Was this the subject of Wells’s meditations in July 1909? It is certain, in any case, that at the start of the twentieth century British public opinion began to perceive that the country’s island position was in danger. As early as 1903, Erskine Childers’s spy novel The Riddle of the Sands, depicting secret preparations for a German landing on the English shore, enjoyed great success. The Royal Navy remained more powerful by far than other naval forces, and as long as the threat came only from the sea, all that was needed was a certain vigilance. But Blériot’s flight shattered this certainty. From 25 July 1909, the situation had definitely changed. Maritime supremacy, however useful it remained, no longer had any great value in protecting the metropolis. British exceptionality had had its day. What was to be done?
To confront this new geopolitical configuration, the British Empire decided to take the initiative. Since 1887, representatives of the colonies and ‘dominions’ had met at regular intervals in ‘colonial conferences’, renamed ‘imperial conferences’ in 1907. But from 1911, a common foreign policy under British tutelage was established: the Empire was transformed into a Commonwealth. The same year, the United States signed treaties of arbitration with both Great Britain and France. Great Britain, a centre now on the decline, and the United States, en route to becoming the new hegemon, renounced war as a means of resolving conflicts. The two great ‘Lockean’ powers thus removed themselves from the ‘anarchy’ of international relations.40 We could say that the centre of the world was globalized.
At the same time, this hegemonic centre expanded in Europe, since France, formerly the main contender on the Continent but singularly weakened by the lost war with the new German contender in 1870–71, was now assimilated into the Lockean centre. In 1912, a Franco-British naval agreement, bearing initially on a colonial dispute in Syria but rapidly extended to North Africa, sealed the new alliance between the British hegemon and its ancient rival. A new world configuration thus saw the light. In Europe, Germany acceded to the rank of principal Hobbesian contender, and the lines of the Great War were mapped out. On the world level, the globalization of the hegemonic power paved the way for the most striking development in the twentieth century’s history of violence: the collapse of the separation between the European centre and the colonized periphery. The coming conflict would not be simply a European Great War, but the First World War.
The news brutally interrupted the lethargy of the three holiday-makers. They found it exceptionally hard to make sense of the notice written in Italian and published in a local newspaper, the Sentinella Bresciana: an aviation rally very close by, on the other side of the lake. The world’s most famous airmen were to come and exhibit their flying machines. Franz’s excitement was contagious. The three friends, who were staying on the Austrian side, decided to travel by boat to Desenzano and then take the train to Brescia, on the Italian side of the frontier. Arriving in the afternoon, they spent the night at a shabby hotel. On the morning of 11 September 1909, they finally reached the airfield.
Less than a year after finding work as a jurist with the Bohemian Institute for Workplace Insurance, Franz Kafka was not yet entitled to a paid holiday. He had to convince a doctor friend to supply him with a medical certificate to travel to Riva, on Lake Garda, in the company of his best friend, Max Brod, and his brother Otto. A few weeks before, at the end of July, Max had written a piece on Blériot’s flight across the Channel. As for Kafka, he had recently complained of the difficulties he had in writing and his doubt about his vocation as a writer. This led Max Brod to issue a challenge: each of the three would write a report on the Brescia rally, and they would then choose the best.1
This rally was a world event of great importance. The town’s hotels were full up, and curious spectators arrived from Rome, Naples, and even abroad. King Victor Emmanuel III was in attendance, and the high aristocracy gathered around his majesty. A number of eminent representatives of the world of culture were likewise present: Gabriele D’Annunzio – nicknamed simply Il Poeta – and the demigod of music, Giacomo Puccini. They had all come to witness the spectacle given by the best aviators of the day: Louis Blériot, Glenn Curtis, Henri Rougier, and Alfred Leblanc, along with a number of Italians, including Guido Moncher, originally from Trentino and thus a subject of the Habsburg emperor, like Kafka and his Prague friends. Moncher, however, ‘wore Italian colours, trusting more in them than in our own’.2
Kafka saw the representatives of official culture as rather pathetic figures: D’Annunzio, ‘short and weakly, dances attendance before the most important men on the committee’, while Puccini showed ‘a nose that one might well call a drinker’s’. As for the aviators, Rougier was ‘a little man with a strange nose’ who had difficulty in calming his nerves; Curtiss tried with difficulty to read his American newspaper, while Blériot’s wife was visibly concerned for her husband. Human and fragile on the ground, the aviators only showed their true qualities once propelled into the air by their machines. ‘Sit[ting] at his levers’, Rougier resembled ‘a great man at his writing desk’, calmly in control of the technology. Blériot, stoically confronting a technical problem that threatened his performance, was transformed once in the air: now ‘One sees his straight body over the wings, his legs are stretched down like a part of the engine’. Henri Rougier, the altitude champion who had reached the height of 190 metres, seemed, at the end of this literary report, ‘so high that you had the impression of his being able to determine his position only in relation to the stars’.
Gabriele D’Annunzio had not come to Brescia simply to shine in society, but also to collect material with a view to his next novel. This prodigious child of Italian literature had become famous in 1889 with his first novel, Il Piacere, inaugurating the decadent style in Italy. Five other successful novels followed until 1900. In the mid-1890s D’Annunzio became acquainted with the work of Nietzsche, and began to combine psychologizing introspection with the theme of the superman. From the start of the new century, however, his creative energy began to decline, and the decadent dandy sought literary subjects suited to the coming new age. This was his mission in Brescia. He persuaded Glenn Curtis and Mario Calderara to take him up in their planes in order to taste the sensations of flight. D’Annunzio emerged transformed by this experience. He had found the subject for his new novel, Forse che sì, forse que no, published the following year, 1910.3
Two plots dovetailed here: the first, anchored in the heritage of D’Annunzio’s decadent period, depicts the complicated relationship that the aviator Paolo Tarsis had with two sisters and their brother, while the second adopted a virile and warlike tone, that of the modern superman.4 Tarsis and his friend Giulio Cambiaso had been comrades in the navy. Dreaming only of battle and heroism, they fled from the ‘outward discipline’ imposed on the military in time of peace. They travelled the East in search of adventures, and in Cairo met a French ornithologist, who ‘revealed to them the static sense of three dimensions towards the sky’. Tarsis and Cambiaso then built a light plane in order to join the ‘little aristocracy’ of aviators.5
The plot, structured around the antagonism between decadent love and virile friendship, contrasts three pairs of themes. The first two – woman/man and earth/sky – are classic, but the third – cars/planes – is more surprising and resolutely modernist. The tone of the novel is set by the first sentence, shaken by ‘the heroic wind of speed’. In this