Ezra Pound: Fascist Modernism as Committed Literature?

Résumé 0

This article analyses the question of committed literature from an unfamiliar angle, that of the generation of modernist writers who explicitly or implicitly appeared to subscribe to the politics not of the Left, as we commonly understand committed literature to do, but of the Right and of Fascism. Taking Ezra Pound as representative of that generation, the paper analyses some little-known essays Pound wrote between 1938 and 1943 while living in Italy. Published in one of the most prominent literary magazines of the Fascist era, Meridiano di Roma, these articles ranged over a series of well-established Poundian motifs, from the question of the Jewish dominance of financial world-markets, to the theory of money proposed by Gesell, to, less often, Pound’s literary judgements on his contemporaries. The article sets these essays in the context of Fascist cultural policy, but then proceeds to ask whether Pound’s own use of Italian does not in fact tell us more about his political commitments and allegiances than the explicit theories of money and state organisation he propounds in the essays written for Meridiano. The essay concludes by suggesting that Pound’s instrumental use of Italian is part of a larger history, on which Pound was silent, but to which he made what is perhaps one of the most ambitious contributions. This history maps the shift in cultural dominance from British to American English, and the corresponding move towards the age of US imperialism. Drawing on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s different notion of committed literature as outlined in their book on Kafka, the article concludes that while Pound’s work can easily be seen as ‘committed’ in those terms, the direction and shape of this commitment is not towards the Fascist regimes of Western Europe, but towards the USA.