Kitsching The Cantos

Kitsching The Cantos

Tiffany, Daniel Newton, 1952-

Modernism/modernity, Volume 12, Number 2, April 2005, pp. 329-337(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mod.2005.0071

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TIFFANY / kitsching the cantos

329

MODERNISM / modernity

VOLUME TWELVE, NUMBER

TWO, PP 329–337.

© 2005 THE JOHNS HOP-

KINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Daniel Tiffany,

Professor of English and

Comparative Literature

at the University of

Southern California,

is the author of Radio

Corpse: Imagism and the

Cryptaesthetic of Ezra

Pound (Harvard University

Press, 1995) and Toy

Medium: Materialism and

Modern Lyric (University of

California Press, 2000),

named by the Los Angeles

Times as one of the “Best

Books of 2000.” His

poetry and translations

(from French, Italian,

and Greek) have been

widely published. He

is currently writing a

book entitled “Lyric

Monadologies,” a study

of the problem of lyric

obscurity, vernacular

poetry, and infidel culture.

Kitsching The Cantos

Daniel Tiffany

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

Kitsch is the most important, if still largely misunderstood, cat-egory of aesthetic production to have emerged from the political turmoil of the 1930s and from the polemics of late modernism. Yet the antithetical relation between kitsch and the principles of modernism (or art in general) is dangerously unstable and ambiguous: Greenberg identified kitsch as a parasite feeding upon the productions of the avant-garde,1 while Hermann Broch (the Austrian novelist whose 1933 essay on kitsch established the framework for all later formulations of kitsch, including Greenberg’s) claimed that kitsch is “lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art.”2 Furthermore, Broch (an unlikely defender of modern formalism) declares: “Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art. . . . Its relationship to art can be compared—and this is more than a mere metaphor—to the relationship between the system of the Anti-Christ and the sys-tem of Christ” (63, 62). That is, kitsch is the dialectical “system” opposed to art (and to modernism in particular), whose unmarked

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330 resemblance to the “system” of art only enhances its catastrophically destructive chal-lenge to the values of art. Broch’s recognition of the perilous correspondences between art and kitsch led him ultimately to view kitsch as a Luciferian phenomenon—not as a static category distinct from art, but as the fallen condition of an exalted aesthetic ideology. He describes Romanticism’s susceptibility to “a disastrous fall from the cosmic heights to kitsch”: a Luciferian “swerve” from cosmos to cosmetics. That is, properly speaking, kitsch is a matter of becoming rather than being. To characterize a poem or painting as kitsch therefore implies that the work need not have been produced as kitsch and, moreover, it is revealed to be kitsch—an apocalyptic orientation—in the course of its historical transmission.

The same modernist critics who constructed the opposition between kitsch and avant-garde tended to view kitsch as a form of degraded Romanticism, suggesting that the attempt to isolate kitsch from art is related to the antagonism displayed by modernist writers toward Romantic poetics (and to the phantasmagorical properties of Romantic values in modernist texts).3 Further, we should bear in mind that mod-ernist theories of kitsch emerged in the 1930s (the period when Pound revived the compositional principle of the ideogram) and that references to Romanticism in this context often served as a means of linking kitsch to the aesthetic ideology of National Socialism. In Pound’s case, one finds encrypted in the modernist image a residue of Romantic hermeneutics and necrophilia which repeatedly disrupts his formalist doctrine, and which later contributed to the fascist coloring of the revised, mythical ideogram. Thus one could argue that the foreign body encrypted in the modernist image (and modernism in general) is the problem of kitsch (as a degraded form of Romanticism). Indeed, a cryptological reading of the problem of kitsch first becomes evident, as I indicated earlier, in Broch’s alarming figure: “Kitsch is certainly not ‘bad art’; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art” (62). Similarly, Adorno writes, “It [kitsch] lies dormant in art itself, wait-ing for a chance to leap forward at any moment.”4 Furthermore, Adorno explains, “the revolt against art’s a priori affinity with kitsch has helped guide the development of art towards the decomposition of works. What art used to be, kitsch may become in the future. Kitsch may be a corrective to the decomposing trend in art, perhaps it is even the true progress of art” (435). Adorno suggests here that the figurative “death” of art (its “decomposition”) in modern formalism arises from an allergic reaction to kitsch. Moreover, it is kitsch, the apparition of “mimetic enchantment,” that will rise, eventu-ally, from the grave of modernism. In this passage, Adorno predicts the “return”—after modernism—of kitsch, an orientation exceeding, and revising, the thesis that kitsch is merely a degraded form of Romantic poetics.

I want to argue that a similar encrypting and reanimation of kitsch occurs, under the “spell” of fascism, in the modernist precinct of The Cantos. To gain some perspective, one should bear in mind that, just as the problem of kitsch, generally, is associated with the power of images in modern society, so the problem of kitsch in Pound’s work emerges first in the context of Imagism. In the most obvious sense, the modernist image in poetry emerges as an emblem of opposition to the dangerous potency of Victorian

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331“rhetoric,” the catch-all term Pound uses to condemn the symptoms of poetic kitsch: ornament and falsification. In his Vorticist writings, Pound explains, “The point of Imagisme is that it does not use images as ornaments” (Pound’s emphasis).5 Pound is careful to distinguish the new poetic image from “false metaphor, ornamental metaphor” and “applied decoration.”6 Indeed, one could argue that poetic modernism, in its early stages, attempted to counteract the general perception, infecting literary culture as well, that poetry, in contrast to prose, is the verbal embodiment of kitsch (a legacy of Romanticism that continues to haunt the public estimation of contemporary poetry).

Despite Pound’s strategic success in isolating the modernist image from the symp-toms of literary kitsch, it must be emphasized that this manifest opposition is fatally undermined by the extravagant and polarized rhetoric of Imagist poetics. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” (written by Pound as an “autopsy” of the Imagist period), offers a brilliant account of the medusal power exercised by kitsch over the creator of the modernist image. The poem condemns, on one hand, the kitsch sensibility of “the age”:

a tawdry cheapness Shall outlive our days . . . We see tdkalsnDecreed in the marketplace.7

In these lines, a perfume marketed under the name of the ancient Greek word for beauty becomes a symbol for the antithesis of modernism, a symbol despised by the obituarian prospect of the poem, yet embraced by the Imagist Mauberley: “The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster” (186). The most unstable and troubling aspects of the poem arise therefore from its acknowledgment that the destructive character of kitsch finds its fullest expression in the sensibility and “mediumistic” art of Mauberley, who is clearly one of the primary “faces” (if not the occluded source) of Imagist poetics.

Though “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” may condemn Mauberley’s hyper-aesthetic sensi-bility, the poem cannot disguise the rhapsodic, yet forbidden, allure of poetic kitsch:

Thick foliagePlacid beneath warm suns,Tawn fore-shoresWashed in cobalt oblivions;Or through dawn-mistThe grey and roseOf the juridicalFlamingoes (Personae, 201)

In another instance,

The coral isle, the lion-coloured sandBurst in upon the porcelain revery:Impetuous troubling

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332 Of his imagery (Personae, 199)

The fact that Mauberley is both an image-maker and a self-destructive addict of beauty suggests that Pound’s early crypt poetry, which we must now, by analogy with Mauberley’s art, regard as kitsch, is one of the hidden well-springs of Imagism. Indeed, The Cantos itself is riddled with passages recalling the pre-Raphaelite cult of beauty. Furthermore, it is Mauberley’s death—some would say suicide—in the poem from an excess of pleasure which establishes the terms for a phantasmic revival of kitsch, as a form of ethnographic “possession,” in the context of Pound’s fascism.

The many passages in The Cantos which betray the rhapsodic sensibility of kitsch in the most conventional manner frequently occur at the three principal sites of Pound’s historical imagination (which he calls the “phantastikon”): medieval Italy or France, ancient China, and Greek antiquity. Often, the scenes mix details and references to several places, or cultures, at once, as in this Chinese tableau alluding to the Roman god of sleep:

Plain, as the plain of Somnus, The heavy cars, as a triumph,Gilded, heavy on wheel, And the panthers chained to the cars,Over the suave turf, the form wrapped,Rose, crimson, deep crimson,And, in the blue dusk, a colour as of rust in the sunlight.8

The Hellenic version of this scene usually involves some nudity, lots of water, and perhaps a peep at a pagan god:

Bathing the body of nymphs, and Diana,Nymphs, white-gathered about her, and the air, air,Shaking, air alight with the goddess, Fanning their hair in the dark,Lifting, lifting and waffing,Ivory dipping in silver, Shadow’d and o’ershadowedIvory dipping in silver (The Cantos, 14)

Other variations of these bucolic and naughty tableaux (with the technicolor palette of a Maxfield Parrish image) may offer a bit of Chinoiserie, or a vision of a dead Italian queen, or Circe, in a Mongol court; or a Troubadour poet floating in a pagan landscape:

Ivory rigid in sunlightAnd the pale clear of the heavenPhoibos of narrow thighs, The cut cool of the air

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333Blossom cut on the wind, by HeliosLord of the light’s edge, and AprilBlown round the feet of the God (The Cantos, 145)

As these passages indicate, the lyric substance of epic kitsch tends towards archaism—a lost language to render lost worlds—a verbal palette designed to catch the eye and ear of the carriage trade.

The primary solution to restrictions and categories imposed by a formalist under-standing of kitsch derives from a counter-argument within the modernist discourse on kitsch, which yields an esoteric form of kitsch that resonates with the principles of high modernism. From the standpoint of this counter-perspective, one could argue that Christmas tree ornaments painted with Hitler’s portrait belong in the same aesthetic domain as the cryptic insignia of the SS uniform; or that the aggressively modernist installations of the 1932 fascist exhibition in Rome provide the context for processions of Italian youth dressed in togas. The sources of these two ostensibly divergent modali-ties of kitsch are identical: the cryptology of myth, nostalgia, and death.

In the context of Pound’s work, the spirit of modernist, totalitarian kitsch emerges from Mauberley’s grave: the cult of beauty revives as a formal paradigm of “possession,” modeled after the tropes of ethnographic collecting and symbolized by the principle of paideuma. The fascist poetic is no longer possessed simply by objects of beauty (though that experience, too, persists in The Cantos), but by “dead” objects, charged with mythological significance, which the poet has rescued from a tawdry modernity, yet also arranged in a collection according to the esoteric and didactic impulses of Pound’s aesthetic ideology. This collection is itself a monadic “image” (in the sense that a museum collection is an image) of a fascist utopia. The anachronistic and totalitarian features of kitsch are therefore evident in The Cantos not merely in the sentimental or rhapsodic effect of some of its images, but, by implication, in the praxis of collect-ing which governs The Cantos. This collection provides in turn a simulacrum of the mythological community to which the nostalgic images refer. Pound’s poetic praxis in The Cantos therefore fuses kitsch and high modernism, most obviously, in it atavistic seizures of pre-Raphaelite “beauty” (which occur like blackouts in the experimental ethos of the text); yet also in its sometimes hysterical impulse to display its verbal booty, its contraband, its sentimental treasure. In addition, directly imitating the kitsch sensi-bility of Fascist propaganda, certain sections of the later cantos employ melodrama and simplistic myths to mobilize support for the Fascist regime. These various modalities of kitsch coincide in the notorious Italian cantos.

The cryptological reading of kitsch was initiated, as I mentioned, by Broch, who associates kitsch with “that atmosphere of quite indecent necrophilia which so largely dominates Romantic literature.”9 More recently, the historian Saul Friedländer has examined the necrophilic dimension of kitsch, as well as its nostalgic character, in relation to fascist culture. In an essay on kitsch and the apocalyptic imagination, he refers to “the use of kitsch and death motives in representations meant to exorcise the past by re-invoking its specific kind of fascination.”10 In his seminal work, Reflections

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334 of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Friedländer develops a conception of what he calls “a kitsch of the apocalypse,” and observes, “The paradox of kitsch and mo-dernity is that kitsch is often an antimodern face of modernity.”11 Further, he claims, “Kitsch death is a means to digest the past” (40), and that kitsch often signals “a cult of primitive and archaic values” (33). Thus he associates kitsch with “exorcism” and the “work of mourning”—an aberrant mourning, I would add, that calls to mind the permutations of Pound’s fascination with death (85). Friedländer’s necrological and apocalyptic reading of kitsch focuses on the phenomenon of myth, which he defines as “a footprint, an echo of lost worlds, haunting an imagination invaded by excessive rationality and thus becoming the crystallization point for thrusts of the archaic and the irrational” (49). “Kitsch,” he argues, “is a debased form of myth, but nevertheless draws from the mythic substance” (49).

Quite clearly, Friedländer’s understanding of kitsch, as it appears in the context of fascist culture, calls to mind many of the features of Pound’s archaism, as well as the more specific features of his mythological revision of the ideogram (which occurs under the spell of fascism, in concert with the ethnographic doctrine of paideuma). In addition, although Friedländer adheres to the formalist view of kitsch as depending upon “an unreflective, immediate emotional response,” he also lays the groundwork, through his conception of myth, for a theory of high kitsch, of esoteric kitsch, which would help to account for Pound’s fascist modernism. He refers, for example, to “the pseudo-spirituality that envelopes such kitsch, finding there constant exploitations of esotericism and mystery as well as the no less frequent evocation of the universe of legends and myths” (46). He also notes that “the kitsch of death, of destruction, of apocalypse, is a special kitsch, a representation of reality that does not integrate into the vision of ordinary kitsch”—not at first glance, one must add (26). Just as Friedländer’s historiographic model presents kitsch as a phenomenon that is at once immediate and esoteric, so Pound views myth—the modernist matrix of high kitsch—as being impli-cated at once in ratio (in totality) and in secrecy; as a phenomenon that is both violently direct and mysterious in function: a veritable black box of aesthetic production.

I want to close my discussion of kitsch by considering briefly a moment in The Cantos where the two modalities of kitsch—low and high, vulgar and refined, immediate and esoteric—coincide. In fact, while works of reactionary modernism such as The Cantos may invoke the hierarchy implicit in the concept of kitsch, they also call into question such distinctions, since the esoteric mode of kitsch, which submits the “possessive” logic of the collection to the principles of high modernism, aspires to complete transparency and immediacy (just as the obscurity of the ideogram is an effect of literary positivism). I want to turn, finally, to cantos 72 and 73, originally published in 1945, but withheld from the standard edition of The Cantos until 1987. Written by Pound in Italian and published in an official newspaper of the Fascist Salò Republic near the end of the war, these cantos represent some of the most blatant and simplistic material written by Pound in support of the fascist regime.12 They fulfill to a remarkable degree Friedländer’s thesis that “Kitsch related to death scenes and ceremonies of sacrifice seems to be at the very core of a certain type of extreme political motivation” (“Apocalyptic Imagina-

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335tion” 205). That is, these cantos display the features of “ordinary” kitsch (immediacy, sentimentality, etc.) placed in the service of a totalitarian regime (a function of kitsch emphasized by Broch) and permeated by an atmosphere of death.

The fact that these cantos were written and published in Italian indicates, I think, Pound’s desire to present these emblematic narratives to his audience with as little mediation as possible, but also the degree to which he continued to identify with Italian fascism in its final desperate hours. Canto 72 presents the poet absorbed in a visitation from the underworld by three ghosts, including the recently deceased fascist, and leader of the Futurist movement, F.T. Marinetti. Pound’s former nemesis, whose fascist views have apparently softened Pound’s antagonistic stance towards Futurism, asks Pound to lend him his body so that he may continue fighting for the Fascist cause—a bizarre episode of body-snatching which serves well as an emblem of late modernism. Canto 73 presents a related scenario, with considerably less ambiguity concerning its political aims: Pound receives a dream-like visitation from Cavalcanti’s ghost, who tells Pound (and the reader) an uplifting tale of heroism from the contemporary battle-front. The story involves an Italian peasant girl, “un po’ tozza ma bella” (a little stocky, but pretty), who meets a group of Canadian soldiers in the Italian countryside with several German prisoners in tow, scouting for stray enemy combatants in the final months of the Allied clean-up in northern Italy. The girl, a fascist partisan, leads the Canadian outfit into a minefield, where she and the Canadians are killed, while the German prisoners escape to fight once more. The poet celebrates the girl’s heroism, claiming “The brave young girl’s spirit was singing, singing with joy... Glory of the Fatherland, Glory! Glory to die for the Fatherland in Romagna! The dead are not dead.”13

This melodramatic narrative reflects, without qualification, the features of what Friedländer calls the “kitsch of apocalypse,” seeking to elicit from its audience, through mythical scenes of death and sacrifice, an emotional, unreflective response. (More specifically, canto 73, in particular, clearly aims to mobilize support for the German-backed Salò government.) At the same time, however, the dramatic setting of these cantos—a conversation with the dead—cannot help but recall the interview with the dead that inaugurates The Cantos, thereby suggesting that these cantos, inspired by fascism, subscribe in the most explicit manner to the impulse guiding The Cantos as a whole. There is also a formal continuity: these cantos are composed according to the high modernist principles of the ideogrammic method. Canto 72, in particular, like the cantos that precede it, is fragmentary, allusive, and didactic. Restored to its place within The Cantos, one notes that canto 72 follows the last of the Adams’ cantos, which are composed almost entirely of citations from other texts, and therefore offer an example of Pound’s literary positivism, under the guise of the ideogram, at its most extreme. Canto 72, itself, sustains the logic of preservation, accumulation, and display that informs the collection of curiosities stored in The Cantos: one finds familiar and scurrilous references to Churchill and usury, to medieval history and to the “mysterious bed of divine Isotta,” to Confucius and Gemisto, etc. In this context, one should not fail to note Friedländer’s thesis that “Cumulation is a characteristic of kitsch,” that the language of kitsch is “one of accumulation, repetition and redundancy: a massive use

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336 of synonyms, an excess of similar epithets, a play of images sent back, in turn, from one to the other in echoes without end.”14 Thus the phenomena of accumulation and “possession” are central not only to the ideogrammic logic of the collection but to the phantasmagoria of kitsch. Despite the ostensible opposition between avant-garde and kitsch, the esotericism, allusiveness, and formal complexity of high modernism are not necessarily antithetical to kitsch. Indeed, as Greenberg observed, these avant-garde strategies are easily appropriated by the “system” of kitsch—a condition suggesting that The Cantos may be an unstable amalgam of avant-garde and kitsch combined in a single literary monument. In Pound’s case, the totalitarian reserve of kitsch coincides with the cryptic dimension of the modernist image, just as the transparency of kitsch, in the context of The Cantos, may be viewed as the “afterlife” of literary positivism—an afterlife shrouded in secrecy, violence, and “racial” memory. The dialectical relation between modernist and collector helps to explain, therefore, the surprising lack of ten-sion or incongruity as the poem moves from the ideogrammic construction of canto 72 to the fascist parable of canto 73. On one level, this parable of death is simply one more “curiosity” in the excessive and nostalgic collection of The Cantos, yet it is also, in its susceptibility to complex ideological diversions, a parable not only of Pound’s strange modernist “museum,” but of the forms of “possession” on which it is founded and to which it is a monument.

Notes1. In his 1939 essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg writes: “The precondition for kitsch, a

condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends. It borrows from it devices, tricks, stratagems, rules of thumb, themes, converts them into a system, and discards the rest. It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reser-voir.” Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 10.

2. Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch” (1950), reprinted in Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (New York: Bell Publishers, 1969), 62. This essay is a revision of Broch’s original essay on kitsch, “Kitsch and Art-with-a-Message,” written in 1933.

3. Broch, once again, lays the groundwork for this position, calling kitsch “a specific product of Romanticism,” and claiming that “Romanticism, without therefore being kitsch itself, is the mother of kitsch” (“Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 61, 62). Greenberg makes a similar statement: “the Ro-mantics can be considered the original sinners whose guilt kitsch inherited. They showed kitsch how” (15). This position is echoed by more recent theorists of kitsch. See Matei Calinescu, for example, who remarks, “we can see kitsch as a hackneyed form of romanticism.” Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 240.

4. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge, 1984), 339.5. Ezra Pound, A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (1916) (New York: New Directions, 1970), 88.6. Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions,

1973), 374.7. Ezra Pound, Personae (New York: New Directions, 1971), 186-187.8. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1987), 94.9. Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 58.10. Saul Friedlander, “Kitsch and the Apocalyptic Imagination,” Salmagundi 85–86 (Winter–Spring

1990): 206. 11. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 30.

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33712. My knowledge of the historical context of cantos 72 and 73 depends on an article by Robert Casillo, “Fascists of the Final Hour: Pound’s Italian Cantos,” in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 98–127. Casillo’s essay provides a close reading, as well as a translation, of the Italian cantos.

13. Pound, The Cantos, 434–435, my translation.14. Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism, 52, 50.

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Kitsching The Cantos