"Infinite Remoteness": Marinetti, Bontempelli, and the Emergence of Modern Italian Visual Culture

Over the last decade Italian culture in the immediate aftermath of World War I came under increasing scrutiny as historians and cultural critics attempted to describe with greater precision a period Benedetto Croce writing in 1918 anticipated as "una lunga e perigliosa via" that could only be travelled by "temprando le proprie forze mentali e morali" (27). Linking the palpable sense of disorientation to the brutal logic of post-war capitalism and to the trauma the war unleashed on millions of soldiers, historians such as Emilio Gentile, Mario Isnenghi and Antonio Gibelli provided a wider context with which to understand the momentous developments that led to the emergence of reactionary modernism in Italy. So too American scholars of Italian fascism such as Jeffrey Schnapp, Barbara Spackman and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who in their groundbreaking studies from the nineties focussed on the technological, corporal, and ideological conditions that together contributed to the rise of fascism. Yet for all the interest in the war's legacy and the forms mass politics would take in the twenties, little attention has thus far fallen on how the First World War altered Italian visual culture. Indeed, when the question is raised, modern visual culture in Italy is often disjoined from the effects of the war so that a sort of critical amnesia results: traumatic changes in human perception are elided in favour of approaches that treat visual and narrative worlds as if fantasy alone had produced them.¹

The critical reception afforded Massimo Bontempelli's La vita operosa (and its earlier companion La vita intensa) is particularly prone to such amnesia. The novel, a crucial narrative from the post-war period, recounts the metropolitan adventures of a recently demobilized soldier and former author, who returns to Milan only to discover through the help of his technologically savvy Dàimone that nothing can ever be the same: not literature, not urban space, and certainly not modes of seeing. Approaches to the novel—beginning with Carlo Bo in 1943 and continuing with Luigi Fontanelli in 1997—limit themselves to examinations of Bontempelli's style and the novel's place within the Futurist avant-garde and the later '900' aesthetic; or read the novel as an allegory of economic crises and post-war dislocation.² As useful as these approaches are for an exegesis of Bontempelli's early work, they have unwittingly blocked an examination of how La vita operosa codifies perception reconfigured by the experience of war. When the studies do adopt a visual approach to the novel, it is primarily to repeat what the war sanctioned: "praticamente l'irrazionalismo europeo e futurismo" (Baldacci 22) or the "trasfigurazione magica" (Mascia Galateria 310) that technology introduced into daily life; they leave unexamined the effects on vision after the war, or when speaking to altered perception, quickly dissociate the First World War as it appears in the novel's imagined world from the "spazio-tempo vissuto diversamente sul Carso disseminato di cadaveri." This occurs despite the fact that the war "ha invaso ogni piega della vita cittadina, ha stravolto persone e ceti, annulando barriere" (Narmi 692). The paradox of a trauma that could alter Italian society to such a degree while failing to modify the spatial-temporal horizon of a novel that foregrounds its own debt to war-time vision on almost every page is never accounted for in any of the novel's readings. By adopting an approach that draws attention to the novel's enmeshment in perception traumatized by the war, we can determine more precisely how deeply the experience of that conflict extends into post-war Italian visual culture.

To do so I first provide some general background to the effects of war on perception in Italy. Taking advantage of recent historiographic strides in this direction, I describe how the war forced its participants to doubt the reality of what they were witnessing, so that...