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240 bob perelman Good and Bad / Good and Evil Pound, Céline, and Fascism The Pound Tradition is a much debated context for poetics. While Ezra Pound was a major proponent of innovation in modernist form, and thus progressive in aesthetic terms, his authoritarian dogmatism, the Rome Radio broadcasts and their anti-Semitic content, and the dispute over his canonization after his award of the Bollingen Prize (1948) have kept his reception in doubt. What should a politically conscious, formally innovative poet make of the paradox of Ezra Pound? Bob Perelman addresses this troubling dark side of modernism, framed by Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between good/bad and good/evil in The Genealogy of Morals and its later use for Nazi ideology. For Perelman, readings of Pound’s poetry as aesthetically “good”—in its progressive techniques of “direct treatment of the thing” and its rejection of sentiment—mask an expulsion of unwanted psychic material (after Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”) that makes poetic form complicit with despicable politics —the expulsion and destruction of the Jews and other groups.Perelman goes on to read the psychic abjection of difficult“material”in Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novels as a model for anti-Semitism in fascism, showing how Pound’s formal construction of value in The Cantos connects his diatribes against Jews, usury, and cultural degeneracy with the value-making assumptions of poetry. Perelman’s essay is a courageous challenge to examine the psychic mechanisms of literary form as inherently political and moral. We use the terms good and bad when discussing writing; we reserve good and evil for politics. To call writing evil seems exaggerated. A good writer can have bad politics, we say, treating politics aesthetically, which is much the easiest way. Pound and Céline had lousy politics, we say, but they’re good writers. Since their political statements are often so monstrous,since supporting Hitler and Mussolini is no longer a live option, and since Pound and Céline both, in various ingenuous to disingenuous ways, recanted, it’s convenient to dismiss their politics as having arisen from some psychological defect and to look at what’s good in their writing in a purely aesthetic context. But politics, aesthetics, and psychology are so intertwined in their work as to provide a chance to explode the fiction of a purely aesthetic or formal consideration of writing. To start with an unfair comparison. Take the Compleynt of Artemis in Canto XXX: good and bad / good and evil 241 Pity spareth so many an evil thing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . All things are made foul in this season, This is the reason, none may seek purity Having for foulnesse pity And things growne awry; No more do my shaftes fly To slay. Nothing is now clean slayne But rotteth away. (147) Compare Himmler, speaking to the SS group leaders in 1943: “The Jewish people are to be exterminated,” says every party member. “That’s clear, it’s part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination , right, we’ll do it.” And then they all come along, the eighty million upstanding Germans,and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. . . . Not one has had the stomach for it. Most of you know what it is to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet . . . to have remained decent, this has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history . (In Miller, 79) I find it hard to believe, but as I watch myself reading, I see myself feeling as much anger towards Pound’s words as towards Himmler’s. Clearly my feelings have no sense of scale. After all, Himmler is a mass murderer talking to an audience of mass murderers, exhorting them to kill with a firmer sense of purpose. But his language is a dull blend of pep talk, nagging, and that horrible mix of disguised arousal (“made us hard”) and cliché at the end. The fact that its reference is absolutely real makes its bathetic surface stupefyingly pathological. So why be mad at Pound? He wrote those lines as a supporter of Mussolini, but before Hitler came to power. And what is he talking about? Artemis, for god’s sake. Meaning what? Is he complaining that Poetry is publishing too much Amygism? That people are listening to Brahms and not Antheil? But reference isn’t exactly...

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