SOURCE: Sicari, Stephen. “Reading Pound's Politics: Ulysses as Fascist Hero.” Paideuma 17, no. 2-3 (fall-winter 1988): 145-68.

[In the following essay, Sicari argues that Pound's explanation of heroic action in his pre-war Cantos helped formulate his later professed admiration for Fascism.]

To understand Ezra Pound's admiration for Italian Fascism in general and Mussolini in particular, we can examine the poet's conception of heroic action in those of The Cantos written before the fall of the Fascist State.¹ In 1938 Pound described “the Malatesta cantos” as “openly volitionist, establishing, I think clearly, the effect of the factive personality” (Guide to Kulchur 194). Sigismundo Malatesta is a hero for this poet because he manages to create something beautiful and good despite the obstacles inherent in a corrupt culture: “All that a single man could, Malatesta manages against the current of power” (GK 159). I shall argue that the poet's early work on The Cantos prepares him to embrace a “fascist” conception of the hero whose strong and directed will can transcend historical determinism and alter humanity's course through history. His enthusiasm for Mussolini springs from decisions made first in his poetry.²

Pound develops and deploys a version of the Ulysses figure³ as the paradigm for heroic action that the other “real” heroes of the epic—Malatesta, Ferdinando III, Jefferson, Van Buren, and Mussolini himself—follow. Pound's Ulysses seeks to break free from the conditions of a corrupt present and return to purity of human origins, where he can begin work toward a healthy order. We shall follow his periplum away from the present until, in Canto XLIX, the poet credits “no man” with writing a visionary poem of “Confucian social order” as the wandering Ulysses at last becomes the center of a new order, a new home.

One ought to be struck by the absence of any mention of The Cantos in W. B. Stanford's classic account of The Ulysses Theme. In his final chapter, “The Re-Integrated Hero,” Stanford credits James Joyce with successfully solving “a radical antinomy in the [Ulysses] tradition—the conflict between the conceptions of Ulysses as a home-deserter and as a home-seeker” (Stanford 215). Pound too seeks to reconcile these contrary motions, and he does so by reading Dante.

1

Ulysses is central to the Commedia. In Inferno XXVI, Dante hears the story of Ulysses, a voyager who disdains a return to Ithaca, his literal home, and who instead seeks the intensity of new and forbidden experience. Employing Joyce's terminology, Stanford calls this Ulysses the “centrifugal” wanderer (Stanford 181), one whose thirst for new experience is so compelling that no obligation—“not fondness for a son, nor duty for an aged father, nor the love I owed Penelope”—could conquer it. He has been consigned to hell as a “false counseller,” for he in turn incites his companions to abandon in like manner the bonds of affection and duty that support civilized life. Ulysses and his companions break free from “home” and all its “centripetal” obligations and travel beyond the Pillars of Hercules, beyond the assigned limits of our allotted experience. At last Ulysses sights a mountain, at which point a storm arises and sinks his ship. This journey, away from the familiar and toward experience as yet undifferentiated by human categories, ends in a violent storm of chaos that overwhelms the centrifugal wanderer.

While briefly noting that Dante might be “condemning a tendency to over-adventurous speculation and research in his own mind” (Stanford 182), Stanford does not appreciate the central role Ulysses plays in Dante's epic. As Giuseppe Mazzotta remarks, “Ulysses will appear, even in Paradiso, as a constant reminder to the poet of the possible treachery of his own language and the madness of his own journey” (Mazzotta 105). Dante recognizes that his poetic language leads us on a quest that nearly duplicates Ulysses'—after all, what is the Commedia about if not what Ulysses seeks, “experience of the world and of the vice and worth of men”? Pound responds to Dante's treatment of Ulysses as he deploys that figure in The Cantos.

Inferno I opens as the pilgrim awakens “within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” He is stricken with fear, but soon he takes hope at the sight of a hilltop clothed with the sun's light. The pilgrim decides to climb this hill to reach the comforting light, but three wild beasts block his easy ascent and send him scurrying back. John Freccero demonstrates that in Inferno I Dante is taking issue with the Platonic conception of transcendence, that one can achieve a transcendent experience by means of a direct ascent to the light (Freccero 6-11). The opening Canto insists that the path to God's light is no easy and direct ascent.

Freccero argues that Ulysses' voyage recounted in Inferno XXVI recalls the pilgrim's own aborted journey that the three beasts cut short: “In Dante's reading, as in the reading of the [medieval] neoplatonists, the voyage [of Ulysses] was an allegory for the flight of the soul to transcendent truth” (Freccero 15). He then demonstrates how Inferno I, Inferno XXVI, and Purgatorio I are all connected by the image of shipwreck (Freccero 23). “[I]n the first canto of the poem,” he notes, “the pilgrim seems to have survived, by pure accident, a metaphorical shipwreck of his own”:

And as he who with labouring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to the perilous waters and gazes, so my mind, which was still in flight, turned back to look again at the pass which never yet let any go alive.

(Inferno I, 22-27)

While Ulysses' fate is to die at sea, “as One willed,” the pilgrim is spared. At the end of Purgatorio I, having just completed the descent to hell that becomes the ascent up Mount Purgatory, he recalls both his own earlier survival and Ulysses' death by water:

We came then on to the desert shore that never saw man sail its waters who after has experience of return.

(Purgatorio I, 130-2)

We are meant to recall that Ulysses drowns just as he sights a mountain that no one ever saw before, a mountain that in the medieval geography Dante follows can only be Mount Purgatory. As the pilgrim embarks on his own purgatorial experience up this mountain, the poet recalls Ulysses who failed to see the need for purgation before he set sail for ultimate experience. Unlike Ulysses, Dante undergoes purification as preparation for the experience of transcendence.

As Dante climbs Mount Purgatory, he purges sin after sin until he is free of all contamination. At the top of this mountain he enters Eden. Wandering in the earthly paradise, he recalls the experience of Inferno I:

Already my slow steps had brought me so far within the ancient wood that I could not see the place where I had entered …

(Purgatorio XXVIII, 22-24)

The “ancient wood” here recalls the “dark wood” of Inferno I. There, Dante was in a wood darkened by his own sin; here, he wanders in an ancient wood that is the place of humanity's pure origins. The difference between Dante and his Ulysses is not in their ambitions, for both seek transcendence of the human condition bound by space and time; but in their methods, for Dante sees the need to purify himself of the stain and contamination that being in space and time has placed on him before he can ascend to transcendent union with God. Both seek to move away from the conditions of the present, but Ulysses' voyage is a reckless attempt at escape while Dante's is a more deliberate effort at purification.

So like Ulysses, Dante may forsake his present home, his present culture that is contaminated by sin; but in his movement away from that home, he manages to reach his original home, Eden, whence he can ascend to his true home, union with God. The centrifugal impulse away from home has been reconciled with the centripetal impulse to find home. In precisely this pattern Pound deploys his Ulysses.

2

As Ronald Bush has noted (Bush 133), the very first of The Cantos begins precisely where Dante's Ulysses begins his personal narrative: “When I parted from Circe, who held me more than a year … I put forth on the open deep with but one ship and the company which had not deserted me.” But the fact that the poet has been translating Andreas Divus' Renaissance translation of Book XI of the Odyssey may be evidence enough that Pound's Ulysses is a centripetal, and not a centrifugal, voyager. Moreover, Pound finds a “crime and punishment motif in the Odyssey” (Literary Essays 212-13), and the descent to the underworld, which he read as a ritual of purification (Bush 132), might indicate that he follows Homer's and not Dante's wanderer. As if to foreclose the possibility of such a mis-reading, he abruptly halts his translation of the Latin text: “Lie quiet Divus” (1/3). The reader cannot fail to notice that a sharp break has occurred in the narrative, a break designed to cause the reader to take special note of the way the poet has chosen to continue Ulysses' wandering. The ritualistic solemnity of Pound's translation is suddenly broken by an agitated voice that pedantically cites his source:

Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.

Pound shifts for a moment to an editorial voice unnerved by the prospect before him: a Ulysses who ignores Ithaca and Penelope's arms and who travels instead toward unknown experience, uncharted seas. Rather than look upon and follow the centrifugal movement that is about to take place, this editor retreats to the shelter of scholarly pursuits. But the poet resumes his narration, again in a solemn voice but no longer following Homer's hero:

And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe.
                                                                                Venerandam,
In the Cretan's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichachi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

(1/3, my italics)

This Ulysses sails “outward and away,” a distinct centrifugal movement away from all known and familiar bonds. Pound's wanderer, however, does not drown but attains instead a vision of the divine. By breaking free of all constraints and structures that “home” may come to stand for, he can return to humanity's first home, its original consciousness that can see “gods float in the azure air” (III/11). Forsaking Penelope, he finds “Aphrodite,” a visionary experience of love and delight that is his true home.

In 1917, when Pound was working on this Canto, Rudolf Otto was advancing a similar conception of the human mind. For Otto, the holy “is a purely a priori category,” “an original and underivable capacity of the mind implanted in the ‘pure reason’ independently of all perception” (Otto 112).⁴ Canto I suggests that the original and natural human consciousness is one that sees the presence of the holy in the world. The “home” Pound's Ulysses seeks is not a place but a way of being, not the familiar world of civilized duties but the lost and recoverable consciousness we originally enjoyed. The vision of Aphrodite that ends Canto I signals the return to this consciousness that once was ours but that the passage of humanity from the state of nature to civilization, a passage increasingly marked by the desensitizing effects of usura, has obscured but not destroyed. If in history we have been so corrupted that we no longer see the holy, then we must follow Pound's centrifugal movement outward and away from the present set of conditions that determine human consciousness, away from and before all history, if we can ever reach our proper home, a holy consciousness. In his investment in a myth of healthy and pure origins subsequently contaminated by “history,” Pound's fascism takes root.⁵

In Canto VII Pound relies explicitly on Dante's text to continue his meditations about the way to return home. Here the poet depicts humanity as hollow and deficient, and ends that portrayal with a quotation from Dante that is central to his reading of the Commedia:

                    Thin husks I had known as men,
Dry casques of departed locusts
                    speaking a shell of speech …
Propped between chairs and table …
Words like locust-shells, moved by no inner being;
                    A dryness calling for death …
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca …

(VII/26)

These husks function as Pound's image for the present state of humanity, hollow and desiccated. The words these hollow men speak are only the “shell of speech”; fallen men speak a fallen language. It is the poet who can speak full words, words with substance and “inner being.” As he calls our attention to this partial humanity, he quotes the opening line of Paradiso II, in which Dante distinguishes his voyage from Ulysses':

O ye who in a little bark, eager to listen, have followed behind my ship that singing makes her way, turn back to see your shores again; do not put forth on the deep, for, perhaps, losing me, you would be left bewildered. The waters I take were never sailed before …

Ye other few that reached out early for the angels' bread by which men here live but never come from it satisfied, you may indeed put forth your vessel on the salt depths, holding my furrow before the water turns smooth again.

(Paradiso II, 1-15)

Like Ulysses, Dante claims to sail waters “never sailed before,” and like Ulysses he promises wonderful experience. But unlike Ulysses, who is consigned to hell as a false counsellor for inciting others to follow his dangerous quest, Dante does not seek to seduce so much as to warn. And unlike Ulysses, who drowns in sight of Mount Purgatory, Dante has already undergone purification on that mountain and has begun his ascent to Paradise. Dante calls those few who, like himself, “reached out early for angels' bread,” to follow his “ship that singing makes her way”; the poet's true song, and not Ulysses' false counsel, can lead fellow voyagers safely back to purity and then forward again to blessedness.

Pound marks a crucial distinction between Dante's Ulysses and Dante: where the former's wandering is a reckless escape from the oppressive conditions of a corrupt civilization, Dante's journey is a more deliberate leading of those who are brave enough to follow a dangerous path toward a new way of being. Pound's Ulysses is not like Homer's, who simply wants to return to the home he was forced to leave; nor like Dante's Ulysses, who recklessly leads others from home to their destruction; but like Dante himself, who wants to leave the present state of civilization and find a new one, who is willing to leave one home in the effort to find our true and satisfying home.

In Canto XX, the poet presents Ulysses through the complaint of the Lotophagoi, the lotus-eaters who refuse to continue the journey home:

What gain with Odysseus
They that died in the whirlpool
And after many vain labors,
Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowing bench,
That he should have great fame
And lie by night with the goddess? …
Give? What were they given?
Ear-wax.
Poison and ear-wax …

(XX/93-94)

Pound makes the lotus-eaters speak the “shell of speech” of the “hollow men” who do not have the strength to follow Ulysses on his way back home. Hugh Kenner describes this speech as “the drone of blighted voices without being, betrayed not by personal accident or heroic necessity but by an inner saplessness of the will” (Kenner, Poetry 278). Because their will is deficient, these “husks of men” refuse to follow the strong-willed Ulysses and choose instead to remain in lotus-land, forever cut off from home.

Donald Davie challenges Kenner's negative assessment of the lotophagoi: “one can only be astonished at the impression the passage gives, which Pound's letter to his father confirms, that the lotus-eaters are offered naively to be admired by the reader as having attained one stage toward an all-important illumination” (Davie 134). The letter Davie cites is Pound's description of “the main subject of the Canto, the loto-phagoi: lotus-eaters, or respectable dope smokers; and general paradiso” (Selected Letters 285). While Pound seldom has kind words for “dope smokers,” these are “respectable.” The letter suggests that these lotus-eaters are on the way to a “general paradiso,” and the Canto does proceed immediately from their complaint to a lovely scene that might merit that label. But we do not have to choose between these two eminent Poundians: Kenner is correct in that these lotus-eaters are not exerting their will properly; and Davie is correct in that they have attained “one stage” on the way to transcendence. For the situation of these “dope-smokers” strongly resembles one Dante faces in Purgatorio II.

Having just emerged from hell, Dante meets a friend of his, the musician Casella, and asks:

If a new law does not take from thee memory or practice of the songs of love which used to quiet all my longings, may it please thee to refresh my soul with them for a while, which is so spent coming here with my body.

(Purgatorio II, 107-111)

Like the lotus-eaters, Dante and the other penitents are weary and wish rest from labor. But Cato, who functions as the guardian of Purgatory, sharply rebukes their sloth and rouses them to continue their journey up the mountain and toward Eden:

What is this, laggard spirits? What negligence, what delay is this? Haste to the mountain to strip you of the slough that allows not God to be manifest to you.

(Purgatorio II, 120-123)

“A new law” does render this rest an offense. The penitents are not allowed to rest yet but are encouraged to continue their journey that will result in the manifestation of God. Similarly, Pound's lotus-eaters enjoy a false rest, a dangerous ease: for their comfort prevents them from reaching a purity that would let gods and goddesses be manifest to them. As Kenner suggests, they need their wills strengthened so they can continue their journey; and as Davie suggests, they have reached the shores of Mount Purgatory and are on the way towards Edenic purity. Following Dante, Pound knows that to find rest anywhere in the present state of human being is to lose opportunity for a new way of being.

Observing that the erotic aspects of Ulysses' career did not become a dominant theme until late in the nineteenth century, Stanford claims that “Joyce makes as much of this erotic element as any writer before or after him” (Stanford 217). Once again, Stanford ignores Pound, who makes sexuality central, even pivotal, to Ulysses' quest for home. While Homer regards sexual relations (with Circe and Calypso) as temptations that impede his return to Ithaca and Penelope's arms, Pound comes to regard sexuality as the way back to our original home. At the end of Canto I, Ulysses returns to Circe, who becomes, as if by magic, the goddess of love, Aphrodite. Canto XXXIX resumes the Circe theme. The Canto opens with a description of vulgar sexuality:

Fat panther lay by me
Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,
All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,
Lions loggy with Circe's tisane,
Girls leery with Circe's tisane. …

(XXXIX/193)

Circe's charms transform Ulysses' men into beasts, but the hero is able to enjoy Circe's beauty and remain fully human. Indeed, at the end of this Canto in which Circe takes Ulysses to her bed, the couple engage in what can only be called “holy sexuality”:

Beaten from flesh into light
Hath swallowed the fire-ball
A traverso le foglie
His rod hath made god in my belly
                                        Sic loquitur nupta
                                        Cantat sic nupta
Dark shoulders have stirred the lightning
A girl's arms have nested the fire,
Not I but the handmaid kindled
                                        Cantat sic nupta
I have eaten the flame.

(XXXIX/196)

The sexual act is not, as it was in Homer's story, a temptation to avoid but a risk to be taken: it can turn us into beasts or bring us to a perception of holy light that marks our original consciousness.

By including in the center of this erotic Canto three moments from Paradiso, Pound places Ulysses in an explicitly Dantesque context:

When Hathor was bound in that box
                              afloat on the sea wave
Came Mava swimming with light hand lifted in overstroke
sea blossom wreathed in her locks,
“What are you box?”
                              “I am Hathor.”
Che mai da me non si parte il diletto
Fulvida di folgore
Came here with Glaucus unnoticed, nec ivi in harum
Nec in harum ignessus sum.
                              Discuss this in bed said the lady. …

(XXXIX/194)

Dante's heaven flashes forth in the middle of Ulysses' sexual adventures. “Che mai da me non si parte il diletto”—“so that never will the delight pass from me”—records Dante's joyous response in Paradiso XXII to a hymn in praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Fulivida di folgore”—“I saw light in the form of a river pouring its splendour”—is just one of the many beautiful moments in Paradiso (here, from Paradiso XXX, 62) in which the divine light pours through the universe. And the speaker has arrived in Dante's heaven “with Glaucus unnoticed”; Pound recalls how Dante compares his entry to heaven with Glaucus' metamorphosis into a sea-god: “I was changed within, as was Glaucus when he tasted of the herb that made him one among the gods of the sea” (Paradiso I, 67-69). Sandwiched between the story of the Egyptian fertility goddess Hathor and the Circe episode from The Odyssey, these three moments from Dante, each an image of divine sensual delight, serve to extend the significance of Ulysses' sexual encounter with Circe. The god the couple makes (“‘Fac deum’ ‘Est factus’”) is aligned with Dante's divine consciousness. Once again, Ulysses' voyage, which is now distinctly a sexual voyage, is given a Dantesque destination.

The very next Canto explicitly defines the centrifugal journey as the attempt to escape the confines of a corrupt culture, to transcend the limitations of history. The first half of Canto XL focuses on the economic factors that have contributed to the corruption of western civilization: Adam Smith's observation about the tendency of groups to conspire against the general public; Mr. D'Arcy's permit “for 50 years to dig up the subsoil of Persia” to find oil; and most especially, Mr. Morgan's “‘Taking advantage of emergency’ (that is war)” to make huge profits from the sale of arms. This half of the Canto ends with a description of a corrupt civilization:

               With our eyes on the new gothic residence, with our
eyes on Palladio, with a desire for seignieurial splendours
(AGALMA, haberdashery, clocks, ormoulu, brocatelli,
tapestries, unreadable volumes bound in tree-calf,
half-morocco, morocco, tooled edges, green ribbons,
flaps, farthingales, fichus, cuties, shorties, pinkies
et cetera
          Out of which things seeking an exit

(XL/198-199)

According to Kenner, this passage depicts a “pseudo-civilization” whose “tokens are things, ‘clutter, the bane of men moving’; its touchstone is the multiplication of things” (Kenner, Gnomon, 275). It is “out of these things seeking an exit,” away “from a Victorian suburbia Pound has … imagined for him” (Makin 57) that another centrifugal wanderer, Hanno the Carthagenian general, undertakes his periplum:

PLEASING TO THE CARTHEGENIANS: HANNO

that he ply beyond the pillars of Herakles
60 ships of armada to lay out Phoenician cities
to each ship 50 oars, in all
30 thousand aboard them with water, wheat in provision.
Two days beyond Gibel Tara [Gibraltar] layed in the wide plain
Thumiatehyon, went westward to Solois …

(XL/199)

Like Dante's Ulysses, Hanno sails westward “beyond the pillars of Herakles.” In Pound's hands, the Carthagenian's motive for exploration is the desire to find an exit from the things of a decadent suburban civilization. The second half of Canto XL is another translation of a text that recounts a wanderer's journeys; and, as in Canto I, Pound is a faithful translator until the final six lines:

Went no further that voyage,
                              as were at the end of provisions.
[The translation ends here, without a break]
Out of which things seeking an exit
To the high air, to the stratosphere, to the imperial
calm, to the empyrean, to the baily of the four towers
the NOUS, the ineffable crystal. …

(XL/201)

What we discover in Pound's addendum to the translation is that Hanno really seeks a way “to the empyrean,” “to the imperial calm” where Dante climaxes his journey out of corruption. Hanno's periplum, his careful navigation around coastlines, suddenly seeks to go up “to the stratosphere.” While Makin argues that Pound chooses Hanno's example over and against Dante's (Makin 58-59), it seems rather that he subordinates Hanno's method to Dante's goal. Going westward, “beyond the pillars of Herakles,” is an attempt to reach blessedness, a state that cannot be reached by remaining within the confines of the present civilization. Again, Pound takes pains to rewrite the centrifugal voyage so that its ultimate destination is the attainment of a divine consciousness.

In Canto XLVII, Pound's Ulysses finally reaches origins by means of an arcane sexual encounter. As this Canto opens, Ulysses is back with Circe. But whereas in Canto I Ulysses descends to the solemn Homeric underworld of ghostly shades, in Canto XLVII he journeys “to the bower of Ceres' daughter Proserpine”; his descent this time entails participation in the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone that this Canto obliquely presents (Sicari 311-12). Pound's version of Eleusis is decidedly sexual, as the “wiles” of the female “call” this male wanderer to her “cave”:

Two span, two span to a woman,
Beyond that she believes not. Nothing is of any importance.
To that is she bent, her intention
To that art thou called ever turning intention
Whether by night the owl-call, whether by sap in shoot,
Never idle, by no means by no wiles intermittent
Moth is called over mountain
The bull runs blind on the sword, naturans
To the cave art thou called, Odysseus,
By Molü hast thou respite for a little,
By Molü art thou freed from the one bed
                    that thou may'st return to another. …

(XLVII/237)

Like the moth and the bull, Ulysses is drawn to the darkness of these mysteries wherein lies the woman whose only “intention” is to lure and couple with the man. Molü, which in Homer is a plant that protects Ulysses from Circe's transformative power, here offers respite to the wandering hero; it frees him from “the one bed” so he can “return to another.” One may suppose that he is freed from Circe's bed so that he can return to the bed he has been long absent from, Penelope's. If so, Pound has drastically rethought the nature of Ulysses and has transformed the centrifugal wanderer back into the Homeric home-seeker.

But as the Canto continues we note that the bed he returns to is certainly not Penelope's:

So light is thy weight on Tellus
Thy notch no deeper indented
Thy weight less than a shadow
Yet hast thou gnawed through the mountain,
                    Scylla's white teeth less sharp.
Hast thou found a nest softer than cunnus
Or hast thou found better rest
Hast'ou a deeper planting, doth thy death year
Bring swifter shoot?
Hast thou entered more deeply the mountain?

(XLVII/238)

The weight of his body is hardly felt by Tellus, for she is both a woman who has become a goddess and the earth itself. With images of plowing and planting so dominant here and elsewhere in the Canto, we begin to suspect that the sexual partner of this wanderer is not Circe nor Penelope, but the mother goddess of the earth. Molü has freed him from the bed of the “woman” so that he can return to the bed of the “mother.”⁶ “Scylla's white teeth” threaten Ulysses with the castration that is the promised punishment for the one who dares to lie with the mother. Pound's wanderer dares to break the primary law of his civilization that prohibits union with the mother, a law massively protected by taboo, guilt, and punishment. The only way to move fully “outward and away” from the present civilization is to challenge the law upon which the entire culture rests. Breaking this first and fundamental law is Pound's version of passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules, passing beyond the assigned limits of human experience.

Only this law-breaker, only this out-law, can achieve the return to the original human consciousness:

The light has entered the cave. Io! Io!
The light has gone down into the cave,
Splendour on splendour!
By prong have I entered these hills:
That the grass grow from my body,
That I hear the roots speaking together,
The air is new on my leaf,
The forked boughs shake with the wind.
Is Zephyrus more light on the bough, Apeliota
more light on the almond branch?
By this door have I entered the hill.

(XLVII/238)

Ulysses manages a return to our original consciousness in which we are one with the world. He is not castrated but rather “enters the hills,” enters his true home by achieving a consciousness that feels union with the world. When confronted by a consciousness that sees the holy, the world becomes our home. Though he resembles Dante in the attainment of an original consciousness, Pound's wanderer also resembles Dante's Ulysses strongly in his thirst for forbidden experience and in his risk-taking. The centrifugal is absolutely essential if we are ever to reach a new and satisfying home.

It is a thirst for the new that leads Ulysses “outward and away” from the present culture that limits the possible relations of the self to the world. He achieves an experience—seeing Aphrodite, entering the hill—that seems new because the current state of human being no longer remembers it. To “make it new” (which is, after all, his central “imagiste” lesson) is also to renew what has been forgotten. Original purity seems new but is really the ground for a lost way of being to which Pound hopes we can return. The centrifugal thirst for new experience has led the wanderer to an original experience that can become the center of a renewed order. The centrifugal gives way to the centripetal.

3

This Ulysses provides the paradigm for the poet's understanding of Italian Fascism. Pound cares little for the specific details of Italian Fascism as ideology or party platform; for him, they are the merely local “accidents” of a more fundamental reality, “the cupolas and gables of fascism” (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, v). What interests him is the “essence” of Italian Fascism, the role of the human will in shaping the course of events towards definite visionary goals. Pound approaches Mussolini through Ulysses; he examines the present historical figure as a possible embodiment of the prototypical fascist hero.

Stanford notes the potential for Ulysses to become a fascist leader: “When [the centrifugal aspect of the Ulysses theme] was applied to Ulysses as a politician it tended to produce either an overbearing Duce or an insatiable anarchist” (Stanford 223). Although he ignores Pound in his treatment, Stanford has defined the poles of Pound's politics: the hero works to create a new order by taking advantage of the opportunities provided by anarchic conditions. Ulysses breaks away from the conditions that have created the present version of humanity and then seeks to create a new order. The poet is impressed by Jefferson “and/or” Mussolini because they both were “opportunists,” the one seizing the advantages to be gained by “trying to set up civilization in the wilderness” (J/M 66) and the other taking control of the mechanisms of power in the anarchy of post-World War I Italy:

There is opportunism and opportunism. The word has a bad meaning in a world of Metternich and Talleyrands; it means doing the other guy the minute you get the chance.

There is also the opportunism of the artist, who has a definite aim, and creates out of the materials present. The greater the artist the more permanent his creation. And this is a matter of WILL.

(J/M 15-16)

The fascist hero is the artist who directs his will toward a visionary goal and uses whatever materials he finds at hand to drive a new set of conditions through a firmly entrenched present. In his discussion of Jefferson and Mussolini, Pound emphasizes the thing done, the course of action taken. About Jefferson: “No man in history had ever done more and done it with less violence or with less needless expenditure of energy” (J/M 15). “I am concerned with what he actually did, with what his mind did when faced with a particular problem in a particular geography” (J/M 11). The local details are important because they reveal how the hero's mind works, how he wills and aims at a better order in a particular place and time. He seeks not an escape from the conditions of history but the opportunity that permits him to move the world closer to the earthly paradise he has envisioned.

Pound's analysis indicates that Mussolini deserves even greater praise than Jefferson, who at least “found himself in a condition of things that had no precedent in the remembered world. He saw it like a shot that a new system and new mechanisms MUST come into being to meet it” (J/M 62). Mussolini finds himself in a more entrenched and tradition-laden culture, in an Italy “with a crusted conservatism that no untravelled American can even suspect of existing” (J/M 23), in an Italy with various traditions “milleniar, forgotten, stuck anywhere from the time of Odysseus to the time of St. Dominic (J/M 25). “All of 'em carved in stone, carpentered and varnished into shape, built in stucco, or organic in the mind of the people” (J/M 32). How can change be implemented in a world of such powerful cultural traditions that they have been forgotten as parts of tradition, that they seem “organic in the mind of the people”? “It takes a genius charged with some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast [the people] out of [their] preconceptions” (J/M 26). What Pound admires in Mussolini is his capacity to effect sweeping change toward justice in a country deeply conditioned by centuries of conservatism.

Pound is careful to indicate that his examination of Mussolini as an example of the fascist hero is based on his reading of Dante's study of the hero's will: “It is … a matter of the DIRECTION OF THE WILL. And if the reader will blow the fog off his brain and think for a few minutes he will find this phrase brings us ultimately both to Confucius and Dante. … The whole of the Divina Commedia is a study of the ‘directio voluntatis’ (direction of the will)” (J/M 16-17). Dante descends through hell observing the fate of those who failed to direct their will; climbs Mount Purgatory joining those who seek the purity of their Edenic state; and ascends through heaven witnessing those whose purified will directed their virtuous behavior, until his “desire and will, like a wheel that spins with even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Even in his prose Pound acknowledges that he approaches Mussolini through his study of Dante, that the historical figure is seen as an active and present example of a model hero envisioned by poets.

As we have seen, the hero for this poet is a Ulysses who breaks free from the present and reaches the health of an original consciousness. What distinguishes Pound's attitude towards origins from previous myths of purity that abound in our literary tradition is that for this poet origins are entirely recoverable. But this recovery is only the “beginning” of the fascist hero's work. As Michael Bernstein argues, it is “admiration for the potential accomplishments of human will” that “must dominate the epic” (51-52). Now purified, the wandering hero becomes aware of new goals toward which to direct his will, of the potential for a renewed humanity. As he listens to John Maynard Keynes' inept if not immoral response to a question about economics, the poet imagines himself in the earthly paradise thinking of very different goals than the “orthodox economist”:

                              Jesu Christo!
Standu nel paradiso terrestre
Pensando come si fesse compagna d'Adamo!
                              [Jesus Christ!
Standing in the earthly paradise
thinking how to make a companion for Adam!]

(XXII/102)

Unlike Keynes, who, perhaps unwittingly, serves to defend and advance the corrupt economic conditions of the present, the poet has broken free from these conditions and stands on Edenic ground, where he wonders how to begin the work of making companions for Adam. His examination of economics starts from the premise that a renewal of Edenic humanity is possible and dependent upon monetary justice.

The purified hero is inspired by his vision that “humanity” is constructed in time, that it is a product of historical activity:

If a man has not instincts, he ought to be in the way of making them. He has numerous instincts, and makes more everyday: a part of his consciousness is constantly crystallizing itself into instincts.

(The Natural Philosophy of Love 21)

Instincts are the product of human effort; tendencies that seem “natural” and “necessary” are really constructed over time; new instincts, and thus a new version of humanity, are possible. Pound recalls Gourmont's insight often in the 1930s, as he becomes increasingly an admirer of and advocate for Mussolini:

Gourmont then got round to defining intellect as the fumbling about in the attempt to create instinct, or at any rate on the road towards instinct. And his word instinct came to mean merely PERFECT and complete intelligence within a limited scope applied to recurrent conditions. …

(J/M 18)

Gourmont's instinct is the result of countless acts of intellection, something after and not before reason. …

(GK 195)

Pound believes that a “perfect and complete” human nature is possible if the scope and conditions of human being are so efficiently controlled that new forms of behavior become “instinctive.” The political implications of these views become even sharper as he translates Confucius:

When right conduct between father and son, between brother and younger brother, has become sufficiently instinctive, the people will follow the course as ruled.

(Confucius 65)

Ulysses' goal, to make companions for Adam, is the Confucian goal, to make “right conduct” instinctive, to create a new humanity that follows the course laid out by the leader. The purified wanderer becomes the Confucian moralist. The centrifugal movement away from corruption leads to the purity and health that become the center for a renewal of an ancient tradition once realized in Confucian China.

The recovery of origins enables the fascist hero to extend the field of the possible as he “dissociate[s] necessity from habit” (J/M 86). Pound's antipathy to Freud stems from the poet's perception that psychoanalysis argues for the necessity of human pathology: Freud “elevates pathology into a principle” (Selected Prose 154; see Sicari 316). Freud's work may accurately describe a corrupt culture, but other possibilities for humanity still exist:

‘Freud's writings may not shed much light on human psychology but they tell one a good deal about the private life of the Viennese.’

They are the flower of a deliquescent society going to pot. The average human head is less in need of having something removed from it, than of having something inserted.

(J/M 100)

Written in 1933, some three years before Canto XLVII, this passage posits that Freudian psychoanalysis takes something out of the human head, that it takes energy from humanity, that it castrates the individual. Freudian theory, as Pound sees it, makes the husks and shells of Canto VII seem necessary and natural. But if these weakened humans would dare follow the wanderer through Canto XLVII, they can hope for “the gift of healing, that hath the power over wild beasts” (XLVII/239). Castration is a threat that seems so dangerous that few of us dare the return to origins, but if we follow Pound's wanderer, we are promised a healing from the disease of the present culture and a renewal of our original power.

Canto XXVII, written early in Pound's years in Italy, presents historical examples of human groups that did achieve such renewed strength. It begins with a quotation from Guido Cavalcanti, “Formando di disio nuova persona”—Forming from desire a new person. A. J. Gregor argues that Italian Fascism aims first at energizing and mobilizing the indifferent and inert masses (Gregor 159). As Pound sees it, a weakened people first must be energized with desire. This Canto records a moment that has actually occurred when a “new people” acted with an instinct toward beauty and order:

Sed et universus quoque ecclesie populus,
[And all the people of the church,]
All rushed out and built the duomo,
Went out as one man without leaders
And the perfect measure took form. …

The people are energized to “rush out” and start building; they are organized to seem “one man without leaders”; they all will the same end and act spontaneously, naturally. But the “perfect measure” does not take form without leadership, for the Canto suddenly shifts to a lengthy depiction of an energized people who do act “without leaders”:

These are the labours of tovarisch,
That tovarisch wrecked the house of the tyrants,
And rose, and talked folly on folly,
And walked forth and lay in the earth
                    And the Xarites bent over tovarisch.
And that tovarisch cursed and blessed without aim. …

The “tovarisch” (Russian for “comrade,” suggesting revolutionary man) has the power to destroy the house of the tyrant but lacks the aim to know whom to curse and whom to bless. Unlike the shells and husks of men depicted in Canto VII, “tovarisch” has been energized; but his energy, when released, is purely destructive: “Laid never stone upon stone.” Pound sees both the need to give humanity back its original power of desire and the need to organize an energized humanity so that a new order is constructed. Canto XXVII demonstrates the place of the leader, to energize and to organize.

Pound makes central to this poem the transfer from the centrifugal movement “outward and away” to the centripetal ordering around a new center. For the purified wanderer of Canto XLVII becomes the visionary poet who writes Canto XLIX. This Canto opens: “For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses” (244). Daniel Pearlman argues that Pound's Ulysses is “no man” now because he has been “chastened” by his insights from Canto XLVII and here records his “vision of Confucian social order” (Pearlman 193). The wandering hero becomes the fascist leader as he writes the verses that set what seems a new goal, “a people of leisure” whose ease allows them to delight in the world:

Wild geese swoop to the sand-bar,
Clouds gather about the hole of the window
Broad water; geese line out with the autumn
Rooks clatter over the fishermen's lanthorns,
A light moves on the north sky line;
where the young boys prod stones for shrimp.

(XLIX/244-5)

Such lines “evoke something one can only call a sense of timeless depth” (Makin 208); they are meant to suggest the joy and comfort of an ancient tradition unchanged in centuries that seems new because forgotten. This Canto records the wandering hero's vision of a perfect order to be renewed, a vision of utopia still possible. “No man” writes the verses that direct an energized humanity toward the goal of social harmony. The centrifugal Ulysses gives way to the centripetal Confucius. The anarchist becomes the fascist.

The “people of leisure” in the earthly paradise of Canto XLIX have been made harmonious, but they do not know how:

Sun up; work
sundown; to rest
dig well and drink of the water
dig field and eat of the grain
Imperial power is? and to us what is it?
The fourth; the dimension of stillness.
And the power over wild beasts.

(XLIX/245)

Such is the Confucian principle, that “the benevolence of the administration should be unnoticeable, or like wind on grass” (Makin 210). Those who labored to form this healthy version of humanity did not seek to dominate the people but to organize their energy toward fulfillment. Pound's fascism does not harm individuals but organizes a revitalized people toward harmony:

A thousand candles together blaze with intense brightness. No one candle's light damages another's. So is the liberty of the individual in the ideal and fascist state.

(Agenda 17 & 18, p. 7)

No one's flame is threatened with reduction but encouraged to blaze and then joined to others until the ideal state shines brilliantly throughout Europe. Pound's “ideal and fascist state” values the individual because each person's flame adds to the beauty of the harmonious group. Unlike Stalin's regime that “considers humanity NOTHING save raw material” and “treats man as matter” (Doob 49), Mussolini's fascism hopes to renew each person's original strength and then arrange the movements of the various individuals into the “perfect measure” that reaches “the dimension of stillness.” As in Dante's cosmology the stillness of the Empyrean is both cause and effect of the perfect motion of the various heavenly spheres, so the stillness of the earthly paradise is created by the perfect ordering of the revitalized energy of the people.⁷

Pound's understanding of fascism avoids the opposite errors made by liberal democracies and Stalinist tyrannies. The one regards the individual as anterior to and independent of the state, and so does not aim to direct the wills of its people. Instead, the liberal state allows each person the liberty to pursue his own private desires and goals. For the fascist, a liberal state can only be a chaotic arena in which individual wills compete and conflict (Gregor 211). Its goal is not harmony. But the other makes the opposite error, in that it desires harmony to the point that it crushes its people into banal uniformity. Pound distinguishes between “domination” and “organization”:

The last state of degradation whether of a democratized or of a non-democratized people is that in which they begin to wail to be dominated. DISTINGUISH between fascism which is organization, with the organizer at its head, to whom the power has not been GIVEN, but who has organized the power, and the state of America, where the Press howls that we should GIVE power to Roosevelt, i.e., to a weak man. …

(J/M 108)

In Pound's estimation, fascism is not the “Muscovite tyrranous man-crushing variety of collectivism” (Agenda 17 & 18, p. 74) but the organization of the energy that is the people toward a visionary goal of beauty and order. The hero does not have a Nietzschean “will to power”; he does not “thirst […] for power.” “The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will to order” (J/M 99). John Espey explains that Pound understands the word “order” as the synthesis of the forces that make Beauty possible (Espey 328). The poet understands the fascist call for order, then, as an aesthetic program for the creation of beauty. He approaches Mussolini as an artist working towards the beauty of a new order, willing a new set of conditions that leads to the construction of a renewed humanity: “I don't believe any estimate of Mussolini will be valid unless it starts from his passion for construction. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place” (J/M 33-34). The poet asks us to “[t]ranspose [a] sense of plasticity … to ten years of fascismo in Italy. And to the artifex” (J/M 92). As a sculptor works on stone to fashion a perfect form, so the artifex carves different instincts in the people and provides a social framework that allows the people to move spontaneously toward harmony. Mussolini can be properly understood only by a lover of beauty:

[T]he Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers
of power but with the lovers of
                                                            ORDER
                                                            to kalon.

(J/M 128)

To kalon—the Greek for beauty—is used to describe Mussolini's ambition, to create a perfect order that allows beauty to flourish.

The writer of an epic faces the challenge posed by modern historical analyses, especially Marx's, that one man cannot rise above determining factors and effectively will a new order. As in the classical epic, where an Achilles changes the fortunes of war simply by showing himself to the enemy, or where an Aeneas carries the entire destiny of the Roman Empire in his person, so in The Cantos one man's will can change the course of events we call history: “Italy had a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, a partial unification, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently” (J/M 89). Much of the poet's hostility to Marx can be attributed to his vehement rejection of “Necessity” as a force that explains historical events.⁸ His epigram to Jefferson and/or Mussolini—“NOTHING IS WITHOUT EFFICIENT CAUSE”—marks his understanding of historical causality, that all events are brought about by an “agent whereby a change or state of rest is first produced.”⁹

Once the fascist hero sees the potential for renewal, what does he actually do? This poet advocates a “volitionist economics” which holds that economic justice can be achieved only by some rare individual who is strong enough to take control of the mechanisms of exchange. Pound is famous for his interests in various “devices” that he hopes can procure justice (perhaps his advocacy for Gesell's “stamp scrip” is the most striking example of these “tricks,” and his entire attitude toward money rests on his belief that money is merely a device to facilitate exchange). But before analyzing the various devices Pound would like to try, we should note first and foremost that a belief in such devices indicates his politics. For government is simply a machine that can run toward justice or toward inequal distribution, depending only upon who is running the machine. The strong man takes the machine at his disposal and makes it work toward justice:

Mussolini may at any moment find out that some laboured and ingenious device for securing a fair amount of justice in some anterior period and under earlier states of society NO LONGER works, or is no longer capable of giving as much justice as some new rule made to fit the facts of the year ELEVEN, facts, i.e. that have been facts for a short time only.

(J/M 77)

The leader dismantles old devices and invents new ones in his work toward “economic justice, which latter is no more impossible or inconceivable than the just functioning of machines in a power-house” (J/M 123). Peter Nicholls considers Pound naive in conceiving of economic change “not in terms of the dialectical movement of history but as a moment of rupture within it” (Nicholls 53). But Pound's position derives not from analyses of economic forces but from a poet's examination of the hero. A poet's history, then, seeks to understand the role of the human will in history, and all other matters of economic causality are regarded as devices used or abused by strong men.¹⁰ Pound follows a centrifugal wanderer until he becomes the visionary of a renewed order which he works to achieve largely by tinkering with the machine of government, the various mechanisms of exchange. For by working toward economic justice he begins work toward “a people of leisure” who are not “driven from the norm by economic pressures” (Sicari 315) but who instead enjoy their life in the world that has become a truly satisfying home.

Notes

1. By limiting my examination to the first fifty-one Cantos, I do not mean to imply that Pound renounces his advocacy of Italian Fascism or his fascist understanding of history any time thereafter. I do mean to suggest that the poet “solves” a prominent problem in these early Cantos, when he becomes satisfied with his understanding of the role of human will in history. Canto XLIX signals a shift in the epic from a movement “outward and away” from the present to an ordering around what appears a new center for a new civilization. After the fall of Mussolini, Pound labors to maintain his faith in the ideal fascist state in The Pisan Cantos and to develop a way to continue work for this state in Rock-Drill and Thrones.

2. While Alan Durant (Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis) and Peter Nicholls (Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing) both provide significant readings of Pound's politics, they privilege modes of analysis developed outside the poetry (Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist economics). I hope instead to argue from within The Cantos, from within the decisions the poet makes about Ulysses, decisions that provide the form of the epic and shape Pound's fascism.

3. Though Pound persistently uses the form Odysseus, and not Ulysses, I choose to call Pound's wanderer Ulysses to indicate that the poet is not responding solely to Homer but to the broader tradition of “the Ulysses theme,” a tradition that Dante contributes to and alters dramatically (Stanford 176).

4. Like Ernst Cassirer, who proposes that humanity's original consciousness is a “mythic consciousness” that sees divine creatures animating the universe, Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy) can be considered a NeoKantian thinker who believes that he has found a natural and original category of the human mind. I do not mean to suggest that Pound read their tracts, but that the notion of an original “holy consciousness” is one that the 1920's would see often. Pound is in some serious company in this hypothesis about the human mind.

5. A “fascist” view of history posits that humanity has other healthier possibilities and that real individuals acting in the world, not some mysterious and mystical force called “Necessity,” prevent a return to health and beauty. Pound's attitude toward “the possible” informs the final section of this paper.

6. See “The Secret of Eleusis” (Sicari, Paideuma 14, 2 & 3). I argue there that Canto XLVII is Pound's attempt to formulate a new consciousness by changing the basic familial structure of the human mind: instead of a father who forbids the mother and enforces separation and loss, Pound's family assumes the existence of a benevolent father who permits the child to remain one with the mother. This new configuration brings the self back into intimate contact with the world.

7. Peter Makin quotes a letter wherein Pound explains that his concept of “stillness” in this Canto derives from Dante's “im mobile, the [heaven] which does not turn” (208-9). As Pound manages the transfer from centrifugal dispersal to centripetal reordering, he gives his “noman” a Dantesque direction and identity.

8. Perhaps Pound has simplified the Marxist attitude toward “necessity,” for this statement of Jameson's reflects a wariness about the term as acute as Pound's: “History is … the experience of Necessity, and it is this alone which can forestall its thematization or reification as a mere object of representation or as one master code among many others” (Jameson 102). “Necessity” is, in Althusser's words, “an absent cause”; it is not some mysterious force but a term that expresses our sense of an ultimately untranscendable horizon of causality. But all the same, there is in Marxist thinking an antipathy to the “great man” theory of history, and Pound opposes Marxism along these lines.

9. Aristotle, Physics, Book II, section three. I feel certain that Pound is thinking of Aristotle's “four causes”—the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final explanations of change. He emphasizes in his study of Mussolini the role of the efficient cause, the agent that sets new events in motion. Pound makes an heroic act of the efficient cause, a triumph of the will to create a new form on given material toward a visionary end.

10. In Eleven New Cantos (XXXI-XLI), Pound includes the “war against the Bank” waged by a series of American presidents, a war eventually won by the forces of usury. The National Bank is a device that these presidents, and Pound, recognize as one that works against the general welfare of the American states. Jackson and Van Buren are examples of the hero who aims at economic justice by taking control of the mechanisms of exchange from the forces of usury.

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