1The conjunction that I have proposed in my title may seem improbable, even perverse, given the contrasting reputations of Ezra Pound as a Fascist and anti-Semite and of Walter Benjamin as both prophet of a kind of secular Judaism and one of the first great diagnosticians of the roots of fascism in the mythologies of mass culture. I will throughout this paper try to give appropriate attention to the “or” of my title—that is, to the differences between my two writers. However, I want to argue here that we can fully understand the “or” only if we also recognize the “and.” For there are, I believe, some striking similarities between the literary projects of Pound and Benjamin, caused in part by their search for a language that will achieve an unmediated relationship with things, and in part by the historical circumstances that shaped their lives. In this essay, therefore, I shall begin with the “and,” and I shall allow the “or” to emerge as we go.
- 1 My information here comes largely from the "Chronology, 1892-1926," published as an appendix to vo (...)
2Walter Benjamin was born in 1892 and was thus seven years younger than Pound. Nevertheless, the precocious Benjamin matured in time to experience the period of cultural ferment and (sometimes) ecstatic hope that immediately preceded the war; and to both Pound and Benjamin this period stood throughout their lives as a benchmark of human possibility. For Pound, these were the Imagist and Vorticist years that he evoked so poignantly in the Pisan Cantos. Benjamin spent the years just before the war at the center of a group of young intellectuals who found an identity within the more progressive wing of the German Youth Movement, and in 1914 he was elected president of the Berlin unit of the Free Students’ Association. In the period from 1912 to 1914, then, both Pound and Benjamin experienced a sustaining intellectual and/or artistic community of a type that they would never know again, and both emerged as leaders within these communities. For both, too, the war meant the immediate destruction of these communities. For Pound, the intolerable losses were the deaths in battle of Gaudier-Brzeska and T.E. Hulme. Benjamin -experienced a comparable trauma in the double suicide of Fritz Heinle, the poet that he most admired among his contemporaries, and Rika Seligson, also a member of the Benjamin circle. On August 8, 1914, the day that the German army invaded Belgium, Heinle and Seligson killed themselves in the Free Student’s Associa-tion meeting-room in Berlin, as a protest against the war.1
3Neither Pound nor Benjamin participated actively in war resistance, but the depths of Pound’s bitterness is evident in “Mauberley”:
Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” non “et decor”…
walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy… (P188).
4And we can hear a comparable bitterness in a letter that Benjamin wrote in early 1915 to his former teacher and spiritual mentor Gustav Wyneken, breaking off their relationship after Wyneken published an essay summoning the youth of Germany to mystical self-renewal through participation in the war. “Theoria within you has been blinded,” Benjamin tells Wyneken. “[Y]ou have sacrificed young people to the state, which had taken everything from you. The young, however, belong only to those who love them and the idea in them above all. The idea has slipped out of your erring hands and will continue to suffer unspeakably. The legacy I now wrest from you is that of living with the idea” (Correspondence 76). I hope that the passages here quoted from Pound and from Benjamin will lend credence to my suggestion that for both writers the war called radically into question the public discourses of the time. The lies that the old men told in their efforts to justify the war, their specious appeals to “the idea,” bred in many of the young a cynicism about language itself, but not so Benjamin or Pound. Rather both sought in very different ways to reground language in an immediate experience of “things,” to define a truth against which we can judge the deceitful language of the old men. In the case of Benjamin, these themes emerge in a major essay written in 1916, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In this essay, Benjamin expressly rejects the Saussurian theory that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary and merely conventional, and he labels this theory “bourgeois”: “Through the word, man is bound to the language of things. The human word is the name of things. Hence, it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to the object, that it is a sign for things (or knowledge of them) agreed by some convention. Language never gives mere signs” (Selected Writings I 69).
5The world itself, Benjamin proposes, exists as a nexus of relationships that come into being only within language. Things in themselves are mute, but they call out to us to name them, and God has “expressly assign[ed] to man himself… the task… of naming things. In receiving the unspoken nameless language of things and converting it by name into sounds, man performs this task” (70). But human language in turn “must fall short of the creative word of God” (70). God brings the world into being through speech, and “human language always remains limited and analytic in nature, in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word” (68). Thus the multiplicity of human languages, but thus too the mutual translatability of these languages. But at this point, an element of the arbitrary, the “mere sign,” enters human language: “in the Fall, man abandoned immediacy in the communication of the concrete—that is, name—and fell into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of -prattle” (72). Thus language becomes “not only communication of the -communicable but also, at the same time, a symbol of the noncommunicable” (74). Never-theless, all the languages of men participate in what Benjamin calls “language as such,” and therefore an “uninterrupted flow of… communication runs through the whole of nature, from the lowest forms of existence to man and from man to God. Man communicates himself to God through name, which he gives to nature and (in proper names) to his own kind; and to nature he gives names according to the communication that he receives from her, for the whole of nature, too, is imbued with a nameless, unspoken language, the residue of the creative word of God, which is preserved in man as the cognizing name and above man as the judgment suspended over him” (74).
- 2 The dates of Pound’s first important writings on poetics show that the war itself was clearly not (...)
- 3 It may be objected that when Pound says that good art bears true witness, he is speaking in the ac (...)
6Benjamin defined the relationship between words and things in a philosophic vocabulary that was alien to Pound, but I want to propose that the American poet was also, in the period from a little after 1910 through the early 1920s, engaged in a quest for a language that would achieve a direct, unmediated relationship with things.2 The imperatives in terms of which Pound laid out his poetics have become so integral a part of 20th-century discussions of poetry that they have begun to sound like platitudes. But I hope that by laying out these familiar principles alongside Benjamin’s theories of language, we can gain a renewed sense of how profound was Pound’s understanding of the poetic and linguistic crisis of the early 20th‑century. What are the qualities that the new poetry must have, according to Pound? First, it must be true. In the important 1913 essay titled “The Serious Artist,” Pound says flatly, “Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports… [I]f the artist falsifies his reports… in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics, then that artist lies… and he should be punished or despised in proportion to the seriousness of his offence” (LE43-4). Conversely, Pound declares, “good art” is “art that bears true witness,… the art that is most precise” (44).3 The measure of the truth of art is the degree to which the writer has found the exact word, le mot juste. Benjamin can, I think, help us to grasp the full implications of the -concept of le mot juste. For clearly, the idea of le mot juste implies that there is for each sensation, experience, or object that we encounter a “word” that will name it accurately, grasp its essence, deliver up to us its truth: or, as Benjamin might say, a “word” that, if it is not identical with the true “name” of the thing (for this name is known only to God), at least touches upon that name, thereby bringing the essence of the thing into presence for us.
7Pound’s label for the configuration of words that will accurately present or bring forth an experience or object is, of course, “image.” The first of Pound’s familiar Imagist principles, “Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether -subjective or objective,” clearly assumes that there are things, and that the words of the poet can give us access to these things. Symbolism, Pound says, sought to build up associations around the things of this world, thereby giving them a false because merely ascribed meaning. But “Imagisme is not symbolism” (GB84), and the image offers us, not associations, but a direct, unmediated knowledge of the real itself: “An image, in our sense, is real because we know it directly” (86). Herbert Schneidau’s description of the place of the image in Pound’s poetics still seems to me our most accurate to date, and in the final paragraph of his book he sums up Pound’s thinking on this subject in terms that ally the poet with Benjamin’s quest for a language of absolute immediacy: “In the end Pound’s ‘poetry of reality’ depends on his boundless faith in language. He truly believed that words did not merely describe or point to real things, but could really body them forth.” Pound set out to achieve “a registration of reality which would so absorb the words that no inexactness would be left to get between thing and reader.” The result would be “an ‘Image’: not a copy, but a revealing presentation of a thing that essentialized it, showed its substance, manifested the lines of force of its morphological shape. In this sense, the Image is not just ‘indistinguishable from the thing’: it is more striking, more lasting, than any given perception of the thing… These conceptions depend on an idea of language in which the word has, through the centuries, in the ‘magic moment’ received reality into it. In this moment, all analogies for language are transcended” (200-201). Writing in the late 1960s, Schneidau probably had not read Benjamin, but his summation of the Poundian image offers an uncanny anticipation of my argument here.
8In the 1920s, both Pound and Benjamin became increasingly interested in the fragment and in montage as ways of bringing objective reality into language. In an “Epistemo-Critical Prologue” to his 1925 habilitation thesis On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin proposes a (deliberately, or accidentally) “ruined,” fragmented, disjunctive discourse as an alternative to the attempts of intentional consciousness to grasp the truth. Instead of pursuing “an uninterrupted purposeful structure,” we can allow truth to surprise us, by beginning again and again:
Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation… Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into discrete particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum. Both are made up of the distinct and the disparate; and nothing could bear more powerful testimony to the transcendent force of the sacred and to truth itself. The value of fragments of thought is all the greater the less direct their relationship to the underlying idea… (28-9)
9From the fragment and the mosaic as ways of pointing toward truth, Benjamin moves, in the last section of On the Origin of German Tragic Drama, into what seems an entirely new territory, a full-fledged theory of allegory. Benjamin’s strongly affirmative treatment of allegory may seem odd, coming from a critic who has insisted, as late as the prologue to the Origin book itself, on the “name-giving power” of the word to “release the idea from the heart of reality.” It might seem that Benjamin’s quasi-mystical view of language should issue more appropriately in a Coleridgean celebration of the symbol, with its claim to reveal the universal through the particular. But in fact, Benjamin seeks to rehabilitate allegory precisely in order to fend off the claims of the symbol. The -symbolist poet claims to speak a “word” that is indistinguishable from the “name” and thereby to draw the totality of the cosmos into the text. “[T]he artistic -symbol, the plastic symbol,” says Benjamin, claims to offer an “image of organic -totality” (176). On the other hand, “in the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disappears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contained -shrivels up” (176). The symbol claims to reconcile all contradictions, while allegory allows the “conflict between theological and artistic intentions” to play itself out. The symbol claims the authority of “nature.” Allegory, in contrast, -inhabits history, and “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (178). But even as it acknowledges “the transcience of things,” -allegory also seeks “to rescue them for eternity” (223), and it is this dual impulse within allegory that moves Benjamin to celebrate this apparently archaic literary form.
10In the war years and the early 1920s, Pound too moved beyond his early doctrine of the image, to more complex theoretic formulations, most notably the theory of the ideogram. Pound first came upon the concept of the ideogram in 1915, when he edited for publication Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.” Notoriously, Fenollosa misread the Chinese written character as essentially pictographic. In the most famous example, he analyzed the character for the abstract term “red” as combining four concrete radicals: “rose,” “cherry,” “iron rust,” and “flamingo.” Early on, Pound had advised young writers to “go in fear of abstractions” (LE5), and Fenollosa’s essay appeared to point toward the possibility of a poetry that would avoid abstractions entirely, except insofar as they emerge spontaneously from the juxtaposition of concrete particulars. But it is also important to note that the ideogram, as described by Fenollosa, is not a static “picture” but an active play of forces. Initially, as Schneidau points out, Pound seems to have been excited primarily by Fenollosa’s emphasis on verbs. In 1916 he wrote to Iris Barry, “You should have a chance to see Fenollosa’s big essay on verbs… He inveighs against ‘IS,’ wants transitive verbs… Let the grime do something to the leaves. ‘All nouns come from verbs.’ To primitive man, a thing only IS what it does” (L82). For Pound, then, the ideogram became a new way of mapping language onto the world, one that allowed a full recognition of the unique particularity of each individual thing, and that saw the cosmos as an interplay of energies among these particulars.
11To equate Benjamin’s “allegorical writing” with Pound’s “ideogrammic method” is clearly a stretch. Yet I would like to argue that despite the obvious differences between these two theoretic formulations, they play analogous roles in the works of my two writers, insofar as both offer alternatives to the mediatory claims of the symbol. For poets such as W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot, the symbol offered a way of mediating between subjective experience and objective reality, thereby offering us access to a transcendental realm that we can know and grasp in human terms. To the symbolist, as a consequence, language as such is incidental, a means to a spiritual end. In contrast, I would propose, for Benjamin and Pound, language itself is the end, and the word offers the only sacrament that we can know. To both our writers, any system of dogma and ritual that claims to offer us access to the transcendental is simply another form of idolatry: we create gods in our own image, and then we proceed to worship them—and, worse, we insist that others worship them too. For Benjamin, the fragment, the ruins of allegory, testify to the eternal aspiration of human beings toward meaning, and to the inevitable failure of those aspirations—a failure which itself becomes the ultimate proof of the presence of the divine within the world. For Pound, the ideogram becomes a way of -talking about things without subsuming their unique, irreducible quidditas into an abstract category. Pound’s decision to proceed without an “Aquinas-map,” a set of pre-established logical categories for sorting things out, becomes a radical act of faith that, beyond all the idols that human beings have created to enslave themselves and others, there is a pattern to it all: that, as he says at the end of The Cantos, “it coheres all right,” even though he “cannot make it cohere” (CXVI 796-7).
- 4 I am not the only observer to be struck by the similarities between these two works: J.M. Coetzee, (...)
12I turn now to the two massive works to which Pound and Benjamin devoted their primary energies, The Cantos and the ArcadesProject. My sense that there are some striking parallels between these two projects was, in fact, the starting point of this essay; and the argument that I have developed up to this point represents, in effect, an attempt to work out some possible explanations for these parallels.4 As for the parallels themselves, the first and most striking is the fact that both texts are not only unfinished but also intrinsically, it seems, unfinishable. Pound, its seems clear, began The Cantos with at least a crude plan, which he spelled out in different ways to various friends and family members. Yet at all stages of the composition Pound subverted his own plan. Pound’s maps may have given him some sort of provisional guidance along the way, but they do not govern the way the poem actually unfolds. Indeed, Pound’s actual methods of composition seem very similar to those recommended by Benjamin: “Tirelessly the process of thinking makes new beginnings, returning in a roundabout way to its original object. This continual pausing for breath is the mode most proper to the process of contemplation.” More simply put, the process overrides the plan, and as Hugh Kenner tells us, Pound’s “most radical decision” was “to experience the poem as he wrote it, himself committed to all of which he wrote, himself Odysseus actually en route” (379). The “finished” poem that Pound aspired to create is unimaginable—and would certainly have been unreadable, for a poem completed in accordance with Pound’s intentions would have been the “fascist epic” that some have imagined The Cantos to be. But Pound’s artistic instincts were always sounder than his political judgment, and as a consequence he has left us, not a finished architectural masterpiece, but a “ruin”—a collection, in his own words, of “errors and wrecks” (CXVI 796), ruined not by time but by the circumstances of its creation, in a century in which any gesture of completion, finality, has come to seem a lie.
13Benjamin too, theorist of allegory as ruin, ended by leaving as his -summative achievement a vast, labyrinthine ruin. From the late 1920s until his death in 1940, Benjamin devoted most of his energies to what he envisioned as a study of mid-19th-century life in Paris, the “capital of the world,” as represented in particular by the Arcades, the glass-enclosed passageways of shops and stores built through Parisian residential blocks. These Arcades represent, for Benjamin, a decisive moment in the history of capitalism, and they were in fact the direct ancestors of contemporary shopping malls. From one point of view, the Arcades material represents simply notes toward an unfinished research project, organized into the so-called “convolutes.” But as its translators note, we can also see the project as a groping toward a radically new mode of discourse: “many of the passages of reflections in the ‘Convolutes’ section represent revisions of earlier drafts, notes, and letters. Why revise for a notebook? The fact that Benjamin also transferred masses of quotations from actual notebooks to the manuscript of the convolutes, and the elaborate organization of these cited materials in that manuscript (including the use of numerous epigraphs), might likewise bespeak a compositional principle at work in the project, and not just an advanced stage of research” (ix). But whether the material that has come down to us represents simply a mass of notes or an exploration of a new mode of composition, it seems clear that the project was unfinishable, no matter how
long Benjamin might have lived. For the convolutes develop by accretion and exfoliation, not by the working-through of an argument toward closure. I would like to believe that as a writer Benjamin knew that the open-ended structure of the convolutes had allowed him to create an open field in which a potentially infinite array of connections could open out. But any attempt to “complete” the project would short-circuit this process of exfoliation.
14Both The Cantos and the Arcades materials are aesthetically and intellectually satisfying despite (or perhaps even because of) their open-ended structure, because both are grounded in the premise that any flash of perception, any fragment of experience, any bit of text or any other object that comes to hand can, if we see it aright, open to us a vision of the Whole. In the first section of this paper, I have traced the early speculations of Pound and Benjamin on the relationship between word and thing, and their later theories about allegory and the ideogram; and in their mature work these speculations bear fruit. The aesthetic of The Cantos remains Imagist, as Kenner and others have noted, for Pound is the master of a language that gives us, paratactically, the flash, flash, flash of one discrete perception after another, in which the sacred reveals itself: for “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel/but spezzato apparently/it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage/the smell of mint, for example,/Ladro the night cat” (LXXIV 438).
15The moment of perception plays a somewhat different role in Benjamin, but he too insists that truth reveals itself, not in an unfolding narrative, nor even in the rigorous development of a chain of reasoning, but in a visionary flash. The well-known “Convolute N,” focussing “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” begins, “In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows” (456). For Benjamin the key issue is, not intensity of sensory perception as it is for Pound, but historical awareness. Thus the moment that interests him is what he—or rather his translators—calls the “now of recognizability” (486). What reveals itself in the “now of recognizability” is, Benjamin proposes, the “dialectical image,” in which “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (462). Thus the dialectical image reveals the presence of the past in the present, allowing us, for a moment, to understand our lives as history. It is important to keep a clear distinction between Benjamin’s dialectical images and the sensory images in which, for Pound, the divine flashes forth for a moment, and I will have more to say later on the differences between the two. But here I would simply underscore the instantaneous nature of these moments of perception, and the ways this emphasis leads Benjamin, like Pound, toward a privileging of the fragment.
16If truth reveals itself only in the moment, then our standard methods of writing history and our normal forms of theoretic discourse are, as narrative was for Pound, not only inadequate but dangerously misleading, because such discourses encourage a delusion that we have somewhat mastered the subject before us. Thus just as Pound has proposed a radically new model of the poem, Benjamin is proposing a whole new way of doing both history and -philosophy, as Susan Buck-Morss eloquently argues:
In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin was committed to a graphic, concrete representation of truth, in which historical images made visible the philosophic ideas. In them, history cut through the core of truth without providing a totalizing frame. Benjamin understood these ideas as “discontinuous.” As a result, the same conceptual elements appear in several images, in such varying configurations that their meanings cannot be fixed in the abstract. Similarly, the images themselves cannot be strung together into a coherent, non-contradictory picture of the whole. (55)
17As so laid out, the analogies between Benjamin’s method in the Arcades materials and Pound’s ideogrammic method are, I think, obvious.
18In practice, both Pound’s and Benjamin’s text take the form of montage: sensory images, bits of information, patches of quoted text—all juxtaposed without the kinds of connectives that we would normally expect to bring together all these bits and pieces into a single, stable system of “meaning.” Both Pound and Benjamin were fascinated by film as a new art form, and both sought in the montage aesthetic of film a model for their own practice. Benjamin explicitly commits himself to a montage method: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by -making use of them” (Arcades Project 460). Intriguingly, Pound invoked the same “ragpicker” metaphor in the discarded first draft of “Canto I,” where he wonders if “the modern world/Needs such a ragbag to stuff all its thought in” (P 229).
19The image of themselves as ragpickers, rescuers of the discarded flotsam of a culture, with a mission to allow such materials a second life, also led both Pound and Benjamin toward a poetics of the quotation. “This work,” Benjamin tells himself at one point, “has to develop to the highest degree the art of -citing without quotation marks” (Arcades Project 458). In practice, Benjamin usually cites with quotation marks, scrupulously providing bibliographic references for his sources. Yet it is also true that the Arcades materials incorporates vast tracts of direct quotation. Pound too, notoriously, gives himself over to the poetics of quotation: he, like Benjamin, may well have been haunted by Mallarmé’s vision of a book that would consist entirely of quotation. And Pound, unlike Benjamin, truly does perfect the art of “citing without quotation marks,” for in The Cantos we are often unsure whether Pound himself or a quoted text is speaking. But the incorporation of extended patches of quotation into both The Cantos and the Arcades materials represents a logical extension of their authors’ abiding faith in the material word. For both, a passage of text, no less than an artifact or a sensory image, can become a “luminous detail,” flashing forth the truth about an entire culture or an entire moment of history—or even revealing a transcendental order that lies forever beyond the power of our words to grasp and control.
20The Cantos and the ArcadesProject, finally, both move beyond their -respective authors’ earlier writings, in a new determination to engage history; and indeed, the new forms of discourse that Pound and Benjamin invent are designed specifically to allow such an engagement with history. Pound and Benjamin shared a sense that the artist occupies a privileged position within history. On several occasions Pound described artists as “the antennae of the race,” a metaphor implying that they are uniquely sensitive to what is emerging within history. And Benjamin offers a strikingly similar metaphor to suggest the prophetic role of the artists:
In every true work of art there is a place where, for one who removes there, it blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that art, which has often been considered refractory to every relations with progress, can provide its true definition. Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn. (Arcades Project 474)
21In accordance with these metaphors, both Pound and Benjamin seek to position themselves in a history open towards a future that may be intuited but that slips always beyond our grasp. Both also assume that we must understand where we have come from if we are to move forward. Thus The Cantos explores a series of historical moments that Pound sees as analogically linked. Benjamin, on the other hand, attempts to engage a single historical period, the middle decades of the 19th‑century, and a single place, Paris, but he is determined to encompass the whole of that time and place.
22For both Pound and Benjamin, the turn toward history was prompted by a sense that the peace of 1918 had in fact resolved nothing. The quivering antennae of both our writers told them that the period from 1918 to 1939 was in fact no true peace at all, but only an interlude before another and even more destructive war. Both hoped to avert that war, and like most of their contemporaries they were drawn to social movements that promised an end to war through a radical renovation of the social order. Benjamin declared himself a Marxist, and throughout the 1930s he tried to write in accordance with the officially approved discourse of international Communism: i.e., “dialectical materialism.” Pound, after a brief flirtation in the late 1920s with the political Left, opted for Mussolini and what eventually became the “Axis” of international Fascism. And at this point, of course, the destinies of our two writers diverge.
23Given the array of similarities between Pound and Benjamin, how can we account for their very different fates, as men and as writers? Is there anything inherent in Pound’s qualities as a writer that carried him into the radio studio in Rome, and thence into the cage at Pisa,‑etc.? This is, of course, the question that all Pound scholars nervously edge toward or evade, depending on our taste for controversy or lack of it. My answer to this question is a (qualified) “yes.” The key here is, I think, the difference between Benjamin’s “dialectical image” and Pound’s fundamentally undialectical sense of history. To Benjamin, past histor-ical moments open up their full meaning only in the “now of recognizability,” whereas for Pound certain past moments serve as a measure against which the present is to be evaluated. For Benjamin all history moves toward redemption, but for Pound the moment of redemption is already over: Confucius and John Adams and Major Douglas have discovered certain eternal principles, and our task is to recover these simple truths. What sends Pound down the path toward Fascism is, I believe, precisely the conviction that in a day’s reading any man can discover all that he needs to know: if the truth is so transparent, then there must be an “enemy” who has deliberately blocked our access to it. And all -conspiracy theories of history end, sooner or later, in anti-Semitism.
24Pound’s sense of history is in fact mythic and archetypal, not dialectical: Confucius, Jefferson, Adams, and Mussolini all become essentially the same, as examples of the Great Man. Undoubtedly, we can see some similarities among these men, as founders of new political orders. But at the same time there were profound differences among them: Jefferson (Adams is a more ambiguous case) had a deep and abiding faith in “the people” while Confucius and Mussolini looked to an elite to lead the masses, Confucius and Mussolini tried to carry out their political revolutions in long-established societies, while Jefferson and Adams saw themselves as shaping a new nation in a new land,‑etc. When I say that Pound’s view of history is archetypal rather than dialectical, I mean that he can see the similarities but not the differences between Jefferson and Musso-lini. In contrast, Benjamin is not telling us that the Parisian Arcades are “the same thing” as Sears, Roebuck in the 1920s, much less that they are “the same thing” as the modern shopping mall—which he, of course, never saw. But by allowing us to perceive similarities and differences across these various sites, Benjamin allows us to recognize the continuing power of commodity fetishism over our lives.
25Benjamin’s strategy for engaging with history is thus, I believe, far preferable to Pound’s. Indeed, one of Benjamin’s major goals in the Arcades Project is to strip away the very myths that prevent us from understanding the circumstances of our lives, whereas Pound’s limitations as a writer and his disastrous errors as a man can all, I believe, be traced to his hunger for simple answers, encompassing myths, and eternal archetypes. In this respect, reading the Cantos against the Arcades Project can help to illuminate what goes wrong in Pound’s work.
26Yet reading the Arcades Project against the Cantos can also, I think, illuminate the limitations of Benjamin’s intellectual project. Pound’s lifelong faith in the possibility of a language of immediate presence means that his text can enact what Benjamin’s only points toward. For better or for worse, Pound’s project puts him into history, to live through the consequences of his commitments, disastrous as they may have been. Benjamin, in contrast, manages to stand aloof. In this respect Benjamin’s suicide seems to represent a confession of failure before the immense catastrophe of the war, while Pound lives and writes his way through this historical moment (albeit on the “wrong” side), into the ambiguous but genuinely anguished recognitions of Pisa. As a poet, that is, Pound is engaged with language in a way that draws him into the world, and thus the poem that issues from his struggles takes on a life that extends beyond his own twisted and even vicious theories. I and others may find Benjamin’s theories vastly more attractive than Pound’s, but his work also reminds us that the reflective moment moves us out of immediate engagement with the world, in a way that poetry does not. Benjamin’s writings can help us to understand the power of the living word, but in reading Pound we must come to terms with the living word itself, which can open to us the moment of illumination, but which also reveals, often without the author realizing it, the dark powers of greed and rage within the human heart.