F. T. Marinetti's Onslaught on London and Recursive Structures in Modernism

What is it about?

Many accounts of the formative years of English modernism rely on Futurism’s own questionable record of F.T. Marinetti’s visit to London in the spring of 1910 as the catalyst for an avant-garde revolution in Anglo-American literature that led through Roger Fry’s revolutionary Post-Impressionist exhibition to Imagism, and onto Vorticism. New evidence presented here, however, supports the position advanced by a number of scholars that Marinetti did not visit until after Fry’s exhibition. We can now quite precisely date Marinetti’s important “Futurist Speech to the English” to Tuesday December 13 1910, rather than as thought to the spring of that year. Close examination of the content and context of this lecture, to an audience of Suffragettes at the Lyceum Club for Women, highlights the sheer extent of Marinetti’s propaganda drive between 1908 and 1910, as he attempted to garner support for his movement and neutralise the satirical attitude of the mainstream English press. Moreover, Futurism, it appears, actively altered the historical record in order to genealogically prioritise itself. Such a process finds itself recursively working back into modernist studies, through a process in which theories of British historical and cultural decline or inferiority, alongside a presupposition of the continental avant-garde’s guiding influence, tend to unconsciously take root in studies of literature of this period. In contrast and as illustration, we can find in one of Wyndham Lewis’s early essays – previously considered imitative of, but now clearly an influence upon, Marinetti – the extent to which “on or about December 1910” British society and culture was already in the process of radicalizing itself.

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Why is it important?

In recent years theories of decline have tended to circulate around histories of English modernism. Such theories of decline have reinforced what I would term a parabolic periodization of English literary history in the twentieth century, in which the rise and fall of English modernism has become synchronous with, or more easily understood as part of, the waxing and waning of British colonialism. Hence the splintering of modernism into so called early-, late-, or post- formulations, in which Britain gradually becomes a “shrinking island” in the face of the rise of the American entertainment industry. This article is designed to demonstrate the extent to which such theories might absorb, recursively, the political and aesthetic programme of the European avant-garde, in this case Futurism.

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