The Poet and the Vampire: Roi Bombance and the Crisis of Symbolist Values.

Somigli, Luca

In his influential Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger proposed an account of the rise of the historical avant-garde that has since become almost canonical. As is well known, for Burger there is a necessary relationship between the revolutionary movements that populated the landscape of early twentieth-century European culture and late nineteenth-century aestheticism, since it was aestheticism that laid bare the conditions of existence of art in bourgeois society against which the avant-garde revolted. Aestheticism's rallying cry of "art for art's sake," its call for the complete autonomy of art from "the praxis of life," to use Burger's vocabulary, is at once a demand to distinguish art from the materialistic, instrumental pursuits of the dominant class and an acknowledgement of "art's lack of social impact" (22). To put it simply, the consummation of the divorce of art from life with fin-de-siecle aestheticism made it possible for the cultural movements that followed to call into question not only specific artistic practices--the schools and tendencies that, having had their moment of glory, receded into the distance of tradition--but rather art as an institution, that is, as the complex apparatus governing the production, distribution and reception of works of art. The cul-de-sac of aestheticism demands of the avantgarde a radically new beginning, one in which the reintegration of art and life is carried out not only at the level of content, as in some sort of new realism, but rather in terms of how art functions in society. Both aestheticism and the avant-garde reject the means-ends rationality of the bourgeois world: what distinguishes the avant-garde is that it does not also, as a consequence, reject life praxis, but rather attempts, in Burger's famous dictum, "to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art" (49).

Of course, Burger had little time for or interest in Futurism. His book reduces the avant-garde to the Dada-Surrealism dyad, and the Italian movement is conspicuous for its absence. (2) If anything, the two nods towards it--a passing reference to its use of montage and a brief sentence tucked in a footnote suggesting that the main argument of the book, "with certain limitations that would have to be determined through concrete analysis" (109), should also work for Futurism--serve to remind us of the narrow scope of Burger's investigation. The reason for his resistance to Futurism is obvious: the Italian movement inconveniently complicates the superimposition of avant-garde artistic practices with Marxist political practice that is central to his book. And yet, this elision results also in a curiously a-historical account of the rise of the avant-garde, with artists and painters appearing on the scene fully armed, like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter, and prepared to launch their assault on the institutions of art. As a result, their oppositionality seems to be a sort of a priori rather than the outcome of a process of intellectual and artistic maturation. On the contrary, what interests me, and keeps drawing me to Marinetti's pre-futurist works, is the question of how the transition from aestheticism to the avant-garde may have occurred in the actual literary practice--in the formal, stylistic or genre choices--of specific writers of the period.

Marinetti's experience is in this respect particularly revealing, as the founder of Futurism arrives to the avant-garde, and in fact contributes in a fundamental way to the parad igm shift that the avant-garde marks, after a decade of militancy in the ranks of the Symbolist movement, the culmination of literary aestheticism. In the early years of his literary activity, the public image that Marinetti adopted and carefully cultivated was that of the dandyish aesthete living in the artificial paradises created by the poetic word and far removed from the concerns of the material world. Tullio Panteo's booklet II poeta Marinetti, published on the eve of the foundation of Futurism and, as some have suggested, likely heavily edited by Marinetti himself, catches the poet in a telling pose: "pallido e biondo, con lo sguardo sempre lontano, troublant come una carezza, [...] l'eterno innamorato delle stelle e della luna, il sublime cantore del mare". (3) Even in this private moment, it is not difficult to discern in Marinetti the author of the poems of La Conquete des etoiles (1902), Destruction (1904), or La Ville Charnelle (1908), where the great Symbolist theme of the transcendental quest for freedom from the shackles of material reality is recast in terms of a cosmic agon among the forces of nature--the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea--in a characteristically elaborate language rightly described by Giovanni Lista as in "a state of permanent exaltation" (F. T. Marinetti 34).

Likewise, in his critical writings of the same period, we find Marinetti adhering closely and almost dogmatically to the established articles of poetic faith of the Symbolist milieu. In a long review of Vittorio Pica's volume of essays Letteratura d'eccezione published in the May 1899 issue of L'Anthologie-Revue de France et d'Italie, for instance, he stressed approvingly the self-referentiality of art championed by aestheticism, and offered his own version of the motto "art for art's sake" by arguing that "[l]a litterature, comme tous les arts, n'a d'autre but qu'elle-meme" (129). (4) Reasserting the antithetical opposition between art and life, he further wrote that art "peut influencer utilement l'ame humaine comme (et parfois mieux que) l'alcool et l'amour en lui donnant l'oubli de la realite par le reve" (129). (5) Two years later, in reviewing the opening performance of Pietro Mascagni's opera Le maschere, a grandiose event involving its simultaneous staging in six different Italian cities, Marinetti took the opportunity to restate his preference for Wagnerian opera by appealing to Paul Bourget's argument about the fragmentation of organic structures in modernity formulated in his famous 1881 essay on Baudelaire (later incorporated in the Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 1883). Towards the end of his review, Marinetti asks: "Le style decadent dont parle Bourget et que Nietzsche incrimine dans l'oeuvre de Wagner, n'est-ce pas le style de notre vie au debut du XXe siecle?" (128). (6) The question was of course meant rhetorically, and yet a coeval reader might well have wondered whether it shouldn't in fact be taken at face value. At the dawn of the twentieth century, was the retreat from reality into the artificial paradises of the absolute poetic word or of a life lived like a work of art--that "decadent style" that, from Bourget and Wagner to D'Annunzio and Nordau, had come to be identified with literary modernity tout court--the only way to salvage art from the demands of the material world?

What is remarkable about Marinetti's conception of literary modernity as it emerges here and in other contemporary critical essays is its relative belatedness, its reliance on the terms of a poetic program that was already some two decades old, and that owed more to Gautier and Bourget than to the more recent debates in the periodicals of the literary avant-garde, including some like the Revue blanche to which Marinetti himself contributed. In other words, as he entered the literary arena at the turn of the century (his first publication, aside from youthful pieces in his Egyptian magazine Papyrus, was a poem in the March 1898 issue of the Anthologie-Revue de France et d'Italie), Marinetti seemed to be engaged in a rear-guard defence of a poetics that was in fact under increasing attack from a number of quarters and was by no means universally shared by his contemporaries. By the mid-1890s, the poetic winds had shifted in the French literary milieu, as Michel Decaudin has documented in his monumental monograph on the "crisis of Symbolist values." "From 1894 to 1898," he writes, "the keywords changed: there is less talk of the Dream, or of the Ideal, and the beauty of Nature and the splendour of Life are declared" (94). The results ranged from Andre Gide's fascination with Nietzschean will to power to Proust's call for a poetry that should reject obscurity and find inspiration in nature, but in any case, they were all characterized by "the questioning of Symbolist values and the intention of turning the very forms of life into material for the work of art" (Decaudin 94). (7) What I would like to suggest here is that the bleak allegorical drama of Roi Bombance and his court is Marinetti's own moment of questioning of the Symbolist values, and in particular of the sharp fracture between art and life, between aesthetic experience and daily praxis, between striving towards the Ideal and material reality. In Le Roi Bombance, the impossibility of a mediation between the two domains is articulated plastically on the stage and pushed to its ultimate conclusion, and in this sense the play constitutes a necessary step towards Futurism as the attempt to overcome precisely the stalemate here represented. That no salvation is to be expected from a corrupt body politics is no surprise in a work steeped in the decadent humours of the fin de siecle. What is perhaps surprising is the fact that no salvation can be found by retreating into the artificial paradises of art, either. (8)

Published in September 1905 by the Societe du Mercure de France, Le Roi Bombance was Marinetti's first attempt at a theatrical work and his first major digression from the domain of poetry, privileged until that point of his career. (9) The play was the result of a long process of gestation begun as early as 1902, when, with its earlier title of Les Marmitons sacres, it was listed as a work in progress on the cover of La Conquete des etoiles. The date of completion is less clear. Responding to an inchiesta entitled "I nostri scrittori in villeggiatura" published by the periodical Verde e azzurro in 1903, Marinetti spoke of the play as finished and described it as "una tragicommedia in quattro atti di un sarcasmo spietato contro lo sfruttamento attuale delle folle betes [sic] et moutonnieres" ("I nostri" l). (10)

However, in an often quoted letter to Giovanni Pascoli, he tied the play more closely to the political events of the period, noting that "l'oeuvre a ete terminee pendant la greve generale milanaise" of 1904 ("Carteggio" 20). (11) In the meantime, it had undergone a change of title, probably to avoid any confusion with Max Jacob's satirical novella Histoire du roi Kaboul 1er et du marmiton Gauwain, which had appeared in 1904. (12) It is also worthy of note that over the years Marinetti's conception of the play had changed, at least if we are to take seriously the genre labels he invoked: by the time it finally came out, what in 1903 had been a "tragicomedy" had become something quite different, a "Tragedie satirique en 4 actes, en prose," as recited its subtitle, which was retained in Decio Cinti's Italian translation of 1909. In any case, the final product was, as is well known, an overwrought and excessive work. As distant as possibly imaginable from that syntheticism that Marinetti would put forward as the fundamental characteristic of Futurist dramaturgy a short decade later, it is rather a sort of melting pot, to stay with the cookery metaphor on which the whole play is founded, in which the author stirs a number of themes from his previous poetic and critical production without necessarily blending them successfully.

Furthermore, it is clear from the static plot, the abundance of long passages of oratorical grandstanding, and the complexity of the stage effects, that the work had been conceived in the first place as a literary object rather than for performance. (13) Set in a sort of land of Cockaigne "vaguement medieval" (6), where even buildings have the shape of mouth-watering delicacies, Le Roi Bombance tells the story of the eponymous sovereign, ruler of the "Royaume des Bourdes" ("Citrulli" in the Italian version, where Bombance is named Baldoria (14)), following the death of his prime minister and royal cook Ripaille (Panciarguta), who committed suicide to expiate for the late delivery of a fish to the Royal table. Unfortunately, the great chef has taken to the grave his secret for the production of the pills that made it possible to feed the "Affames," the general populace, and thus keep them under control. Tourte (Torta), Syphon (Soffione) and Bechamel--the Marmitons sacres, or "sacred kitchen boys," of the original title--volunteer to prepare a great banquet. Their aim, however, is to take over the royal kitchen, and they fail to deliver the promised feast. The Idiot, "poete de son metier" (4), (15) attempts to inspire the mob of the Affames to look beyond their bodily needs towards the Ideal, but is beaten up for his troubles. While Bombance dies of hunger, the three Marmitons finally bring out the food, including eventually the properly pickled bodies of the king and of his high priest Pere Bedaine (Fra Trippa), and quickly the Affames start fighting among themselves for the best morsels. Estomacreux (Famone), their leader, discovers that the Marmitons have in fact stashed much of the food away for themselves and leads a revolt against them. The pilgrim Alkamah arrives, tells the story of the birth of Sainte-Pourriture (Santa Putredine), the macabre patron of the kingdom, and announces her coming. The Marmitons die and are themselves devoured. The fourth and final act opens with Estomacreux and the now former Affames obscenely bloated after their gruesome meal. Estomacreux vomits Bombance, who emerges from his belly crowned with Estomacreux's teeth and proceeds to free his other subjects. As the king puts the Marmitons on trial for treason, the bodies of the dead Affames and of their leader, thrown into the putrid Swamps of the Past, come back to life and launch a new assault against the castle. The play ends with Sainte-Pourriture who declares that she has brought the Affames back to life to continue the perpetual cycle of "Creation!... Destruction!... et Regeneration!" (260) over which she presides with her son, the vampire Ptiokarum, according to whom the only imperative governing the world, beyond any moral consideration, is the law of perpetual desire.

As we have already seen, over the years Marinetti's generic description of the play had changed from tragicomedy to satirical tragedy, thus bringing into relief the obvious anti-utopian message of the play. (16) Marinetti himself clarified the terms of his political satire when he famously dedicated the Italian edition of the play to Filippo Turati, Enrico Ferri and Arturo Labriola, leaders respectively of the moderate and maximalist wings of the socialist party and of revolutionary syndicalism, but the point had not been missed by its earliest reviewers, who had easily interpreted the play as a not-so-subtle critique of the revolutionary aspirations of the left and of the politics of accommodation and "trasformismo" that characterize, in Marinetti's vision, not only the traditional parties but also the rising force of socialism. Labriola, who reviewed Le Roi Bombance for L'Avanti, painted an ambiguous portrait of Marinetti and his politics. "Molti di noi lo sanno frequentatore delle assemblee socialiste, delle radunate pubbliche, delle agitazioni popolari e partecipe anche di certi sommovimenti nazionali che rasentano lo stato rivoluzionario," (18) he wrote, but could not decide whether this restless activism was a quest for mere aesthetic emotions or for an elusive political faith. While expressing an overall positive view of the play, he saw in its "assoluta indifferenza per tutte le valutazioni morali" (19) nothing more than a nihilistic, inconclusive rebelliousness. (20) Perhaps more perceptively, Domenico Oliva, the theatre critic of the Giornale d'ltalia, noted that the sweeping pessimism of the play in the end blunted to a certain extent its critical edge, as all the parties represented could comfortably see it as an attack on their adversaries:

   L'hanno lodata i conservatori, e si capisce, anche se il loro
   partito e rappresentato come timido, incerto, facile a rassegnarsi
   all'imperio violento degli altri; ma i socialisti l'hanno pure
   lodata, singolarmente i rivoluzionari, che v'hanno veduto anzi
   tutto la burla atroce fatta ai loro compagni riformisti, i quali
   nel poema [sic] del Marinetti sono appunto i cuochi della felicita
   universale: ne ai riformisti e spiaciuta la figura che fanno i
   rivoluzionari, cosi brutali, cosi pronti alle ubbriacature, cosi
   desiderosi di mandare altri a spasso per mettersi al loro posto. E
   poi questo grande scherzo funebre-culinario-digestivo accenna a
   quella che si crede la fatale decomposizione della societe borghese
   e rivela in chi l'ha concepita un amaro e profondo scetticismo:
   piace a chi sogna rivoluzioni lo scetticismo degli avversari, piace
   che questi considerino i mutamenti umani come un'inutile corsa alla
   morte. (21)

That Marinetti might not hold much hope for a socialist revolution was no surprise. In a 1900 article on the May 1898 unrest in Milan which had culminated in General Bava Beccaris's massacre of some eighty civilians, he had written: "En effet, nul pays au monde ne se prete moins que l'Italie a une reforme par voie de faits revolutionnaires. [...] Le parti socialiste est depuis longtemps convaincu qu'il n'obtiendra de victoire durable dans la societe actuelle qu'en se maintenant dans le cadre des lois, par le suffrage universel et la lutte parlementaire. Les dernieres elections italiennes viennent de lui donner raison" ("Emeutes" 575-576). (22)

However, in Le Roi Bombance the reasons for Marinetti's pessimism go well beyond the specific situation of Italy, as the play undermines through its corrosive humour the very theoretical foundation of socialism, its materialist conception of history, which for Marinetti--and the symbolism could not be more straightforward--is nothing more than the satisfaction of the basest instincts. For this reason the "intestinal revolution" of the Affames, to use Giusi Baldissone's rather apt term ("Re Baldoria" 262), cannot lead to any change in power relations between rulers and underlings, but merely to a replacement of the members of the dominant class. During the revolt, Estomacreux promises the Affames a new law that will guarantee the greatest personal--or at least, culinary--freedom: "En verite, le jour est venu oU toutes les tendances de l'Estomac Universel doivent librement s'exercer en vue de la digestion generale" (112). (23) However, once he replaces the Marmitons and takes control of the banquet, the division of the victuals is done not on the basis of abstract principles, but rather of the power relations among the rebels. When one of them, Vermicelle, complains on behalf of those who have been pushed away from the seats closest to the kitchen that the best places should be assigned by chance, he has to accept Anguille's reply: "tu vois bien que le sort s'est deja prononce en nous donnant des muscles que tu dois respecter bon gre mal gre!" (128). (24)

The ideals of justice and freedom vehicled by socialism cannot be translated into daily practice since in the material world what prevails are the basest and most rapacious instincts. The destiny of all political utopias is thus their defeat, or rather and more bitterly, their repudiation, as they appear as nothing more than instrumental strategies in the conquest of power on the part of an elite.

It is in the context of this pessimistic vision of society and progress that, in my opinion, must be interpreted Sainte Pourriture, perhaps the most complex and polyvalent figure in the play, if nothing else because she does not have an obvious referent in its (at times rather crude) culinary symbolism. For Gunter Berghaus, who in T he Genesis of Futurism approaches Le Roi Bombance in light of Marinetti's reading of Nietzsche around the time of its composition, Sainte Pourriture, the self-described "Mort qui enlace la Vie" and "Mort dans la Vie, accouplees" (259), (25) represents natural law and illustrates the principle of the "eternal return." According to this interpretation, Sainte Pourriture is a fundamentally positive character, who has the task of articulating the "tragic wisdom" that is the moral message of the play, namely that any material progress is destined to be dissolved in the natural cycle of life and death. A similar reading is proposed by Baldissone ("Re Baldoria" 265), according to whom one can see in the "Triumph of Death" represented by Sainte Pourriture a paradoxical negation of Death itself, since the moment of regeneration arises from destruction (indeed, as Baldissone has argued in several instances, the negation of death constitutes a veritable thread connecting most of Marinetti's works; cf. Filippo, esp. 214-221). In a long harangue towards the end of the play, Sainte Pourriture herself proclaims:

   Ce trident symbolise ma triple force: Creation! Destruction!... et
   Regeneration.

   Ce que vouz appelez "la mort" n'est que l'un des innombrables
   changements dont la succession est la vie!...

   Ne dites pas: "Nous mourrons demain!... Je vis!... J'etais
   mort!..." Mais dites plutot: "Je suis une parcelle du cadavre
   eternel et vivant de la nature!" (260). (26)

And yet, it is precisely in the oxymoron "cadavre vivant" that I think we can begin to see the fundamental ambiguity of Sainte Pourriture: while she presents herself as a life-generating principle, this life emerges from a condition of death and immobility, from, precisely, a corpse. This is not so much an instance of the "Bergsonian law of eternal becoming," as Baldissone has suggested ("Re Baldoria" 264), as, rather, a further symptom of Marinetti's pessimism, which sees no way out of the condition of decadence and putrefaction--both material and spiritual --represented by the Kingdom of the Bourdes. In fact, of the three aspects of Sainte Pourriture, that of creation, of the birth of an original principle, is never shown: in the eternal cycle over which she presides, the new is precisely what is always absent. The gruesome regurgitation of Bombance, Pere Bedaine, Anguille and their companions is not a mere concession to a morbid imagination. The characters come out of the stomachs of their devourers exactly as they were before being eaten, just as in their turn the cadavers of Estomacreux and his followers, thrown into the swamps, are resurrected with the very same characteristics, attributes and desires they had before their death, in a hermetically sealed and sterile circular process of repetition, rather than a Nietzschean return or a Bergsonian becoming. Notice for instance how the recurrence of the iterative verb "remacher" in Estomacreux's final attempt to incite the reborn Affames to revolt--"Faut remacher le Roi! Faut remacher le Pretre!" (254); "Faut remacher Bedaine" (265) (27) --underlines the repetitive and compulsive nature of the characters' actions. (28) Within this framework, the expulsion of the women with which the play opens is neither the umpteenth confirmation of Marinetti's misogyny nor, as Daniela Quarta has suggested, the involuntarily parafeminist expression of the exclusion of women from the historical process (135). Rather, it serves to emphasize from the earliest lines of the play--when for instance the women rail against the men calling them "impotent" (15)--the barrenness of the world of the Bourdes.

What then is the target of Marinetti's satire? On the one hand, as in traditional satire, the historical forms of human attempts to govern nature, to impose meaning upon it through social structures. On the other--and from this comes the bitter humour of the play--its target is also the always already lost struggle on the part of human beings to overcome their own materiality, their destiny to be annihilated in the natural cycle represented by Sainte Pourriture. The only character who seems to express a third alternative to the opposition between history and nature is the Vampire Ptiokarum, son of Sainte Pourriture, for whom the only goal of existence is desire. Desire overcomes morality, but it also makes it possible to break through the self-referential circularity of natural cycles by pushing forward the boundary line drawn by any specific goal. "Un but? ... Le monde ne saurait en avoir," Ptiokarum says, "parce qu'un but est une limite ..." (264). (29) Sainte Pourriture notes that her son is wiser than she is when he describes the law of desire in the following terms:

   Rencontrer l'extase partout! ... en toute chose! Et l'aimer
   eperdument! ... Desirer toute la nature les bras ouverts, les levres
   tendues!... Embrasser dans un vaste reve d'amour les hommes et les
   choses ... sans s'arreter a la possession ... S'user dans le desir
   effrene de toutes les apparences succulents et lumineuses du
   monde! ...

   Ce desir est-il bon ou mauvais? ... Qu'importe! ... L'essentiel,
   c'est de desirer! ... (262) (30)

Desire lies precisely "beyond good and evil," but this does not solve the problem posed by the play. What forms can in fact desire assume if its formalization determines its de facto failure as it becomes a concrete goal? While Ptiokarum calls for a sort of dissolution of the individual in the flow of desire, its fusion with the forms of the world without privileging any of them, the Bourdes, the ever-hungry mob, absorb the world turning its variable and mutable forms quite literally into objects of consumption.

Ptiokarum's argument at the end of the action is not entirely unprecedented within the economy of the play. Already in Act two the Idiot had opposed the crass materialism of the Bourdes to his own poetry, described as a striving towards the unreachable and intangible Ideal. The Idiot, too, is tormented by hunger, but his Hunger is "immortelle et divine" (90) and cannot be sated by any object of this world. Poetic research shares with Ptiokarum's law of desire the impossibility of fulfillment. In his last harangue to the crowd, the Idiot contrasts the materialist conception of Freedom invoked by Estomacreux with his own superior notion:

   La Liberte? ... Cela ne se mange pas! ... Connaissez-vous l'effort
   d'enjamber un parapet ... d'escalader une muraille ... une montagne
   inaccessible? ... Voila la Liberte! ... [...] Ne criez pas: "J'y
   suis! ... "Vous n'y serez jamais! ... Plus haut! ... [...]
   D'ailleurs que feriez-vous, sur la cime souveraine? ... Vous seriez
   pietines par les grands nuages [...] Et les Etoiles vous
   nargueraient toujours! ... (250) (31)

This grandiloquent speech, with its network of images that both draws upon Marinetti's contemporary poetic production and anticipates the rhetorical arsenal of early Futurism--the stars and the sea as symbols of the Ideal; the theme of the poet's ascent to the "cime souveraine" reprised in the conclusion of the manifesto of foundation of Futurism ("Debout sur la cime du monde, nous lancons encore une fois le defi aux etoiles" ("Manifeste" 109)) (32)--authorizes a reading of the Idiot as a sort of authorial persona, the Symbolist poet thrust into a world governed by base material instincts. Furthermore, the play emphasizes the differences between the Idiot and the Bourdes, describing them in antinomic terms. While Bombance, Pere Bedaine and, once fed, Estomacreux are grotesquely fat and heavy, the Idiot is "maigre, degingande" (4) (33) ("il n'a jamais faim ... et il n'a jamais ete gras!" (91), (34) Estomacreux says of him scornfully); whereas the sole goal of the other characters is eating, the Idiot never eats and in fact prefers the artistic representation of food, to be admired at a distance, to the real thing, as when he enthuses over the "spectacle" of the delicacies embroidered on the drapery over Ripaille's casket; finally, he commits suicide and is the only character who is not brought back to life, but seems rather to die a definitive death.

On the basis of these elements, some commentators have seen the Idiot/Poet as the positive character in the play, the only figure whose destiny seems to fit the label of "tragedy" invoked by the subtitle. Indeed, such an interpretation was authorized by Marinetti himself, who offered it on a number of occasions, not least in one of his late memoirs, Firenze biondazzura sposerebbe futurista morigerato, written with Alberto Viviani in 1944.

   I'"Idiota" e il Poeta e uno Zaratustra ancora piu lirico di quello
   immaginato da Nietzsche E il pensiero vivente e operante di tutta
   la tragedia poiche egli tenta con uno sforzo supremo di conquistare
   i "citrulli" all'ideale

   Nessuno come Marinetti e riuscito fino ad oggi a creare una
   personalita cosi potente come quella dell' "Idiota" il quale con
   miscuglio genialissimo di grottesco poesia pensiero giunge a
   toccare le vette del piu alto lirismo puro in contrasto col
   materialismo senz'ali che striscia terra terra dietro il lusorio
   [sic] fantasma che Stomaco e Pancia sieno i motori dell'universo
   (126-127). (35)

More recently, Baldissone has interpreted the poet as a sort of diminished figura Christi ("Re Baldoria" 264), while for Berghaus, who continues his Nietzschean reading of the play, he would represent an intermediate step towards the Ubermensch (Genesis 69). (36) I would suggest however that not even the Idiot escapes the satirical onslaught of the work. The crucial question that the play cannot answer is in fact what might be the social function of the poet in a world in which there is no space for the ideals he represents.

From the beginning, art is presented as an activity with a fundamentally practical function. (37) In act one, for instance, the cellar master Poulemouillet (Pancotto) laments the disappearance of poets because "Leurs chansons bercaient un peu le desespoir des estomacs! Car ce sont parfois de fameux enchanteurs de serpents ..." (35). (38) The ambiguous nature of art is further explored in act two, when the Idiot is called upon to give a demonstration of the power of his poetry. On a hot summer night, outside the castle now occupied by the three Marmitons, the king, a gaunt and pale shadow of his former self, is dying of starvation. The Idiot seeks to provide some solace to the dethroned sovereign and his subjects through storytelling. Frequently interrupted by the jeers and the taunts of the Bourdes, he narrates the story of his conquest of the "Manoir de l'Impossible" (78), an impregnable castle of a thousand bronze doors, where he sated his soul on "la bouche assouvissante de Tlntangible" (79). (39) In a crescendo of classic Symbolist topoi, of mythical warriors and beautiful damosels, of pale moonlight and distant stars, the parable of the Idiot turns self-reflexive, becoming in fact a justification of the superiority of art over material concerns. Following the lesson of the Mallarme of "Crise de vers," the Idiot envisions poetry as a means of freeing language from the material shackles of referentiality to gesture towards the unreachable ideal. In this lies the poet's own superiority. "Je suis le maitre du monde!" he proclaims. "Je suis l'elu du ciel! Je suis le Roi du Rois de par l'incantation de mon verbe, de par mon souffle inspire qui feconde l'espace!" (80). (40) But as the self-proclaimed King of Kings continues his tale, the attention of his listeners flags and when he gets to narrating his encounter with the "divine enfant," the female personification of the poetic Ideal, they fall asleep. To get their attention back, the Idiot must change his approach. He now stages the "scene dialoguee du Poete et de la Dame Ideale" (87), (41) where the part of the "Ideal Lady" is played, so to speak, by a puppet made by wrapping the poet's jacket around his broken sword. What had been a demonstration of the evocative power of the poetic word thus turns into a vaudeville act, the ventriloquist and his dummy, (42) and then quickly degenerates into a sort of Punch and Judy show in which the poet slaps around his masochistic beloved. The dramatic monologue thus becomes a farce, as the now attentive Bourdes recognize. "La farce est tres amusante!" (89), (43) they exclaim delighted, and their laughter infects the Idiot himself. The spell broken once and for all, he is cast back into the material world of his audience, and even his sadness at having lost the Ideal appears feigned, a final moment of recognition of the ineffectuality of his poetic mission.

This scene is interesting for a couple of reasons. In the first instance, it is once again difficult not to interpret the Idiot/Poet as a thinly disguised stand-in for the author, especially if one considers Marinetti's renown for his poetry performances at the turn of the century. (44) More importantly, however, here Marinetti significantly changes the terms of the debate on the role of the artist. In fact, if in Le Roi Bombance Marinetti had limited himself to staging the alienated condition of the poet as the misunderstood bearer of a superior truth forced to stand the mockery of the popular masses, then his Idiot would have been nothing more than a belated articulation of yet another decadent topos whose lineage can be traced back at least to Baudelaire's "Albatros," included in the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal (1861). On the contrary, he sets this scene of public (self-)debasement, of fall from grace, against the similar fall of Bombance, the former King now reduced to an emaciated and famished beggar. What we are witnessing here, then, is a double crisis of legitimation--a crisis of both politics and poetics, the two domains that Symbolism had uncoupled and that in the play are forcefully rejoined. Bombance's political authority is undermined by the rising forces of mass politics, as we have seen, but these forces also undermine the authority of the Idiot/Poet, they reduce him from a supposed "King of Kings" to a mere entertainer for a popular audience. Thus, at the core of Le Roi Bombance lies the awareness--which at this point cannot be further translated into a positive program--of the spurious nature of the notion on which the whole enterprise of fin-de-siecle Symbolism had been built, namely that the autonomous status of art in relation to life made it possible to turn artistic pursuit into a moment of redemption from the brutality of material existence. In Le Roi Bombance, on the contrary, both politics and art are governed by the law of numbers, by the will of the crowd. (45) In act one, Bombance can retain his nominal role of sovereign only by accepting the demands of the three Marmitons, the supposed representatives of the people. Likewise, in act two the Idiot can retain his role of artist only by accommodating his art to the crude interests of his audience. In the end, he himself laughs at his puppet show, only to admit "Mon rire a dissous l'ldeal" (89). (46) Not by chance, the fiercest enemy of the Idiot is Estomacreux, who sees very clearly the relationship between art and politics, and for whom the fables of the poet, far from offering a glimpse of a superior truth unreachable by other means, are simply another tactic to deceive the oppressed masses.

If the suicide of the poet seems to suggest an essential difference between him and the other Bourdes, (47) the last laugh--and the last line --is left to the Vampire Ptiokarum who calls even this conclusion into question. When Sainte Pourriture offers him the "blanche cervelle" of the poet "impregnee d'azur," (48) the Mallarmean colour of the Ideal, Ptiokarum replies: "Non, elle me degoute ... comme les autres, petite mere!... Et j'ai fait une indigestion de Bourdes ... Je suis ... fatigue" (267). (49) For the Vampire, then, there is no essential difference between the Bourdes obsessed by material goods and the Idiot obsessed by the Ideal. According to the Symbolist poetics that had formed the young Marinetti, the marginality of poetry in modernity is its very power, as poetry supposedly gives voice to experiences that do not obey the utilitarian logic of any other human activity. Here, however, this marginality is no longer a gift; rather, it is endured as a destiny to which art must submit, and the bitter laughter of satire comes to include among its targets even the poet, whose sacrifice in the end has no positive effect. If for the Bourdes history repeats itself over and over, unchanged, the poet is on the contrary expelled from history, its "truth" unheard and unbearable. In the end, there are no solutions to the long-standing dilemma of the relationship of art and life in this play where, with a final melodramatic coup de theatre, everything is drowned in the blood vomited by Ptiokarum, which covers the stage like a "rideau supreme" (268). (50) Autonomy is patently impossible and no other options appear on the horizon, aside from subjection to the materialist and utilitarian logic of entertainment. The poet's suicide is a gesture of utter defeat, not of final defiance.

But perhaps the apocalyptic conclusion of the play can also hint at developments to come, and, to return to our starting point, at how Marinetti could accomplish the transition from a decadent to an avantgarde aesthetics. Ptiokarum's vomit, which, like a flood, sweeps away everything in its path, (51) is an early version of that tabula rasa of history that Marinetti would invoke in the founding manifesto of Futurism, when for the first time he called for the destruction of museums and libraries, of the repositories of a past oppressing the free expression of the vital energies of the present generation. To many early commentators, this appeared as little more than a publicity stunt. However, it was precisely by calling into question the legitimacy of those institutional sites that, throughout the nineteenth century, had contributed to circumscribing the space in which culture could be legitimately produced, preserved and consumed--in a word, art as an institution--that Futurism was able to start articulating the new modes of relating art and life that would be developed, for instance, with the Futurist serate or the practice of words-in-freedom. The semantic and thematic proximity of Le Roi Bombance to the first manifesto, especially evident if we compare the rhetoric of the speaking subject in the latter text to that of the Idiot, allows us to track in concrete terms the evolution of Marinetti's project, to see how a very similar conception of the poet as a figure on the margin leads to different consequences once the frame of reference is changed. Le Roi Bombance is the first step in this process. Here, Marinetti could only voice his growing dissatisfaction with the utopianism of the poetics of Symbolism in a play at the core of which can be identified--as Sandro Briosi already suggested in 1969--"a polemic against himself" (48), or perhaps against the persona of Symbolist aesthete taken up as a homage to his poetic fathers but increasingly useless in dealing with the problem posed by modernity.

WORKS CITED

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Baldissone, Giusi. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Milano: Mursia, 1986.

--. "Re Baldoria: il riso della morte." I bersagli della satira. Barberi Squarotti, G. (a cura di). Torino: Tirrenia, 1987. 261-275.

Berghaus, Giinter. The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti s Early Career and Writings 1899-1909. Leeds: The Society for Italian Studies, 1995.

--. Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1998. Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Briosi, Sandro. Marinetti. Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1969.

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Lista, Giovanni (ed.). Marinetti et le futurisme. Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1977.

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. "Les Emeutes milanaises de mai 1898. Paysages et silhouettes." Revue blanche 173 (1900): 561-576.

--. "Lettere inedite di F. T. Marinetti." Gustavo Botta. Di Martini, Carlo. Padova: Rebellato, 1969. 94-100.

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--. "Mascagni contre Wagner." La Plume 284 (1901): 127-128.

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--"Vittorio Pica." Anthologie-Revue de France et d'Italie 2.7 (1899): 129-132. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso e Alberto Viviani. Firenze biondazzurra sposerebbe futurista morigerato. 1944. Perrone Burali d'Arezzo, Paolo (a cura di). Palermo: Sellerio, 1992.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso e Giovanni Pascoli. "Carteggio inedito PascoliMarinetti." Salaris, Claudia (a cura di). Alfabeta 6.71 (1985): 19-21.

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Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2009.

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LUCA SOMIGLI

University of Toronto

NOTES

(1) An early version of this essay appeared, in Italian, in the Festschrift titled Melanges offerts a Marie-Helene Caspar, edited by Janine Menet-Genty (Nanterre: C.R.I.X., 2005). Subsequent research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I thank Shirley Vinall for her perceptive comments.

(2) Oddly enough, though, Futurism is mentioned on the back cover of tire American paperback edition as one of the subjects the study of which will be seriously affected by Burger's book.

(3) "with a far-away gaze, troublant like a caress, [...] the eternal lover of the stars and the moon, the sublime singer of the sea" (unless otherwise specified, all translations are mine). II poeta Marinetti was in fact assembled quoting extensively from articles previously published in French and Italian newspapers and periodicals. Doubts regarding its authorship had already been expressed in 1908 by Alberto Ragghianti in a scathing review of Les Dieux s'en vont, D'Annunzio reste, reprinted with remarkable aplomb by Marinetti in Poesia 4.8 (1908): 15-16. Cf. also Cammarota 49-50.

(4) "Literature, like all the arts, has no other goal than itself."

(5) Art "can usefully influence the human soul in the same way as (and sometimes even better than) alcohol and love by bringing to it the oblivion of reality through the dream."

(6) "Isn't the decadent style that Bourget talks about and that Nietzsche censures in the works of Wagner the style of our life at the beginning of the twentieth century?"

(7) Giovanni Lista has also related the composition of Roi Bombance to the question of the isolation of Symbolism from contemporary social reality after Mallarme's death in 1898 ("Marinetti poeta" 49-50). See also Marchai 62.

(8) Giovanni Calendoli already suggested that Roi Bombance represents a turning point in Marinetti's career in his introduction to the first volume of Iris edition of Marinetti's theatrical works (see esp. XIV-XV). It is not by chance that in La Ville charnelle, published after the play, the partial return to the ideals of Symbolism is vehicled, at least in part, by the introduction of new themes such as the machine and speed which "foreshadow the birth of a new world" (Calendoli XV)--that is, foreshadow Futurism.

(9) At the turn of the century, Marinetti had written (in French, as usual) a play set in Venice at the end of the fifteenth century. The play, sometimes referred to as Paolo Baglione after the name of its protagonist, was published only posthumously as Dramma senza titolo in the first volume of Teatro edited by Calendoli, in a translation by Benedetta Marinetti.

(10) "a tragicomedy in four acts ferociously and ruthlessly sarcastic towards the current exploitation of the stupid and sheepish crowds."

(11) "the work was finished during the general strike in Milan." A slightly different version of this letter, to an unknown correspondent, was published by Lista in 1977 (Marinetti et le Futurisme 63).

(12) On Jacob's novella and its relation to Roi Bombance, see Eruli (153-156).

(13) Roi Bombance was first staged only on 3 April 1909, in an attempt to capitalize on the furore that followed the publication of the founding manifesto of Futurism. It was directed for the "Theatre de l'oeuvre" by Aurelien-Francois Lugne-Poe, who in 1896 had also directed the first performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. Critical reactions were almost universally negative, and the play folded after only three performances (a planned tour of Belgium and Germany was also cancelled). In Italy, the play was produced only in 1929 in Rome by the "Teatro delle macchine." For a history of the Parisian staging and its reception, see Lista's La Scene futuriste (66-74). The question of the influence of Ubu Roi on Roi Bombance looms large over the criticism of Marinetti's play; see in particular Eruli (who is, however, mostly concerned with demonstrating the superiority of the French writer over his Italian epigone) and Gobin.

(14) All references are to the original French text. For the reader's convenience, I include in parentheses the Italian version of the characters' names, if necessary, when they are first mentioned in this essay.

(15) "poet by profession."

(16) On Le Roi Bombance as dystopia, see Cesaretti.

(17) Marinetti was even more specific in a letter to Gustavo Botta (undated, but probably written in late January or early February 1906), where he explained: "Ho deriva to il personaggio di Bechamel da Turati, quello di Syphon da Ferri--quello di Estomacreux e una sintesi Labriola-Lazzari-Braccialarge [sic] e molti altri--del resto capirai perfettamente la quantite di osservazioni dirette e di libera intuizione che contengono tutti i personaggi del Roi Bombance.--Le Roi, per esempio, si trova al primo atto nelle condizioni d'un qualsiasi re italiano all'indomani della morte d'un Crispi" ("Lettere" 100; "I based the character of Bechamel on Turati, of Syphon on Ferri--Estomacreux is a synthesis of Labriola-Lazzari-Braccialarghe and several others--In any case, you'll perfectly understand the amount of direct observation and the free intuition that all the characters of Roi Bombance involve.--In the first act, for instance, Le Roi is in the situation of an Italian king after the death of someone like Crispi"). Turati and Labriola were also indicated as the source of inspiration for Bechamel and Estomacreux, respectively, in the letter to Pascoli mentioned above. Costantino Lazzari was one of the founders, in 1892, of the Partita Socialista Italiano; Comunardo Braccialarghe was a well-known figure in anarchosyndicalist circles.

(18) "Many of us know him as a frequenter of socialist meetings, public assemblies, popular agitations and even as a participant in certain national tumults that come close to the state of revolution."

(19) "absolute indifference for all moral judgment."

(20) Marinetti reprinted most reviews and notices of the play (at times with some judicious editing) in his journal Poesia, from issue 1.9 (1905) to 4.1 (1908). They appeared, usually under the rubric "Il trionfo di 'Roi Bombance'. Giudizi della stampa italiana ed estera," in a special section of the journal, unnumbered in volumes one and two, dedicated to reviews, notices, and in general to Marinetti's publicity machine. Labriola's review is quoted from issue 1.10-11 (1905).

(21) "The conservatives praised it, understandably, even though their party is represented as timid, uncertain, quick to surrender to the violent rule of others; but the socialists, and curiously the revolutionary socialists, also praised it, as they saw in it first and foremost a vicious prank at the expense of their reformist comrades, who in Marinetti's poem are precisely the cooks of universal happiness; but the reformist socialists didn't dislike how the revolutionaries come out, so brutal, so prone to intoxication, so quick to send others packing so they can take their place. And finally this great funereal-culinary-digestive joke points to the supposedly fatal decomposition of bourgeois society and reveals the bitter and profound skepticism of its author. Those who dream of revolutions like the skepticism of their enemies, or the fact that they see any human change as a useless race towards death." Oliva's review is quoted from Poesia 2.1 (1906). On the critical reactions to the political symbolism of the play, see also Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre (37).

(22) "Indeed, no country is less suited to social reform through revolution than Italy. [... ] The socialist party has been convinced for a long time that it will never achieve a lasting victory in today's society except within the law, through universal suffrage and parliamentary struggle. The most recent elections are proving it right." The "most recent elections" mentioned here are those of 1900, in which, among other things, D'Annunzio had run as a socialist candidate, and Turati's party had defeated the incumbent Speaker of the House in Milan.

(23) "In truth, the day has come when all the tendencies of the Universal Stomach must manifest themselves freely, with general digestion as the final aim!"

(24) "You can see that chance has already made its choice by giving us muscles that you have to respect whether you like it or not!"

(25) "Death embracing Life" and "Death joined together with Life"

(26) "This trident is a symbol of my threefold strength. Creation!... Destruction!... and Regeneration! What you call 'death' is nothing more than one of the innumerable changes which, in succession, constitute Life!... Do not say: 'We shall die tomorrow!... I am alive!... I was dead!.' Say rather: T am a particle of the eternal and living corpse of Nature!...' (247).

(27) "We must chew up the King again! We must chew up the Priest again!" "We must chew up Bedaine again."

(28) This repetitiveness is further emphasized in the Italian version, in which Estomacreux/Famone's final words, the doggerel "Machons le Roi / porteur de lois; / machons Bedaine / farci de chaines!" (267; "Let's chew up the King / Bearer of the laws; / Let's chew up Bedaine / Stuffed with chains"), are replaced by the repetition of his call to arms "RimastichiamBaldoria! Rimastichiam Fra Trippa!" ("Re Baldoria" 173; "Let's chew up Baldoria again! Let's chew up Fra Trippa again").

(29) "A goal? ... The world cannot have a goal, because any goal is a limit ..."

(30) "Finding ecstasy everywhere! ... In everything! Loving it endlessly! ... Desiring all of nature, opening your arms to it, offering your lips! ... Holding men and things in a vast dream of love ... without stopping at possession ... Consuming oneself in the unbridled desire for all the succulent and luminous appearances of the world! ... Is this desire good or bad?... Does it matter? ... Desiring is what is essential!

(31) "Freedom? ... It's not something you eat! Do you know the effort to overcome an obstacle, to climb a high wall or an inaccessible mountain? This is Freedom ... [...] Do not cry: "I have arrived." You will never arrive! ... Higher! ... Higher! ... [...] After all, what would you do on the sovereign peak? ... You would be trampled by the great clouds [...] And the Stars will always taunt you! ..."

(32) "Standing on the top of the world, once again we hurl our defiance to the stars." The version published in Le Figaro is slightly different from the one that has become canonical and reads: "Debout sur la cime du monde, nous lancons encore une fois le defi insolent aux etoiles" (rpt. in De Villers 107)

(33) "thin, lanky."

(34) "he is never hungry ... and he has never been fat!'

(35) "The 'Idiot' is a Poet a Zarathustra even more lyrical than the one imagined by Nietzsche He is thought that lives and operates throughout the tragedy because he attempts with a supreme effort to conquer the 'citrulli' to the ideal. No one yet has managed to create a personality as powerful as the 'Idiot' who with a genial mixture of grotesque poetry thought achieves the peaks of the highest lyricism in opposition to the materialism that slithers after the playful impression that the Stomach and the Belly are the engines of the universe."

(36) More convincingly, Lista sees the Idiot as a parody of the Symbolist poet, specifically of "the famous Sar Peladan, founder of the Rose-Croix" ("Marinetti poeta" 50).

(37) On the avant-garde as a response to the commodification of art, see Adamson's Embattled Avant-Gardes.

(38) "their songs eased a little the dark desperation of the stomach! Indeed, poets can sometimes be great snake charmers.Poulemouillet's words are echoed by Bombance's last words to the Idiot--whose name, we find out at this point, is the very poetic Aldor, "Golden Wing" ("Alidoro" in the Italian translation)--just before the King's "death:" "leurs (the poets') chansons bercaient autrefois nos estomacs et facilitaient nos laborieuses digestions!" (92; "their songs once eased our stomachs and helped our digestion").

(39) "the sating mouth of the Intangible."

(40) "I am the master of the world! I am the chosen of the heavens! I am the King of Kings by virtue of the enchantment of my word, of my inspired breath which fecundates space!"

(41) "the dialogic scene of the Poet and the Ideal Lady."

(42) "[J]e suis ventriloque et mon ventre est plein de voix comme les chateaux abandonnes" (87), the Idiot says as he announces the "scene dialoguee" (87; "I am a ventriloquist and my belly is full of voices like abandoned castles").

(43) "The farce is very funny."

(44) The photograph, reproduced by Panteo (201), of Marinetti reading his poetry "ai buoni villici di ViggiU" ("the good countryfolk of ViggiU") while looming above them astride a bust of Manzoni closely recalls the scene just described, in which the Idiot addresses the Bourdes from an improvised stand, a dead tree trunk.

(45) On the figure of the crowd in Futurism, see Poggi, ch. 2 (Poggi specifically discusses Le Roi Bombance on pp. 37-38).

(46) "My laughter dissolved the Ideal.'

(47) Cf. Giovanni Lista: "Master of his own destiny, the Poet-Idiot commits suicide, thus confirming his freedom" (La Scene 38).

(48) "white brain soaked in azure."

(49) "No, it disgusts me ... like the others, dear mother! ... And I already got an indigestion of Bourdes ... I am ... tired."

(50) "supreme curtain."

(51) The comparison with a flood is made explicitly in the last stage direction, which describes Ptiokarum's blood as a "torrent immense [...] mondant la scene" (268; "immense torrent [...] flooding the stage").