wrote that references the "men of 1914." And Eliot. You can read both items at "My Life."

Stephen Joyce v. Carol Schloss

I’m a Jane-come-lately on this issue, but here it is nonetheless.

A few months back, the New Yorker published an article, “The Injustice Collector,” by D. T. Max, which questioned whether Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson, was “suppressing scholarship” with his aggressive attempts to control Joyce-related materials (he even claims to have destroyed family documents). Because of his reluctance to permit Joyceans access to materials related to his grandfather, or to cite such materials, the Stephen Joyce has acquired quite a bitter reputation amongst scholars.

However, Joyce lost a recent case involving scholar Carol Schloss, who has written a biography of Lucia Joyce, James’s daughter and Stephen’s aunt, titled Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. Stephen Joyce forbade Schloss to cite from copyrighted materials (both published and unpublished), which effectively rendered some of her claims insupportable. Schloss, however, took Joyce to court and won. You can read the press release here.

Now, if only Mrs. Valerie Eliot would allow scholars to access and cite TSE’s work without obtaining special permission (which, apparently, she isn’t eager to grant), all would be well. Of course, with Ronald Schuchard's new endeavour (to publish a multi-volume collection containing all of Eliot's prose), and Mrs. Eliot's hiring of a fresh editor for the second volume of letters, that day might not be too far off. Fingers crossed, anyway.

Reviews of Raine's Monograph on T. S. Eliot

I must admit I've not read Raine's work yet, and I probably won't get around to it for a while, but I found the following reviews fascinating in their foci.

“Raine’s Sterile Thunder” by Terry Eagleton for Prospect Magazine.
Eagleton's review, which dismisses Raine as an "acolyte" bearing offerings to the "high priest," seems rather peculiar. Eagleton takes Raine to task for neglecting to address TSE’s misogyny, anti-Semitism, purported homosexuality, etc., but then he reminds us that the poetry itself is what matters.

and a review by Tom Paulin for The Guardian.
Paulin also wonders why Raine doesn't investigate Eliot's private life or socio-political views.

Both reviews evoke, to me, the flamethrowing years of the 1980s and 1990s when any critic worth his or her salt (Gilbert & Gubar, Pinkney, Ellman, etc.) took a potshot at Eliot. Studies of Eliot's misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, sexuality, psychology, etc. triumphed over rather moderate, less-politicized explorations of his work. The tide has, of course, shifted, and scholars are publishing critiques that study Eliot's poetry, drama, and social criticism that illustrate the man's complexity rather than casting him as a strictly reactionary figure.

The impetus for this shift, I believe, lies in the extreme positions that several critics maintained in the latter half of hte 1990s. For example, Suman Gupta wrote an essay for The Times Higher Education Supplement in 1996. Gupta he argued against a “liberal consensus” that admitted Eliot’s numerous personal faults “[did] not make him a bad poet.” Gupta disagrees, for the as the aesthetic remains tightly bound with the social, and “all evaluative acts are social,” then a writer's personal politics should affect his or her literary status. Consequently, Gupta maintains, the canon requires a re-evaluation of “great” writers.

Gupta’s argument focuses on modernists (including Joyce, an author typically excluded from charges of racism and anti-Semitism), and he asserts that their works “should not be given to any students as 'great’ any longer--they provide neither social-cultural nor aesthetic-literary models.” On other words, get rid of 'em.

I found it curious then--and now--that Gupta's critcism focsed on racism alone. Why not misogyny? homophobia? Like I said, curious.

Furthermore, how far back should we take such revisions? Should we eliminate Shakespeare, Chaucer, Swift, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston? If you apply it to one author, you should apply it to all. If we're going to trace out negative stereotypes, we might as well dismiss the canon altogether. Yes, it's a slippery-slope argument, but I do think that Gupta's suggestion crests such a slope and begins a downward slide.

This is not to say that readers should ignore such issues; instead, we might consider how questionable portrayals of human beings--be it a "simple" stereotype (Lydia Languish) or blatantly racist (Bleistein)--informs a work. What socio-cultural or historical context permitted or encouraged such views? And how can we use these works to shatter still-extant myths about human beings? This seems to be the current of contemporary scholarship, and long may its course run.