The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde

3. Zukofsky: The Voice of the Fetish

Beyond “First Generation” Modernism: Objectivism’s Red Wedge Throughout the mid-1930s, Pound and Zukofsky carried on a sometimes congenial, sometimes explosive epistolary relationship. They debated, among other things, the nature of the commodity form; the political stakes and ideological underpinnings of anti-Semitism; the role of the poet in the public sphere; and the nature and direction of historical transformation in the era of capitalist production, which we have been thus far calling “modernity .” Their exchange portended an aesthetic and ideological rupture, transatlantically articulated, within international literary modernism. While Pound’s political and aesthetic dispositions have been well documented, history has only recently returned to Zukofsky’s anticapitalist modernism. This chapter recuperates the formal hermeneutics of Zukofsky’s Depression-era Marxist work, and explores, in particular, the commodity and its critique as structuring architectures of Objectivist poetics. Even as Marjorie Perloff affirms a break between first and second modernism , she writes that “a certain sense of belatedness . . . haunts Zukofsky’s production.”1 Drawing a rather stark boundary between Objectivism and “proletarian” poets (scare quotes in original), Perloff’s critical narrative offers us a sanitized, and de-leninized, Zukofsky. In this critical narrative, Zukofsky becomes a comforting harbinger of postmodern aesthetic ideals, a bellwether of “the shift that takes place at the turn of the decade . . . from the modernist preoccupation with form in the sense of imagistic or symbolist structure, dominated by a lyric “I,” to the questioning of representation itself . . . [in this shift] the boundaries between the “real” and the “fantastic” become oddly blurred.2 By some contrast, Charles Bernstein emphasizes an intensification of fidelity to history and its transformations: “second-wave 3 Zukofsky The Voice of the Fetish 104 The Commodity’s Inscape modernism may be understood in thiscontext as part of a continuing struggle to reinvent modernism for present times and present conditions, often in specific response to challenges posed by first-wave modernists. Its technical innovations are an ongoing witness and adjustment to the social dislocation and relocations of contemporaneity, the pressure of reality.”3 In the spirit of Bernstein’s commentary, we find that the following exchange between Zukofsky and Pound reveals the deep and irreparable differences that subtended the epistemological break within modernism and signaled the beginning of the Zukofsky era. In response to Pound’s accusation that Zukofsky mistakenly applies the concept of the commodity to human labor, Zukofsky writes: “There’s more material fact and imaginative poetic handling of fact in that first chapter of Marx than has been guessed at in your economic heaven.” Pound’s own position is expressed with characteristic causticity: You bloody buggaring fool/Have you not even enough sense to USE A WORD with a meaning and let the meaning adhere to that word. A commodity is a material thing or substance/it has a certain durability. If you don’t dissociate ideas, and keep ONE LABEL for ONE thing of category, you will always be in a gormy mess. Labour may transmute material, it may put value into it, or make it serviceable . I suppose it comes of being a damn foreigner and not having bothered to learn english.4 Pound begins with the classical bourgeois economists’ empiricist assertion that labor cannot be a commodity because it is not a durable good. He furthermore establishes an ideational link between a putative organic adequacy of signifier to signified (“use a word with meaning and let meaning adhere to that word”) and the material immediacy of the commodity object. In this regard, he maintains a fidelity to pre-Kantian thought; upon observation, things confess their concepts. For Pound, labor is a supplement acting upon this world of preexisting things. Zukofsky responds by suggesting that Pound actually read Marx, here “Charlie”: “You can still read Charlie and find out for yourself why labor is the basic commodity (if that word is to have any consequential meaning itself) and how the products of labor are just the manifestations, and money yr. capitalistic juggling, of that commodity.” Later Zukofsky exclaims: “Yr. English language (private pauperty!)!”5 For Zukofsky, following Marx, labor itself is a commodity to be bought and sold. Commodity goods are “manifestations ” of the labor process that leads to their production. In a characteris- Zukofsky: The Voice of the Fetish 105 tically Marxian play on words, Zukofsky exploits the multiple and contradictory valences of “manifestation”: an indication of material existence (in this case, of labor); the materialized...