Yoko Ono has repeatedly implied that the arts are a sort of “peace industry” acting as the countervailing force to the monstrous military-industrial complex. While there is no good reason to doubt that her own work was done in the spirit of peace-making, there is less concrete evidence that the arts have ever been unequivocally in support of peace, or were ever truly autonomous enough from the remainder of human industry. Yet this autonomy and supposed commitment to loftier values are ideals which persist well enough in the public imagination: when we speak of ever-intensifying conservative-vs.-progressive “Culture War,” the wording suggests an anomalous tragedy wherein even cultural enterprises have become tainted with the evils of coercive violence and the will to exterminate an enemy group. Yet any degree of shock over such a situation betrays a poor grasp of history, particularly the last 110 years or so. There have been more than enough historical cases in which the two would-be “opposing” forces perfectly merged into one another, with war being fought to preserve or impose an aesthetic sensibility, and this same aesthetic sensibility being that which first seduced combatants into the trenches.
Some would counter this right away by insisting, as many other artists have, that “art” and “culture” are not congruous in either their inspirations or their aims, so capital-A Art cannot be held responsible for a war fought for, and with, “culture”. Nevertheless, so long as there is a plurality of the public that does not make this distinction, this argument will have to remain intact for now. There is unlikely to ever be a surgical procedure that can completely separate art and culture from the impulse to conflict, because those swept up into a conflict want some indication of how life will look when they are victorious; of how things will be once the survival-level concerns of mass violence can be replaced by aspects of a thriving existence. This same vision also extends to posterity, as belligerents roused to war by such abstractions as nation and “blood” are often attracted to the belief in preserving the fruit of their struggles beyond their own lifetimes – if seen from this perspective, all cultural endeavors, whether they are explicitly labeled as such or not, become “monuments” to the fallen and reminders to remain vigilant in honoring their sacrifices.
I strongly recommend Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s book on the notorious Gabriele d’Annunzio as an object lesson in this concept of culture as war, and just how wholeheartedly a public came to embrace this as an ideal when it was framed attractively enough (the subtitle Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War already confirms much of what we need to know about the false autonomy of art). One of the first things that strikes me on reading this book is that the titular character here has not been committed to celluloid (like his close Japanese analog, Yukio Mishima), as the dramatic arc of d’Annunzio’s life is filled with as much sheer adventure, comical absurdity, and cautionary nosedives into complete narcissism and psychopathy as any leading anti-hero of the 20th century. The narrative within this book, however, lights enough fires in the imagination (and elicits plenty of sardonic laughter in the sections dealing with d’Annunzio’s total lack of moderation in all things), that a cinematic equivalent might be unnecessary.
As it stands, this account is one of the more compelling illustrations of what happens when a highly influential voice rejects the mutual exclusivity of violent struggle and beautification of the world. D’Annunzio, the author claims, dreamed of creating a “politics of poetry,” and this biography shows how such a dream “grew organically out of long-established trends in European intellectual and social life.” Though the world has grown steadily less Romanticized since d’Annunzio’s time, I would argue that this dream of an armed aesthetics still persists even in an age where poets no longer command the massive followings that d’Annunzio once did, and in which he could confidently state that “the word of the poet, communicated to the mass, is an act like the exploit of the hero.”[1]
The young d’Annunzio, raised in the Abruzzo along the Adriatic Sea, came of age in the fresh wake of the Risorgimento movement that ignited a vigorous new sense of Italian-ness. It becomes clear very early on in Hughes-Hallett’s narrative that he feels personally challenged to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Romanticist artist and statesman Massimo d’Azeglio with his famous pronouncement “L'Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani” [roughly: Italy has been made, what remains is to make Italians]. It is also clear enough that he views the acts of violence necessary to achieve a united Italy as perfectly complementary to the aesthetic development that would make each individual Italian a microcosm of the nation. To achieve that would require allowing “the rhythm of Art and the rhythm of Life [to] beat together in the same pulsation”[2] (an idea still somewhat radical at the time of their utterance; similar words were put in the mouth of Andrea Sperelli, the decadent and aristocratic hero of his premier novel Il Piacere [Pleasure]).
By the time d’Annunzio was fifteen years old (in 1879), his first volume of verse was published. Though perhaps in debt stylistically and thematically to the work of Shelley and (closer to home) Carducci, this did not prevent a future outpouring of work in prose and stage drama. His capacity for self-mythologizing was already evident this early, too: in 1880 the young poet sent out a faked death announcement which was apparently met with real expressions of mourning over the flower of youth having been cut down far too soon. Having then been “resurrected,” the incorrigible prankster would spend the next decade in Rome becoming perhaps the only living Italian writer with a truly international reputation, while earning some professional clout as a journalist locally. Again, like Yukio Mishima, his aesthetic owed much to a poetic reconciliation of agony and ecstasy, even sharing the same patron saint (the arrow-pierced St. Sebastian) as Mishima did. It is possible though that, even in his formative stages, d’Annunzio took things much further than most of his contemporaries, and in his mature life he certainly carried the idea of voluptuous martyrdom to its logical extremes.
In the full bloom of his artistic career, d’Annunzio was far from the marginal figure that his founding contributions to Fascist thought likely made him: it was not exceptional for him to be spoken of in superlative language such as that used by G.B. Rose in 1897, e.g. he is not only “second only to Carducci among the living poets of Italy” but also “the most brilliant figure that has arisen in the last years of the dying century, and if he is a promise of what the next is to bring forth, the outlook is as ominous as it is fascinating.”[3] Negative criticisms, like the philosopher Benedetto Croce’s influential dismissal of d’Annunzio as a “dilettante of sensations”, needled at the social irresponsibility inherent in his decadent work, but nevertheless probably still worked to invite curiosity about that same work.
A decent amount of that curiosity came from women swept up in d’Annunzio’s stunningly eroticized descriptions of his world, and among them some of the leading talents of the day that became Il Vate’s muses prior to being cruelly disposed of (e.g. legendary actress Eleanora Duse, who easily proved d’Annunzio’s match in sheer intensity, the dancer Ida Rubenstein, and the heiress / relentless eccentric Marchesa Luisa Casati). With or without these muses to accompany him, d’Annunzio’s commitment to eroticizing all aspects of life extended to the creation of a personal designer fragrance (“Acqua Nuntia”) and to a staggering heap of debts as well: a recurring theme here is the game of whack-a-mole that the great poet is forced to play with his creditors, who hound him from one residence to another as he fails to learn his lesson and continues to spend well beyond his means. In his twilight years, the placement of the battleship Puglia’s prow in his private garden is just one reminder of the absurd excesses he would enjoy throughout his turbulent life.
All of the above is just an alluring run-up to the merger of d’Annunzio’s languid daydreams with his thirst for righteous vengeance and apocalyptic tremors of manmade fury; and at several points Hughes-Hallett has to castigate anyone “simple-minded” enough to dismiss one of the book’s most easily grasped lessons: that “artistic talent and refined sensibility” are not “incompatible with political extremism and an appetite for violence.” D’Annunzio, apparently unsatisfied with being seen as what Giuliana Pieri calls “a refined but ultimately vacuous figure” like those populating his novels, underwent a deathly serious campaign to become instead “the spiritual and poetic guide of the nation.”[4]
Beginning with d’Annunzio’s theatrical but inconsequential and brief parliamentary career, and continuing with his rise as one of the most inflamed of pro-war orators prior to the outbreak of the so-called “war to end all wars,” he manages to tap into a reservoir of mass hysteria so well that he is even forgiven for the blasphemous act of naming an oratory tour his “Passion Week,” and he eventually earns the grudging respect of figures with a similar creative / political inclination to reconcile revolutionary violence with novel creative acts. The Italian Futurists’ lodestar and poet of “dynamism,” Filippo Tomas Marinetti, is just one of the more recognizable names. Just as it is difficult to state the impact of his authorial career to an English-speaking audience that has encountered very little of his work in translation, it is also necessary to remind that some of his more notable oratory showings were inextricable from the fabric of Italy’s modern history: in 1915, his speech urging Italian intervention in the Great War was the front page story of the most popular weekly paper, Domenica del Corriere.
It should go without saying that d’Annunzio’s preaching of a “blood sacrifice” mysticism was partially responsible for an incalculable amount of needless slaughter, and Hughes-Hallett’s biography does admit quite a bit of disillusionment with the warrior-poet ideal once enough blood was spilled for an unclear, abstract, spiritual objective. Whatever else may be said about him, though, d’Annunzio did personally commit to intimate experience with the terror and insanity of mechanized warfare, awarding him a credibility that eludes countless “transgressive” modern artists who claim to have some unique understanding of reality with “extreme” aesthetics alone. Within this arena, many of d’Annunzio’s accomplishments were still in the realm of the theatrical, particularly in his famed flight over Vienna to drop patriotic leaflets on the enemy capital (d’Annunzio was not the actual pilot of his two-seater craft, even if he might have been the media focus of this mission). However, his desire to make a life into art, and to extend that process to an entire nation, was still done with enough conviction that he was very close to realizing an artful death as well: the poet lost one of his eyes to anti-aircraft fire, and was at the frontlines long enough for him to be awarded several medals of valor.
Once his legitimacy had been certified thanks to his war heroism, d’Annunzio was ready for his most dramatic and consequential artwork as a “poeta soldato”, the irredentist occupation of the city of Fiume in 1919. Enraged at how the post-WWI Versailles peace conference rejected Italy’s claims upon the Dalmatian coast, d’Annunzio simply took it upon himself to make a so-called “sacred entry” into the city and declare himself as its Commandante – it was an audacious act which, preceding Mussolini’s “March on Rome” three years later, made d’Annunzio into one of Il Duce’s chief rivals once nascent Fascism had seized the reins of power in post-WWI Italy. This takeover was accompanied by some decidedly un-poetic acts of viciousness, including the forcing out of the non-Italian population and general mayhem at the hands of the death-fetishizing, dagger-wielding Arditi. The latter, not unlike some later countercultural elements in the 20th century, resented being tossed aside by their nation after their usefulness had been expended in war, and lived out their time in Fiume as a brazen caricature of the crazed beasts that the civilian populace perceived them as. In short, they were the perfect “house band” to back d’Annunzio’s regular nights of ecstatic oratory, and their leader was not shy in offering fulsome praise for their neo-satanic commitment (e.g. “to be among you is to enter the fiery furnace.”)
Thusly, Fiume was twisted into an inversion of the peacenik utopia that briefly took place in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury: like that other idealized bohemian enclave, the fifteen-month autonomous zone of Fiume was a forum for social and political elements on every conceivable margin. Hughes-Hallett writes that “socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and […] fascists” all made Fiume their home along with “groups whose homeland was not of this earth,” e.g. “the Union of Free Spirits Tending Towards Perfection, who met under a fig tree in the old town to talk about free love and the abolition of money, and YOGA, a kind of political-club-cum-street-gang described by one of its members as ‘an Island of the Blest in the infinite sea of history.’” In fact, if we substitute d’Annunzio’s poetry for “rock ‘n roll”, the “sex and drugs” components of that unholy trinity were a regular feature of Fiume’s life at the time: many of Fiume’s citizenry undoubtedly lived by a motto of “make love and war” when not proceeding under the other official slogan of the city, non me frego [here with a gloss of defiance close to “I don’t give a shit.”] Il Vate, in spite of his own fondness for cocaine, eventually became fatigued by the “rabble stuffed with phrases and crammed full of drugs,” with that rabble presumably including the resident artist who marketed his work as “fantastic impressions, morphine style.”
The Fiume experiment was doomed to fail, as it was an affront to all of the victorious Allied powers from the First World War. The brief occupation was also untenable without some real knowledge of logistics and urban planning to complement the outbreaks of poetic rapture and eroticized death drive. Regardless, d’Annunzio’s place in history was secured, and his character so much larger-than-life that the authorities could not properly punish him for his petulant mockery. Though this climactic episode showed that his story was uniquely his own, he was never alone in viewing war as a meaningful and aesthetic force: Hughes-Hallett cites contemporaries like Rupert Brooke in Britain and Thomas Mann in Germany celebrating the coming orgy of death as “a purging and a liberation.” Without having to name such illustrious names, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War is bursting with examples of how the creative and destructive impulses reinforce one another, and strong implications that the destructive impulse will win out once this relationship is forged.
Though it is not obligated to, the book does not really hint at ways out of this conundrum, particularly when a messianic figure arises to convince them that (as d’Annunzio did) they are all “heroes” containing within them the seeds of cultural destiny. It does, however, capably diagnose how such messianic figures come to be supported, and how such is nearly impossible without mastering the arts of dramaturgy, poetic ecstasy and narrative skill that makes idealized fictions seem more palpably real than the actually experienced present (until such point that it becomes that present). Importantly, the book also exhibits how those qualities have never been the exclusive property of either the “Left” or “Right,” and indeed invokes the work of Georges Sorel (author of Reflections on Violence): Sorel’s work, though written for explicitly socialist journals, was embraced by d’Annunzio and the nascent fascist movement, and, as Hughes-Hallett reminds us, “proclaimed the subordination of all ideologies to the pure, transformative power generated by violent struggle, by general strikes, and by terrorism.” Both Sorel and d’Annunzio, in turn, would be indebted to Nietzsche’s study of tragic Greek antiquity, and in particular his salute of its “contempt for all security of the body, for life, for comfort…the terrible gaiety and the profound joy which the heroes tasted in destruction.”
We may no longer have among us anyone with the eloquence of a d’Annunzio, but we clearly still have with us the belief that culture and aesthetics are not only worth fighting for, but that the fighting itself must be an aestheticized ritual. Our high military commands still refer to conflict zones as “theaters” of war, and more recently NATO’s official Twitter account draws embarrassing, simplistic analogies between the Ukrainian resistance and pop-cultural fantasies like Harry Potter and Star Wars. Meanwhile, we see fewer episodes in which men of culture stand in total contradistinction to men of war: for example, the famed confrontation in which the writer Miguel de Unamuno stood against the Spanish Legion commander José Millán-Astray and his shouts of viva la muerte [long live death].
Having said all this, the permeation of aesthetic life by calculated violence does not mean there is no chance for any kind of a “peace industry”: but its development may need to take place farther and farther away from the worlds of mass media. A character like d’Annunzio was nothing if not the “media” manipulator of his time, laying the groundwork for the totalitarian ideal of “one transmitter, a thousand receivers,” and (as marginal movements near the end of the 20th century already understood) small-scale / piecemeal acts of direct communication can be a viable means of living an aesthetic life decoupled from conflict and coercion. The aesthetics of non-aggression are not dead, though they will have a very hard time co-existing with cultural visions that value posterity (and related concepts like “martyrdom”) over actual lived experience, or which value a great quantity of public recognition (i.e. high “follower counts”) over the intensity of intimate exchanges, or which attempt to dictate reality rather than reveal aspects of reality that others may freely interpret. A decreed and compelled reality is, in the final estimation, irreconcilable with one typified by the regular flux of meanings that we associate with poetic activity: the “politics of poetry” now means the “subjugation of poetry” more often than not.
Note: all quotes in the text take, unless otherwise noted, from the 2013 edition of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, Preacher of War
[1] D’Annunzio, G. (1900). “The Third Life of Italy”. The north American Review, 171 (528): pp. 627-652.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Rose, G.B. (1897). “Gabriele d’Annunzio”. The Sewanee Review, 5(2): pp. 146-152.
[4] Pieri, G. (2016). “Gabriele d’Annunzio and the Self-Fashioning of a National Icon.” Modern Italy, 21(4): PP. 329-343.