Lockwood and the Futurist Renaissance

Examining the epigraph to No One Is Talking About This

On the epigraph

There will be!

People!

On the sun!

Soon!

Thus begins the novel, with an extract from ‘I and Napoleon’ by Mayakovsky, of whom I had no prior knowledge, though a quick Google revealed that he is a Russian Futurist. Other than a hazy memory of a quotation from The Manifesto of the Futurists in the liner notes of a Manic Street Preachers album, I had no real knowledge of what a Futurist was, or what beliefs they might espoused. But, I’m always game for a burrow into a Wikipedia hole, so in I went.

Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash

Turns out, the reference to a Futurist work is pertinent. The Futurists were initially a group of Italian Modernists, whose manifesto was written by F T Marinetti, who was also a contributing editor to the Italian Fascist Manifesto. ‘Futurist’ is no misnomer; of all the Modernist ideologies, none seems to exemplify the Modernist spirit of ‘Make it New’ better than the Futurists. Where T. S. Eliot saw such newness as assembled from the bombed-out shards and ruins of the past, (see The Waste Land’s telling line, ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins …’), the Futurists want to consign the past to the fire, destroying it completely in favour of the new. Even they, when they became the old, the moribund, desired only their own destruction:

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!

Note the tone: hyperactive, convulsive, dynamic — it is hard, as a cynic in ash-blown 2023, to take such rhetoric seriously at all. Viewed through the milky lens of postmodernism, all I can see is irony. Perhaps. But such love for progress — above all, for the Futurists, for speed — is a hallmark of Modernism: in its pushing forward no matter the human, fiscal or environmental cost, the rampant humanistic ideology that’s essentially Enlightenment self-wrought mythology on crack. It’s the belief that one is living in a special time, is part of a race of special people, capable of special things, of touching the face of God, of man as super-man. It ends, perhaps, with the fall of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer, watching it detonate, said that later that the line, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ floated through his mind. One doesn’t just take this in purely material terms: it was a rending of time itself.

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Mayakovsky’s equivalent to Marinetti’s Manifesto was A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which he co-authored with David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh and Victor Khlebnikov. It is written with the same obsession with speed, youth and the incontrovertible forwardness of time. The past is a trap: ‘The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.’ Key in this essay, though, are the references to language, particularly poetic language:

We order that the poets’ rights be revered:

To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty).

To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.

Why such hatred towards the past? Perhaps history see-saws between societies that cherish the past and those that idolise the future? Living in both of those is easier than living in the present, because they exist only in psychic realms, meaning they’re more easily manipulable and prone to slippages, biases, mutations. Living in the present, truly, is damned difficult. Also, in a Russian context, throwing the old overboard is a political act. Writing in the years following the Revolution of 1917, it was vital to draw vital distinctions between the new order and the old Tsarist regime. When taken this way, looking back as anathema seems understandable, at least. In the 20s, society was still very much unstable — unstable enough for a second war in the next decade — living in the present was too precarious, too frightening, too horrid.

This is where I think Lockwood meets Mayakovsky. By opening the novel with not only his words but the cultural baggage his name carries, she indicates that modern society might mirror some of the preoccupations of Mayakovsky’s. There’s a hundred years between the two texts, almost exactly, fitting with W.B. Yeats’ conceptualisation of history as working within ‘gyres’ — cycles that spin out conically, before contracting back in and repeating

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. Are we, then, living in a society obsessed with the future? Perhaps. This novel explicitly concerns the internet, and its impact on our ability to be in the world (that is, the present)

³

, preferring instead the Futurist sensations of the internet. Speed is the defining characteristic of the internet age: one can have one’s desires gratified if not instantly, then pretty fast, then very quickly, certainly quicker than at any point in history. Speed means that one hurtles into the future, craving the next thing — we know that modern apps, especially those designed for smartphones, are designed to keep users engaged, interacting, refreshing, always thinking about what’s coming next, waiting with knowing uncertainty for the next dopamine hit. And, in an era of crisis, an era of uncertainty (like in the years following the Revolution), the future becomes even more important: the present is too hard, and the past too traumatic.

But, if we’re applying the Mayakovsky quotation to the modern age, then we’re left with the equivalency of an internet-centric society with putting people on the sun. Such impossibility flies in the face of an optimistic vision. for the future. Is the irony knowing? Will ‘progress’ — the surging, technological progress of the Futurist spirit — only lead to mankind’s destruction?

N.B. I originally intended this post to be about the whole novel, but I got distracted by this discussion of the epigraph. For brevity’s sake, I’ll probably release at least one more post, which will look at the novel itself.

1. More on this here.

2. See ‘The Second Coming’:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

3. Dasein, or being-in-the-world is, in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. My grasp of all this is so nascent that the footnote I intended to write in which I expand tangentially on this connection has already juddered to a halt. See?