The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism by Stephen Hartnett
The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism by Stephen Hartnett
The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism by Stephen Hartnett
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The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism:
Analyzing Pound's Cantos 12-15
Stephen Hartnett
Introduction
For Marxists, the rise of fascism is often directly linked to the interests
of monopoly capital; historians concerned with issues of race, particularly
"the Jewish question," have tended to emphasize fascism's anti-Semitism;
many of the culture critics loosely associated with the Frankfurt school have
seen fascism as the surfacing of certain latent authoritarian psychologies
as well as-and here Lukacs is exemplary-of an aesthetic and philosophi-
cal milieu that celebrated "irrational" and "ahistorical" tendencies. The list
of critical positions is extensive, as is the corresponding documentation,
much of which is relentless in its graphic detailing of the brutalities of the
death camps and the genuine terror of everyday life under Hitler and on
the battlefront. Whatever position one takes on this question of how and
why fascism arose, certain facts remain: 6 million Jews exterminated in the
Many thanks to Andrea Slane, Joseba Gabilondo, and Martin Padget for their helpful
criticisms; to Michael Davidson, without whose guidance and detailed commentary this
essay would have been unthinkable; and to Shawny Anderson and Meg Sachse for their
considerable editing efforts.
boundary 2 20:1, 1993. Copyright ? 1993 by Duke University Press. CCC 0190-3659/93/$1.50.
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66 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
camps; 18 million Russians dead on the Eastern front; all of Europe reduced
to rubble; over 35 million dead worldwide. Within this historical framework,
the writings of Ezra Pound are more than embarrassing and are certainly
more than the "wrongheaded" pronouncements of an artist who had lost his
bearings. There was a generation of scholars and poets who chose, out of
simple ignorance or open sympathy, to brush these matters under the rug
to make room for discussions of Pound's poetry; there is now a small, but
growing, group who provides devastating critiques of Pound's fascist and/
or anti-Semitic and/or phallocentric positions to disabuse the thinking that
we can talk about Pound's poetry without including his politics.' The most
significant breakthrough of the latter group shows that Pound's poetry and
politics are simultaneous: We can no longer pursue Benjamin's thesis con-
cerning the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics-
the division will not hold.2
My contribution to the already overcrowded world of Pound criticism
attempts, then, to historicize what a majority of Pound criticism has either
avoided or taken for granted. Specifically, I offer an analysis of the construc-
tion of ideology as it pertains to the historical moment of the rise of fascism.
My project thus entails two sections in which I reevaluate the terms fascism
and ideology; then, in the final section, I employ these terms to address
the question of how we might analyze the semiotic strategies employed
by Pound in his production of textual "meanings." As for the "politics" of
this essay, especially as concerns my construction of a historicotheoretical
position from which to analyze both Pound and the rise of European fas-
cism, I think it is sufficient to suggest that such analyses (even those that
1. This shift in perspectives is exemplified by the differences between the literally wor-
shipful tone of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971), and the biting political edge of Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-
Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1988).
2. The reference is to Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani-
cal Reproduction," in his Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), where he details (among other things) the manner in which fascism aestheticized
political activity through mass rallies and other public spectacles. The essay is particu-
larly helpful for my purposes here, for it discusses the manner in which fascism utilizes
technology to veil property relations. For example, Benjamin writes, "Mass production is
aided especially by the reproduction of the masses. In big parades and monster rallies,
in sports events, and in war" (251 n. 21). Or, "War and war only can set a goal for mass
movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system" (241). I
return to these questions in detail in later sections.
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 67
Sources of Crisis
3. The period preceding World War I was exemplary of this movement, particularly within
the Balkan peninsula. For example, on 13 March 1908, Socialists marching in Budapest
and demanding universal suffrage were attacked by both the official State police as well
as civilian right-wing hit squads such as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organiza-
tion. Also active were the Bulgarian-based Cyril and Methodius Society, the Macedonian
Supreme Committee, and the Servian Society of the Sava. The paradox of the situation
is that both the Socialists and the more traditional nationalist Right were struggling for the
dissolution of the remaining bonds of foreign rule-particularly that imposed by the Turks
of the Ottoman Empire-but neither of these groups was able to impose its alternative
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68 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
show that the success of fascism was based on its abilities to manipulate
this dual crisis in representation and interpellation.
ideologies in the face of the region's long-standing barriers of different languages, races,
educational and religious systems, cultural traditions, and so on. Interested readers may
wish to consult Barbara and Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan Nation
States, 1804-1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977); Ivan T. Berend and
Gyorgy Ranki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780-1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982); Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondences of Leon
Trotsky, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monad Press, 1980); Jacob Gould Schurman,
The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914); Wesley Ge-
wehr, The Rise of Nationalism in the Balkans, 1800-1930 (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1931); George Mylonas, The Balkan States (St. Louis: Eden Publishing, 1946).
4. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem
of Fascism (London: New Left Books, 1974), 77; hereafter cited in my text as Fascism.
5. Figures cited in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World Pub-
lishing Co./Meridian Books, 1962), 124. Also of interest is Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities (London: Verso, 1991).
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 69
6. For a brilliant analysis of this inability to think beyond such static categories, see
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radi-
cal Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1987). Further discussion of the subject is found
in Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture
in Marxist Theory (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergin Publishers, 1981), where he sug-
gests that "the trouble with Marxism has been to take the proletariat as a class as an
unproblematic category" (73).
7. See Louis Althusser's important 1970 essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Appara-
tuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New
Left Books, 1971), 123-73.
8. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Popu-
lism (London: Verso, 1987), 100. For an updated version of Laclau's analysis of inter-
pellative strategies and their relation to economic dislocations, see the stunning opening
essay of his New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 3-85.
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70 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 71
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72 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
maire of Louis Bonaparte," in which the desire for a stable marketplace and
a specifically nonrevolutionary government feeds the call for a strong leader.
The result is the December 1851 taking of power by Louis Napolean.'o
The key to each of these moments is the obscuring of relations of
production via a misrepresentation of the ties between state power and
finance capital. For example, Alice Yeager Kaplan observes that fascism is
dependent on a "separation of technology from economic production" and
that within fascism,
The ideological aspect of this strategy lies in the fact that it is precisely a
means of not addressing the actual crises at hand. Indeed, by condens-
ing economic and political crises into an abstract question of "technology,"
fascism obscures the questions of relations of production while simulta-
neously guaranteeing the necessity of its continued (and hidden) ties to
finance capital. The ideological process, then, involves fascism represent-
ing itself as capable of engineering such an accelerated technological re-
sponse to social crises while in fact doing so only through an increased
bond to monopoly capital. Clearly, one of the major ideological cover-ups of
fascism is its ability to represent finance capital as an enemy of the petty-
bourgeoisie while simultaneously increasing its ties with the interests of
monopoly capital.
This ideological veil was achieved via the mass representation of
finance capital as the specific realm of Jews and usurers. This representa-
tional strategy of equating Jews with finance capital served a dual purpose:
It channeled animosity toward an easily marked social group while simul-
10. See Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Karl Marx: Selected
Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), where he writes:
"The Bonaparte dynasty represents the conservative peasant. . . . The peasant who
wants to consolidate his holding" (318). The general idea here is that a representative of
the status quo won out over the more radical claims of both the Left and the Right.
11. Alice Yeager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French
Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26, 27. Kaplan pro-
vides a fascinating analysis of fascism's use of the radio, the loudspeaker, movies, bill-
boards-technologies of communication in which the sender is absent and communal
reception emphasized.
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 73
taneously obscuring the roles of the real power brokers. In this manner,
the questions of class antagonisms and the relations of production were
condensed into the one signifier of (as Pound would call it) "Jewsry," which
functioned as a marker of otherness against which the Fascists were able to
interpellate the petty-bourgeoisie. A similar process of ideological veiling is
found in the fact that Jews were also represented as the chief actors for Bol-
shevist interests. Such ideological representations facilitated a shifting of
political discourse from questions of class relations and the relations of pro-
duction to the more vague territory of race and nationality. Thus, as material
distinctions based on one's situation within the relations of production and
governmental hierarchies become confused, so the fascist rhetoric of one
Leader, one People, one Land, Technology, and so on, increasingly acts as
a means of interpellation that seals off otherness, that locks in similarities,
and that effectively shuts down all oppositional discourse.
I am suggesting, then, that fascism arose (in part) as a specifically
ideological movement that was able to interpellate the petty-bourgeoisie
and nonaligned workers (1) through projections of national rather than class
action; (2) through representations of a neutral state policy that was anti-
capitalist as well as antisocialist; and (3) through representing a concrete
other against which a unified position could be constructed. Ideology is used
in this sense to designate a set of beliefs and policies geared toward the
obscuring of political and economic relations, with interpellation understood
as that process by which individuals are constructed or hailed as political
subjects through an acceptance/recognition/acknowledgment of their par-
ticipation within a particular set of ideologies. Fascism is used in this sense
to designate that historically specific project by which the petty-bourgeoisie
and nonaligned working classes were interpellated via the ideologies out-
lined above. When I speak of fascism, then, I mean to suggest not only
a specific set of ideological factors but also an interpellative strategy that
arose as an alternative to the post-World War I crises in both the traditional
bourgeoisie and working classes.
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74 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
12. We could obviously look at this issue from many perspectives. For a psychological
analysis of how fascism is made to appear "legitimate," see Ernst Bloch's 1932 essay
"Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectic," New German Critique 11 (Spring
1977): 22-38; for a more traditional, sociological analysis, see The Nature of Fascism,
ed. S. J. Woolf (New York: Random House, 1968).
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 75
13. Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), 41.
14. Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason, trans. Mary Varney Rorty (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1980), 137. Within such "cognitive privilege," the privileged viewer/
reader is represented as privy to some organic truth. This corresponds to what Albert
calls "a revelation model of knowledge," in which "truth is manifest and lies open to view
so that one need merely open one's eyes to see it" (21). For example, on 12 April 1991,
the Associated Press Wire Service quoted General Schwarzkopf as stating, "Anyone who
dares even imply that we did not achieve a great victory obviously doesn't know what the
hell he's talking about."
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76 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
Money as Sign
Perhaps the most obvious example of a sign system that must be
"kept hold of" is money. This follows from the fact that money is central to
the functioning of any "modern" culture and-perhaps more to the point,
since the same could be said of language, as well-that the printing and
backing of money is explicitly within the jurisdiction of the state (whereas
language generally is not). As such, the control of the meaning of money
is absolutely central to the functioning of any government, particularly to a
government that has arisen as a stopgap against the chaos of both an eco-
nomic crisis and a general crisis in political representation. Thus, whereas
socialist economics seeks a radical redistribution of wealth as well as a re-
15. Alan Durant, Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books,
1981), 171.
16. Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing (London: Macmillan,
1984), 216, 217. Much of the thought in this paper was/is generated by Nicholls's study,
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 77
of exchange was detailed earlier as following from the double fear of the
petty-bourgeoisie of monopoly capital accumulation "above" them and of
socialist redistribution "below." This reduction of the complex questions
of economics to "simplistic oppositions" is analogous to the condensation
of signifiers noted earlier, in which broad class issues were reduced to crude
Bolshevism (a process that was seen, paradoxically, to be furthered by
the Second and Third International's dogmatic economism) and in which
international financial crises were reduced to Jewish usury.
In each of these cases, the reduction of politicoeconomic contradic-
tions to binary opposites corresponds with the construction of normative
categories that facilitated "legislation." Finance capital is especially diffi-
cult to enmesh within this process, for it is not-as is the small cash that
exchanges hands daily between buyer and seller-directly reducible to a
this-for-that equation. Indeed, with finance capital, the distance between
sign and object is large; thus, the "meaning" of finance capital escapes
what Nicholls calls the "determination of the law." It is exactly this mobility
of meaning between money and object, between signs of value and objects
of value, that fascism must curtail.
I have so far withheld specific references to Pound, but I will here
address his economics, for they are representative of such an attempt to
close off the play of difference between sign and object. For example, Lewis
Hyde suggests that for Pound,
the arch criminal is the man who makes sure that value is detached
from its concrete embodiment and then plays the gap between sym-
bol and object, between abstract money and embodied wealth....
All the crimes that Pound warns us against come down to one: to
profit on the alienation of the symbol from the real.'7
as well as from discussion with Nicholls upon the occasion of his lecturing on Pound at
the University of California at San Diego, 18 October 1988.
17. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1979), 267. This "alienation of the symbol from the real" and the response
of seeking semiotic closure so as to prevent its widening are cited by Paul Smith as the
central moments in Pound's theory/practice of representation. Smith writes, "Pound at-
tempts to restore the signifier to the signified; he tries to elide the material gap in order
to restore faith and confidence in the word as an instrument in the revelation of reality"
(from Smith's Pound Revised [London: Croon Helm, 1983], 38).
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78 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
Pound would like to reattach the symbols to their objects. ... The
poet of Imagism longs to have the symbolic value equal imaginative
value. Only then would there be no risk of crime. And how are we
to establish this equivalence? Either change the nature of money
itself (stamp scrip) or else enforce a "just" currency. Enforce it-with
state power.'18
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 79
tails two parts: first, a brief look at certain of Pound's prose statements con-
cerning the function of money; second, a longer look at Cantos 12 through
15. In both of these sections, my intent is not to "prove" once and for all
that Pound either was or was not a Fascist; rather, my hope is to histori-
cize more thoroughly the textual strategies he used to invest his particular
ideological moments with meaning.
20. Ezra Pound, ABC of Economics (1933), cited as it appears in his Selected Prose,
1909-1965, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions Press, 1972), 260; hereafter cited
in my text as ABC.
21. This distinction transfers questions of power relations into abstract ethical questions.
Such is the reading offered by Charles Berezin in "Poetry and Politics in Ezra Pound,"
in Partisan Review 48, no. 2 (1981): 276, 277, passim. For a more apologetic analysis
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80 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
of Pound's economics, see Earle Davis, Visionary Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968).
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 81
tunes" (ABC, 259; my emphasis). In the 1939 essay "What Is Money for?"
Pound writes, "State authority behind the printed note is the best means
of establishing a just and honest currency. . . . Only the state can effec-
tively fix the just price."22 The connections between statolatry, status-quo
anticapitalism, and the scapegoating of finance capital-as-other are made
even more explicit when Pound states,
22. Ezra Pound, "What Is Money for?" (1939), as cited in Selected Prose, 292, 293.
23. Pound, "What Is Money for?" 297.
24. Some representative examples of such readings are H. N. Schneidau, "Pound's Poet-
ics of Loss," in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, ed. Ian Bell (New Jersey: Barnes and
Noble Books, 1982), 103-20; and Kathryne Lindberg, "Rhizomatic America," from her
Reading Pound Reading: Modernism after Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 211-31. A particularly embarrassing example of such deconstructive readings is
Christine Froula's "The Pound Error: The Limits of Authority in the Modern Epic," from her
To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound's Cantos (New Haven: Yale, 1984), where
she claims that seeing Pound as authoritarian "only mirrors the expectations of authority,
the desire to be told what to think, feel, and value, that we as readers bring to the poem"
(165). Such thinking seems indicative of the refusal to exercise political judgment so
essential to deconstruction.
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82 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
employed not in conveying meanings but in organizing the text itself? I sug-
gest that we need to acknowledge those deconstructive readings that see
the Cantos as a masterful avoidance of the stasis of any one overriding
theme, while nonetheless believing that the Cantos (or at least Cantos 12
through 15), are, in fact, organized by certain consistent structuring prin-
ciples. My thinking here has been influenced greatly by Alan Durant, who
summarizes this movement from an analysis of meaning to an analysis of
structuring practices when he writes of the Cantos,
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 83
writes that Bacon "Bought all the little copper pennies in Cuba" and goes on
to tell us that "Baldy's interest / was in money business."26 Baldy becomes
ill, however, and returns to Manhattan, with Pound providing the specific
address of "24 E. 47th." This is a fine example of the "production of rela-
tions" between signs: Pound juxtaposes the generalized and exotic other-
ness of Cuba against the specificity and assumed familiarity of New York
represented by 24 E. 47th. The political implications of this juxtaposition
of specificity against otherness will become more important as I proceed.
Bacon is then described as working in
Commercial stationery,
and later, insurance,
Employer's liability,
odd sorts of insurance
ing. On the one hand, Bacon is represented as a usurer who pollutes the
generalized otherness of Cuba, which is portrayed as a premodern culture
in which one hoards "little copper pennies" and counts them like a child-
"un centavo, dos centavos" (53). On the other hand, Bacon is represented
as a trickster whose street-smarts enable him to exploit the misfortunes
of monopoly and other organized forms of capital; that is, he helps the
"little man" collect insurance against the dockyard disasters of modernized
shipping companies, against the organized sellers of sex whose brothels
burn down, and against the "whole'r Wall St." (54). Jean-Michel Rabate
reads the reference to Hermes ("arrived, miraculous Hermes") as Pound
suggesting that "Bacon's faculty for and speed in adapting render him the
26. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions Press, 1986), 53.
All further references to the Cantos will be given in the text, immediately following the
quoted passage, with page numbers only. Canto 12 was written during the summer of
1923, as was Canto 13; it is possible that Cantos 14 and 15 were actually finished as
early as 1922. For more information on the dates and personal stories surrounding the
writings of these poems, see Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra
Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1988).
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84 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
equal of the God."27 What, then, does it "mean" for Bacon to be a god-
like trickster who exploits monopoly capital in Manhattan after having been
a centavo-hoarding usurer in Cuba? Can we not read the juxtaposition of
these situations as dependent upon the modernist myth of the unpolluted
primitivity of certain "undeveloped" regions? And doesn't such "modern"
versus "premodern" thinking serve as a justification for the ethnocentrism
that fuels colonialism? The importance of these questions will become more
clear as I proceed through the rest of Canto 12 and on into Cantos 13, 14,
and 15.
It turns out, however, that the water in the estuary is fresh. Dos San-
tos thus produces a "first lot" of pigs to mortgage for "the second lot," and,
before long, "Dos Santos fattened, a great landlord of Portugal." The ques-
tion appears again: Is Dos Santos a usurer or a trickster? A smart buy
sneaked out from under the noses of auctioneers and other big-money Chi-
cago bidders can only be seen by Pound as a positively creative act-Dos
Santos does, after all, literally create food. But what of Dos Santos's status
as a "great landlord"? Surely such landholdings (rented out to others no
less) are the mark of accumulating capital, which is definitely noncreative in
Pound's status-quo anticapitalist worldview. The questions, then, are, How
are these possibilities represented? and What is the "tissue of relations"
between them?
I suggest that the relation is one of aggressive ahistoricity. Specifi-
cally, we are given two historical moments, each loaded with significance,
and yet no dialectic. This might perhaps be explained by the fact that draw-
ing some sense of genesis or continuity through Dos Santos's rise would
reveal the inconsistencies in Pound's previously discussed split between
27. Jean-Michel Rabate, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos
(London: Croon Helm, 1986), 274.
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 85
property and capital. Indeed, it seems that Pound's crude economic bina-
rism forecloses the possibility of his analyzing the dialectical transformation
of property into capital, thus leaving him with two hypostatized fragments.
Pound then seals off the ambiguities of the dialectics of economic relations
by concluding the section with the line: "Go to hell Apovitch, Chicago aint
the whole punkin" (55). Apovitch is clearly intended to be Jewish, with Chi-
cago the site of the original auction. Thus, by focusing hostility on the U.S.-
based modern "Jewsry" of Apovitch, Pound directs attention away from the
complex dialectical contradictions and linkages between property and capi-
tal, trickster and usurer, and core (Chicago) and periphery (Cuba/Portugal).
My point is that Pound's story-ending imperative-"Go to hell Apovitch"-
serves to close off the ambiguous relations established between Dos San-
tos the trickster and Dos Santos the landlord and pig merchant. Indeed, it
is difficult to read such tag lines as anything less than semiotic watchdogs
intended to police our reading of the text.
The third example of economic behavior in Canto 12 is that of The
Honest Sailor. This story is told by Jim X in a "bankers' meeting" full of
Notice that Jim X has for his last name a mathematical variable,
suggesting either endlessly anonymous and replaceable possibilities or
perhaps simply x, as in the sign for multiplication.28 Such anonymous mul-
tiplication is clearly evident in the bankers' "investment in new bank build-
ings / productive of bank buildings" (55). An immediate socialist response to
these lines might be one of solidarity, and yet the poem as a whole strikes
me as a clear example of Pound's signifying strategy of closure/condensa-
tion, as religious leaders, bank directors, trading company executives, and
landlords are uniformly categorized as usurers who own slum property and
28. Carrol F. Terrell et al., A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Volume 1 (Berke-
ley, University of California Press, 1980), suggest that Jim X is based on John Quinn,
an "American lawyer; authority on modern Irish literature and drama; collector and patron
of modern art" (60). Michael Davidson has informed me that Quinn was patron not only
to Pound but to Eliot and Gaudier-Brzeska, as well.
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86 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
The sailor is even able to send his son (the child of a whore given to him
while he was in the hospital recovering from "too much booze") to college.
Upon his deathbed, the honest sailor-now a wealthy shipping magnate-
informs his son, who calls him "father," that
Notice that the son calls the sailor "father," whereas the sailor refers
to himself first as "fader" and then as "moder." I suggest that we read this
line as an example of what Russell Berman refers to as the practice of
"specious nomenclature." This is a process by which the misnaming of a
subject serves to distance it from some perceived social body. With spe-
cious nomenclature, Berman writes, "the name testifies to the enemy as
29. There is much support for this reading. For example, Michael Bernstein writes of
Pound's ideograms, "There is no voice but his own to give them authority" (from his Tale
of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980], 47), while Daniel Pearleman likewise sees Pound's signifying strategy as
"evidence of an authoritarian manner" (from his "The Anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound," in
Contemporary Literature 22, no. 1 [Winter 1981]: 106, 107). Peter Brooker also supports
these charges, as he observes that Pound's signifying strategies provide evidence of "a
decidedly fascist tendency" (from his "The Lesson of Ezra Pound: An Essay on Poetry,
Literary Ideologies, and Politics," in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, 28).
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 87
30. Russell Berman, "The Wandering Z," foreword to Kaplan's Reproductions of Ba-
nality, xii. "Specious Nomenclature" was one of Pound's favorite markers of otherness:
"Rosefield" instead of Roosevelt; "Jewspapers" instead of newspapers; "Jewsry" instead
of usury.
31. Terrell's Companion tells us that "Stambouli" is "the oldest part and main Turkish
residential section of Istanbul" (60).
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88 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river. (58)
From the street trading and lending of centavos in Cuba to the dockyard
accidents of Manhattan to a Chicago boardroom full of "usurers in ex-
celsis"-from all of these images of modern economic and moral decay,
Pound escapes into the paradisiacal cedar grove of a dynastic temple. In
the following pages, I argue that the nostalgic gesture of longing for a lost
era of "order" and unpolluted nature (cedars are one of Pound's most fre-
quent signs for natural beauty) functions as a bolt against the slippage of
"meaning" in Canto 12. Indeed, whatever questions might have surfaced
concerning the different levels and contexts of usury in Canto 12 are con-
densed by Canto 13 into binary opposites, with modern usury juxtaposed
against the paradisiacal premodern dynastic order of China, circa 500 B.C.
The Kung Canto proceeds with statements by various followers of
Kung, each offering a different perspective on how to govern, to which Kung
replies: "They have all answered correctly, / That is to say, each in his
nature" (58). Such forgiving pluralism might be read as little more than the
flippant answer of a ruler whose power is beyond challenge. Perhaps this
explains why Juan Jang, whom the Companion describes as "an old friend
of the philosopher, older than he himself" (62), elicits such condemnation
from Kung. Indeed, it seems that "each in his own nature" applies only to
students and not to elders, who, we may presume, have more social power
and are therefore more of a threat to Kung. For example, according to Kung,
Juan Jang is sitting by the roadside not meditating or thinking or pondering
being but "pretending to / be receiving wisdom" (59). This enrages Kung,
who shouts, "You old fool, come out of it, / Get up and do something useful."
And then: "a man of fifty who knows nothing / Is worthy of no respect" (59).
This sentiment corresponds with Pound's statement concerning eco-
nomics as the distribution of "everything useful and desirable" (ABC, 252),
for here again we find unqualified and totalizing categories begging the
question of how to distinguish something "useful" from waste. For that mat-
ter, how can anyone "know nothing"? These lines are thus further examples
of the way in which alternative forms of knowledge are normativized-
via cognitive privilege-into that which is not "useful" and not worthy of
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 89
These lines follow Kung's appeal for a leader with character. A literal reading
might see this as an authoritarian gesture; a deconstructive reading might
see this as an excessive claim that undermines its own ability to signify;
a Marxist reading might see this as further evidence of the will to control
raw materials. I acknowledge the possible validity of each of these readings
while wanting, however, to return to the question of how such text is pro-
duced in relation to Pound's other textual constructions. Therefore, I think it
helpful to recall my earlier comments concerning Pound's representation of
Cuba as a premodern/preindustrial culture, for here again, with the example
of China circa 500 B.C., we find Pound engaging in what Edward Said ex-
amines as "Orientalism."32 Specifically, Pound creates a static geographic,
cultural, and historical other against which a stable self may be authored.
This observation should bring to mind my earlier remarks on the political
function of signifying practices that condense the role of "Jewsurers" and
Bolsheviks, for in both cases the strategy is to condense a complex matrix
of economic and political relations into easily presented and clearly marked
symbols. Thus, despite the ambiguity of the conclusion to Canto 13, we can
still pursue the broader question of how the series of signs that make up
the Kung Canto relate back to Canto 12, and forward to Cantos 14 and 15.
In this sense, I read the Kung Canto as functioning as an oriental-
32. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
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90 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
... politicians
......... e and ..... n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots. (61)
bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 91
The sheer violence of these lines is, in itself, disturbing. What I find
perhaps more dangerous is the relation of these Cantos to those that pre-
cede them, for I suspect that much of the ferocity of Cantos 14 and 15 is a
response to the ambiguity of 12 and particularly to the potential slippages
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92 boundary 2 / Spring 1993
that occur at the end of 13. Indeed, what are the semiotic relations between
the concluding lines of Cantos 13 and the Hell of 14 and 15? And, for that
matter, how do these relations extend back to and through 12?
In discussing Canto 12, I emphasized the poem's condensation of
geographic and historical specificity into synchronous moments of some
wider "modernist" movement toward international usury. Canto 13 was then
seen to offer the 2400-year-old moral example of Kung's "order by charac-
ter," but it ends with a particularly curious and indefinite statement. I then
read Cantos 14 and 15 as providing a vulgar honor role of slanders and
scatological references, all relating to and resulting from various forms of
modern economic/moral decay. Cantos 12, 14, and 15, thus, on my reading,
construct a cycle, with 13 wedged in the middle, so that whatever ambiguity
might have remained after reading 12 or 13 is erased via the avalanche
of accusations in 14 and 15. Indeed, the Hell of financiers drinking "blood
sweetened with shit" cannot help but revalue my reading of Canto 12. Thus,
while the honest sailor and his monster son, along with Bacon and Dos
Santos, might have initially been read as somewhat ambiguous signifiers of
generalized sexual, economic, and geographic otherness, they are now-
after reading Cantos 14 and 15-nothing short of "infinite pus flakes" and
"usurers squeezing crab-lice." In short, the multiple forms of usury men-
tioned in Canto 12 are here, in 14 and 15, literally condensed into all that is
inhuman, uncivilized, full of and spouting shit, diseased. My argument, then,
is that whatever potential slippages I may have found in Cantos 12 and 13
are buried within Cantos 14 and 15 beneath a tirade of loaded signifiers
that, not surprisingly, adhere closely to the ideologies of fascism.
In my section on the semiotics of fascism, I emphasized the use of
cognitive privilege and binarism. Such strategies are employed in Cantos
12 through 15 with much vigor. The attack in Canto 13 on Jang, who "knows
nothing" and should do "something useful," serves as an example. The
lines from Canto 14, "Bog of stupidities, / malevolent stupidities," are per-
haps even more to the point, for Pound announces that the actions of both
bourgeois politicians and the "anonymous" masses result not from alterna-
tive agendas but from stupidity; and not just from simple ignorance but from
aggressively malevolent stupidity. Pound then juxtaposes against such vul-
garities and stupidities the paradisiacal order and character of Kung. The
binary pole is thus set: On the one hand, we have the condensed Hell
of modernity; on the other hand, we find the cedar groves of Kung's im-
perial dynasty. The "production of relations" between Cantos 12, 13, 14,
and 15, thus, on my reading, enacts Pound's transition from using language
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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 93
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