Pound, Postmodernism, and Fascism

LEON SURETTE Pound, Postmodernism, and Fascism1 Alfred Kazin's long article in the New York Review of Books, 'The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound,' is one of several recent 'correctives ' to the allegedly dominantview ofPound as a maligned genius ofthe Modern Age.2 Kazin's central point is that Pound was fascist3 and racist from the 1930S until his death. On this point there can be no argument, even though Pound scholars have long endeavoured to avoid admitting it. In the article Kazin makes several telling - and wise - points about Pound's work and career. His rather extreme claim that Pound 'identified modernism as a fundamental revolution in consciousness whose social correlatives were fascism - to the end - and bolshevism in its beginnings' (16) may even be true. And Kazin's call for a rewriting of twentiethcentury cultural history is justified, if not his assumption that such a rewriting must be revisionist: Modernism must not become the only writer of its history, especially when puffed up with the antidemocratic and racist views of Ezra Pound. Modernism is not our only tradition. The museum of modern literature, like all museums these days enshrining the first half ofthe twentieth century, cannot show us all that we leave out and even deform in the name of art. (24) The uncomfortable facts about Pound's political behaviour and racist views documented by Kazin cannot be denied and ought to have been faced more squarely in the past by the Pound 'industry.' But Kazin's article tells us next to nothing that has not been known for nearly forty years. Why, one is tempted to ask, are these forty-year-old revelations given so much space in the most prominent and politically conscious review journal in the United States?4 The answer is to be found, I think, in the efflorescence of postmodernism, a movement still indistinct in outline but often identifiable by an active hostility towards an equally ill defined modernism, and one which has swept North American academies like wildfire over the past ten years. In the following pages I propose to examine Pound's engagement with Fascism and with secret history in the . light of postmodern critiques of modernism itself. Postmodernism is still too volatile a movement to be defined or characterized with any precision, but perhaps a word on the occurrence UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1989/90 POUND, POSTMODERNISM, AND FASCISM 335 of the term will help to establish its horizon. The term was, I believe, first used within architecture to describe a departure from the austerity of modernist architectural style. Its next occurrence was within literary criticism as a label for the abandonment of formalist realism in favour of intricate fantasy by such authors as John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut. Initially, then, the term described a departure from modernist practice, not an opposition to it, and was applied to style. Today it also applies to stylistic departures from modernism in other arts such as the new decorative architectural styles and chromatically simple music such as that of Philip Glass. But the term is now also applied to the neopragmatist critique of logical empiricism, to the techniques of commentary deriving from Jacques Derrida called 'Deconstruction,' and to neo-Marxist cultural or social history which gives primacy to automatic economic, institutional, and technological forces as opposed to 'liberal' historiography's concentration on the ideas and motivations of historical actors. It is this last broadly anti-modern sense of 'Postmodernism' that I intend to address. Like modernism itself, postmodernism is a broadly based cultural phenomenon with an impact in virtually all fields: philosophy, political science, history, psychology, linguistics, and even biochemistry as well as literature and the arts. For the purposes of this discussion it will be helpful to highlight one ubiquitous feature of the movement, and that is its insistence on the contextuality, relativity, or historicity of meaning and knowledge in contrast to the modernist insistence on the context-free, positive, or permanent nature of meaning and knowledge. The claim that modernism is characterized by a notion of context-free knowledge might seem surprising to literary scholars raised on the New Critical privileging of context in the...