| her crutch-compasses. For the first time she is required to describe herself, and realising that she has no meaning she can only compare herself to a useless text: "Come una carta assorbente troppo usata ho su di me numerose scritture e sono un reticolato di segni incompleti e insignificanti ..." (VG 94) After the encounter between Light and Fire, Garar� disappears between two curves of the earth�s surface (VG 130). [20] In this realm she cannot exist consciously. The Allegro Azzurro concludes that Garar� was "il vuoto vestito di logica!" (VG 131) reinforcing the idea that Garar� as a function is empty of signification. The logic of Garar� is the imperative logic of the symbolic order, thus after she disappears "L�eterno dinamismo gioioso della creazione continua il suo ritmo alogico" (VG 131). The rhythm of eternal dynamism belongs to 'poetic logic'. The ternary model posited by both Kristeva and Benedetta is useful as a topology of avant-garde writing but becomes more problematic in its application to broader ideological concerns. In Benedetta�s terms, the third space is associated with freedom as it is located outside of the jurisdiction of linguistic imperatives. For Kristeva, it is also a site of subversion (of linguistic imperatives) and consequently revolutionary. Both models involve a similar notion of transgression and the playful heterogeneity that accompanies it. However it is precisely these ambiguous concepts of 'freedom' and 'revolution' that provide us with the possibility to unravel the avantgarde-fascism question from a linguistic perspective. It is arguable that Kristeva�s model of revolution in language is fundamentally impossible because any transgression of the symbolic order must still rely on some form of symbolic system for there to be the possibility of representation at all. Furthermore, 'transgressive' expressions have a tendency to become re-absorbed into the symbolic domain. Grosz notes that: Avant-garde practices can lead to a transgression of the symbolic, that is, to the limits of signification, but they do not obliterate them. They are displaced and repositioned elsewhere. Representational ruptures cannot destroy socio-symbolic unities, for, on [Kristeva�s] understanding, this amounts to a dissolution of sociality itself. Radical subversion is essentially reformist: as the order of language, the symbolic, can only accommodate so much change at any given time. [21] This is especially relevant in considering the futurist program of destruction and rennovation, and fascism�s analogous shift from 'movement' to regime. Investigating the nexus between fascism and the avant-garde, Andrew Hewitt comments that, "the ability to represent fragmentation reasserts a representational totality in which the problem of fragmentation is itself implicitly negated." [22] In other words, the mere act of representing by means of a transgressive avant-garde language (read fragmentation) permits such language to be absorbed and embedded in a broader representational discourse. True rupture is thus prevented by the very act of its representation. Benedetta was aware of this danger and there are indications of this awareness in all of her novels. In the last chapter of Viaggio di Garar� she warns of the "audacia pericolosa del dittatore che vuol uniformare a capriccio l�umanit�" (VG 126), which is noteworthy when one takes into account the fact that the novel was published in 1931, at a time when the fascist regime was well and truly established in Italy and the year after the Nazi Party won the elections in Germany. It is fair to suggest that Benedetta is making a derisory comment on Mussolini�s regime, which was actively supported and promoted by many of the futurists. A similar tendency can be found in Astra e il sottomarino, a novel which celebrates expression and transgression but concludes with the story of a ruthless father who imprisons his three daughters in a pyramid and forbids them any form of subjectivity or self-expression. Futurism as a movement is grounded in negativity, as its creative thrust is based on a total rejection of the positivist perspective � and arguably the entire European Enlightenment tradition. What futurism (and the historical [to page 78] avant-garde) disputes is positivism�s claim to explain everything. If we were to read Viaggio di Garar� through its historical and ideological context, it would seem apparent that Garar��s journey is a modernist deconstructive narrative representing the impossibility of a totalising positivist discourse to explain itself beyond mere description (or translation). However futurism itself was to position itself as a totalising discourse, reconstructing through its manifestos all the traditional discursive divisions by employing the prefix 'futurist': futurist literature, futurist painting, futurist science, futurist theatre etc. The influence of the Symbolic is never distant from futurist theoretical practice, and, like positivism, futurism as ideology falls victim to its own conceit in its failure to question or subvert its own totalising assertions. The futurist and Kristevan notion of a space beyond context is ultimately impossible and Bendetta�s paradox remains unresolvable. What Benedetta�s novels provide us with is an aesthetic model of revolution, transgression and freedom consistent with the futurist-modernist program. The pessimism with which she illustrates how such creative transgression can be exploited (particularly in Astra) and the anti-fascist warning towards the end of Viaggio di Garar� indicate, perhaps, a personal scepticism regarding the direction of the 'revolutionary' movements of her time. Nevertheless, Benedetta celebrates transgression and the resultant jouissance, not only as instances of creativity and subjectivity but almost as a precondition of human subjectivity itself. [23] Her positing of conceptual spaces in Viaggio di Garar� and Garar��s progress between them provide us with a ternary developmental narrative, structurally analagous to the theories of subjectivity that would later be put forward by Lacan and Kristeva. Her self-critical scepticism towards the 'freedom' promised by such a narrative could equally be applied to Kristeva�s limited notion of 'revolution'. Viaggio di Garar� is an exemplar, not only of avant-garde writing but of the contradictory process of avant-garde representation and provides a useful point of reference for the reading of all futurist texts. (1) Benedetta Cappa Marinetti Le forze umane � Viaggio di Garar� � Astra e il sottomarino ( Rome: Altana, 1998). All citations for this essay are taken from the original editions of these novels: Le forze umane: romanzo astratto con sintesi grafiche (Foligno: Franco Campitelli-Editore, 1924),Viaggio di Garar�: Romanzo cosmico per Teatro (Milan: Giuseppe Morreale-Editore, 1931), Astra e il sottomarino: Vita Trasognata (Montepulciano: Editori del Grifo, 1991). Benedetta Cappa Marinetti is referred to as Benedetta as it was her nom de plume. I use Marinetti when I refer to her husband Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. (2) Luciano de Maria, �Avvertenza� Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore) xi. (3) In her introduction to The Women artists of Italian Futurism, Mirella Bentivoglio emphasises this point and goes as far as suggesting that the aggressive aspects of futurism contributed to a presumption among some scholars that there were no female adherents to the movement. Mirella Bentivoglio and Franca Zoccoli The Women Artists of Italian futurism: almost lost to history (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997) 3. (4) Benedetta, Viaggio di Garar�: Romanzo cosmico per Teatro (Milan: Giuseppe Morreale-Editore, 1931). Hereafter abbreviated as VG. (5) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, �Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista�, Teoria e Invenzione futurista, 46. (6) Julia Kristeva, �Revolution in Poetic Language�, trans Margaret Waller, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 90-136 (7) Ibidem, p. 41 (8)Benedetta Cappa Marinetti Le forze umane: Romanzo Astratto con Sintesi Grafiche (Foligno: Franco Campitelli-Editore, 1924). Hereafter abbreviated as LFU. (9) F. T. Marinetti, op. cit. (10) Bruno Corra, A. Ginanni, R. Chiti, Settimeli, M. Carli, Oscar Mara, Nannetti, �La Scienza Futurista�, in �L�Italia Futurista�, 15 June 1916, reproduced in Futurismo: I Grandi Temi (Milan: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 1991), 218. (9) �Revolution in Poetic Language�, 93-98 (11) Ibidem, p. 219 (12 Kristeva (1986), op. cit. note (6), pp. 93-98 (13)Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1977) 69. cited in Michael Payne Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 168. (14) Kristeva (1986), op. cit. note (6), pp. 93-98 (15) In Viaggio di Garar� , Benedetta uses underlining to distinguish direct from indirect speech. I have maintained this typographical distinction in the citations. (16) Kristeva examines the significance of headlessness as a metaphor for the limits of the visible in her novel Possessions, trans. Barbara Bray, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 3-10. Georges Bataille adopts a similar configuration through his notion of sacred horror in �The Sacred Conspiracy�, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 178-181. (17)Elizabeth Grosz and Hazel Rowley, �Psychoanalysis and Feminism�, Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunem (London: Routledge, 1990) 185. (18) The desire for freedom from linguistic restrictions is also explored in Marinetti�s �Immaginazzione senza fili� in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 46. (19) �Psychoanalysis and Feminism�, 193. (20)Garar� is drawn into the subconscious fold. This is effectively her true locus of meaning. (21) Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989) 60. (22) Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993) 65-6 (23)This is especially the case in Le forze umane. For Luciana, creative self-expression is inalienable from subjectivity and consciousness. |