Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound.

Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound.
By Luke Carson. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 1999.
ix+283 pp. [pound]47.50.

It is often argued that Pound's work entered the academy mainly through divorcing his poetry from his political ideology. Although it contradicted Pound's own insistence on their inseparability, the elision of his abhorrent social ideas supposedly liberated the poetry. This study by Luke Carson clearly demonstrates that such separation is no longer tenable in studies of Pound, nor is it viable in critical evaluations of Stein, Zukofsky, and of modernism itself. Indeed, the central narrative of this book is what happened to the 'poetico-"political economy"' of modernism during and after the great depression. The book has five chapters, of which three focus primarily on Stein and two on Zukofsky, but effectively there is continual reference to each writer throughout.

Carson argues that the three writers shared the utopianism of modernity in their commitment to the Enlightenment-derived ideal of universality. When the depression precipitated a crisis for this commitment each responded differently. Pound remained truest to utopian ideals, and Carson emphasizes that his political ideals were logically consistent with the core elements of Enlightenment thought, although embodied in his disastrous endorsement of corporatist fascism. Stein also maintained the universalist ideal but found it intensely troubling since the depression made her see more clearly than before that the ideal demanded a 'system of sacrifice'. Her classical liberal heritage led her to reject fascism and its cult of the paternal leader ('fathers are depressing'). Nevertheless she perceived that individual fulfilment necessitated a social structure of inequality in which, during a depression, some would starve: 'privacy requires someone's privation' as Carson puts it (p. 54). Although sympathetic to Marxism, Zukofsky also saw that the dream of abundance and the actuality of scarcity were inseparably connected. He could, however, conceive of no solution within the economic and political discourse available to him. While his poetry utilizes Marxist paradigms in acutely criticizing the systemic inequality of American society, he is simultaneously aware of his own contradictions, leading him sometimes to paralysis and sometimes to a desire for transcendence.

The most valuable aspect of this book is Carson's treating these writers seriously as social thinkers. At first it takes some adjustment to see Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky mentioned alongside Marx, Freud, Veblen, John Dewey, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Hannah Arendt, as if the terms and status of their discourse were unproblematically comparable. But the approach is implicitly justified by the quality of insight into their work and ideas, and explicitly by recalling that the writers had a 'message' that they believed should be heard and acted upon by influential readers; they certainly saw themselves as important members of the body politic. Carson is perhaps most illuminating on Stein, whose economic and political interests have, as he indicates, been relatively neglected. However, the readings of Zukofsky's 'A' are also very stimulating, especially where Carson interweaves insights into the poem with an account of US corporate history and an analysis of how the corporation rose to take the place of the state.

This is a demanding but ultimately rewarding book. My main reservation concerns the repeated invocation of Freud's theories on mourning, melancholia, and fetishism as means to explain the relation between well-being, loss, and sacrifice. Too often these seem incongruous with identifying the practical effects of macro-economic forces, although a reasonable case is made for their relevance to Stein. Although some concepts are difficult, this is a well-written book and a well produced one (I found only one possible misprint). It will be of immense value to anyone interested in the three writers individually and more generally in the politics of modernism.