SOURCE: “Adams, Mussolini, and the Personality of Genius,” in Paideuma: A Journal Devoted to Ezra Pound Scholarship, Vol. 18, No. 3, Winter, 1989, pp. 77-103.

In the following essay, Cody suggests that the attraction of Mussolini was related to the notion of “personality” advanced by the German Romantics, which sought to distinguish itself from both the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy by its tenet of inborn—rather than inherited or gained—superiority.

In his book Fables of Aggression, Fredric Jameson suggests that both Wyndham Lewis' narratives and his fascist sympathies reveal efforts to defend the integrity of the subject against the threat posed to it by industrial capitalism, socialism, and communism. Jameson notes that Lewis' writing before World War I displayed a certain degree of fascination with the way machines and businesses manipulate workers' actions, and Jameson writes that “the exploration of this narrative option would by its own inner logic and...