Poetry · Chapter
Lions’ Jaws explained
This chapter satirizes the artistic and sexual rivalries among Danriel Gabrunzio, Raminetti, and Bapini, depicting their flamboyant posturing, manifestos, and manipulations of women.
What happens
This chapter satirizes the artistic and sexual rivalries among Danriel Gabrunzio, Raminetti, and Bapini, depicting their flamboyant posturing, manifestos, and manipulations of women. It culminates in Gabrunzio's political violation of Fiume, asserting dominance over his competitors.
Themes in this chapter
Sexuality and Gender
The chapter explores sexual conquest, manipulation of women, and gender dynamics through the rivalries of Gabrunzio, Raminetti, and Bapini.
Art and Aesthetics
Satirizes avant-garde art movements, manifestos, and the commodification of art through the flabbergast movement and Gabrunzio's theatricality.
Characters to notice
- Danriel Gabrunzio
Portrayed as a flamboyant, lecherous artist who perfumes his mise-en-scène, receives bare virgins, and ultimately violates Fiume.
- Raminetti
Leader of the flabbergast movement, cracks a circus-master whip, possesses women of two generations, and gets short sentences for obstructing thoroughfares.
- Giovanni Bapini
Erudite philosopher experimenting with auto-hypnotic God-head, joins flabbergastism, publishes comments linking women to plumbing, and advertises his ugliness as an aphrodisiac.
- Mary
Referred to as Nima Lyo, Anim Yol, Imna Oly, a secret service buffoon to the Woman's Cause who petitions to be the mother of a flabbergast child.
Key passages
“Riding the sunset Danriel Gabrunzio corrects the lewd precocity of Raminetti and Bapini with his sonorous violation of Fiume and drops his eye into the fatal lap of Italy.”
Gabrunzio asserts dominance over his rivals by dramatically seizing Fiume, a political act that symbolizes his final triumph.
Climactic event blending artistic rivalry with political conquest.
“These amusing men discover in their mail duplicate petitions to be the lurid mother of 'their' flabbergast child from Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias Imna Oly (secret service buffoon to the Woman's Cause).”
The men receive multiple identical letters from a woman using pseudonyms, offering to bear their child as a parody of feminist activism.
Satirizes both the men's egos and the Woman's Cause.