[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