Giovanni Papini and Walt Whitman: Pragmatism, Nietzsche and Futurism

Abstract

This is an essay in three parts. The first reconstructs Giovanni Papini’s encounter with William James and his contribution to transatlantic Pragmatism as part of an intellectual action aimed at modernizing Italian culture and making it more international. It argues that Papini’s early reading of the two volumes of Walt Whitman’s Canti scelti shaped his own brand of pragmatism. The second part centers on Papini’s 1908 essay, “Walt Whitman”, and his cultural and very influential interpretation of Whitman. Apparently reviewing Luigi Gamberale’s Foglie d’erba (1907), Papini not only pragmatically used Whitman’s poetry to show Italian artists how to write modern literature, but created an image of the poet/Whitman as a hybrid, avant-gardist and pragmatist, Übermensch. Through Whitman, Papini also participated in the cultural debate of the time, when Nietzsche and his Zarathustra were quoted, interpreted and used for their own aims by feminists like Sibilla Aleramo, syndicalists like Benito Mussolini, and artists like F.T. Marinetti. The third part of my essay centers on the image of the ‘newborn’ modern man and its machinistic Futurist incarnation, to show how its spiritualist version in Papini’s work and its dynamically futurist image project in-human and anti-human visions of a future humanity, totally different from that of full-bodied, sentient and democratic human beings imagined by Whitman.