Dyspepsia* as Dystopia? F. T. Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance

Abstract

La Grande Dypepsie eclatera tout a coup, coincidant avec le refroidissement de la terre sterile! (Quatrieme acte, p. 230) You have stripped off the old self ... and have clothed yourself with the new self (Colossians 3: 9-10) It seems fair to say that even out of F. T. Marinetti's French, pre-futurist and thus already less popular literary production, his tragedie satirique (or, tragedie hilare) Le Roi Bombance (LRB), (1) published by the editions of Mercure de France in 1905 and subsequently staged in 1909 at Paris' Theatre de l'Oeuvre, stands out as a text still very much at the margins of both editorial and critical attention. Two simple considerations immediately confirm that Marinetti's theatrical piece has generally (and, given its 'un-theatricality,' one could perhaps add 'understandably') failed to find its audience in both the publishing and scholarly fields. (2) As of today, the only available editions of the text are either the rare original 1905 French, or the even more elusive 1909 (and 1920) Italian translation. (3) The second consideration is that--if I did my homework properly--only three or four full-length scholarly articles have dealt with Le Roi Bombance in recent times. (4) Although from different methodological perspectives, all of these essays invariably discuss Marinetti's work by observing its satirical, socio-political message delivered through the culinary allegory and by underlining in particular the intertextual relationship it establishes with one of Alfred Jarry's most popular texts, Ubu roi (1896). A synthetic glance at the plot of Le Roi Bombance may immediately illuminate both the pervasiveness of such an allegory and, in general terms, the nature of the frequent comparison with Jarry's text: The cook (Ripaille) of the imaginary kingdom of Bourdes, who was able to prepare delicious food for his king, has died and his death has initiated a political crisis. The people protest, and the three royal cooks, in order to calm the situation down, promise to organize a banquet. However, their real goal is just to barricade themselves into the royal kitchens and stuff themselves with food. The 'starving' crowd discovers that it has been fooled and, increasingly mad, eats the king (Roi Bombance), his cooks, his servants and also the court poet (L'Idiot), the one who, telling his stories, had vainly attempted to direct the appetites of the people towards more idealistic objectives. In the end, the characters of Sainte Pourriture (Saint Putrefaction) the eternal force of transformation, accompanied by the vampire Ptiokaroum, resuscitates the characters, who are then 'vomited out' by the same people who had previously ingurgitated them. (see also Eruli 1970, 261) Antipodal observations may easily arise after reading this play. On the one hand, it is hard to deny that we are dealing with an almost illegible (and almost 'un-stageable') text, characterized by 'lunghissime tirate, linguaggio enfatico e molto tradizionale, azioni macchinose' (Eruli 1992, 152), which rightly deserves to have slipped into oblivion. On the other, however, one also has the impression that the wealth of implications simultaneously elicited and hidden in its verbal and visual 'overflow' may have not yet been explored in its totality. The fairy-like quality of the play and its suggestive force, for example, does not seem to have been stressed enough by scholars. The plot, after all, also tells the story of how one of the 'king's two bodies' (the royal/historical one) is degraded into the other (the natural/pathetic one) until it overlaps with the 'classic,' fairy-like figure of an 'ogre' (Bombance is described as having a 'vaste nez bourgeonnant [ ... ] une houppe de cheveux blonds enfarines [ ... ] la bedaine qui surplombe les cuisses' etc., p. 1). (5) Such a visual coincidence may well anticipate and make evident in a deceivingly elementary fashion--as the 'curtain rises'--not only that 'eating and incorporation' shall be the true protagonists of the piece and that, consequently, the borders of human subjectivity are potentially at stake, but also that the problematic relationship between the 'corporeal' and the 'temporal' (or, in other words, the 'body' and 'history') not to mention the one between the 'beast' and the 'god,' already constitute central preoccupations for Marinetti (and the dynamics between Mafarka and Gazurmah in Mafarka le futuriste (1909) could arguably be a soon to be example of the latter). …