Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

4 D'Annunzio and the Antidemocratic Fantasy

4 / D'Annunzio and the Antidemocratic Fantasy Reading Splits Like Marinettis Mafarka lefuturiste, D'Annunzio s 1895 Le vergini delle roue takes as its theme the generation of a superhuman son.1 Claudio Cantelmo, the novel's protagonist, sets out to choose, from among three sisters, a gen­ itrix who will bear him an exceptional son. The theme in itself makes the novel an easy target for quick identifications of pseudo­Nietzschean superuomismo with protofascism, but surrounding the fairy­tale princessesare politically explicit declamations that make it all the easier for intellectual his­ torians and literary critics to find the literary roots of fascism in this fin de siecle text. A text about the making of a precursor has itself been made out to be a precursor. My task in this chapter is to rethink the precursory rela­ tion, to ask to what extent we may find protofascism rooted in a fin de siecle literary text, and to compare the ideological implications of D'Annunzio's reproductive fantasy to those of Marinetti's parthenogenetic dream. As with Mafarka,my strategy will be to posit points of articulation among the elements that make up the narrative. In the case of Le vergini, those elements come already split neatly apart by D'Annunzio criticism: the po­ litical declamations contained in book 1, and those of the old prince, have been lifted like a clouded gem from the intact and antiquated setting of the decadent fairy tale in which we find the virgins Anatolia, Massimilla, and Violante. This splitting makes it possible to isolate what are almost un­ equivocally protofascist statements and connect them, in precursory fashion, 77 78 / D'Annunzio and theAntidemocratic Fantasy to D'Annunzio's own political activity during the Fiume takeover. A par­ ticularly brutal example appears in Paolo Alatri's inaugural address from the symposium on D'Annunzio held at Yale in March 1987. Alatri cites the loci classici of Nietzscheanism, antiegalitarianism, and antiparliamentarism from the novel and then concludes brusquely that "the fact that two or three years after the march on Rome, D'Annunzio posed or could appear as an antagonist to Mussolini rather than one of his followers or collabo­ rators detracts nothing from the common belonging of both men to the same cultural, ideological, and political root."2 Alatri's essay is surely not an example of subtle literary analysis (nor even less of subtle historical analy­ sis since he cites a historical fact only to discount it), but all the same one must grant that even without metonymical slurring or wholly retroactive reading, Le vergini does indeed contain political orations whose constitutive elements can be found on a checklist of protofascism. Let us then, for the moment, follow a "split" reading of the text and examine both a definition of protofascism and the incriminating passages. In Fables of Aggression, Fredric Jameson offers a persuasive description and diagnosis of protofascist discourse in the form of just such a checklist of four elements. The first of these constitutive elements of protofascism concerns its relation to Marxism; Jameson writes that protofascism "remains a reaction to and a defense against the continuing ideological threat and presence of a (defeated) Marxism, which thus occupies that taboo position around which the various fascist ideologies must organize themselves." If the Marxist, and later Bolshevik, threats function as catalyst, they must be accompanied by the weakening of other political forces: the elaboration of protofascism "as an ideology is, however, determined less by the practical dangers of Marxism or Communism than by the disintegration and func­ tional discrediting — even after the failure of revolution on the Left — of the various hegemonic and legitimizing ideologies of the middle class state (liberalism, conservatism, Catholicism, social democracy, and so on).3 Or, as Alice Kaplan puts it, both left and right must be weakened in order for fascism to be both left and right (or, again, as Sternhell would say, neither left nor right): "All standard systems of political representation must be on the blink."4 Jameson elaborates on this second element: If therefore as a reaction­formation it defines itself against Marxism as the fundamental enemy, protofascism grasps itself consciously as the implacable critique of the various middle class ideologies and of the parliamentary sys­ tem in which they find representation. (3) The structural inconsistency of these first two features opens up an ambiguous space in which a critique of D'Annunzio...