Good and Bad / Good and Evil Pound, Céline, and Fascism
The Pound Tradition is a much debated context for poetics. While Ezra Pound was a major proponent of innovation in modernist form, and thus progressive in aesthetic terms, his authoritarian dogmatism, the Rome Radio broadcasts and their anti-Semitic content, and the dispute over his canonization after his award of the Bollingen Prize (1948) have kept his reception in doubt. What should a politically conscious, formally innovative poet make of the paradox of Ezra Pound? Bob Perelman addresses this troubling dark side of modernism, framed by Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between good/bad and good/evil in The Genealogy of Morals and its later use for Nazi ideology. For Perelman, readings of Pound’s poetry as aesthetically “good”—in its progressive techniques of “direct treatment of the thing” and its rejection of sentiment—mask an expulsion of unwanted psychic material (after Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”) that makes poetic form complicit with despicable politics—the expulsion and destruction of the Jews and other groups. Perelman goes on to read the psychic abjection of difficult “material” in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novels as a model for anti-Semitism in fascism, showing how Pound’s formal construction of value in The Cantos connects his diatribes against Jews, usury, and cultural degeneracy with the value-making assumptions of poetry. Perelman’s essay is a courageous challenge to examine the psychic mechanisms of literary form as inherently political and moral.
We use the terms good and bad when discussing writing; we reserve good and evil for politics. To call writing evil seems exaggerated. A good writer can have bad politics, we say, treating politics aesthetically, which is much the easiest way. Pound and Céline had lousy politics, we say, but they’re good writers. Since their political statements are often so monstrous, since supporting Hitler and Mussolini is no longer a live option, and since Pound and Céline both, in various ingenuous to disingenuous ways, recanted, it’s convenient to dismiss their politics as having arisen from some psychological defect and to look at what’s good in their writing in a purely aesthetic context. But politics, aesthetics, and psychology are so intertwined in their work as to provide a chance to explode the fiction of a purely aesthetic or formal consideration of writing.
To start with an unfair comparison. Take the Compleynt of Artemis in Canto XXX:
Pity spareth so many an evil thing.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
All things are made foul in this season,
This is the reason, none may seek purity
Having for foulnesse pity
And things growne awry;
No more do my shaftes fly
To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne
But rotteth away. (147)
Compare Himmler, speaking to the SS group leaders in 1943:
“The Jewish people are to be exterminated,” says every party member. “That’s clear, it’s part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.” And then they all come along, the eighty million upstanding Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew…. Not one has had the stomach for it. Most of you know what it is to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet … to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history. (In Miller, 79)
I find it hard to believe, but as I watch myself reading, I see myself feeling as much anger towards Pound’s words as towards Himmler’s. Clearly my feelings have no sense of scale. After all, Himmler is a mass murderer talking to an audience of mass murderers, exhorting them to kill with a firmer sense of purpose. But his language is a dull blend of pep talk, nagging, and that horrible mix of disguised arousal (“made us hard”) and cliché at the end. The fact that its reference is absolutely real makes its bathetic surface stupefyingly pathological.
So why be mad at Pound? He wrote those lines as a supporter of Mussolini, but before Hitler came to power. And what is he talking about? Artemis, for god’s sake. Meaning what? Is he complaining that Poetry is publishing too much Amygism? That people are listening to Brahms and not Antheil?
But reference isn’t exactly the point, nor is the exact depth of Pound’s commitment to fascism. It is true that there are passages in his radio broadcasts where he calls for Jews to be murdered and preaches eugenics; in a letter he writes, “With 6 million jews on the premises, the U.S. has 5 million 900 thousand walking advertisements for the Nazi regime” (in Nicholls, 155); in the Pisan Cantos, after his supposed recantation, he writes, “and the only people who did anything of any interest were H., M. and / Frobenius” (LXXIV [436]), and twice in the later Cantos he speaks of Hitler as “furious from perception” (XC [606] and CIV [741]). But beyond the damning particulars of Pound’s personal history, beyond the analogies that are present between the Compleynt and Himmler’s address, there is the fact that, as writing, the Compleynt is so good. Pound’s lines have art, and are not displaceable. They stand there unavoidably perceptible and particular. Archaism, rhyme, half rhyme, long vowels, wrenched emphatic word order, enjambment—a crude telegraphic list to forestall a long discussion of terribly effective sound patterning: “clean slayne.”
It’s right there that my anger lodges.
I can see much of Pound’s work, holographically, fractally, in those two words. They fit together like granite blocks, so “clean,” “hard,” “virile.” Consider when he leaves Hell in Canto XVI: “the passage clean-squared in granite” (69); or “With usura hath no man a house of good stone / each block cut smooth and well fitting” (XLV [229]); or the way he so easily eliminates societies for lack of such hardness and precision: “‘No civilization’ said Knittl, they got no stone.’ (Hrooshia)” (LXXXIX [604]). Or consider the clean/rot separation which governs so much of what he says, or the ay of “slayne,” its erotic, pagan archaism.
There’s power on Pound’s page, and it’s shocking how writing so good makes such an accurate anthem to the glories of the SS. This is not mere irony, as when a death-camp commander whiles away his spare time listening to Beethoven or reading Goethe. The rhyme between Pound and Himmler is not fortuitous.
Pound pretends to a god-like moral perfection, and strives to make his art perfect. Céline, on the other hand, aspires in the opposite direction, and thus makes for much more “comforting” and “amusing” reading. Words, for him, are definitely not instruments of perfection. “Our sentences are hard put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation …” (Journey, 291). […]
At this point, it will be useful to bring in Nietzsche. His discussion of good-and-bad and good-and-evil is helpful in comprehending how Pound’s transcendent fascism is related to the more hysterical, anarchic variety indulged in by Céline.
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains that the term good originates with the nobility. It conflates their power and their essence; they are, and they are good. Good and bad originally meant good and not-so-good: noble, fair-haired, tough and healthy; or not. But, Nietzsche’s originary narrative goes on, if the warrior and priest castes aren’t synonymous, there’s trouble: impotent vengeful priests, the worst kind of enemies. These are the Jews who “dared to invert the aristocratic value equations: good/ noble/powerful/ beautiful/happy/favored-of-the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that ‘only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed’” (167–68). This “Jewish inversion of values” produced the moral categories of good and evil, which are therefore a slavish invention; Christian love, sickly and anti-life, grows out of this damaged root. A key point is that the “good” of the good/bad pair, the powerful nobles, are precisely the “evil” of the good/evil pair, the powerful slave masters. […]
Listing the primary, most powerful terms first, the two sets could be redefined as Strong/bad and Evil/weak. Another point to keep in mind is that there’s a narrative involved: the Strong are originary, archaic, ancestral; the Evil are historical. What “the poets sing about” is always set back in the mythic past.
Céline belongs to the second pair. But where Nietzsche places slaves and nobles in a national, cultural setting, for Céline in Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan the stage is much smaller, and more privatized: the family is the matrix where the Evil keep the weak in their place. It’s a grim and disfiguring battle. In Journey, the narrator, living in a tenement, overhears some parents beating their daughter:
First they tied her up; it took a long time, like getting ready for an operation. That gave them a kick. “You little skunk!” cried the father. “The filthy slut!” went the mother. […] Meanwhile the child was squeaking like a mouse in a trap. “That won’t help you, you little scum. You’ve got it coming! Oh, yes! You’ve got it coming!” … They gave her a terrible thrashing. I listened to the end to make sure that I wasn’t mistaken, that this was really going on…. I was helpless….
And then I heard the old man saying:
“All right, old girl! Step lively! In there!” As happy as a lark.
He said that to the mother, and then the door to the next room would slam behind them. Once she said to him, I heard her: “Oh, Julien, I love you so much, I could eat your shit, even if you made turds this big …” (229–30)
This sense of detachment, of listening in horror, which might ultimately connote some moral purpose, vanishes in Death on the Installment Plan. Ferdinand, the narrator, Céline’s namesake, becomes that abused child.
Childhood there is a disgusting fecal prison—his ass is never clean—with his father constantly bellowing and his mother whining at him in reaction to the mental and economic hopelessness of their lives. For hundreds of pages they frantically struggle to get out of debt, the father working in an insurance office, hating it and terrified of being fired, and the mother, lame, limping around Paris to sell second-hand lace. They constantly feel themselves falling short and compensate by foisting their dreams onto Ferdinand, who fails miserably at everything.
He goes to school and learns nothing. He has one moment of success, passing his examinations (even though he seems to know nothing more than that there are four seasons) and receiving a proud hug from his father. But the fact that he’s shit in his pants turns this triumph into more mortification.
Out of school, Ferdinand looks for work. It’s hot, hopeless, his suit is boiling, his shoes pinch, he’s dirty. Somehow, he manages to find a lousy job as a jeweler’s errand boy, but then he gets seduced by the Boss’s wife, a graphic cow; there’s a sex scene, with Ferdinand humiliated by his black feet and, as usual, his unwiped ass. The seduction is part of a swindle to steal a gold scarab he’s carrying around in his pocket for the Boss (castration) and to pin the blame on him. The guilt sticks, of course: he’s fired.
Days, months, or years later—there’s no time in Céline’s writing, only the accumulation and evacuation of stress—he’s sent on a sensible errand by his mother. The scene (308–17) reads like a cross between Jack and the Beanstalk and Oedipus Rex. At first the fairy tale predominates. His mother sends him out to buy a careful measure of this and that—“seventy centimes’ worth of their best ham for your father … three portions of cream cheese and if you can remember a head of lettuce, not too wide open”—but of course he completely screws up, ending up in a drunken delirium amid a pile of stuporous bodies in the mud of a park lake which they have drained dry by their thirst on a boiling summer day. (Céline is no realist.)
Back home at two in the morning, we’re in the land of Oedipus. Ferdinand is drunk, smeared with mud and cream cheese; the father, suffering from boils, still up practicing his typing in a pathetic attempt at career advancement, is furious: the mother is lying in the bed, “naked up to her stomach,” as the father sees it. He begins a typical Célinian tirade, pages and pages of obsessive, static nagging: “As corrupt as three dozen jailbirds! … Profligate! Scoundrel! Idler! And then some! He’s calamity personified!” etc. (314).
Father and son fight, almost to the death. Céline makes sure we feel the father’s pus, fat, blood: “I dig into the meat … It’s soft … He’s drooling … I tug … I pull off a big chunk of moustache.” At the end of the fight, the father has turned into a baby. “I squeeze some more. I knock his head against the tiles … He goes limp … he’s soft under my legs … He sucks my thumb” (316–17).
But if the parents are the fountain of endless horror and disgust, the one good, sane figure in the book is Uncle Edouard, who is constantly coming to Ferdinand’s rescue. […] These good uncles represent kind fathers, not fulminating irrationally, not covered with boils, not economic failures. Céline longs to have the hopelessness and rage that he sees within the petit bourgeois family resolved without altering its structure.
But the hopelessness and rage have left their mark: the child, the self, will always be a mess, a defect. Just as his parents feel victimized by society and by their problem son, Céline asserts his identical status: “I stuck to my convictions. I too felt myself to be a victim in every way” (289–90).
These are the feelings of an abused child, and, as Alice Miller shows in For Your Own Good, were a possible psychological basis for the rise of Fascism. Mein Kampf contains descriptions of family life that are very much like those in Céline’s first two novels. The same cycle of debt, despair, nagging, self-loathing, and violence prevails in the midst of hopeless pretense towards bourgeois respectability. Hitler was regularly beaten and humiliated by his bastard-risen-to-civil-servant father, who always wore his uniform, insisted on being addressed as “Herr,” and, when he wanted Hitler to come to him, would whistle on two fingers. But Hitler clung all the more tightly to the family model of power of which he was the victim. A world without Father meant Communism—swarms, chaos, death:
The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature [Father] and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength [Father] by the mass of numbers and their dead weight…. The result of an application of this law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet. (65–66)
Here, the apotheosis of the father conflates the historical (the aristocracy, i.e., feudalism) with the transhistorical (Nature and eternity) in ways that will be quite similar to Pound’s. This granting of omnipotence to a finite source of damage was the initial Big Lie of the Nazi regime. It was, obviously, quite a popular solution. Céline, in the first part of his career, avoided any such solutions, instead clinging obsessively to his devastating presentation of the problem. In his hands it was so funny, so horrific, and his use of slang gave voice to such a large, hitherto-silent segment of society, that his first two books were immensely popular. Not so popular in France as National Socialism in Germany, but still, for a novelist, not bad.
Quite possibly ill at ease with such success, in the late thirties he staked this literary capital in a passionate and hysterical political gesture, transforming himself from a nihilistic novelist, acclaimed by the left, to a virulently anti-Semitic right-wing pamphleteer, publishing Mea Culpa, Bagatelles for a Massacre, School for Corpses, and Les Beaux Draps. The pamphlets are violently anti-Semitic, pacifist, and somewhat diffidently fascist, but, throughout, threads of self-loathing are mingled together with the anti-Semitism, and large patches of anarchy and even a little vague communism blur the commitment to fascism. At first, in right-wing circles and later in Vichy France, Céline was acclaimed as a famous spokesman. But by the time the third pamphlet came out, Céline, as well as being despised by the left, was considered useless by the right and was ignored. After the war, of course, he was scum. Throughout, and to the end of his life, he “felt himself to be a victim in every way.” […]
The pamphlets reproduce the structure of the Célinian family. The above represents the horrible father, the existing cultural institutions. The child-individual is more worthless than ever: no longer merely unwashed, he is now pure shit. Religion, the father-institution, has made this explicit. It “grabbed hold of man in the cradle and broke the bad news to him right away…. ‘You little amorphous particle of putrescence, you’ll never be anything except garbage. By birth you’re just shit’” (Mea Culpa, in Thiher, 229–30). There is also the good father or uncle, now a beneficent dictator. Céline has a tepid vision of “all of France in the same family, Jews excluded of course, a single family, a single dad, dictator and respected” (Les Beaux Draps, in Kristeva, 177). “Jews excluded of course”—but, unfortunately for Céline, his vision of the Jew is so polymorphous that it includes almost everyone. England and the Church are Jewish; Stalin is Jewish; France is Jewish. The Jews are “camouflaged, disguised, chameleon-like, they change names like they cross frontiers, now they pass themselves off for Bretons, Auvergnats, Corsicans …” (Bagatelles, in Kristeva, 181). It’s not exactly that for Céline the self is the Jew, but that the entire constellation of power and loathing—the Evil/weak scenario—that the self feels in the family has become crystallized in the figure of the Jew, now omnipotent (Evil), now despicable (weak). […]
Céline finally becomes the ultimate monad, the abused child, the self-hating petit bourgeois, a mercenary army of one in the “war of all against all.” […] His last words [in Rigadoon] speak of a failed invasion of the Chinese, with the yellow vermin drowning in vats of brandy, white France’s last line of defense.
Céline may have made the switch in enemies to the imaginary Chinese, but the charged particle, what triggered the figuration of an enemy, was the Jew, who of course was also central in the Evil/weak scenarios of Nietzsche, Hitler, and Pound.
They are not the same scenarios, however. In Nietzsche’s Genealogy, the Jew was a philosophical moment, the ancient producer of the Bible. For Pound and Hitler, on the other hand, the Jew was the essence of what was wrong with modern life: he was the incarnation of Finance.
Marx, in “On the Jewish Question,” sheds some interesting light on this. He’s making a basic distinction between civic (i.e., economic) and political society. In feudal times, he says, there was no separation between the two: one’s economic status was one’s political status, with the lords, and finally the king, divinely in control of all wealth. The bourgeois revolution fractured this unity, creating 1) economic man, an asocial unit with certain “natural” rights, all of which translate finally into nothing more than illimitable economic activity, and 2) political man, “an allegorical, moral person” (234). Making use of the Jews’ historical position in Germany, and of a German pun equating “Judaism” with “business,” Marx then asserts that the Jew is the typical civic man, that “civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew [i.e., the businessman] from its own entrails.” […] One of the losses entailed by the money economy is that it dissolves any sense of place: “The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general” (238–39). This is especially disturbing because nationalism, besides projecting an image of familial wholeness, is the nearest thing in the contemporary world to the lost sense of feudal wholeness.
Marx’s analysis sounds quite like Pound in places, except that Pound is not punning when he says “Jew.” Money has deprived the entire world of its specific value: “With Usura hath no man a house of good stone … no picture is made to endure nor to live with / but it is made to sell and sell quickly” (XLV [229]). The Jew stands between Pound and his goals in two ways: 1) the modern Jew, as money incarnate, represents the society which commodifies everything, including writing, and thus the Jew makes a very convenient enemy for the marginalized intellectual; Pound is constantly harkening back to some form of feudalism, European or Confucian, where there would be identity between the political and the economic, and where there would be no commodities, only aesthetic objects: stone, bread, emerald, poetry. And 2) the historic Jew, the “inverter of aristocratic values” in Nietzsche’s sense, stands for the moment when the weak, the manufacturers of the Evil/weak pair, somehow managed to push the Strong back into archaic never-never land. Pound constantly laments that “the Gods have not returned” (CXIII [787]): the Jew would be the prime villain, having introduced monotheism and incarnating money.
In wanting to transcend the money economy via art, Pound, far from being iconoclastic, is echoing a primary Victorian concern. Fifty years before him, Matthew Arnold had extolled “Culture” as the vehicle for overcoming the tawdriness of commodity culture and for erasing all class conflict. Culture, says Arnold, “seeks to do away with classes, to make the best that has been known and thought in the world current anywhere…. The men of culture are the true apostles of equality” (Culture and Anarchy, 70). Here, an aesthetic quality, “the best that has been known and thought,” seeks to replace that religion of political culture, money, that uniter of all abstract economic cogs, with a more mysterious currency, art, which is not exchangeable but which always retains its specific qualities, its virtù in Pound’s usage.
Arnold calls his standards of value “touchstones,” passages from the classics against which to measure all other mental expression. […] The touchstone of all touchstones, the passage which can survive intact as only a single line, is “In His will is our peace.” Arnold’s Culture preaches a similar acquiescence; however, for Arnold, the calming authority is not God but the State. “We want an authority, and we find nothing but jealous classes, checks, and a deadlock: culture suggests the idea of the State. We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self” (96–97).
Underneath this neutral superlative, “best,” lurks the figure of power, the Strong. Arnold quotes Joubert approvingly: “Force till right is ready, and till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler” (“The Function of Criticism,” 138). The values from an ahistoric past justify a transcendentally natural status quo facing a permanently deferred future. In the meantime, Culture naturalizes the State by being the mask of authority, presence, and common sense, all the more total for being internalized: “The deeper I go in my own consciousness … the more it seems to tell me that I have no rights at all, only duties; and that men get this notion of rights from a process of abstract reasoning” (Culture and Anarchy, 175).
Pound had Mussolini’s dictum, “Freedom is not a right but a duty,” engraved on his stationery.
Marx agrees with Arnold that abstraction breeds rights, but for Marx the “natural rights of man” are the result of the economic abstraction—the endless exchangeability produced by the money economy. The rise of capitalism coincides with a similar process of abstraction in mental habits: the ascendancy of logic (e.g., Utilitarianism). “Logic is the money of the mind…. [It] is alienated thinking and therefore thinking which abstracts from nature and from real man” (in Hyde, 264).
Pound’s ideogrammatic method is thus not just a fortuitous discovery out of Fenollosa but an attempt to circumvent the money economy by presenting “unalienated thinking”: unmediated particulars. Pound specifically opposes the ideogram to the syllogism (“Sapor, the flavour … not to be split by syllogization”; CV [748]). In Pound’s presentation of Fenollosa’s description of the ideogram, the primary example is the word for red in Chinese, which brings together pictures of “rose,” “cherry,” “iron rust,” and “flamingo.” There is no convention, only the immediacy of perception. Pound explains approvingly that “the Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS” (ABC of Reading, 22).
The components of the ideogram are, for Pound, natural signs, impossible to misconstrue. In China, one locus for Pound’s notion of totality, everyone could read “by nature.” But this can only be reproduced in our mercantile age by the genius, who is equivalent to the imaginary natural man of archaic wholeness. “Gaudier Brzeska, who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY. He said, ‘Of course, you can see it’s a horse’” (21).
Here, “the real shape of things” invokes the authority of Nature, just as Nietzsche’s mythic good (Strong) also is backed by Nature: the nobles are more natural than the slaves—stronger, healthier, better looking. But the authoritative, immediate, visible, real—rose, cherry, etc.—is perpetually shading over into the authoritarian mystery revealed only to the elect.
This dichotomy is present throughout the poem:
“We have,” said Mencius, “but phenomena.”
monumenta. In nature are signatures
needing no verbal tradition,
oak leaf never plane leaf. (LXXXVII [573])
Phenomena are utterly immediate, visible, but somehow it takes an authority, Mencius, to tell us this. Phenomena become monuments to genius. A few lines down: “Monsieur F. saw his mentor / composed almost wholly of light.”
On the other hand, The Cantos are filled with an ever growing mass of ignorance and blindness, from the sailors who fail to recognize Dionysus in Canto II to “the living” in the fragment of CXV who are “made of cardboard.” The truth that is so visible to the elect becomes “arcanum” by the end of the poem. […] Pound’s use of “Donna mi Prega” in Canto XXXVI is typical of the poem’s disposition toward its readers: “Wherefore I speak to the present knowers / Having no hope that low-hearted / Can bring sight to such reason” (177).
Pound, through Cavalcanti, is speaking of Love here, and although the tone of the translation is ethereal, it would be wrong to take Pound’s vision of Love as nonsexual. The emphasis on sex throughout The Cantos is obvious: there are a number of passages similar to the ode to procreation in Canto XLVII: “By prong have I entered these hills” (238) etc. Sex—correct sex—is explicitly a divine act and is central for Pound: the Eleusinian mysteries are, he says, predicated on sex; Confucian authority is sexual: “that man’s phallic heart is from heaven” (XCIX [697]); even the seemingly “chaste” light imagery in the late cantos is explicitly sexual, constantly associated with procreation (see Sieburth, 129–58). Light, for Pound, is a kind of divine sperm; and the brain is specifically spermatic:
It is more than likely that the brain itself, is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid…. Let us say quite simply that light is a projection from the luminous fluid, from the energy that is in the brain. (“Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love,” 203, 210)
Far-fetched as the above assertions sound, Pound is enabled by the contingent physicality of this intellective, procreative light to produce some of his most characteristically beautiful images, as when he speaks of light flowing or raining, being solid or tensile. And this conception is clearly of great personal importance to him. He speaks of “the thought of genius” being “a sudden out-spurt of mind” and equates his activity as an intellectual with sex: “Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation” (“Postscript,” 204, 208).
But, as the last quote shows, this procreative, loving light has its shadow. Love, for Pound, is inseparable from authority. On a social-sexual level, he is absurdly sexist: woman is “a chaos / An octopus / A biological process” (XXIX [144]); whereas sperm is “the form-creator … which compels the ovule to evolve in a given pattern” (“Postscript,” 206). Pound is treating the Male (or sperm) here as Nietzsche’s narrative treats the nobility: there is hierarchy without conflict. But, for Pound, political authority is threatened by the interchangeability produced by money, and procreative authority is circumscribed (circumcised) by monotheism. Correct sex—light, authority, order, beauty, natural increase—is continually being swamped by perverted sex—usury, kikes, buggery, darkness. This is most patent in Canto XCI (610–13), where a long apotheosis of light beginning “that the body of light come forth / from the body of fire” and ending with images of crystalline light “overflooding, light over light … the light flowing, whelming the stars” is set next to:
Democracies electing their sewage
till there is no clear thought about holiness
a dung flow from 1913
and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud
and the american beaneries
Filth under filth (613–14)
This split between light and dark is absolute, and all the terms involved are tightly associated in a fundamentalist rhyme. […]
The marketplace represents the fall from mystical presence, which only is available to the authority. Pound’s position is most revealed at the point when he’s being interviewed at St. Elizabeth’s, preparatory to pleading insanity. For years, he’s been trying to save the world, writing letter after letter to world leaders, and, via radio, addressing the whole world. But suddenly, as he says to one examiner, “There was no use to discuss his ideas about monetary theories and economics because most people … would not be able to … comprehend them” (Torrey, 201). The Truth is authoritative and ineffable, equally. The teacher merges into the high priest. […]
Action is Pound’s hope for transcending the money economy that leaves no room for him to be anything more than an aesthete, an epiphenomenon. Only by action can he realize his feudal fantasies of power and presence, and, finally, of paradise.
The Boss, of course, is action incarnate:
Having drained off the muck by Vada
From the marshes, by Circeo, where no one else wd. Have
drained it.
Waited 2000 years, ate grain from the marshes;
Water supply for ten million, another one million “vani”
that is rooms for people to live in.
XI of our era. (XLI [202])
The contradictions of the money economy are now gone, and, as the date suggests, the millennium is here, inaugurated by Italian fascism. The masses react—in dialect (working-class language is always, for Pound, a more or less amusing deformation)—with insane gratitude: “‘Noi ci facciam sgannar [i.e., scannar] per Mussolini’ / said the commandante della piazza” (We would let ourselves be butchered for Mussolini; XLI [202]). […]
The Cantos, in which historical particulars were to stand undistorted, end up by dissolving difference into an immaterialist and authoritarian idealism. The Fasa and their king, Gassir, “rhyme” with Mussolini and the Salô Republic, aestheticizing and canceling history.
Nor does Pound’s use of the aesthetic overcome the political and economic contradictions it’s aimed at; it merely repeats them. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound, in condemning the reductive logic of industrialism and political economy, mimes that action, making Jefferson and Mussolini interchangeable ideogrammatic units:
If you are hunting up bonds of sympathy between T.J. and the Duce, put it first that they both hate machinery or at any rate the idea of cooping up men and making ’em all into UNITS, unit production, denting in the individual man, reducing him to a mere amalgam. (63) […]
In a money economy, value is abstract and can, I think, be usefully compared to the way meaning floats above the words in Saussure’s model: in both cases, there will always be a gap because there is no organic authority backing either meaning or value. Pound is always castigating the nonnatural circulation of money: hoarding and, especially, usury do not follow the natural order. The proper relation of authority to money will finally produce, as he sees it, a transparent, immediate, natural wealth: “ate grain from the marshes.” Pound’s desire for a language without syntax, where words would have their full value, aims at a similar immediacy: Osiris before he was torn apart, before he lost his phallus.
Pound the economist is constantly repeating Mussolini’s claim that the problem of production has been solved. And Pound the poet is constantly repeating his touchstones as if their value were completely transferable, their meaning unalterable. Yet the text that is actually produced, far from being naturally obvious, is notoriously privatized, with Pound’s mind the final arbiter of meaning and producer of value.
“The exact word,” the ch’ing ming that Pound finds to be the root of Confucianism and that is the root of his own practice as a poet, is finally a monad, not tainted with the negative difference that words have in Saussure’s model. The exact word has its virtù conferred on it by an act of authority: it’s the guinea stamp that makes value, Pound says (aware of the pun on his name), not the metal. Meaning comes directly from the phallus.
But Pound’s authority is a private mystery and can’t transcend the marketplace. This contradiction ultimately drove Pound to posit an “unwobbling pivot” of poetry and absolute rule, backed by the unlimited credit of Nature. So, grain becomes sacred, olive oil worthy of a rite; the polite remarks of a Mussolini become the words of a god. The more imaginary the Father, the more totally he is said to rule.
In the Evil/weak pairing, the weak are naturally obsessed with Evil, which has power over them. But in the Strong/bad pair, the Strong can’t really be bothered with noting the existence of the bad. The Strong tends towards self-universalization: “the whole tribe is from one man’s body.” Dissecting this fantasy along economic lines would yield Marx’s description of feudalism where “the unity of the state … inevitably appears as the special concern of a ruler and his servants, separated from the people” (232).
When the bourgeois monad (the weak) encounters his projection of this feudal wholeness (the Strong), the gaze of power is impossible to reciprocate or comprehend, one simply worships:
between the two pine trees, not Circe
but Circe was like that
coming from the house of smoothe stone
“not know which god”
nor could enter her eyes by probing
the light blazed behind her
nor was this from sunset
(CVI [754])
To make an unfair comparison again, this passage can be set beside the following account of another bourgeois monad, who found that looking at Hitler was a similar experience:
Hauptmann was introduced. The Führer shook hands with him and looked into his eyes. It was the famous gaze that made everybody tremble, the glance which once made a distinguished old lawyer declare that after meeting it he had but one desire, to be back home in order to master the experience in solitude. (Miller, 74)
Fascism was to transcend the atomization of contemporary capitalist society. In the “Limbs of Osiris,” Pound begins by seeing a career in poetry as something that would act as a bond between specialists: “Every man who does his own job really well has a latent respect for every other man who does his own job really well…. He gets his audience … [by proving] him[self] the expert.” But this specialization is transmuted into the universal truth of the genius. First Pound fetishizes words in a long simile, comparing them to giant cones filled with a complex electricity, then he asserts that the resultant energy is “the power of tradition, of centuries of race consciousness … which nothing short of genius understands” (33–34). […]
But for Pound to say that he could read the contemporary interest rates off any given painting—an act of genius-seeing like that of Gaudier-Brzeska—is to treat art in a profoundly abstract way, to give it a quantifiable value in the aesthetic marketplace. By filling The Cantos with gods, languages, quotes, Chinese and Egyptian characters, Pound is finally equivalent to the bourgeois interior decorator, the consumer-king acting out his fantasy of pre-market wholeness, purchasing uniqueness with interchangeable units.
Céline, the essential petit bourgeois, makes an excellent tool (club) with which to critique (smash) Pound’s pretensions. The next time Pound says
God’s eye art ’ou.
The columns gleam as if cloisonné,
The sky is leaded with elm boughs.
(CVI [755])
making the world his church, the petit bourgeois reader can come back with Céline: “But what does the grocer think of it … shit on the panorama!”
Céline at his best is utterly untranscendental—his fantasies are all presenttense paranoia—but that is the problem with him as well: his humor and shock is finally static. One’s resentment is gratified, but one is then stuck with that gratified resentment. Pound’s work, on the other hand, does present a model for a writing that takes on a significant portion of experience and tries to change it. But his fantasy of the Good/Strong, born out of the actual weakness of his position as marginalized intellectual, pointed his project in exactly the wrong direction—his work is a Mistake in unusually pure form.
This is valuable in that contemporary writing often can’t even be bothered to address the problem that might result in such a mistake. O’Hara’s apotheosis of personality communicates beautifully, but it eschews social change. […] On the other hand, both would-be Archaic poetry and language writing often assume social change. “The whole tribe is from one man’s body”—exactly wrong, twice. We don’t spring from Pound’s or Mussolini’s or the Great Sage’s mind/phallus, nor is it informative to define us as a tribe. But the next line does pose a necessary question: “What other way can you think of it?”
WORKS CITED
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Céline, Louis Ferdinand. Castle to Castle. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions, 1970.
———. Death on the Installment Plan. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions, 1971.
———. Journey to the End of the Night. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions, 1983.
———. Rigadoon. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: New Directions, 1975.
Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology. London: Verso, 1982.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1943].
Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage, 1983.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question.” Early Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregory Benton. New York: Vintage, 1975.
Miller, Alice. For Your Own Good. Trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
Nicholls, Peter. Ezra Pound, Politics, Economics, and Writing: A Study of The Cantos. Atlantic City, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1956.
Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, n.d.
———. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1975.
———. Certain Radio Speeches. Ed. W. Levy. Amsterdam: Cold Turkey Press, 1975.
———. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970.
———. “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.” Selected Prose. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.
———. Jefferson and/or Mussolini. London: S. Nott, 1935.
———. “Postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love by Remy de Gourmont.” Pavannes and Divagations. New York: New Directions, 1974.
———. Selected Prose. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.
Sieburth, Richard. Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont. Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 1978.
Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Thiher, Allen. Céline: The Novel as Delirium. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1972.
Torrey, E. Fuller. The Roots of Treason. San Diego: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
PUBLISHED: Excerpted from Marginality: Public and Private Language (1986), 6:6–25. KEYWORDS: modernism; psychoanalysis; politics; history.
LINKS: Bob Perelman, “Exchangeable Frames” (PJ 5), “Plotless Prose” (PJ 1), “Three Case Histories: Ross’s Failure of Modernism” (PJ 7); Jackson Mac Low, “Sketch toward a Close Reading of Three Poems from Bob Perelman’s Primer” (PJ 2); George Hartley, “Jameson’s Perelman: Reification and the Material Signifier” (Guide; PJ 7); Bruce Andrews, “Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis” (Guide; PJ 6); Charles Bernstein, “Writing and Method” (Guide; PJ 3); Norman Fischer, “Modernism, Postmodernism, and Values” (PJ 7); Ben Friedlander, “Laura Riding/Some Difficulties” (PJ 4); Doug Hall, Forgotten Tyrant (PJ 5); Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description” (PJ 9); Leslie Scalapino, “War/Poverty/Writing” (PJ 10); Scalapino and Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange” (Guide; PJ 9).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Writing/Talks (ed.; Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996); Braille (Ithaca, N.Y.: Ithaca House, 1975); 7 Works (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978); Primer (San Francisco: This, 1981); a.k.a. (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1984); To the Reader (Berkeley: Tuumba, 1984); The First World (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1987); Captive Audience (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1988); Face Value (New York: Roof, 1988); Virtual Reality (New York: Roof, 1993); The Future of Memory (New York: Roof, 1998); Ten to One: Selected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wes-leyan University Press, 1999); Iflife (New York: Roof, 2006); with Rae Armantrout et al., The Grand Piano; with Francie Shaw, Playing Bodies (New York: Granary, 2004).