File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 58


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



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