revolution

Piers Kelly "The revolution in futurist language - A Kristevan approach to Benedetta Cappa Marinetti's Viaggio di Garar�", Convivio: Journal of ideas in Italian studies. (St. Lucia, Qld: Minerva E & S, 2000) v. 6, no. 1 April. pp. 70-79.

The recent republication of Benedetta Cappa Marinetti�s novel Viaggio di Garar�: romanzo cosmico per teatro is testimony to a renewed interest in Italian futurism and signals, perhaps, a more celebratory approach to the movement as a whole. [1] Due to a previous tendency to evaluate futurism according to historical or biographical criteria, the so-called Futurismus Renaissance heralded by Luciano de Maria has thus far been discursively limiting and limited. [2] The archival approach to futurism encourages a reading of futurist texts in terms of Italian cultural history in which F. T. Marinetti�s manifestos are positioned as the 'authentic' theoretical point of reference. Considering the breadth and scope of the futurist movement, its rediscovery has been an exceedingly selective one, and important futurist writers (principally women) have been unnecessarily excluded from the futurist canon. [3] The works of Benedetta deserve to be re-examined, not only through the critical lens of a post-fascist, post-structuralist hindsight, but also as valuable and philosophically relevant works of literature in their own right.
First published in 1931, Benedetta�s second novel Viaggio di Garar� [4] is an allegorical allusion to the structure of a fundamental futurist literary principal: "La distruzione della sintassi" and "Parole in libert�" first detailed in Marinetti�s "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista". [5] As both a novel and a play, Viaggio di Garar� is a text that strives to represent transgression as an esoteric movement between three 'realms' that are positioned as three stage scenes. The inhabitants of the concluding realm embody Marinetti�s notion of parolibere through their joyful subversion of language and their resistance to classification or recontextualisation in a homogenising discourse. However, while this transgressive 'space' is superficially situated outside of any organising principal, it is nonetheless not immune to being re-absorbed as discourse. Benedetta acknowledges this dilemma but is unable to elaborate on it other than by means of a vague oracular dream in which the cycle of seasons is invoked as a metaphor for destruction and rebuilding. It is in the elucidation of this very paradox that Julia Kristeva�s article "La r�volution du langage poetique" provides a useful futurist gloss. [6] While Kristeva announces the revolutionary possibilities in semiotic transgressions, these apparent transgressions of symbolic structures in the futurist/fascist discourse question the extent to which 'poetic language' is actually 'liberating' in the political sense. The thorny question of the relationship between fascism and the Ital-
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ian avant-garde necessitates a more rigorous structural reading of futurist literature than a merely historical or biographical one affords. Kristeva�s "Revolution in poetic language" provides a helpful mode of interpretation to the discourse implicit in Viaggio di Garar�, especially as Benedetta�s text appears to illustrate formally Kristeva�s notion of avant-garde writing. Similarly, an understanding of the limitations of Kristeva�s linguistic model can reveal some of the paradoxes inherent in the futurist (ideological) aesthetic as much as it may expose the shortcomings of Kristeva�s understanding of 'revolution' in language.
The anti-heroine of this text, Garar�, is an aged dwarf who travels on two grucce-compassi (crutch-compasses) with the intent of measuring and describing everything in her path. She journeys through three realms: Il Regno della Materia Dinamica, Il Regno delle Volont�-Tensioni and Il Regno delle Libert� Creatrici, which effectively frame Benedetta�s narrative of transgression. In the first realm, Garar� (a manifestation of positivist science) begins studying Mata, a giantess who devours little beings called dinici in a seemingly prehistoric lake situated in the cuore di Tempo-Spazio (VG 1). Her failure to impose any kind of order on Mata or to give expression to the dinici brings her to Il Regno delle Volont�-Tensioni. Here, the situation is reversed and Garar� finds herself in an organised and motionless environment, neatly divided into three atmospheres. The beings (called Volont�-Tensioni) that inhabit this realm manifest themselves as platonic representations of philosophical, emotional and scientific forms. Garar� encourages these beings to act (or rather create) and when they ignore her she attempts to reinvigorate the realm by upsetting the precise limits of the three atmospheres. While the atmospheres deteriorate, the most powerful of the Volont�-Tensioni, Time, returns to conquer Garar� with its eternal song. Garar� subsequently enters Il Regno delle Libert� Creatrici where she finds herself on an Edenic riva verde oro della gioia (VG 77). Here she encounters the piccoli allegri who have spherical, internally illuminated heads (VG 78). They dance joyful arabesques and prepare for the great encounter between Light and Fire. It is a realm full of movement, music, laughter and light with which Garar� is unable to interact. She gradually disappears under the sand as the realisation dawns on her that her reason cannot embrace the irrational wonder of the universe.
The journey of Garar� traces a continuum that is constructed through three conceptual spaces. The concluding space is that of jouissance, parolibere or 'poetic language'. This last phase is the conclusion of a sequence in which the futurist avant-guarde discourse is situated. In "Revolution in poetic language", Kristeva writes:

A literary semiotics must be developed on the basis of a poetic logic where the concept of the power of the continuum would embody the 0-2 interval, a continuity where 0 denotes and 1 is implicitly transgressed. Within this �power of the continuum� from 0 to a specifically poetic double, the linguistic, psychic and social �prohibition� is 1 (God, Law, Definition). [7]

By applying this model to the text one sees a correspondence between Benedetta�s realms and the three numeric terms used by Kristeva. Kristeva claims that avant-guardist writing surpasses the symbolic term '1' in order to enter into a new zone of expression that does not subscribe to symbolic laws.

0 semiotic chora - Regno della Materia Dinamica
1 symbolic order - Regno delle Volonta Tensioni
2 poetic language - Regno delle Liberta Creatrici

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