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Jeffrey T. Schnapp

Modernism/modernity, Volume 9, Number 4, November 2002, pp. 667-673

(Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/mod.2002.0079

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 SCHNAPP / gorilla art
667

Gorilla Art: On an Unpublished Letter

from Karl Vossler to Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti

Jeffrey T. Schnapp

MODERNISM / modernity
1
Down with professors! The slogan resounds throughout the VOLUME NINE, NUMBER

FOUR, PP 667–673.
early manifestos of Italian Futurism, underscoring the
movement’s two-pronged assault on the historicist cult of the © 2002 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
past and the positivist culture of scientific rationality. From the
front page of Le Figaro, the 1909 Founding Manifesto had prom-
ised not only to destroy the institutions of memory (“museums,
libraries, and academies of all sorts”) but also to free Italy “from
its fetid cancer of professors, archeologists, ciceros and antiquar-
ians” (TIF, 11). Five years later, in the spring of 1914, this po-
lemic was alive and well, as attested by a mock funeral for “the
passéist philosopher” Benedetto Croce held in the Sprovieri
Gallery in Rome. A large papier-mâché head “sculpted by means
of slaps” was paraded about the gallery on a worm-eaten book
while the painter Giacomo Balla rang a cowbell and emitted the
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
sounds nyeeet-nyeeeet—a hybrid of sheep bleats and Russian
occupies the Rosina
“nays.” For his part, Marinetti pronounced a funeral oration that
Pierotti Chair in Italian
justified the sculptor’s violent technique by citing the professor’s Literature at Stanford
rotten breath and tongue, the potatoes and onions fermenting University, where he
in his brain, and his capacity to kill genius and to stink up even directs the Stanford
the divine Roman springtime. The stench was such, he claimed Humanities Laboratory.
in his valediction, that, in order not to wretch, he needed to His latest book (in
collaboration with
light a cigarette. (A cigarette was lit and the attack of nausea was
contemporary artist
nipped in the bud.)2
Jonathan Hammer) is
Even when World War I was five years away, there was never Ball and Hammer
any doubt that the “fetid cancer” that was filling Italian minds (Tenderenda the Fantast)
with potatoes and onions was a Teutonic export, even if champi- (2002).
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

668 oned by the likes of Croce. The Futurist offensive against the old Italy thus necessarily
had a northern neighbor in its sights: “We combat Germanic culture, not in order to
defend Latin culture, but in order to defeat these two equally noxious cultures in the
name of the contemporary Italian creative genius. Our answer to [Theodor] Mommsen
and Benedetto Croce is the Italian scugnizzo [street-urchin]” (TIF, 336). In the place
of the Neapolitan germanophile, Futurism embraced the legendary Italian double of
the Brazilian meninho da rua: a trickster, lawbreaker, and troublemaker, and a street-
guerrilla who lived for the present alone, whose laboratory and library were the mod-
ern urban jungle.
Marinetti was, of course, a most improbable scugnizzo, having earned a degree in
law from the University of Genoa, gained acclaim in France for works such as La
Conquête des étoiles (1902) and the Jarry-esque Le Roi Bombance (1905), and having
inherited a considerable fortune from his father Enrico.3 But with the scugnizzo-ideal
firmly in mind and armed with abundant street smarts, he did everything within his
powers to promote the fame and fortune of the Futurist movement from the moment
of its birth to the time of his death in 1944 at the age of 68 (the result of a heart
condition, developed in the wake of a voluntary stint on the Russian front). Among his
most characteristic techniques was the meticulous and systematic compilation of press
clippings, essays, and books concerning Futurism and the reception of his work.
Whether such materials were favorable or unfavorable mattered less than their imme-
diate use-value or potential to be recycled in movement publications. Much as in today’s
film advertisements, Marinetti would lift the most tenuous sliver of praise from a wholly
negative context in order to use it for promotional purposes. In this manner his Futur-
ist propaganda machine abrogated all of the movement’s founding principles in the
process of documenting its conquests. Words of praise from eminent figures, however
faint, or the right sort of shocked and hidebound words of criticism were viewed as
equally valuable in buttressing Futurism’s claim that it represented the central force of
renewal in contemporary life. Little did it matter that they should issue forth from the
most fetid potato- and onion-brained members of the professoriate, such as Croce,
Mommsen, or even Karl Vossler.
In the spring of 1914, probably during one of his German speaking tours, Marinetti
became aware that, in the course of extending the scope of his already renowned
Italienische Literaturgeschichte (1900; 2nd ed. 1908), Vossler had given a series of
public lectures at the Frankfurt Freies deutsches Hochstift in which he had concluded
with a brief discussion of Futurism’s impact on the Italian literary scene.4 Vossler occu-
pied the chair in Romance Philology at the University of Munich as of 1911 and, not
being an expert on contemporary literature, had been forced to scramble. (He con-
fessed to Croce that “I’m reading fast and furiously when I can so as to bone up a
bit.”)5 Well received, the lectures were expanded and published in May of that same
year as Italienische Literatur der Gegenwart von der Romantik zum Futurismus. The
book version consisted in a chronologically ordered sequence of case studies extend-
ing from Alessandro Manzoni to Giovanni Pascoli to Gabriele D’Annunzio, and closed
not with Futurism, but with an entirely new coda: a full chapter dedicated to Croce,
 SCHNAPP / gorilla art
the great “renewer of aesthetics and literary criticism” to whose critical writings, Vossler 669
proclaimed, “I owe almost everything.”6 (The treatment of Futurism, expanded to ten
paragraphs, was wedged into the conclusion of the D’Annunzio chapter.) This Crocean
teleology, intended from the start but absent from the lectures, may seem unpromis-
ing from a Futurist perspective. Not reading German and acquainted only with the
book’s title, Marinetti didn’t know better. But he knew that Vossler was a figure of
enormous prestige thanks to the recent appearance in Italian translation of his
Positivismus und Idealismus in der Sprachwissenschaft (1908) and of his commented
edition of Dante’s Commedia.7 In the first of these, a ferocious antipositivist polemic,
combined with a claim that individual artistic creation represented the essence of hu-
man language (and, therefore, the basis for all linguistic inquiry), might well have
seemed in harmony with the values of a movement that, despite its commitment to
industrial civilization and mechanical reproduction, never tired in asserting the supe-
riority and autonomy of art. In any event, Marinetti mobilized in the usual manner,
dashing off a letter with accompanying Futurist enclosures.8
Vossler’s reply is preserved in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Books Library. Dated
28 July 1914, the fateful day of Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia, it
starts by staging its own little funeral:

My dear Marinetti,
I have asked my publisher to send you a copy of the little volume that interests you
[Italienische Literatur der Gegenwart]. But you will surely be disappointed because it
treats Futurism not as a new beginning but rather as the final expression of a movement
that starts with Romanticism. In short, I’m sorry to have to say so, but it judges Futurism
from a passéist standpoint. As a matter of fact, my view is that Futurism has within it
something that has already come and gone, something dead or, better, still-born: to wit,
the same ironic and playful sense of humor [umorismo] with respect to the real that,
though stale as could be, can be found in the Romantics, especially the German Roman-
tics. The latter informs Schelling’s theory and program and the art and style of the Schlegels,
Hoffman, etc.
I am deeply persuaded that life is anything but a game. Which is to say that I believe in
life and that I approach it with the utmost seriousness. I observe that Futurism also has a
serious, vital side, fed principally by the sense of tedium it feels when confronted by
aesthetes and dilettantes like Anatole France and the Dannunzians. It won’t be easy to
kill them off or to bury them, but if anyone can accomplish the task, I think you are the
ones. The fiercest humor [umorismo], the most biting irony, the most gleeful kicks in the
shin are all befitting of and appropriate to this labor of destruction. But when you do
battle against everything old, even libraries, I’m no longer with you. Modern life is a tree
that needs to push ever higher and higher and, for this very reason, it needs to plunge
ever more robust roots into the soil of tradition, into the past. We professors of history are
the hidden heels, the underground veins, the subtle threads that take suck and nourish-
ment from these roots. And even among you Futurists, there is a tendency towards his-
torical recurrence, towards a return to so-called “prehistoric” primitive art, especially in
the domain of painting. Your proposals and efforts to create words-in-freedom and the
wireless imagination also involve a return to a type of art that has something antediluvian
about it (“antediluvian” in the best sense of the word). It is this strain of primitivism in
your art that bodes best for the future, in my view. Go back to the art of Negroes and
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

670 gorillas. Why not? To justify your style you claim that poets and audiences are old friends
who understand one another with a mere wink or nod: without syntax, without connec-
tive ties [fili], without logical argumentation [ragionamenti]. True, but only of the primi-
tive state that you wish to revive. It is also true that pure lyricism has no need for temporal
perspective or for spatial proportion. If there’s a defect in your program, it consists in the
fact that it remains a program (or, rather, that it strives to present itself as such). Tech-
niques can’t simply be decreed. Every poet has to find and elaborate his own. But at its
core your program itself is a form of poetry, which is to say song, a song about song [un
canto sopra un canto]. The theories that a song contains cannot be discussed; they can
only be savored. This is all I have to say at this point. Maybe some day or other I’ll write
an interpretive article on Futurism. But my ideas aren’t limpid or sober enough quite yet.
After all, a high degree of sobriety is required to interpret the enthusiasms, mysticisms
and intoxications of your movement. Thus far no one has attained such sobriety and,
unsurprisingly, you yourselves least of all, because poets are fated to remain ineffable
enigmas to themselves.
Yours sincerely,
K. Vossler9

Though the letter opens with harsh criticisms comparable to those found in the 1914
volume—the book reduces D’Annunzio to a mere master of commercial self-adver-
tisement and casts the Futurists as merry pranksters [Spassvögel] who have taken the
“decomposition of real consciousness into the dream of art . . . to the ultimate extreme
of absurdity”—it closes on a friendlier note.10 A nadir is marked with Vossler’s identifi-
cation of Futurist words-in-freedom poetry with “Negro art” and gorilla grunts. But
then comes a sudden swerve towards recognition that Marinetti’s theorizations are
themselves meta-lyrics (literally “a song on top of a song”): lyrics that perhaps are not
exalted enough to be treated as philosophical utterances, yet tasty all the same.
Just how amicable is this swerve? Only slightly so. A passage from Italienische
Literatur der Gegenwart suggests that the conflict that structures Vossler’s letter is not
reducible to that over whether it is Crocean passéists or Marinettian Futurists who are
truly still-born, or simply to the opposition between humor and seriousness, drunken
poets on a destructive rampage and sober professors of history patiently absorbing the
juices of tradition at the root of the tree of modern life. Rather, such literary skir-
mishes appear enfolded within the impending Franco-Italian/German hostilities. The
seriousness and sobriety repeatedly celebrated in the letter are distinctively German
attributes, attributes that must be defended because, according to the book, they are
under attack: the jocular Marinetti, Vossler insists, “writes French better than Italian”
and “considers the serious German people an inferior race.”11 Paradoxically, this ex-
plicit apology for German sobriety and implicit critique of Franco-Italian insobriety
admits some leakage. Whereas in the book Futurism’s predecessors were only said to
be French and English, in the letter they become (presumably unserious) Germans of
the ilk of Schelling, Schlegel, and Hoffman or of the oddballs [Querköpfe] that cheered
Marinetti in Berlin.12 Whereas in the book the Futurists were the unabashed advo-
cates of turning hospitals and cemeteries into night clubs, in the letter they too, de-
spite themselves, are granted a slice of the Sachertorte of seriousness. Finally, whereas
 SCHNAPP / gorilla art
in the book the philosopher of language was the stolid champion of the “hard and 671
modest labor” that he attributes to the “greater and better portion of the [Italian]
populace” that, unlike the Futurists, is immune to “megalomaniacal pan-Italian impe-
rial dreams,” in the letter he himself seems to have succumbed to the ambient mirth.13
Despite the fact that he takes life “terribly seriously,” his ideas are not (as yet) so
limpid and sober as to permit the drafting of an interpretive article.
Limpidity and sobriety never came. The essay in question was never written.14 Nor
did Marinetti ever find a use for Vossler’s criticism or praise. The exchange proved
something of a draw, though; with the outbreak of the Great War, tipsy gorillas as-
sumed a place of honor atop the tree of modern life.

Notes
1. Contro i professori is the literal title of a text dating from May 1910 that Marinetti would later
anthologize in Guerra sola igiene del mondo. See Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione
futurista, I. Meridiani, ed. Luciano de Maria (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1983), 306–10; hereafter
abbreviated as TIF. All translations from the Italian and German are my own.
2. The event was described in Lacerba by an anonymous commentator:
The poet Radiante [Revillo Cappari] and the painter [Fortunato] Depero (with their heads
concealed within huge black tubes with eye- and nose-holes cut out) were carrying the head of
the philosopher on their shoulders propped atop a worm-eaten book along the sides of which
hung two arms made of rope and hands made of paper. The painter Balla, disguised as a
sexton, brandished a paint brush like a torch and went about irregularly beating a cowbell,
intoning in a nasal voice: nyeeet-nyeeet.
For this quotation and the broader historical context of this Futurist happening see Claudia Salaris,
Marinetti. Arte e vita futurista (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997), 155–60.
3. See Salaris, 53–7.
4. The lectures took place in March and were published as “Über neuere italienische Literatur” in
the 1914–15 edition of the Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts. The discussion of Futurism is
limited to two paragraphs on pp. 19–20.
5. The entire passage reads: “. . . I’m sorry to have partly lost contact with things Italian, especially
now that I am preparing a series of lectures on modern Italian literature to be presented in Frankfurt.
I’m hoping they will prove good enough to be published. I’m reading fast and furiously when I can so
as to bone up a bit.” Karl Vossler, Letter to Benedetto Croce, 12 February 1914, Carteggio Croce-
Vossler 1899–1949, ed. Emanuele Rèndina (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991), 177; hereafter abbreviated as
CCV.
6. “I must acknowledge that, as is evident from my bibliography, I owe almost everything to the
outstanding critical works on contemporary Italian literature authored by Benedetto Croce that have
been appearing over the last twelve years in his review La Critica.” See Vossler,“Vorwort,” in Italienische
Literatur der Gegenwart von der Romantik zum Futurismus (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1914), 5;
hereafter abbreviated as ILG. “Renewal of Aesthetics and Literary Criticism—Benedetto Croce”
[Erneuerung der ästhetik und literarischen Kritik—Benedetto Croce] is the title of the book’s final
chapter. Croce was duly touched by this tribute and replied, “Your exposition is so accurate that at
many junctures—I’m not saying this to flatter you, but because it’s the truth—you have illuminated
me about myself.” Croce to Vossler, 8 June 1914, CCV, 183.
7. Vossler’s reputation had been further enhanced by publications including his 1904 study of the
philosophical groundings of the dolce stil nuovo and various studies of the Troubador tradition (most
recently of Marcabru).
8. Marinetti to Vossler, 28 July 1914, Marinetti Archive, Yale Beinecke Library. Series III, box 17,
folder 1133.
 M O D E R N I S M / modernity

672 9. The Italian original reads:

Carissimo Marinetti,
ho dato ordine al mio editore che vi spedisca una copia del volumetto che vi interessa. Ma
sarà una delusione per voi, perchè il futurismo vi è considerato solo come il punto finale d’un
movimento che comincia col romanticismo, non come principio d’un altro movimento. Insomma,
vi è giudicato, mi dispiace doverlo dire, passatisticamente. Infatti, mi pare che c’è qualche cosa
nel futurismo che è già passata, già morta ossia nata morta ed è specialmente quell’umorismo
ironico e giocarellone dinnanzi alla realtà, cosa stantivissima che si trova tale e quale nei romantici
specialmente tedeschi; vi si trova come teoria e programma nello Schelling e come arte e stile
negli Schlegel, Hoffman, ecc.
Io sono profondamente convinto che la vita è tutt’altra cosa che un gioco, cioè credo alla
vita e la prendo terribilmente sul serio. Vedo che anche nel futurismo c’è il lato serio, cioè
vitale, ed è, prima di tutto, il tedio che voi provate contro gli esteti e dilettanti, contro gli
Anatole France e i D’Annunziani; e se c’è qualcosa che riesce ad ammazzarli e seppellirli—
cosa difficile assai—credo che siate voi. In questo lavoro di distruzione ci può essere e sta
benissimo il più feroce umorismo, la più sarcastica ironia, i più divertenti calci. Ma se ve la
pigliate con qualsiasi cosa vecchia e perfino con le biblioteche, non ci sto più. La vita moderna
è un albero che deve spingersi sempre più in alto e appunto perciò deve sprofondare le sue
radici anche più forti nel suolo della tradizione, del passato. Noi professori di storia siamo i
tacchi nascosti sotterranei fili e filetti succhianti e poppanti della radice. E in voi futuristi stessi
c’è una tendenza al ricorso storico, alle arti primitive cosidette preistoriche, specie nella pittura.
Nel programma e tentativo vostro delle parole in libertà e dell’immaginazione senza fili vi è un
ritorno ad un genere d’arte che ha dell’antediluviano (sia inteso in senso buono). Ed è appunto
questa primitività della vostra arte che me ne sembra il migliore augurio. Tornate pure all’arte
dei negri e dei gorilla, non sarà male. Voi dite per giustificare il vostro stile che il poeta e il
pubblico son amici vecchi che s’intendono con un cenno, senza sintassi, senza fili, senza
ragionamenti. Ciò è vero per lo stato primitivo che volete ripristinare. Ed è anche vero che il
lirismo puro non ha bisogno di prospettive temporali nè di proporzioni spaziali. Se c’è un torto
nel vostro programma è di essere un programma, cioè di darsene la sembianza. La tecnica non
si può proclamare; ogni poeta deve trovarsela ed inventarsela da se. Ma in fondo il vostro
programma è una poesia, è un canto anch’esso, un canto sopra un canto. Le teorie contenute
in un canto non si discutono, si gustano. Ecco quanto saprei per ora dirvi. Può essere che un
giorno o l’altro io scriva un articolo interpretativo sul Futurismo. Ma finora le mie idee non
sono ancora abbastanza nette e sobrie. Perchè bisogna essere molto sobrio per poter interpretare
gli entusiasmi, i misticismi e le ebbrezze del vostro movimento. Finora mi pare che nessuno
abbia raggiunto questa sobrietà e voi stessi, come è naturale, meno di tutti poichè il poeta è a
se stesso il più ineffabile enigma.
Abbiatemi vostro,
K. Vossler
10. “Commercial advertisement [Geschäftsreklame], an area in which D’Annunzio is a true mas-
ter, disorients the public and renders ever more difficult the task of separating the good from the
merely showy [des Gediegenen vom Flittergold]” (ILG, 116). “Such an estrangement of art from life,
or better, such a decomposition of consciousness of the real [Wirtlichkeitsbewusstseins] into the artist’s
dream of art [Künstlertraum] is today being taken to the ultimate extreme of absurdity by the Futur-
ists. Therein lies, if I am not mistaken, the task, the raison d’être and the purpose [Ernst] of these
pranksters” (ILG, 120).
11. The original phrases are “der besser Französisch als Italienisch kann” (ILG, 120) and “das
ernste Volk der Deutschen” (ILG, 122; emphasis added). Vossler repeatedly levels the same accusa-
tion at the Italian press in his subsequent correspondence with Croce: “Here the grandest of spec-
tacles is unfolding: the reawakening of a nation of seventy million, united to a man, from the emperor
on down to the humblest rag picker. The ideas of modern socialism are merging with those of military
feudalism. Colossal social relief measures are being implemented. Every individual lives for the col-
 SCHNAPP / gorilla art
lective, for the fatherland. And to all this Italy closes its eyes, lending an ear instead to the humanitar- 673
ian phrases and empty sentimentalism of the French.” Vossler to Croce, 24 September 1914, CCV,
185. Vossler published an open letter in Il Giornale d’Italia 3 (19 October 1914) making precisely this
same point.
12. The original reads: “Darum hält Marinetti das ernste Volk der Deutschen für eine inferiore
Rasse, obgleich er in Berlin Querköpfe genug gefunden hat, die ihm zujauchzen” (ILG, 122).
13. “This type of reaction [i.e. the revolt of the Futurists] is hopeless. One can’t escape boredom
by means of games and fussing about [Spielerei und Getue], but rather only through hard and modest
labor. Such is the toil being generously undertaken by the greater and better portion of the [Italian]
populace” (ILG, 123). “[Italy is summoned] to sell off its art and museums to purchase instead can-
nons, aircraft, destroyers and dirigibles. . . . This is how Futurism tumbles and, thanks to its megalo-
maniacal pan-Italian imperial dreams, falls into the void” (ibid).
14. Vossler returned to the topic of Futurism only in cursory fashion. The expanded third edition
of his Italienische Litteraturgeschichte contains a new pair of final paragraphs culled from Italienische
Literatur der Gegenwart and concludes with the remark that “Italy’s entry into the World War was for
these giddy individuals the biggest party they had ever attended” (“Der Eintritt Italiens in dern
Weltkrieg war für diese Taumelnden das grösste Fest ihres Lebens”). See Karl Vossler, Italienische
Litteraturgeschichte (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen, 1900; revised 3rd ed., 1916), 153. He also made only
minimal changes to the second edition of Letteratura italiana contemporanea dal romanticismo al
futurismo (trans. Tomaso Gnoli [Naples: Ricciardi, 1916; revised 2nd ed., 1922]), principally in the
form of a reference to Marinetti’s 1921 “Manifesto of Tactilism” and to the ongoing productivity in
Italian culture of “futurism, expressionism, dadaism and other programmatic extravagances” (142,
147).