[continued from previous post]
Occasionally Pound's texts, even his most thoroughly Confucianist texts,
become dialectical despite his intentions, leading the reader to come to
conclusions which are not in keeping with Pound's stated adherence to
Confucian orthodoxy. For instance, in the China Cantos' treatment of the
period of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1126 A.D.), we find the single
reference to a Chinese peasant rebel in all the Cantos. His name is Ouang
Siaopo (Wang Xiao-bo).
and there arose in the province of Sse'tchuen a revolt
because of the greed of the Mandarins
Not content with their salaries
began to bleed merchants for licenses
which new damn tax made money so scarce in that
province
that men cdn't buy the necessities.
Therefore Ouang Siaopo of the people
demanded just retribution
and they went against Tsing-chin city, and
took
Pong chan
by violence and cut open the governor's belly
which they filled up with silver
(bit of what he had extorted)
(55.295).
The concise reference to Ouang Siaopo, like other references in the Cantos,
may lead the reader outside the work to seek information in other texts.
Judging from the Cantos as a whole, Pound's own view of the rebel was
consistent with the Confucian view that peasant revolts merely reflect
"moral decay and the loss of social equilibrium." This is the "discovery"
which Pound would wish his readers to make, if they did further research.
But the intertextual dialectic, which the act of reading the Cantos
naturally engenders, yields discoveries which cast into doubt the very
nature of Confucian society, as Pound wishes to portray it. Wu Tien-wei
points out that
Just as the peasant revolts were aimed at over-
throwing the existing social order that the
Confucianists tried to defend, so the leaders
of peasant uprisings usually held Confucius
in contempt and criticized Confucianism
(Wu Tien-wei, 63).
This was apparently true of Ouang Siaopo, who was, according to other
sources, responding to more than a mere currency crisis and demanding more
than a "just distribution" in the sense which Pound understands it. During
the Northern Song period, when Ouang Siaopo appeared
the gap between the ruling class of landlords
and bureaucrats and the people was increasing.
To consolidate their power, the rulers were
compelled to mollify the landowners by not
restricting the enclosure of land. Consequently
the concentration of land in the hands of the
big families grew apace, while the peasants lost
their lands and were either driven out of their
villages or debased as semi-serfs . . .
Under the circumstances, peasant revolts
occurred sporadically. As early as 993, a revolt
in Sichuan led by Wang Xiao-bo gained a following
of thousands of people within a fortnight. Wang
raised the slogan "the equalization of wealth
between the rich and the poor," the first such
revolutionary slogan ever proposed
(Wu Tien-wei, 68).
Pound's reference to a figure such as Ouang Siaopo in the Cantos, and his
use of ideograms such as ** T'ai P'ing, were by no means designed to elicit
sympathy for peasant rebellions; much less were they intended to encourage
the reader to consider the importance of class conflict in historical
development. The ideogrammic technique, which purports to "present one
facet and then another . . . " with the aim of providing a "just
revelation," in practice, is used in the Cantos only to present certain
facets. Nothing in Chinese history which appears to contradict the basic
tenets of fascism, is deliberately illuminated, though one catches an
occasional glimpse of something outside this ideological field.
If the political struggle of the middle of the 20th century is
characterized by the struggle between fascism, communism and bourgeois
parliamentarianism, then the "Poundian supra-dialectic," as it reflects this
struggle, strives to sublimate the latter two philosophies and elevate
fascism to the supreme level accorded to the Absolute in a Hegelian
synthesis. This is a classic fascist dialectical procedure. What makes
Pound's supra-dialectic unique is the way he tacitly admits the
impossibility of finding justification for the totalitarian synthesis in an
examination of Western history, though he does "filter out" of his
presentation, so to speak, much which runs counter to the goals of the
fascist experiment. One might cite here his omission of any reference to
Livy, who from a bourgeois viewpoint was notable for his advocacy of the
rule of law, and who, from the Marxian perspective, was noteworthy for
frequently observing that one of the motive forces in Roman history was "the
increasing bitterness between the masses and the ruling class" (Livy, 2.23).
To conclude, Pound's fascist political ideology, as expressed in the
Cantos, and elsewhere, is not only thoroughly consistent with Confucian
political philosophy as he interprets it, but is also strongly dependent on
it. His use of certain ideograms to symbolize fascist ideological
principles is founded on more than a mere desire to find parallels between
Mussolini, the Roman Emperors and the Confucian Kings. Pound, having
surveyed European socio-political history, finds his totalitarian vision on
precarious ground. He intuitively recognizes that authoritarian government
has little chance of success if it has to find historical justification in
the chronicles of European events, or philosophical justification in the
writings of the greatest thinkers of classical antiquity, such as Aristotle
and Plato. Pound is dependent on Confucian China for his political
philosophy because, unlike the more blithe fascist, he demands an ideology
which has been "tested," found to succeed, and is embodied in a classical
literary canon. Having found such an ideology in Confucianism, he wants it
applied to contemporary socio-political reality. This is essentially what
is represented by the axe in the character Hsin1 *and by the phrase "Make it
new."
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
|
