Kitsching The Cantos

To call Ezra Pound's experimental epic, The Cantos, a monument of literary kitsch would be nothing short of blasphemy: no epithet more contrary or perverse could be applied to Pound's ambitious and learned poem, or indeed to any canonical work of high modernism. The cultic substance of The Cantos has been evident now for decades, yet the poem remains, when viewed from the perspective of kitsch, apotropaic—inscrutable to eyes blinded by the dogmatic principles of modernism. To describe The Cantos as kitsch is unthinkable, however, only because modernist critics—Clement Greenberg, most notably—defined kitsch in the 1930s in opposition to the principles of modernism and the avant-garde.

Kitsch is the most important, if still largely misunderstood, category of aesthetic production to have emerged from the political turmoil of the 1930s and from the polemics of late modernism. Yet the antithetical relation between kitsch and the principles of modernism (or art in general) is dangerously unstable and ambiguous: Greenberg identified kitsch as a parasite feeding upon the productions of the avant-garde,¹ while Hermann Broch (the Austrian novelist whose 1933 essay on kitsch established the framework for all later formulations of kitsch, including Greenberg's) claimed that kitsch is "lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art."² Furthermore, Broch (an unlikely defender of modern formalism) declares: "Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art. . . . Its relationship to art can be compared—and this is more than a mere metaphor—to the relationship between the system of the Anti-Christ and the system of Christ" (63, 62). That is, kitsch is the dialectical "system" opposed to art (and to modernism in particular), whose unmarked resemblance to the "system" of art only enhances its catastrophically destructive challenge to the values of art. Broch's recognition of the perilous correspondences between art and kitsch led him ultimately to view kitsch as a Luciferian phenomenon—not as a static category distinct from art, but as the fallen condition of an exalted aesthetic ideology. He describes Romanticism's susceptibility to "a disastrous fall from the cosmic heights to kitsch": a Luciferian "swerve" from cosmos to cosmetics. That is, properly speaking, kitsch is a matter of becoming rather than being. To characterize a poem or painting as kitsch therefore implies that the work need not have been produced as kitsch and, moreover, it is revealed to be kitsch—an apocalyptic orientation—in the course of its historical transmission.

The same modernist critics who constructed the opposition between kitsch and avant-garde tended to view kitsch as a form of degraded Romanticism, suggesting that the attempt to isolate kitsch from art is related to the antagonism displayed by modernist writers toward Romantic poetics (and to the phantasmagorical properties of Romantic values in modernist texts).³ Further, we should bear in mind that modernist theories of kitsch emerged in the 1930s (the period when Pound revived the compositional principle of the ideogram) and that references to Romanticism in this context often served as a means of linking kitsch to the aesthetic ideology of National Socialism. In Pound's case, one finds encrypted in the modernist image a residue of Romantic hermeneutics and necrophilia which repeatedly disrupts his formalist doctrine, and which later contributed to the fascist coloring of the revised, mythical ideogram. Thus one could argue that the foreign body encrypted in the modernist image (and modernism in general) is the problem of kitsch (as a degraded form of Romanticism). Indeed, a cryptological reading of the problem of kitsch first becomes evident, as I indicated earlier, in Broch's alarming figure: "Kitsch is certainly not 'bad art'; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art" (62). Similarly, Adorno writes, "It [kitsch] lies dormant in art itself, waiting for a chance to leap forward at any moment."⁴ Furthermore, Adorno explains, "the revolt against art's a priori affinity with kitsch has helped guide the development of art towards the decomposition of works. What art used to be, kitsch may become in the future. Kitsch may...