An Older Future: Gabriel Alomar's El Futurisme (1904)

Abstract

4 It remains impossible to verify the extent to which Marinetti availed himself of El Futurisme or its subsequent translations and reiterations.5 The tracing of Alomar's potential influence on Marinetti will necessarily remain speculative. Since Lily Litvak resurrected Alomar's text from relative oblivion a few decades ago, however, scholars have squared off as to the extent of Marinetti's indebtedness to the Catalan's precedent.6 Alomar's text did not prefigure Marinetti's Futurist venture in any prescriptive, or even descriptive, sense.

With fanfare both ceremonious and critical, 2009 witnessed the exhumation of an incendiary tract that had demanded to be buried like a dead letter: the "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909), which, now a noble manuscript in its own right, has found itself prodded back into the limelight over the past year like a reluctant Lazarus.1 The first in a long series of raucous interventions penned by F. T. Marinetti-poet, publisher, and tireless promoter-the manifesto appeared on the front page of Paris's Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. Seeking to liberate Italy from its role as Europe's cultural cemetery-a storehouse of relics, an open-air museum for the ages-Marinetti proposed a ruthless purge of his country's aesthetic and poetic sentimentalisms. He launched his venture from the most modern of European capitals, in a widely distributed daily; the hurly burly of the manifesto's reception duly catapulted his ambitious program onto the world stage. For all of Marinetti's famous condemnations of passéisme, however, the shibboleth of his own movement was, by 1909, already a bit old hat.

We might think of 2010, in fact, as marking the incidental anniversary of a slightly older, less strident, Futurism. On June 18, 1904, the Mallorcan poet and journalist Gabriel Alomar (1873-1941; Fig. 1) delivered his lengthy lecture, El Futurisme, to a small audience at Barcelona's Ateneu (a private literary society). The redacted version of his address appeared the following year in the journal l'Avenç ("advance," "progress")-an outlet, as its name would suggest, of Catalan political vanguardism- before being translated into Castilian and published as a slim volume. Reviews in the Parisian Mercure de France and other publications further circulated the basic tenets of El Futurisme, as well as the importunate ambition of its name, throughout some prominent literary circles.2

Marinetti likely first caught wind of Alomar's essay through Marcel Robin's substantial 1908 review in the Mercure, a journal that Marinetti-like the better part of forward-thinking individuals in turn-of-the-century Paris-read avidly, and to which he occasionally contributed. This fact was not lost on Alomar, who reacted vehemently against the expropriation of his title, accusing Marinetti, in March 1909, of plagiarism.3 At the latter's professed ignorance of Alomar's essay, the Spanish poet Ruben Darío insisted, already in 1909, that the Italian impresario recognize "the priority of the word if not the entire doctrine."4 It remains impossible to verify the extent to which Marinetti availed himself of El Futurisme or its subsequent translations and reiterations.5 The tracing of Alomar's potential influence on Marinetti will necessarily remain speculative. Since Lily Litvak resurrected Alomar's text from relative oblivion a few decades ago, however, scholars have squared off as to the extent of Marinetti's indebtedness to the Catalan's precedent.6

Alomar's text did not prefigure Marinetti's Futurist venture in any prescriptive, or even descriptive, sense. To be sure, the Catalan's Futurists are notably "hyperaesthetic," and he insists upon poetry and art as the only possible vehicles of social and political renewal. Yet he is not eager to adumbrate what his "future" will look like, nor to disarticulate and reconfigure-as Marinetti would-the very terms in which it might be conceived, conveyed, or hastened. The rupture with academic dogma and religious fetishism, Alomar promises, will entail a certain violence. But the look and feel of that violence in his figurations-manifested as a butterfly shrugging off its chrysalis, for instance-seem naïve compared with the hard-bitten sneers of the century's modernism that followed. Even when Alomar excoriates the encrusted institutions that his futurists would vanquish, his language remains eminently civil in tone, texture, and lilt. As Marcel Robin noted in his early review in the Mercure, while the rhapsodic energy of Alomar's language is stirring, the dimensions of his particular "future" remain elusive.7

Alomar's invectives against "the catacombs of pedantic erudition," and "our putrid educational system" stand, perhaps, as his most proto-Marinettian pronouncements- echoed in countless Italian tirades against "the despotism of pedantic academies," and "the virus of routine, of imitation and pedantry."8 Likewise Alomar's harsh critique of the Church-and its hold on education in Spain and Catalonia (and, thus, his native Mallorca)-anticipates Marinetti's violent denunciations of clericalism in both rhetoric and tone. The regeneration of Catalonian culture in particular significantly subtends Alomar's project. His Futurisme, in short, is inseparable from his catalanisme. To a great extent, he conceived of the former as a handmaiden to the latter.9 As Jordi Castellanos has argued, Alomar helped to reconfigure the very concept of catalanisme, from a retardataire dogma "opposed to modernity," to a youth-driven sensibility increasingly in sync with a burgeoning literary avant-garde.10

Any comparison with Marinetti's writing is conditioned not only by the texts' different formats and figurations, but also by the divergent trajectories that they carved out for their respective authors. Alomar's essay inspired the founding of a few journals under the (somewhat amorphous) designation of Futurisme, as early as 1907. Though Alomar contributed to their short runs, his address at the Ateneu did not usher in a larger movement, whether aesthetic or political. As his project became rather quickly superseded by the increasingly reactionary impulses of Catalan Noucentisme-headed by Eugeni d'Ors after 1906-Alomar channeled his own energies into more wide-ranging journalistic pursuits. Marinetti, by contrast, dedicated his entire life to the development of Futurism, as both an exponentially interdisciplinary enterprise and a political program. Whereas that program found an afterlife in-indeed, served as an animating prolepsis to-Italian Fascism, Alomar's writings were largely shirked not only by d'Ors's conservative agenda, but also by the dictatorships that followed.11 Marinetti agitated unabashedly for Italian colonial expansion. The same year as he penned El Futurisme, Alomar, by contrast, dedicated an entire work to the defense of Algeria against French colonialism.12 Alomar repeatedly disavows a facile nationalism in El Futurisme, taking pains at every turn to inflect his Catalanism with conditions and caveats.

Despite its extensive appeals to a renewed poetic sensibility, El Futurisme stands more as a treatise on political economy than an aesthetic manifesto, more a humanist homily than a proposed transvaluation of language itself. Its language represents, in fact, a hodgepodge of various nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century modes (transcendentalist, theosophic, and anthroposophic), shot through as much as with lingering Enlightenment principles as with anti-positivist, Bergsonian inflections. For Alomar, Giosuè Carducci's "Hymn to Satan" still epitomized radical defiance; Marinetti and his cohorts dismissed the same poetry as "nostalgically monotonous weepy"-the epitome of passéisme, despite its ostensible iconoclasm.13 While Alomar rejects as deficient the wan, "plaster model" of man cast by nature, he figures its futurist foil as a marble statue-a metaphor inimical to Marinetti's mechanized poetics, even constitutive of its chief anathema.14 Even-or especially-in his Parnassian (and often pompier) hyperbole, Alomar unwittingly caricatures certain nineteenth-century tropes and affectations. 15 What Norbert Bilbeny calls Alomar's "republican radicalism," and what Joan Ramon Resina dubs his "positivist libertarianism," unfurls in a Whitmanesque blend of fiery defiance and quixotic utopianism.16 By whatever name we call it-aside from Futurism-some form of dynamic liberalism appeared to Alomar as an exciting political prospect. The very yoking of these binaries seemed, to Marinetti and his ilk, a ridiculous prospect by the end of the century's first decade. It is precisely Alomar's lingering ingenuousness that now spares his text any suspicion of bad faith.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the tension between Alomar's aims and his somewhat outmoded stylistics invites the dismissal of his Futurisme as revealing simply a "vaguely modernizing curiosity."17 Even the great modernist, Catalan poet, J. V. Foix would later describe Alomar's writing as politically adventurous, but "anachronistic" in a literary sense.18 Still, to chalk up Alomar's text as "insufficiently modern" is to forget what passed muster as modern at the turn of the century, to disavow the shifting conditions of modernity-and its modernist foils-as they took shape.19 As Resina notes, innovation and historicism were inextricably intertwined in modernist discourse at the turn of the century. Consider, in this vein, Nietzsche's deliberations on history's "Uses and Disadvantages" (which, not coincidentally, earned him Marinetti's categorical dismissal as a crusty "Academic Professor," the philosopher's most radical blasphemies notwithstanding).20 El Futurisme, for its part, is as elegiac as it is exhortative. Alomar never posits the future-and the rupture that will usher it in-as entirely divested of the forces that brought about its becoming. "Tradition," he writes, "is a supremely powerful cultural element, since, as you well know, no man may boast of the complete invention of any idea or method." As Daniel Cottom has recently argued, Marinetti's embrace of a misanthropic, mechanized poetics of anti-individualism-which literalized and fetishized novelty as a technological revolution, a notion entirely absent from Alomar's purview-often betrays a fundamentally anachronistic sensibility, quite in spite of his intentions.21

Conversely, some of Alomar's earliest expositors claimed to spy another affect beneath his ostensibly humanist logos. "Alomar," Marcel Robin declared in his Mercure review, "is better armed for negative criticism, for offensive combat rather than the investiture of some impossible peace in his chimerical city; an anarchist should occupy himself solely with destruction."22 According to Robin, Alomar's rhetoric of synthesis, of collaborative construction, gives the lie to some fundamentally iconoclastic-even "anarchic"-tendencies. This seems more the projection of contemporary French anxieties than the discernment of any actual political predisposition on Alomar's behalf. Alomar's anarchic "rebellion" is a rhetorical one, marked more by chivalrous earnestness than any militant machinations. His language insists, again and again, upon the constructive benefits of meliorist cooperation, based upon "Poetic" intuition and liberal individualism. Still, while Robin seems slightly off the mark as to the core of Alomar's sentiment, he rightly identifies at its heart a dialectical tendency, the nuances of which become flattened when compared to Marinettian bombast.

In this vein, Alomar's writing resonates far less with the latter's scorched-earth rhetoric, than it does with the Florentine Futurists' more nuanced approach to the politics of historicism. The "secular religion of spiritualized nationalism"23 developed by Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici-beginning around the same years as Alomar's first Futurist pronouncements, and taking further shape in the journals La Voce and Lacerba-is rehearsed in terms strikingly similar to Alomar's.24 The Florentines actively distinguished their "new sensibility" from Marinetti's "new technicality"; they differentiated their "disdain for the cult of the past" from Marinetti's "disdain for the past," tout court.25 Just as Florentine Futurism pursued conflicting Italian and Tuscan interests, so too Alomar's text must be considered in the cultural, ideological, and epistemological contexts out of which it developed and to which it contributed. Indeed, El Futurisme need not be held hostage-whether nominally or notionally, politically or poetically-to its disparities from any other iteration of "futurism." Aside from its importance to the fitful developments of twentieth-century Catalan and Spanish culture, and its unclassifiable resistance to various categorical imperatives (whether modernisme, noucentisme, or unreconstructed catalanisme), the text merits further consideration as a tract on its own terms. It is hoped that the present rendering-the first substantial translation in English, to my knowledge-will at the very least afford Alomar's writing more scholarly attention in the Anglo-American world.

The pyrotechnics that have accompanied the centenary of Italian Futurism have passed over Alomar with barely a sound. If we are to take him at his word, he would have preferred at least some earnest refutation to utter silence. "Oh, the supreme delight that our sons may contradict us!" reads one of the last lines of El Futurisme. This invitation to the funeral of his Futurisme, even as he pens its birth announcement, envies little of Marinetti's summons for new generations to bury his movement in its turn. More than a hundred years on, however, Alomar's self-effacing cadences ring with far more sincerity.

A note on the translation

The translation is based upon Alomar's 1905 text (Fig. 2), written in Catalan, reprinted in Gabriel Alomar, Obres Completes de Gabriel Alomar, Volume II; El futurisme: seguit del articles d'El poble català, 1904-1906 (Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 2000). I have chosen to omit from the present translation Alomar's lengthy excursus on the question of Catalanism, as it deals more specifically (and at times ploddingly) with internal political economy at the expense of the text's other, more evocative, and representative themes.

Footnote

Notes

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

1. "When we reach forty, other, younger, and more courageous men will very likely toss us into the trash can, like useless manuscripts. And that's what we want!" F. T. Marinetti, "The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909), reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, Günter Berghaus, ed., Doug Thompson, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 15-16.

2. Marcel Robin, "Lettres espagnoles," Mercure de France, December 1, 1908, 557-59.

3. Gabriel Alomar, "Sportula: El Futurisme a Paris," El Poble Català, March 9, 1909. Alomar would likely have been horrified to find that even Wikipedia's Catalan entry on "Futurism" makes no mention of his precedent, nor even of his existence: <http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurisme> (last accessed February 1, 2010).

4. Cited in Lily Litvak, "Alomar and Marinetti: Catalan and Italian Futurism," Revue des Langues Vivantes 38:6 (1972), 586. As early as 1909, Marinetti peremptorily (and perhaps defensively) averred that the tag of Futurism had occurred to him "in a flash." See the preface to Gian Pietro Lucini, Revolverate (con una Prefazione futurista di F. T. Marinetti) (Milan: Poesia, 1909). He reiterated the originality of his invention in 1915, writing, "For a moment, I hesitated between the words 'Dynamism' and 'Futurism.' My Italian blood, however, surged the more strongly when my lips proclaimed aloud the freshly invented word 'Futurism.'" Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo, reprinted as "Futurism's First Battles," in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, 151.

5. On the details of these various incarnations, see Andrew A. Anderson, "Futurism and Spanish Literature in the Context of the Historical Avant-Garde," in Günter Berghaus, ed., International Futurism in Arts and Literature (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000).

6. A few notable studies-from Lily Litvak's pioneering essay more than three decades ago, to a more recent reappraisal by David Bird-have done much to elucidate the affinities and divergences, both potential and practical, between Alomar's essay and Marinetti's numerous Futurist writings. Lily Litvak argues for the two Futurisms as bearing "identical foundations and aspirations" (Litvak, "Alomar and Marinetti," 603). Giuseppe Sansone and, more recently, Andrew Anderson, have argued for their fundamental difference. For a summary of the polemic, see Anderson, "Futurism and Spanish Literature," 153-54. I concur with Joan Ramon Resina's assessment in "Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana" that, while we cannot exaggerate the affinities between the two authors' texts, or even their world views, the insistence to the contrary often comes at "the expense of Alomar's modernity." Joan Ramon Resina, ed., El aeroplano y la estrella: El movimiento de vanguardia en los Países Catalanes, 1904-1936 (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), 18. David Bird's recent essay scrupulously differentiates between the two authors, but admirably refuses, in doing so, to let Alomar's Futurism to be "critically subordinated to Marinetti's Italian one." In other words, Bird seeks to reverse the prevalent iteration of Marinetti's "Futurism" as the originary or paradigmatic one. David Bird, "Differentiating Catalan and Italian Futurisms," Romance Quarterly 55:1 (Winter 2008), 13-27.

7. Marcel Robin, "Lettres espagnoles," 559.

8. Marinetti, "Futurism, an Interview with Mr. Marinetti in Comoedia," 19; "The Necessity and Beauty of Violence," 63, 69, in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.

9. "Catalanism must futurize itself," Alomar insists toward the end of his polemic. Gabriel Alomar, El futurisme: seguit del articles d'El poble català, 1904-1906 (Mallorca: Editorial Moll, 2000), 73.

10. See Jordi Castellanos, "Gabriel Alomar i el Modernisme," in Alomar, El futurisme: seguit del articles d'El poble català, 1904-1906, 7-39.

11. See David Bird "Unrealized Speculative Models of Cultural Formation in Late 19th and Early 20th Century Spain," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Spring, 2006, University of Kentucky.

12. Gabriel Alomar, Un poble que es mor: Tot passant (Barcelona: Edit. L'Avenç, 1904).

13. See F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, et al., "The Futurist Cinema" (1916), reprinted and translated in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 217-18.

14. In this regard, the congruence of Alomar's writing to other European avant-gardists of the period seems as important as his potential anticipation of-or difference from-Marinetti. Writing during the very same years from Paris, the expatriate Italian, Ricciotto Canudo, describes a Homo Novus, and repeatedly insists upon artistic "synthesis" as the only way forward: a gathering of all expression into the "Temple" of "universality." Both Canudo and Alomar reveal the same millennial optimism, verging on the chronically vague, rendered in a new-age language in which grand concepts-Poetry, Music, Spirit-are capitalized and consecrated as the new (old) crux of society, both Mediterranean and modern. See Ara H. Merjian, "A Screen for Projection: Ricciotto Canudo's Exponential Aesthetics and the Parisian Avant-Gardes," in European Film Theory, Temenuga Trifonova, ed. (London: Routledge, 2008).

15. His secularized cry of "non serviam" evinces what Herbert Marcuse has called the "search for an authentic language" that informed Hegelian dialectic and its "Great Refusal." See Herbert Marcuse, "A Note on Dialectic," originally published in Telos 8 (1960); reprinted in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds. (New York: Continuum, 1997), 448.

16. Norbert Bilbeny, Política Noucentista, de Maragall a d'Ors (Catarroja: Editorial Afers, 1999), chapter four ("The republican radicalism of Gabriel Alomar"); Resina, "Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana," 15.

17. The term is Joan Ramon Resina's, paraphrasing those authors dismissive of Alomar's modernism (Resina, "Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana," 17).

18. Cited in Resina, "Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana," 16-17.

19. Resina, "Observaciones sobre la vanguardia catalana," 16-17.

20. F. T. Marinetti, "Ce qui nous sépare de Nietzsche" (1912), translated and reprinted as "Against Academic Teachers," in F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings, 81.

21. David Cottom, "Futurism, Nietzsche, and the Misanthropy of Art," Common Knowledge 13:1 (Winter 2007), 94.

22. Robin, "Lettres Espagnoles," 559.

23. Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 21.

24. The journal Leonardo, in which Papini, Soffici, and Giuseppe Pressolini first joined forces, was founded in 1903. Their subsequent efforts toward a "collective project of cultural renewal" evince, as Walter Adamson's account of Florentine modernism demonstrates, a fundamental affinity with Alomar's rhetoric. Adamson writes, "No word was more important to the message of Leonardo, or recurred more often in its pages, than 'renewal' and its various equivalents: 'rebirth,' 'reawakening,' 'renaissance,' 'regeneration,' 'resurgence,' 'resurrection.'" Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 79. The same terms mark Alomar's text at every turn, and to similar ends.

25. See, in particular, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Papini, and Ardengo Soffici, "Futurismo e Marinettismo," Lacerba, 3:7 (February 14, 1915), 49-51; emphasis mine. Alomar would not follow the Florentines, however, in their eventual "critique of the illusion of democracy," and their support for Mussolini's Fascism. See Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence, 25-6.