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When “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” (Marinetti 2006: 11–16) was published in 1909, “experimental literature” was primarily associated with Le roman expérimental (Zola 1880). Although Émile Zola was acknowledged as one of the “great precursors of Futurism” (Marinetti 2006: 45), the accolade was in recognition of the French novelist’s urban themes, not the Rougon-Macquart cycle’s status as a new, scien-tifically conceived form of fiction based on an amalgam of Hippolyte Taine’s positiv-ism and an influential introduction to experimental medicine (Bernard 1865). Three

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decades later, Italian Futurism was establishing broader-based connections between scientific experiment and literary experimentation. That is to say, its experimental paradigms were frequently indebted to a broad range of recent discoveries made in many countries outside Italy, rather than being focused on a small number of special-ist disciplines, as Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels were. Moreover, they were generally conceived with the aim of reconstructing Futurist literature in order to make it an effective vehicle for the improvement of modern life in general during the early dec-ades of the twentieth century. For the Italian Futurists such a program was inevitably a matter of socially applied, not merely theoretical, science.

The Italian Futurists were both ingeniously eclectic and up-to-date in their responses to state-of-the-art science. Despite some fanciful references to technological advances in his “Futurist Visionary Hypothesis” of what Italy would be like in the twenty-first century (Marinetti 2006: 221–5) and his prophecy of the emergence of “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine” (85–8), Marinetti usually cited hard science’s experimental paradigms in support of his claim that he and his fellow Futurists were

“the Futurists of tomorrow, not of the day after tomorrow,” with their “intense focusing on the present [. . .] preparing the way for a Tomorrow which will emanate directly from us” (146; Marinetti’s emphasis). Apart from emulating technological advances, preparing for tomorrow’s future was a task predicated on a “vision of the mind and body transformed, giving human beings new mental and physical powers” (Humphreys 1999: 6–10). The program was predicated on a rejection of Italy’s passéist (antiquated) cultural heritage and an aggressive iconoclasm seldom equalled in subsequent experi-mental literature.

Recent evidence in Futurism and the Technological Imagination (Berghaus 2009) sup-ports the movement’s boast to be “based on the complete renewal of human sensibil-ity brought about by the great discoveries made by science” (Marinetti 2006: 120).

According to one contributor, “unlike scholars, poets and artists from other periods of history who occasionally borrow thematic material [. . .] from the world of science, the Futurists looked to science for direction of mind [. . .] to articulate their aesthetic per-ception of reality” (Pietropaolo 2009: 43). The interface between the avant-garde and the sciences – a characteristic of both Italian Futurism and Russian Cubo-Futurism – is of great importance for an appreciation of the two movements’ literary experiments.

Marinetti, who once considered “Elettricismo” and “Dinamismo” appropriate titles for Futurism, cites an impressive array of scientific disciplines and topics in his mani-festoes: astronomy, biology (Lamarck’s pre-Darwinian theory of evolution), chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, physics, technology, sensory percep-tion, chronophotography and, not least, current Futurist experiments with “photo-dynamism,” a field relevant to the depiction of moving objects in Futurist painting, collage and experimental poetry.

Despite the absence of the term “experiment” in Futurist manifestoes, modern scholars (Janacek 1984; Drucker 1994; Berghaus 1998, 2009) have been less reluc-tant to apply the term. However, when it comes to the movement’s boisterous self-presentation, caution is required for Futurism’s scientific preoccupations are often

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expressed in terms that smack of manifesto hyperbole. Take, for instance, the claim to work with “the cool detachment of an engineer” (Marinetti 2006: 196), the Lamarck-ian belief in “an incalculable number of human transformations” (86) or the recom-mendation of an electric power station with its distribution columns “bristling with meters, control panels, and shining levers” as “models for [Futurist] poetry” (136). For all the rhetoric, Marinetti expresses an urgent need to discover the scientific “laws”

or “formulas” that will help explain certain phenomena. In other fields, including chronophotography (Apollonio 1973: 38–45) or the exploration of sensory perception via “tactile panels” (Marinetti 2006: 370–82), specific experiments were devised and carried out, though these remained divorced from the literary sphere. Of course, one needs to bear in mind the fact that Italian Futurism subscribed to an interdisciplinary ethos, one that encouraged cross-fertilization between media: e.g. text/image collage, the fusion of Machine Art with Mechanical Ballet, innovative stage sets and “robotic acting” (Berghaus 1998: 396–441), as well as such new genres as aeropoetry and Total Theater (Marinetti 2006: 400–7). In such a stimulating environment, ingenious joint ventures were undertaken that were experimental in ways that would have been inconceivable, had Italian Futurism remained an exclusively literary project.

II. “Words-in-freedom” as experimental poetry

In reaction to the over-sentimental, visually static poetry that was still deemed to hold sway in contemporary Europe, Marinetti proposed “a telegraphic lyricism that bears not the slightest hint of books but, as much as possible, the taste of life” (2006: 127).

With poetry accused of bookishness and Marinetti, at war with “Mallarmé’s static ideal” (128), heralding a “Typographical Revolution” designed to “impose on words (already free, dynamic and torpedo-like) every kind of speed” (128), the stage was set for Italian Futurism’s boldest literary experiment.

The ensuing “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom” and “Geometrical and Mechani-cal Splendor and Sensitivity Toward Numbers” (Marinetti 2006: 107–19, 120–31 and 135–42, respectively) issued sweeping proposals for the reform of poetry as part of the most radical agenda any European avant-garde had yet contemplated. Not only was conventional syntax to be banished from poetry, further drastic measures were also demanded: verbs were to be used in the infinitive, adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions abolished, punctuation replaced by mathematical symbols and the personal pronoun avoided. In the interests of brevity, the deployment of onomatopoeia in lieu of ver-bose descriptions, anarchic spelling and other “telegraphic” forms of minimalist com-munication were prescribed. (Sample results appear as postscripts to the “Technical Manifesto” and “Destruction of Syntax.”) A potentially more creative proposal came with the invitation to “dismantle and remake words, cutting them in half, extending and reinforcing their centers or their extremities, increasing or reducing the number of their vowels and consonants” (Marinetti 2006: 131). But as we shall see, it was the Russian Cubo-Futurists who turned to language-generation strategies of this kind. Yet

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failed experiments are also experiments. Even Italian Futurism’s puerile “motsfondus en liberté” (fusedwords-in-freedom) (Marinetti 2002: 126–31), comprising compound neologisms formed from existing words, demonstrated that Romance languages (unlike Russian and German) resist all such exercises in deconstruction and compounding.

(On the advantages and limitations of Italian Futurism’s telegraphic experiments, see White 1990: 143–214.) Words-in-freedom had a greater impact when they involved reductive processes similar to those used in a telegram.

Marinetti’s proposals were formulated with a dual function in mind: (i) as a deliberate riposte to the passéism of late 19th-century poetry (Symbolism was as much Marinetti’s target as it was that of the Russian Cubo-Futurists and Formalists); and (ii) as a mode of discourse appropriate to the modern dynamic world of speed, technological efficiency and, ultimately, the mechanized slaughter of the First World War prefigured in the movement’s founding manifesto. According to the inventor of words-in-freedom,

the speed of trains and automobiles [. . .] familiarizes us with foreshortened perspectives and visual syntheses [thus creating] a horror of slowness, of minu-tiae, of analyses and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abridgment, and synopsis: “Tell me everything, quickly, in a couple of words!”

(Marinetti 2006: 122) As a corollary, the true Futurist poet would

convey [life] telegraphically, [. . .] with the same economical rapidity that the telegraph imposes on reporters and war correspondents in their sum-mary reports. [. . .] the poet’s imagination has to be able to make connections between things that have no apparent connection, without using conductor wires, but rather condensed Words-in-Freedom.

(Marinetti 2006: 123) It could be argued that words-in-freedom constituted a fruitful form of literary experi-ment in much the same way as Cubo-Futurist and OuLiPo lipograms did (see Baetens, this volume), in that both are based on a principle of systematic omission, in the one case the omission of one letter of the alphabet, in the other, that of entire grammati-cal categories. But whereas lipogram-production resembles a literary parlor game, the Italian Futurists’ “telegraphic” device was invariably deployed with a political purpose in mind. Although still obliged to communicate his Aesthetic of the Machine Age in conventional Italian, Marinetti expressed his trust in the new Telegraphic Lyricism:

“Words freed from punctuation will radiate out toward one another, their diverse magnetisms will intersect, in proportion to the continuing dynamism of thought”

(Marinetti 2006: 116). However, Futurism’s subsequent free-word experiments dem-onstrated that syntactical reform was not enough. New typographical layouts, new text/image configurations and unique one-off effects were still called for.

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Despite Marinetti’s campaign to enshrine words-in-freedom as Futurism’s signa-ture style, the movement’s poets experimented with a number of literary sub-genres and artistic forms: “synchronic charts” (multi-sensory patterns of words structured to resemble in layout either maps or campaign plans), “designed analogies” and “auto-illustrations” (typographical effects arranged in the shape of designated objects), pre-dominantly verbal collages, aeropoems inspired by the new military vantage-point afforded by flying, tactilist tables (Marinetti 2006: 370–82) and concrete poems con-sisting exclusively of onomatopoeic sequences and acoustic neologisms. Futurism’s most ingenious free-word poet, Francesco Cangiullo, devised a poetry of handwritten stanzas arranged on musical staves to create an anti-bookish template, as well as cre-ating a whole variety performance from a cast of “humanized” letters of the alpha-bet. Carlo Carrà’s war collages in Guerrapittura (1915) worked with a combination of verbal effects and images, as did much of the experimental work of the so-called Second Futurists. In the midst of such a flurry of inventive activity, one of the most significant forms of interaction was between the founding Futurist painters’ concern with dynamism and the influence this would have on words-in-freedom and Futurist verbal collage.