LATER EZRA POUND: ÉMIGRÉ WRITER AND PARRĒSIAST

The reflections on the later Pound’s life and work as an émigré par excellence seem to reify the properties of the ancient parrhēsiast who daringly speaks truth to authorities. Such an approach can serve as a constructive key to describing Pound’s collaboration with and advocacy of the Italian fascism. Pound’s radio speeches and poetry of that period testify to the organic structure of his work, conditioned by an artistic embodiment of a specific form of cultural memory as an aesthetic European-American continuum. The creation of the author’s multicultural, heteroglossic “masks” dating back to antiquity in his early lyrics in the 1909 Personae culminates in the later Pound as a persona of a classical parressiast. Parrhēsia, defined by Michel Foucault as verbal manifestation of frankness, truth, danger, criticism, and duty, is embodied in the political and artistic representations of artist’s American identity. The argument of the article is that the perspective of the émigré writer as parrhēsiast that combines the historical specificity of the era, the national identity of the writer, and his biographical individuality, provides the meaningful critical optics to comprehensively apprehend the ideological position of Pound in his autobiographies, the broadcasts over the Rome radio, and the poetic features of his 1948 Pisan Cantos. In his 1949 “Autobiography”, Pound rationalizes his speaking on the fascist radio as a duty of the American citizen. Such a claim echoes Foucauldian political and ethical dimensions of parrhēsia. The former implies citizenship as a prerequisite in the institutionalized relations between democracy and truth, and the latter analyzes the relationship of an individual who publicly criticizes the mainstream. As a radio anchor, Pound takes on the image of the parrhēsiast and this persona acquires new overtones and meanings in the context of the Foucauldian “game of life or death”, leading to em-bodiment of logos. The airwaves serve as a vehicle for exercising speaker’s freedom of speech. The emphatic “Dr. Pound,” an academic title officially granted by an American university, underscores his sanction of truth-telling as the representative of a privileged elite, which resonates with the symbiosis of intellectual authority and personal moral credibility in verbal parrhēsiastic actsin Foucault’s texts. In the Pisan Cantos, the thesaurus of artistic and poetic personae of the epic is appended with an intertextual portrait of Villon whose “The Great Testament” functions as a counterpoint. The allusion to the burden of “The Epitaph in Form of a Ballad” in the original language and the reference to New Testament’s Barabbas point to an unapologetic confidence in poet’s case and rectitude, leaving no room for a feeling of deep remorse or hope for empathy. The textual excision of the supplication to God for mercy, which structures the ballad genre of the original text by Villon, articulates the denunciation of the genre of palinode. Such poetic gestures intensely and stoically mark the act of parrhēsia as a free and dutiful choice of a way of life that affirms Pound’s self and American identity as parrhēsiast through the combination of unconditional expression of views and discursive aestheticization of the autobiographic and epic genres.