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The Untameables

F. T. Marinetti

Translated from the Italian by Jeremy Parzen
with an Introduction by Luigi Ballerini
and Artwork by Alden Marin

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"How could one define The Untameables? Adventure novel? Symbolic poetry? Science fiction? Fable? Philosophical-social vision? None of these categories fits. It's a free-word book. Nude crude synthesizing. Simultaneous polychromatic polyhumourous. Vast violent dynamic." So F. T. Marinetti -- the founder, theoretician, and ringleader of Italian Futurism -- describes his fiction.

As Luigi Ballerini points out in the introduction, it is not hard to imagine this horrific world as a metaphorical representation of the "stinking, blood-filled trenches" experienced by Marinetti during his service on the Austrian-Italian front in World War I. Certainly there is something far more pitiable about the "heroes" of this work, Vokur and Mazzapà -- perhaps another version of the Laurel and Hardy kind of pairing that is part of a long literary tradition beginning with Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet and continuing with such figures in works by Joyce and Beckett -- than the violent Nietschean warrior Mafarka of Marinetti's earlier "African" novel Mafarka the Futurist. For neither the black guards nor the prisoner Untameables control their destinies. The mysterious rulers of this desert island are the Paper People, cone-shaped beings "surmounted by circumflex book-hats," who hiss their instructions into the ears of the Negro guards. In short, not only is this world ruled by people of the written word -- not unlike bureaucratic paper pushers -- but it is metaphorically ruled by the author and readers -- the ultimate Paper People who push and bully their raw entrapped characters into a bizarre series of events.