Resembling Pound: mimesis, translation, ideology - Ezra Pound - Post-ing Modernism

Criticism, Spring, 1993 by Joseph Kronick

A glance at Pound's writings in economics will yield enough analogies between money and writing to leave little doubt as to the logic that joins the two together. In this he participates in a discourse linking words to coinage that has been the subject of numerous studies since Derrida's "White Mythology." But for Pound, the corruption of money was one with the corruption of books, and he blamed both on Jews. In a radio speech, Pound said, "Cabala, for example, anything to make the word something it does NOT say."(15) And in 1942 he writes, "Not a jot or tittle of the hebraic alphabet can pass into the text without danger of contaminating it. . . . Cabbala, black magic, and the whole caboodle. . . always destroying the true religion, destroying its mnemonic and commemorative symbols" (SP 320). To say that the presence of the Hebrew alphabet contaminates any text is tantamount to saying all texts are contaminated, except perhaps those that do not have a material basis, spoken poetry and unwritten music. ("Only spoken poetry and unwritten music are composed without any material basis, nor do they become |materialized'" [SP 307].) Apparently, Pound believed we can, indeed, say what we mean but only if our writing bears within it a link to natural processes, as does he ideogram.

If we turn to the Fenollosa essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, we find that hieroglyphs are symbols of thought with "no basis in sound" (CWC 8). The pictorial basis of language includes the sentence whose "form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. . . . [I]t was a reflection of the temporal order in causation " (CWC 12). The ideogram would be the true mimetic language, both imitating nature and partaking of natural processes. He offers a natural theory of language based upon metaphor, "the revealer of nature": "Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate" (CWC 23,22). In a note, Pound cites Aristotle in his own translation: "Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius." It is but a short step from metaphor as the revealer of relations to money as the medium of exchange.

Pound's economics were founded on the belief that distribution, not production, is the problem. He turned to C. H. Douglas's social credit program, which dictates that the state lend, not borrow, money or credit slips to allow purchasers to consume the goods that manufacturers produce in abundance but are unable to sell. For Pound, the task of the just state is to make goods available, and to do so it must exercise its sovereign right to coin money, but the state abdicates its responsibility when it gives this right to a central bank. Money "is a certificate of work done within a system, estimated, or |consecrated,' by the state" (SP 311). Economics, like language, must have a material basis, a natural basis, or else it is contaminated by metaphysics or, in his venomous phrase, "the Jewish poison."

After Douglas, Pound turned to Silvio Gesell, Whom he credits with inventing counter-usury, a money that loses value if it is hoarded [Schwundgeld = "withering currency"]. Gesell devised a monetary system in which a stamp would be afixed to money itself at one per cent of the face value. If the money was not spent within a set period of time, another stamp would have to be purchased to maintain the value of the note. It would make no sense to hoard money because the money would eventually consume itself in the cost of stamps. As a "representation" or "money picture" of extant goods, Gesell's stamp scrip would measure the durability and diminishment of perishable goods - it would be a money having its basis in nature (SP 277). However it would have to exist in "just proportion," Pound insists, with a fixed money so that a basis for measurement between extant goods and available money can be maintained. As a representation or picture of extant goods available, money would have the status of writing, a representation with a material basis in nature. We find a certain metaphorics set up that allows us to perceive Pound's corpus as a single entity uniting aesthetics, economics, and anti-Semitism. It is but a small step from an economics based upon a monetary device, stamp scrip, that not only represents extant goods but shares their organic quality, to a theory of language based upon le mot justle, even as an economy is based upon just prices.