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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780521870405 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2007 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.63(d) |
About the Author
Rebecca Beasley is Lecturer in English at Birkbeck College, University of London.
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Cambridge University Press
978-0-521-87040-5 - Ezra Pound and the Visual Culture of Modernism - by Rebecca Beasley
Excerpt
Introduction
The 1930s were years of consolidation for Ezra Pound. His poetry became available to a wider public as its publication was taken over by major publishers, Faber and Faber in Great Britain, and Farrar and Rinehart in the United States. A new generation of poets and critics, including R. P. Blackmur, Basil Bunting, e.e. cummings, George Oppen, Allen Tate and Louis Zukovsky, looked to him as the vanguard of their literary revolution. His confirmed status was reflected in his literary criticism, which, always pedagogical, now explicitly took on the form of the textbook. ‘How to Read’, first serialised in the New York Herald Tribune in 1929, was published in book form in 1931; in 1934 it was supplemented with ABC of Reading, conceived as a ‘text-book that can also be read “for pleasure as well as profit” by those no longer in school; by those who have not been to school; or by those who in their college days suffered those things which most of my generation suffered’ (ABCR, ix). In 1938 Guide to Kulchur appeared, ‘written for men who have not been able to afford an university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today’ (GK, [6]). Between them, these threeworks set out a programme of study and thought designed to provide the reader with ‘instruments’ and ‘tools’ with which to measure literary works and compare pieces of information (ABCR, 14; GK, 23).
Measure, compare – but first of all, look, is Pound’s injunction in his textbooks, and in them we encounter a succession of figures distinguished by their optical perspicacity. There is the post-graduate student instructed by the biologist Louis Agassiz to look at a dead fish for three weeks; the fifteenth-century painter and medallist Pisanello, who drew horses so precisely that (Pound believed) Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, sent him to buy them; the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who could ‘see’ the meaning of Chinese characters ‘without any study’ and the critic of the future who will be able to tell the economic health of a period from a painting (ABCR, 1–2, 14, 5; GK, 27). The picture gallery is Pound’s chosen analogy for his comparative mode of criticism: in How to Read the example of the National Gallery suggests that the ‘best history of literature [. . .] would be a twelve-volume anthology’ (HTR, 10), and in ABC of Reading, shading the art gallery into the laboratory, the quotations are presented as ‘exhibits’ (ABCR, 81).1
Pound advocates gaining knowledge by listening as well as by looking: in ABC of Reading, he remarks that the concerts he organised with Olga Rudge and Gerhart Münch in Rapallo during the winter of 1933 ‘demonstrate[d] the How to Read thesis in a medium nearer to poetry than painting is’ (ABCR, 8; EPM, 337–40). But even though Pound believed music to be the more precise correlative to poetry and, indeed, he was engaged with music during this period in a way he no longer was with the visual arts, as an analogy it is nevertheless looking that is the preferred model of engagement, the art gallery that suggests a methodology, and the painting that is the equivalent of the verbal text. It is indicative that Pound capitalises ‘look’ four times in ABC of Reading (all in the first two chapters), a rate exceeded only by his capitalisation of ‘know’ ‘listen’ is not capitalised once. The object of this book is to track how the visual sense and the visual arts came to occupy this key position in Pound’s thought, and to explain the shifting ideological significance of their presence.
The terms of my title require some explanation here. It is a critical commonplace that early twentieth-century literature was in thrall to the visual arts: ‘we are under the dominion of painting’, wrote Virginia Woolf in 1925.2 The notion of a ‘visual culture of modernism’ is, in this sense, an instantly recognisable concept. However, viewed from another perspective, from within the critical field of visual culture, the phrase is more problematic. Since its emergence in the last thirty years, visual culture has come to define itself through a very different set of theoretical precepts and objects of interest than those historically associated with modernism. For W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, ‘the most obvious evidence’ of interest in visual culture is ‘the emergence of studies in film, television, and mass culture, alongside a new social/ political/ communicational order that employs mass spectacle and technologies of visual and auditory stimulation in radically new ways’.3 While the ‘new’ is conventionally, though not unproblematically, understood as a constituent of modernism, the other elements of this definition have been typically associated with the not-modernisms, the avant-garde and postmodernism. In these discourses, it is precisely modernism’s failure to engage with mechanical reproduction, mass culture and the socio-political order – in short, with the distinctive features of twentieth-century modernity – that is its defining trait. For critics such as Marshall Berman, Peter Bürger and Andreas Huyssen, modernism is the reactionary response to modernity – and Pound is frequently invoked as this argument’s defining example. Berman, for example, defines modernity against ‘a distinctive mode of aesthetic modernism, pervasive in our century – e.g. in Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and their many followers – in which modern people and life are endlessly abused, while modern artists and their works are exalted to the skies, without any suspicion that these artists may be more human, and more deeply implicated in la vie moderne, than they would like to think’.4
These influential anti-modernist critics revised the hegemonic conception of the relationship between modernity and its literary expression, rejecting self-conscious experiment as the marker of modernity in favour of art’s critique of its own social status.5 They thus attacked the very ground of modernism’s self-definition as a radical movement. But in doing so, they also regenerated Anglo-American modernist studies, galvanising the discipline into moving beyond the exaltation of formal experiment for its own sake and conducting a sustained interrogation of early twentieth-century cultural production. The ‘new modernisms’ that have emerged are less hostile to modernity than their singular predecessor, even if they retain an equivocal relationship to technology and mass culture.6 After two decades, the challenge of Bürger’s ‘historical avant-garde’ has been assimilated, as is demonstrated by Ann Ardis’s recent reappropriation of the once uncontentious phrase ‘modernist avant-garde’.7 The legacy of anti-modernism is a more nuanced history of literary activity in the early twentieth century, from which the radical and the reactionary have emerged with a considerably more complex relationship than was previously acknowledged.
But even though the respective values of visual culture and of modernism no longer seem as opposed as they did ten years ago, in this study I want to preserve the tension between the two terms in order to pursue a particular argument. In her recent book on visual culture and the modernist novel, The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture, Karen Jacobs argues that the perspective of visual culture
allows us to see literature as responsive to a broader set of influences than the narrow and often purely formally conceived aesthetic sphere. Determinations about modernist politics have often been predicated on assessments of its form, equating its opacity with elitism and solipsism or, conversely, with the progressive project of defamiliarization and subversion [. . .]. These various valorizations of form, I believe, threaten to obscure equally important valorizations of the ideological content of modernist texts.8
Like Jacobs, I am drawn to visual culture as a means of expanding our thinking about modernism, and asking questions about the ideological content of modernist texts, as well as their form. But our approach is different; where Jacobs juxtaposes the terms modernism and visual culture to explore how modernist texts can be productively understood as responding to the visual culture of modernity, my title intends to register a visuality embedded within modernism itself, modernism understood here as the retrospectively applied literary critical category. My interrogation of modernism is informed by a recognition of its influence on the inter-war professionalisation of English studies, and its construction through an institutionalised version of its own terms. The canonisation of certain texts under the term ‘modernism’ in the mid-twentieth century was achieved by a criticism that emphasised ‘spatial form’, analysed by ‘practical criticism’ or ‘close reading’, and, above all, believed that the literary text could ‘embody reality rather than merely refer to it’.9 These terms were derived from modernism’s own account of itself, an account, I want to emphasise, that drew heavily on modernism’s encounter with the visual arts. Literary modernism is, paradoxically, a visual culture.
Pound contributed decisively to this formation of modernism, and from the very beginning of his career his engagement with the visual arts had a fundamental impact on his theorising of the literary. The nature of that impact has long been a source of debate. William Carlos Williams famously denounced Pound as ‘color blind’, citing his preference for Francis Picabia and Fernand Léger over Picasso, Braque and Matisse as evidence of his lack of knowledge and taste, and at the end of his career Pound himself dismissed the idea that his association with artists had had ‘anything to do with [him] as a writer’.10 But literary critics have found much to say about Pound’s writing on art, especially his advocacy of the distinctive critique of pre-war aesthetics mounted by Wyndham Lewis and the vorticist group, and his ardent support for contemporary sculpture. Richard Cork’s and Timothy Materer’s rigorous work on the vorticist Pound over the last thirty years has carved out a unique place for him in the period as a catalyst in the history of art, as well as of literature.11 The ground for this portrait was well prepared by early studies by Walter Baumann, Donald Davie, Hugh Kenner and Hugh Witemeyer that deployed Pound’s own spatial analogies, ‘patterned energy’, ‘rose in the steel dust’, ‘vortex’ and ‘intaglio’ to elucidate his experiments in poetic form.12 In the new wave of Pound scholarship in the 1980s, the visual arts continued to play an important role: Harriet Zinnes’s anthology of Pound’s writing on the visual arts made available previously obscure articles, notably the ‘Art Notes’ column for the New Age, and Charles Altieri, Andrew Clearfield, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Michael North and Marjorie Perloff explored Pound’s poetics through the lenses of cubism, collage, vorticism, classicist architecture and sculpture, and futurism, respectively. In 1984 the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of Pound’s Artists, accompanied by a book of the same name that to date is the best single source of information about Pound’s interaction with visual artists.13
However, it was also in the 1980s, and indeed in these works, that the use of the visual arts as an interpretative framework for Pound’s poetry began to be productively questioned. As the critical landscape was revivified by its encounter with post-structuralism and Marxism, and at the same time more sustained attention was given to Pound’s politics and economics, discussion of Pound and the visual arts could no longer be restricted to analyses of formal interaction. Two statements from this period summarise the questions such studies raised. First, Charles Altieri wrote:
But if we concentrate simply on comparing the concepts or stylistic devices poets and painters share, we tend to reduce poetry to a narrow range of predicates and to subordinate it to values in fact best realized by the visual arts. Relations between the arts, especially in post-romantic cultures, are not likely to resolve into a series of discrete borrowings. We ought then to expect intricate networks of provocations and threats, permissions and fears as writers see what can be borrowed, who one becomes when one imitates, and what may be possible if one tries to transform what has been inherited into the characteristic thematic and performative dimensions of poetry.14szs
For Altieri the limitation of the formalist analyses he associates particularly with Kenner’s criticism is that they leave out a consideration of ethics: he proposes instead a ‘constructivist aesthetic’, in which contemporaneous visual arts challenge Pound to develop a poetics in which he can balance, ‘the aesthetic, the utopian, and the practical’.15 A year later, Michael André Bernstein suggested a related programme:
What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of Pound’s specific statements about various artists, with each utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and texture of Pound’s own work. The attempt to focus attention on The Cantos’ network of artistic references – its invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural achievement – will yield only trivial results unless the inner dynamic linking Pound’s various exampla and the actual role these play in the poem’s argument become clearer in the process.16
Unlike Altieri, Bernstein is less interested in rethinking Pound’s formal response to the visual arts than he is in mapping the ideological implications of Pound’s allegiances and references. But what these proposed programmes share is an insistence that the visual arts be seen as part of the ‘argument’ of Pound’s work, providing a model that is not restricted to the formal.
The last decade has seen a number of responses to these programmatic statements. Four works in particular have set out the parameters within which this study is conceived. Vincent Sherry’s Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism made the decisive move of associating Pound’s and Lewis’s prioritising of the visual sense and the terms of their visual rhetoric with a particular ideological tradition, an anti-democratic Continental philosophical tradition that also includes Julien Benda, Ortega y Gasset, Remy de Gourmont and Wilhelm Worringer. David Kadlec’s more recent Mosaic Modernism focussed its discussion of Pound’s aesthetic terminology particularly on the individualist anarchism Pound encountered in the pages of Dora Marsden’s Egoist, whose privileging of immediacy and action Kadlec compellingly relates to the juxtapositional technique of The Cantos. In Solid Objects, Douglas Mao explained the modernist attraction to objects and ‘thingly opacity’ as an aspiration to a realm beyond the reach of ideology, minutely detailing the lacunae in Pound’s theorising of individual production that rationalised his turn to fascism. Finally, Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism demonstrated with force and clarity how the detailed reconstruction of moments of cultural production could yield insights into the politics of form.17
This book traces the place of the visual and the visual arts in Pound’s work, from his earliest writings, many of them unpublished, to the 1930s, by which time his interest had lessened: as Reed Way Dasenbrock has commented, though Pound ‘continued to cite artists and works of art as touchstones or exemplars of civilization, [. . .] there is virtually no discussion of works qua art in the way there was in the decade from 1914 to 1924’.18 In order to track and assess the associations Pound built between his literary project and contemporaneous visual culture, this study proceeds chronologically, measuring Pound’s interaction with the visual arts, and his interpretations of particular works, against those of contemporary critics. In his first published article, written from within American aestheticism’s cult of beauty, Pound’s professional investment in the visual arts is clear: the visual arts are to provide the model for an alternative mode of criticism from the philological tradition in which he had been educated. Analogies with works by Whistler, Waterhouse and Turner function as explanatory strategies in place of biographical information and textual scholarship, and extensive quotation (showing) rather than commentary (saying) introduces a methodology that looks forward to the close reading techniques developed in the 1920s. Pound continued to use the visual arts to invoke a transcendent poetics of beauty during his first years in London, but as he reconfigured the terms of his career through the movement tactics of imagism and vorticism in the context of the post-impressionist debates about aesthetic modernity, his interpretation of the visual arts began to focus on their ability to set his poetry to the task of contemporary critique. This, indeed, made contemporary art an important model not only for the form but also for the content of The Cantos, yet during this period Pound also began to seriously question the ability of painting and sculpture to foster the ‘free circulation of thought’ which had become his chief preoccupation.19 The very materiality of painting and sculpture makes them luxury goods, he decides, and, disregarding the mass arts of photography and cinema, he argues that literature alone can lend itself to popularisation. The conceptual art of the dadaists forces a reconsideration of this question and during the 1920s Pound’s aesthetics enter a final phase in which the prime criterion of artistic value is intelligence.
However, this is only part of the story, and while an account of the visual arts as a component of Pound’s self-fashioning can explain the rationale for his engagement, it falls short of interpreting the politics of that engagement. Pound’s aesthetic decisions cannot be separated from ideological considerations, and for that reason this study frequently ranges well beyond Pound’s writing about art, both to lesser known or unpublished critical pieces by Pound, but also to contemporary debates that enable an evaluation of his decisions. In the first chapter, for example, consideration of the ideology of the department store and the professionalisation of university study leads to a reading of Pound’s poetics of beauty as part of the middle classes’ reconfiguration of the cultural landscape from an aristocracy to a meritocracy. In chapter two, a genealogical account of Pound’s critical terminology leads us not only to the familiar formalist criticism of Laurence Binyon and Roger Fry, but also to the less familiar individualism of Huntly Carter, the art and drama critic of the Egoist. Although Pound was not committed to a single political position at this point, for critics at his other main publishing outlet, the socialist New Age, his criticism appeared to encode the Egoist’s individualist anarchism, a politics that linked Pound to the new art movements before he engaged with them himself. Chapter three is a sustained reading of the earliest drafts of The Cantos as what Pound termed a ‘realist’ text, in which the vorticist art of Lewis and Gaudier is admired as ‘a historical method’ that can represent the values of the individualist and oppose the verbalism of both German Kultur and British democracy.20 The final chapter describes the intellectual and ideological trajectory of the post-war Parisian avant-garde at the time of Pound’s stay in Paris from 1921 to 1924. The aesthetic choices William Carlos Williams professed not to understand are explained by the dadaists’ lone commitment to an individualist and anti-nationalist programme, while Picasso led the embrace of post-war patriotic classicism. Yet the dadaist programme, with its dissolution of artistic categories into ‘art in general’, to use Thierry de Duve’s term, would for Pound initiate the collapse between the aesthetic and the political that brokered his shift to Italian fascism.21
To return to Pound’s early poetry and to issues of aesthetics is not to put aside the ethical questions that accounts of his later career inevitably make central. This study endeavours to provide a bridge between work on Pound’s early career and the criticism on his later career that has had more to say about politics and history. My reading of Pound’s early writings demonstrates how directly he was concerned with social and political questions during this supposedly aestheticist phase, and my account of Pound’s intellectual activity in post-war Paris, in particular, helps to explain how he arrived in Paris as an individualist anti-nationalist, and left as a supporter of Mussolini – Tim Redman’s otherwise excellent study of Pound’s attraction to Italian fascism omits the Paris period entirely. I aim to contribute to the recovery of a history of modernism in which the revolutionary rhetoric of the avant-garde, appearing first in the visual arts and subsequently in literature, is not read simply as the posturing of the competitive young artist, but rather as having a particular political resonance. Modernist individualism should not be collapsed into late Romantic subjectivity. This mistake formed the basis of one of the most powerful critiques of modernism, that levelled by Georg Lukács, who argued that the modernists’ ‘rejection of modern reality is purely subjective’, lacking ‘both content and direction’, unlike ‘the bourgeois protest against feudal society, the proletarian against bourgeois society’, in both of which ‘the protest [. . .] was based on a concrete terminus ad quem: the establishment of a new order’.22 On the contrary, modernist individualism did envision the establishment of a new order, hence its attraction to both communism and fascism, sometimes simultaneously. While Pound’s engagement with contemporary art has tended to be interpreted as evidence of his aestheticist preoccupation with form, this study explores how the appeal of the visual arts lay primarily in their apparent immediacy, an immediacy valued first as an expression of subjectivity, then as the corollary of anarchist direct action, and, finally, the cult of efficiency that drew Pound to fascist Italy.
© Cambridge University Press