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- Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
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En Lin Wei <[log in to unmask]>
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Sat, 12 Aug 2000 08:34:51 GMT
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>Unless someone cares enough about a poet's work to
>tlk about it, it will eventually vanish. ("What thou lovest well
>endures, the rest is drowss.") And so I want to ask Wei why he is so
>obsessed with Pound, since apparently he sees nothing of value in
>Pound's poetry.

Obsessed.  Perhaps you mean, "highly interested."  I am not sure that I am
more or less obsessed with Pound than anyone else who studied and written
about him (and who also happens to be interested in China, economic justice,
fascism, polytheistic religion, American history, Adams vs. Jefferson, and
several other issues).  I will try to explain my personal reasons for my
interest later, if you like.

>Literary criticism is interesting, for me, only insofar
>as it helps me to see reasons for being interested in a writer's work.
>Criticism as cultural demolition sees to me simply a waste of time.
>

I can sympathize with this point of view.  But criticism to explain a value
system ---not merely as "cultural demolition", I agree fully agree with you
here-- but as something else, is important.  Criticism is dialectical, in
the Hegelian sense, I believe, in that that it must contain negative
dialectic "destruction" and positive contruction, which may or may not fall
outside the original area of discourse.  I think I have made fairly clear
what values I embrace, and what values (and prejudices) I reject.  Pound
helps to clarify this in my mind, partly as a negative example, but partly
in a postive sense as well, in that he was interested in what I believe to
be very crucial issues: in culture, in politics, in economics, in religion,
in the "need" for a epic, in other aesthetic matters, and in broad social
and historical questions.


>But furthermore, if Wei wants to talk to us about Pound's fascism, it
>seems to me that he should do so within the context of the ongoing
>critical discussion of this issue.

Your context and my context may not be identical.  You may define it as you
wish, I will meet you in the middle, perhaps, or on the side.  The context
itself undergoes constant revision and redefinition.

>And I personally find myself
>impatient with any discussion that does not take into consideration the
>questions that I started to raise almost 20 years ago.  In particular,
>I was at that time trying to get beyond the knee-jerk equation of
>"fascism" with "evil," and was trying to understand it as a historical
>phenomenon.

Knee-jerk is a relative term.  One might say now that to try to call fascism
a "phenomenon" (rather than as social evil) among Pound scholars is often,
and has been, a sort of knee jerk reaction.  I don't say that you are doing
this.  But I make the statement merely to suggest that "knee-jerk" is in the
eye of the beholder.

As to your being "impatient with . . . ." ; I do not advise impatience with
any point of view.  The question I raise is this, and I have no way of
knowing whether it coincides with or relates to questions you raised twenty
years ago:  How does Pound's fascism relate to his Confucianism?  (Or to put
it another way, Is Pound's frequently repeated equation of Confucianism
simply an eccentricity (as Kenner claimed, in one offhand remark in his
"Pound Era") or is it part and parcel of the both Pound's fascism, and one
of the essential components of it?  I would argue the latter.  I meet
resistance of course, mainly because people want to say, "well Pound was a
fascist, but he was really a nice guy and a great poet".  Many people simply
do not want to deal with Pound's fascism as a hard fact; they would rather
see it as an unfortunate accretion, as an "ugly wart" on the beautiful
totality that is Pound's acheivement.



>  In the years since I wrote my article, I have found
>especially instructive Zeev Sternhell's books on the intellectual
>history of fascism: Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France
>(U of California P, 1986) and The Birth of Fascist Ideology: from
>Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton U P, 1994).
>Books such as these raise important historical questions about fascism.
>  What was its relationship to socialism? ("Nazi" after all is an
>acronym for "National Socialist"?)

People accuse me of saying things which are obvious?  What about that last
sentence?  The fact is, that may be useful information to some and not to
others.  Personally, ( I do not mean you should have written that last
paragraph), but I believe the question fascism's origin is the "socialist"
movement was laid bare YEARS AND YEARS ago, and is obvious to anyone who has
read even the oldest and most outdated biography of Mussolini.  But there
you are.  What you might think is obvious, I might not think is obvious, and
vice versa.  No blame should be attached to either side.  I cannot fault you
for choosing to interest yourself in any particular question, nor should you
fault me for interesting myself in the questions I do.

>To Conservatism and the historical
>Right? To Populism?

This is a highly personal matter.  But anyone who has dealt with the
heritage of fascism in Latin America, and lived (as I have) with its
vestiges (not so vestigial as one might like), need not worry about the
relation of Conservatism, Right-wing ideologies in general, and Populism.
(Even that supposed liberal "Madonna" wants to make Eva Peron, of all
people, a sort of semi-folk hero to Americans.)

I have lived with various forms of fascism in three different countries (not
even including the US, which some would want to argue is a fascist country).

>In particular, what are the specific intellectual
>lineages within which Pound was entangled? Here I continue to be
>expecially interested in Guild Socialism . . .

Now I must ask WHY?  Why is guild socialism so interesting?  You have your
own reasons, I am sure.  But why are you not more interested in the
historical movements which either you (or I think) might hold out more hope
for our time.  Proudhon, Kropotkin, the Spanish syndicalists, Guerin,
Bakunin, Makhno, --- the anarcho-communists, the libertarian socialists, the
anarcho-syndicalists, PRECISELY BECAUSE POUND IGNORED THEM--- may be of far
greater interest.

And I say this to all people who live near or work on college or university
campuses?  Are you ignoring what may be one of the most politically
significant movements of our time?  The student anti-globalist,
anti-sweatshop, environmentalist, labor rights movement, which paralyzed
Seattle, and which has struck Washington, and Philadelphia, is most
impressive.  These students are taking inspiration from Chomsky, Kropotkin,
and Proudhon on the ideological front, not from fascism, from guild
socialism, from communism, or any rightist doctrine which reinforces
hierarchy.


>a matrix out of which
>important intellectual figures of both the Right (Odin Por, Arthur
>Penty, Pound himself) and of the Left (R. H. Tawney, G. D. H. Cole)
>emerged. And where precisely does Pound stand amid all the intellectual
>currents of his time?  For example, I have recently been exploring his
>flirtation with the political Left from 1926 to 1931, when he published
>several pieces in Communist-affiliated journals, including New Masses.
>
An interesting topic; but the communists (Marxist Leninists) were no better
or were really not that much different from the fascists in their method of
operation.  I think everyone realizes that now, and this is why other
thought systems which were repressed are coming to the fore (thought systems
that were repressed by fascists, by communists, and by capitalists).

(continued in next post)

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