Future Imperfect

Future Imperfect

By José Lourenço

Browsing through my family library on a solitary evening, I came across a slim pocket book titled ‘Modern Poetry’, edited by Guy N. Pocock M.A. and published by J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd, of Aldine House, Bedford Street, London. It was first published in 1920. One in the series ‘The Kings Treasuries of Literature’, of which Sir A. T. Quiller Couch was the general editor.

I flipped through the poems and reached its last poem, titled The Parrot, by Sacheverell Sitwell. But what caught my attention was a brief two page ‘Note On Futurist Poetry’, the last note in this book. This is what the editor Pocock had to say:

“When a new movement in Art attains a certain vogue, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for however far-fetched and unreasonable their tenets may seem today, it is possible that in years to come they may be regarded as normal. Such things have happened before. Moreover, one cannot shut one’s eyes to the very significant effect of these modern ideas in the matter of painting and music.

With regard to Futurist poetry, however, the case is rather different; for whatever Futurist poetry may be—even admitting that the theory on which it is based may be right—it can hardly be classed as Literature.

This then, in brief, is what the Futurist says: that for a century past conditions of life have been continually speeding up, till now we live in a world of noise and violence and speed, of trains and motorcars and wireless telegraphy, of aeroplanes and giant howitzers. Consequently, our feelings, thoughts and emotions have undergone a corresponding change: we live ten times as fast as our great-grandfathers did.

This speeding up of life, says the Futurist, requires a new form of expression. We must speed up our  literature too, if we want to interpret modern stress. We must pour out a cataract of essential words, unhampered by stops, or qualifying adjectives, or finite verbs. We must leap from one idea to another without check, using plus and minus signs instead of full-stops and semicolons; and regulate the pace and tone by musical signs, such as rallentando or crescendo. Instead of describing sounds we must make up words that imitate them; we must use many sizes of type and different coloured inks on the same page, and shorten or lengthen words at will.

Well, they may be right; and certainly their descriptions of battles and so forth are vividly chaotic. But it is a little disconcerting to read in the explanatory notes that a certain line describes a fight between a Turkish and a Bulgarian officer on a bridge over which they both fall into the river—and then to find that the line consists of the noise of their falling, and the weights of the officers: ‘Pluff! Pluff! a hundred and eighty-five kilograms.’

Perhaps we may explain what is meant by making up an example. Suppose the poet set himself to rewrite the Nursery Rhymes, the famous adventure of Jack and Jill might appear in this guise:

Children + clumsiness = disaster

Jack + Jill incline 1 in 8 puff pant summit + pail Bubble-bubble-splash incline 20⁰ + carelessness = biff bump rattle SPLOSH Jack minus water plus crown + abrasion of epidermis + Jill weight 4 stone 2 lb. = Misery.     

This we feel, though it fulfils the laws and requirements of Futurist poetry, can hardly be classed as Literature. All the same, no thinking man can refuse to accept their first proposition: that a great change in our emotional life necessitates a change of expression. The whole question is really this: have we essentially changed?”

The reader will empathise with Pocock’s genteel and understated outrage at the Futurist’s impudence. Poppycock and fiddlesticks, and all that. This pocket book of modern poetry after all contains poems by RL Stevenson, WB Yeats and Walter de la Mare, all worthy stalwarts of our childhood English textbooks.

Cut to 2017. Have we indeed ‘essentially changed’, 97 years later? The internet (of things, too), artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and Mars-destined rockets are propelling us at ever headier speeds. We now live a hundred times faster than our great-great-great-great grandfathers did. Really? I find the tranquillity of a jetliner quite conducive to good sleep. And the internet lets me work from home, and thus travel less and laze around more.

But what happened to the Futurists? Who were these intrepid gentlemen anyway?

Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane, and the industrial city. There were parallel movements in Russia, England, Belgium and elsewhere. The Futurists did their thing all over the place—in painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial and interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music and architecture (and even Futurist meals!).

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909!) exhorted a breaking away from all the laissez faire of the past, onward to an aggressive dynamism. There was also explicit glorification of war as ‘the world's only hygiene’, and an underlying nationalism. This futurist poet had a rather tempestuous relationship with the fascist regime in his country.

Marinetti seems to have been as high as a kite when he wrote Point No.11 of his Manifesto:  “We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”

Art scholars concede that “Futurism influenced, to some extent, many art movements— Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism”. (Wtf are those last three!)

There is plenty to be found on Futurist expression on that great grunting sow of knowledge, the Internet, with its ever increasing blazing speeds. But are there flashes of Futurist styling still seen in literature around us today? There are indeed modern poets today who arrange words on a page in irregular but very deliberate breaking of traditional structure. The Futurists had a ball of a time doing this. Their poems celebrated onomatopoeia and graphic word-imagery.   

Marinetti’s ‘Zang Tumb Tumb’ was one such sound poem and ‘concrete poem’ where typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. This poem tells the story of the siege by the Bulgarians of Turkish Adrianople in the Balkan War, which Marinetti had witnessed as a war reporter. As the reader must have guessed, it is this poem that Pocock scoffs at in his note, with its battling officers tumbling off a bridge. Here’s how the poem ends, with Bombardment:

“1 2 3 4 5 seconds siege guns split the silence in unison tam-tuuumb sudden echoes all the echoes seize it quick smash it scatter it to the infinite winds to the devil

In the middle these tam-tuuumb flattened 50 square kilometers leap 2-6-8 crashes clubs punches bashes quick-firing batteries. Violence ferocity regularity pendulum play fatality

...these weights thicknesses sounds smells molecular whirlwinds chains nets and channels of analogies concurrences and synchronisms for my Futurist friends poets painters and musicians zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

ZANG-TUMB

TUMB-TUMB

TUUUUUM”

It would seem to appear that children at primary schools are budding Futurists, with a natural talent for ‘sound poems’ in their yelling and play during recess breaks. It’s a pity we crush this potential in them, by subjecting them to formal metre, rhyme and rhythm in higher school.

Anyway, fuck all that. The venerable Pocock had dismissed the Futurists’ attempts to demolish literary structures. Sentences were clearly holy to him. They had to be strong and correct in form, rearranged carefully (where necessary) to achieve lofty verse.

I like browsing old books mouldy with mildew. But I also like reading very new books. Like Tenth of December, a collection of nine short stories by George Saunders, the American writer who won the Man Booker prize in 2017 for his first novel Lincoln in the Bardo. One very strange story in the collection is titled The Semplica Girl Diaries. Its protagonist struggles to keep up with his wealthy neighbours, recording his tribulations in a diary. His language is fractured, with awful grammar, and he sounds like an Asian immigrant whose first language is certainly not English. His diary notings don’t conform to Pocock’s notions of literature. Some samples:

“In morning kids go off to school per usual. Greenway comes at ten. Nice guys. Big guys! One w/Mohawk. Yard done by two (!). Roses in, fountain in, pathway in. SG truck arrives at three. SGs exit truck, stand shyly near fence while rack installed. Rack nice...”

“Very moving piece on NPR re. Bangladeshi SG sending money home: hence her parents able to build small shack. (Note to self: Find online, download, play for Eva. First fix computer. Computer superslow. Due to low memory? Possibly delete “CircusLoser”? Acrobats run all jerky, due to low memory + elephants do not hop = no fun.)”  

“Am so happy. Feel so lucky. What did we do to deserve” In part, yes: luck. Scratch-Off win = luck. But as saying goes, luck = ninety percent skill. Or preparation? Preparation = ninety percent skill? Skill = ninety percent luck? Cannot exactly remember saying...”

 The Semplica Girl (SG) is a grotesque decorative innovation where poor immigrant girls are strung up, dangling a couple of feet above a lawn, with a ‘microline’ passing through their skulls and tied at both ends to a rack frame. They are a symbol of prestige for the American house owner, and their job is just to smile and look good, with time out for toilet and food. Our grammatically challenged diarist wins a lottery and installs a rack with four SGs for his daughter’s birthday party.     

A very bizarre tale. It reminds us that 97 years later all our speed and dynamism has not covered us with glory, and never will. But look at Saunders’ disjointed sentence-phrases with whacky punctuation and plus signs and equal to signs all over the place. Was Pocock’s Jack and Jill eerily prophetic? This story is in a highly acclaimed book by a writer who has won a much coveted award for literature. Can’t be classed as literature? The story is dysfunctional both in story and form. Which is why it is so gripping. The telling of a story may change in style. A ‘great change in our emotional life’ may necessitate a change of expression. But the story—the pain and sound and fury— remains the same. Because we ... have not essentially changed.   
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