Their antic dinners and wild proclamations are meant to be taken with a dollop of the zany, the movement itself sometimes appearing to be what Oscar Wilde may have had in mind when he conjured up “zanies of style.” Though where there’s style there’s content, and Marinetti isn’t content with jokes. He defines Italian Futurism of the 30s as “the renewal of Italian pride, a formula for original art-life. the religion of speed. spiritual hygiene. the aesthetics of the machine. Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win. ”
At the Holy Palate restaurant, sometimes known as the Aluminum restaurant, site of Futurist dinners, one might be served “sculpted meat,” which is “symbolic of Italian regions.” Marinetti demands: “The word Italy must rule over the word Liberty! The word Italy must rule over the word genius. The word Italy must rule over the word intelligence. The word Italy must rule over the words culture and statistic. The word Italy must rule over truth.” It’s an odd position from the man who called for words in liberty, words freed from syntax. But not an odd position for a fascist. Words in liberty become fixed, their meaning subsumed by a new syntax, one created by the State. Marinetti was, after all, one of the first members of the Fascist Party. And his own words, not freed from history, resonate with it, tasting the bitter aftermath of the Great War and Italy’s sense of betrayal at the hands of the Allies. A past that also, in 1932, included the deaths of many of the leading Futurists, like Boccioni and Sant Elia, a startlingly innovative architect, both of whom, like so many other, had enthusiastically rushed to do battle in that war. In fact it was the Great War that effectively put an end to the most productive moment of Futurism. In this respect, it’s not surprising that Marinetti calls for the murder of nostalgia. The Futurist door to modernity, once pried open and walked through, must be shut forever on the past — past failures and past losses.
If Marinetti hadn’t written it himself of The Futurist Cookbook, it would have been necessary to comment: “It is not by chance this work is published during a world economic crisis.” Marinetti’s “antidote” is “a Futurist way of cooking: optimism at the table.” Significantly the cookbook begins with a parable against despair. In “The Dinner That Stopped a Suicide,” Giulio is obsessed with killing himself, as “She” has died in New York — at that time a place of many capitalist suicides — and is “calling” to him to join her. So Marinetti, Prampolini and Fillia, the “Aeropainters,” rush to rescue their friend. But another “She” has sent Giulio a message, he tells them, another “who resembles her.” Giulio “must not betray death” and says he must “kill himself tonight.” “Unless?” the Aeropainters ask. “Unless?” Marinetti asks. “Unless you take us instantly to your splendid, well-stocked kitchens.” A hilarious retort to a singular cul de sac or a worldwide depression, and an absurd way out of the devastating effects of the War that ushered in Hitler and Mussolini, as well as killed the earlier Futurism, which was once synonymous with avant-garde.
It’s not without consequence, either, that death in the suicide story is represented by She, for women, who are always other in Futurism (though sometimes [m]other), sit uneasily at its table, occasionally having to eat food shaped like their own bodies. The first Futurist Manifesto proclaimed: “We will glorify war, the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive genius of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. We will destroy. feminism.” And it’s not just coincidence that the call against death also comes from a She, “one who resembles her.” This may be reference to capitalism under a Fascist state. But in any case, it’s the female body that signifies death as well as renewal. “The fugitive eternal feminine is imprisoned in the stomach. At dawn he devoured the mammellary (sic) spheres of all mother’s milk.” In the “Geographic Dinner,” she’s a waitress, “a shapely young women dressed in a long white tunic on which a complete geographical map of Africa has been drawn in color; it enfolds her entire body.” This is a neat conflation, woman as Africa, especially Africa, the site then of some Italian colonies. She is colonized and that part of the world is turned into something to be devoured, the waitress, the provider, greedily eaten up like a woman might be by a hungry lover desirous of conquering and overwhelming her. Women here, like food, are figures of speech.
While the first wave Futurists embraced both internationalism and war, but not feminism, the second wave are Italian firsters. They call for an end to Xenomania, defined in the cookbook as “the international cuisine of grand hotels, which in Italy is “submit[ted] to only because it comes from abroad,” Xenomanes are anti-Italians, like Arturo Toscanini, who “disown[ed] his own national hymns. opportunistically playing foreign anthems,” those who don’t “promote Italian influence in the world,” and who are “infatuated with foreign customs and snobbisms.” While the second wave Futurists trounce some traditions, including the earlier Futurists’ internationalism but not their patriotism and antifeminism, there remains the traditional belief in an overpowering principle that centers existence. For Marinetti, it not a belief in God but the state, Italy under Mussolini. As Hannah Arendt put it: “The Fascist movement, a ‘party above parties,’ because it claimed to represent the nation as a whole, seized the state machine, identified itself with the highest national authority and tried to make the whole people ‘part of the state.’”
To make Italians into, and part of, a healthy state, Marinetti wants to put the nation on a diet that is not just concerned with food. No more “Xenomania.” “No more after dinner speeches.” “Elementary patriotism demands that at least half the music on, programme should be by modern or Futurist Italian composers.” Like most diet books and cookbooks, The Futurist Cookbook is sometimes repetitive, hammering away at its prescriptions for right living, its short announcements like press releases or ads that are trying to sell a product. In this case, the nation. Eating ought to imbue that patriotic feeling. As in, the way to the heart is through the stomach.
And speaking of the heart, the recipe — in fact the cookbook — is a prescription for the regulation of pleasure. While everything in The Futurist Cookbook seems to be full of imagination and is funny and clever, not that much is really left to the imagination. We’re told not only what to eat but how to and with what feelings, in what kind of restaurant, listening to what type of music and sniffing what kind of scents. The Futurist “New Year’s Eve Dinner,” for instance, is meant to overturn crusty bourgeois conventions, when “the same elements have conspired to produce a happiness which has been enjoyed too often.” So, “everyone eats in compulsory silence; the desire for noise and jollity is suppressed.” One may sympathize with the urge to throw away customary and obligatory forms of feeling that seem hollow and perfunctory. But to replace those with others is problematic, to use words like “supress” and “compulsory” means one kind of order is being supplanted by another. In this light it’s interesting to consider the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, his regulation of pleasure written during the French Revolution while he was in jail. A pessimist, de Sade presents a dystopia which took to the extreme the problem of imagining what complete liberty would mean and look like under the law. He translated the furthest reaches of liberte, egalite and fraternite, where laws insist upon pleasure and turn pleasure inside out, into pain, at least for some. In the midst of a revolution, de Sade questions the ability of any state to provide pleasure or happiness. Marinetti, a man at liberty, whose words are supposedly also “in liberty,” sets down a regimen — tongue in cheek — for the right libertinage. The optimistic Marinetti exuberantly ordains a future of aluminum and steel, of controlled anarchy and virility, of art that scoffs at some traditions in search of a genuinely contemporary existence. He doesn’t question a pursuit of happiness that looked to the nation for its greatest rewards.