Adjectival Structures Claim the Future in the Futurist Manifesto

This grammatical analysis breaks down how adjectival structures are deployed in long metaphor, thus crafting a convincing rhetoric that started Modernism.

Emerging from an electrocuted, muddy ditch after a car accident in the winter of 1909, Filippo Marinetti realized that in his recklessness on the outskirts of Milan that there was something fascinating in the discovery of speed and new technology. He arrived home and penned the first Futurist manifesto, published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, and what would be the first of many manifestos detailing the grand narratives of twentieth-century art movements aimed at creating utopian worlds within the singular vision of the Modern world. Writing with distinct, visual descriptive language that incorporates single-adjectives and transitions into long, adjectival metaphors, Marinetti presents his political platform in narrative format, with a similarly convincing tone. Throughout the manifesto, Marinetti employs adjectival phrases and structures to create long metaphors, which illustrate the narrative of the manifesto and support his argument that Italy will survive if it casts away its antiquated history to embrace speed, technology, and war—the future.

The use of long metaphor through adjectival phrases is one of the primary ways Marinetti crafts a convincing argument in the manifesto about the need to abolish the museums, cemeteries, and antiquaries that he believes are holding Italy back from achieving progress. One such metaphor is, "Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color,” wherein Marinetti constructs the final two sentences to function adjectivally in describing the exclamation, “Museums, cemeteries!” The phrases “Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other” and “Public dormitories where you sleep side by side forever with beings you hate or do not know” are both noun phrases that function adjectivally as subject complements to “Museums, cemeteries!” Here, we are wholly convinced in the argument for the abolition of cemeteries because of the visually descriptive and distinct metaphor of the cemetery as a “public dormitory sleeping side by side forever with beings you hate or do not know,” which creates a deeply disturbing and disconcerting tone. This long metaphor furthers Marinetti’s argument in the manifesto that museums and reliquaries should be abolished from Italy because they are described in a way that is disgusting and makes a reader view them as unnecessary. 

Another such long metaphor is found in the sentence fragment, “Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, cavalries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!),” wherein the phrase in parentheses is a long noun phrase functioning adjectivally describing the daily trips to museums, libraries, and academies. Describing these places as places of wasted effort, crucified dreams, and registers of false starts creates a sense of desperation and weariness, which is helpful in the construction of Marinetti’s argument against them in his manifesto because this descriptive language creates an emotional and psychological connection between the reader and the text. The adjectival structures, which are the foundation of the long metaphor, elicit emotional responses to the text within a reader, like anger and sadness, and these emotional responses help Marinetti use the manifesto to call the people of Italy to action.

Adjectival structures are the basis of The Futurist Manifesto; without them, Marinetti would not be able to construct the long descriptive, sensually-appealing metaphors that emotionally sway readers and connect them with his dramatic argument. This is important because when the manifesto was published in a prominent European newspaper directly at the turn of the century, those frustrated with European tradition and history and anxious to advance into the Modern world followed him; with the convincing argument crafted in The Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti founded Modernism.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics as a Closed Text

This essay was written for WRRH 227: Writing and the Culture of Reading, a reading theory course, in the spring of 2021.

Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics easily differentiates itself from other contemporary young adult novels in several regards—its instinctual, unerring prose and its characters as irresistibly developed as living human beings—but one of the chief ways the novel distinguishes itself from its peers is its ability to engage with readers in what Louise M. Rosenblatt, a literary theorist of the book The Reader, the Text, the Poem calls the “literary transaction.” Rosenblatt writes that “we do not…take the organism and environment as if we could know about them separately in advance of our special inquiry, but we take their interaction itself as subject matter of study” (Rosenblatt 17); it is this interaction, an ongoing process of the reader interpreting and shaping the text within their own imaginative construction, that we define as the literary transaction, and it is this that we study through the lens of Special Topics in Calamity Physics because its prose forces us into what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading,” even for the unliterary person, and through this we compare the openness and closeness of the text as it functions amongst different genres. With its wholly original descriptive language and its deceptively-woven plot structure, Special Topics in Calamity Physics presents itself as the perfect experiment grounds for studying reader response theory in practice

One idea that spearheads the early chapters of The Reader, the Text, the Poem is the ongoing discourse about language as perception, language as socially performative behavior, and the scrutinized focus that is paid attention to the relationship between the text and the reader. Rosenblatt asserts that the reader takes more of a role in the creation of literature than we give them credit for; without the reader, once the book leaves the author’s hands it is a mere text, and unlike other disciplines of art, does not assert is role as art until a reader interacts with it and imaginatively constructs abstract concepts and images out of words; she writes “the relation between the reader and the text is not linear…it is a situation, an event at a particular time and place in which each element conditions the other” (16). Thus, the artistic creation of literature would not be possible without each individual reader arriving to the text with different backgrounds, experiences, and psyches, which is how texts are able to produce endless variations of poetry and meaning. Rosenblatt writes that reading is functionally similar to a musical performance, and that a reader produces the abstract, artistic constructions as a result of interaction with the text in the process of reading, which 

Another theory important to understanding a certain individual reader’s relationship with a text is the theory of the literary versus the unliterary person, laid out in C.S. Lewis’s Experiment in Criticism. Though not the focus of this study, the idea is indispensable to understanding. The unliterary crowd is one that Lewis describes as people who don’t take reading seriously, who consider reading an activity to be done simultaneously with the radio on or those who couldn’t dream of reading a book more than once. The unliterary demand swift-moving stories that are linguistically stripped of unnecessary words, who want only the Event, readers who entirely unconscious of style. It is difficult for the unliterary reader to read anything without a narrative, and the most unliterary find it difficult to read anything fiction—Lewis specifies “the most unliterary of all sticks to ‘the news’” (Lewis 28). It is then easy to imagine that the unliterary reader will interact differently with a text than a literary reader, and find it more difficult to engage with what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading;” in “aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text. Imagine that the unliterary reader is not distracted by the radio during the reading event, and it is easy to imagine that the literary transaction with an unliterary versus a literary person will be very different. 

Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is unique among its contemporaries because it challenges the tropes of the unliterary reader. Lewis writes that the reader wants to see the forest, not each individual tree, and thus literary cliche and bad writing are actually preferred by the unliterary reader. Suppose we had two readers of Special Topics in Calamity Physics side by side, with their focus centered on the book alone. Pessl employs a series of tactics that force any reader into the perspective of aesthetic reading and crafts a text that makes the literary transaction open to imaginative construction in a deceptive way.

As indicated by the list of cross-genre texts in the table of contents, Special Topics in Calamity Physics evades genre categorization: it is a coming-of-age novel for protagonist, Blue; it is a tragedy, a mystery, a romance, and an epic. Pessl’s prose completely defies literary cliche, with lines like “I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard” (Pessl 122). Descriptive language like this strengthens the literary transaction; the reader is more emotionally invested in the text the more they have to interact with it, and Pessl’s prose requires a lot of heavy investment and attention—this is not a text one could read to fall asleep at night and still understand the plot line. This language forces us into aesthetic reading; because the exposition of the novel lasts just under a third of the novel with its Dostoyevskyian prose, the unliterary reader (if they have not already put down the book and waled away) will be forced into reading the novel aesthetically; it is up to them to take Pessl’s literary pyrotechnics and construct abstract concepts and images from them. No singular reading of Special Topics in Calamity Physics could be efferent because descriptive language like this requires textual animation outside of the physical; a reader must convert the aesthetic, non-visual metaphor into sensory construction, which lies outside of the simple conveyance of information.

Like other discourse theorists of the twentieth century, Rosenblatt notes that reading is a socially performative behavior, and the literary transaction evokes a reader’s “internalized culture in order to elicit from the text this world which may differ from their own in many respects…moreover, the text may yield glimpses of the personality and codes of the author” (56). The transaction will always yield an interplay between at least two sets of codes, two sets of values; this is what a reader assumes when they participate in the literary transaction with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, that they are not only constructing abstract poetry from text, but that they are also trusting Pessl as an author because there is a residue of her in her text. This explains the concept of what Rosenblatt refers to as an “open text”: we trust the author to tell us the truth because as readers we are entrusted with the responsibility of constructing her text, and as we lengthen our relationship with the text, we are creating an emotional and psychological bond with the plot. Like all relationships, a reader’s relationship with the text—and with Pessl—is based on trust and truth-telling.

But because of its genre-bending code-switching, Special Topics in Calamity Physics cannot be called an open text—it heavily borrows literary tactics and rhetorical devices from the mystery genre and the epic drama genre, which call for a certain level of author deception in the literary transaction. Pessl reels readers in, literary and unliterary alike, in the ambling exposition of Part One, which unfurls the last chapter of her protagonist’s childhood and lays the narrative groundwork for an epic hefty as The Odyssey. Particularly observant readers may not trust Blue as a narrator because it is obvious that she is too reliant on her flaky father for her world view, but they will trust Pessl as an author—her prose and storytelling thus far give her credibility, and readers trust her to navigate them through the rest of the novel.

But by borrowing from the mystery genre in particular, Pessl writes a closed text, and deception of the reader is a key part of the literary transaction that makes the finale of the book a satisfying conclusion—because it had an ending the readers didn’t expect, because they didn’t realize they could not trust their author. Here, the literary transaction differs because authors rely on readers to construct their text into abstract images and ideas, and readers do so wholeheartedly because they believe Pessl and the text. It is critical in the construction of a closed text to have readers buy in fully to the notion that they are participating in a literary transaction with an open text in order for the author to truly pull the wool over their readers’ eyes—in a book like an Agatha Christie mystery, readers don’t trust Christie because they expect a twist ending, and thus don’t fully engage in the imaginative construction required of the reader in a literary transaction. Pessl is able to pull off the total deception because, by working across genres in Special Topics in Calamity Physics, readers will not completely expect the twist ending of a mystery and thus fully participate in their task of constructing the novel out of total abstraction.

Introduction: Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio

This is the academic introduction to my ekphrastic novel, Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio, which I completed as an honors candidate in Writing and Rhetoric at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Through the completion of my novel and honors project, Salut Modernistes! The Riviera Portfolio, I have written on many different works of art as I explain museum exhibitions, curatorial practices, and write on different movements throughout the period of Modern Art. In the contemporary era, it might be easier to simply include a photo or copy of a work of art in the text rather than write about it, but legal logistics impede this—often, with Modernist works that have families still living, a hefty royalty to a copyright must be paid to use this image. 

This isn’t a new problem—leading art critic of the Victorian era John Ruskin also found it difficult to get art to the masses in the nineteenth century, when reproductions of works in color were often costly. Authors such as Ruskin and me (and a plethora of others throughout history) have employed ekphrasis, a description of a work of art used as a literary device, not just as a way to sidestep copyright laws but to use different kinds of storytelling that employs both a reader’s abstract construction of a narrative as well as a reader’s abstract construction of a visual scene. Ekphrasis is often my favorite part of my own writing, allowing me to construct a scene that will connect readers with all of their senses rather than just the visual.

I believe that due to the nature of her early work at the Sorbonne, literary theorist Louise M. Rosenblatt would have varied opinions on the different aspects of ekphrasis: its place in the act of aesthetic reading, the blurred boundaries of art disciplines that ekphrasis creates, how it affects the unique value of art disciplines as well as how ekphrasis aids in the creation of the poetic experience. Rosenblatt’s first book, L’Idée de l’art pour l’art dans la littérature anglaise is a study in the theories of art for art’s sake developed by English and French writers “to combat the pressures of an uncomprehending or hostile society,” (Rosenblatt xi), and it is here that we see the development of her ideas arguing for a nurturing, free environment within a reader for poets and other artists of the world. 

Let me first begin with ekphrasis, starting in Homer’s Odyssey with the description of Achilles’ shield. Ekphrasis isn’t the mere description of the action in the painting, though that could certainly be part of it, but the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a work of visual art. This takes the one-sided act of viewing a work of visual art and levels the experience with the literary event; in order to “view” the work through ekphrasis, an author makes a reader engage in the same mechanisms of abstract construction that a reader would have to enact in order to read a text. In the same way that a reader makes a text a poem or a work of literature, through an author’s use of ekphrasis, a reader  makes a work of visual art into the same poetic event; classically, ekphrasis is employed by authors to consciously show the superiority of literary art to the visual, and I argue that while this point is debatable, a reader makes more of an emotional and psychological connection with a work of visual art when it is first experienced through an abstract literary construction.

Through the use of ekphrasis, authors force readers into an act of what Rosenblatt calls “aesthetic reading.” Whereas in her theory of efferent reading involves reading for a certain purpose, so that only the “residue”or purpose of the text remains, “aesthetic reading” concerns the reader during the actual reading event;  a reader will engage all of his senses and “pay attention to the associations, feelings, attitudes, and ideas that these words and their referents arouse within him. Listening to himself, he synthesizes these elements into a meaningful structure…In aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he is living through during his relationship with that particular text” (25).

But what is the author’s purpose of engaging a reader in aesthetic reading? If an author could pay the royalty (or perhaps use for free an image of a work of visual art), what could be the benefits of using ekphrasis instead? In the case of John Ruskin, the purpose of using ekphrasis to defend painter J.M.W Turner’s works was to allow more people to be affected by the purpose and narrative of the painting than could physically be moved by its image, and to prove to readers that Turner’s work was the precipice for a major modern art movement. In the case of Ruskin, many fewer people could physically see a painting in a gallery or museum during the Victorian Era, and a reproduction in a book cannot convey the same narrative, action, or themes that the original work can, nor can it invoke the same emotions within a viewer. In order to make Turner’s message and depictions of subjects more widespread, ekphrasis was a logical way to spread the word and make art more public than its narrow bourgeois audience.

However, Ruskin used ekphrasis more creatively than just spreading the social themes of a work through text. Ruskin was the first author to use ekphrasis in a way that persuaded readers into believing in his imaginative understanding of a work of art. In his 1843 book Modern Painters, Ruskin defends Turner’s depiction of “truth” in his paintings against Neoclassical art critics who decried the paintings’ mimetic inaccuracies. In his lengthy defenses of Turner in Modern Painters, which would become a five-volume book completed in 1860, Ruskin used ekphrasis in order to elevate art criticism out of the Neoclassical age, aligning public opinion with contemporary Romantic painting by shifting viewer concern from the general truth to particular truth, a key component of Romantic thought. 

Ruskin describes Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On, also known as The Slave Ship (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) with rich imagery influenced by the descriptive writing of Sir Walter Scott, the blank verse of William Wordsworth, parallels with the King James Bible, and references to Shakespeare that enrich the narrative of the painting in a way that serves the literary reader more than the physical viewer of the painting. In his passages, Ruskin constructs a narrative beyond Turner’s painting, giving us a dramatic image charged full of emotion that is only experienced because of a reader’s full engagement in living through the text. In viewing a work of visual art, there is no equal to the aesthetic literary event.

This is because, unlike the text, a work of visual art exists without viewer’s necessary participation in order for it to become art. Rosenblatt writes that “the reader of a text…is, above all, a performer…the performer’s attention is absorbed in what he is producing as he plays. Once he stops playing, we are left only with the black and white score” (29), which shows that unlike a work of visual art, literature and poetry are can only be evoked by a reader; unlike a work of visual art, their aestheticism lies in the abstract construction of a mental image by a reader’s translation of the words, which ends as soon as a reader ceases the literary event. The aestheticism of a visual work of art lies in color, composition, and an artist’s masterful handling of formal elements; the aestheticism of a text does not exist until a reader translates an author’s attempt at formal composition. Rosenblatt writes that a reader of the literary work of art should aspire to “a complete absorption in the process of evoking a work from the text, a sensing, clarifying, structuring, savoring, of an experience as it unfolds” (29). The literary work of art has the unique ability to make a reader live through an entire sensual experience as if it were truly experienced, while the visual work of art cannot achieve this alone.

This is what Ruskin and others achieve through ekphrasis: while it is certainly useful as a device through which to share the message of visual art with the masses, ekphrasis has the ability to give readers an experience of living through the narrative of a work of visual art. Ekphrasis enriches a reader’s relationship with a work of visual art by giving him a “total lived-through experience” (29) that engages with all of the senses and gives him a psychological and emotional connection through his own construction of the work, which is impossible by appealing to the visual sense alone.