Multimedia Archaeologies

Andrea Mirabile's Multimedia Archaeologies examines the verse-plays of Gabriele D'Annunzio, particularly Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and La Pisanelle. D'Annunzio—twentieth-century Italy's most famous demagogue, poet, artist, and proto-Fascist celebrity—moved to France on a self-imposed exile from 1910 to 1915, during which he composed a number of now-forgotten works both in French and Italian. The verse-plays from this period are a veritable mélange of archaic references from the Renaissance and medieval period, shot through with a Decadent penchant for aesthetic sensuality and spectacle. These dramas fixate on the erotic martyrdom of saints, a theme for which there is a strong precedent in the works of Wilde, Flaubert (who wrote about St. Sebastian in particular), Swinburne, and most important, Richard Wagner. Mirabile's study produces a compelling claim that D'Annunzio's French plays are “total artworks” or Gesamtkunstwerk following the aesthetic ideals of Wagner, and that they “test the distinction between the literary, the musical, and the visual” (25).The book offers a rigorous comparatist framework from which to reexamine D'Annunzio's works from his period in France, a prolific set of writings that have been overshadowed by the salacious elements of his life and political affiliations, which included an awkward alliance with Mussolini. The recent publication of a new critical biography (Lucy Hughes-Hallett's Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War from Knopf) and a Penguin Classics edition of his early novel Pleasure have reintroduced his work to critics and readers outside of Italian Studies. Yet more scholarship is certainly required in order to parse out D'Annunzio's complex relationship to different national movements of Decadence, Modernism, and the Avant-Garde in his varied writings. Mirabile's study makes use of many unpublished documents housed at the Vittoriale degli Italiani, D'Annunzio's estate and museum–archive, including D'Annunzio's large collection of Wagner's volumes, to advance some of his arguments. The resulting study is dense with archival material and scholarly references, if rather difficult to follow in its opening chapters.Multimedia Archaeologies is divided into three sections that trace the different artistic mediums in which Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien participates: literature, visual art, music, and cinema. In “The Verbal: Saint Sebastian, Adonis, and Christ,” Mirabile contends that this French play writes a “Genesis story of Modernism” (46) through a complex interweaving of erudition, ambiguity, violence, and stillness. It is worth noting that D'Annunzio wrote and published in French not only because of a cultural attraction, but also due to pressing financial concerns. Yet the five-act mystery play debuted in 1911 in Paris to lukewarm reception, with critics citing its androgynous star Ida Rubenstein as the center of the play's “lack of decency” (22). Rubenstein, along with the lesbian artist Romaine Brookes (whom D'Annunzio managed to briefly seduce) and aristocrat Robert de Montesquiou form a trio of erotic liaisons that heavily influenced all of D'Annunzio's work from his exile in Paris. Mirabile argues that these somewhat androgynous figures from D'Annunzio's personal life shadow the central motif of the Christian martyr St. Sebastian—“a textual and an existential sign”—and contribute to a “typical Dannunzian fusion of art and life” (72). Mirabile also argues throughout the book that this integration of semiotic realms produces a unique type of emerging Modernism and waning Decadence that showcases D'Annunzio's “total artwork,” one that is distinct from other writers who harbor similar fixations, such as Oscar Wilde (whose decadent verse drama Salome predates D'Annunzio's by twenty years). Yet it is unclear how this claim arises from a focused discussion of the “verbal,” since much of the chapter is a continuation of the Introduction's more general discussion of the myth of Saint Sebastian and the messy trajectory of D'Annunzio's personal life leading up to and including his French exile. These two opening sections therefore run together without a clear explanation of the stakes of the book's title—notably the loaded terms “archeology,” “media,” and “total artwork.” We encounter a greater exploration of these ideas in the study's concluding chapter that would be better served up front.The following two chapters on the visual and musical aspects of D'Annunzio's French period works are clearer and more persuasive. “The Visual: Aesthetic/Ecstatic” makes a strong case for the pictorial quality of Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and the relevance of the visual arts to D'Annunzio's oeuvre: “the radical intensification of the pictorial and visual dimensions of writing” (86) and “the pleasures and pains of sight” (84). This ambivalence toward seeing that Mirabile traces throughout Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien allows for a greater contextual reading of D'Annunzio's play within the aesthetic traditions of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, including D'Annunzio's obsession with the works of Walter Pater (whose cultivation of the erotics of seeing in The Renaissance seems to have heavily influenced D'Annunzio's French period) and the echoes of Le Martyre in T. S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of St. Sebastian. The chapter on music—the highest art form for most decadent writers—probes D'Annunzio's collaborative relationship with the French composer Claude Debussy.Mirabile's arguments about music as the final crux of the Gesamtkunstwerk's completion also serve as an interesting gateway into D'Annunzio's biography. Mirabile discusses what might be the most famous incident about D'Annunzio's life in dispassionate critical terms, calling it “life-as-music” (122). In 1919 D'Annunzio led a small army to the city-state of Fiume, a town that was not granted to Italy by the Paris Peace Conference. D'Annunzio drove up in a red Fiat and successfully occupied the territory, in no small part due to his overweening celebrity, leading to a sixteen-month Dionysian frenzy, in which music becomes the hallmark of Fiume's new constitution: “a religious and social institution” (qtd. on 124). This sliding from aesthetic totality to political totalitarianism is an uneasy and unavoidable issue for a study on D'Annunzio, as the distaste for human limitation is at the forefront of the total artwork's “divine, unbounded, and unreachable totality” (162). While scholars have made convincing arguments that Italian fascism was in fact Dannunzian, rather than the other way around, Mirabile concludes his work by focusing some attention here, arguing that D'Annunzio's political life can easily be read as another element of his multimedia creative oeuvre. The total artwork, conceived in the form of drama, knows itself to be bound by time and space but momentarily exceeds such boundaries, achieving a “state of ecstatic suspension” (187). This is a kind of atemporal loss of borders and distinctions that Mirabile argues anticipates “current multimedia hybridization” (188). There are clear parallels between the charged definition of ecstasy in D'Annunzio's total artwork and others who took up Wagner's challenge, such as Heidegger, whose “ek-static” dwelling is where temporal finiteness collapses. Yet Mirabile points out that D'Annunzio has not been folded into the critical genealogy of the Gesamtkunstwerk, most probably, he argues, due to the “intensely interdisciplinary critical approach, in which conventional separations are questioned” (156) that his works demand.The book's short final chapter on D'Annunzio's complicated relationship to cinema is its most fascinating. While D'Annunzio collaborated on a number of films that are now lost or destroyed, Mirabile succeeds in rendering the artist's relationship to this medium in meticulous detail. Cinema would appear to be the ideal form for D'Annunzio's art, which—as the French verse-plays exhibit—seeks a kind of sculptural stillness married with temporal dynamism and experimentation. Thus D'Annunzio's abandoned project Théâtre de Fète, which he began planning in 1910 and was meant to be built at the Esplanades des Invalides, anticipated contemporary video art with its elaborate lighting installations and mise-en-scène. That the work was never completed is also a telling reminder of the aesthetics of failure that haunt the total artwork's impossible futurism.Multimedia Archaeologies ultimately wants to accord D'Annunzio's complex and often-disordered creative corpus a more influential place within the critical trajectory of modern to postmodern art. The difficulty of this project lies precisely in the artist's complete dedication to a singular form of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which renders it nearly impossible (as the organization of the book shows) to find a stable point from which to assess individual and collective elements of his life and work. Yet the kind of radical translatability that D'Annunzio sought across genres raises interesting questions about such a creative mode. If Mirabile is right in noting that D'Annunzio's work is attuned to the mass production that distinguishes contemporary life, there is also something remarkably similar to Susan Sontag's call for an “erotics of art” that reveals itself in his oeuvre. D'Annunzio's adherence to a kind of semiotic porousness exceeds the aims of decadent aesthetics, gesturing to “contemporary multimedia experiences” (182) and to more general issues of translation across linguistic and generic boundaries that characterize ongoing debates in the field. Multimedia Archaeologies invites us to not only consider D'Annunzio's verse-plays as exemplary of an entire current in modernism, but also to weigh the complex legacy of the long nineteenth century and its total artwork, whose shadow continues to cast itself in the field of aesthetics

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Literature · Period (music · Spectacle · Theme (computing · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Musicology and Musical Analysis