The Trial of F.T. Marinetti

When the first modern novel was put on trial

F.T. Marinetti was an Italian poet and dandy. He was the founder of the Italian Futurist movement, which would be the first of a number of art movements comprising modernism. His manifestos had a profound influence on visual arts within Italy, and abroad influenced English poets such as Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound.

His first novel, Mafarka the futurist, was initially published in Paris to broad critical acclaim. When it was later translated into Italian and published in Milan however, Marinetti was quickly brought before court and charged with obscenity and distributing pornography.

He was eventually acquitted, but the legal battle was recorded and published in Italy under the title Il processo e l’assoluzione di “Mafarka il Futurista.” It’s an interesting document in it’s own right, and gives a glimpse into the Futurist movement. It also places Mafarka in a very distinguished tradition of modernist literature being put on trial, a tradition that includes Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

Mafarka the futurist is not any less shocking of a book today than it was when it came out, and has been out of print and ignored for years in the English speaking world. We will be releasing a new translation in June. In the meantime, enjoy this selection from The Trial and Acquittle of “Mafarka the Futurist.”

DAY ONE

On October 8, 1910, the grand courtroom in the 3rd Section of the Milan Court was packed with a huge crowd, which had flocked there for the contempt trial brought against the poet Marinetti for his novel Mafarka the Futurist.

Numerous Futurists were present, coming from every part of Italy, a host of gangly and resolute young men, facing the battle as always, with their legendary swagger. We noticed the painters Boccioni, Russolo, Carrà, and the poets Paolo Buzzi, Cavacchioli, Palazzeschi, Armando Mazza, etc. Also prominent in the audience were many elegant ladies from Milanese high society and all the representatives of Italian critics.

Marinetti’s defenders were Hon. Barzilai, Lawyer Sarfatti,

Innocenzo Cappa and lawyer Brusorio.

At the beginning of the hearing, the prosecutor immediately requested that the trial be held in camera, as the incriminated passages had to be read. Lawyer Brusorio then arose, who with a brilliant and subtle legal disquisition demonstrated lucidly how such a measure should be considered absurd. He pressed Lawyer Sarfatti, victoriously arguing this thesis, and the Tribunal ruled shortly thereafter that the hearing be held in the presence of the public.

Then began the questioning of F. T. Marinetti, who, with a blazing, lively and sincere eloquence, defended himself and his work, taking to speak the following . . .

The Interrogation

of F. T. Marinetti

I had the good fortune to inherit from my father a fair amount of substance, but I never made use of it in a base and trivial way. On the contrary, I availed myself of my independent position to implement a vast and audacious project of mine for intellectual and artistic renewal in Italy: that of protecting, encouraging and materially aiding the young innovators and rebellious geniuses who are daily being stifled by the indifference, avarice or short-sightedness of publishers.

These, of course, all sacrificing to the illustrious dead, the opportunists, or the gloriously moribund, profess a profound contempt for youth, especially when it performs its activity in a reckless and innovative manner.

In order to purify this atmosphere of old age, where the maniacal worship of the old and the most pedantic academicism, an unclean business opportunism and a great moral and physical cowardice prevail, I created the vast and courageous Futurist movement, which I began in Paris in the columns of the Figaro and continued in my international journal Poesia, which I have been directing for five years with enormous sacrifice of money and the dogged labor of my days and nights.

Thus I came to gather around my futurist magazine a host of poets and painters who were very young, but endowed with a formidable inspiration and an absolute contempt for easy mercantile successes and banal official consecrations. You already know their names. They are the Futurist poets G. P. Lucini, Paolo Buzzi, Cavacchioli, Palazzeschi, Govoni, De Maria, Armando Mazza, Folgore, Libero Altomare, Mario Betuda, and the Futurist painters Boccioni, Russolo, Carrà, Balla, Severini and many others. And also the great young musician Balilla Pratella, author of Sina d’ Vargoün.

Our movement is fatal. We are awaited by a dying Italy… But unfortunately my words are broken by excessive emotion… And I repeat myself often!… So much the better!… I shall not tire of it… Business opportunism, contempt for youth, moral and physical cowardice: this is what we fight!… Here is what the pornographer you condemn fights in Italy!

(Applause)

I would also like to declare that I am not a literary dilettante who considers his verses to be feathers in his cap, nor a decadent weirdo who has chosen on a snobbish whim a foreign language such as French to seduce beautiful ladies and distract his elegant idle.

I will give you in this regard, some explanations:

I was born in Alexandria of a Piedmontese father and a Milanese mother. The lack, in that city, of an Italian classical education meant that I had to enter a French boarding school, where I was prepared for the diploma of bachelier ès lettres, which I later won at the Sorbonne in Paris. With this diploma I then entered the University of Pavia and the University of Genoa, where I took a degree in law.

Having thus become, by a contest of unintentional circumstances, a French writer, although being of Italian soul and nationality, I divide my literary activity between Paris and Milan, where I have my French and Italian publishers.

In Paris, in the Editions of the Plume, precisely my first epic poem appeared: La Conquête des Etoiles, an enormous oceanic vision in which a fantastic struggle takes place between the stormy waves and the unreachable stars.

This poem, of transcendental idealistic symbolism, has absolutely no erotic or sentimental details. Indeed, woman, I will say, is absolutely excluded from it, as she is also excluded from my satirical tragedy Le Roi Bombance, which appeared in Paris in the editions of the “Mercure de France,” performed with great fanfare at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre and recently published in Italian by the Fratelli Treves publishers, under the title of Re Baldoria.

I will add in this connection that the Parisian audience had a cry of astonishment, at the raising of the curtain, at witnessing the immediate exodus of all the women of the fantasy country I had conceived, who, indignant against the low and vulgar sensuality of the men, abandoned them to their fates with a lively ultra-idealistic protest.

After several other volumes of verse and prose, I published a year ago, in Paris, the novel Mafarka le futuriste, a work I love more than all my others and in which I succeeded in expressing my great futurist dream.

There I described the impressive ascension of an African hero, made of temerity and cunning, who, having manifested the most impetuous will to live and dominate in battles and manifold adventures, routing the armies of the Negroes and conquering the scepter of his liberated city, not yet satiated with having fashioned the world to his liking, rises at once from warlike heroism to philosophical and artistic heroism. He wants to create and he creates, in a superhuman struggle against matter and mechanical laws, his ideal son, a masterpiece of vitality, a winged hero to whom he transfuses life in a supreme kiss, without the concurrence of woman, who witnesses the tragic superhuman birth.

I wanted, with this novel, to give man unlimited hope in his spiritual and physical perfection, releasing him from the maw of lust and assuring him of his imminent liberation from sleep, weariness and death.

I wanted to describe the glorious elevation of life, which was vegetable, animal and human and will soon manifest itself into a prodigious winged and immortal being. I wanted to trespass on the becoming of man in an infinite multiplication of strength and splendor.

This great poem, by turns epic, lyrical and dramatic, begins with a first chapter constructed with the balance and precision of detail that the novel demands.

It is this first chapter that is the incriminating chapter.

In writing it, I naturally obeyed the principles of high literature, which are summed up in expressing one’s dream as effectively as possible, considering images not as frills or decorative gems, but as essential elements of expression, unconscious instructs to fix the elusive truth and to specify the indefinite and indefinable.

I therefore wrote The Rape of Negresses so that from a great torrid furnace of lust and brutality the great heroic will of Mafarka might leap forth.

The crude description and obscene details, the words that may arouse disgust are of absolute necessity in my poem.

I have been able, in this way, to produce according to a law of contrast and I would almost say “of trampolines,” the leap of the human spirit, which, freed from the tyranny of love and the obsession of woman, at last breaks away from the earth and opens the great wings that sleep in the flesh of man.

(Thunderous applause)

It will be said to me, with an overabundance of critical myopia, that I could have overlooked this or that detail, using palliatives, veils, metaphors, and minute subtexts…

You will allow me to declare to you that a writer can have no other method than absolute sincerity, for the anguish of creation has nothing to do with the coquetry and false modesty of a cold courtesan.

I will also point out that as far as there is monstrous in the legend narrated by Mafarka under the tent, in the second chapter, one must first consider that Africa can be summed up in three words: heat, filth and lust. I am not talking about Pierre Loti’s Africa, stylized and perfumed specifically for the great academic salons of Paris.

You know, moreover, that the manly member, monstrously developed and ceaselessly industrious, constitutes the central and haunting motif of African literature and life.

(Vivid hilarity)

I shall cite as an example one of the comedies performed in Arab and Turkish theaters: the comedy of the Wise Man and the Almea, in which an old man, bent over papyri, is moved by the appearance of a veiled woman who gradually denudes herself, while he gradually inhales a monstrous cardboard virile member, which arouses the liveliest mirth and the greatest complacency in the spectators. A similar spectacle appears on the scene in the famous Turkish comedy, The Triumph of Friendship, or Caraguez.

I shall conclude by pointing out that a pornographer would have chosen a quite different subject, I mean a European, indeed a city subject, and would have written, for example, a novel about the Milanese slums, instead of an African poem, kindled by a jaunty imagination, conceived and written for a few connoisseurs and absolutely precluded to the majority of intelligences, who unfortunately have no familiarity with poetry.

A great ovation barely suppressed by the chairman closed the poet Marinetti’s speech. Then the distinguished novelist Luigi Capuana, professor at the University of Catania, who had come specially from Sicily as an expert witness in defense of the founder of Futurism, had the floor. He read in a silence of religious attention a long, deep and exhaustive expert opinion of his own, which will remain a valuable document in our literature.

The Appraisal

of Luigi Capuana

In matters around the moral defense against the work of art, one knows whence one begins and never knows where one will end up.

One begins with the publications of those little conscientious publishers, speculating on the unhealthy curiosity of the lowest sphere of the reading public; and it is well to prevent that unhealthy curiosity from being fed and increased by books and booklets which have never had anything to do with art. It may then come to the scruples of I do not remember which French writer, of whom, years ago, I read in the Catholic magazine Polyblion, that he had seen fit to publish a translation… expurgated… of Promessi Sposi!

(Applause)

He had wanted to show himself more manzonian than Manzoni himself. The glacial figure of Lucia and the admirable analysis of the heart of the nun of Monza (already so attenuated, as is well known, by the great Milanese novelist because of his strange conviction that in the world too much love is made and too much is said about it, that it is not convenient to reason about it even in books) had prompted that translator to castrate a novel that is the height of purity, so much so that it never occurred to any of our strictest King’s Prosecutors to proceed to seizures and to indict its thousand editors.

Those poor devils who try to make money by printing and peddling their filthy wares, perhaps believe themselves authorized to do so by the example of the Government, which allows and covers with its legal protection certain institutions where they certainly do not give moral lessons, and, what is worse, undermine public hygiene. But the Government has paternally thought of establishing a legion of janitors charged with ensuring, as far as they can, the health of the frequenters of tea houses, as they call them in Japan, and that public hygiene feels fully at ease. The pornographic book dealers have done nothing of the sort, and it is only right therefore that, from time to time, a zealous King’s Prosecuter or a generous President of Ministers should intervene to raise their voices against the rampant scandal and remedy it.

I confess, to my blushes, that I have not read the famous circular of H. E. Luzzatti; but I see from its effects, that it respects the classical art, and that the executing magistrates show almost all of them to have an equal laudable respect for it.

I have not heard, for example, that the stupendous recent translation of the comedies of Aristophanes, gifted to Italy by my dearest friend Ettore Romagnoli, has been struck, so far, by any penal lightning: although a single scene from the Lysistrata (if ever a modern writer had imprudently induced himself to write it) has enough to call down upon him the indignation of all our King’s Prosecuters. H. E. Luzzatti and the magistrates charged with enforcing the prescriptions of the Code have immense admiration, and, no doubt, that of the innumerable host of scholars, for this tribute of classical veneration. It is understood that they esteem it thoroughly, as we say today, sterilized by the passing of time and rendered inoffensive even when, in concept and word, it shows itself far more libertine than any modern production.

Probably H. E. Luzzatti and the King’s Procurators also reflected that in the opposite case, it would be necessary to proscribe, at the very least, three quarters of world literature: not a very easy undertaking, as well as an extremely ridiculous one.

Aristophanes, Lucian, Catullus, Juvenal, Petronius, the Boccaccio, the Bandello, Rabelais-let me mention a few names that come first to my memory-are therefore, fortunately, very free to go into people’s hands and delight them without fear of being accused of tickling their vicious inclinations and inducing them to sin.

Why won’t the same treatment be used for modern art? Note well that I say “art.” No matter how much I thought about it, I could not explain this monstrous difference.

So today I cannot conceal my astonishment at being called upon to express my opinion around the morality of a work of high poetry, not intended, precisely because of its high conception, its impetuous and exuberant richness of images and vocabulary, for that majority of readers who demand from the book, more than anything else, a diversion from the manifold tediousnesses of life or their enviable facetiousness.

I would have loved better to know that the incriminating King’s Prosecuter had remembered St. Jerome—the reminder cannot offend him—that while he was busy translating the Bible, he kept under his bedside the comedies of Aristophanes, nothing scandalized by the fat boldness of the great Athenian: and I do not mean to flatter Marinetti, by lowly recalling Aristophanes in connection with his Mafarka the Futurist. I simply want to point out that Italy has, at this time, a King’s Procurator more uncompromising than the Holy Translator of the Bible.

It might be answered that, perhaps, when St. Jerome was delighting in the nocturnal reading of the comedies of Aristophanes, he was busy translating those chapters of the Book of Kings where it is told—with details to give points to the hated true futurists—the brutal story of that prince (son of David, if I am not mistaken), who, having fallen hopelessly in love with his own sister Tamar pretends to be ill in order to have her as his nurse and by this ruse succeeds in doing her violence, and in satisfying the incestuous urge; or, perhaps, the saint was intent on translating the idyllic book of Ruth, where the latter gives herself, with little praiseworthy deception, to her old relative Booz and forces him to marry her. It might be answered that on that occasion St. Jerome was charmed by the vivid biblical pages, and therefore helpless against the seductions of the pagan Greek poet.

Of course, there is to be objected that the patient translator probably thought that if the Holy Spirit, inspiration, according to the Church, of those sacred books, did not think it improper to diffuse himself in those daring particulars, all the more could this be permitted to a pagan poet who wished only to do a work of poetry, and not to collaborate in a collection destined to be the sacred text of the Jewish religion and of future Christianity.

Now in Marinetti’s futurist novel, neither incest nor the interested seduction of a poor old man is described in the most dazzling colors.

Marinetti is simply an artist, and he does not believe himself to be under the dictating influence of the Holy Spirit. His Holy Spirit is thought, the feeling of human elevation toward a most noble, and perhaps unattainable ideal: and this thought, this feeling, this artist cannot reason it out, discuss it by way of syllogisms, of philosophical and scientific deductions, but only express it by representation, by imaginative creation, which has fixed laws of proportions, of harmonies, of coloring, from which no artist who wants to be such can escape.

And the day the bleak vision of that barbaric world presented itself to his mind, that he could artistically render the contrast between the brutality of instincts and the spirituality of aspiration toward a more human, indeed divine, region, he did not hesitate to yield to the impositions of the subject, nor did he attempt to evade any of the demands that could make the concept of his poem more evident. viz: Contempt for the morally animal part of the instincts, and enthusiasm for the liberation of the nobler part of man that carnal passions diminish, when they do not come to nullify.

Mafarka is nothing else. It is precisely the poem, not the novel, of the conquest of the full possession of the spiritual freedom of the individual; poem, which is as much as to say (we must not forget this) fantastic representation that must strike the imagination, make evident, solid, real the world intended to adumbrate the concept. The artist is more logical than nature: he does not digress, he does not allow himself to be carried away, as it is, by the accidents that often get in the way of his work. In the world of Art, blind and importunate chance does not exist: I repeat very old things, but not out of place. Finally, the artist is at the same time equally prejudiced as Nature: he must have no hesitations, no repentances, and be as omnipotent as her.

In Mafarka the force of creation is truly extraordinary. That world⸺man and landscape⸺gigantically barbaric is affirmed there as reality, is explained without reticence, without those silly modesty that become, if one looks closely, hypocritical and cowardly shamelessness.

(Thunderous applause)

That is why it seems to me, that it stands well in its place the pivotal episode of the Rape of the Negresses that excited above all the magisterial conscience of the King’s Prosecutor, preventing him from seeing that the artist needed the basis of that filthy substratum to show his violent indignation against the baseness of instincts. He scandalized the necessary brutality of the representation, the crudity of the precise vocabulary; he attributed a deplorable complacency of vice to the prodigious evidence of that nefarious orgy, and paid no more attention to the rest: he did not think that the spirit of the author speaks, right there, by the mouth of Mafarka el Bar, when he makes him burst into the midst of all that human rottenness, with the scimitar⸺I quote the very words of the Poet⸺flaring and curved over his head like a halo.

⸺Mangy dogs! Crusty pustules! Hearts of hares! Ears of rabbits! Race of scorpions! You have nothing but a stinking ulcer instead of a brain, under your crushed foreheads…. etc.

And I interrupt the quotation, so as not to abuse the patience of the Tribunal. The intimate concept of Marinetti’s poem is condensed entirely there. It can be seen that the senses of the King’s Prosecutor must have been most excited by the artistic power of the representation of that orgy, if they prevented him from understanding the profound reason, indeed the artistic necessity of it, and make him suppose a most vile bookish speculation in those pages which form an integral part of the organism of the poem, and cannot be split off, without destroying the life of the most vigorous work of art, of which Marinetti is certainly proud, as an oeuvre, of the highest morality.

This, with full, free and serene consciousness, is my opinion around the poem Mafarka the Futurist.

The first day of the trial closed with the prosecutor’s indictment, which ill succeeded in sustaining the absurd charge made against Marinetti. We do not reproduce it here, as the demure P. M. demanded and obtained for himself the measure of closed doors.