alan marshall
Nevertheless, there is, I think, in Adorno’swriting, if I understand it correctly,
an intuition that experimental literature had not just found a way of expressing this
latest stage of the human condition—it was strangely and unavoidably complicit
in it. For modernism abandons the individual subject in the attempt to give it
expression; abandons the ordinary, to express the ordinary. There are modernist
poets in the Anglo-American tradition who seem to bear this intuition out, if not
necessarily after a fashion of which Adorno would have approved, since for him
there could be no way back: the doubly negative knottedness of modernism could
not simply be untied. For Adorno, as for the German-language poet Paul Celan
(reworking the words of Bertolt Brecht), ‘ein Gespr ̈ach|beinah ein Verbrechin ist’(‘a
conversation|is almost a crime’).^6 Whereas, in the work of an exemplary modernist
like Ezra Pound, we can detect, in the desolation of Pisa, at the end of the Second
World War, an extraordinary longing to speak plainly again—to say something
simple, to converse. The poetry is full of attentions and recognitions, commonplace
things, snatches of dialogue recalled or overheard, the grace, as Georg Lukacs called ́
it,^7 of the ordinary:
In the spring and autumn
In ‘The Spring and Autumn’
there
are
no
righteous
wars^8The simplicity of this is of course hard-earned and deceptive—but it is indubitably
there: for example, in the highly subjective but straightforward judgement (wars
are wrong), whose subjectivity is all the more exposed in that it is presented
apropos of nothing, and in that it seems to reflect damningly on Pound’s own role
in Mussolini’s war. The simplicity is complicated for a moment by the bookish
allusion to the Confucian classic,The Spring and Autumn Annals^9 —but it is bared
again by the strangely unreasonable nature of what is being said; as who should say,
there might be righteous wars in summer and winter. The repetition of the phrase
‘in the spring and autumn’ suggests someone deliberately gathering emphasis—or,
alternatively, someone stammering. At any rate, one man trying to speak with
another.
(^6) Paul Celan, ‘A Leaf, Treeless’, inPoems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil,
1988), 330–1. Celan’s poem is a response to Brecht’s stupendous feat of self-exoneration, ‘An die
Nachgeborenen’ (‘To Posterity’). 7
Georg Lukacs, ́ The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971; 1st pub.
1920), 50.
(^8) Ezra Pound,The Cantos(London: Faber, 1986), 497.
(^9) See Carroll F. Terrell,A Companion to theCantosof Ezra Pound(Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993), 422.