from the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature

1. We must destroy syntax by placing nouns at random as they are born.

2. We must use the verb in the infinitive,

so that it will conform elastically to the noun and will not subordinate it to the I of the writer who sees or imagines. Only the infinitive verb can convey the sense of life's continuity and the elasticity of the intuition that perceives it.

3. We must abolish the adjective

so that the naked noun can retain its essential color. The adjective, carrying in it a principle of nuance, is incompatible with our dynamic vision, because it implies a pause, a mediation.

4. We must abolish the adverb,

old clip that holds words together. The adverb maintains a fastidious unity of tone in the sentence.

5. Every noun should have its double

—that is, a noun should be followed, without any conjunctive phrase, by the noun to which it is tied by analogy. Example: man-torpedo boat, woman-harbor, square-funnel, door-faucet.

6. No more punctuation.

Once adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctive phrases are suppressed, punctuation is naturally annulled in the carried continuity of a living style that creates itself, without the absurd pauses of commas and periods. To emphasize certain movements and show their directions, we will use mathematical signs, x + : - + < >, and musical symbols.

7. Up to now writers have indulged themselves in direct analogies. For example, they have compared an animal to man or to another animal, which is still almost the same as photography. For example, they have compared a fox terrier to a tiny thoroughbred. Others, more progressive, might compare this same trembling fox terrier to a little Morse apparatus. I myself compare it to boiling water. The

analogies here have become increasingly vast,

the connections increasingly deep, though very remote.

Analogy is nothing but the immense live that connects distant, seemingly different, and hostile things. It is through very vast analogies that this orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphic, can embrace the life of matter.

When, in my Battle of Tripoli, I compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme fatale, I intuitively introduced a great part of the universe into a brief episode of African battle.

Images are not flowers to be chosen and picked sparingly, as Voltaire maintained. They are the very lifeblood of poetry. Poetry must be an uninterrupted succession of fresh images or it is nothing but anemia and chlorosis.

The vaster the connections an image encompasses, the longer it will keep its stupefying power. We must spare the reader's astonishment, you say. Bah! Instead we should worry about the fatal corrosion of time, which destroys not only the expressive value of a masterpiece but its stupefying power. Haven't our ears, too often enraptured, worn out Beethoven and Wagner? Therefore we must abolish all that language contains in the way of clichéd images, or faded metaphors—that is, almost everything.

8. There are no categories of images,

noble or vulgar, elegant or bases, eccentric or natural. The intuition that perceives them has neither preferences nor prejudices. The analogical style is therefore master of all matter and its intense life.

9. To render the successive movements of an object, we must render the

chain of analogies

it evokes, each one condensed, drawn into one essential word.

Here is a striking example of a chain of analogies still masked and weighed down by traditional syntax:

Why yes, sweet machine gun, you are a charming lady, and sinister, and divine, at the wheel of an invisible hundred-horsepower, roaring and snorting with impatience...And soon you will leap into the circuit of death, to a smashing crash or victory! Would you like some madrigals full of grace and color? As you wish, madam! I also see you as a gesticulating orator, whose eloquent, tireless tongue strikes his impassioned circle of listeners to the heart. Now you are an omnipotent trepan boring through the too solid skull or this stubborn night. You are also a steel rolling mill, an electric lathe, and what else?...a great oxyhydrogen blowpipe burning, chiseling, and slowly melting the metallic tips of the last stars. (Battle of Tripoli)

In certain cases we must link images in pairs like chain shot that can level a clump of trees in its flight.

To surround and capture all that is most fleeting and elusive in matter, we must make closely woven nets of images or analogies that we will cast into the mysterious sea of phenomena. Except for its traditional form, this sentence from my Mafarka the Futurist is a closely woven net of images:

All the bitter sweetness of his youth rose in his throat, like the cries of children rising from the playground to their old teachers leaning on the parapets of the terraces from which boats can be seen skimming across the sea.

Here are three closely woven nets of images:

Around the wells of Bumeliana, under the bushy olive trees, three camels, lying comfortably on the sand, gargled happily like old gargoyles, harmonizing their spitting with the thump-thumps of the steam pump supplying water to the town.

Shrill and dissonant Futurist sounds in the deep orchestra of the trenches with their sinuous channels and sonorous vaults, as the bayonets come and go, violin bows that the sunset-conductor's red baton fires with enthusiasm.

It is he who, with a sweep of his hand, gathers the scattered flutes of birds in the trees and the plaintive harps of insects, the creaking of branches, the crunching of stones...It is he who stops dead the mess tin drums and the clashing guns so all the stars in golden clothes, arms open wide above the footlights of the sky, can sing out over the muted orchestra. And here's a lady at the show: in a low-cut gown, the desert flaunts her vast bosom with its thousand liquefied curves, polished with pink rouge under the tumbling jewels of the lavish night. (Battle of Tripoli)

10. Since all order is inevitably the product of cautious intelligence, we must orchestrate images by arranging them with a

maximum of disorder.

11. Destroy the "I" in literature

—that is, all psychology. Man, utterly ruined by libraries and museums, ruled by a fearful logic and wisdom, is of absolutely no more interest. So abolish him in literature. Replace him with matter, whose essence must be grasped by flashes of intuition, something physicists and chemists can never do.

Auscultate, through things in freedom and capricious engines, the breath, the sensibility, and the instincts of metal, stone, wood, etc. Replace the psychology of man, now spent, with a

lyrical obsession with matter.

Beware of attributing human feelings to matter; rather, divine its different guiding forces, its powers of compression, expansion, cohesion, and disgregation, its rush of molecules en masse, or its whirls of electrons. We must not offer dramas of humanized matter. The solidity of a sheet of steel interests us in itself—that is to say, the incomprehensible and inhuman alliance of its molecules and electrons that can withstand, for instance, the penetration of a shell. From now on, the heat of a piece of iron or wood interests us more passionately than a woman's smile or tears.