Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism. An Anthology.

Somigli, Luca

Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism. An Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 603.

One hundred years after its foundation, and after some forty years of serious critical inquiry, Futurism still retains a curious and uneasy position in the history of early twentieth-century literature, or at least in the versions of that history produced in the English-speaking world. If, in fact, there is a general consensus that Futurism inaugurated what would become known as the "historical avant-garde" and set the pattern of antagonistic provocation that would characterize later movements like Dada or Surrealism, its actual production in literature and the figurative arts has remained little known. For decades, only its manifestoes were readily available in English. Serviceable as they may have been, F. S. Flint's and Umbro Apollonio's collections - the first limited to Marinetti's texts, the second focused on the figurative arts - have contributed to nurturing the notion of Futurism as a movement that produced little more than loud and brash proclamations, especially in literature. Among the many publications celebrating the centennial of Futurism, the present anthology thus stands out as it satisfies a very real need for primary material in translation. The three editors, literary historians Lawrence Rainey and Laura Wittman and art historian Christine Poggi, have assembled a sampling of Futurist works ranging from the well-known to the surprising even for the specialist that does, at long last, justice to the diversity of the movement.

The anthology opens with an introduction by Rainey, who reads the history of Futurism in parallel to that of Marinetti. The identification of the movement with its founder is not in itself unproblematic, if perhaps inevitable. However, Rainey is not interested in simply retelling the life and time of the writer; rather, he uses Marinetti's biography to bring out the larger cultural and social questions that the movement confronted. Thus, while Marinetti's life provides the main thread of the narrative, all the other major and many of the minor figures of Futurism, from Umberto Boccioni to Mario Carli, from Francesco Cangiullo to Enrico Prampolini, come centerstage when Rainey turns to the various domains in which Futurism intervened, in particular the figurative and performance arts and politics. What emerges in this account is that Futurism was the first artistic movement to imagine, at times with giddy excitement and at times with halfdisguised horror, a world in which the human subject has been displaced from the center of the universe. This translated not only in the introduction of new themes but in a complete rethinking of how art was produced and received by its audience; see for instance Rainey's connection of a technique like "the uniform application of strokes across the canvas surface," inherited from Divisionism, to the erosion of "the principle of distinction between objects and environments, bodies and space, matter and atmosphere" (9).

The volume is divided into three sections. The first, edited by Rainey, is dedicated to manifestoes and other theoretical texts and, clocking at over 250 pages, is by far the most generous such selection in English. All the classics are there, re-translated for the occasion: the founding manifesto, of course, and "Let's Murder the Moonlight," "Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto," etc. However, there are also quite a number of unexpected choices, such as Margaret Wynne Nevinson's article " Futurism and Woman," published in the suffragist magazine The Vote in response to Marinetti's lecture at the Lyceum Club in London in late 1910, and the first significant piece on the Italian movement in a British publication. (Four years later Nevison's son Christopher would co-author with Marinetti "Futurism and English Art," also re-published here, the manifesto that would precipitate the rift between the Italian caposcuola and his erstwhile British sympathizers.) Texts by Enif Roberts, Rosa Rosa and the mysterious Giovanni Fiorentino document the debate on the "woman question" that raged on the pages of L'Italia futurista in 1917, while manifestoes on fashion, advertising, or radio witness to the interdisciplinary interests of the group even during the Fascist ventennio, when the movement for the most part retrenched into the domain of art.

The second section, edited by Poggi, presents a visual repertoire covering thirty artists working in media ranging from painting and sculpture to dance and visual poetry, as well as visual documents such as photographs of the various protagonists of the movement. Introducing the section, Poggi traces the main tendencies of Futurist art. If the pre-war "heroic" phase of the movement has, as is to be expected, the lion's share of the essay, later developments in the visual arts such as aeropittura or sacred art, as well as the contribution of the movement to fields such as set design, are also discussed in fair detail. As in the case of the manifestoes, often-reprinted images are juxtaposed to rather unfamiliar ones, such as the photographs of Valentine de Saint-Point's performance of "metachorie," the dance she created in 1913, or Rougena Zatkova's remarkable polymaterial collage Water Running under Ice and Snow. It should be noted that while the reproductions are in black and white (undoubtedly to contain costs for a text that could be easily used as a course sourcebook), their quality is consistently very good.

The final section, edited by Wittman, is dedicated to literary production. While the first was organized chronologically and the second alphabetically by artist, this section is structured around five broad areas associated, as Wittman explains, "with a specific period, a dominant image, and a particular aspect of stylistic innovation" (409): "The Simultaneous City," "Words-in-Freedom War," "The Metamorphoses of the Moon," "Technical War," and " Theater, Aeropoetry and Tactilism." Again, one of the pleasures of this section is skimming its index to find authors otherwise unknown (at least to this reviewer). Who knew for instance that the poet-boxeur Armando Mazza had a daughter, Anna Maria who was briefly a Futurist poet herself? Here she is anthologized with "Torment," a poem clearly in dialogue with Balla's classic 1911 painting The Street Lamp. Wittman's translations render very effectively both the semantic meaning of the original texts and their visual character, an especially daunting challenge in the case of "words in freedom." Marinetti's "Terrifying Tenderness" (a section of 8 anime in una bomba) or Govoni's "The Diver" give a sense of both the difficulties facing the translator and of the effectiveness of the result.

Whether adopted as a textbook in a course on the avant-garde or used as a sourcebook by students and scholars who do not have access to the original Italian texts, this anthology will without a doubt influence the study of Futurism for a long time to come. Indeed, for once the accolades printed on the back-cover are not rhetorical: This truly is, to say it with Marjorie Perloff, "the definitive anthology of Futurist writings and artworks available in English."

Luca Somigli, University of Toronto