Recipes for the Future: Traces of Past Utopias in The Futurist Cookbook
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10848770903363920
ISSN1470-1316
Autores Tópico(s)Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
ResumoAbstract This essay suggests an interpretation of F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa's La cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook) as a fundamentally utopian text that re-proposes and carries into the twentieth century some aspects of the nineteenth-century utopian tradition. In particular, it intends to further investigate the possibility that the alimentary discourse in La cucina shares some similarities with, and was influenced by the “gastrosophic” theory on the social role of meals and gastronomy, originally conceived by Charles Fourier (1772–1837), one of the founding figures of the French utopian tradition. While strengthening the connection between futurism and French utopian thought and reasserting the centrality of food aesthetics in the avant-garde, this analysis provides another perspective on futurism's contradictory relation to tradition, exemplified in this additional re-appropriation and, to quote Cinzia Sartini Blum, “recycling of the past.” Notes NOTES 1. F. T. Marinetti and Fillìa, La cucina futurista (1932) (Milano: Longanesi, 1986). Let me immediately clarify that, although Fillìa (Luigi Colombo, 1904–1936), the book's co-author, is himself a figure worthy of note, in this essay I intend to focus only on Marinetti. Most of the sections I shall consider (“Against pastasciutta,” “Invitation to Chemistry”) display Marinetti's signature at their end and propose the overall ideology that Marinetti had already divulgated in several popular publications of the period. Fillìa's contribution to the book, probably also because he was a painter more than a writer, is mostly traceable in its conclusive, more visual sections, with which I am not specifically concerned here (“Determining Futurist Meals” and “Futurist Formulary for Restaurants and Quisibeve”). All translations from the original texts (Italian and French) are mine. Although I did not use it, there is an English translation of Marinetti's La cucina futurista: The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (London: Trefoil Publications, 1989). 2. Mirella Larizza, Fourier, ed. M. Ceretta, introd. M. Moneti Codignola (Firenze: Olschki, 2002), 21. 3. Claudia Salaris, Cibo futurista: Dalla cucina nell’arte all’arte in cucina (Roma: Stampa Alternativa, 2000), 8. Salaris had already gone over the history of the relationship of futurism and food. She observes that the manifesto “La cuisine futuriste,” signed by the French cook Jules Maincave, but already bearing the evident influence of Marinetti, was first published in French in the journal Fantasio (1913). Following the Futurist gala dinners and events in the 1920s and a renewed interest in culinary matters in Italy in the 1930s, Marinetti and Fillìa subsequently re-presented the text to an Italian audience in 1930, via the gastronomical magazine La Cucina Italiana. The book itself, as a heterogeneous ensemble of documents (manifestos, journal articles about the current “food campaign,” descriptions of past culinary events, fictional narratives and extravagant food recipes), was originally published in 1932 by the Milanese publisher Sonzogno. 4. Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Fiction of Power (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 137. 5. Günter Berghaus notes that during his Parisian stay, Marinetti regularly visited the Abbaye de Créteil, a utopian community near Paris founded by Georges Duhamen and Charles Vildrac. Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 36–37. Moreover, even earlier, in the years 1888–93, while a young student at the Jesuit college Saint Francois Xavier in Alexandria in Egypt, Marinetti notoriously followed a “a solid French scholastic training,” one which may well have included a thinker of Fourier's caliber (F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (TIF): A cura di Luciano De Maria [Milano: Mondadori, 1990], ciii). Interestingly, in this same period, he writes at least one essay on Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), the French philosopher and social innovator, whose name is frequently associated with Fourier's under the common label of reformer and socialist utopian. See Francois Dagonet, Trois philosophies revisiteés: Saint Simon, Proudhon, Fourier (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1997). 6. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). 7. In Marinetti, TIF, xxxviii, xlii. 8. Krishan Kumar, in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, ed. R. Schaer, G. Claeys, and L. T. Sargent (New York: The New York Public Library, 2000), 262. 9. For a discussion on the potential presence of an embryonic utopian aspect also in Le Roi Bombance, see Enrico Cesaretti, “Dyspepsia as Dystopia: F. T. Marinetti's Le Roi Bombance,” The Romanic Review 97.3/4 (May–November 2006): 351–67. 10. Anne Bowler, “Italian Futurism and Fascism,” Theory and Society 20.6 (December 1991): 785. 11. At the same time, Carol Helstoski observes that “The Futurist Cookbook appears to have little to do with fascist policies, which aimed to conserve available food supplies.” Carol Helstosky, “Recipe for the Nation: Reading Italian History through La scienza in c ucina and La cucina futurista,” Food & Foodways 11 (2003): 129. For a discussion of Marinetti's rejection of pasta, see also Michel Delville, “Contro la pastasciutta: F. T. Marinetti's Futurist Lunch,” Interval(le)s 1.2 (2007): 14–24. 12. It should also be mentioned that the allusion to the lightness and the spiritual and physical flexibility that Italians must possess anticipates the nutritional components of “naturism.” This was another utopian strain within Futurism, interconnected with fascist ideals of physical culture and autarchy. Its manifesto by Marinetti and Ginna (“Il naturismo futurista,” 1934) proposed, among other things, an alimentation that “makes the spirit nimble” (Salaris, Cibo futurista, 77). 13. Michel Onfray, Le ventre des philosophes: Critique de la raison diététique (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1989), 154. 14. The reference is, of course, to Karl Marx's anti-utopian statement when asked to portray the future of Communist society: “I do not write cook-books for the kitchens of the future” (in Schaer, Utopia, 251). 15. Such a society was supposed to be organized in groups of people (“Phalanxes”) hosted in a complex of buildings (“Phalansteries”). I cannot help noticing that in Futurist Democracy Marinetti writes about instituting an “Eccitatorio” made up of a group of young members that should replace the “decrepit … institution of the Senate” (Marinetti, TIF, 416). 16. In particular, Charles Fourier, Théorie des Quatre Mouvements (TQM) (Paris: J. Jacques Pauvert, Éditeur, 1967); Le Nouveau Monde amoureux (NMA) (Paris: Slatkine, 1979); Théorie de l’Unité Universelle (TUU) IV (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966); Le Nouveau Monde Industriel et Sociétaire (NMIS) VI (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966). 17. Fourier's position on questions of gender and sexuality was incredibly open-minded and advanced for his (but also our) times. He was not only “an early advocate of women's liberation” (James W. Brown, “Alimentary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory: Pierre Leroux, Etienne Cabet and Charles Fourier,” Dalhousie French Studies 11 [1986]: 90), but he believed, for example, that in Harmony, every man and woman had the right to have a satisfying minimum of sexual pleasure, and he promoted free love, polygamy and “the universal gratification of sexual desire, even when desire did not have ‘normal’ heterosexual congress as its object.” J. Beecher and R. Bienvenu, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), 60. 18. Charles Fourier, Teoria dei quattro movimenti, Il nuovo mondo amoroso e altri scritti sul lavoro, l’educazione, l’architettura nella società di Armonia, Scelta e introduzione di I. Calvino (Torino: Einaudi, 1971), xxix, xix. 19. De Maria first noted that “the examination of futurism is the examination of its contradictions” (Marinetti, TIF, xlvii) and, more recently, Blum added that “futurism combines a penchant for outrageous utopian visions with a persistent interest in the practical, efficient aspects of modern life” (Blum, The Other Modernism, 18). 20. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Roy Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1999), 16–17. 21. Larizza, Fourier, xxx. 22. Carmelo Romeo, Introduzione a Charles Fourier (Messina: Samperi, 1983), 78. 23. Brown, “Alimentary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory,” 74. 24. Onfray, Le ventre, 162. 25. According to Fourier, one can become a gastrosophe only after reaching the age of eighty years. 26. Onfray, Le ventre, 157–58. 27. Salaris observes that Marinetti most likely consulted Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste (1826), which anticipates his interest in the integration, concatenation and multiplication of the five senses, the introduction of chemistry into alimentary science and the notion of the “edible landscape,” one of the strongholds of futurist cuisine (Salaris, Cibo futurista, 9–21). 28. Larizza, Fourier, 13, 17. 29. Onfray, Le ventre, 107. 30. Onfray significantly mentions the concept of “eternal return” when he writes on both Fourier and Marinetti: “La volonté fourieriste est la maintenance du désir dans son eternal retour,” and then with regards to La cucina futurista: “La diététique comme révélateur de l’éternel retour” (Le ventre, 123, 177). 31. Brown, “Alimentary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory,” 82–83. 32. Fourier too deals with the importance of satisfying all the senses in Harmony (and not only taste). 33. Marinetti knew both F. Picabia's “Le manifeste cannibale” (1920) and O. de Andrade's “O manifesto antropofago” (1928). 34. I am grateful to Pierpaolo Antonello for drawing my attention to the fact that the reference to the breasts and maternal milk recuperates an image already present in the original “Futurist Manifesto,” following the episode of the car accident: “I avidly tasted your fortifying mud, which reminded me of the saintly black breast of my Sudanese wet nurse” (Marinetti, TIF, 9). 35. Re: “Invitation to Chemistry,” Salaris chose to emphasize its affinities with Brillat-Savarin, as “another point of contact between The Physiology of Taste and The Futurist Cookbook” (Salaris, Cibo futurista, 10). 36. In Edwige Comoy Fusaro, “Réflexions sur le texte (pseudo-)littéraire chez Paolo Mantegazza: Un giorno a Madera. Una pagina dell’igiene d’amore,” Cahiers de narratologie 14 (2008). http://revel.unice.fr/cnarra/document.html?id=543 37. Fusaro, “Réflexions sur le texte (pseudo-)littéraire chez Paolo Mantegazza,” 3. 38. Claudio Pogliano notes that “Since 1931 Silvestro Baglioni—physiologist, eugenicist, sexologist—published a supplement to his journal Fisiologia e Medicina entitled “Il problema alimentare. Chimica—Fisiologia—Patologia—Terapia.” All the Fascist ‘battles’—for grain, milk, rice, grape—had an echo or were anticipated there, since it was certain that the science of alimentation was crucial for the relationship between the economy of the human body and that of the social one.” Claudio Pogliano, “Scienza e stirpe: eugenica in Italia (1912–1939),” Passato e presente 5 (1984): 92–93. 39. Brown, “Alimentary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory,” 89. 40. Brown also notes that “Fourier … allies gastronomy with pharmacy on the basis of certain transmutations which occur either during the mixing of chemical substances” (“Alimentary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Social Theory,” 89). A similar alliance is certainly pursued in Marinetti's “Invitation to Chemistry.” 41. Onfray, Le ventre, 122. 42. Onfray, Le ventre, 120. 43. See Pogliano, “Scienza e stirpe: eugenica in Italia,” 64. 44. Pogliano, “Scienza e stirpe: eugenica in Italia,” 64. 45. F. Rouvillois, in Schaer, Utopia, 319. 46. Larizza notes that “there are many interpreters who insist on Fourier's folly” (Fourier, 3n).
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