At 02:57 PM 5/25/00 -0400, Tim Romano wrote:
>
>By flame for three days to South Horn, the bayou,
>the island of folk hairy and savage
>whom our Lixtae said were Gorillas.
>We cd. not take any man, but three of their women.
>Their men clomb up the crags,
>Rained stone, but we took three women
>who bit, scratched, wd. not follow their takers.
>Killed, flayed, brought back their pelts into Carthage.
>
>
>I have a clear sense of the ideological foundations of Pound's racism. But
>the man does not seem to me to have been capable of this kind of
>monstrosity. Has someone assembled convincing evidence that Pound was truly
>this inhumane in his race-thinking?

Would it be useful to rephrase that rhetorical question ("a question that
won't take yes for an answer") something like this?

In the ancient text Pound quotes, Hanno's men commit what most of us
well-fed readers of poetry would call a monstrosity. But the history of the
twentieth century has definitively demonstrated that monstrosity is just a
part of being human. Stanley Milgram's laboratory experiments are famous,
but they are really only confirmatory replications of earlier work carried
out in the field by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and, yes, Mussolini.

Now, a characteristic common to most documented monstrosities is that the
monsters themselves weren't conscious of being monsters. In our time, a few
monsters have laid claim to a redemptive advent of tragic recognition, but
as often as not that assertion has turned out to be simply a career move.
(I'm thinking of Albert Speer and Martin Heidegger.) And most of the
monsters -- the Eichmanns and the Molotovs, or for that matter the entirely
remorseless Christies and Bundys and Gacys -- didn't even get that far.
They plodded to their graves protesting their innocent banality.

No doubt Pound could have become a monster too if the circumstances of his
life had turned monstrous. There was nothing uniquely evil about the French
literary generation that gave birth to Drieu La Rochelle and Abel Bonnard
and Robert Brasillach. But give Pound special credit for this: in poems
like Canto 40, he showed us monstrousness _an sich_. Insofar as Pound's
metaphrase of Hanno is what the social scientists of our time would call
"value-free," it is a look into the heart of darkness. The darkness has
always been there, but Pound's language has helped us see farther into it.
And for me, the language that explores that darkness is more interesting
than the language that seeks an exit from itself into "the NOUS, the
ineffable crystal."

But was the creator of that language conscious of what he was doing? Was
Pound's racism a savage, all-destroying laughter, like Louis-Ferdinand
Celine's, or a mere nasty  psychic one-upmanship, like Brasillach's? The
answer to a question like that would bear on the content of the poetry,
just as Tim's question does, but it might also give us some perspective on
the form.

Jonathan Morse