Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2000 17:25:15 +0300 (EET DST) From: Fredrik Hertzberg LIT <fhertzbe-AT-ra.abo.fi> Subject: Re: VS: PLC: odours, races etc. (was Fairness to Faulkner) On Wed, 9 Aug 2000 Boris.Vidovic-AT-sea.fi wrote: > Another issue (maybe more interesting and potentially more polemicly > charged): how one can relate (or simply enjoy) to the works of art that > are embedded in a unexeptable political attitude? Can we enjoy watching > pyramides although we know that hundreds of slaves died building them? > How to relate to Leni Riefenstahl's films, 'Birth of a Nation', Celine, > Pound? I don't have ready answers but would appreciate others' thoughts > on this issue. I came to think of an interseting quote when I read the above, it is from the distinguished American literary scholar and professor Jerome McGann, writing in Towards a Literature of Knowledge (U Chicago P 1989) about Pound: "Poetry must have sympathy for the devil, nor can that demon be a beast for other people. Poems come to show the human face of what we would rather imagine as inhuman. The _Cantos_ are not vitiated or ruined by their fascism - that is merely a sentimental way of reading them, a way of allowing us to preserve our own confidence in the possession of their truth. The fascism of the poem is the work's ultimate experience of metamorphosis - for Pound, obviously, but for us his readers as well. The poem forces us to the brink of an ultimate spiritual catastrophe that corresponds exactly to what we associate with Pound. The experience tells us that evil is what human beings bring into the world, that evil is what we do (though it is not the only thing we do). Fascism, like Ezra Pound, occupied the human world, and occupied it in a powerful, even a dominant, way. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity for evil. Fascism is one way human beings decided to be human in the twentieth century, and the _Cantos_ shows us how this was, how this might have been, true. Though the name for this way has gone out of fashion, it is not a way that has yet been abandoned, or that can be forgotten. It is our touchstone for reading the _Cantos_." And another quote on Pound, by Charles Bernstein, prof. of Poetry and Poetics, in _A Poetics_ (Harvard UP 1992): "I do not, however, equate Pound's politics with Pound's poetry. _The Cantos_ is in many ways radically (radially) at odds with the tenets of his fascist ideals. In this sense, Pound has systematically misinterpreted the nature of his own literary production; refused, that is, to recognize in it the process he vilified as usury and Jewishness... the power of his method - his poetic ear above his spouting mouth - was such that his rantings are absorbed into _The Cantos_ not as truth but as befouled rubble, not as privileged material but as debased material, framed and denounced by those readers able to pick and choose for themselves... It is always revealing to ask of a work: what does it serve and how? The answer to this question, however, is not identical to what the worker's intentions might be. A response to this challenge is that some work may usefully evade any single social or political claim made for or against it because of the nature of its contradictions, surpluses, and negations." Fred --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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