Ezra Pound in the Present: Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity 9781501307713, 9781501307744, 9781501307737

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Part I: Pound’s Methods
1. Why Pound’s Imagist Poems Still Matter
2. Not-So-Distant Reading
3. Paleolithic Media: Deep Time and Ezra Pound’s Methods
Part II. Pound’s Worlds
4. “I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan
5. Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature
6. Ezra Pound and the Comparative Literature of the Present, or, Triptych Rome/London/Pisa
Part III: Pound’s Values
7. Ezra Pound and the Critique of Value
8. Ezra Pound’s Effective Demand: Keynes, Causality, and The Cantos
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Ezra Pound in the Present

Ezra Pound in the Present Essays on Pound’s Contemporaneity Edited by Paul Stasi and Josephine Park

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Paul Stasi, Josephine Park, and Contributors, 2016 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray Cover image © Creative Commons All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stasi, Paul, 1972- editor. | Park, Josephine Nock-Hee, 1971- editor. Title: Ezra Pound in the present : essays on Pound’s contemporaneity / edited by Paul Stasi, Josephine Park. Other titles: Pound’s contemporaneity Description: First edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2016012318 (print) | LCCN 2016024043 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501307713 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501307737 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501307720 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972 – Criticism and interpretation. | Contemporary, The, in literature. | Civilization, Modern, in literature. | Social perception in literature. | Value in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. Classifi cation: LCC PS3531.O82 Z6255 2016 (print) | LCC PS3531.O82 (ebook) | DDC 811/.52 – dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012318 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0771-3 PB: 978-1-5013-4178-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0773-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-0772-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations

vi vii xiv xv

Part I Pound’s Methods 1

Why Pound’s Imagist Poems Still Matter Charles Altieri

2

Not-So-Distant Reading Josephine Park

21

3

Paleolithic Media: Deep Time and Ezra Pound’s Methods Aaron Jaffe

45

3

Part II Pound’s Worlds 4

5

6

“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan Christopher Bush

75

Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature Jean-Michel Rabaté

107

Ezra Pound and the Comparative Literature of the Present, or, Triptych Rome/London/Pisa Christine Froula

135

Part III Pound’s Values 7

Ezra Pound and the Critique of Value Paul Stasi

173

8

Ezra Pound’s Effective Demand: Keynes, Causality, and The Cantos C. D. Blanton

201

Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

232 246 249

List of Figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Postcard of Verona arena, front, 1923 Postcard of Verona arena, back, 1923 “Society Formed to Provide for Budding Authors and Artists,” Popular Mechanics, 1922 Aurochs cave painting, postage stamp, Monaco, 1949 Henry Strater, image of Canto 12 from A Draft of XVI Cantos, 1925

51 52 58 61 71

Preface The seeds of this book began in 2013, when we each found ourselves teaching The Cantos. Noting the number of Poundian themes that seemed “in the air”—from the recognition of the sins of finance capital, to a renewed interest in China, and a fetishized investment in the founding fathers—we found ourselves rethinking many of our assumptions about his work. In light of contemporary events, Pound seemed different—and relevant all over again. Our half-serious shorthand for the set of questions this raised was “Would Pound have joined the Tea Party?” Given the strong populist strain in Pound’s thinking, with its characteristic combination of progressive and reactionary elements, we could hear his voice in the Tea Party’s outrage at the government bailout of the financial industry. He would have appreciated, too, their hatred of taxes and felt at home among their veneration of eighteenthcentury American leaders. At the same time, he would have found their anti-intellectualism appalling and, despite his well-documented and famous intolerance, he would have rejected outright the xenophobic nationalism of the American right-wing. Indeed, Pound’s critique of nationalism—his investment in world literatures, distinct from the category of “world literature” as it is currently understood—remains one of his most compelling intellectual efforts. Writing at the time of an emergent globalization that has fully bloomed in the contemporary world, Pound attempted to find a polyglot poetic form adequate to that world, without homogenizing its component parts into something like a world culture. That is to say, he required national boundaries and national particularities, even as he worked to transcend them. Perhaps his work could be relevant for our present conversations about comparative literature? And what could Pound’s seemingly prescient desire to connect the United States to China have to say about the forms of economic interdependence that have linked these nations in the twenty-first century?

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To raise these questions is also to recognize how deeply interconnected Pound’s varied lifelong interests were. Economics, aesthetics, governments, and anthologies were all of a piece for Pound; and in a time of widespread financial crisis, when the relationship of all areas of life to the larger economic conditions of the world is harder and harder to ignore, might not Pound’s claims about the relationship between art and economics have something interesting to tell us? In short, the world seems to have caught up with Pound, making him seem less and less like the lone voice in the wilderness that was one of his most cherished personae. Rather, his maverick economic and political determinations engage with some of the most important developments of this last century, and his conviction in the force of the work of art seems welcome, mired as we are in the very material conditions he addressed with acts of aesthetic making. As we mulled all of this over, the idea for the book began to take shape. We  generated a list of contemporary interests, some intellectual, some historical (a false distinction if ever there was one). Our goal was to engage both those thinkers who had powerfully shaped our existing sense of Pound— and might be willing to rethink some of those ideas in light of the present day— as well as newer scholars whose recent approaches to Pound might animate his relationship to the contemporary. The collection that emerged took our incipient thoughts in new and challenging directions, situating Pound in ways that help us reimagine his work while simultaneously suggesting how that work might help us reimagine our present moment.

The chapters Divided into three parts—Pound’s Methods, Pound’s Worlds, and Pound’s Values—the chapters in the book all take seriously Pound’s idea that artists are the “race’s antennae,” a phrase often invoked to valorize the artist’s prescience (SP 229). What immediately follows it, however, is telling: “The effects of social evil show first in the arts” (SP 229). These lines resonate in at least two ways with Pound’s work. First, and most obviously, they suggest the ways in which a familiar range of twentieth-century social evils made their way into Pound’s

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art. More subtle, however, is the idea of registering that the metaphor of antennae suggests, for Pound’s oeuvre provides a record of the contradictions of his moment, many of which persist into the present day. None of the chapters ignores Pound’s flaws nor suggests that these flaws should themselves be dismissed. Rather, what unites these chapters is the shared conviction that Pound’s efforts to include history inevitably reveal the ways history included him, and that these historical engagements are of a piece with his aesthetic achievements. In doing so, they cast new light on many of the old chestnuts of Pound criticism. Charles Altieri returns to Pound’s image to identify an alternative to the epiphanic lyricism that dominates poetry today. Distinguishing the construction and intensity of Pound’s early lyrics from the standard of visual epiphanies and aural refinement installed by his fellow imagistes, the chapter rereads Pound against Vincent Sherry’s recent claim for a lingering decadence in modernist verse. Reconsidering the sights and sounds of Pound’s imagism—in which we do not see pictures but relations, in music that does not make impressions but patterns—Altieri reads these works as a movement toward “concrete states of mind that establish their own complex realities.” These states and realities form the platform for The Cantos, and in marking this through line into Pound’s epic, the chapter uncovers the “certitude”—Pound’s ideogram for truth, a person standing beside his word—by which the private self contributes to public culture. Altieri signals the remarkable conviction of the “composing intelligence” of Pound’s image, whose ability to manifest alternate worlds and independent beings is sorely needed in our present scene of lyric. If Pound’s images establish patterns and relations, they also build the archive of materials to which The Cantos continually turn. Considering this archival structure in relation to what we have come to call “big data,” Josephine Park queries the resonance of Pound’s reading guides with the present digital turn in literary study. Considering Pound’s literary data alongside Moretti’s distant reading—both stunts against the conventional reading practices of the classroom—the chapter identifies a shared desire for ever-larger data sets as modes of capturing ethics, on the one hand, and the elusive history of style, on the other. It is no coincidence that this

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longing for big data sends both of these literary iconoclasts to China, the ultimate storehouse in the Western imagination. Park reads the onslaught of the China Cantos as the longed-for appearance of pure data in Pound’s epic, while Moretti’s turn to the Chinese novel becomes a refuge away from the close reading he eschews in his accounts of the Western canon and its swaths of lesser works. China is a strangely easy read in both cases, and both forays expose their grounding methodological assumptions. Against Moretti’s literary history routed through quantitative exploits, however, Pound is a through-and-through media historian; the chapter concludes by positioning Pound within the modern epistemic break of media history, typing out data at once transparent and distant. Aaron Jaffe’s chapter also reads Pound as a theorist of media, though here the history is no longer literary but geological. Taking up Pound’s notion of the “osmosis of persons,” which describes the intercourse between humans and things, Jaffe develops a reading of Pound in light of contemporary theories of deep time. Pound’s “osmotic yield of permanent, classified, or uncorroded value” traces a “technical drift across semi-permeable membranes,” that suggests our constant exposure to “invisible agencies and hidden mechanisms of value.” Jaffe’s chapter centers on the Twelfth Canto, often lost between the grandeur of the Malatesta Cantos and the calm of the thirteenth, to show how its simultaneous consideration of aesthetics, Roman architecture, and speculative business endeavors demonstrates the range of inhuman processes that structure our lives. The “deep time” of Pound’s aesthetic is also at the center of Christopher Bush’s chapter on Pound and Japan. Tracking Pound’s fifty-year engagement with Japanese art and artists, Bush demonstrates that Japan was far more than an aesthetic container for the revelations of Pound’s China. The political and philological possibilities Bush discovers in Pound’s Japanese correspondence—particularly evident in Pound’s longstanding exchange with avant-garde Japanese artist Kitasono—present anew the highly unstable compound of fascist and worldly fascinations that animated his work. At the heart of this elaboration of Pound’s personal and political investments in Japan as a modern empire is a revised understanding of Pound’s notions of the image and the noh: the chapter insists upon the cultural and political

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intensity invoked by each form—the image belonged to collective experience; the noh told the tale of the tribe—to build toward its culminating insight that the modern poem that contains history “must also endeavor to contain the world.” Attending to Pound’s Japan thus illuminates the geopolitics of Pound’s epic ambition, fashioned out of a complicity between cosmopolitanism and totalitarianism that undoes many of our present cultural and political dichotomies. Jean-Michel Rabaté takes up the question of Pound’s epic ambition through the “whole dream” of his East–West assemblage, recovering an oft-overlooked concept of globalized culture at the heart of The Cantos. Returning to Pound’s encounters with Tagore and Fenollosa—in order to elaborate Pound’s distaste for the haze of peaceful global synthesis and the active knowledge work that saved him from mere orientalist appropriation— the chapter demonstrates that Pound’s modernist palimpsest, with its radical overlay of ages and spaces, is not a dream of Spirit but a set of concrete references linked by complex ideological bridges. Rabaté’s exhortation to take seriously Pound’s methods of making use of the vast and highly partial knowledge he plumbed is premised on a major gamble: that this vital mode of comprehending world literature may show us a way out of the present crisis in the discipline of comparative literature. Reclaiming Ezra Pound as a radical guide to the globe, Rabaté identifies him as “our American Nietzsche,” a global theoretician whose works may be able to revive our presently lost sense of world literature. While Rabaté understands Pound through the rubric of world literature, Christine Froula borrows a phrase from James Sibley Watson to describe Pound’s “comparative literature of the present.” Taking up the “striking reversal” in Pound’s estimation of imperial force registered by the distance between Homage to Sextus Propertius and The Pisan Cantos, Froula shows how The Cantos’ openness to history’s vicissitudes demonstrates “the inscrutability of history as shared past and moral touchstone for the present.” Far from diminishing The Cantos’ power, this realization “allows the infinite web of interfering temporalities crisscrossing any present to be felt” within its pages. Fleeting references to events such as the Katyn Massacre become touchstones for thinking through the various efforts of

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occlusion and recovery that constitute our relationship to a past continually turning into our present. The relationship between past and present is central to Paul Stasi’s chapter, which finds Pound at the beginning of a capitalist crisis whose effects are just now coming into focus. Drawing on the work of the loosely affiliated German Wertkritik thinkers, Stasi argues that Pound’s lifelong investment in utility represents nothing less than an attempt to abolish value as it is currently constituted under capitalist social relations. Beginning from the separation of value into use value and exchange value, Wertkritik thinkers such as Robert Kurz and Norbert Trenkle argue that capitalism is increasingly unable to produce value in the narrow terms through which it understands the concept. Valorizing only a thin slice of human existence—the surplus value that can be generated through labor and which can, in turn, be captured in the commodity—capitalism thus tramples over vast areas of human life irrelevant to its basic processes. The goal is not, however, to find ways to monetize these aspects of our existence, but rather to transcend the entire division between use and exchange. Stasi argues that Pound’s notion of the “cultural heritage” represents an understanding of the dominance of past labor over present labor. This understanding reaches its fruition in the Adams/China sequence, where Pound effaces his own labor in a relentless argument for social utility that not only ignores but also actively seeks to combat contemporary notions of aesthetic autonomy. Of course, aesthetic autonomy has never been a prime Poundian concern, as the presence of financial institutions such as the Monte dei Paschi di Siena within The Cantos attests. Departing from the curious fact that Pound’s “damned good bank” was in fact a key player in the ongoing financial crisis begun in 2008, C. D. Blanton situates the Bank of Siena at the center of a subtle shift in The Cantos’ methodology. Premised on the “illuminating detail,” Pound’s Cantos stake their poetic power on an immediacy that finds its analogue in the factive personality, “a structure of causality visibly reducible to the intention of an individual or corporate agency.” The contrast, famously, is to a structure “concealed in distances and absences, by abstruse calculations of value,” but the Bank of Siena similarly lacks

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immediacy, presenting itself as the organizing ground for the Fifth Decad’s set of otherwise inconsequential details that rhymes with the absent cause of capitalist social relations. The centrality of economics to modern life—the hidden cause it is the effort of The Cantos to disclose and critique—turns against Pound’s own poetic method. “Image,” Blanton concludes, is here “committed to a concept and thereby rendered entirely mediate, withdrawn from superficial legibility.”

Acknowledgments The editors thank the contributors for their superb chapters and Haaris Naqvi and Bloomsbury Press for their support. They also thank their families— especially their respective “better makers”—for living with Ezra Pound for longer than they might have wished.

Abbreviations ABCE ABCR C CEP EP&J GB GK J/M L/ACH L/BC L/JQ L/WL LE MA P RSWWII SL SP SR

ABC of Economics ABC of Reading The Cantos Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound and Japan Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir Guide to Kulchur Jefferson and/or Mussolini Letters of Ezra Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson Ezra Pound and Senator Bronson Cutting The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot Machine Art and Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. M. Ardizzone Personae/The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, rev. ed. Baechler and Litz “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of WW II Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige Selected Prose, 1905–1965, ed. W. Cookson The Spirit of Romance

Part One

Pound’s Methods

1

Why Pound’s Imagist Poems Still Matter Charles Altieri

Two basic concerns frame my interest in addressing Pound’s Imagist poems. The first requires a little personal history. For two years I have been privileged to serve as a judge for two poetry awards—the Kingsley Tufts prize for distinguished achievement and the Kate Tufts prize for the best first book of poetry in the United States. This has meant reading over 350 volumes of poetry each year. And that has meant trying to preserve my sanity by a range of speculations about the state of poetry in the United States. From my perspective poetry in the United States seems to be thriving. At least two-thirds of these volumes had compelling poems and impressive craft—largely due, I think, to the emerging effect on publishing of the growth in creative writing MFAs. But there is a downside to this success story since well over two-thirds of these volumes were committed to pretty much the same kind of poem, at least when one looks for generalized patterns. I call this a poetry seeking epiphanic enlightenment as the imagination committed to some version of a plain style dwells on some concrete situation. The basic mark of a successful epiphany seems to be the production of bated breath or charged silence as an evocative image enables a narrated situation to break into something approximating timeless compassion bringing renewed attention and hope to a bleak world. I think this ambition for poetry is an important one. But it is also a limited one that risks taking on the appearance of a somewhat mindless ritual. So I think criticism has to analyze the weaknesses of this set of assumptions about the lyric. Then perhaps it can help bring about change by spelling out

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other viable and fresher ways to construct intelligent, intense, and moving verbal experiences. I hope to offer one challenge here by drawing attention to how many of Pound’s Imagist poems do not quite conform to the epiphanic model. Instead they dwell on how language constructs poetic scenes by foregrounding the role of the making in anything we might see or find by means of the poem. This will be a familiar argument, but I hope to push the contrast between making and finding further than most critics of Pound’s earlier works have done, by asking what we find when we focus on what the making can establish. First we have to look briefly at an Imagist poem that does stress the epiphanic, and with certain adjustments in style could be in many respectable contemporary collections because of how it deploys a plain style focused on the power of a single unfolding event both to occupy and to reward attention. The best example I can think of is the one poem Amy Lowell published in Des Imagistes, so I cite all of “In a Garden”: Gushing from the mouths of stone men To spread at ease under the sky In granite-lipped basins, Where iris dabble their feet And rustle to a passing wind, The water fills the garden with its rushing, In the midst of the quiet of close-clipped lawns. Damp smell the ferns in tunnels of stone Where trickle and plash the fountains, Marble fountains, yellowed with much water. Splashing down moss-tarnished steps It falls, the water; And the air is throbbing with it; With its gurgling and running; With its leaping and deep, cool murmur. And I wished for night and you. I wanted to see you in the swimming-pool, White and shining in the silver-flecked water.

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While the moon rode over the garden, High in the arch of night, And the scent of the lilacs was heavy with stillness. Night and the water, and you in your whiteness, bathing.1

Notice first how the opening stanza pushes for syntactic intricacy that weaves a dense set of sensations together visually and grammatically. Even though there is technical enjambment, each line takes on the weight of defining a particular grouping of impressions within the overall scene. Never one not to overdo a fine moment, Lowell links the water to the throbbing air and therefore needs an imaginative expansion of the scene that can begin to align the inner life with the profusion of sensual details. So she turns to “you.” And she makes the compelling decision to elaborate all the differences between a person and the natural scene while stressing how she wants the person as literal and as physical as the other sensations. The epiphany, then, is simply the realization of how fully the person not only fits into the scene but also somehow internalizes it or at least modifies its significance for himself and for her by performing the action of bathing. That action promises a resonance that does not deny the domain of appearances but indicates his power within it—to absorb the landscape and to elicit her distinctive care. More generally, we can see here how what Pound called “Amygism” contributed to the historical shaping of what Imagism seemed to exemplify as a set of possibilities for lyric poetry. The most important change Imagism brought about was its critique of all rhetorical effulgence (or language effects born of relations to other language effects rather than to subject matter): only the unadorned word, free verse, and elemental syntax will suffice to stage how illumination might be possible within a manifestly secular world.2 The corollary of this critique of rhetoric is the possibility that poetry can stage aspects of elemental experience in such a way as to call attention to their place in our lives and thus perform an act of valuing particulars sharply at odds 1 2

Ezra Pound, ed., Des Imagistes: An Anthology (London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1914), 38. This is a typical statement for Pound of 1912: Poetry’s “force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power … I mean it will not try to seem forcible by rhetorical din and luxurious riot … At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither” (LE 12).

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with the instrumental generalization so fundamental to our culture. Finally, poetry, in sharp opposition to prose, has the power to alter the senses of time fundamental to consumerist culture. Hence the significance of Pound’s famous definition of the “Image” as “that which presents an emotional and intellectual complex in an instant of time” (LE 4). The emotional epiphany is just this sense of the power of intense contemplation to isolate the instant and allow it to take on its own identity in contemplative space. This is how “emotion endures” (LE 14). But Pound, like virtually all major poets in the twentieth century, refused to settle for these principles that would sustain the epiphanic style. So I want to examine just what features of his versions of Imagism display significant alternatives to that style, in the hope that we can recover the force of his example and provide different possibilities for contemporary poetry. However, to develop this argument I have to address a second perspective on Pound that threatens to undo much of his power to shape a future for poetry because it mires him in aspects of literary history that do not transfer effectively into forms of ongoing imaginative power. I refer to Vincent Sherry’s brilliant Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence, a book that presents a very strong case for how the values basic to Decadent Writing pervade Pound’s Imagist phase and make it continuous with the Mauberley poems. In my view, Sherry’s book tries, in the name of literary history, to treat Pound’s early works as a series of dazzling enactments of what turn out to be symptoms of a severely limited culture. Sherry’s thesis on Pound is one aspect of his larger argument that critics writing in the spirit of Modernism have suppressed the ways Modernist writing partakes in and is pervaded by concerns that can reasonably be labeled decadent. Critics have accomplished this by absorbing decadence into Symbolisme and then stressing Symbolisme as primarily a set of technical strategies rather than a more encompassing fascination with particular structures for valuing experience. Sherry shows how Symbolisme cannot account for the continuing focus in Modernist writing on sensation, on a musicality that pulls against any determinate speaker, on a congruent absorption in the most private features of sensibility leading to a repudiation

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of public life, on an overall sense of “the melancholy in modernity,” and on the strong opposition between the symbol and the many features of Modernist writing that are much closer to the ironies of Benjaminian allegory.3 Above all, only the spirit of decadence provides a sufficient context for why so many Modernists deny any idea of progress, preferring instead to pursue a sense of “perennial afterness” as the time zone in which modernist writing most fully comes into its own.4 I think Sherry’s generalizations apply to most Imagist poetry, especially Lowell’s. There is in this work an obvious fascination with the immediacies of sensation, at least partially abstracted from any specific objective situation. There is a corresponding musicality set against the speaking as it pursues the poem’s interests in an intensity almost divested of actuality because of its self-absorption. Character tends to be absorbed in sensation rather than concerned with action. And, most important, the primary effect of that sense of character involves a radical splitting off of private sensibility from concerns for public welfare, a situation that did not prepare writers well for the shock of the First World War, where public events and needs simply overwhelmed concerns for private sensibility, and where writers had to find means of adapting their entire imaginative dispositions to what perplexed the understanding.5 Yet, for all Sherry’s eloquence, he seems to me in the case of Pound not to distinguish significantly between references to decadence and fealty to decadent values. There remains for me a huge difference between Pound’s American engagement with the decadence he finds everywhere in Europe and the promise of work capable of repudiating the core values 3

4 5

Vincent Sherry, Modernism and the Reinvention of Decadence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17. Ibid., 29. Sherry’s summary nicely catches the imaginative intensity and fluent abstraction of his argument: This is the decadence Pound extends in his own early practice, then, in the dominance he gives to the prosodies as well as the images of fall, of loss, of disembodiment: in the art of the cadence … and in his address to the apostrophized other as the beloved, in that otherwise odd erotic of disembodiment, in a sort of apostrophilia. (189) Sherry necessarily makes Hugh Kenner the prime concealer of Pound’s relations to decadence. I imagine this essay as a clumsy version of how Kenner might have responded to Sherry’s book.

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of decadent pessimism. We can test my claim by looking at three areas where Pound develops alternatives to Sherry’s characterizations of his work. First, Sherry wants to equate phanopoeia with decadence’s interest in the particulars of sensation. But to do this he has to reduce Pound’s view of sensation to the rendering of isolated phenomena, thereby ignoring how Pound links ideals of sensation to the capacity to register complex relational forces distinctive to how art makes its worlds manifest. Second, there is the matter of lyrical music, where Sherry simply never addresses Pound’s interest in the troubadours and in Italian alternatives to iambic pentameter. If one emphasizes these contexts, one can see the distinction between Pound’s experiments in melopoeia and those of H.D. or Richard Aldington. Pound’s music in his Imagist poems is in fact arguably his most radical break from the nineteenth-century sensibility that, nevertheless, still haunts some of his efforts to capture troubadour love lyric. Finally, Sherry’s separation of poetry into private lyrics and public address simply does not work for Pound because he elaborates a third term—the constructivist work of art—which casts the private self as capable of bearing significant public force because of the work the composing intelligence can make manifest. By taking up these three motifs I hope to show that the same traits that provide alternatives to decadence also provide substantial and still viable alternatives to the plain style epiphanic lyricism that has become so dominant today. Sherry has to treat the Mauberley poems as the culmination of Pound’s failure to break from decadence, while my story prepares a stage for that other major Pound text of 1917, a Draft of Three Cantos.6 Let us begin our analysis of Pound’s distinctive achievements in his Imagist poems by elaborating two aspects of phanopoeia that break sharply from any rhetoric of the image that relies on aligning poetry with the task of description while simultaneously aligning poetic affect with the cult of sensation. The first is simply the concision by which Pound’s Imagist poetry managed to reconcile the speaking energies of his Canzone poems with an aura of engagement 6

One of the great mysteries in literary history for me is how the author of Mauberley could publish in the same year the draft of the first three cantos, with its incipient cultivation of assertively individualist values sustained by the work writing could accomplish.

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with the concrete world. Imagine how one might adapt the intricate play of sensations in “Ballatetta” (1910) to a modern sensibility: The light became her grace and dwelt among Blind eyes and shadows that are formed as men; Lo, how the light doth melt us into song: The broken sunlight for a healm she beareth Who hath my heart in jurisdiction. In wild-wood never fawn not fallow fareth So silent light; no gossamer is spun So delicate as she is, when the sun Drives the clear emeralds from the bended grasses Lest they should parch too quickly, where she passes. (CEP 147)

This poem offers an odd conjunction between the troubadour’s confident subtleties about how light plays on the mind’s surfaces and a focus on aural effects that make speaking so musical it loses almost all purchase on an actual world. The light evoked literally melts us into a site where only song can be sufficiently delicate to preserve a sense of this woman’s passing (rather than her presence). Now consider “Liu Ch’e” from Des Imagistes (and we could move forward to “The Jewel Stairs Grievance”): The rustling of the silk is discontinued, Dust drifts over the court-yard, There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves Scurry into heaps and lie still, And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: A wet leaf that clings to the threshold. (P 110-1)

The sensibility here seems even more decadent than in “Ballatella”: It was Poe who argued that there was nothing more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman. Yet Pound’s mode of rendering this death is quite different from Poe’s. There is no dwelling on sensations or elaboration of the qualities of light, except perhaps for the dance of light vowels pervading the poem. There is a strong sense of relations among facts rather than moments of perception,

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with each fact dominating a particular line and so constituting a kind of form for the poem. Given this sense of the concrete situation, there emerges an implicit demand to recognize how any kind of overt lament might be seen as painfully self-indulgent. For the sensibility speaking this poem there can only be a process of emotionally coming to terms with what has changed, without indulging in abstractions about change. Pound accomplishes this in large part by modifying how poetry stages phanopoeia. It is crucial that the dead woman makes no appearance in the poem. Phanopoiea is, here, not a process of picturing but of evoking the possible force of visual details. Here the woman is not so much another fact in the poem as the emergent cause of all the facts because she now is seen to establish their affective force. Indeed her absence itself becomes an actual mode of presence in the poem’s recourse to the analogy of the “wet-leaf that clings to the threshold.” This figure of the wet leaf is not one of Pound’s most successful images since is it is rather mawkish. But the figure does sustain for the poem a significant internal contrast whose dynamics are presented in what I think are the most powerful lines in the poem: “There is no sound of foot-fall, and the leaves / Scurry into heaps and lie still.” The enjambment strangely (and accurately) has the leaves laboring to become still. But their stillness as a kind of mass grave is sharply different from the one leaf that cannot be lumped with the mass and so becomes an emblem for what can emerge of her life in her death. The  enjambed line focuses our attention not on pictures but on relations among pictures that occupy different planes of experience. That this clinging leaf will not blow away defines a mode of pain very different from the transience evoked by the scurrying of the leaves. The crucial point here is that in his Imagist poems Pound is rarely content with the specific pictures his images provide, as was the case with the hyphenated images in Lowell’s “In a Garden.” Pound’s poem seems convinced that providing the image as picture would cover over an absence rather than recreate a presence—an act that takes all the skills of foregrounded making. That is why the speaking voice is so central to many of Pound’s Imagist poems: bringing to life the energies of the speaking replaces the act of picturing by the act of composing an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

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Fortunately, Pound makes this contrast clear in his prose: “There have always been two sorts of poetry which are … the most ‘poetic’; they are firstly, the sort of poetry which seems to be music just forcing itself into articulate speech, and, secondly, that sort of poetry which seems as if sculpture or painting were just forced or forcing itself into words” (LE 380).Then he adds that the difference between genius and talent is that the former is capable of producing “evocation” while the other is mired in “description” (LE 380). Consider in the light of this statement how the images in Des Imagistes take on presence by soliciting the kind of power produced by something close to the principle of sheer emergence. “Fan-piece for Her Imperial Lord,” for instance, moves from a description of the fan to the articulation of the woman’s relation to the fan as a kind of embodied isolation and grieving, significantly without any epiphanic hush. And “Ts’ai Chi’h” plays the petals falling in the fountain against the substantial permanence of the ochre formed by their decay. In effect, the ochre becomes the presence of a past, an evocation of something like real distance between lyrical pleasure and a world of consequences.7 Finally, there is the well-known but perhaps not sufficiently appreciated visual aspect of “The Return”: See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering! See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back; These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,” inviolable. Gods of the wingèd shoe! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air! 7

The phenomenon of virtual emergence is strongest in “Sub Mare.”

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Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men! (P 69-70)

Notice how the imperative “see” is driven in fact by what we hear, by the miming of tentativeness and the way the enjambment leads to an intricate self-gathering cadence. In the first stanza there is emphatically no independent description; there is only what sound can solicit as the possibility of sight. And sight never becomes definitive; instead it hovers between visual detail and imaginative projection about the soldiers’ feelings. The power of sight depends ultimately not just on these details but on the contrast provided by the memories of these heroes starting out in triumphal glory. It is as if the warriors dominated the event not because they are seen directly but because they occupy a hallucinatory space between present and past. The thought of the warriors elicits imperatives to see, but the imperative is much stronger than any form of presence that actually comes into sight. In effect, sound and simile produce a constant promise of substance, but the poetry is all in how that promise evokes what cannot be present except in memory and in projection—the one a domain where promises are stored, and the other a domain in which they are continually produced. Apologists for war want to erase both these dimensions—of memory and of psychological projection. But in poetry the entire space of appearance can be saturated with it. In making a case for the complexity of phanopoeia I find myself also invoking the work of melopoeia. This interrelation is crucial to our understanding of Pound because the play of sound becomes something other than an accompanying music inviting us to enjoy delicate structures of aural sensation. Sound, in Pound’s Imagist poems, establishes something very close to an ontological dimension of the poetic scene inviting us to treat

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aural events as establishing a distinctive set of substantial qualities for the experience being rendered.8 Obviously this assertion is much easier to demonstrate than to describe in abstract terms. Consider how the music in H.D.’s “Sitalkas” in Des Imagistes differs from that of “Doria,” Pound’s first poem in that collection. H.D.’s poem is so impressionistic, so reluctant to anchor in a visual scene its sensations produced by a god “who touches us not,” that the sound has to do almost all the work of producing a concrete location: Thou art come at length More beautiful Than any cool god In a chamber under Lycia’s far coast, Than any high god Who touches us not Here in the seeded grass Aye, than Argestes Scattering the broken leaves.9

There is here a beautiful process of making the god manifest in the insistent long o sounds. Then, when the poem has to acknowledge the remoteness of the god, it switches to a music dominated by e sounds that makes “here” a very different place than the kind of existence shaped by the parallel hypothetical comparatives in lines three and six. Both sets of sounds define possible sites of attention. And, as Sherry notes, the effect of sound here produces a “counter-rhythm to the cadences of speech.”10 For Sherry, this resistance to the speaker’s presence represents the quintessential cadence of decadence because it makes central not a dramatic scene but “the finer audition of the reader’s inner ear, that subtler music.”11

8

9 10 11

Pound’s fullest early statement of his sense of sound as expressive substance, along with this claims about individual power, is the opening pages of the essay “Calvacanti” (LE 149–155). Pound, Des Imagistes, 20. Sherry, Reinvention, 165. Ibid.

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Not so Pound’s “Doria”: Be in me as the eternal moods of the bleak wind, and not As transient things are— gaiety of flowers. Have me in the strong loneliness Of sunless cliffs And of grey waters. Let the gods speak softly of us In days hereafter, The shadowy flowers of Orcus Remember thee. (P 64)

Here the sound-play is congruent with the speaking, or, rather, is the speaking defined in the fullness of its will. One might say that the adventure in this poem involves producing strong imperatives that exemplify how a musical mode can take sexual form, and, then, the way that sexual form establishes deep analogies with fundamental conditions that shape overall attitudes toward experience. It seems as if even the idea of the Dorian mode invokes a powerful will, defined in the poem by the opening line’s long e’s and the equivalences they can establish with feelings of surrender to the power of what endures. This imperative then defines itself further by a startling contrast with how transient things come into language—their instability captured in a flurry of short and long a sounds. Fortified by this contrast, the voice in the poem can even appropriate the a sounds for a third imperative that reaches beyond the bleakness to a kind of transcendental comfort. Now the a’s mellow into the strong o’s that provide a resting place for those who internalize that bleakness. This sequence invites us to read the final two imperatives as implicating something close to post-coital satisfaction for this relation to the gods. Having completed the initial sharp demand, the poem can soften, reaching out to a sense of the gods becoming an audience (as in “Erat Hora”) and beautifully returning to the long e’s at the end as softened and spread out in time by the fullness of vocalic round sounds in “the shadowy flowers of Orcus.”

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In “Doria,” Pound makes fully articulate what he means by claiming that “in Provence … the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it” (LE 91). This poem does not just exemplify effective musicality, nor the power of cadence, nor anything smacking of decadence. Instead, Pound puts all the focus on the compositional act. The force of that act of intelligence dispels any satisfaction in the vagaries of responding sensitivities. The effect is not refinement of the senses but the production of an alternative, richer world in which to exercise those senses. Here we enter—through sound—the possibility of participating in what come to seem abiding conditions of passion, not unlike Yeats’s gods whose footsteps on our souls provide us with our emotional lives. Pound’s shorter poems give substance to Hegel’s claim that with Romanticism, the arts take on a quest for a new inner sensuousness that has little to do with perception. One might say that “Doria” psychologizes music since it so adamantly reinforces the will to speech. But since the poem is quite impersonal about that speaking, as if it too were an event in the world, I think it better to treat the music as having a kind of ontological force. Indeed, in all of his Imagist poems Pound treats music less as accompaniment to speech than as a means of establishing for speech a distinctive imaginative site with an ontology all its own. Music seems to correlate speech with deep and distinctive sources of passion. Pound’s essay on Arnold Dolmetsch may be the closest he comes to making explicit the stakes in the imaginative worlds music can compose for even simple direct speech. Here I will rely almost entirely on quotation because Pound puts the case so brilliantly that one need only listen to how Dolmetsch helps Pound characterize the mode of independent being forged by the union of phanopoeia and melopoeia. The opening passages of the essay speculate on how myth arises as the only alternative to skepticism because myth has the capacity to preserve the literal terms of “some very vivid and undeniable adventure” (LE 431). One turns to myth because at least there the emotion felt might survive, and even provide the basis for communal conversation about how the world of the gods comes to intersect with that of human experience,

16

Ezra Pound in the Present

in the form of “bewildering and pervasive music moving from precision to precision within itself ” (LE 431). Dolmetsch matters because he brings an older music to life so that we can hear again “tones as clear as brown amber” (LE 433) carrying something like the force of myth without its discursive content. That force renders irrelevant the specific instruments making these tones, so the music of the poem can escape any decadent interest in old instruments for their symbolic qualities. For Pound, “this old music was not theatrical. You played it yourself as you read a book of precision … It was not an interruption but a concentration.” When decadence occurs, often in the form of the cult of impressionism, we become “reduced … to such a dough-like state of receptivity that we have ceased to like concentration” (LE 433). Buoyed by the example of Dolmetsch, Pound explicitly takes on what he sees as the heritage of decadence. Impressionism, he argues, is decadence turned popular, in the sense that the art of sensations becomes available to the masses. But Impressionism has the consequence of cultivating “ ‘emotional’ music as opposed to patterned music” (LE 434), and therefore has to ignore what can be constructed in order to occupy a secular version of the space of myth. Such music “starts with being emotion or impression, then becomes only approximately music” (LE 434). (One can hear Hulme here.) Music that begins with the “vortex of pattern,” on the other hand, concentrates on, and concentrates in, being purely music rather than producing an impression. Then the music proves “capable of being, after that, many things” (LE 434). And if we recognize the power of such patterns, and the capacity they bring to separate art from the vagaries of its stagings, we can see ultimately how the modern arts might be coming together to unite phanopoeia as an art of emergence with melopoeia as a celebration of sheer emotional substance. Through such art we learn what is involved in ceasing to treat the emotions as our particular possessions so that we can attend to how they place our psyches in an enlarged world where shadows become substances and facts elements in dance compositions: As I believe that Lewis and Picasso are capable of revitalizing the instinct of design so I believe that a return, an awakening to the possibilities, not necessarily of ‘Old’ music, but of pattern music played upon ancient

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instruments, is, perhaps, able to make music again a part of life, not merely a part of theatricals … It is a dance, danced for the dance’s sake, not a display. It is music that exists for the sake of being music, not for the sake of, as they say, producing an impression. (LE 435)

Now we are in a position to engage Sherry’s basic evaluative point—that the literature of decadence stressed private lives and sensoria in a way that could not address the sense of public crisis created by the First World War, and indeed by all large-scale operations of political force. This seems to me true about decadence. But it is not true about what Pound was exploring in these Imagist poems. For when phanopoeia and melopoeia reach their maximum intensities, there emerges a third elemental feature: the dynamic concentration made present by works of art. That mode of concentration is devoted to displaying how the private can, in fact, become a public force. Minimally, these acts of concentration establish what we can only call the presentation of real emotion independent both from description and from the world in which description locks us. Pound begins to make concrete states of mind that establish their own complex realities, with the complexity the  measure of how emotion can claim its own domain in our imaginative  lives. Then one might say that his Cantos take on the task of attempting to develop these constructive powers while also interpreting their significance  as they conflict with the historical realities brought into play by demands for practical description. But Pound’s specific theorizing is more important for my purposes than his modes of presentation because of how he makes articulate a feasible model of fusing private and public. First, art can be seen as the impersonal stabilizing and intensifying of the force of personal intelligence—as sound works to ground the power of will in “Doria.”12 Second, one has to recognize the potential value of the ways in which impersonality stages intelligence. Impersonality demands that the artist display powers by embodying them in the work of a medium (see LE 324n). One cannot effectively assert intelligence: One must demonstrate it at work so that others can “appreciate”

12

“The supreme test of a book is that we should feel some unusual intelligence working behind the words” (LE 420). See also Gaudier Brzeska.

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it and thereby “determine its value” (LE 282). Such work makes manifest the power to keep matter from growing “gangrenous and rotten” (LE 280). So the dramatic presence of intelligence in art stages a kind of phanopoeia of its own, consistently struggling to make visible its capacity to permeate matter with force. “The Return” outlasts any particular war, and it offers a powerful reminder of what we risk when we go to war. My final point about the work of intelligence addresses the specific and distinctive way it manifests itself as the working of private force in public space. That manifestation consists in how the work constitutes a kind of “certitude” capable of changing our entire model of evaluative reasoning. “Certitude” is Pound’s version of the ideogram for truth—a person standing beside his word. But certitude is also a kind of inner strength, whose richest analogue is how the form of a work leaves no gaps or absences in its content. Rather it completes the content by forming a singular identity. This kind of identity is not something one can describe because description would suggest something incomplete about the mode of presence. The presence would have to be supplemented by more activity, in an endless pursuit of what can only be displayed as being and having complete identity between will and its manifestation. By my own logic I cannot offer further description. The important thing is to assert the possibility that discussions of value can lead beyond argument, and into the distinctive ways works of art take on a public nature. This is Pound on Jacob Epstein: The man who tries to express his age, instead of expressing himself, is doomed to destruction … I should ask my opponents to argue, not with me, but to imagine themselves trying to argue with one of the Flenites, or with the energies of his “Sun-God” … The test of a man is not the phrases of his critics; the test lies in the work, in its “certitude.” What answer is to be made to the “Flenites”? With what sophistry will you be able to escape their assertion? (GB 102; see also LE 284)

Suppose that contemporary writers did not evade the force of such certitude by sophistries. What might they do? First they would alter how poetry presents visual experience by dwelling not on sensations per se but

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on the sense of visual force that occurs when particulars move out of sight, giving way to irreducible patterned relations to other phenomena forming shapes that emerge with their own capacity to distribute how emergence and withdrawal establish complex emotional fields. Second, sound would neither displace speaking nor be used to characterize individual speakers. Sound would instead constitute the fields of energies where any kind of speaking might take on distinctive force. And, finally, poetry would not shy away from conflict or rely on intricately evanescent subtleties. It would carry strength of conviction as a dominant contribution to a culture that seems to reward those who opt for the safe path of letting others define them for their own purposes. Certitude does not usually produce success in the social world. But certitude may be the only force that gives poetry a chance to become sufficiently visible to shape pieces of our future imaginings.

2

Not-So-Distant Reading Josephine Park

Can we read Ezra Pound’s revolution in literary criticism alongside the present rush toward the digital humanities? The distant reading touted by Stanford’s Literary Lab seems anathema to the Luminous Detail of the Ezuversity; against the DH drive toward massive data collection, Pound’s guides to reading are all about narrowing selection. And yet I’m struck by an intriguing set of resemblances between Pound’s ABCs and the graphs of Franco Moretti, the leading and controversial light of the present movement: neither engages in the currents of reading standardized within the university, and both cull methods from social science to set a new standard for reading, with economic models in particular set against naturalized literary ones. I hasten to add, however, that even these fairly basic similarities call forth differences: Pound cautioned against the wholesale importation of scientific method into literary study that Moretti gamely attempts; Pound’s antimoney economism is hostile to Moretti’s grounding in Marxian analysis;1 and Moretti’s exasperation with close reading is a far cry from the reading practices Pound advocated. Despite these potentially overwhelming caveats, however, this chapter follows a hunch that not only could there be commerce between Pound and Moretti, but that considering one reading strategy against the other could be a mutually illuminating—if not mutually damning—exercise.

1

It is worth noting that Pound’s historiography is in several key respects indebted to Marxian analysis—as noted by Rabaté and Stasi’s contributions to this collection.

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A century ago, Pound’s landmark 1913 essay “The Serious Artist” built upon the premise that “It is obvious that ethics are based on the nature of man,” in order to spell out the role of aesthetics: the arts give us our best data for determining what sort of creature man is. As  our treatment of man must be determined by our knowledge or conception of what man is, the arts provide data for ethics. (LE 46)

The arts as data: this is not a diminishment of the arts but a claim for their seriousness—and, of course, for the serious artist. Something happens when the arts are converted into data, however: They become material toward the service of a larger project. Elevated into “data for ethics,” the arts are no longer an endpoint, the product of prodigious labors in a particular time and place; instead, they become a starting point with all of the attendant forces of standardization and collective apprehension (in both senses of the word) that constitute the data set. The argument of “The Serious Artist,” which redefined good writing by balancing imagistic principles of precision with the focused energies of the vortex, would become the kernel (or, better, the acorn) for Pound’s self-described “stunt piece” Guide to Kulchur (GK 183), the 1938 guidebook that capped a decade’s worth of concerns over how to read. The peculiar intensity of his 1930s polemics, when Pound was hardening his aesthetic and ideological judgments into a defensive pose girded for war, marks a point of dark convergence between his prose and poetry, in which what had been writerly concerns become transposed into readerly ones. In 1913, “The Serious Artist” presented itself in lieu of “a properly accurate treatise” (LE 50) whose phantom possibility would finally materialize in the Guide to Kulchur, the only prose volume for which Pound secured an advance contract—a fortifying fact and burden under which every page seems to buckle. Guide to Kulchur looks back longingly to the brevity and bold strokes of “The Serious Artist,” whose concluding gesture—“I have tried to establish a clear demarcation” (LE 55)—proleptically sums up his 1930s efforts and echoes with the voice of the late cantos. Indeed, it is the arts as data that lies at the heart of Pound’s polemics during his intellectual nadir in the late 1930s—and out of which the hard ascent of

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The Pisan Cantos would find its extraordinary footing. Back in “The Serious Artist,” Pound’s protest that “I take no great pleasure in writing prose about aesthetic. I think one work of art is worth forty prefaces and as many apologiae” (LE 41) delineated poles of prose and poetry that would collide in his 1930s ideogram of culture. The celebrated ideogram of the 1910s, in which, as Pound so rapturously discovered in Ernest Fenollosa’s papers, we seem to see “things work out their own fate,”2 would morph into the ideogrammic method of the 1930s, reworked to accommodate Pound’s increasingly idiosyncratic and often pernicious data. That “the arts provide data for ethics” is the given of the ideogrammic method, which was Pound’s methodological anchor in the Guide to Kulchur, and the cantos he composed during this period turned to vast tomes billed as ethics in order to make art out of their political data. The stunt of a guide to culture curiously resonates with Franco Moretti’s “distant reading”—a phrase that itself began as a joke but quickly assumed the mantle of naming his method.3 Never coy about methodological intent, Moretti charts the influence of evolutionary and world-systems models on his work in the chatty introductions that frame the essays collected in Distant Reading, and in contrast to the rigors of these methodologies, distant reading feels like a mere, if witty, rejoinder. And yet, it has become necessary: Distant reading is the catch-all term for the various dimensions of “sociological formalism” Moretti has been working through in the new millennium in large part because it does not possess the organizing force of the more systemic theories—namely Darwin’s and Wallerstein’s—that preceded his turn to very big data.4 Unlike natural selection or world systems theory, distant reading does not organize data; instead, it is driven by data. It almost goes without saying that evolutionary and world systems have already made the conversion of the work of art into data, but Moretti’s more recent turn to the Literary Lab and the new freedoms he has discovered in the modeling technologies therein—no longer bound to the natural order of trees

2

3

4

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights, 1968), 9, original emphasis. Moretti explains that this “fatal formula” was in part “meant as a joke” in his preface to “Conjectures on World Literature” in Distant Reading (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 44. Ibid., 59.

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and waves5—ponder literary data in an inductive mode liberated from grander theoretical models. In contrast to the usual criticism against the application of theoretical hypotheses, data-driven research revolves around the stuff of the set, shifting the burden from theorizing to invite question after question about data collection. I should say from the outset here, of course, that this contrast between deduction and induction is never so clear—every question about data is also a question about a theory of collection—but what interests me is the unleashed force of data, which always invite cooptation by larger systems. Data must be captured, and big data cries out for even bigger moves—and, I contend, for bigger data sets. Despite their vastly different political interests and technological means, Pound and Moretti are both controversial for their respective totalitarian and totalizing ambitions, and it is of particular interest that these critics who want to transform reading in order, on the one hand, to uncover levels of civilization, and, on the other, to present a true history of literature, both trace their data-driven desires to China, the ultimate storehouse of big data in the Western imagination. This chapter will turn first to a consideration of Pound’s 1930s theses on reading whose ideogrammic method led back to China, and then to the evolution of Moretti’s literary histories, whose splashy dive into data seemingly necessitates a recapitulation of Chinese otherness as the guarantor and limit of the liberation of literature from reading. I will conclude by considering the necessity of China in the context of comparative literature and media studies for both Pound and Moretti.

I From Ezra Pound’s 1929 pamphlet “How to Read” to his 1934 schoolbook ABC of Reading to the Guide to Kulchur, we can trace an expanding concept of reading that ultimately imagines the good book as a glowing orb, capable of sloughing off layers of dull and inert reading. These guides grow dramatically in length, from forty-odd pages to well over 300, and 5

Moretti concludes “Conjectures on World Literature” with these metaphors (60–61).

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their titles reveal key shifts in the aesthetic and political exigencies that consumed Pound’s thought in the era. As a how-to, “How to Read” is self-help that “maintains the health of thought” (LE 22): The task of the pamphlet is to provide a healthy regimen for thought via the intake of good writing. The ABC of Reading expands and reframes the foregoing pamphlet: ABCs are always a set of principles, and in Pound’s avant-garde textbook,6 a set of core literary works are themselves the principles— select primary works are charged with setting the standard for evaluating all others. Pound’s ABCs thus collapse postulates with exempla, and his text proceeds by declaring the significance of Chaucer, who is exhibit A, and so on. It is worth noting that the ABC of Reading is less about how to read than it is a tendentious anthology that postulates a wave model of literary history, in which one great tide of literary innovation dissipates before the next—a figuration that resonates with Moretti’s 2000 wave model of world literature in “Conjectures on World Literature.” This recurring wave indicates a shared propensity for stylistic figuration between these two thinkers—an incidental resemblance that is also a by-product of collating literature as data. Pound’s ABC of Reading similarly calls forth the concept of the variable, because his peculiar textbook repeatedly states “Let the student decide”: it is up to the student to identify the best works in whatever set she may encounter. Pound certainly has very strong ideas on the matter, but the potential variability of what texts could stand as A, B, and C underscores the fact of ABC as data to be fixed—an endless return to the elements that Moretti’s recent scholarship underscores as well, even as such returns threaten to undo the very waves both beckon forth. The straight line between “How to Read” and ABC of Reading tangles into Guide to Kulchur, whose ambitions eclipse those of these earlier works. Nevertheless, the continuum between them is critical for comprehending the 6

I take this phrase from Alan Golding’s “Louis Zukofsky and the Avant-Garde Textbook,” Chicago Review 55.3–4 (Autumn 2010), in which he describes “a tradition of avant-garde responses to mainstream cultural practices and pedagogical institutions” (33) that prominently features Pound’s ABC of Reading. In Ezra Pound, Popular Genres, and the Discourse of Culture (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), Michael Coyle provides a dizzying catalog of primers presented as ABCs in the period (129–131).

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stakes of all three, and in Guide to Kulchur, Pound devotes a chapter to the aim of his literary criticism, in which he returns to a primal scene of his life as a reader: About thirty years ago, seated on one of the very hard, very slippery, thoroughly uncomfortable chairs of the British Museum main reading room, with a pile of large books at my right hand and a pile of somewhat smaller ones at my left hand, I lifted my eyes to the tiers of volumes and false doors covered with imitation book-backs which surround that focus of learning. Calculating the eye-strain and the number of pages per day that a man could read, with deduction for say 5% of one man’s time for reflection, I decided against it. There must be some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage. (GK 53–54)

The somatic experience of the library presents a strange terror: Strapped to the hard, slippery chair, pinioned by books at either arm and eyes trained upward—all chillingly reminiscent of the modern invention of the electric chair, the deadliest perversion of the live current of poetry that Pound always sought to harness—Pound identifies “false doors covered with imitation book-backs” to create a seamless and petrifying image of a mausoleum of culture. The near nonsequitur of “I decided against it” in the following sentence points toward the missing antecedent of this “it”: reading. The Guide to Kulchur is in many ways a treatise against reading and, as such, a strangely fitting capstone for “How to Read” and the ABC of Reading, whose titles, in the hard light of the Guide to Kulchur, could be recast as “How to Read Less” and the ABC of Not Reading. Against the paralysis-inducing activity of reading, which always risks the falsehood visible in the covered doors of the British Museum, Pound seeks out “some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage.” Of course, there is no way around reading, and the struggle of the Guide to Kulchur is to spark a proper mode of reading and, further, to defamiliarize the reading experience for the weary reader who finds herself lost in the pages of this book in particular. Its most oft-cited passage awakens the reader and transforms the text: Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand. (GK 55)

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Against the death sentence of reading in the British Museum, “man intensely alive” reads “for power.” Considered alongside the postulate of art as data for ethics in “The Serious Artist,” reading for power emerges as an illuminating counterpart to the equation of the earlier essay: put in the reader’s hand, the art that served as data for ethics lights up so that it can be put to use. Pound goes on to say, “To read and be conscious of the act of reading is for some men (the writer among them) to suffer. I loathe the operation. My eyes are geared for the horizon” (GK 55). Strikingly, it is the secondary fact, of being “conscious of the act of reading” that intensifies the suffering, and the precise “operation” Pound loathes in this instance is the added pain of this consciousness that threatens to blind him. Reading for power thus requires not being conscious of the act of reading—and for Pound, an answer to this conundrum was close at hand: the ideogram, which reanimated the deadening operation of reading such that reading itself could become an artistic act. In his 1918 edited version of Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, the landmark essay on poetics Pound discovered among the treasure trove of Fenollosa’s papers, Pound appends a footnote describing the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska’s ability to read the Chinese character. Pound edited Fenollosa with a heavy hand, and this note recalibrates the extraordinary perception called forth by the ideogram: Professor Fenollosa is borne out by chance evidence. Gaudier-Brzeska sat in my room before he went off to war. He was able to read the Chinese radicals and many compound signs almost at pleasure. He was used to consider all life and nature in terms of planes and of bounding lines. Nevertheless he had spent only a fortnight in the museum studying the Chinese characters. He was amazed at the stupidity of lexicographers who could not, for all their learning discern the pictorial values which were to him perfectly obvious and apparent.7

Gaudier’s aesthetic powers evoke a reading experience that renders text into a blazing luminescence. This light certainly recalls the Luminous Detail that 7

Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 30–31. Pound refers to this prowess again in the ABC of Reading: Gaudier, “who was accustomed to looking at the real shape of things, could read a certain amount of Chinese writing without ANY STUDY” (ABCR 21).

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I noted in my opening salvo as a counter to considering Pound alongside the big data of digital humanities, but what strikes me about the febrile light of the 1930s in the Guide to Kulchur is the way in which the shining details, the phalanx of particulars that first lit the way of Pound’s poetics, have had to be recharged in the service of an ideogram of civilization. Indeed, in this later incarnation, the ideogram of imagism must be charged with a methodological force derived from the arts as data: the Fenollosan ideogram of 1913 undergoes a calculated shift, into the ideogrammic method. The ABC of Reading in fact began with an exhortation toward “a proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters” in an opening chapter that culminates in a section heading that spells it out: “The Ideogrammic Method or the Method of Science.” Indeed, we may describe the ABC of Reading as an overlay of ideogrammic method onto the precepts laid out in “How to Read,” and it is in this first chapter that Pound sketches a notorious illustration of the method. Upon presenting the components of the Chinese character for “East” in which the discerning eye can identify the “sun tangled in the tree’s branches” (ABCR 21), Pound asks, But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint? He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE CHERRY IRON RUST FLAMINGO […] The Chinese “word” or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS. (ABCR 21–22)

All of this is familiar material from “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” but Pound, as Christine Brooke-Rose has pointed out, got “the cherry-rose-flamingo bit” exactly wrong:8 What Pound presents 8

Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 109.

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as an illustration of the method is in fact a citation of Fenollosa’s prime counterexample, of the brick-like dullness of medieval thinking in the West. Pound’s key instance of the ideogram in action is thus a flagrant misreading of Fenollosa’s essay. This error certainly exposes Pound as a poor reader—a telling (and perhaps apt) failure in a book devoted to reading—but if we follow Fenollosa’s presentation of this example as an illustration of European medieval thinking, this illustration of the ideogram resonates with Pound’s presentation of Chaucer as the “mind of Europe” in the ABC of Reading. Most significantly, however, these four reddish items definitively transform the components of the ideogram into a data set. Indeed, if we return to the Chinese character for “East,” the decoding of which immediately preceded the example of the picture of red, we can see that this recapitulation of Fenollosa, too, has been spun differently. Fenollosa traced visible etymologies through primitive notations that developed into the highly pictorial ideograms cherry-picked for his essay, but Pound’s presentation of the ideogram as a conglomeration of “the essentials of the first picture of man, tree or sunrise” (ABCR 21) is far less interested in the evolution of the sign; for Pound, the elements are essential, and, notably, particular. The Chinese word “is based on something everyone KNOWS” and this knowledge is cultural, as Pound emphasizes in the strange parenthetical statement that follows this line: (If ideogram had developed in England, the writers would possibly have substituted the front side of a robin, or something less exotic than a flamingo.) (ABCR 22)

It was Fenollosa’s whole point that the ideogram couldn’t have developed in England—hence the counterexample of Western logic—but the method Pound derives from the ideogram has less to do with China than with data; it is “the Method of Science.” Immediately after his flagrant misreading, Pound returns to his source: “Fenollosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC” (ABCR 22). But at this point Pound maps out his further divagation because, as he puts it, Fenollosa “died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a ‘method’, ” which permits and even

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necessitates Pound’s remarkable extension of the Fenollosan ideogram: “This is nevertheless the RIGHT WAY to study poetry, or literature, or painting” (ABCR 22, 23). This turn exerts a key shift, from Fenollosa’s analysis of poetic writing to Pound’s argument for proper reading. In fact, we may register this very shift from writing to reading in Pound’s bad recall of Fenollosa’s essay, not only because Pound as reader undoes Fenollosa’s writing, but also because this counterexample makes it possible to read rose—cherry—iron rust—flamingo without the singular artistic eye of Gaudier. Because it is, again, “based on something everyone KNOWS,” everyone can read it—which is the power of the ideogrammic method. Guide to Kulchur is itself a large experiment in the ideogrammic method as a means of reaching the distracted reader. To return to its stated aims, Pound begins Chapter Five by noting a rare instance of popular acknowledgment for his illustrative powers: At last a reviewer in a popular paper (or at least one with immense circulation) has had the decency to admit that I occasionally cause the reader “suddenly to see” or that I snap out a remark … “that reveals the whole subject from a new angle.” That being the point of writing. That being the reason for presenting first one facet and then another—I mean to say the purpose of the writing is to reveal the subject. The ideogrammic method consists of presenting one facet and then another until at some point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register. (GK 51, original ellipsis)

If the Fenollosan ideogram “had to stay poetic,” the point of all writing is a poetics of revelation, and this renewed standard in the Guide to Kulchur goes a long way toward explaining the peculiarities of the poetry Pound composed in this period. That the point of writing is, in fact, the reader both is and isn’t an obvious truth for high modernist poetry—though obviously the reader was never far from Pound’s poetics, from imagism onward. But the aim of the ideogrammic method is singular in its focus on what the reader can see. In many ways, this new attention to the everybody of the reader flouts the insistence on precision and the cautions against excess so prominently

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featured in Pound’s imagist rules; the ideogrammic method is not about “direct treatment of the ‘thing’ ” (LE 3) but instead “consists of presenting one facet and then another”—it is a multidimensional presentation whose juxtapositions, though they may occasionally recall the haiku-like contrasts of imagist verse, in fact violate its central tenets in favor of striking “a part that will register” of the reader’s mind. Pound periodically pauses to justify the onslaught of data point after data point in the Guide to Kulchur by adumbrating the fact of the ideogrammic method—and when he insists that “Real knowledge goes into natural man in titbits” (GK 99), he takes shelter in the ideogrammic method, which facilitates redundancy and even makes a virtue of it. Guide to Kulchur is, furthermore, a study of virtue that enshrines a hero of ethics: the book opens with a piecemeal “Digest of the Analects” which portrays Kung the Philosopher in Socratic dialogue with various interlocutors. All of the master’s speech revolves around what for Pound was the ultimate virtue of Confucius: in Pound’s translation, “To call people and things by their names, that is by the correct denominations, to see that the terminology was exact,” after which he inserts an image of the ideogram for “right name” (GK 16). The very excess of Pound’s translation here, with its three matched phrases, demonstrates the multiple facets of his ideogrammic method, which takes tack after tack to express a single concept. The Guide to Kulchur in its entirety is meant to be boiled down to this single insight, through which Pound believes the reader may register the levels of civilization in the worlds she encounters, notably including her own time and place. The far-reaching reverberations of this core insight appear in Pound’s comments on these bits of the Analects, in which Pound draws out potential applications, as in “May we not suppose that XII, 9 of the Analects teaches the folly of taxation?” (GK 18). The distance between the ideogram for “right name” and this speculation on taxation marks out the expanse of the Guide to Kulchur, which insists upon application with a fervor that outstrips the “right way” of the ABC of Reading. The most gratuitous excesses of the Guide to Kulchur are directed against Aristotle, and the text culminates in a hostile reading, book by book, of the Nichomachean Ethics. Pound ultimately brands Aristotle a secondary

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intellect: “As ethics, Arry is not fit to clean the boots of Confucius” (GK 326).9 The Guide to Kulchur thus opens with Kung, deemed the true philosopher, and closes with what Pound claims is a false one—and Pound begins the chapter devoted to his discomfort in reading Aristotle by explaining Having put down one’s ideogram of culture, or say one’s road map intended to aid the next man to a few of the summits, with less fatigue than one’s own, one has almost a duty to attempt rectification, i.e. to compare one’s outline with some gt. book against which one may be prejudiced or at least wherewith one supposes one’s self to be not in accord. (GK 304)

How this contrast could function as “rectification” only becomes clear when we reconsider the closing passage of Pound’s “Digest of the Analects,” in which Kung intones, “You have heard the six words, and the six becloudings?” to then enumerate six different variants of love of learning, each contrasted to a “beclouding” that leads to “foolish simplicity” and so on. Pound includes the ideogram of “beclouding” on the page, in whose image “we find confusion, an overgrowing with vegetation” (GK 20). At the far end of the Guide to Kulchur, then, Aristotle, with his “abominable mixture of weeds and loose language” (GK 314), serves as this contrasting force of “beclouding.” By bookending his ideogram of culture with these philosophers, Kung and Aristotle, standard bearers for an age of virtue and a contrasting “decadence” (GK 315), Pound encases the great sprawl of the Guide to Kulchur within a Confucian mode of rectification that corrects Aristotle’s ethics—through which he aims to deliver on his 1913 assertion that “the arts provide data for ethics.” This philosophical frame guides the cantos Pound composed in this same period, which dive directly into the data. Cantos LII-LXXI march through a dynastic history of China and then cross the Pacific to Revolutionary America to arrive at the final emperor in the series, John Adams. The fact of this data is signaled by Pound in the table that opens this section of The Cantos—a singularity in Pound’s epic—in which Pound lists numbered dynasties as the 9

In Reading Pound Reading: Modernism after Nietzsche (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Kathryne V. Lindberg elaborates the neo-Aristotelian modes of Pound’s “notions of reading and metaphors” (43).

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contents of these cantos, explaining that “In the text names of Emperors and of Dynasties are in CAPS” (C 256). This formal detail indicates that these are facts—or “titbits”—of an order palpably different from the heterogeneous material of the preceding cantos. It has always been a stretch to try to consider the entirety of The Cantos as an image, but this series is emphatically meant to create an ideogram: Facing the table of contents is a startlingly large ideogram, identified in the table as the “Rays ideogram from Fenollosa collection” (C 255). This image of light insists upon the book as the “ball of light in one’s hand” from the Guide to Kulchur; the strange purity of the experiment of this section is its rigorous and absolute presentation of the ideogrammic method in action. And so, flowering from Pound’s Confucian chastening of Aristotle, Cantos LII-LXXI are meant to glow before the reader, who ought to become “man intensely alive” in contact with its pages. Yet, as readers of Pound’s 1930s writings know, the ideogrammic method is unlovely: against the imagism of Cathay, those crystalline translations from Fenollosa’s crib sheets, we have the dense brutality of the history lesson of the China Cantos. Traveling from ideogram to its method, Pound seems to have lost sight of the very luminescence this journey was meant to discover. Notable too is how unlike the China Cantos are to the two preceding cantos set in China: Canto XIII portrays Kung before a dynastic temple and presents his voice extemporizing a gentle lesson that concludes with apricot blossoms; Canto XLIX, the beautiful “Seven Lakes Canto” inspired by a series of Chinese paintings, closes with a glimpse of paradise. The unrelenting China Cantos offer no such images; instead they march through evidence of ages and ages of good and bad rule in China in order to present an ethics of unclouded rule. Governed by the rectifying frame of Kung versus Aristotle in the Guide to Kulchur, this material has absorbed the larger system of ethics in order to appear as data pure and simple. Pound arrived at the ideogrammic method by clouding Fenollosa’s essay, and when the ideogram morphs into method, its Chineseness is immaterial—and yet the ultimate test site for the method is China and its history, divorced from its poetic riches. But why must Pound return to China when his ideogrammic method has obviated its Chinese origins? My reading of Pound’s reading followed his pamphlets and guides into the ideogrammic method in order to

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comprehend his data-driven methodology, but the turn to China in Cantos LII-LXXI indicates a new order of ambition: This China is big data. There is little inevitability in Pound’s trajectory from Fenollosan ideograms to Confucian historiography—Pound’s misreading of Fenollosa in fact severs the tie between ideogram and China in order to propound a method—and yet Pound wades through volume after volume of a Jesuit translation of a Confucian history of China. If we consider this reading against Pound’s wild dissatisfaction with reading Aristotle in the Guide to Kulchur, we see that Pound needs China because it is a soothing and ultimately easy read. China is manageable big data, unlike the welter of Pound’s notes on the Nichomachean Ethics—and this enticement in fact accounts for much of Western fantasy about China. It can serve as such a clean contrast precisely because its data can be consistent in a way that our own can never be, mired as we are in it. Pound’s trajectory from ideogram to ideogrammic method presents a significant divergence from the longstanding allure of China for the West—and yet it also plots a drive toward data that necessarily returns to China even after its Chinese origins have been transcended in favor of a scientific method. Against Pound’s lively, early interest in the Far East, this late turn to a flattened history presents a flow of data that sketches out an ultimately unliveable dimension. That Ezra Pound, the poet of “The River Merchant’s Wife” and an actual Confucian, could coddle himself with Chinese history as data set presents a cautionary tale about the peculiar dangers of the drive toward data—which installs an ethics of not reading that dims his epic.

II At the outset of Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1994, tr. 1996), a materialist history of a select genre he defines as “an almost super-canonical form, yet one that is virtually unread,” Moretti spells out a key “technical matter”: To do justice to this proposed literary history, a centaur critic would be required: half formalist, to deal with the ‘how’; half sociologist, to deal with the ‘why.’ Nota bene: half and half. Not some

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reasonable compromise, but Jekyll and Hyde. To bring it off, I would have drunk any potion.10

It is tempting to read his subsequent scholarship as the manifestation of this ambition, and the Moretti we encounter in the essays collected in Distant Reading (2013) traces this galloping desire, toward the new potions of the Literary Lab. The scholarly evolution we discover in Distant Reading wrests the critic from the canon along the way: The realization of Moretti’s metamorphosis shifts the objects of his study from the unread super-canon of works like The Cantos to the “great unread” of genre fiction, dime novels, and even Hollywood. Indeed, the centaur critic who read the unreadable, encyclopedic, and sacred works of the Western literary canon would soon be pilloried for eschewing reading altogether, along with what Moretti deems the “theological exercise of close reading.”11 One of the many appeals of Moretti’s scholarship is his chatty and confessional voice, whose charm both ameliorates and magnifies the audacity of his scholarly experiments. The essays collected in Distant Reading are introduced by his personal accounts of each, in italicized prefaces in which Moretti charts a methodological shift, from the “idea of literature as a collection of masterpieces” (from the preface to “Modern European Literature: A Geographical Sketch,” first published in 1994) to the quantitative turn whose arrival he signals in the preface to “The Slaughterhouse of Literature” (2000), an essay poised at the cusp of his plunge into “Quantitative Formalism.”12 In this preface, he lays out the slaughter to come: considering “all those forgotten detective stories” that he read for the essay, Moretti wonders, But was it still reading, what I was doing? I doubt it. I read “through” those stories looking for clues, and (almost) nothing else; it felt very different from the reading I used to know.13

10

11 12 13

Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 4, 6. Moretti, Distant Reading, 48. Ibid., 2, 65. Ibid., 64–65.

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Moretti is being absolutely literal when he says he read “looking for clues”— the essay charts the triumph of the clue as the central device in detective fiction—and the heady brew to come in the Literary Lab would certainly feel “very different.” Distant Reading is framed, then, as both the narrative of a scholar’s evolution and an answer to his critics, and Moretti is especially disarming when he takes on his detractors. He includes, for instance, his reply to Christopher Prendergast’s review of Maps, Graphs, Trees (2005), the crossover hit that made Moretti news but also put him in the firing line among literary critics. In the preface to this piece, which singles out Prendergast’s as one of only a handful of viable critiques, Moretti dispatches with much of the rest, which end up gravitating around close and distant reading—are they complementary, compatible, opposite, do I really want people to stop reading books, etc. I have asked for it, so I won’t complain, but it’s not very interesting.14

But this is very interesting—as evidenced in the provocation of his title—and Moretti has done more than ask for it: not reading in his usual manner is the bedrock of his quantitative turn, which nevertheless betrays close readings at every turn. Indeed, reading for clues is a fair description of close reading, and its literalization in Moretti’s hands displaces rather than does away with close reading. It is impossible not to notice the prevalence of “the reading I used to know” in Distant Reading—as in the analysis of titles of novels in “Style, Inc.: Reflections on 7,000 Titles,” which burrows into the parts of speech of book titles in order to identify a market-driven trend. The essay opens by identifying a novel’s title as “A code, in the market,” which, when properly read, can “allow us to see a larger literary field” and particularly “the force of the market.”15 Isolating a single line to analyze as code is akin to what we ask our students to do in close reading exercises, and Moretti’s modes

14 15

Ibid., 137, original emphasis. Ibid., 181, 192.

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of reasoning through the probable causes for the subtle shifts in titles he uncovers insist upon a layer of interpretation that critically intervenes between the code and market forces. All of the new literary history presented in Distant Reading marks out a space for hermeneutics between culled data and social force—which, of course, is the space that has always been claimed by the literary historian. Moretti remarks in his prefatory notes to “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” that “the essay retreated from quantification into a qualitative analysis of plot,” and he goes on to ask, “Did I really need network theory to discuss Horatio and the State, or ‘symmetry’ in Dickens?”16 The answer is plain, but in his concession Moretti introduces a key, ancillary feature of data collection: “No, I didn’t need the theory; but I needed the networks.”17 “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” converts Hamlet into a set of networks, through which underlying structures of the play become visible. A particularly welcome consequence of this approach, Moretti explains, is “once you make a network of a play, you stop working on the play proper, and work on a model instead” and, crucially, “one can intervene on a model; make experiments.”18 The fruits of this method are the products of an audacious removal of Hamlet from his play, through which Moretti uncovers Horatio’s hidden centrality—a discovery that Moretti finesses into a resonance with the state: “I can think of no other character that is so central to a Shakespeare play, and so flat in its style. Flat, just like the style of the State.”19 This revelation—a belated hermeneutical application—unveils ideological and formal assumptions about the state recast as style. But Moretti’s own style has the strange power of making one feel churlish about such criticisms because what matters to Moretti is his arrival at that elusive literary category, style, by quantitative means. Hamlet, of course, is the centerpiece of the Western canon, and in contrast to the turn away from masterpieces that opened Distant Reading, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” clearly recalls the formalist literary scholarship of previous eras, now overlaid with new modeling tools. Moretti’s technological 16 17 18 19

Ibid., 211. Ibid., original emphasis. Ibid., 218, 220, original emphasis in both cases. Ibid., 229.

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powers of visualization certainly derive from quantitative methods, but this analysis is rather unlike his resolve to examine “prose style from below” in “The Novel: History and Theory,” in which a turn to big data was hailed as a means of resituating canonical works as by-products of popular styles.20 That essay is a more gestural account of the eighteenth-century proliferation of novels in Europe as objects of consumption, but both essays stake their innovations on new modes of uncovering the force of style: in “The Novel: History and Theory,” the forward-looking style of the adventure tale extends the history of the novel, back into premodern genres as well as into the future; for “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” the style of the state maps the hidden heart of the text onto a larger political structure. And as these experiments mine data sets and plot networks to illuminate a style that maps a formalist “how” onto a sociological “why,” both exhibit a further and very striking similarity: as Moretti writes in the preface to “The Novel: History and Theory,” But the pièce de resistance of the essay was clearly the pages on the Chinese novel, which I saw as a unique opportunity for removing all aspects of ‘inevitability’ from the history of the European novel; not in the name of abstract anti-teleological principles, but on the basis of the very concrete fact that this major tradition had developed in a completely different way. The theme returns in ‘Network Theory, Plot Analysis’, with the discussion of Dickens’s and Cao Xueqin’s narrative networks: a modest attempt at the comparative morphology that comparative literature has seldom managed to be.21

In both of these essays, Moretti needs China. Why? Pound can supply a useful contrast here: In his “Immediate Need of Confucius,” Pound went to China for an ethical corrective22—seemingly a far cry from Moretti’s comparative approach—and yet in Moretti’s “very concrete fact” of China I detect a resonance between their very different interests in literature as data. For Moretti, both the history of the Chinese novel and Cao Xueqin’s narrative networks provide alternatives to a European order of 20 21 22

Ibid., 164. Ibid., 159–160. As Pound put it, “If the editors complain that I am not confining my essay to Confucius, I reply that I am writing on the ‘need for Confucius.’ I am trying to diagnose Western disease” (SP 76).

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things that serve to validate Moretti’s findings on the European novel. Put simply, China is a foil for European literary development: China provides data for the West. I began this chapter by underscoring the service that data must render, and in Moretti’s comparative morphology, the Chinese material remains a data set when and because European materials generate complexities that require interpretative acts that exceed and even obviate quantitative play. And so, as Moretti ponders why it is that the adventure story, “The antitype of the spirit of modern capitalism” should be the prevailing style of the European novel into modernity, he takes a critical detour through China.23 An appealing provocation shapes this turn: Moretti postulates a resituating of “The European rise of the novel as a deviation from the Chinese path,” which he illustrates via a reading of The Story of the Stone as a horizontal narrative that prevents development—in pointed contrast to the forwardrushing adventure of premodern European tales that paradoxically consumes bourgeois readerships.24 This establishment of a Chinese standard critically defamiliarizes our own literary history in order to expose the strangeness of our governing stylistic predilections—a use of China that resonates with Hegel’s world history, but renewed by Moretti’s reperiodizing of China alongside Europe. If Hegel’s ahistorical China revealed Western dynamism, this contemporaneous China reveals our inconsistencies and paradoxes— and, crucially, creates a place for the centaur critic to puzzle over seeming mismatches between literary expression and mode of production heightened by their seamless and contemporary alignment in China. Hence, in “The Novel: History and Theory,” the pure data of China do not require the alchemy of the literary historian’s powers of interpretation. It is worth noting that Moretti’s eastward turn in this 2007 essay prefigures the next step in his increasingly quantitative methods: He launches the East–West comparison by listing a handful of Chinese classics to note that their “Titles are already a clue—what would European titles do without proper names—but here, not even one”—thereby pointing toward the focus of his next essay, “Style, Inc.:

23 24

Moretti, Distant Reading, 177. Ibid., 171.

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Reflections on 7,000 Titles.”25 Perhaps we may read the turn to China in “The Novel: History and Theory” as an instigation for the breathtaking expanses of data to come: Moretti’s China—like Pound’s—is a quantifying path. When The Story of the Stone reappears in “Network Theory, Plot Analysis,” Moretti presents a Chinese network of “a chain of transactions that generates indebtedness” at its heart.26 This material concludes the essay in rousing tones: presenting this set of relations, Moretti ponders, But what a strange life, for a protagonist: constantly summoned by this and that relative, kept under supervision, asked to perform all sorts of duties— even the many delightful opportunities he is offered come usually with constraints attached. The protagonist, yes, but not free. The protagonist, and therefore not free: because he has a duty towards the structure: towards the relation-based society he is part of.27

If “The Novel: History and Theory” wanted to make strange the European novel, this second turn to The Story of the Stone reinstates Chinese strangeness: against the horizontal standard of China in the earlier essay, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” unveils a very familiar truth. Moretti’s late return to unfreedom resonates with Hegel’s Orient, mapped and plotted by its distance from freedom. China’s remarkable constancy in Distant Reading illustrates the ambitions and limits of big data for literary history: As a quantitative standard, China is unfree because, as mere contrast, it serves a complex and uneven European literary history. The final paragraph of “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” spells out its payoff: “what networks make visible are the opposite foundations of novel-writing East and West.”28 The revelation of the dutiful Chinese novel secured by network theory—akin to Moretti’s assumption of state style in his reading of Horatio—exposes the theory of networks as itself steeped in the mythology of metaphors of East and West. This discovery finally exposes a short-circuiting system because it hews so closely to its grounding assumptions: networks make visible what we already

25 26 27 28

Ibid., 168. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 240, original emphasis. Ibid.

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knew, because big data, always ready to serve, tell us what we want to know. In this unveiling of the Chinese protagonist’s “strange life,” we discover that Moretti’s network is a closed loop that discovers itself through big data.

III In finding a distaste for reading and close reading in the data-driven labors of Ezra Pound and Franco Moretti, this chapter has arrived at a singularly legible China. Pound learned from Fenollosa that reading Chinese was not reading but aesthetic seeing, and with the ideogrammic method he sought to extend this seeing into a writing meant to glow in the reader’s hand. Yet, the discontinuity between ideogram and its method becomes all too evident in Pound’s central misreading of Western for Eastern method, in which China falls away—only to acquire an astounding prominence in the cantos of the period. Perhaps the best way to comprehend the force of Chinese history for Pound in this period is to recall that this China was a book—a set of books, to be exact. In the Guide to Kulchur, Pound explains that his volumes of de Mailla’s Jesuit translation of Confucian historiography sat neglected on his shelf for fifteen years—to be taken up and consumed whole in the 1930s. Even as Pound was railing against stultifying reading, then, he found himself captivated by a set of dusty books, out of which he instantly transformed reading into writing. The China Cantos are, thus, a set of reader’s notes. They are, finally, a transcription—and emphatically not the translations of his previous foray into Chinese. Indeed, against the vividly rendered longing of Cathay’s personae, the China Cantos seem to present a negative image, or a negation of the image altogether. And considered amid Pound’s tracts against reading in the period, Pound’s transmitted history is meant to be a demonstration of the kind of enlivening reading he dreamed of in the Guide to Kulchur. To take historical data and copy it down into a poetry book is a striking reversal of the arts as data: It is data as art. Data as art may in fact be a good way of describing a later conceptual turn in modern poetics, what Marjorie Perloff has now defined as “unoriginal genius,” but this reversal cuts hard against the dictates of “The Serious Artist.”

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In Pound’s hands, data as art presents only hollowed ethics, and the China Cantos lay bare the problem of his data-driven project, which is finally information governed by a political, rather than an ethical, program. Pound was never “a mere searcher after exotics,”29 and his later Confucian turn marks the endpoint of the modified equation of “data as art for politics”: for Pound, Confucianism was never a mask for fascism but its proper core philosophy. The politics of Pound’s 1930s China, of course, would have been utterly unrecognizable to Fenollosa, who had been a practicing Buddhist in Japan; but if Fenollosa’s China was an in-built aesthetic sense, then Pound’s would become a political theology awash in data. This China was a serendipitous find: a mass of information that proved the viability and ready applicability of a political order. In Jefferson and/or Mussolini (1933), his most incendiary publication, Pound claimed that Mussolini was a modern incarnation of Jefferson, but it was in the 1940 publication of Cantos LII-LXXI that he could prove this contention: The China Cantos provided the data for the bedrock of correct civilization—and hence could serve as a touchstone for political virtue, but at the expense of aesthetic and ethical ones. If Pound’s China is ultimately meant as an edifying read, Moretti’s is a refuge from the hermeneutics of close reading. In Moretti’s hands, the perpetual protagonist of his restive European literary history is genre, and his particular genius is to map out its heretofore largely unseen trajectory—a task that takes on new life in the Literary Lab, in which the unread can be charted alongside the canon and very familiar narratives can be subjected to new networks via modeling practices that expose buried forms. Having escaped the confines of close reading, Moretti exhorts us to free ourselves from the strictures of narrowed reading practices—all the while displacing his own close readings onto the data and the networks. This is literary history after all, and so, for Moretti, the payoff is always an uncovering of a stylistic persistence or loss— and so, too, his reasoning is always an aesthetic musing, even as he pores over the titles of doggerel and the statal alignment of Horatio. Moretti’s “distant reading” is resolutely not media studies, a fact made clear in Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New, which concludes by distinguishing 29

From Pound’s opening note to Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character, 3.

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her media history of inscription from literary history: Though they “share the same groundwater,” she argues for a “valuable distinction to be drawn between studying literature while putting aside questions of aesthetics (media history) and studying literature while ‘believing it,’ naturalizing literariness and literary aesthetics (English).”30 Moretti wants to account for writing sorely neglected by questions of aesthetics, but it also goes without saying that he is all about “believing it,” and the potion he wants is the alchemy of both: The centaur critic can strategically put aside his reading practices in order to expand and reconfigure his data, only to reapply close reading to the aesthetic categories newly isolated by these acts. A strange shape thus emerges over the course of the essays in Distant Reading: from exhilarating expansion, in which literary fields become newly vast and flexible, to a contraction into “questions of aesthetics.” The signal challenge of big data to literary study is what we can do with it, and Moretti is the preeminent literary historian of the digital turn because he is so adept at managing the problematic “so what?” that always attends this material. His payoff is always literary: a surprising glimpse into the career of a genre, the key unit of form in time through which literary study takes in history. In order to pull off this feat of channeling quantitative practices back into questions of style, Moretti parcels out reading, and what he marks as not reading exposes network theory as, finally, a theory of networks—that is, a methodology that reveals its assumptions. That Moretti is not a media historian presents an intriguing lens for comprehending the prevalence of a contrasting Chinese literary history in his recent scholarship. He is not interested in media but literature, and because he is a comparatist through-and-through, China returns as a late necessity; its literary history is presented as wholly unlike because it functions as a defining limit. Orientalist othering is certainly not the point, however, and I read this turn to Chinese literary history as a cover for a European focus whose broader aspirations are constricted by a displaced but ultimately continuous hermeneutical application. But Moretti actually gets to practice distant reading on Chinese literature, which is shielded from

30

Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 153, 154.

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the close readings that lend an aesthetic dynamism to his analysis of dime novels and classics alike. Hence, though he displaces his reading onto titles as codes and plots as networks, he strikingly does not extend this skill into The Story of the Stone, the recurring Chinese classic of his recent essays. And as the data set that can remain unread, Chinese literature is the ultimate big data, a strangely inviolable and vast set that reveals all over again how closely Moretti has read his European literature. Moretti and Pound are both scholars and pedagogues of comparative literature, but if Moretti’s comparatist skills become a kind of alibi for his fundamental divergence from media studies, Pound’s comparative literature was always media studies. Perhaps we may read the exigency of data in Pound’s oeuvre within Friedrich A. Kittler’s media theory, in which a Foucauldian periodization sketches an epistemic break via Nietzsche’s “zero point” of “Writing and writers as accidental events in a noise that generates accidents and thus can never be overcome by its accidents.”31 With Nietzsche, Kittler presents a scene of writing in which the author disappears, and writing from 1900 forward channels the white noise of information—and so the protagonist of media history is the typewriter and not the typist. The China Cantos demonstrate that Pound’s “Immediate Need of Confucius” was also an immediate need for data, and it is in considering these cantos that I always see Pound at his typewriter, pounding out information. The lure of data works in very different ways between Ezra Pound and Franco Moretti, two iconoclasts whose ethical and literary programs each insist upon information with a new order of magnitude. That they both find this material in China is an indication of how unknowable and yet how familiar this desire is.

31

Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 183, 184.

3

Paleolithic Media: Deep Time and Ezra Pound’s Methods Aaron Jaffe

This chapter claims that the puzzling and often overlooked Twelfth Canto is important evidence for understanding Ezra Pound as a deep time mediatheoretical thinker.1 Invested in the scalar implications of an epochal version of modernity that extends the contemporary way back into prehistory, he draws on correspondences between cultural-aesthetic “means of transmission and registration”—as he described the ideogram—and physical transport phenomena of mass, energy, and momentum—to borrow a term from the natural sciences—to understand the inhuman drift of cultural value and risk (ABCR 19). In an early essay, “The Serious Artist,” Pound writes that “the arts, literature, poesy, are a science, just as chemistry is a science” (LE 42). This comparison isn’t yet another exercise in Poundian bluster. Rather the analogies with the mechanics of natural phenomena are integral to the critical-aesthetic technique of the Twelfth Canto in particular as well as the stakes of The Cantos as a whole as an epic including prehistory. Pound’s near contemporary Walter Benjamin develops similar connections concerning the idea of porous media. His 1925 essay, co-written with Asja Lacis, on the concept of porosity considers the topography of Naples (its caves, crypts, grottos, catacombs, voids left by victims of Vesuvius, also referenced by Pound in Canto VII) as an interface between, among, and across strata of temporal existence. Benjamin and Lacis investigate how the topological

1

For the relation between deep time and media theory, see Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

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hybridity of natural and cultural phenomena disclose critical forms of temporal interpenetration: At the base of the cliff itself, where it touches the shore, caves have been hewn … As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellation. The  stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended for ever, no figure asserts it “thus and not otherwise.”2

Bracketing their claims about “the stamp of the definitive”—about which Pound would likely differ—there is something decidedly Poundian in their proposed link between inhuman agencies and cultural-aesthetic technique. “Porosity results … from the passion for improvisation,” they write.3 As such, it provides a technical affordance that “demands that space and opportunity be preserved at any price”: “Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into innumerable, simultaneously animated theaters. Balcony, courtyard, window, gateway, staircase, roof are at the same time stage and boxes.”4 Above all, these topoi are inhumanly administered by physical processes, solid matter moving across voids, caves, built structures, derelict boxes, ruined buildings and abandoned furniture, leaving effluvial accumulations of old and new stuff. Conceptually, Benjamin and Lacis anticipate what Jussi Parikka calls the geology of media, registering not simply that humans make a geological impact on the earth but also a sense that earth itself serves as an inhuman archive with mediating abilities—a geophysical computer of sorts. These associations resonate with Pound’s concerns, especially his idea of an “osmosis of persons,” from Canto XXIX (C XXIX.143). As Jennifer Scappettone suggests, this phrase involves an “intercourse between salience and ambience [between humans] as well as things [that] complicates

2

3 4 5

Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, “Naples,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard, 1996), 416. Ibid. Ibid., 416–417. Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 245.

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traditional notions of figure and ground.”5 Here, Pound plays scientist manqué akin to Eliot’s famous allusion to catalysis in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an analogy that situates the Poundian interest in medium at the avant-garde of current media theory. Pound’s osmotic yields of permanent, clarified, or uncorroded values might seem opposed to Benjamin and Lacis’s emphasis on transformation, mutability, and flux, but what matters decisively to both is the transportation of phenomena across planes, membranes, and surfaces, including—in Pound’s example—his own life and contacts. The output isn’t situating an authentic, biographical self or measuring timeless mystical forces but tracing a technical drift across semi-permeable membranes. In other words, it describes an interface effect that filters as well as impedes, pushes forward and backward, and situates the critic-creator in the extreme present as well as in deep time. 6 The dynamics, as it were, stand in for the inhuman administration of both matter and value, where risk means exposure to invisible agencies and hidden mechanisms of value. The business on the tables—be it capital or information—has epoch and planetary spanning ambitions, and the tables serve as platforms for managing concerns and administering risks. What one hand advances, the other takes away, as Benjamin describes the workings of the city lottery of Naples, an activity where “trade … borders on a game of chance.”7 The table, the arena, and the cave, which provide the three conceptual spines of the Twelfth Canto, are more than literary symbols; they serve as directional signals for orientating Pound’s poetic project in terms of its research and development to scales of media theoretical deep time. Analogical and “factish,” to borrow Bruno Latour’s peculiar coinage, these

6

7

See Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012). On  the relation of Pound’s ideas and technical media, see especially Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995). There’s also significant evidence that Pound’s project is directly embedded in the evolution of media theoretical discourse, especially Vilém Flusser’s theory of the technical image. The formative influence of Pound on McLuhan is well known and McLuhan in turn was a profound influence on Flusser in several ways and McLuhan may in fact have personally directed Flusser to read Pound. Flusser had several, carefully annotated critical works by Pound in his library, focused on Pound’s ideas about the image and the ideogram, an observation for which I’m indebted to Seth Morton’s work in the Flusser Archives in Berlin. Benjamin, “Naples,” 418.

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indicators are heuristic programs that provide Pound with critical sites for human and inhuman agencies to commingle and aggregate.8 At once artificial construct and natural feature, each functions as material media topology, a strong mediator extending far away in space and way back in time. The cave functions as a paleo-dwelling place and ground-zero for the art world; the arena works as a site for the staging of personae before audiences seated on stone steps that resemble strata cut into the earth; the table, outside the theater, is not only the place where assorted business gets brokered but also alludes to another interface of geophysical mediation, the subterranean water table and hidden conduits for sedimented drift. These tropes, in effect, serve as fossilized technical images giving objective, inhuman character to aesthetic agencies over epochal timespans. Technical images, as Vilém Flusser writes, “liberate their receivers by magic from the necessity of thinking conceptually, at the same time replacing historical consciousness [and] the ability to think conceptually” with programs.9 Pound’s particular relevance to the genesis of Flusserian media theory depends on his consideration of the image and the ideogram as a time-based “meta-medium”—to adopt Julian Murphet’s word—“in which words and photographic images both became ‘photographic’ and ‘printed’ at the same time.”10 The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, for instance, highlights a certain kind of meta-medial technicity resonant with Flusser’s concept of the technical image: In what sense can verse, written in terms of visible hieroglyphics, be reckoned true poetry? It might seem that poetry, which like music is a time art, weaving its unities out of successive impressions of sound, could with difficulty assimilate a verbal medium consisting largely of semi-pictorial appeals to the eye.11 8

9 10

11

Latour’s version of the materiality of the image is a useful comparison with Pound’s account. See Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) as well as the collection edited by Latour and Peter Weibel, ICONOCLASH: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art (Cambridge: MIT, 2002). Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000), 17. Julian Murphet, Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 63. Ezra Pound and Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights, 1964), 6.

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Reading backward from Flusser to Pound (or, more accurately, his idiosyncratic adoption of the ideas of Ernest Fenollosa), then, involves special attention to the ways media mediates spatial and temporal unevenness and conceptual simultaneity: epochal possibilities of media relations before alphabetic culture, to put it in a Flusserian framework. In effect, the cave, table, and arena serve as complex anthropogenic artifacts of human perspective. I note a key point Boris Groys makes that the invisible part of the technical image, the hidden part addressed with metadata, is assigned a real place somewhere, territorialized, inscribed in a hidden database.12 While it is true that the Twelfth Canto includes seemingly random personal reminiscences from Pound’s life, the appearance of these scattered details is less directed toward fashioning a unique or even coherent biographical foundation for his poetic project than in dragging Pound’s biographical database in the throughput of technical affordances—situating the human as a form-factor in deep time.

I Compared to Sigismondo Malatesta and Confucius—the heroes Pound introduces in the Eighth through Eleventh Cantos and the Thirteenth Canto, respectively—the figures of the Twelfth Canto—Baldy Bacon, Dos Santos, and the Honest Sailor—are fairly humble. They don’t seem to stack up. Indeed, the Twelfth is the first canto readers tend to overlook. It isn’t in Selected Poems. Nor is it included in New Selected Poems and Translations. Compared with its neighbors, the canto’s references are even more idiosyncratic and yet also somehow more ordinary, making the relevance of these materials to the heroic dimensions of Pound’s projected “poem including history” seem remote (ABCR 46). Still, it merits a second look. Composed in two spurts— in 1922, in the aftermath of a period of vigorous promotional exertion for Joyce, Eliot, and others and close on the heels of Ulysses and The Waste Land, and again in 1924, after Pound’s last meeting with John Quinn, the important modernist booster—it’s the canto in which Pound comes to terms 12

Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 82.

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with his poetics as a media-theoretical aesthetic practice including both research and development. That Pound’s project includes research—in the sense of archival discovery and historical rescue—was clear from the start. Yet, it’s only in the Twelfth Canto where Pound attempts to make poetic sense of all the development work, all the hustling and blustering needed for “making the modern world possible for art,” to cite Eliot’s somewhat Poundian formulation from this period.13 Consequently, the Twelfth is less about highlighting particular personalities in the familiar sense—though it does offer a few new personae—and more about the function of particular transport phenomena, platforms for the “osmosis of persons,” and for his poetic project, more broadly. These platforms—strata with special accretions of trash and treasure—serve as durable metaphors for the Poundian project as a whole. In addition to the continued importance of the seaborne craft (“periplum, not as land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing”) and the Tempio Malatestiano, three crucial topoi come to the surface: the table, the arena, and the cave (C XLIX.324). Significantly, the Twelfth Canto is not emblazoned with a roman numeral in either of its two original printed forms, the version published by Ford Madox Ford in the transatlantic review in January 1924 or the one published by William Bird and illustrated with suggestive capitals by Henry Strater in A Draft of XVI Cantos in late 1924.14 Mussolini only marched on Rome at the end of 1922, and it was in the early part of that same year—modernism’s annus mirabilis, in fact—that Pound first visited the Tempio in Rimini and began to delve into the Malatesta materials. By 1930, the year A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared, Pound had fully embraced Roman numerals. But, Twelve begins as a canto of 1922, squarely in that year, with Pound and Eliot at a café table—in the Café Dante, as it happens—by the arena in Verona, a scene he also inserts in the Fourth Canto and cross-references in several other places:

13

14

T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 178. Indeed, the absence of roman numerals in all but two of the first sixteen cantos (the Hell Cantos are the exception) is a signal that Pound’s pivot toward Rome and fascism happened later. By the time A Draft of XXX Cantos was published in 1930, he had embraced the Benito Mussolini-led Risorgimento as well as Roman numerals.

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And we sit here under the wall, Arena romana, Diocletian’s, les gradins quarante-trois rangeés en calcaire. (C XII.53)

Lawrence Rainey settles the date for the scene as the first week of June of 1922.15 Pound was still living in Paris, Eliot established in London, and both were then vacationing in Verona, a detail signaled by the Baedeker French that references the number of limestone steps in the adjacent arena, a piece of throwaway data that proves especially luminous.16 According to several sources—including a subsequent mention in Canto 78—Pound and Eliot were accompanied at the table at the Verona café by at least one more person, invisible here, Pound’s other other woman, Bride Scratton.17 It impossible to know precisely what was talked about, and so this is lost, but the

Figure 3.1 Postcard of Verona arena, front, 1923. From collection of Aaron Jaffe. 15

16

17

Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). See Rainey’s second appendix, “Pound’s Travels in Italy, 1922,” 237–241. See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: I: The Young Genius 1885–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 83. Rainey, Monument, 240.

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Figure 3.2 Postcard of Verona arena, back, 1923. From collection of Aaron Jaffe.

fact of this conversation—between Pound, Eliot, and other invisible or absent discussants—is important. Scratton recalls Eliot thumping down the finished manuscript of The Waste Land, the “justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment,” as Pound wrote elsewhere (SL 180). Others speculate that they may have been arguing about the Bel Esprit, Pound’s scheme to raise money for artists and authors. Eliot was to be the test case, the subscription kick-starter promising to free him from the drudgery of nonartistic employment.18 This flash of contemporary poetic business is a long way from Pound’s seat at the Vorticist cenacle at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel in London, or the back of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore in Paris—and still not far enough away from Eliot’s banker desk in London. In Canto 78, when Pound remembers this scene, he complains, that “the program (Cafe Dante) a literary program 1920 or / thereabouts was neither published nor followed” (C LXXVIII.501). My hypothesis is that this table was the site of an epic conversation—a heated argument about the nature of modern aesthetic practice, the same

18

Moody, Ezra Pound, 84.

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one that gets cross-referenced in the Eighth Canto: “These fragments you have shelved (shored). / ‘Slut!’ ‘Bitch!’ Truth and Calliope / Slanging each other sous les lauriers” (C VIII.28). Laurel trees are still there today, planted by the arena, ornamental ones in pots, separating the café tables from the Via Dietro Anfiteatro, adding greenery to second floor balconies. Furthermore, Pound calls Eliot a bitch elsewhere in this period, in a well-known letter written just after his intense editorial and promotional intercession on behalf of Eliot (“Complimenti, you bitch. I am wracked by the seven jealousies.”)19 The corrosive, misogynist invective—slut, bitch—is telling given the figuration of male pregnancy that comes later in the canto (indexed to Pound’s notion of his “midwifery” of The Waste Land) as well as all the invisible women throughout.20 In the Eighth Canto, Pound takes pains to distinguish his approach from Eliot’s: The way the world ends is not by prostituting one’s talents for companions but by publically shaming them under the wall before the arena. Here, he calls Eliot out for trading in a private poetics composed merely of fragments; Pound’s proposed revision of Eliot’s Waste Land line (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) suggests that the Eliotic citational method risks leading others to book shelves alone. When tradition serves merely as a display of erudition, it becomes but an expedient means of shoring up the damaged poetic self with shoddy literary-citational plaster. The  rhymed quatrains of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920)—coordinated with Eliot’s formally similar Ara Vos Prec— pegs these kinds of biographical-aesthetic indecisions with the slapdash aesthetic expediency of the recent present: The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; 19

20

J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925 (State College: Penn State University Press, 1990), 308. For Pound’s gendering and sexualization of collaborative work, see Aaron Jaffe, Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127ff.

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Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the “sculpture” of rhyme. (P 186)

For his alternative arrangement, Pound scales aesthetic time “outward” into the extreme epochal past. Put another way, he’s more invested in the Paleo— and a deep contiguity of the temporal drift of human activity—than more recent alternatives because its temporal extremity promises forms of aesthetic surety about “lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature” (LE 42). Pound’s version of the Anthropocene Age, in other words, running contrary to current practice, is that it is both very old, and that it remains open for business. The word Holocene—the most recent age that includes the present day—means wholly or entirely new, as if to indicate that there is nothing old about it from a geological perspective. Other labels for deep time express similar relations to newness (Pleistocene, Pliocene, and Paleocene mean most new, more new, and old new, respectively), or express place-names where certain dates of fossil deposits were first unearthed (Devonian, Cambrian, Jurassic, etc.). In  fact, the relatively recent neologism Anthropocene provides a portmanteau of both tendencies—registering an entirely different impulse from Pound’s—namely admonition about modernity’s deleterious impact upon the planet. In a sense, the Anthropocene brackets humans out from the other side, conveying the destiny of the human to become a future fossil. As such, the label designates peak human impact, connecting technological change and inexorable eco-catastrophe.21 The relevant cataclysm might be the invention of the 21

There is an extensive and contentious body of critical literature on this term. See, in particular Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio 36.8 (December 2007). For a good overview of the concept’s utility and limitations for literary and media theory, see Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

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coal-powered steam engines in 1781 or the advent of Neolithic agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago.22 In any case, the Anthropocene designates something far more recent and discretely contained than what Pound has in mind in The Twelfth Canto. Pound’s Paleo concerns borrow from incipient modern discourses about immense time scales from the nineteenth century that make an altogether different intervention. Instead of delineating a very new planetary era, Pound—and his sources—extend lived human temporality into the deep drift of prehistoric pasts. In fact, deep time might be thought of as a displacement of the human into inhuman temporal vastness, what John McPhee describes as “time in quantities no mind had yet conceived.”23 Nevertheless, the concept of deep time draws upon a battery of ideas about long timescales from James Hutton, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Antonio Stopponi, Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Alfred Wegener, as well as a host of other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century naturalists, integrating a variety of incipient disciplines, including geology, cosmology, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, evolutionary discourse, plate tectonics, speleology, anthropology, and archeology. John Lubbock, in particular, is relevant to Pound’s concerns in the Twelfth Canto. Banker, naturalist, philanthropist, inventor of the bank holiday, literary list-maker, and general polymath, he was, as David R. Bridgland has noted, a prodigious autodidactic and synthesizer, researching a “broad sweep of disciplines, now [arranged] under more specialized classification within archaeology, physical geography and geology.”24 His massive opus Prehistoric Times, according to one source, was “the most influential work on archaeology of the nineteenth century,” and went into

22

23

24

In either case, at least in terms of order of magnitude, Anthropocenic discourse syncs its timelines with the young Earth creationists, whose eccentric calculations draw on the supposed authority of Genesis. Both kinds of time-thinking share a pervasive strain of castigatory anthropocentricism, the latter keyed to mass industrialization of reading and writing and the former to the emergence of reading and writing as such. In a sense, the Anthropocene registers a pseudo-religious feeling— either promethean shame or inhumanist ambivalence—about writing, the notion that humans are leaving their planetary mark, above all. John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 104. My thinking about these concepts is indebted to Siegfried Zielinski’s indispensible work Deep Time of the Media, which conceptualizes deep time thinking as a media-theoretical project. David R. Bridgland, “John Lubbock’s Early Contribution to the Understanding of River Terraces and Their Importance to Geography, Archaeology and Earth Science,” Notes and Records (2014), 49.

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seven editions, the last of which appeared shortly after his death in 1913.25 It was Lubbock who popularized the terms Pound employs, Paleolithic and Neolithic, underscoring both paleo-technicity and emphasizing the prehistoric drift of humans into the new: I. That of the Drift; when man shared the possession of Europe with the Mammoth, the Cave bear, the Wooly-haired rhinoceros, and other extinct animals. This I have proposed to call the “Paleolithic” period . II. The later or polished Stone age; a period characterized by beautiful weapons and instruments made of flint and other kinds of stone; in which, however we find no trace of the knowledge of any metal, excepting gold, which seems to have been sometimes used for ornaments. For this period I have suggested the term “Neolithic.”26

Here, prehistorical deep time is a project of extending the long now—not a purification process but as an inhuman means of administering research and artifactual value through contingency and risk. Deep time is a flow of artifacts—transport phenomena, in effect: first, cave art, sharpened sticks, and old stone, then, masks and personae, then, ornaments, refinements, and new stone. It’s entirely fitting that Lubbock’s account of literary value functions with similar inhuman agencies: It is one thing to own a library; it is quite another to use it wisely. I have often been astonished how little care people devote to the selection of what they read. Books, we know, are almost innumerable; our hours for reading are, alas! very few. And yet many people read almost by hazard … In any such selection much weight should, I think, be attached to the general verdict of mankind. There is a “struggle for existence” and a “survival of the fittest” among books, as well as among animals and plants. As Alonzo of Aragon said, “Age is a recommendation in four things—old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old books to read.”27

Selection here is removed from the arena of private interest or volition and becomes a function of inhuman forces administering very old things.

25

26 27

Bruce Trigger, A History of Archeological Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 114. John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 2. John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1895), 51, 52.

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II Returning to Pound and Eliot under the laurel trees: Whatever the two thought of the popular entertainer playing on the stage inside the very, very old arena is irrelevant.28 From the deep time perspective, the arena itself counts most. What matters is not the transient content found inside but that the stage remains open for business. With this reference, the mise-en-scène of the development of Pound’s method enters the poem proper. Jean-Michel Rabaté flags it as the decisive event in The Cantos when “the showman’s techniques come to the fore.”29 Indeed, the theater of the Twelfth Canto comes ready-loaded with questionable sources, which, as Carroll Terrell puts it, emanate “mostly [from] nonliterary and personal experience.”30 Much of the Twelfth Canto is leveraged on the obscurities of EP’s life and contacts and in a sense it’s the canto that fully signals the formative eruption of his particular brand of speech—the rhythms, invective, and habits of affect familiar from his correspondence—into the epic space of the poetic arena proper. Next to heated café table talk by the ruined arena, there’s also the matter of the cave. It comes up at the start of the Twelfth Canto, when Pound remixes these lines from the previous canto: And we sit here. I have sat here For forty four thousand years, (C XI.50)

The anthropology is now obsolete—but, in Pound’s day, forty-four thousand years was the state of knowledge (in some quarters, at least) for estimating the recession of the last ice age.31 The cross-reference indexes this deep timeline to the event of Pound sitting down with Eliot at the Café Dante 28

29

30

31

Rainey tracked down that Tontolini, a silent-film-star, comedian, and vaudevillian, was performing in the Verona amphitheatre during Pound and Eliot’s visit. Based on current practice, they certainly saw posters for Tontolini from their seats, and, Rainey writes, they attended one of his performances (Rainey, Monument, 54). This is the moment, Rabaté writes, when Pound “cannot remain on a balcony, as in a play by Lope de Vega, but is caught up in the play.” See Jean-Michel Rabaté, Language, Sexuality and Idealogy in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1986), 61. Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1980), 58. See Peter D’Epiro, A Touch of Rhetoric: Ezra Pound’s Malatesta Cantos (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), 23.

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under the wall across from the area with its forty-three limestone strata. The count is decisively off; the Verona arena has, in fact, not forty-three steps but forty-four. Pound acknowledged the discrepancy later in life, explaining that he had not counted the floor.32 The point of the missing step is, in effect, that the stage of the arena is up for grabs, available for the serious artist of the present epoch. Specific numbers and material concerns matter, too. It’s pure conjecture, but forty-three may as well signify the number of names of subscribers Pound had lined up for Bel Esprit—or else, the magic number needed for Eliot to act on the plan. Indeed, the massive PR campaign was well underway, even landing in Popular Mechanics of all places.33 The idea was not to attract aristocratic patrons of yore—but to engage economies of scale, directly raising funds from people of small or smallish

Figure  3.3 “Society Formed to Provide for Budding Authors and Artists,” Popular Mechanics 38.5 (November 1922), p. 819. 32 33

Terrell, Companion, 59. Society Formed to Provide Leisure for “Budding Authors and Artists,” Popular Mechanics (November 1922), 5.

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means, at least thirty subscribers, each pledging £10 or $50 per year.34 In a letter from earlier that spring, Pound underscores two main principles: 1. 2.

That the reader is a consumer and that quality is a luxury … As there is no aristocracy, one must form a combine of simple particulars to pay.

It is a risk. So is an oil well.35

Risk is central to the business model. By the end of 1922, Eliot began to have second thoughts about Bel Esprit in part because he was reluctant about its risks, embarrassed about the boomerang effect publicity would have on the security of his employment at Lloyd’s.36 In the late spring, however, Bel Esprit was still a going proposition. Instead of incremental bean-counting, the hypothetical conversation in the Café Dante charted bold aesthetic risk in terms of thousand-year increments approximating in geophysical strata. Pound had been talking in grandiose, revolutionary-millennial terms for some time, long before resetting his calendar to Year One with the arrival of Ulysses (SL 174).37 Ten years earlier, he was writing in similar ways about a proposed “American Risorgimento” “that [would] make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot!” (SL 10). The café dispute hinged on the missing stratum; the place for the long now in the 44,000-year range of human aesthetic activity.38 In mid-August of 1919, 34 35 36

37

38

See D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 175. Ibid., 242. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1:1898–1922, eds. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 789–790. A newspaper had run a garbled—and libelous, in Eliot’s view—account of the management of the funds, and, more poignantly, Eliot received an anonymous letter writer which insulted his pride by including a meager “donation” of a handful of postage stamps. See also Eliot’s letter to Pound, February 9, 1923 in T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 2: 1923–25, eds. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 49. In a letter to H. L. Mencken, beating the drum for what he calls “this ‘Bel Esprit’ show” (“[I]t will cost you fifty bones a year, but if I can afford it, you can”), he writes that “The Christian Era ended at midnight on Oct. 29–30 of [1921]. You are now in the year 1. p.s.U. [post scriptum Ulysses], if that is any comfort to you” (SL 174). Forty-four thousand years was a frequently circulated estimate for the “coming of men like ourselves,” as H. G. Wells put it. In his enormously successful Outline of History (1920), H. G. Wells notes that, “between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the Fourth Glacial Age softened towards more temperate conditions, a different human type came upon the scene, and, it would seem, exterminated Homo Neanderthalensis.” See H. G. Wells, Outline of History (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 65. No less

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three years before Verona, Pound walked Eliot ragged across southern France on the trail of the troubadours of the High Middle Age, a trail that also led them to Paleolithic cave art. Eliot went on alone to see the cave paintings.39 In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” published the very next month, Eliot refers to “the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen” as the first citable instance of the literary mind of Europe.40 For him, “tradition,” the accumulated cultural wealth of humankind, meant a fixed annuity for the present, a store of value created in the past providing immediate payout: “the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.”41 Eliot’s point is that the artistic mind—Paleolithic, Homerian, or Shakespearean—did not fundamentally change; what changed was the accumulation of cultural wealth. Whereas Eliot’s cave is a museum for the aesthetic preservationist, Pound takes a different approach. In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, for instance, he describes a more extroverted encounter: “the PALEOLITHIC VORTEX resulted in the decoration of the Dordogne caverns” where the “driving power was life in the absolute” and “his energy brutal—HIS OPULENT MATURITY WAS CONVEX,” a connection sufficiently important to get repeated twentytwo years later in Guide to Kulchur (GB 20, 21; GK 63, 64). In The Pisan Cantos, Pound is still thinking about the caves, remembering travels with Eliot—wave cut stone and Eliotic fears of Christological damnation—but also encounters with cave art:

39

40

41

than Theodore Roosevelt makes similar claims in an article called “How Old Is Man” published in National Geographic in 1916. Even Boys’ Life was in on the game, running in the June 1922 issue, co-incidentally, an adventure tale about the great Cro-Magnon race migrating down from the Himalayas into southern France. Pound was well aware of deep time thinking about human culture; his idiosyncratic reading habits included the glaciologist and geologist Louis Agassiz. See Massimo Bacigalupo, “Tradition in 1919: Pound, Eliot and the ‘Historical method’,” in T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition, eds. Giovanni Cianci and Jason Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 111–112; Moody, Ezra Pound, 360 and Patrick Parrinder, “Science and Knowledge at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury English Literature, eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 29. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 39. Ibid.

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But the caverns are less enchanting to the unskilled explorer than the Urochs as shown on the postals, we will see those old roads again, question, possibly but nothing appears much less likely, (C LXXIV.448)

The cave hails him, promising an ecstasy in backward decent—a vertical analogue to Benjamin’s ninth thesis on the philosophy of history.42 “[T]o the cave art thou called, Odysseus,” he writes earlier (C XLVII.237). Urochs—or, Aurochs, the ancestral Ur-livestock—graze at the limit. The ones on stamps— like the special issue from the Principality of Monaco—may be less disputed— and better circulated—but the ones on cave walls issue brutal aesthetic energies.

Figure 3.4 Aurochs cave painting, postage stamp, Monaco, 1949. From collection of Aaron Jaffe. Reprinted with permission of the Stamp Issuing Office of the Principality of Monaco. 42

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 257.

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For Pound, the cave is a medium for permeating past and present, a cavernous altar for the osmosis of persons. As Peter Liebregts observes, Pound’s Hell is always pagan—always Hades—and, as Sean Pryor notes, “the Eleusinian initiate must descend into hell for blissful illumination.”43 In short, the ice sheet recedes, Caveman Pound comes down, sits on his haunches, tries to convince the tribe to start making art, fails, and then climbs back up into the cave and squints at the read-outs on the ancestral, Paleolithic “registering instrument” (LE 58). In the Twelfth Canto, the ticker tape from the instrument reads both boom and bust. The Cantos as a whole are full of ups and downs, and it’s constitutively hard to tell if Twelve signals ascent or decent. More to the point: Twelve confronts readers with anecdotes about risk-taking business schemes, models, and motives: Baldy Bacon finding the margins on storing unwanted copper pennies, Dos Santos’s speculation in undesired water-soaked corn, and the Honest Sailor’s unlikely establishment of a shipping concern. Each anecdote provides an economic fable about improbable investors and investment that critics tend to interpret through Pound’s burgeoning economic concerns; through a method of poetic osmosis, however, we see that he’s thinking about idiosyncratic investors snatching opportunities from garbage. Bacon’s question hovers over The Cantos as whole and has a certain resonance for Pound’s biographical situation as he is contemplating the wreckage of the money business of Bel Esprit and discovers new energies for his own poetic efforts: Is there more than one kind of business, or is all business money business?

III The Twelfth Canto is ambivalent about many things. It contains specimens of the toxic racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and misogyny that makes Pound such an unresolved figure for literary history. There’s no excuse for 43

See Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Flushing: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 233–234 and Sean Pryor, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 156.

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this offensiveness; if it’s judged mostly incidental to Pound’s aims, it’s never accidental to them either. The offensive undertone is integral to the archly Poundian insight seized in each of the three case studies: Like a rose in the steel dust, or the mixture of Mud and Light Hugh Kenner seizes on, dubious information is crucial to aesthetic possibility.44 The particular deposits and accretions, precisely because of their potential insignificance, present not only a means of finding luminous details but also a way of seeing the contemporary in epochal terms. Most of the names listed in the Twelfth Canto are unknown, unknowable, and possibly disreputable. The canto references people Pound knew personally: a man named Henry; someone called Apovitch associated with Chicago; someone else named Quade, “elsewhere recorded,” who conspicuously wore a monocle. People he heard about from others, or read of in the newspapers, such as one Nicholas Castano, a Cuban capitalist, or “two buck niggers,” chained to Bacon in his story, or, the various characters in Jim X’s joke. It is a canto of minor firsts: the entrance of anecdotes, rumors, jokes, bets, and bad taste into the materials of Pound’s heteronymous project. Tim Redman flags the canto as “the first extended presentation of economic themes.”45 It’s the first time Pound mentions his economic bugbear, Usury, which, Rainer Emig observes, thereafter “spreads like an epidemic over the entire poem.”46 In a related vein, the canto announces the arrival of commodities and the attendant problems of valuation, scarcity, and luxury— that less might somehow be more. It exposes us to a questionable joke about pregnant men and how the joke’s awkward recirculation ignites suspicions about the character of Pound’s judgment.47 The canto doesn’t introduce the arena trope—or, ships, caves, tables, steps, strata, or planes—but it cements the importance of cross-reference as an engine 44 45 46

47

Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1951), 244. Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 75. Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Longman, 1995), 119. See Daniel Albright, “Early Cantos I-XLI,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, ed. Ira B. Nadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 76 and also Davidson’s more general discussion of literary “pregnant men.” Davidson argues that Pound’s story condemns mobility and cosmopolitanism, through what he describes as, “the Dantean condemnation of usurers and sodomites as those who pervert nature through economic and sexual practices that prevent natural increase.” Michael Davidson, “Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity,” in Sex and Disability, eds. Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 130.

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of poetic meaning and the role of the lure of referentiality and false connectors in poetic method. In Twelve, right from the start, the information circulating in Pound’s economy of reference becomes uncertain, overwhelming, and unmanageable. Baldy Bacon provides the cardinal example. Readers have long taken him as an exemplar of Pound’s economic preoccupations—but perhaps somewhat overzealously have condemned him as an engine of economic vice (as an avatar of “financial malpractice,” in Earle Rosco Davis’s phrase) or praised him as an agent of economic virtue (as a salutary agent of “profitmaking and entrepreneurial activity,” in Peter Nicholls’s words).48 From the poetry alone, it’s decidedly unclear whether Bacon’s activities are good or bad. Indeed, the canto fashions a kind of experimental test case for comparing the activities of the “serious artist” and the work of certain speculative agents who trade in nuances of knowledge, information, and risk.49 So, what exactly is Baldy Bacon’s business scheme in Cuba? Frankly, it’s difficult to understand given the scant information supplied, but perhaps achievement in the face of poor information is precisely the point. Here’s what can be pieced together: Some time after the Spanish–American War, Bacon is in Cuba buying all the centavos he can. He finds many sellers of these copper pennies—so many, in fact, that he rapidly gains monopoly control of the supply. Thereafter, anyone who needs pennies—anyone for whom making small change is a matter of course—is obligated to buy from Bacon, who charges a premium on top of face value. The fee—“Baldy’s interest,” as Pound puts it—runs him afoul of the authorities, and he is ignominiously deported (C XII.53). Readers have been often tempted to read the villain in this—the modern Croesus squatting on his horde of gold—but centavos are not made of precious metal. You can’t corner the market on copper; it’s far too cheap; there’s far too much of it.50 The anecdote actually highlights the problem of

48

49

50

Earle Rosco Davis, Vision Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1968), 53; Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 30. Pound’s anthropogenic poetics was an early development, as Bacigalupo notes, in “an important series of articles published in autumn 1913, Pound described the scientific function of the arts as providers of data for the study of man” (Bacigalupo, “Tradition,” 195). If anything, the discrepancy between the coin’s face value and its commodity value as copper was the issue. Pre-republic centavos were far too cumbersome weight and size. No one wanted them.

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seigniorage not usury—how the state controls monetary instruments and generates income from the discrepancy between face value and the costs of producing and distributing currency. In Bacon’s example, the inefficiency and incompetence of the monetary system lets an individual, an entrepreneurial hustler who has the right information, wrest the seigniorage racket from the state. Bacon’s angle—the illumination in his cave, in essence—is the centavo shack. Is it important to note that Bacon—who knew the ways of many men, like Odysseus—was a real person Pound actually knew, but perhaps he is best understood as an accidental contact. Pound met Bacon in New York in 1910.51 When Bacon vacationed in Europe in the summer of 1922, right after Pound was in Verona with Eliot, the two renewed their acquaintance. As late as 1939, Pound was sending Wyndham Lewis to Bacon in New York as a potential contact.52 Whether Bacon invested in Bel Esprit in 1922 is unclear, but, even if he never fronted any “bones,” Pound admires him. For Pound, Bacon provides example of the kind of ex nihilo, free-wheeling effort that modern art needs to provide for its development and continuation. In a similar vein, the canto turns to another scheme and schemer, whose case Pound chances on in a book: the Portuguese merchant, Jose Maria dos Santos. Dos Santo buys a ship full of seemingly ruined grain on the cheap on a hunch that its cargo hasn’t been spoiled by seawater. The critical information is that the accidental spill happened in an estuary. Knowing this, Dos Santos mortgages his patrimony and all his possessions to buy quantities of suckling pigs, fattening them on the grain, and thus takes a risk and establishes his legacy. Dos Santos spots an opportunity and makes use of timely information.

51 52

Accounts of Cuba as Spanish possession and in the earlier days as a U.S. protectorate are full of tales of the currency crisis, big, clumsy, copper coins, and money changers on every corner: “[N]o ordinary man would think of getting change in copper, as he would have to hire a pack mule to take it home, and then he would have to get rid of it in driblets, as cabmen object to taking twenty cents in copper, and small merchants do likewise, preferring silver and insisting upon getting it” (Halstead 375). Cubans couldn’t mint their own coins—eventually they were minted in Philadelphia. A buyer like Bacon willing to exchange copper for silver or gold would find many willing punters. He’s buying all this copper at a times when the United States has sovereign control of Cuba’s monetary system and when available coinage is in scarce supply. Terrell, Companion, 59. In 1913, he praises Bacon’s energies in “Patria Mia.” In 1939, “Then there is Baldy Bacon … [D]on’t go fooling around with Mrs B / in fact you keep yr / eye on paint. If the republicans win and the crisis passes, the old New England habit of family portraits might REVIVE and baldy bee is on it” (L/WL 216).

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Upon scrutiny, the information itself is dicey, the estuary water is probably fresh. In fact, Dos Santos got lucky; he could easily have lost his bet. The Tagus Estuary is partly brackish.53 The name Dos Santos—Portuguese for two saints—is a clue that the canto isn’t about a trinity of sureties but about a certain dualist wager inherent in the enterprise. Pound asks us, in effect, which two of these three are saints? Or else, thinking of the final example in the canto: of these three seafarers, which two are most honest about the value of their information and contacts? The Honest Sailor material, concerning a joke Pound was told by John Quinn, details the improbable establishment of another legacy. In paraphrase, it runs as follows: a dissolute sailor goes into the hospital, has an operation and afterwards is presented with an unwanted baby from the maternity ward as his son. We found this baby in your belly, the doctors tell him. The shocking news reforms him. He quits drinking and is suddenly charged with new energies. To  provide for his child’s care and education, he establishes a formidable shipping concern. At the end of his long life, now a wealthy man, he calls his heir to his death bed and informs him that, despite appearances, he’s not his true father: “I am not your fader but your moder,” quod he, “Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli.” (C XII.57)

The crudity of the joke often deflects attention from one of its key interpretive questions: What makes the Honest Sailor so honest? Compared with the other two cases, which turn on apparently decisive business acumen, this anecdote is rife with bad information. To read it only as a fable of can-do entrepreneurial spirit ignores the fact that the Honest Sailor is more Phlebas than Odysseus.54 And, nothing about the sailor’s personality accounts for his success, except for the desire he discovers to nurture and provide for imagined progeny.

53

54

“Tagus Estuary Natural Reserve.” Wikipedia. April  19, 2013, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus _Estuary_Natural_Reserve. After all, Quinn’s role in the Bel Esprit scheme—and supporting Eliot, for that matter—cannot be underestimated. See B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 582–583. All the following details about Quinn are from Reid.

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The arena, I would like to argue, is everything: Jim X’s joke getting lobbed like a hand grenade on a tedious meeting of bankers. This audience is composed of “usurers in excelsis / the quintessential essence of usurers,” writes Pound—and thus enters the fateful world (C XII.55). Hypocritical slum lords gathering in a board room, lit only by their cigars, may pose as “Deacons in churches” on Sundays, but in this context they only complain of bad returns on their predatory investments (C XII.55). The cave is not illuminated, and the moral of the last of Pound’s cases is the role of dumb luck in all success. Accident is certain. Most telling is the status of the anecdote as a tribute to the anonymous benefactor. The joke-teller stands for one such benefactor, John Quinn, for whom Pound reserved his highest esteem. The last part of Twelve, appended after the rest and printed the same year Quinn died, serves as an unlikely tribute to him. Quinn visited Europe for the final time in the fall of 1923—spending time with Pound, Joyce, and other modernist contacts. He must have told Pound the Honest Sailor story then. In 1922, Quinn had declined Pound’s invitation to join the walking tour of Italy (“Padua, Siena, Verona, Venice and other places”) and it is easy to imagine Quinn as one of the invisible parties to the conversation with Eliot at the table in the Café Dante.55 Quinn’s efforts as a supporter of modernist literature and art were extraordinary—Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Lewis, Yeats, Ford, Conrad, and others all received his generous support—but their immediate legacy was uncertain and obscure. When Conrad visited the United States in 1923, he had snubbed Quinn, till then one of his most forceful supporters. The event spoiled modernist speculation for “Jim X” somewhat, leading him to put his massive collection of Conrad items on the auction block as well as much of the rest of his tremendous treasure trove. And, when Quinn died the following year, his will made no effort to preserve the collection intact; instead, it required that the entire hoard be liquidated for assorted provisions for family relations and lovers. However dogged the generosity on behalf of the cause, however keen his sense for the investments or contacts with experts—Pound most of all—ultimately the legacy he left 55

Ibid., 564.

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behind was to cast it all to the wind. The testament made clear, in the words of his biographer, that Quinn’s “success was a thing accomplished for the benefit of his immediate family and no one else.”56 Pound wrote Quinn’s trustees to volunteer his services to help preserve the collections, invoking Nero’s last words in praise of Quinn: that the world has lost an artist, and that the collector is equal to what he had collected. As efforts to keep Quinn’s collection intact were rebuffed by squabbling heirs, Pound’s inclusion of Jim X and his story of the Honest Sailor in the canto serves as a commentary on these developments. He says as much to Quinn’s companion, Jeanne Robert Foster: You may be faintly cheered to see John’s honest sailor in the capital of CANTO XII backside to the audience … You can threaten the family that if they don’t behave I will print it J. Q. instead of lightly veiling the narrator. On the whole you’d better not, as they wd. Get the hole book put on the HINDEX and stopped at customs.57

In this regard, Quinn represents not only Jim X but also his double, the Honest Sailor. The Strater illustrations in A Draft of XVI Cantos, which fashion the Sailor returning to the rising Manhattan vortex from the southern European one, the estuary-soaked grain fattening the suckling pigs, and a cornucopia of centavos spilling downwards, all solidify the connections in the Twelfth Canto’s osmosis of persons: Pound, Eliot, the Cunning Sailor, the Honest Sailor, Bacon, Dos Santos, and Quinn, the Man from New York. The money gets spent and something other than money remains: Tables, Arenas, Caves. The Latin word strata means levels—as in layers of rock in the ground or superimposed coats of paint—and it also shares, as Flusser points out, an etymology with the word strategy in the sense that strategy is something spread out or distributed.58 More than a scattered array of miscellaneous literary, historical, and biographical characters, the Twelfth 56 57

58

Ibid., 639. Letter of September 4, 1925 in Richard and Janis Londraville, Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford: Jeanne Robert Foster and Her Circle (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 205. Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 100.

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Canto leaves us with a stratigraphy of mixed media—surfaces, contexts, scenes, hazards and risk distributions that determine, oblige, and configure concrete research strategies and development projects. These might be best described—following Flusser—as mediation zones for critical-creative work across temporal interfaces. When it comes to strategic orientations, the stratigraphic heap for Pound is less about broken images (for composing private narratives or dramas) than smoldering boundary stones. For Pound, devising proper method amid the detritus resembles what Flusser calls projectivities—projective and project-driven activities across multiple media interfaces—rather than subjectivities. What emerges, as Flusser writes, “will no longer be found in any place or time but [projected] in imagined surfaces … absorb geography and history.”59 The deep time media-theoretical approach, as Zielinski notes, engages strata as “a treasure of possibilities (or perhaps better: potentialities), which permanently had to be explored, every day and everyday new.”60 From this point of view, the strata of the remote past provide both a critical destination and a creative point of departure for a tremendously stocked storehouse of experience and experiment. Following Pound, Flusser also traces a drift from the technical image to the traditional image back to the Paleolithic: About forty thousand years ago, no doubt in a cave in southwestern Europe, the subject withdrew further into its subjectivity to get an overview of the objective circumstances in which it found itself … The earliest image makers known to us (e.g., at Lascaux) fixed their observations on the walls of caves to make them accessible to others (to us as well); that is, they acted (for hands are required for this fixing), and did so in a new way, inasmuch as they used their hands to grasp objects (e.g., bulls) but to manipulate surfaces to represent objects (e.g., bulls). They sought symbols, and the activity was about symbols … [F]rom this imaginative consciousness came the universe of traditional images, of symbolic content, the universe that would henceforth serve as a model for manipulating the environment (e.g., hunting bulls).61 59 60

61

Ibid., 4. Siegfried Zielinski, “Vilém Flusser: A Brief Introduction.” https://film7000.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/ flusser.pd Flusser, Into the Universe, 11–12.

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Speculation begins here, with the hunting and gathering of the image, 40,000 years ago, the same temporal order of magnitude which interests Pound. Only very recently—in the last few thousand years, as it were—came fitful efforts to cultivate or tame the image, efforts Flusser connects for better or worse to the advent of literary humanism: Before [writing], during the forty-thousand-year period of so-called prehistory, other media—especially pictures—carried … information. And even during the relatively brief period when texts were dominant, images continued to be effective, dialectically challenging the dominance of texts. And so one is tempted to say that linear texts have played only an ephemeral role in the life of human beings, that “history” was only a diversion, and that we are now in the process of turning back to two-dimensionality, into the imaginary, magical, and mythical.62

Flusser resists these temptations—the lures of imagination, subjectivity, and originality—and makes a crucial point that returns us to Pound “embedded in fields of relationships,” with his multimediated project, seated outside the ancient arena in Verona: The technical image isn’t a return to images that depict observations of objects per se but an opening for the computations of new media concepts confronted by inhuman scales of contingency.63 To the cave art thou called, Odysseus.

62 63

Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 5.

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Figure 3.5 Henry Strater, image of Canto 12 from A Draft of XVI Cantos, copyright ©2016 by Mary de Rachewiltz and Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Courtesy of Cornell University Libraries.

Part Two

Pound’s Worlds

4

“I am all for the triangle”: The Geopolitical Aesthetic of Pound’s Japan Christopher Bush

Tokio takes over, where Paris stopped. –Ezra Pound, “VOU Club” (EP&J 201) “This Twentieth Century not only turns a new page in the Book of the World, but opens another and a startling Chapter. Vistas of strange futures unfold for man, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe, of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.”1 So begins Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” a text whose poetic and linguistic speculations have been the cause of so much extravagant praise, irate condemnation, and occasional fatigue, but also the object of periodically renewed fascination as modernist studies’ relationship to China, writing, media, and poetry have changed over the years.2 Certain passages—man sees horse; the rising sun seen through the branches of a tree; the alignment of flamingo and iron rust—have been chewed upon as much as any bits of literary criticism from the past century. But the historical, even

1

2

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein, eds. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 41; 75. Where two different page numbers (separated by a semicolon) are given for a single passage, they refer to different locations of the same passage (or nearly identical passages) in the two versions of the text given in the critical edition. In addition to the invaluable critical edition of Saussy, Stalling, and Klein, for a detailed account of the essay’s complex publication history, see David Ewick, “The Instigations of Ezra Pound by Ernest Fenollosa I: The Chinese Written Character, Atlantic Crossings, Texts Mislaid, and the Machinations of a Divinely-Inspired Char Woman,” 東京女子大学紀要：論集 Essays and Studies (Tokyo Women’s Christian University), forthcoming.

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geopolitical, vision with which the essay opens signals a broader context that has only rarely been considered as relevant to the poetic program that follows. Anyone who has read such earlier Fenollosa essays as “The Coming Fusion of East and West” (1898) will recognize the importance of this broader context. At least as early as 1889, Fenollosa had envisioned a coming Asian century: “the history of the European races will have to be rewritten … Hang Chow [Hangzhou] shall be to them a second Athens, and Shanghai their London of the future.”3 Even in the “Written Character” essay itself, Fenollosa explicitly claims that learning to understand Asian cultures “with patient sympathy” is “the only way to master” what he calls the “China problem,” a problem facing all nations, but the United States in particular: “we […] must face it across the Pacific, and master it or it will master us.”4 This geopolitical overture is even more explicit in Fenollosa’s unedited text, where he asserts that “Strange as it may seem, the future of Anglo Saxon supremacy in the world is probably bound up with the future of that East.”5 Continental Europe has, he writes, lost any sense of individual liberty and also fears a thriving Asia, so it falls to the United States (and, to a lesser extent, England) to support a free China and “to help her merge [her best ideals] into the heritage of our own freedom.”6 I describe such ideas as a “broader context” because Fenollosa was not the only cultural critic of the period to contemplate a merger with and/or the acquisition of China in the name of keeping it free from others who might merely exploit it. For such was the basic premise of Japanese pan-Asianism, echoed, for example, in Fenollosa’s wish for China to avoid being “chained in slavery to some Western form of Despotism.”7 The “Written Character” essay

3

4 5 6

7

Qtd. in Lawrence Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (London: Greenwood, 1976), 139. Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 42. Ibid., 75. Ibid. Even in the heavily edited version of the text published by Pound, the first four paragraphs of the essay lay out the world historical stakes of the current East–West encounter, the next six paragraphs the broader potential of Western awareness of “Oriental” literatures, and only then the questions of poetics that constitute the remainder of the essay. For an extended discussion of the perceived significance of Japanese modernization for Western modernism, see Christopher Bush, The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 75, emphasis added.

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itself hints at this when it claims to “represent for the first time a Japanese school of study of contemporary Chinese scholarship. Hitherto Europeans have been somewhat at the mercy of contemporary Chinese scholarship.”8 “At the  mercy of ” because, for Fenollosa (as for his Japanese friends and collaborators  Okakura Kakuzō, Miyake Yonekichi, and Ariga Nagao), Chinese culture had, since the Sung dynasty (960–1279), become stagnant if not decadent. Happily, according to their narrative, China’s “original spirit still lives, grows, interprets, transferred to Japan in all its original freshness.”9 It  would fall to others, then, but especially to the Japanese, to “think for the Chinese in the place of the Chinese,” as Naitō Konan would have it in one of the foundational texts of Japanese Sinology, Shinaron (1914).10 This historical context provides new insight into Pound’s uses of China and Japan, and the relationship between them, for Japan has, with a handful of exceptions, been treated as a narrowly aesthetic inspiration for some of Pound’s early works, soon left behind for the more “solid” stuff of China.11 Yet, not only did Pound continue to read about and to reference aspects of traditional Japanese culture throughout his life, he also knew living Japanese artists and writers, and developed a particularly strong interest in contemporary Japan during the time of its, and his own, alliance with European fascism. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Pound wrote a series of

8 9 10

11

Ibid., 43. Ibid. Qtd. in Makoto Kurozumi, “Kangaku: Writing and Institutional Authority,” in Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, eds. Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 218. I here specify “Sinology” [shinagaku] as opposed to traditional Chinese Studies [kangaku]. On this distinction see, in addition to Kurozumi, Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), which also references Fenollosa’s collaboration with Miyake. For a recent reassessment of Okakura Kakuzō, also known as Okakura Tenshin, see Noriko, Mizuta, Miya Elise Mizuta, Haga Kōichi, and Natta Phisphumvidhi, eds., Beyond Tenshin: Okakura Kakuzō’s Multiple Legacies: The Review of Japanese Culture and Society, Vol. 24 (2012). On Ariga’s career in relation to Japanese colonialism, see Alexis Dudden, Japan’s Colonization of Korea: Discourse and Power (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 65–73. I echo here the phrase most commonly cited in support of this prioritization of China over Japan in Pound scholarship, taken from a January 1917 letter to John Quinn: “China is fundamental, Japan is not. Japan is a special interest, like Provence, or 12–13th century Italy (apart from Dante). I don’t mean to say there aren’t interesting things in Fenollosa’s Japanese stuff (or fine things, like the end of Kagekiyo, which is, I think, ‘Homeric’). But China is solid” (L/JQ 94). As will soon become clear, my own essay is very much indebted to the work of those scholars who have taken Pound’s Japan seriously, above all David Ewick.

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articles for the English language Tokyo newspaper The Japan Times and Mail, in which he presented his cultural, historical, and political vision, writing in a 1936 letter to his fellow Axis ally, the great Japanese modernist poet, artist, and photographer Kitasono Katue, that there were “two things I should do before I die, and they are contriving a better understanding between the U.S.A. and Japan, and between Italy and Japan” (EP&J 28). Indeed, in Pound’s imagined postwar order, Japanese would, along with English and Italian, function as one of three world languages. Far from being replaced by China in Pound’s late cultural vision, Japan came to represent one of the actual states, indeed empires, through which his own hopes for totalitarian Confucianism and “idiogrammic culture” might be realized. For Pound, Japan represented not just a unique national culture, but also the living continuation of Chinese civilization, much as he considered a select few European nations of his time to represent the inheritors of a living European tradition. His long-term vision of Asia needs to be understood not merely as including Japan along with China, but in terms of a Japanese mediation of China that was at once political and philological. This chapter approaches this multifaceted topic from three directions. First, it demonstrates Pound’s interest in and awareness of contemporary Japan by providing an overview of his numerous interactions with Japanese artists and writers. Despite Pound’s known interest in such premodern forms as the haiku and the noh, these interactions bear directly on the production of new art and on Pound’s future-oriented cultural projects. Second, it revisits the significance of Pound’s use of the noh as a model for “a long imagist or vorticist poem,” which I argue should be understood not simply as a narrowly formal model for adding complex temporal dimensions to the image, but also as a way to foreground the historical dimension of images, linking momentary perception to collective memory. Finally, it considers the place of Japan in Pound’s fascist era vision of the world and its future, emphasizing his engagement with what might be called a mediated Orientalism with respect to China. I emphasize Japan, then, not to tout its importance relative to China, but to achieve a more multidimensional picture of how Pound’s uses of East Asia related to his conception of tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism, particularity and universality—and, ultimately, the

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dreamed-of resolution of these oppositions in an aesthetic politics. Pound’s relationship to Japan frustrates easy oppositions between Orientalist and authentic, fascist and cosmopolitanism, between bad High Modernism and good multilingual, multicultural modernisms. His work thus gains a new kind of importance in our present not because it provides anything like a model to be emulated, but for the more interesting reason that its unstable mixture of cosmopolitan possibility and totalitarian complicity cuts across our contemporary dichotomies, demonstrating once again, as Michael North wrote a quarter century ago, that “modernism still has a claim on our interest precisely because it does not make good sense, because we find in it more of the unfinished business of our time than in any other literature.”12

“not merely studying ideogram” One of the defining characteristics of conventional Orientalism is its willful obliviousness to the contemporary realities of the peoples and places it claims to represent, its need to assert that the culture of a given place is inaccessible to those who currently live there, wandering, mummy-like among its ruins. It is only certain outsiders, then, who can reconstruct the ruins and read anew the great texts of that culture, perhaps in the name of, but always despite, the locals. To a large extent, Pound’s relationship to China can be criticized in precisely these terms, but this is far less so with Japan. Indeed, although the majority of Pound’s published remarks on Japanese culture focused on premodern literary forms, he was in correspondence or personal contact with Japanese writers and artists for more than half a century.13 His earliest correspondence with a Japanese writer began when he was contacted by Yone Noguchi in the summer of 1911, at which time 12

13

Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), viii. On Pound’s interactions with living Chinese writers, see especially Zhaoming Qian’s Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends (Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Although Pound had Chinese as well as Japanese correspondents and acquaintances, my claim is that his relationship to China remained far more strongly marked by an Orientalist denial of Chinese contemporaneity. See below.

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Noguchi was a poet of much greater reputation than Pound.14 Following his success as a poet, Noguchi was soon treated as something of an authority on Japanese culture by his English audience, giving a number of lectures on Japanese literature at such places as Oxford (at the invitation of Robert Bridges), the Royal Asiatic Society, and the Quest Society, leading to the collection of essays The Spirit of Poetry and a widely read book on Japanese art.15 His correspondence with Pound runs from 1911 to 1917, when there were also personal meetings, including visits to Pound and Yeats during the famous winters at the Stone Cottage. Despite the importance of Pound’s receiving the Fenollosa manuscripts in December 1913, we must not exaggerate either the significance of that date or the textual character of Pound’s relationship to East Asia. For in addition to Noguchi, by 1915 Pound was meeting regularly, in London, with the dancer Michio Itō (as is well known), but also (less well known) with the writer Torahiko Kōri and the painter Tamijūrō Kume, who had received some noh training from Umewaka Minoru (Fenollosa’s teacher as well).16 Pound spent additional time with Kume in Paris in the early twenties, even showing the painter’s work in his own apartment there and maintaining a correspondence with him until his death in 1923, a correspondence that documents, among other things, Kume’s failed efforts to find a university post for Pound in Japan.17 Starting in the 1930s, we have Pound’s extensive correspondence with Kitasono Katue (discussed in some detail below) and, finally, there is Pound’s nomination of Junzaburō Nishiwaki for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. 14

As Hakutani writes: Noguchi was indeed a well-known bilingual Japanese and American poet, who by 1915 had published not only books of criticism widely read in England and America (The Spirit of Japanese Poetry and The Spirit of Japanese Art), but also several collections of his own English poems. By this date, moreover, his poems had been praised by Willa Cather, Joaquin Miller, and Gelett Burgess in America, by Bliss Carmen in Canada, and by George Meredith, William Rosetti, Thomas Hardy, and others in England.

15

16

17

Yoshinobu Hakutani, “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” Modern Philology 90.1 (August 1922): 47. Ibid., 55. These were all between 1914 and 1915, but were prepared by articles dating back to at least 1912, often originally published in journals Pound knew, such as Rhythm. For an important reevaluation of the extent of Pound’s interactions with overseas Japanese during this time, see David Ewick, “Notes toward a Cultural History of Japanese Modernism in Modernist Europe, 1910–1920, with Special Reference to Kōri Torahiko,” The Hemingway Review of Japan 13 (June 2012): 19–36. Andrew Houwen, “Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos and His Translation of Takasago,” The Review of English Studies, New Series 65.269 (2013): 337–338.

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Yet, even Sanehide Kodama, the editor of the invaluable collection of primary sources Ezra Pound and Japan, tends to describe Pound as someone “looking at Japan through the back end of a pair of opera glasses [… as] a far-away, beautiful country,” throughout his life (EP&J xv). Whatever their intent, such critiques of Pound have the effect of shielding his Japan from the contemporaneous politics with which it was enmeshed. Skepticism about the extent and accuracy of his knowledge is obviously warranted, but it was not the case that Pound’s Japan was some distant fairyland preserved from historical change. Most telling in this regard is Pound’s correspondence with Kitasono (1902–78), with whom he exchanged some fifty letters between 1936 and 1966. Poet, essayist, and artist, Kitasono was a major figure in the history of modern Japanese literature and art, one of the few to have played an important role in both Dada and Surrealism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s before becoming the central figure of the VOU movement (launched in 1935) and, eventually, a recognized figure of the international avant-garde in the postwar period, corresponding with, for example, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, for whom he created several covers for the Black Mountain Review.18 Some of Pound’s exchanges with “Kit Kat” (as Pound dubbed him) are deliberately comical, as in the August  1940 letter describing the American poet’s visit to a Japanese “cultural relations bureau” in Italy: “Fenollosa meant nothing to ‘em. thought I ought to get wise to MODERN Japan and not bother with (or stick to) Noh. Well, they gave me a damn good cup of COFFEE. So, I kidded ‘em about disappearance of tea ceremony” (EP&J 93). Beyond such teasing, Pound was well aware of how “modern” Japan was, even if he did not always approve: “As to Mr. whatshisname at yr / Kultur buro / I shd / have thought that the J. Times with especially its advertising matter / ‘GRRRReatest electric etc.’ in the WORLD / etc. was adequate to tell the occident about how modern (and/or American) Japan is” (EP&J 94).

18

John Solt’s Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Press, 1999) remains the most extensive and important source on Kitasono in English. In this article I follow Solt in Anglicizing Kitasono’s given name as “Katue” rather than “Katsue,” the former reflecting the French pronunciation and preferred by Kitasono himself.

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While the correspondence unsurprisingly reflects Pound’s continued interest in premodern Japanese literature and in the role of Chinese classics in Japanese intellectual life, it also abounds in evidence of Kitasono’s cosmopolitan connections to Western modernist trends.19 In early 1939, Kitasono references six poets from his VOU group participating in a Charles Henri Ford chain poem, for example, and in some instances Pound seems to be learning about European modernism by way of Kitasono: “Neue Sachlichkeit sounds O.K.: naturally Italy hasn’t yet heard of it” (EP&J 72, 106). In this vein Pound most frequently references French surrealists (including Louis Aragon, René Crevel, and Benjamin Peret, among others), perhaps because of their movement’s importance to Kitasono’s own work. In a 1936 letter, Pound asks “if the Noh plays are not surrealist in the best sense, I shd. welcome a statement as to what they shd. be called” (EP&J 28). More generally, he often suggests that Japan might be considered ahead of Europe, possibly serving to introduce Western readers to, for example, e. e. cummings and Peret (if they could get big in Japan first), even writing, in a 1937 letter responding to a group of poems sent by Kitasono: “The poems are splendid, and the first clear lighting for me of what is going on in Japan. The NEW Japan. Surrealism without all the half-baked ignorance of the French young” (EP&J 40). He then adds in the margin his ideogrammatic stamp of approval 新, as in “make it new” (his famous, if loose, translation of 新日日新). Correspondingly, it is sometimes precisely in the references to Japan’s relationship to surrealist novelty that we find reference to traditional Chinese thought and a sense of newness not dictated by chronology: “Mencius is the most modern author. I mean STILL, today, the most modern / 1940 whereas Aragon is 1920. Or was” (EP&J 106).20 The goal here is to valorize Mencius as timeless and thus modern, but this message is, correspondingly, conveyed through some hesitant formulations about the modernity of the contemporary. 19

20

Early in his correspondence with Kitasono, Pound asks: “Does VOU include a critique of Japanese past poetry as a whole? A position from which you look at Chinese poetry, Japanese poetry gradually freeing itself from (? Or continuing) Chinese, as we continually sprout from or try to cut away from, or reabsorb, resynthesize, greek, latin?” (EP&J 39). See also “Mencius continues to be most MODERN oriental author in spite imported sur-realism” (EP&J 93).

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But Pound seems clear enough in his belief that this group of Japanese modernists might be setting the pace for modernisms to come. In “VOU Club,” a January  1938 essay for The Townsmen that was the first Western language account of the group, Pound writes: for half a century after Pap Flaubert started writing, any man who wanted to write English prose had to start by reading French prose. And it may be that from now on any man who wants to write English poetry will have to start reading Japanese. I mean modern Japanese, not merely studying ideogram, as I have been advocating for the past twenty years. (EP&J 201, emphasis added)21

Not only is this written during the period in which Pound is typically thought to have long since left Japan behind for China, it also explicitly recognizes that Japanese writing is “not merely” ideogram, despite Pound’s ongoing fascination with Chinese characters. He praises these Japanese modernists— to whose works he has, of course only limited and mediated access—with tropes and values that will be familiar to readers of Pound’s Imagist and Vorticist work: The Japanese eye is like those new camera shutters that catch the bullet leaving the gun […] All the moss and fuzz that for twenty years we have been trying to scrape off our language—these young men start without it. They see the crystal set, the chemical laboratory and the pine tree with untrammeled clearness. (EP&J 201)

Here Pound implicitly distances the Japan-cum-modernism he admires from, for example, Italian Futurism: the former understand radio and chemistry, but also (still) have the noh.22 And Pound views this both/and modernism as not simply the achievement of an isolated group of poets, but an early indicator of an historic shift: “I know that nowhere in Europe is there any such vortex of poetic alertness. Tokio takes over, where Paris stopped” (EP&J 201). 21

22

For a brief discussion of the early Western language sources on VOU, see Solt, Shredding, 114 and 126. The pine appears in the background of every noh play. More to the point here, it is a recurring reference in Pound’s accounts of the noh, especially Takasago. In addition to Houwen, “Ezra Pound’s Early Cantos,” see Richard A. Gardner, “Takasago. The Symbolism of Pine,” Monumenta Nipponica 47.2 (1992): 203–240.

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This much is fairly explicit in the correspondence with Kitasono, but elements of such an identification of Japanese poetics with the course of modern history can also be found decades earlier, during the Imagist period. Yoshinobu Hakutani has offered a strong interpretation of Pound and Noguchi’s interactions at that time, ultimately concluding that “It is more accurate historically to say that Noguchi influenced Pound rather than the other way around.”23 While Hakutani several times foregrounds Noguchi’s priority, as he does here, the broader picture he paints is of a dialogue, an “agreement on imagism” from roughly 1908 to 1914 that “constituted an interpenetrating relationship of Japanese poetics and Western intentions in early modernism.”24 The “interpenetrating” quality of this relationship bears directly on the prospect of an East–West fusion, an issue of pressing political importance for Pound, which resonates from the receipt of the Fenollosa manuscripts to the later embrace of fascism. For the “image” was never just a question of poetic technique, but of civilizational type. In an essay written in 1915, but published only in 1991, Pound makes the connection quite explicit: “The European thinks by ‘ideas,’ the Jap by ‘images.’ They are different systems of grouping […] If we are in for a Japanese alliance we may as well use whatever means we have of trying to understand the Japanese mind.”25 Pound links the significance of aesthetic lessons to be gleaned from Japan to its geopolitical present, here with reference to its then-recent alliance with the Triple Entente against the Central Powers.26 The chiasmatic intertwining of images and concepts is not merely one of the ways in which an English language poet might try to understand the Japanese mind; as a mode of East–West fusion more generally it approximates a formula for the universal production of culture, if not the 23 24 25

26

Hakutani, “Ezra Pound, Yone Noguchi, and Imagism,” 54. Ibid., 68, emphasis added. Ezra Pound, “Affirmations VI: The ‘Image’ and the Japanese Classical Stage,” Princeton University Library Chronicle LIII.1 (Autumn 1991): 18, emphases added. Similarly: “The Jap thinks by colour. I mean that his thought is a tone rather than a definite statement. But that tone is fully exact” (ibid.). It is important to note that, despite objections from Kitasono, Pound did not consider “Jap” to be pejorative. Japan joined the Entente in order to enhance its ongoing imperialist agenda in East Asia (specifically in hopes that this would help drive out Germany as a competitor for China).

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production of a universal culture. For Pound seems to follow Fenollosa in a belief that an East–West encounter is universal in meaning since it brings together “the two halves of our race.”27 Fenollosa, to recall, understood East and West as complementary modes of civilization, each providing what the other lacks. In his schema, the two together represent the whole of human possibility (Africa, for example, doesn’t enter into the picture). The United States represents the best of the West, while Japan similarly represents not just itself, but the East as a whole: “the gallant islanders are the only possible mediators between Asiatic thought and the thought of the West.”28 This much is generally accepted: that Pound’s discontent with the image and with what Imagism became drove him toward the “vortex” in an effort better to describe the “image” he had, in many respects, wanted all along—dynamic and temporal rather than static and punctual. It is, then, no coincidence, that in “Vorticism” (1914) Pound not only gives an origin account of that “hokku-like sentence” “In a Station of the Metro,” but also includes a note referencing the possibility of the noh as a model for a “long imagist or vorticist poem.” Moreover, just as the “image” becomes the “vortex” in an effort to articulate its temporal and dynamic character (and the very short poem becomes a very long one), so too this should make clear that what “the image” was supposed to have been was not an isolated, much less solipsistic moment, but rather a condensation of collective aesthetic experiences and traditions. Hence the collective and highly citational art of the noh makes an appearance here. Indeed, the early account of the image in relation to East Asia is already about not just individual experience, but, in a word, the problem of a paideuma, that “active element in the era, the complex of ideas which is in a given time germinal, reaching into the next epoch, but conditioning actively all the thought and action of its own time,” as Pound defines it in the 1938 “For a New Paideuma” (SP 284). Such a “complex of ideas” draws on and makes possible the writing of history, but also names an experience of history as living. Both the writing and the experience imply something

27 28

Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 154. Ibid., 161, emphases added.

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held in common, something already known to all who can properly read the history and participate in the experience. Far from being an isolated moment disconnected from history, the image that interested Pound was always about collective experience and memory. It was not simply a way of writing crisper poetry, but part of his effort to rethink how the forms of history are made new in any given present, from the apparitions of the early hokku-like sentences to the palimpsests and ghosts of The Cantos.

“roughly the theme” The importance of the noh to the genesis and structure of The Cantos is long established in Pound scholarship, but its significance has come to be understood in much greater detail since several scholarly discoveries in the 1990s.29 What I want to add here is the claim that we can find already in those early stages important links between specifically Japanese aspects of the material with which Pound is dealing and the political, even geopolitical, aspects of his project to “ ‘express’ a sense of past time in the present” (as he describes it in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson) (L/ACH 10). Pound undertook a flurry of noh-related activity in the mid-teens, following receipt of the Fenollosa manuscripts in December 1913 (the first of the three Stone Cottage winters with Yeats), but three writings from 1917 give particularly strong evidence of the importance of the noh to Pound’s overall conception of his emerging project (all were generally unknown until long after Pound’s death).30 First, there is Pound’s own original set of Plays Modeled on the Noh, one of which had been scheduled to premier

29

30

In addition to the already cited works by Ewick and Houwen, I am relying here on Christine Froula, To Write Paradise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) and Peter Nicholls, “An Experiment with Time: Ezra Pound and the Example of Japanese noh,” Modern Language Review 90 (1995): 1–13. In his Introduction to The Classic Noh Theater of Japan (1916), Pound describes Fenollosa’s previously unknown work on literature as “the basis for a new donation, for a new understanding of ‘the East.’ ” Between the spring of 1914 and Certain Noble Plays of Japan in July 1916, he published translations of more than a dozen noh plays in five different journals. “Noh”, or Accomplishment, an expanded version of the 1916 book, was published in January 1917 and later reissued as The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan, the edition most readily available today. See Houwen for a detailed listing of the journal publications. As previously mentioned, the contemporaneous essay “Vorticism”

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with Yeats’s “At the Hawk’s Well” (today the most famous non-Japanese work modeled on the noh). The second text from 1917, “Affirmations VI: The ‘Image’ and the Japanese Classical Stage,” was apparently intended for the “Affirmations” essay series.31 The third is Pound’s translation of Takasago, meant to be published in Poetry, but fated to remain unknown for over seventy years. In January  1917, Pound writes to Alice Corbin Henderson at Poetry that Takasago will provide “roughly the theme” of his long poem and that he intends to “incorporate [it] more explicitly in a later part of the poem” (and indeed the play is first referenced explicitly in Canto IV) (L/ACH xxii). In the summer of 1917 the “Three Cantos” appeared in Poetry, “each,” writes David Ewick, “demonstrat[ing] clear evidence of EP relying on noh both for theme and method.”32 Houwen notes “the use of Noh-like ‘masks, wigs and stylized gestures’ in Pound’s 1924 opera Le Testament de Villon,” but when the first four cantos are revised as part of A Draft of XVI Cantos in 1925, the noh references are mostly edited out.33 As Ewick documents so thoroughly, the late “teens” interest in the noh returns with renewed force by no later than 1938 and we know that in spring and early summer of 1939 Pound was able to view, and was enormously impressed by, a filmed version of Ai no ue while at the Washington, D.C. Museum of Modern Art.34 Ewick, among several other scholars, has argued for the renewed importance of the noh in the later cantos, including The Pisan Cantos (which reference no fewer than five different noh plays) and

31

32 33 34

(1914) included the “first of three declarations that noh points the way forward for a ‘long Vorticist poem.’ ” As Ewick reports, the second such declaration was in “The Classical Stage of Japan” (Drama, May 1915), and the third in the long-unpublished “Affirmations VI” (about which see below). See David Ewick, “Binding Up an Ancient Love: A Genealogy of Pound’s Japan” (The Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg Castle, July 2012). On this text and its recovery, see A. Walton Litz, “A New Acquisition: Papers of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound Relating to the No Drama,” Princeton University Library Chronicle LIII.1 (Autumn 1991): 9–11 and Earl Miner, “Pound and Fenollosa Papers Relating to No,” Princeton University Library Chronicle LIII.1 (Autumn 1991): 12–16. Ewick, “Binding,” 7. Houwen, “Early Cantos,” 337. For evidence that Pound maintained a strong interest in the noh throughout the 1920s, see Houwen, “Early Cantos,” 337–340. For a detailed account of the Aoi no ue production and Pound’s response, see Diego Pellecchia, “Ezra Pound and the Politics of Noh Film,” Philological Quarterly 92.4 (2013): 503–506.

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Cantos CV-CVII.35 The most dramatic evidence of the noh’s importance in this period, however, is a provocation repeated several times between 1940 and 1941: “We shd / GIVE Guam to the Japs, but INSIST on having 300 sound films of Noh in exchange” (EP&J 237). Finally, there is Pound’s 1954 translation of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, explicitly undertaken with the noh in mind, dedicated to Kitasono, and published with a note expressing the hope that it be performed by the Kanze school of noh performance.36 Thematically, the noh is associated, across the decades, with the staging of ghostly returns, including, I argue, an aesthetics of collective, historical memory. The Guam bit is mad, of course, but also gives a vivid sense of the direct link between cultural value and geopolitics for Pound during this period—the living, even violent intensity of tradition’s value.37 Why the noh? There is obviously room for debate with respect to the significance of specific allusions, parallels, and influences, but what is undeniable are the broader, multiple, and long-term connections between Pound’s idea of the Noh and its relevance to a work “containing history.” The noh’s capacity to serve as a model for a long poem is not just a matter of scale. Rather, length here reflects Pound’s turn to history as both his subject matter and raw material, as is explicitly thematized in Three Cantos. In a prologue to the contemporaneous Plays Modelled on the noh, Pound describes the form’s value to him in no uncertain terms: You tell me you do not want Japanese things, that these new plays must be European. Still it is a Japanese play [Nishikigi] that gives me the closest parallel to my thought … No, I am not going to be oriental. I think you all have your heroes and heroines. You all have your periods […] if you went to Tuileries and really saw Marie Antoinette? If suddenly by the Tiber you saw 35

36 37

Ewick finds noh-derived method, conscious or not, in The Pisan Cantos (1945), but also argues that while the later cantos do make numerous references to noh, their method is not that of the Three Cantos. For an extensive discussion of noh motifs in the later cantos, see Ce Rosenow, “ ‘High Civilization’: The Role of Noh Drama in Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” Papers on Language and Literature 48.3 (2012): 234. Ewick, “Binding,” 11. Still, Pound addresses this head-on in a 1941 Radio Rome broadcast: You may think I am joking about this Guam proposition. I am not. I ask the impartial auditor whether the individual American citizen wouldn’t get a great deal MORE out of a set of such films as I saw, the one in Washington two years ago, than he would out of a few tons of tungsten, with possibly a few family coffins thrown in (Qtd. in Pellecchia 509).

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re-acted, re-arranged, re-presented the events and heard the exact speeches on the morning after the Duke of Gandia was murdered? Ah no, you would not complain about my giving you Japanese emotion.38

It is no wonder that Ewick concludes that such an understanding of the noh as “a way to infuse time present with the historical and mythical past […] reads like a blueprint for the methodology of Three Cantos and The Pisan Cantos.”39 What I wish to underline here, though, is that the figures evoked in this passage are associated with violent deaths at specific locations and are given national significance. As matter for ghost stories, then, their apparition is not merely personal or psychological but communal. While Pound’s tale of the tribe is generally described in terms of epic, we should not underestimate the model of theater (most obviously Greek tragedy, but we might also think here of Yeats’ project of a national theater and its connections to the noh). Pound writes to Kitasono, “One nation may have an epic. Another a set of plays. But one dimension is common to all masterworks, namely that they contain the quintessence of racial quality” (EP&J 184). In short, neither the noh’s default identification as drama nor its implicit association with lyric via the “long imagist poem” should obscure the extent to which Pound understood noh’s cultural function as essentially epic. Illuminating here is Michael André Bernstein’s Pound-oriented account of modern epic poetry as the “enduring literature” of a group that aspires to let the “magic” of words “make actual events live again in the minds of future readers […] the ‘tale of the tribe’ is intentionally directed towards that [daily] reality, and is expressly fashioned to enable readers to search the text for values which they can apply in the communal world.”40 According to Bernstein, “Ideally, poetry can present the crucial elements of the tribe’s

38

39 40

Qtd. in James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 226–227. Ewick, “Binding,” 10. Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 9. Bernstein’s heuristic definition of epic includes four interrelated features. First, it “presents a narrative of its audience’s own cultural, historical, or mythic heritage,” providing models of conduct. Second, it functions as “the voice of the community’s heritage ‘telling itself,’ ” rather than speaking for any individual. Third, the ideal audience is therefore “the citizen as participant in a collective linguistic and social nexus.” And, finally, it is broadly instructive in intent, foregrounding the didactic element latent in all poetry (ibid., 14).

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heritage in a memorable (and memorizable) form, can crystallize its truths in a series of striking images or lines that, like the fixed situations and epithets of oral epics, permit the audience to retain their significance when the text is no longer at hand.”41 This well describes the very vision of history-writing Pound presents (among numerous other places) in a 1940 article for The Japan Times and Mail: “In one sense history, not merely ideological history, is built out of phrases. It is built out of crystallizations of words into very brief groups, say five, six, or a dozen words. These words become fact. And it is impossible to exaggerate their force” (EP&J 186). He then makes clear that the news that famously stays news does so for a specific community, located in a specific place: “By which laconic phrases one means that the ‘news’ printed by these authors is still the event of the day in their countries” (EP&J 184, emphases added). As in the reference to “the quintessence of racial quality” cited above, the function of textual tradition is hardly straightforwardly universalist. While the tribe whose tale The Cantos seeks to tell is certainly not a single nation, many if not most of Pound’s accounts of collective memory are articulated by a single figure meant to evoke a nation: Marie Antoinette and the Duke of Gandia, but also, in the same letter to Kitasono, “I have seen Villon in Paris 500 years after his lines were written. I have seen Boccaccio and Goldini in Italy, and it is commonplace that ‘London is full of Dickens’ ” (EP&J 184). Pound thus envisions a kind spectral league of nations (ironically enough): “you all have your heroes and heroines. You all have your periods,” as he told the imagined audience of his own noh plays, and these are specific. But since we all have them, “the emotion,” the structure of national feeling, is, if not universal, at least widely shared. I would agree, then, with Peter Nicholls’s important article on the noh’s complex temporality which describes Pound’s turn to noh as part of his efforts to get beyond imagism: “If Imagism still drifted toward impressionism, noh theater offered an experience of time as calculated anachronism […] these noh plays suggested to Pound a structural conception of time which

41

Ibid., 23–24.

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would allow him to progress from the momentary intuitions of Imagism to the complex and extended structures of The Cantos.”42 This “calculated anachronism” should be understood in historical as well as temporal terms. Nicholls describes how, for example, the noh “links the manifestation of the god or spirit with the irruption of the past in the present, making the point of greatest intensity that in which time flows back on itself and two moments are, as it were, superimposed or grafted together.”43 Such a “return” is also a renewal, a making-new through “a sort of compound tense in which the past may seem open to change or revision [… and] be modified and transformed through its (re-)enactment.”44 Building on Nicholls’s account, I want to emphasize the extent to which Pound’s use of the noh is concretely historical rather than just abstractly temporal. That is, it aims to produce not a narrowly subjective experience, but a nonnarrative way of telling the tale of the tribe. Such a shift in emphasis from time to history has consequences, because history cannot be separated from particularity: Ghostly visions of Marie Antoinette and the Duke of Gandia, for example, might be analogous, but part of Pound’s point is that they are not simply interchangeable. As Pound emphasizes in “The European Paideuma” (1940), “The Madonna of the Italian peasant is an örtliche raumgebundene Gottheit, a purely local divinity. She is THEIR Madonna, present in a given ambience” (MA 133). The effects of the poem’s “sort of compound tense,” in other words, cannot be abstracted entirely from whatever particular verb, so to speak, is conjugated into that tense. Similarly, by considering the noh as a “form,” we risk missing the importance of its being Japanese, not in the sense that we should read for some singular Japanese cultural essence, but precisely the opposite—that Japanese material opens a network of textual associations and possibilities that, like Pound’s use of Greek, Italian, or Provencal sources, are sometimes

42 43 44

Nicholls, “An Experiment with Time,” 9; 2. Emphases added. Ibid., 6. Ibid. Such a reading of the noh (independent of any concern about Pound) is supported by, for example, Gardner’s analysis of the genre’s “complex interplay of time between past, present, and future,” specifically in Takasago, which the Japanologist reads as a movement from an aesthetic of transitoriness and contingency to a recuperation of the eternal and of unity for the sake of social stability. See Gardner, “Takasago,” 233.

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idiosyncratic, but are often quite specific. Just as “an Italian poem” would not be adequate to describe what the Commedia meant for Pound, so too “a noh play” requires further glossing. What are some of the specific consequences of recognizing the Japanese vectors of The Cantos? To start with the play said to provide “roughly the theme” of the epic, Takasago, we find an emphasis on the connections between distant places. The central image of Takasago is of two pines that famously “grow together” (相生), although one is in Takasago and the other far away in Suminoye. Much of the play consists of an explication of the meaning and associations of this relationship, which works on a variety of analogous levels: the bond between an old married couple; the continuities between the Manyōshū (the first major anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled in the late eighth century) and the Kokinshū (the first imperial anthology of poetry, completed in the early decades of the tenth century, when the play is set); and, not least, the bonds of mutual legitimation linking different emperors and imperial capitals.45 Like Takasago, I want to suggest, The Cantos is about building networks of association between different historical eras, but also about creating such “rhymes” between different places, a kind of translatio imperii. This transfer of cultural and political legitimacy is not permanently bound to any one country or place, nor is it limited to just Europe and the United States.

45

This brief list leaves out, among other things, the Buddhism-specific layers of meaning. See Gardner for a more detailed account. Houwen’s recent work on Pound’s version of the play persuasively highlights its importance for the political vision of The Cantos. In his reading, the symbolic network generated by the relationship between the pines “informs Pound’s poetics of superposition,” which “in turn, reinforces Pound’s reading of Takasago as a paean to a form of centralized rule that Pound increasingly admired before moving to fascist Italy” (Gardner, “Takasago,” 325). Houwen builds on Gardner’s claim that “the two pines symbolize an auspicious reign by symbolizing the unity of the past and present,” but also emphasizes that the two imperial eras whose bond legitimizes the current one are both defined in terms of the major poetic anthologies they produced (219). Anthologies were of course one of the major ways in which Pound envisioned—and tried to put into practice— consequential connections between cultural and political authority. The very title of the Kokinshū 古今集 means “Ancient and Modern Collection,” emphasizing that it brings into the same literary space works by contemporary poets (including the editors) and some of the most ancient poems in the language. Takasago itself self-reflexively participates in this lineage by mentioning the preface of the Kokinshū as a source for the story of the pines, a gesture that has been read in terms of the political significance of the noh for Japan’s samurai class in the early fifteenth century (when the play was written). As Houwen points out, in works that Pound knew both Fenollosa and Binyon compare the Ashikaga shogunate (Zeami’s patrons) to the Medici. The play’s intertextuality thus corresponds to patterns of historical rhyming directly linked to political agendas.

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Recall how the staging of “the modern world,” in the early draft of Canto IV, was a spatial superposition between the European war and a modernizing Japan. Pound certainly understood the noh as a great Japanese civilization accomplishment, but the noh was not simply to be included in his vision of world culture: In very important ways, it provided a kind of model for how the history of culture might be organized, kept alive, and remain politically vital. Like epic, it was both something selected for inclusion and a model of selective inclusion. Its value was therefore not narrowly antiquarian, but part of his overall effort, through translation and criticism, to produce what we might today call world literature, even a new world paideuma.46 Indeed, when writing of the need for “a new paideuma” in The Criterion in 1938, he directly references contemporary Japan and Kitasono in particular: The man who doesn’t want to learn ideogram is a man half-awake. No one in Europe is in a position to say whether Japan or China contains, at the moment of writing, the greater cultural energy. Evidence of Japanese awareness I have on my desk as I write this. I know of no group of poets in Europe or America as alert as Mr. Kitasono’s Tokio friends. I mean to say as conscious of the day that we live in. (SP 285)47

The noh was, accordingly, not merely exotic or anachronistic raw material because modern Japan was understood as both a participant in “global” (largely European) avant-garde trends and itself the self-declared preserver of Asia. The noh is modern, like Homer or Dante: news that has stayed new and demonstrated how to make it new. While Pound wished to repurpose premodern Asian literary forms, this did not exclude awareness of or interest in the Japanese present, any more than his translation of “The Seafarer” or his passion for Dante prevented him from being involved in Vorticism or Italian fascism. To the contrary, one often reinforced the other.

46

47

For a reading of Pound’s culture vision as a kind of cosmopolitan world literature, see Paul Stasi, “ ‘A sane balance of values:’ The Cantos as World Literature,” Comparative Literature 62.4 (2010): 361–375. Similarly, Pound sometimes pairs Fenollosa with Frobenius (from whom he took the term paideuma), as in this riff against bureaucrats and academic specialists as “obstacle equally to communicating Fenollosa or Frobenius.” Qtd. in Zhaoming Qian, “ ‘Chinese Poetry: Prof. Mori’s Lectures,’ Recast by Pound from Fenollosa’s Notes, Transcribed and Annotated by Zhaoming Qian,” Paideuma 31.1–3 (2002), 295.

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The value of the noh idea for The Cantos indicates not simply a lengthening of Imagist/Vorticist form, but a deepening of Pound’s historical vision and of literature’s relationship to collective as well as personal memory. Hence, I claimed above that the ghostliness of the noh models not just a subjective temporal experience of “calculated anachronism,” but models the epic ideal of text and community interpenetrating one another. This tension between national memory and universal feeling points, I suggested, to a deeper problem, namely the tension between particularism and universalism in Pound’s political project. This tension between universal and particular is precisely one of the unresolved—and therefore helpfully visible—problems of high modernist aesthetic politics, most infamously in the temptation of fascism.

“ ‘Dai Gaku’ is better than ‘Ta Tsü’ ” By the late 1930s, Pound was very much thinking of Japan as a fascist ally, specifically doing so in the context of a world-scale vision of cultural fusion in which Japan had a special mission in relation to China. The persistence of Japan throughout Pound’s work is not just a question of literary priority or extent of influence, but of the status of East Asia in Pound’s broader cultural agenda. That Pound’s investment in cultural fusion took an avowedly fascist turn is clear from the following October 1940 letter to Kitasono: “I wish you folks cd / make peace in China. Best possible kick in the jaw for the nastiest kikes and pseudo-kikes in America. If you can manage it we might get on and have a little civilization once again” (EP&J 100). On the one hand, we see here a wish for peace and a granting of agency to the Asian other; on the other hand, by this historical moment, there is little doubt about what the politics of Japan are: “If Japan is going ‘fascist,’ might save time to start where fascism NOW is, no need to go through the experimental phases.” In sum, “I am all for the triangle” (EP&J 82). We see here that the later Axis vision is explicitly continuous with the earlier idea of an East–West fusion based on Fenollosa’s work, a continuity

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that parallels, and occasionally intersects with, developments in Japan. The  summer before the formal signing of the Axis Pact, Pound writes to Kitasono: The radio this morning announced fusion of Oriental and Occidental cultures as part of the new Japanese program. Hardshell conservatives will fear a general discoloration of culture, the sudden acceptance of the faults of both cultures, such, indeed, as Fenollosa found imminent years ago and withstood. A serious fusion means rigorous selection of the best works of both hemispheres and an historiography that shall give the most pregnant facts with greatest clarity of definition. (EP&J 180)48

This “serious fusion,” involving a knowing selection of pregnant facts is, of course, a fair description of The Cantos and of Pound’s own numerous critical and anthologizing projects; indeed he explicitly points out that he has “some seniority” on the topic of selective East–West cultural fusion. The correspondence also regularly invokes Fenollosa (to whose manuscripts Pound was returning during this period). Fenollosa’s own assertions of Japan’s world-historical uniqueness had been predicated on the idea that Japan had not only preserved the best of all Asian civilizations (as his friend Okakura would famously argue), but was also in the process of taking the best, and only the best, from the West. Japan was thus charged with a “unique mission to preserve the Asiatic best, and combine it with the European in a new composite type worthy of becoming a model for the world […] on [Japan’s] shores shall be first created the new latter-day type of civilized man which shall prevail throughout the world for the next thousand years.”49 Elements of this Fenollosian vision persist even in late Pound, as in a 1940 letter from Rapallo in which he writes that Japanese intellectuals have a singular role to play in the coming world order not because of unique racial characteristics, the cult of the sword, or any of the other more conventionally fascistic motifs that appealed to so many on the European Right at this time, but rather because of Japan’s role as

48 49

“The Italian papers are full of news of the cultural pact with Japan” (EP&J 150). Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 156; 152.

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a highly selective cultural repository.50 Correspondingly, Pound’s Japanese contemporaries also looked to the West for models and justifications for their own cultural imperialism, specifically in the Italian Renaissance.51 Alongside its universalist rhetoric of East–West fusion, turn-of-the-century Japanese Pan-Asianism was also a regionalist resistance to Western political, economic, and intellectual hegemony. The claim was, in brief, that Japan was uniquely suited to serve as the Asian frontier of universal modernity, at once taking the best from the West and liberating the East from any sense of dependency. Japanese-led pan-Asianism garnered varying degrees of intellectual and practical support throughout Asia, from the Ottoman Empire to the Philippines. By the 1930s, however, what remained of “Pan-Asianism” seemed, increasingly, but a thin justification for Japan’s own intellectual and political-economic imperialism in the region.52 In this sense, Pound followed the same script, reviving, in the 1930s, the turn-of-the-century ideas of Fenollosa, but with an almost wholly right-wing content (just as was happening in Japan with Okakura’s work, decades after his death). While there is little evidence that Pound had direct knowledge of the corpus of Japanese pan-Asianism, he certainly had plenty of secondhand contact with it through Fenollosa and Kitasono, among others, in addition to whatever he might have picked up from Japanese propaganda in Italy.53 Japanese fascism offered 50

51

For an oft-cited critique of this conception of Japan in Okakura, see Karatani Kojin, “Japan as Art Museum: Okakura Tenshin and Fenollosa,” in A History of Modern Japanese Aesthetics, ed. Michael F. Marra (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2001), 43–52. As Reto Hofmann writes: by stressing that, as a movement, the Renaissance was characterized by a capacity to absorb ancient and diverse cultural traditions and mold them into a harmonious totality, they also came close to likening its significance to the peculiarity that new-order ideologues ascribed to Japanese culture—namely its ability to synthesize the civilizations of East and West. Consciously or not, they created both links and parallels between Italian and Japanese history.

52

53

Reto Hofmann, The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 125. For a collection of contemporary scholarship on pan-Asianism in relation to Japan, see Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007). As Mussolini himself claims in a speech from the early 1930s, Europe is no longer the continent that guides civilization as a whole. This is the dramatic fact that those whose duty it is to think must recognize and point out to others. There was a time when Europe dominated the world politically, spiritually, economically […] But beyond the Atlantic, a great industrial capitalist business world has developed. And, in the Far East, Japan, after coming into contact with Europe during the war of 1905, is advancing rapidly toward the west. Qtd. in Jeffrey Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 159.

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an authoritarian, pro-tradition, (ostensibly) anticapitalist “overcoming” of modernity that, despite its nationalist and even racist dimensions, was in many respects internationalist and even cosmopolitan. From a distance, at least, it was a natural fit for Pound. In many respects, Pound’s embrace of Japanese fascism as cosmopolitan (rather than narrowly nationalist) was hardly exceptional. Historian Reto Hofmann has recently discussed the internationalist turn in fascist ideology as coinciding with the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–36: “No longer just signifying national rebirth, anticommunism, or virile leadership, fascism was now tied to the reform of the theory and practice of international politics.”54 Japan was very much a part of this internationalization of fascism, being “the first power to recognize the Italian annexation of Ethiopia” in 1936, co-signing the Anti-Comintern Pact with Italy and Germany the following year, a cultural pact in March  1939, and finally, in September  1940, the Tripartite Pact.55 This internationalization directly influenced Pound’s interest in Japan: the filmed production of Aoi no ue Pound saw in Washington in 1939 (and which inspired the plan to trade Guam for more such films) had been shot in 1935 as part of a government-sponsored effort to promote Japanese culture abroad.56 And a few years before that, Pound saw noh on film for the first time in the fictional German–Japanese propaganda film New Earth (Atarashiki tsuchi, released in Italy as Mitsucho la figlia del samurai and in Germany as Die Tochter des Samurai). Pound specifically wrote to Kitasono about the brief noh scene, immediately after which the film’s male lead concedes that although he can barely understand the play’s difficult language, “within me, the blood of my ancestors seems to. Hearing [it], I feel like I remember the past.”57 My goal here is not to label an even larger segment of Pound’s work as “fascist” and therefore dismiss it (“even the noh plays!”), but rather to highlight the complicity between cosmopolitanism and fascism embodied in his Japan, 54 55 56 57

Hofmann, The Fascist Effect, 89. Ibid., 112. Pellecchia, 503–504. Ibid., 507–508. The German–Japanese co-production was overseen by two directors, each prominent in their own country: Itami Mansaku and Arnold Fanck, the latter best known for the “mountain films” that launched the career of Leni Reifenstahl. The father of the female lead (the “daughter” of the film’s German and Italian title) was played by Sessue Hayakawa.

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the proximity of what is admirable and what is execrable in his work. For if that work is in many respects definitively (even hopelessly) modernist, it also seems prophetic with respect to current debates about world literature and cosmopolitanism. This tension between the cosmopolitan and the fascist, the archivist and the eraser of history, is visible in distinctive ways with respect to Japan because embracing Japan allowed him to be at once a respecter of cultural difference, a partner in the Asian preservation of Asian tradition, and a full-throated fascist. To make this claim more specific, I will consider in greater detail three aspects of Pound’s relationship to Japan: first, the basic cultural relativist idea that Japan provides an insightfully alternative perspective on the world; second, Pound’s hope that Japanese will become a world language in the future; and, finally, Pound’s understanding of Japan as preserver of Chinese culture. At times, Pound’s account of the importance of the new Japan seems narrowly cultural, as in his praise of Yukio Yoshiro’s “best and most revolutionary book on Botticelli,” in which “the impartial and alien eye really saw what the familiar native eye had taken for granted” (EP&J 185). Botticelli is of no small importance for Pound, but this is still essentially a matter of cultural appreciation—learning to understand one’s own culture better through an “impartial and alien eye”—rather than political consequence.58 The insight that could be offered by this Other goes further, however: “the sooner Tokyo starts TELLING the American people its own history, i.e. the history of the U.S.A., the sooner the American people will find out” (EP&J 190–191). Writing to the ostensibly apolitical Kitasono of the need for epic to include economics, Pound concedes, “It does not touch the lyric writers

58

As discussed in Morel and Demoor, Binyon’s The Art of Botticelli (1913) includes such lines as “we cannot discard the past; we cannot throw away our heritage, but we must remould it in the fire of our necessity, we must make it new and our own.” See Frederick Morel and Marysa Demoor, “Laurence Binyon and the Modernists: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and F.T. Marinetti,” English Studies 95.8 (2014): 912. The Japanese reference is to Yukio Yashiro’s Sandro Botticelli and the Florentine Renaissance (published in English in 1929, going through multiple editions). The reference to Yoshiro is immediately preceded by the claim that “If Japan can produce a better, that is clearer and more incisive, set of brochures showing the real thought of the founders of America’s social form, than now exists in America, so much the greater your glory,” and a few letters later the formulation is even stronger (EP&J 185).

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so closely” but then adds, “However, a ‘fusion or union of cultures’ implies a mutual regard for two historiographies” (EP&J 181, emphasis added). That is, even the lyric realm to which Kitasono and his group seek to restrict themselves must reckon with what Pound here calls “the hang-together of art and the economic system” (EP&J 181).59 This much we would expect from Pound, but he here makes explicit that to the extent that there is a fusion or union of cultures (clearly the case with VOU), there must be some mutual revision of history. This is a compelling twist on a standard plot. An essential part of the non-Western experience of modernity is a complex reckoning with the vocabulary and critical categories of the West, an often contentious coming-to-terms with the pseudo-universality of “history,” “man,” “art,” “reason,” and so on.60 Here we see Pound considering the possibility that Western modernity might heal itself by adapting Japanese terminology, specifically with respect to the (for Pound) always-urgent question of credit: even today men go on confusing mandates or orders to deliver what exists and promises to hand over something which may exist next year or the year after. I hope the Japanese students will find two words, one for each of these paper implements, and then refrain from using the two words indifferently and confusedly. If you do this, the Occident will come to sit at your feet. (EP&J 187)

59

60

Ibid. Despite the seeming difference in their stances on poetry and politics, Kitasono was hardly apolitical. A March  1938 letter to Pound incudes pictures of Japanese swords and praises the “brilliant ceremony […] held to make a present of Japanese armour and sword to Premier Mussolini, on the 20th March, at Hibiya-Park, Tokio.” This is followed by some quite essentialist meditations on the power of Japanese swords, in which Kitasono writes that when he looks at a great sword he feels “directly the lives and morals of all the ages our ancestors passed through […] I feel my eyes are not already those of moderns, but of ancients […] Japan will be prosperous forever as long as Japanese [sic] will not lose their faith in the sword” (EP&J 62–63). Kitasono’s politics and the complex issue of his complicity, or lack therefore, with Japanese ultra-nationalism are discussed extensively in Solt, Shredding. On the complexities of translation in Japanese modernity, see Levy, ed., “The Culture of Translation in Modern Japan.” For a recent analysis of the field of Japanese studies in terms of key terms, see Jordan Sand, Alan Tansman, and Dennis Washburn, eds., “Working Words: New Approaches to Japanese Studies. (Special Issue),” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 25 (December 2013). For a valuable study of the translation of Western political terminology in particular, see Douglas Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan, (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).

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Similarly, he raises the possibility of using Japanese forms of periodization to mark a break from the West. In a letter asking Laughlin to print translations of the VOU group’s poems, Pound suggests the title “Tokio 1937 but the Japanese date should be given first […] as I give the Italian Era Fascista XV and the old style 1936 on my stationary” (EP&J 34). This is not a general cultural relativism because not just any country could set the United States straight about its history. At the same time, however, Japan is not considered unique because it is a self-contained, self-knowing Culture (as is the case with most Japanophilia). What is essential is, rather, the potential for a modern Japan (knowing both the radio crystal and the pine) to extend its categories and culture into the wider world in ways that still allow for the preservation of vital traditions. Perhaps the most spectacular example of Pound’s Axis vision is his “TriLingual System Proposed for World Communications.” After acknowledging that “The present political alliance would suggest German, Italian and Japanese,” he proposes to “sacrifice one party on either side of the immediate division of forces […] on strictly practical and linguistic grounds” (EP&J 151). English is chosen over German because it is already de facto a world language, while Italian is chosen to stand in for the Romance languages because, he says, it is the easiest among them to learn. But why Japanese for Asia, especially when Pound is supposed to be at the height of his Confucianism at precisely this moment? We have a clue in the fact that when describing this linguistic Axis Pound often refers not to “Japanese,” but to “Italian, Ideogram and English (American brand)” or, more precisely, “Ideogram, with the Japanese sound (syllabic) comment, Italian and English” (EP&J 103, 151). But this does not mean, as we have seen, that Pound simply equated Japanese with “ideogram.” How does Pound articulate the relationship between Ideogram and contemporary Japanese and what are the imagined cultural consequences of that relationship for “world communications”? Pound thinks Japanese needs to be reformed if it is to function as a world language, arguing in overtly imperial terms: The national defence of Basho and Chikamatsu can be maintained by the use of the latin alphabet. If any young Tanakas want to set out for world

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conquest, on the line Ubicumque lingua Romana ibi Roma (wherever the latin tongue, there Rome) you will invade much better by giving us the sound of yr/ verse in these latin signs that are understood from the Volga to the West coast of Canada, in Australia, and from Finland to the Capes of Good Hope and Horn. (EP&J 103)

The geopolitical basis of Pound’s “strictly practical and linguistic” choices could hardly be more explicit. Yet, even as he suggests that the Japanese syllabary be replaced with the Roman alphabet, he also encourages the retention of Chinese characters (as readers of Pound would expect). On the one hand, then, a simplifying, modernizing, “universalizing” attitude toward certain aspects of Japanese; on the other hand, an intense desire to preserve, even fetishize Chinese characters, up to and including the calligraphy, where possible.61 While this arrangement in some sense valorizes Chinese, it does not require readers to learn that language in any normal sense, instead folding Chinese into a Japanese context that renders the former a subgenre of the  latter. This makes sense both in terms of the Fenollosian claim that Japan now preserves the best of its culture since China has fallen into decadence and in terms of Pound’s explicit claim that Japanese is easier for Westerners to learn. Not least, according to Pound, because Japanese just sounds better: Several half-wits in a state of half education have sniffed at my going on with Fenollosa’s use of the Japanese sounds for reading ideogram. I propose to continue. As sheer sound “Dai Gaku” is better than “Ta Tsü.” When it comes to the question of transmitting from the East to the West, a great part of the chinese sound is no use at all. We don’t hear parts of it […] the rest is a hiss, or a mumble. (EP&J 103)62

61

62

The correspondence with Kitasono is full of references to new printing and reproduction techniques and how they might help disseminate Asian texts in an appropriate form. For example, “The Leica grainless film and microphotographic processes now make such an edition commercial. It can be produced at the same price as the Loeb library of Greek and Latin texts (which has an English translation on the opposite page). With microphotography there is no reason for not using ideogramic pages taken direct from works of master calligraphers” (EP&J 150). Pound is contrasting the Japanese and Chinese pronunciations of 大学, which here refers to The Great Learning, one of the Four Books of Confucianism. Pound had published his own translation as Ta Hio in 1928. (The pinyin would be dàxué.)

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“Chinese” is here not a living language to be spoken, but a textual tradition to be glossed. Such a hybrid of aggressive modernization and passionate preservation is of course typical of Pound. This attitude can be understood, I want to suggest, as not just an effect of Occidental Orientalist arrogance, but also as echoing key features of Japanese uses of China. Historically, for East Asian scholars, it was not the norm that Classical Chinese should be read in terms of the contemporary spoken language, nor were contemporary Chinese necessarily understood to have a privileged relationship to these texts. In fact, the historical pronunciations of Tang poems (much less the Confucian canon) were considered lost. Conversely, Chinese as a writing system gained “the potential to be read as any one of the number of East Asian languages that developed 訓読 kundoku-like methods for associating logographic characters with local words and usages.”63 “Chinese” here names a language neither necessarily produced nor understood best, much less exclusively, in China. Understood in this way, written Chinese (or, to be more precise, “the Sinitic logographic system” (Clements)) was indeed a language with a sometimes-astonishing historical continuity and a proven transnational, even translingual reach: a natural fit for Pound’s vision of culture—in terms of reading practices, meaning and script matter, but not necessarily pronunciation. The Chinese written character must be maintained, of course, but alone it is insufficient if the text is not particularly intended for Chinese readers. This way of reading is not a pure Poundian product, but a reproduction of Fenollosa’s encounter with the “Sinosphere,” a world of letters in which important aspects of “the original” are bracketed and in which contemporary descendants do not always know best (any more than modern European scholars turned to their Greek contemporaries the better to understand 63

Rebekah Clements, A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 110. Kundoku 訓読 (explanation/gloss reading) is a method of reading in a Japanese manner texts composed entirely in Chinese characters. Although originally developed as a method of reading texts written in Chinese, it later became generative, such that Japanese writers could produce texts written entirely in Chinese characters, intended to be read using the kundoku method. Such texts are not exactly written “in Chinese” and have been defined by linguists as composed in an “interlanguage.” It is interesting to note here that the one full line of verse given as an example in Fenollosa’s Chinese Written Character was not, in fact, Chinese in the sense that it was written by a Japanese with no expectation that it would ever be read “aloud” (even silently) in Chinese.

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Homer or Aristotle).64 It was not (just) Pound’s arrogance or ignorance that bracketed the question of Chinese pronunciation (and indeed Chinese readers); it was also a cornerstone of a lot of Japanese scholarship. Pound was thus following Fenollosa, who had followed Mori, who had claimed the Japanese pronunciations of Chinese characters were “in the main nearer to the sound of those names as used by their owners in their own life time.”65 In Japan itself, the value of Chinese writing and Chinese studies with respect to Japanese modernization was complex and multilayered. As might be expected in a country undergoing aggressive, top-down “modernization,” the study of Chinese classics and even the retention of kanji were, for many, atavisms to be dispensed with as soon as possible. But it is also the case that Western/“modern” learning had historically come into Japan through texts and translations essentially written in “Chinese.”66 Similarly, the Japanese defeat of China in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95 did, on the one hand, give support to the idea that Chinese learning was no longer needed by a modern Japan, but it also intensified claims that Japan was becoming the steward of Asia and should therefore redouble its efforts to preserve the best of Chinese civilization for the benefit of the whole world: “Proclaiming […] a ‘kangaku [Chinese learning] renaissance,’ Taoka Reiun (1870–1912) in 1896 claimed that kangaku would perform ‘the great task of the Japanese people: to answer the call to become pioneers in fusing Eastern and Western thought.’ ”67 We have already seen a similar call to “think for the Chinese in the place of the Chinese” in Naitō Konan’s Shinaron (1914), a work whose very title signals the historical shift to the new academic discipline of Shinagaku, created around the turn of the century as a more scientific approach to the study of China. In many respects modeled on Western 64

65 66

67

As Clements discusses in some detail, the complex history of interlingual practices in Japan does not fit easily into distinctions between translation, commentary, and so on. This is particularly the case with kundoku, which broadly speaking was understood as a way of reading (lit. gloss-reading) rather than translation in most of the senses we would use today. For a subtle analysis of twists and turns of this, see Atsuko Ueda, “Sound, Scripts and Styles: Kanbun kundokutai and the National Language Reforms of 1880s Japan” in Indra Levy, ed., “The Culture of Translation in Modern Japan (Special Issue),” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 20 (December 2008): 135–156. Qtd. in Qian, “Chinese Poetry,” 293. That is, in the interlanguage of kanbun kundokutai described in note 117. See Kurozumi, “Kangaku,” 217. Ibid., 218.

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Sinology, this field was often quite explicitly Orientalist in its attitude toward Chinese.68 Rather than simply denigrating Chinese culture tout court, however, this attitude often saw the preservation of Chinese culture as a powerful weapon in the fight against Western cultural hegemony, “a new Sinocentrism (Chūkashugi)—as opposed to Eurocentrism—in which Japan stood in for Chinese civilization.”69 The parallels with Pound’s interest in China are clear: He believed in the value of Confucian philosophy; he admired Chinese poetry (although mostly only until the Sung, at best); he thought it important to read the texts using the original Chinese as a point of departure, but then developed a nonnative way of reading that necessarily leaves out consideration of tone and rhyme (which would be very important in a more properly Chinese context, at least for the poetry). By contrast, Pound’s enthusiasm for Chinese classics in general and for Confucianism in particular was a consistent source of friction with his Chinese interlocutors, most of whom understood themselves as actively trying to liberate China from the burden of Confucianism and traditional learning.70 Pound’s relationship to China might heuristically be described as Japanese in this sense: The preservation of traditional Chinese tradition was compatible with Japanese modernization in ways that it could not be for Chinese modernizers. The conjunction of Confucianism, totalitarianism, and modernity makes more sense if understood as a version of Japanese stewardship rather than in terms of a direct relationship to China.

Bad cosmopolitanisms It is neither the case that Pound hallucinated (based on Fenollosa’s manuscripts) everything he thought he knew about East Asia nor that he somehow got something essential about it because of his poetic insight. Pound’s East Asia 68 69 70

Qtd. in ibid., 218. On shina, see also Tanaka, Japan’s Orient. Kurozumi, “Kangaku,” 218–219. See Qian Zhaoming, Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends.

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is a complex mixture of knowledge and ignorance, benevolence and racism, subtle precision and gross generalization, much like his Greece or his Provence. Such a conclusion is not as immediately satisfying as either admiring Pound’s singular genius or condemning him as Orientalist, but it is ultimately more interesting, more accurate, and perhaps of greater service to his work. Reading Pound’s uses of Japan in relation to some of his Japanese contemporaries, for example, highlights the extent to which his fascism lurks even in places we might not expect to find it, but also highlights the extent to which Pound was aware of and influenced by aspects of his present that decades of scholarship have hardly acknowledged. Any modern poem endeavoring to contain history must also endeavor to contain the world, a “world” that is, to be sure, as selective and problematic as the “history.” This is not only because failure necessarily accompanies any pursuit of totality, but because the pursuit forces one into particulars. Just as it is easy to critique the omissions of any actually written history, so too is it easy to invoke the world as the other of any actual map of modernism that has failed to include it all. But “the world” is not always liberating, of course. If pursued honestly, it leads to the recognition of some new set of constraints and, quite often, to some other history just as bleak as the one we were hoping to escape. If there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, no scholarly worlding of modernism should be content with the pleasures of a perpetual liberation from Eurocentrism. We must be prepared to be disappointed by the other. If it is worth thinking about Pound’s politics today, it is not because of how we can fix or instruct him (a long-lost cause). What can we learn from Pound? Perhaps there is something instructive in the ways his work eludes our current dichotomies: anticapitalist, philological, and generously cosmopolitan, but also fascist, appropriative, and frequently racist. If nothing else, Pound’s work recalls the central ambiguities of fascism, the reasons it appealed to so many people whom we today otherwise admire or would admire. As Hofmann writes, “The ambiguities of Japan’s fascism are a characteristic of fascism itself, reflecting its role as a mediator between revolution and restoration as well as

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its hybrid nature as a product of global and national history.”71 It is a mistake, even today, to think that fascism is the political philosophy of those who have failed to understand that the nation is a myth or who lack the insight to see global capital behind much that is wrong with the world. As North writes, “Claims that modernists like Yeats, Eliot, and Pound offer aesthetic resolutions of the tension between part and whole, fact and myth, personality and impersonality are inseparable from the claim that they also offer social reconciliations of unity and difference. In fact, it is just those poetic devices that seem to represent reconciliation that instead reveal its impossibility.”72 The Cantos are a record of such a failure, but so too are the various trilingual editions of Asian texts Pound planned, documents of one barbarism we were spared, from a future that never came, in which American poets sign their letters to Japanese friends “salve/banzai/wan soui/alala; und so weiter” (EP&J 105).73

71 72 73

Hofmann, The Fascist Effect, 7. Emphases added. North, Political, 16. “Alala” references D’Annunzio’s “Eia alala,” which became a kind of unofficial fascist call.

5

Ezra Pound and the Globalization of Literature Jean-Michel Rabaté

Let me begin rather polemically by posing a simple question: Why are Ezra Pound’s theories of literature so rarely mentioned in anthologies of Literary Theory or in Guides to World Literature, even if they regularly include a nodding acknowledgment that his ideas paved the way in those domains? Why are Pound’s essays absent from a comprehensive collection like World Literature in Theory edited by David Damrosch?1 And an alert and intelligent synthesis like Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters only mentions Pound in its first pages, merely in connection with the economics of literary value.2 Is it because Pound would displace the idea of a cultural “capital”? Is it because of Pound’s disreputable association with right-wing ideologies? Indeed, one cannot deny that Pound’s very name still emits sulfurous vapors for most. His poems and essays are corrosive, so much so that they tend to be skipped even by liberal minded critics. Is it that the shunning of Pound has to do with the idiosyncratic quality and the complexity of his critical judgments? In this case, it would be necessary to reexamine and restate some of his basic tenets. Many still hesitate before admitting that Pound has had a lasting impact on our disciplines, whether they are called “English,” “Comparative Literature,” “Literary and cultural theory,” or “World Literature theory.” Pound may have launched the contemporary meaning of comparative literature as a discipline, but this discipline is in crisis right now. Perhaps, such is my

1 2

David Damrosch, ed., World Literature in Theory (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 16–17.

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initial gamble, Pound’s concept of a globalized culture will offer solutions capable if not of overcoming the current crisis, at least of foreseeing a different future. Moreover, the crisis has not been limited to the older field of “comparative literature,” but has extended to what looks like a replacement, the domain of “world literature.” The shortcomings of this newer and vaguer field have been exposed by the editors of the journal N+1. In a sharp and caustic survey entitled “world lite,”3 Niki Saval and his colleagues have examined critically the weak consensus upon which the concept of “world literature” has relied. They note that contrary to the generous program of a global literature destroying once and for all our limited provincialisms, the globalization of literary studies has closely followed the movements of global capital. New cities will indeed allegorize a certain displacement, but if novels monumentalize Mumbai, Nairobi, Johannesburg, São Paulo, and Beijing instead of London, Paris, and New York, then the recent critique of colonialism and exploitation in our postcolonial condition looks staid and defanged. Salman Rushdie, tired of gathering the ire of Muslim fundamentalists, endorses the second Iraq invasion in the most liberal manner, whereas a novelist like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who had begun well with an African novel, Purple Hibiscus in 2003, begins her second novel, Americanah (2013) with an evocation of “Princeton,” which is its first word. Key figures like Michael Oondatje, Teju Cole, Junot Diaz, Mo-Yan, and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o exemplify a shift from true internationalist beginnings to an all too eager acceptance by the new locus of the globalized culture, North American universities. My analysis continues the conversation I had with N+1 editors soon after4 while developing themes that I have set forward in a chapter of Crimes of the Future, in which I discuss the problem of the “globalization of theory.” As is well-known, Pound worked by a series of displacements, amalgams, and translations. He first operated vertically in time, going back to Homer, 3

4

“World Lite: What Is World Literature?” N+1, issue 17 (Fall 2013), 1–3. https://nplusonemag.com/ issue-17. Niki Saval, Marco Roth, Shaj Mathew, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, “What’s Wrong with World Literature?” Slought Foundation, Audio Recording, January 30, 2014, https://slought.org/resources/ wrong_world_literature.

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the Greek tragedians, Dante and the Troubadours, at a time when he felt that all ages were “contemporaneous,” a loaded statement that we will need to interrogate. He then operated horizontally by broadening the field of his comparisons to include India, via Tagore and Yeats, Japan, via Yeats and Fenollosa, China, via Confucius and later the Jesuit histories of China, Africa, via Frobenius, and finally Australian aboriginal legends, via Frobenius’s students. After the war, he returned to the Greek texts he had translated first while exploring China differently, by reimagining Joseph Rock’s accounts of the non-Confucian myths and legends of the Naxi group. The vertical dimension had established the main tools of the investigation, a series of “rock drill” probes capable of penetrating the dense strata of a European past; the horizontal exploration had extended the map so as to include at least three other continents, Asia, Africa, Australia, next to Europe and the United States. Of course, the recantation of the final years put an end to the project of a unified synthesis. After his last return to Venice, Pound felt such a strong remorse at having believed so eagerly in Fascist myths of racial superiority and imperialist conquests that he decided to remain silent; he could have been reassured at the same time if he had realized that these dangerous myths, to which he clung for so long, would be debunked or exploded by the mass of texts and documents that he had managed to bring together.

Contemporaneity as radical historicism Thanks to the first two volumes of the excellent biography by A. David Moody, we can situate Pound more accurately among other modernist writers, artists, and critics, if only because Moody uses many unpublished letters and archival documents. One of the first texts to reopen would be The Spirit of Romance, a juvenile book replete with approximations and mistakes, but which nevertheless presents an impressive synthesis of Pound’s ideas about a European tradition going back to Homer and Sappho. The statement

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that most readers will remember comes from the 1910 Preface; it was one of the exhibits in my ideal Anthology of Global Literary Theory5: It is dawn at Jerusalem while midnight hovers above the pillars of Hercules. All ages are contemporaneous. It is B.C., let us say, in Morocco. The Middle Ages are in Russia. The future stirs already in the minds of the few. This is especially true of literature, where the real time is independent of the apparent, and where many dead men are our grandchildren’s contemporaries, while many of our contemporaries have been already gathered into Abraham’s bosom, or some more fitting receptacle. (SR 6)

The locales are not chosen at random here. The Pillars of Hercules are the straits of Gibraltar, and they mark the Western limit of the Mediterranean world. Gibraltar, which Pound had visited and knew well, sits in front of the coast of Morocco just a few miles away, an invitation to explore another continent, a gateway to the darker Africa behind. Jerusalem stands for the antithesis of Athens in Pound’s view of the Classical world, and one may agree that most of Russia in 1910 evoked a medieval society, with a majority of poor mujiks treated as slaves by a minority of rich and westernized noble families. However, Pound’s statement that “All ages are contemporaneous” should not be taken to mean that time does not count in history. On the contrary, the sentence suggests the reverse, namely that we all live in different times and periods even when we share the same present. Pound’s sense resembles what Adolf Loos had written two years before in a provocative essay, “Ornament and Crime.” By comparing ornaments with the tattoos worn by criminals, Loos was pleading for a new culture founded upon clean, pure, and spare lines. His modernity would not be totalitarian, for he knew that in Austria in 1908 there were Tyrolian peasants who loved ornaments on shoes and houses. They simply did not live in the same historical moment. Loos admits that it would be absurd to make these contemporaries reject their kitschy ornaments. His modernist manifesto from 1908 takes into account the uneven development of culture: 5

See Jean-Michel Rabaté, Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 22–28.

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I live in the year 1908, but my neighbor lives approximately in the year 1900, and one over there lives in the year 1880. It is a misfortune for any government, if the culture of its people is dominated by the past. The farmer from Kals lives in the twelfth century, and on the occasion of the jubilee Procession, tribes walked past which even during the period of mass migration were thought to be backward. (…) Even here we have people in the cities who are survivors from the eighteenth century, and who are appalled by a painting with violet shadows, because they cannot understand why the artist has used violet. To them, the pheasant which the cook has spent days preparing tastes better, and the cigarette case with Renaissance ornaments is more pleasing. And what is happening in the countryside? Clothes and household utensils belong to previous centuries. The farmer is no Christian, he is still a heathen.6

One often hears that Pound’s grandiose view of universal literature led him to propose a globalized history, as if his statement implied that he negated historical time. On the contrary, even if he aims at recreating a certain “myth,” with the return of Greek gods, say, such a “myth” will always be fully historicized. This is not what Stein, Eliot, and Joyce believed at that time, or even later. When Joyce described the structure of Finnegans Wake as an atemporal circle, he proclaimed that his last work presented “no past, no future” and that everything would “flow in an eternal present.”7 In clear contradistinction, Pound’s contemporaneous “present” implies a critical task that has nothing to do with the freezing of history according to a mythical pattern of historical returns. Pound’s “present” is the time to make precise discriminations and distinctions. These distinctions cross over long periods of time, but multiply rather than erase differences. We see this idea as well in the sentence preceding the paragraph I quoted: Pound asserts that we need a “literary scholarship” capable of weighing “Theocritus and Yeats with one balance” (SR 6).

6

7

Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime. Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1997), 3. Jacques Mercanton quoting Joyce in “The Hours of James Joyce,” trans. Lloyd C. Parks, in Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, ed. Willard Potts (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 207.

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Let us meditate on this claim. Today, it seems, few professors, whether teaching in departments of classics or English, would feel up to the task. It is indeed difficult. How can we establish a “balance” measuring these poets’ respective merits? We would have to weigh more than style, versification, common themes and images, but would also have to take into account their respective impacts on their ambient cultures, their political ideologies, the many reasons why still today we can think that they have produced “news that stays news.” The “balance” will have to be attuned to translation issues, presupposing our ability to perceive the gap between Greek metrics and Yeats’s verses tripping with a light Celtic touch. Pound’s point is of course not to assume any direct influence of Theocritus, the inventor of Greek idylls and bucolic poetry, on his friend and mentor, an Irish poet gently echoing Celtic legends and visions. In Ulysses, Joyce could not help making fun of the fact that Yeats was in the habit of comparing other poets, like Synge, to Homer. He puts this quip about Lady Gregory in Buck Mulligan’s mouth: “Couldn’t you do the Yeats’ touch? (…) The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time. One thinks of Homer.”8 Nevertheless, what Pound is arguing for is quite different—his maxim entails the elaboration of precise formal criteria, the establishment of complex ideological bridges connecting different cultures and periods. One needs to multiply levels of relevance and technical definitions in order to establish universal criteria, which cannot at any rate be reduced to formalist measurements. One of the thrills lying in wait for new readers of a modernist epic like The Cantos is to try to live up to Pound’s expectations. His homemade compound of references, his broad syncretic culture heaping up scraps and fragments, creates a spiral that unfolds at various speeds through the text. Those who decide to stay as “readers” agree to be enlisted in an educational process that will lead them to read unknown classics and listen to contemporary conversations differently. They will leave behind the traditional conception of culture as that which remains from an ocean of abstruse references when all the rest has been forgotten; they will renew personal dialogues with the great minds of the past. This process is a cumulative discovery or, better 8

James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 208.

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said, an “odyssey” that forces readers to investigate their own languages by progressing in a layered mapping of infinitely enmeshed historical styles. Pound understood early a pedagogical principle that would become emblematic of high modernism. The discovery that civilizations are mortal, as Spengler and Valéry argued, is accompanied by an awareness that they survive in so far as they bequeath linguistic layers, stylistic sediments, intertextual echoes, etymological concatenations, thematic rhymes, allusive subliminal traces that have been deposited unconsciously in each of us. Pound’s first Canto illustrates this procedure. No sooner have we begun reading Pound’s English translation of a sixteenth-century Latin translation of Homer’s Greek lines calling up Odysseus’ voyage to Hades, than we realize that Odysseus’ nekuia is ours: Like the hero, we progress through living and dead language before finding a way home. To make his retranslation more foreign and strange, Pound used strong-stress meter and the alliterative style derived from his previous rendering of Anglo-Saxon poems like “The Seafarer.” This superimposition of Anglo-Saxon rhythms makes us pass through the Latinate diction of a post-Virgilian Renaissance still alive in Andreas Divus’ Latin before leading us back to Homer’s most archaic moment. Then we encounter a world of shades, blood-rites, soothsaying and thirsty but talkative ghosts. In the end, what we have owned as readers is a mixture of archaic and contemporary references; we have thus entered into a modernist palimpsest. The stylistic odyssey of The Cantos makes us explore strange regions of culture by catching us in whirling eddies, which produces an equivalent of the spirals of historical time. We can then take a fresh look at roots whose origins reside in other texts. The main gain is that the scholarship needed to keep on reading will never be a prerequisite, but is apprehended in the present of the experience and also projected in the future, as a desire never fully realized. It becomes something we want to acquire. Pound expresses this urgency somewhat shrilly in Canto CV: I shall have to learn a little greek to keep up with this but so will you, drratt you. (C CV.770)

While enacting this radical historicity, Pound believed in its direct material, social, geographical determinations—all of this is or was in the real world,

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after all. One of the main determinations, he soon discovered, was to be found in economics, another in global politics, by which he designated the stability of kingdoms or empires founded on values and beliefs, whether moral or religious, in fact on some form of Hegelian Sittlichkeit. On these issues, Pound shared important ideas with Hegel and Marx, going even further in the insight that he had to deal with a whole earth. Such a “globe” was a world in which globalization was not just a dream of the Spirit realizing itself, but took a concrete starting point in a history made by men and for men. Pound agreed fully with the drift of the Communist Manifesto, a text in which Marx and Engels wrote prophetically: The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. (…) In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.9

Marx and Engels were completing Goethe’s idealist project of a universal literature by showing changes brought about by the material conditions of the market of ideas. Given these conditions, the task of any thinker, reader, or poet, says Pound, is to tackle vast movements of thought, movements that correspond to ideas of translation in the original meaning: They import ideas by moving them from one culture to another. This happened when Buddhism was imported to China and Japan from India (not a good thing, according to Pound’s biased sources). These translations often accompanied migrations associated with war, conquest, and imperialism. Similar moments of cross-fertilization occurred with the spreading of Christianity to parts of Europe that had been left alone, as with the arrival of Saint Patrick in Ireland, or when Islam was 9

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1847), in Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 224–225.

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disseminated in the Middle East and Africa after the seventh century. This is why a global theory of criticism will learn from religious studies, as Pound knew. If European literary hermeneutics began by adapting techniques of interpretation used for Biblical studies, the knowledge that we live in a multiethnic and decentered world has destabilized the ancient primacy granted to classical studies and a Western canon, and the new awareness of the huge migrations that preceded them have added their share of complexity to our changing criteria. As C. Pierce Salguero has shown in his suggestive Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China,10 translation studies need to combine a syncretic approach comparing broad cultural systems and the finely grained study of specific texts and discourses. If one examines the exchanges between India and China about medicine in the premodern era, one cannot abstract specific recipes for health from religious considerations such as Buddhist views of human salvation; taken together, these rules and considerations reconstitute a network of cross-cultural transmission. If Pound was hostile to Buddhism, he was aware of the fact that Confucius was articulating his definitions of humanity and ethics at the time of Heraclitus, the first philosopher of absolute becoming who died more or less at the same time as the Chinese sage. Plato was still writing about Socrates when Mencius was born. Pound knew that the philosophy of Aristotle would not have reached the Western world in the Middle Ages without the Arab translations of Averroes and many others. Indeed, we see this chronology appended to chapter V of The Spirit of Romance: CHRONOLOGICAL CHART Scotus Eriugina Arab philosophers died 877 Al kindi, died 870 Comments on Aristotle Avicenna, born 980 Guillaume de Poitiers 1071–1127 1170 … 1228 circa 1190 Vogelweide Averroes, died 1198 Bertrans de Born Hauenstaufen … (SR 100) 10

C. Pierce Salguero, Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

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The list goes on, but it is unclear what the three columns refer to: the right hand side looks like philosophy only, but then it includes translations of Ovid. The middle column looks like German references, but then shifts to France, Sicily, and Italy. A last footnote adds somewhat wistfully: The period might be made more transparent by a more thorough table of dates; affiliations of troubadours and dynasties; of books available or newly active at a given time (SR 100). Tentative or amateurish as these groupings may appear, there is nevertheless a wish to establish solid cross-references across different regions and nations, in order to point to a continuum compounding culture and politics. Those two lines contain a whole program for a scholarship still in the making, all the while setting down strong evaluations and definitive judgments: “Curious lack of personality in Sicilian poetry,” or again “Albigeois infamy” (SR 100). Pound begins chapter X of Spirit of Romance with a no less cursory recall of the rise and fall of empires: “In 1453 Constantinople was captured by Mohamed II, ‘conqueror of two empires, twelve kingdoms, and three hundred cities.’ This event and the invention of printing did not cause the Renaissance, but precipitated it” (SR 214). Pound understood that the concept of “imperialism” was not born with the British Empire but had existed earlier in China and Africa, albeit with different inflections. Pound’s radical historicism entailed a curiosity about all the facets of human life, and saw the highest cultural values as rooted in idioms, in landscapes, and in institutions that each contributed defining features to the poetry he was interested in.

A new Goethe from the East? A similar mixture of poetics, religion, and politics presided over Pound’s endorsement of Rabindranath Tagore, a poet whom he did not discover himself, since it was Yeats who was directly responsible for his promotion. Indeed, Yeats was in a better place to perceive links between two “colonies” of the British Empire, India and Ireland. When the Nobel Prize for Literature

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was given to Tagore in 1913, he was not only a famous poet, novelist, and playwright from Bengal, but also a revered educator and a charismatic religious leader. Tagore received the Nobel Prize mainly because of the success of his English version of poems, originally simple songs, in Gitanjali: Song Offerings published in 1912. Gitanjali went through a dozen printings in London just after its publication. In his telegram of acceptance, Tagore thanked the Nobel committee for having “brought the distant near, and made a stranger a brother,” but his acceptance speech was more conscious of what he stood for in terms of East and West: I know that I must not accept that praise as my individual share. It is the East in me which gave to the West. For is not the East the mother of spiritual Humanity, and does not the West, do not the children of the West amidst their games and plays when they get hurt, when they get famished and hungry, turn their faces to that serene mother, the East?11

Those “games and plays” that can lead people to “get hurt” evoke a looming world war that most acute observers saw as inevitable then. Tagore’s openness and universalism was stressing a spirit of peace in anticipation of the slaughter. He also implied that he would use the money to establish a university in which students from the East and the West could gather and examine their common treasures. Tagore also then began his friendship with Gandhi, and like Gandhi, was hoping that a postcolonial situation that would follow from a world war could bring about independence. In fact, for India, the postcolonial stage would take another world war and many more martyrs before being reluctantly granted by a Britain weakened by the conflict. Tagore had been visiting London in the spring of 1912, where he found a devoted supporter in William Butler Yeats, who declared at a banquet: To take part in honouring Mr. Rabindranath Tagore is one of the great events of my artistic life. I have been carrying about me a book of 11

The Essential Tagore, ed. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), xxv.

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translation into English prose of a hundred of his Bengali lyrics written within the last ten years; I know of no one in my time who has done anything in the English language to equal these lyrics.12

Surprisingly, the versions of his poems provided by Tagore were simplified prose translations. Pound, who had heard Tagore sing the poems to a musical accompaniment, knew how different they sounded in the original. More than Yeats, Pound was aware that the prose paraphrase had weakened the original by making it sound Biblical or pastoral, thus erasing the force and the charm of the original. The edition of “the essential Tagore,” in which he is called a new Goethe coming from the East, highlights the embarrassing distortions that his prose versions created. The first line of Gitanjali is often quoted to illustrate the neo-Whitmanian unanimism of these poems. One cannot help noticing that the rhythm and wording sound banal and weak: “Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.” A literal translation from the original by Fakrul Alam is more daring and immediate: “I’ve become infinite: / such is the consequence of your play. / Pouring me out, you fill me / with new life once again.”13 Another typical invocation in the 1912 version begins with “I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed,” where the literal translation offers this: “To the festival of creation I have had an invitation: / Blessed, blessed is human life!”14 Such obvious improvements confirm Pound’s belief in the power of literal translation. Initially, Pound had shared Yeats’s infatuation with the Bengali poet, writing an introduction to six poems by Tagore in the December  1912 issue of Poetry. There, Pound asserted that this publication was “an event in the history of English poetry and of world poetry.”15 Pound stressed the refinement of the poet, and made an important comparison between Bengali and Greek—for him, the sound of the poems was “rather like good Greek” since Bengali derives from Sanskrit, and Sanskrit is a sort of older 12 13 14 15

Qtd. in Probhat Kumar Mukherji, Life of Tagore (New Delhi: Indian Book Company, 1975), 111. Essential Tagore, xxv. Ibid. Ezra Pound, “Tagore’s Poetry,” Poetry 1.3 (December 1912): 92. Poetry Foundation website. http:// www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/3#!/20569670/0. January 26, 2015.

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uncle of ancient Greek.16 Listening to Tagore reading, he felt like a Petrarch who would have heard Homer in the original for the first time. Besides, Tagore was attempting to renew the ancient “fellowship between man and gods.”17 Then Tagore took a trip to the United States. Late in 1912, he visited Urbana, Champaign, where his son was engaged in agronomical research, and wrote to Pound to complain of his solitude. Pound, obviously quite close to the Bengali poet then, narrated an anecdote about his rejection of nationalism in January 1913. Someone had asked how Tagore could be taken as a Bengali patriot when he had written an ode to the King. A student of Tagore then explained that Tagore tried to write a nationalist poem but failed; Tagore had instead given an older poem, saying: “It’s addressed to the deity. But you may give it to the national committee. Perhaps it will content them” (SL 14). Witty as this is, the joke reveals an aspect of Tagore with which Pound ended up being disillusioned: a syncretic religion that would replace nationalist politics. He would begin to make fun of Tagore’s hazy religiosity that anticipated the craze for Khalil Gibran’s global spiritualism: “As a religious preacher (Tagore) is superfluous,” Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe (SL 19). He added: “We’ve got Lao Tse. And his (Tagore’s) philosophy hasn’t much in it for a man who has ‘felt the pangs’ or been pestered with Western civilization. I don’t mean quite that, but he isn’t either Villon or Leopardi, and the modern demands just a dash of their insight” (SL 19). For Pound, Tagore was perfect as long as one considered him as an exotic voice, a contemporary Kabir, but he could not be taken seriously as a thinker, especially when he believed in his mission, which was the dissemination of a universal message of peace. This side of Tagore was closer to the syncretic mysticism of theosophy, which explains why Yeats had been drawn to him in the first place. More important for Pound were the nationalist aspiration of Bengalis and Hindus who were striving to achieve independence from Britain or at least get a form of Home Rule. Tagore, because of his religiosity and universalism, could never be a true nationalist. This universalism had been a determining factor in the award of the Nobel

16 17

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 93.

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Prize, but this became a sign for Pound that Tagore had lost his relevance as a poet. While he had become a welcome symbol of weak or well-meaning opening of the West to the East, his sharpness as a writer had been blunted. Like Yeats, Pound first read Tagore’s religious rhapsodies as another variation on theosophic rhetoric. In fact, the Upanishads were an essential part of his culture. Tagore belonged to Brahmo Samaj, a reformist Hindu sect founded by Rammohun Roy. It rejected ordinary Hinduism and embraced a formless deity. This religion underpinned his whole esthetic while entailing an ethics that prevented Tagore from being a true modernist. In many essays of the twenties and thirties, Tagore attacked Eliot, Pound, and even Yeats, berating them for being alienated from their communities and ultimately for being nihilistic. His vision of art implied that a poet was ethically responsible for all other creatures. Tagore’s West-Eastern Divan linked the Romantic ideal of the poet as priest and prophet, a paradigm that tempted Pound, with a syncretic classicism. Unlike Pound, however, Tagore would uphold all his long life the dream of a peaceful world unified by a rejection of totalitarianism, nationalism, and imperialism.

Another dream of unifying East and West It was mostly because of rising Japanese imperialism that Fenollosa could attempt to create a different form of universalism from the mysticism of Tagore. He had been invited to teach at the new Tokyo university created by the Meiji regime in order to know the best that America had to offer; Fenollosa was a Hegelian teaching at Harvard, and he was called upon to bring the new enlightenment to the East. The story of the transmission of his notes has been told many times, but what stands out most is that his legacy is due to Pound. Fenollosa had died suddenly in London in 1908, leaving a mass of unpublished notes and manuscripts. His widow Mary had first edited one book, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, but spent three years and all her money on the venture. The first edition was published in 1912, by which time she was exhausted. Then she contacted Pound, and suggested that he edit the remaining manuscripts left by her husband. In September 1913 during a

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dinner in London, Mary graciously offered to give Pound the notebooks and manuscripts on which her husband had been working, his notes on Japanese and Chinese language as well as his translations from poems and noh plays. This unique gift pushed Pound and British modernism into uncharted seas. The gift of Fenollosa’s notebooks and manuscripts incited Pound to immerse himself in a huge Eastern tradition; moreover, he believed that it should become accessible to all nonspecialists. Mary Fenollosa’s decision to make Pound her husband’s literary executor was motivated primarily by her literary sensibility. She had appreciated the poetic fervor of the young American and guessed that his energy as a literary agitator could make her husband’s name survive. Pound had already worked on manuscripts of the troubadours, and was as iconoclastic and critical of official scholarship as the late Fenollosa had been. However, Pound was not a sinologist and would never become one, in spite of his efforts. His incompetence caused some blunders (he never realized that Li Po and Rihaku Po were the same famous poet, one name being in Chinese, the other its Japanese transliteration) but those very limitations prevented him from falling into the trap of the orientalism that was rife among official British Museum sinologists. Pound was thus saved from “orientalizations” by his very lack of academic knowledge. It was the limitation of his scholarship that prevented him from adopting the patronizing tone that Said and others critics have denounced when critiquing Western Orientalism. Since knowledge was never static for Pound, he followed his own “impatience of knowledge,” a term used by Hermann Broch to oppose pure science and its appropriation by poets and novelists. Pound’s own impatience was linked with the need to make use of the texts or poets he was discovering. Knowledge was never to remain fixed, stable, or stale—terms that are nearly synonymous for Pound. If knowledge is always seen “in action,” knowledge cannot be self-reflexive: it cannot theorize about itself in a dispassionate way. Pound wrote excitedly to William Carlos Williams in December  1913: “Dorothy is learning Chinese. I’ve an old Fenollosa treasure in mss.” Two months earlier, Pound enlisted the help of his friend Allen Upward who had made him discover French translations of Confucius and Mencius in Pauthier’s 1841 version. Upward had published The Sayings of Confucius in 1904. Pound

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asked him to use these maxims for an article in the New Freewoman. Upward obliged with a selection from Confucius’ Analects. Interestingly, in the context of the change of name for The Egoist, a teaching of “K’ung the Master” made it clear that egoism was forbidden: “There were four things from which the Master was entirely free; He had no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary decisions, no obstinacy, and no egoism.” Nevertheless, this led to a series of essays on Chinese philosophy in the issues of The Egoist; for instance, the first issue of the Egoist (December 1914) had the sinologist William Loftus Hare discuss Chinese Egoism. The gift of Fenollosa’s Asian “treasure” had even broader repercussions when Pound shared it with Yeats. Pound and Yeats collaborated closely from November  1913 to January  1914 when they shared a British cottage. Pound played the role of model secretary; he took dictation, classified correspondence, and read to Yeats at night. Meanwhile they edited Fonollosa’s notes. This looks very much like a Thomas Bernhard novel: the two poets with their strong accents, one Irish, one American, trying to make sense of Fenollosa’s messy notes mostly about languages like Chinese and Japanese that neither can read.18 Nevertheless, the sifting process was productive. In January  1914, Pound sent a version of Nishikigi for which he had used Fenollosa’s rough crib to Poetry, then published “Noh” or Accomplishment, which contains Fenollosa’s essays on noh with a selection of canonical noh plays translated from his papers, while Yeats wrote the introduction. Since the noh plays address a refined aristocracy, its pastoral themes, priests, fairies, ghosts, and peasants, rang close to the Celtic pastoralism of Yeats’s earlier plays. Thus, the magical and ghostly world of the noh could be assimilated to the Irish folklore that Yeats knew so well. Pound also worked on Fenollosa’s translations of Chinese poems accompanied by Japanese glosses. The result was Cathay in 1915, a collection of poems that, by itself, reinvented Chinese poetry, as Eliot said. “The RiverMerchant’s Wife,” “The Jewel Stairs’ Grievance,” and “Exile’s Letter” are masterpieces of creative translation. Finally, Pound tackled Fenollosa’s heady

18

See Thomas Bernhard, Correction, trans. Sophie Wilkins (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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mixture of notes on the Chinese ideogram, compiling The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry in 1918, in which both he and Fenollosa saw the foundations for a new system of poetics. Pound did not follow Fenollosa slavishly, however. In his version of the text, Pound often voiced objections, mostly by inserting notes and emendations. For instance, at one point, Fenollosa contended that the English language was poorer than Chinese because it had an excessive number of verbs that needed abstract adjectives to accompany them. He took the example of “to shine,” which would lead to derivatives like “bright” or “luminosity,” three terms linked by abstractions. Here, Pound interjected a striking rebuke: “A good writer would use ‘shine’ (i.e., to shine), ‘shining,’ and ‘the shine’ or ‘sheen,’ possibly thinking of the German ‘schöne’ and ‘Schönheit’ but this does not invalidate Prof. Fenollosa’s contention.”19 In fact, Pound’s commonsense remark does seem to invalidate Fenollosa’s contention: A good poet writing in English will know how to retain the entire dynamism of a word if its form remains close enough to its verbal aspect. Saussy, Stalling, and Klein, the editors of the notes and essays on the Chinese character, have pointed out that Fenollosa remained a Hegelian philosopher even after he had converted to Buddhism. In Tokyo, his students and colleagues were elaborating a mixture of Hegelian historicism and of Tendai philosophy of the Third Way.20 Saussy, Stalling, and Klein conclude that “Even if ideograms perfectly depicted ‘nature,’ nature itself is a complex of ‘dependent-arisings’ that flash and transmute, however artful the ‘snap-shots’ we use to capture them.”21 They also note the curiously prophetic nature of some essays not transcribed or condensed by Pound, like the striking “The Coming of East and West,” a title that could have been taken as a motto by Pound. However, in that 1898 essay, Fenollosa not only anticipates the RussoJapanese War of 1904–05, but also a century marked by two world wars, with

19

20 21

Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, eds. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 51. Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 22.

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Russia, Germany, England, and the United States all vying for influence in the rich markets and hinterland of China. Forced to be more aware of his double heritage, Fenollosa was torn between several imperialisms, the Spanish having lost to the American version, the Japanese expansion having got the better of an older Russian empire, all of these forces clashing in globalized conflicts: “But the last year has witnessed an expected awakening on both sides of the Atlantic. The forcing together of the two halves of our race by the Spanish war, and the unfolding, if only for a glimpse, of a common, unheard-of-destiny in the East, are like the very voice of Time suddenly made audible.”22 Fenollosa perceives a momentous shift in the “balance of powers” that will modify the map of the world. Such a shift was announced by the clash between two empires: a rapidly declining Spanish empire, and the emerging, perhaps too quickly victorious, American empire. If Pound omitted these political asides when he published the book in 1919, it was not that he was uninterested in the politics of world history, but that he had not yet linked the radical vision of a natural language like Chinese exemplifying an imagist poetics of natural dynamism to a political theology founded on superior values. It is true, though, that he followed Fenollosa’s example when he turned into a disciple of Confucius. However, his version of Confucius was less philosophical and more political, a Dantean good ruler, or a Voltairian adviser to “enlightened despots.” If China was to blend with ancient Greece and thus launch a new “paideuma” built on good governance, such a Poundian syncretism would make Fenollosa’s dream of a fusion of East and West come true.

No grammatology, but the law of the heart Saussy, Stalling, and Klein demonstrate that Pound not only distorted Fenollosa’s notes on Chinese, but also that the poets and philosophers who endorsed these views perpetuated other mistakes by spreading other myths. Pound believed that he could found poetic knowledge on a new philology that 22

Ibid., 154.

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would consist above all in taking Chinese ideograms as a model. Fenollosa made him understand that Chinese words worked closer to the dynamism of nature. Both the practice of poetry and a new literary criticism would be founded upon such a radically decentered philology. Ideogrammatic writing, in this way, launched a new poetics that would also eliminate distinctions between prose and poetry, between music and verb, between personal lyricism and historical document. Thus, in Of Grammatology, Derrida famously named Pound as being one of the rare writers who had tried to break with a Western tradition dominated by logocentrism: It was normal that the breakthrough was more secure and more penetrating on the side of literature and poetic writing: normal also that it, like Nietzsche, at first destroyed and caused to vacillate the transcendental authority and dominant category of the epistémè: being. This is the meaning of the work of Fenellosa whose influence upon Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics was, with that of Mallarmé, the first break in the most entrenched Western tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pound’s writing may thus be given all its historical significance.23

In Derrida’s reading, the crucial decentering is achieved via an Orient that is partly imaginary. As sinologists have confirmed, Fenollosa’s theory relies on a simplification of the writing system of the Chinese language. Not all ideograms are pictograms: only a minority of them are, most ideograms being composed of a phonetic element linked to a radical whose etymology is not a “picture.” What matters is less Fenollosa’s tendentious presentation, however, than what he provided as a starting point for poetry. Pound’s decentering gesture was not consistent either, since the discovery of the “ideogrammic” method was replaced by an ideological system dominated by Confucius’s ideas of “rectification” of designations. In the thirties, Confucius’s linguistics of denomination and respect for family values lent moral weight to the politics of Mussolini. The first appearances of ideograms in The Cantos are contemporaneous with an elliptical and 23

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 92. I changed “historical” to “historial.”

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historical writing that owes very little to ideograms constituted by the stacking up of object symbols as in the early essays. Derrida’s remark on the “historical significance” of Pound’s gesture, with a nod to Heidegger’s Ur-history of being, takes on all its force if one focuses on the event at the heart of the great epic poem that is The Cantos. Italy’s defeat, the execution of Il Duce, the failure of the fascist dream, the incarceration in a prison camp near Pisa, and the possibility of execution for betrayal, all these provoke in the poetic journal of The Pisan Cantos a second break with the poet’s initial theses. The event is a “tragedy” that leads Pound to combine writing with recollection, which makes him meditate on the traces not only of his previous writings but also of the inscriptions of historical events. Seeing himself about to die and writing a Testament like François Villon to whom he had devoted an opera, Pound’s writing needs only to reactivate traces of past events: First came the seen, then thus the palpable Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell, What thou lovest well is thy true heritage What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee (C LXXXI.541)

This passage from The Pisan Cantos harks back to a translation of Cavalcanti’s Canzone in which love derives from sight via a play on words linking Eros to oras found in Plotinus. The ecstatic vision is made up of material traces of the past; they are as it were printed in a heart, which then becomes a veritable recording chamber. Pound’s phrase “that formèd trace in his mind” will return like a leitmotiv in the Cantos that follow. Canto XXXVI offers a translation of the poem in which Cavalcanti had defined love as memory’s flame: Where memory liveth, it takes its state Formed like a diafan from light on shade … (…) And his strange quality sets sighs to move Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame. (C XXXVI.177, 178)

A similar evolution toward a “heart” as receptacle of traces can be discerned in Derrida’s work. His essay addressing the question “What is poetry?” puts

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forward the idea that poetry distinguishes itself from other literary modes through a unique injunction, a fundamental desire: the wish to make readers want to learn the text by heart. This hypothesis, seen superficially, might imply a brazen revival of logocentrism, and therefore Derrida does not state it without a degree of obliquity. His prosopoeia of poetry makes it say this: “I am a dictation, pronounces poetry, learn me by heart, copy me down, guard me and keep me, dictated dictation, right before your eyes: soundtrack, wake, trail of light, photograph of the feast in mourning.”24 Here, poetry becomes “the poetic” in a declension from noun to adjective, which makes it possible to shift the literary genre toward a personal experience, an encounter with otherness as such. However, the law of the poem will always be the same: it is the law of the heart, the law of having to be learned by heart. One can speak of an oral apprenticeship of the poetic text that is nevertheless geared to become spatial writing. Its irreducible spatiality, a turning in place, moving from one return to another, presupposes a strong relationship to the event. As Pound does in his Cantos, Derrida presents the utopia of a writing that is unique and singular but also, paradoxically, repeatable because it is already a repetition of a repetition. It is inscribed on the body of the poet, and within this body, it reaches to its most intimate organ, the heart. Poetry separates itself from a certain ideality proper to “literature”—Derrida’s first planned dissertation was a phenomenological study of the “ideality of the literary object.” Poetry would be less literature than rhythm and event, both theory and the dictation of a literal gush. Derrida then imagines a fable, like a parable. He sees the poem posited like a hedgehog on a highway. Each driver is free to run over it and kill it, or to spare it, picking it up cautiously, so resolutely does it defend itself, rolled up in a ball of sharp bristles. In Pound’s book of traces, a book chockfull of personal memories, most of which are incomprehensible, so closely are the references wed to the tribulations of the poet exiled from New York to London, from Paris to Rapallo and Pisa, Pound reconstitutes an entire tradition through the persisting effort of his poetic writing. He also mimics closely the century’s excesses, having fallen into the traps of anti-Semitism

24

Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 223.

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and fascism, being led astray by his fanatical denunciation of Usury even if he qualified this by saying that Usury came from the disrespect of Jewish law by the Jews themselves. In The Pisan Cantos, Pound repudiates nothing of his past aberrations but gives credit to his old idea of rebuilding the Temple—not only the Temple of Malatesta at Rimini, which had fascinated him long enough, but also the Temple of Jerusalem, which preserved the precepts buttressing economic justice: So that in the synagogue in Gibraltar the sense of humour seemed to prevail during the preliminary parts of the whatever but they respected at least the scrolls of the law from it, by it, redemption @ $8.50, @ $8.67 buy the field with good money no unrighteousness in meteyard or in measure (of prices) and there is no need for the Xtns to pretend that they wrote Leviticus chapter XIX in particular with justice Zion not by cheating the eye-teeth out of Don Fulano or of Caoi e Tizio; Why not rebuild it? (C LXXXVI.474)

The question “Why not rebuild the Temple of Zion?” sounds paradoxical if one thinks of Pound’s often virulent anti-Semitism. However, his madness is not without method. He attacks the concept of a unique and jealous God. For Pound, as for Nietzsche, monotheism anticipated capitalism. A monotheistic God should not be confused with an ethical foundation, unthinkable without the law. This law, which would articulate the truth of the economy (fair return on prices, without exploitation or loss) and would thus also be the basis of the social body, would also be the law of poetic giving. For whoever could allow to resonate within his or her heart the perfect rhythm of memories inscribed by time and history, learned by heart involuntarily, as it were, can hear time resonate as pure gift, in a radical donation. Pound adapted from Frobenius, the German anthropologist and historian of Africa, the term Sagetrieb (the drive to tell stories, that Frobenius saw as

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prevalent in oral cultures). He used the term to describe a drive to express oneself through the heartbeats of poetic speech. Sagetrieb, the “drive to tell legends,” is exemplified in the most diverse cultures while it evokes the term that Heidegger used repeatedly in his later essays, as in Holzwege. The tragedy of the later Pound is that he identified the poetizing force of the Dichten at the very moment that he was excluded from it. He could not reconcile the ethical law with the polytheistic apprehension of a return of the gods to earth except in a veritable palinode, this time, in contrast with the conclusion of The Pisan Cantos, a self-critique always closer to silence. The last fragments of The Cantos accomplish this ultimate shattering of the voice. It is then metamorphosed into text and letters, at the expense of its own legibility.

Pound’s Mochlos A few words about Pound’s specific take on fascism must be said here. There is no doubt that Pound had been “converted” to fascism, and that the political discourse became a religion for him. It was in fact a political theology, as Matthew Feldman has shown cogently.25 Because of Pound’s religious fascism, because of Heidegger’s fascism too, any humanistic approaches to literature and culture should be replaced by a globalized context that pays attention to issues of domination and subjection, of racism and cosmopolitanism. The perspective of a unified world forces us to confront a broader geography and a longer history. Traditional concepts of literary criticism such as tragedy, beauty, and the sublime, the collective or individual nature of interpretation need to be reinterpreted in this expanded political framework. To this end, the novelist and essayist J. M. Coetzee compared the chaos of notes left by Walter Benjamin with Pound’s Cantos. Benjamin’s essays and fragments share with Pound’s works the distinction of being extremely allusive and learned while neither author saw their research authenticated or accepted by universities—like Pound’s various attempts at having his poems 25

Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–1945 (Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2013).

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or critical essays accepted as a substitute PhD by Penn, which all failed. Meanwhile Benjamin’s dissertation on the German baroque drama was not accepted by his university. Benjamin’s obsession was to define modernity without believing in the bourgeois myth of progress. Benjamin shared this insight with Pound: both rejected the ideology of “progress,” Benjamin by keeping his distance from Adorno’s neo-Marxist historical dialectics, Pound by relinquishing any preordained Christian teleology, especially after he had taken Confucian China as his main point of reference. Coetzee’s irreverent analysis makes him denounce Benjamin’s contradictions by comparing his method with that of Pound: both followed the principle of cross-historical ideograms, the juxtaposition of vivid particulars or splintered images whose assemblages will evoke concepts in the mind of the reader. Even if the analogy with Chinese characters has no philological validity, Pound’s Chinese philology agrees with Benjamin’s central contention that “traces” are to be seen in material objects. Traces lead readers turned detectives to a deeper understanding of the causes producing the scene of a political, economic, and historical crime: From a distance, Benjamin’s magnum opus is curiously reminiscent of another great ruin of twentieth century literature, Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Both works are the issue of years of jackdaw reading. Both are built out of fragments and quotations, and adhere to the high-Modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and economists are presiding figures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by the monster of fascism, Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.26

The indictment is severe but Coetzee’s comparison is illuminating. Benjamin and Pound can remain useful “guides” today, even if they may have overestimated the relevance of the bodies of knowledge they gathered for a direct application to our times. It is their radical methods that guide us. 26

J. M. Coetzee, “Walter Benjamin, the Arcades Project,” in Inner Workings, Literary Essays 2000–2005 (New York: Viking, 2007), 61.

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They are educators who flaunt values in which we do not necessarily believe. Pound is an Erzieher, like Schopenhauer for Nietzsche (the German word keeps the etymological root of “guidance” in “e-ducation”). Nietzsche had to move out of Schopenhauer as fast as he could! Pound was failed by professors such as Penniman, while Benjamin’s dissertation was deemed unreadable; none of them would get a stable teaching position. What the University of Pennsylvania professors reproached the young Pound for was similar to what Adorno saw lacking in Benjamin: It was simply “theory,” or, in other words, a discursive justification for their assemblages of objects. If Pound was the only graduate student flunked in Penniman’s graduate class on the history of literary criticism, he notes that he was also the only student interested in the subject.27 Theory would work in similar ways for Benjamin and Pound. It is a discourse that connects issues of language and society, and that is never afraid of provoking and attacking. Like Benjamin, Pound wanted to reach a vantage point beyond specialization, a lever that was also a poetic machine putting all institutions of knowledge at risk. Derrida has meditated on this issue in the wake of Kant’s analysis of the “conflict of faculties.” Derrida generalizes from Kant and finds another “law” in texts: it is not only the law of the “heart” but a “lever” (mochlos in Greek) that will call into question the politics of the interpretive communities that it constitutes. Such a lever conditions a new politics of interpretation; here is how this law can urge us to act: “Declared or clandestine, such a proposal calls for the politics of an interpretative community gathered around the text, and indeed of a global society, a civil society with or without a state, a veritable regime enabling the inscription of a community.”28 The danger embodied by Pound, which explains his quarrels with most of his professors, was that there was no way of stopping his investigations. His desire to reach a lever, linked with a point of view that might be called “comparatist,” would not exclude examining issues of prestige and privilege, of class and money. 27

28

James Wilhelm, The American Roots of Ezra Pound (New York: Garland, 1985), 153, and Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character. The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 68. Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos,” in The Conflict of the Faculties, ed. Richard Rand, trans. Richard Rand and Amy Wygant (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1992), 21.

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This is how James Wilhelm assesses Pound’s years as a student in The American Roots of Ezra Pound. Wilhelm presents How to Read as a diatribe against the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate school in English. He  concludes: “In short, Pound wanted to create a department of Comparative Literature, and was frustrated, just as today many schools tend to divide literary studies almost entirely along national lines.”29 Pound would of course have represented a whole department by himself. And the kind of education he wanted to sponsor could not be constrained, often coming closer to patronage than tuition. In a letter to his former professor Felix Schelling, Pound outlines a project that he will later implement with T. S. Eliot and other friends in need: But then no American University has ever tried to be a centre of thought. Pennsylvania would score if she were first to institute such a fellowship. A fellowship given for creative abilities regardless of whether the man had any university degree whatsoever. The fellow would attend lectures when he liked and then only, he would have no examinations for the thought of them is a poison in a man’s ear … . (SL 99)

Pound’s revolutionary proposal connects a high modernist belief in the power of a new language and the utopian vision couched in practical terms, the pragmatic wisdom that will offer a good life for all. Pound managed to weave his way through incompatible systems of belief not by unifying them within a single ideology (whether Fascist, Confucian, Neo-Platonist, or Transcendentalist) but by questioning a traditional doxa about subjectivity and humanism. This meant coupling such a quest with an ethical demand insisting on one’s unquenchable curiosity and the family values upheld by Greek tragedy. The tragedy was before and after—its arc encloses Pound’s works. It might be fitting to conclude with the motto of Tempus Loquendi, tempus Tacendi, a maxim that served the brutal Malatesta family well enough, but that can be claimed with equal relevance by the Quakers—both believing in oratorical force followed by silent action or silent rumination. Pound’s

29

Wilhelm, American Roots, 153.

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Quaker ancestors presided over some of his obsessions. His final silence after he had realized the extent of his errors kept a Quaker ring. One might want to oppose Basil Bunting as a left-wing Quaker to Pound, his master and friend, the right-wing Quaker. Beyond this alternative, we have now reached a Tempus Legendi. We don’t have to be silent about the unforgivable elements of Pound’s poetry and prose writings, and there are many. However, denouncing his intolerance and prejudice as flaws should not deter us from reading the works. Just as the time for collective efforts at annotation has gone, the time of denunciation has passed. Can one for all that take Pound as a “guide” to “Kulchur”? Nietzsche had taken Schopenhauer as a guide and educator, but had to reject him later. We  tend to see in Pound’s experimental didacticism the function of a modernist Schopenhauer, choosing as a modernist Nietzsche either Eliot, Joyce, H. D., or Stein. But perhaps, after all, Pound was our American Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, he was unzeitgemäss, “untimely” because all at once “modern” and “unmodern.” He acted and wrote “out of season” in the hope of making us revise our own “timeliness.” One could show that Pound is all the more relevant because his “untimeliness” led to a revision of values that we take for granted. Pound’s affinity with Nietzsche, both being deviant philologists ready to criticize everything, both eager to found culture upon a radical reevaluation of all values, was noted by Derrida. Derrida, unsure whether to use Nietzsche as lever to subvert Heidegger or Heidegger as a philosophical machine to dismantle and bury Nietzsche’s intempestive energies, looks very much like Pound on this issue. We may remember that Nietzsche liked quoting Emerson whom he called generically “an American”: “Beware, when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. (…) A new degree of culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.”30 After this quote, Nietzsche mentioned the Cynic Diogenes, the first self-proclaimed “cosmopolites,” a citizen of the world and not of the city, a philosopher who

30

Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 193.

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derided Plato’s totalitarian idealism. According to Nietzsche, Diogenes had criticized a fellow philosopher in those terms: “How can he be considered great, since he has been a philosopher for so long and has never yet disturbed anybody?”31 In the same way, Pound wanted to disturb and function like a cosmopolitan guide to a better sense of life and history. This presupposed that he would never become a boring “academic.” He loved teaching, but for him, the taught tradition would have to be reinvented, rewritten, and reread. He was our own first global theoretician because he was a poet who put his heart less on his sleeve than on the poetic page. He has been a poet and a thinker from whom we can learn about themes and concepts that no one else conveys, and he never forgets to bring us back those tiny things, like a mint leaf in Pisa, that quicken the heart. My essay, too, has tried to trace the main axes underpinning the East–West fantasmagoria of Pound, so as to limn a whole dream in which the figure of a living heart is discernible. Pound’s modernist palimpsest can actively reanimate world literature by giving us the model of a global theoretician endowed with a heart.

31

Ibid., 194.

6

Ezra Pound and the Comparative Literature of the Present, or, Triptych Rome/London/Pisa Christine Froula

Is nobody aware that a contemporary writer, … a poet with the rarest gift for translation, … is actually giving a course on the Comparative Literature of the Present? –Dial publisher James Sibley Watson1 from the death cells in sight of Mt. Taishan @ Pisa Canto LXXIV.447 If Ezra Pound’s fifty-year epic stands like an Everest in the terrain of modern poetry and poetics, the approach to The Pisan Cantos in particular is not for the faint of heart. On the first page of this poem that some might think impossible to have been written, or at least to read, after Auschwitz swing the mutilated bodies of Mussolini and Clara Petacci—the manifest rage of the Italians whose country the megalomaniac dictator has wrecked—framed, incredibly, as elegiac homage. The poet—the expatriate American poet, long resident in the land of Dante— mourns alone. “a lone ant from a broken ant-hill / … of Europe” (C LXXVI.478), he speaks for no one: not the Italian fascists lured to bombed-out chaos by Mussolini’s ambition for a new imperial Rome nor the Italian communists who avenged the fifteen comrades executed there by Mussolini a year before; not the occupying American soldiers who guard the Mediterranean Theatre of Operations USA – Detention and Training Center (DTC), where the poet caught

1

James Sibley Watson (“W.C.Blum”), “Super Schoolmaster,” Dial 49 (1920): 422-423; rpt. as “Review of Pound’s Instigations,” in Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage, ed. Eric Homberger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 193.

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out of his country in wartime catches voices in the air from his cage, nor Hitler’s retreating Germans, whose doom the Italian dictator’s fall forebodes; certainly not the many erstwhile admirers—Gandhi, Churchill, Shaw, Cole Porter, Roosevelt, “a Wall Street ‘Who’s Who’ ”—of the demogogue who reportedly greeted his captors, “You’ve come to rescue me? I’ll give you an empire.”2 Where would Dante have put Mussolini—in the False Counselors’ bolgia, perhaps, among the fraudsters deep in Hell’s eighth circle? But Pound, unlike the Divine Comedy’s architect, had no “Aquinas-map” (SL 323). No Summa Theologica guides his modern epic journey through realms inhabited by spirits after death and “the states of mind wherein dwell all sorts and conditions of men before death” (SR 116). Whirled into the vortex of twentieth-century history, the subject of The Cantos’ first line—“And then went down to the ship”—has scarcely a grammatical mast to cling to, let alone a communal ethics. As the forces of war drive the mind of the poem along an aleatory, existential line, Pound’s “epic … poem including history” traces “by no means an orderly Dantescan rising / but as the winds veer … and the raft is driven / and the voices” (LE 86; C LXXIV.463).3 Had Italy had a leader—a Matteotti, say—to lift it out of the poverty and misery of world depression into an economic paradiso terrestre unmolested by Mussolini’s overmastering student Hitler, might The Cantos too have ascended? As it is, history “includes” the poem rather than the other way around, shattering its mind and voice, scattering fragments over the pages far beyond anything imagined by the orchestrators of the many-voiced Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917/1919), The Waste Land (1922), even Finnegans Wake (1939), river running in its cosmic ouroborus. The Pisan Cantos is less a premeditated form than an improvisatory voice rising from the enormity of its circumstances, interweaving diaristic, mnemonic, and contemplative strands of time. Seventy years on, what to make of this epic emanation from the American Army DTC? How to navigate the intellectual and ethical rapids and riptides of a poem judged by the Bollingen committee America’s most distinguished 2

3

John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 58f, 146–147; Argus, (Melbourne, Australia) Tues., May 1, 1945: 16. Donald Hall, “Ezra Pound: An Interview,” in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, second series, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking, 1965), 57.

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poem of 1949, by critics a “fascist poem” yet “one of the greatest achievements of Anglo-American literary modernism,” by its author, toward the end, a “botch”?4 A monumental document of its war-riven times, The Pisan Cantos is a minefield that puts any attempt to compel its fragments into ideological coherence at risk of false positions. This study extends Watson’s description of Pound’s prose Instigations as a “Comparative Literature of the Present” by “a poet, with the rarest gift for translation,” to Pound’s poetics of modern war and empire.5 Instigations’s worldfaring critical thought moves from French poets through Genesis and its Asian antecedents to contemporary artists and concludes with Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese written character, heralding a century that “turns a new page in the book of the world” to reveal “vistas of strange futures …, of world-embracing cultures half-weaned from Europe; of hitherto undreamed responsibilities for nations and races.”6 So Pound’s poetry sounds the past to seek the coordinates of the present; so it “gather[s] from the air a live tradition” to map and express this new world (C LXXXI.542). Pound’s comparative present flowers spectacularly in the Homage to Sextus Propertius, whose composite poet of ancient Rome and modern London sings love against imperial war, then withers and droops in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s mock-death of inanition in the imperial metropolis. Taking Pound’s early exploration of the situation of poetry under British and Roman imperialisms as touchstone, I hinge to Pound’s Diptych: Rome–London (as he titled a later edition of the two poems)7 a virtual third panel: the Italian Cantos 72 and 73 and The Pisan Cantos, written in 1944–45 in an Italy led to war and defeat by Mussolini’s grandiose dream of a new imperial Rome. This virtual triptych arrays the poems’ disparate “presents” within a long global war, as

4

5 6

7

Robert Casillo, “Fascists of the Final Hour,” in Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture, ed. R. J. Golsan (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 121; Ronald Bush, “Ezra Pound’s Fascist ‘Europa’: Toward the Pisan Cantos” in Europa! Europa? The Avant-Garde, Modernism, and the Fate of a Continent, eds. Sascha Bru et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 210; Daniel Cory, “Ezra Pound: A Memoir” Encounter 30.5 (May 1968): 38. Watson, “Review,” 193. Ezra Pound, Instigations … together with an essay on the Chinese written character by Ernest Fenollosa (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920), 357. Ezra Pound, Diptych: Rome-London: Homage to Sextus Propertius & Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Contacts and Life. (London, Faber & Faber, 1957).

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inseparable from nationalist and imperialist rivalries as from world-changing technological developments. Situating the poems within an incalculable web of European and global violence, the triptych extends the Diptych’s vertical, transhistorical comparative literary “present” (Rome–London) to lateral dimensions (modern global war) and throws into relief a striking reversal in Pound’s stance toward imperial force between the anti-imperial love poet Propertius and the self-styled epic empire-builder Mussolini. How does Pound move from Propertius’s mockery of Roman military and cultural conquest to his disastrous “act of faith” (fede fascista) in Mussolini’s murderous campaign to renew Rome’s imperial glory? (JM 33).8 What to make of Vorticist Pound’s talk with Futurist Marinetti’s belligerent ghost in Canto 72? How does Pound, who arranged the Peacock Dinner to honor Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Byronic author of the prison poem In Vinculis (1888)—“the first Englishman to take the Celtic Irish side in any conflict, or to have suffered even the shortest imprisonment for Ireland’s sake,” and an unsung model for Pound’s Propertius—become Mussolini’s elegist, the last dupe of the delusional Duce and himself a prison poet?9 Does the triptych cast light on the “ἠθοϚ” (ethos), or common values, on which Pound’s modern epic floats or sinks (C LXXXIV.559)? How does the comparative literature of the present—one of modernism’s constitutive projects, with the Homage, Ulysses, The Waste Land, and The Cantos signal instances—unfurl from the wartime Rome/London of Propertius and “dead” aesthete Mauberley to Pound’s Pisan “present”? In posing these questions, I open an issue still urgent today. The Second World War intensified the crisis of human voice and agency escalated by industrial capitalist warfare from 1914 on. The reticent subject that opens Canto I (“And then went down to the ship”) remains a keynote of the Pisan

8

9

See David Barnes, “Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy,” Journal of Modern Literature 34.1 (2010): 30. Lucy McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 83, citing Longford. Planning the dinner, Pound wrote Yeats, “tell Lady Gregory we hate the newspaper press as Blunt hates the British Empire,” (McDiarmid, 51). Blunt, the first poet in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse (164–165), also published Shame of the 19th Century (1900), The Land War in Ireland (1912); and Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (1922). See also Pound’s “Homage to Wilfrid Blunt,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 3.6 (March 1914): 220-23.

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cantos: the poem’s voice says neither we nor I, nor does it project the epic fiction of omniscience, theologico-ethical and narrative, that descends from Homer’s muse to the impersonal catechist of Joyce’s “Ithaka” and the remote transcriber of Molly Bloom’s silent thoughts. Rather: “where in history will you find it?” (C LXXIV.445, emphasis added). More profoundly homeless than Ulysses,The Cantos undertakes an open-ended voyage through unmapped regions, a perilous quest that commits the poem to “history” as common ground (“you”). The question (“where?”) marks the erosion of this ground, the inscrutability of history as shared past and moral touchstone for the “present.” An occluded grammatical subject of an occluded history, the poem’s unstable I/eye registers the long twentieth-century era of world wars, world empires, world target. Central to the poem’s comparative present is the epic task of organizing this violence, giving it aesthetic form, in dialectic colloquy with the Iliad, Weil’s “poem of force,” and the Odyssey, whose wandering warrior-hero—shipwrecked, stranded, companions all lost— returns from war as ОΎ ΤΙΣ (no man), an old beggar, to fight for his home.

Western epic: Mirror of force yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper with a bang not with a whimper Canto LXXIV.445 Pound’s retrospective date of 1918 for his abandonment of Mauberleyesque “stale cream-puffs” to “investigate causes of war to oppose same” marks the watershed between the Rome–London diptych and his turn to the epic genre (SP viii).10 Classicists’ attacks on the Homage (rather as if one were to condemn Ulysses on the grounds that Homer doesn’t sing of waterclosets) overlook the critique of imperial violence Pound ventriloquizes through the incandescent imagination of his resurrected avatar Propertius, a persona divined through the holes and blots and 10

“stale cream-puffs”: Ezra Pound, A Lume Spento and Other Early Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), 7.

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probabilities and impossibilities of the Latin love poet’s extant text and projected, freely elaborated, upon the screen of a warmaking British imperium that fashions itself Rome’s heir—here and now, in wartime London, where the muted aesthete Mauberley also dwells. Pound had satirized British imperialism before the war. The outbreak of war stymied direct attack, but the Homage keeps imperial rivalries and territorial wars (“Martian generalities”; I, P 205) at the fore. The Homage figures war as intrinsic to epic. Finding Propertius loitering about Helicon, Apollo admonishes, “You idiot! … Who has ordered a book about heroes? / You need … not think / about acquiring that sort of a reputation” (II, P 207–208). Though epic muse Calliope hands him a coward’s white feather, Propertius obeys, turning from martial epic to lyrics made to be “thrown, thrown often into a chair, / Where a girl waits alone for her lover” (II, P 208). Forbidden to spend his talent on geopolitics, he eschews bloody battle for a lover’s combat with his beloved drama queen Cynthia (“My genius is no more than a girl”; V, P  213). Still, he threads through his love poems a deft satire on imperial violence, from mock-epic parody of Rome’s military and cultural conquests (“The Parthians shall get used to our statuary / and acquire a Roman religion”; VI, P 214) to family lands confiscated for Octavian’s army (“behold me, small fortune left in my house. / Me, who had no general for a grandfather!” XII, P 224).11 Before the war Pound had rejected his mother’s urgings toward epic aspiration. “Kindly consider what an epic needs for a foundation,” he wrote. “1. a beautiful tradition 2. a unity in the outline of that tradition. Vid. the Odyssey. 3. a Hero, mythical or historical 4. a damn long time for the story to lose its garish detail & get encrusted with a bunch of beautiful lies.”12 Europe’s “Civil War” (as many saw it13) changed the situation of poetry and Pound’s idea of a modern epic. In 1921, having officiated at 11

12

13

Cf. Christine Froula, “War, Empire, and Modernist Poetry, 1914–1922” in The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War, ed. Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 214–18. Letter to Isabel Weston Pound, Autumn, 1909; D. D. Paige/Ezra Pound Letters (carbons), Beinecke Library, Yale University; cited in Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Ezra Pound’s Cantos (New Haven: Yale, 1984), 2. Christine Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1, 356n4.

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Mauberley’s sardonic funeral and embarked on a long poem including no beautiful tradition, illusion, or hero but “history,” with all the risks of such an exposed and uncertain quest, he pronounced “the symbolist position, artistic aloofness from world affairs, … no good now.”14 From the first canto, with its fortuitous origins and manifold temporalities, the poem practices a comparative literature of the present as Pound lifts from the Odyssey’s narrative the ritual descent to the realm of the dead (“older than the rest,” he thought) and floats this petition for prophetic directions for getting home in his elastic canto form (SL 274). Lacking Odysseus’s divine favor and magic môly, equipped with no Aquinas-map, Virgilian guide, or communally validated chart of modernity’s roiling seas, the ill-starred epic poet sets out “a second time” to “sail after knowledge / Knowing less than drugged beasts” (C I.4; XLVII.236). Launched on the heavy seas of a Europe still reeling from the unprecedented industrial war whose causes the poet seeks, The Cantos grapples with the violence intrinsic to epic. In “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” Simone Weil describes the Iliad as “the purest and loveliest” mirror of the force that is, “today as yesterday, at the very center of human history.”15 Writing in 1940, when Mussolini was still waging war in Ethiopia and Hitler had stormed Spain, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France and was bombarding England, Weil observes that in the Iliad force turns anyone it acts upon “into a thing” and blinds those who wield it to “reflection,” “justice,” “prudence,” and their own inevitable destruction.16 Weil finds the Iliad’s moral clarity in its stark depiction of the reciprocal violence the Greeks named Nemesis: the violence that goes around and comes around and turns the hearts of “those who use it and those who endure it” to stone, compelled by a “twofold need for death”: their own and others.17 (So Yeats meditates in “Easter 1916”: “too long a sacrifice / can

14

15

16

17

Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 31 citing Pound, Contact 4 (1921), 1; On The Cantos as a modern epic see Froula, To Write Paradise, 2–8 & passim. Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” trans. Mary McCarthy in On Violence: A Reader, eds. Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 378. Ibid., 378, 380. For Hitler’s critical role in the Spanish Civil War see Pierpaolo Barbieri, Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Ibid., 388, 387.

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make a stone of the heart / O when may it suffice?”) “This retribution, which has a geometric rigor, which operates automatically to penalize the abuse of force,” Weil writes, “is the soul of the epic.” Western languages have no words for the retributive symmetries of “petrifactive … force”: “conceptions of limit, measure, equilibrium, which ought to determine the conduct of life, are in the West restricted to a servile function in the vocabulary of technics. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship to virtue.”18 In this respect Weil sees the West as heir, rather, to “the Romans and the Hebrews,” who “believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot,” hence created no epics or tragedies—only “masterpieces” that for twenty centuries “have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.”19 Perhaps, she speculates, Europeans will “rediscover the epic genius, when they learn that there is no refuge from fate, … not to admire force, not to hate the enemy, nor to scorn the unfortunate.”20 The vilified corpse of Mussolini that opens The Pisan cantos incarnates such retributive violence, as his murderous dictatorship, its symbol the Roman magistrate’s fasces, exemplifies the citation of Roman masterpieces to justify crimes. After his “rape of Ethiopia” by secret aerial bombing and mustard gas,21 Mussolini proclaimed to ecstatic crowds from his Roman balcony: Italy at last has her Empire—that Fascist Empire which bears the imperishable signs of truth and the power of Rome’s emblem … . The people of Italy created the Empire with their blood, they will make it

18 19 20 21

Ibid., 381. Ibid., 389–390. Ibid., 390. See A.J. Barker, The Rape of Ethiopia, 1936 (New York: Ballantine, 1971). Barker estimates damages to Italy (7,000 dead, $17 million for the war, the treasury bankrupted, the future mortgaged) and Ethiopia (760,300 killed, 2,000 churches and 525,000 houses destroyed, 5 million beef cattle slaughtered or confiscated, 7 million sheep and goats, 1 million horses and mules, 700,000 camels, totaling £184,746,023 in the reparations bill), and notes that Mussolini’s campaign contributed to “the great conflagration” of the Second World War (159). J. F. C. Fuller, The First of the League Wars: Its Lessons and Omens (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936), traces the assaults on Ethiopia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Bosworth and Finaldi sum up Italy’s earlier imperial ventures: “by 1921 four decades of rhetoric and of killing had resulted in the settlement there of as many peasants as would have fitted into a single rural hamlet within Italy. The Third Italy … construct[ed] an empire of illusions”, 51.

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fruitful by labour, and defend it against anyone. In this supreme certainty, legionnaires raise your banners, your steel, your hearts to salute after 15 centuries, the reappearance of an Empire on the hills of Rome. Will you be worthy of it?22

As industrial-capitalist warfare turned much of the world into a battlefield of nations vying for imperial power, Pound like every civilian was effectively conscripted. His “poem including history” finds him blown as violently off course as Odysseus when, after his brutal raid, the Cicones retaliated, routing the Greeks and killing six men from each ship.23 After America bombed Hiroshima, Pound constructed a comparative “present,” vertical and lateral, that condemns Odysseus’s attack and opposes to Greek/American aggression the divine grace hypostatized in the noh drama: Greek rascality against Hagaromo Kumasaka vs / vulgarity no sooner out of Troas than the damn fools attacked Ismarus of the Cicones (Canto LXXIX.505)

Pound’s notational poetics subsumes the violence of Admiral Perry and Japanese imperialism, Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, within a comparative present whose dark mirror of global war juxtaposes the symmetries of Nemesis with the noh plays’ heavenward aspiration. But this is only a moment of Pound’s odyssey. In his writings of 1944–45, the poet who opposes war veers into rationalizing violence, from Mussolini’s slaughter of Abyssinians (which, extrapolating from Mussolini’s racialized imperialism, Pound likens to Europeans’ extermination of the Seminoles24) to the destruction of the Spanish republic, from Hitler’s 22

23 24

Argus, Monday (May 11, 1936): 9. Mussolini spoke at night on 9 May. Pound saved a May 10 copy of Il Popolo d’Italia headlined “Il duce annunzia all’Italia ed al mondo la costituzione dell’impero fascista” (“The duce announces to Italy and the world the constitution of the fascist empire”) (Catherine E. Paul, “Italian Fascist Exhibitions" and Ezra Pound’s Move to the Imperial,” Twentieth Century Literature 51.1 [Spring 2005]: 67, 90n3). Joyce considered and rejected a Kikones parallel for Ulysses. See A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work. Vol. 2: The Epic Years 1921–39 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 199f; on October 10, 1935, Pound wrote Senator Borah, “you can have perfectly clear conscience that 7 million of subjected population in Abyssinia will be benefitted by conquest” (Moody, 199, 382n, citing The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Senator William Borah, ed. Sarah C. Holmes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 42).

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invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland to the Holocaust, from Stalin’s Katyn massacre to a (false) “news” account of an Italian war rape survivor leading Canadian troops into a minefield. The Pisan Cantos doesn’t recover the Iliad’s “epic genius”; the poem is no pure mirror of the tragic truth of retributive violence, “the soul of the epic.” At times it has a heart of stone. But if it doesn’t approach the moral clarity of the Iliad, “loveliest of mirrors,” neither is it a new Aeneid celebrating Mussolini’s fantasy of a new Rome with a new, stone-hearted imperial populace.25 Alongside the rationalization of violence that makes these cantos a “fascist poem,” the mirror that this reach of Pound’s epic voyage holds up to “history” reflects something of the Iliad’s tragic knowledge that there’s no refuge from fate, force turns hearts to stone, the enemy’s death foretells our own, and the unfortunates we scorn figure our future. Here I return to Otto Rank’s insight that in modern cultures, with their diverse, contending systems of value and belief, the struggle for a culture’s self-representation must be borne by the artist alone: “the great artist … has to carry it personally, in artistic development and in human suffering”; “he does not practice his calling, but is it, himself, represents it ideologically.”26 As the Iliad voices not Homer’s but “the Greeks’ ” collective mind, Pound’s epic mirrors the violence that shipwrecks it. To echo Conrad’s Marlow on Kurtz’s lineage: all Europe has contributed to the poem’s unforeseeable Pisan destination; indeed, much of the world, from Pound’s native America to his revered Japan and China, has done so. Where the Iliad expresses a coherent ethos, The Pisan cantos register forces that batter the modern world from all directions as the poet struggles to navigate. As collective word, speech, epos, the poem voices, and the poet suffers, a comparative present that overspills its pages—one such “strange future” as Fenollosa foretold.

25

26

Weil, “The Iliad,” 378. On Mussolini’s ideal Italian character see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001), 127 & passim. Cf. Froula, To Write Paradise, 169–170 & n42, citing Otto Rank, “ The Artist’s Fight with Art,” in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings, ed. Philip Freund (New York: Knopf, 1964), 187, 190.

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Green: Gnat on a grass-blade, ant on a broken ant-hill, weeds over ashes What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do? –Virginia Woolf, Diary, August 17, 1938 As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor. Canto LXXVI.478, summer 1945 Learn of the green world what can be thy place. Canto LXXXI.541 In the Iliad’s similes, which liken warriors to fire, flood, wind, wild beasts, frightened animals, trees, water, sand, natural entities moved by violent forces, Weil discerns war’s “last secret”: force turns people into things.27 In 1940, Panzers roll into Paris, aimed at world domination; Hitler poses before the Eiffel Tower; France falls so quickly that elated Germans are awed by their Führer’s greatness; the Iliad’s similes, Weil finds, moralize violence to reveal the dehumanizing effect of force. At this moment in “the continual game of see-saw” that is both the Trojan and modern war, the Germans are high, as blind to their future as the Trojans to theirs when they light fires to prevent the routed Greeks from escape by night.28 The Trojans’ hostile hospitality, their insistence that their enemy stay and fight, keeps see-saw symmetry with the Greeks’ earlier refusal, after one day’s fighting, of Priam’s peace offering: take Helen and her stuff and go home.29 Home: the Iliad evokes, “in painful contrast” to the war, “the faraway, precarious, touching world of peace, of the family, the world in which each man counts more than anything else to those about him.”30 But whereas the Iliad

27 28 29 30

Weil, “The Iliad,” 388–389. Ibid., 381. Ibid., 382. Ibid., 379.

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narrates in omniscient retrospect the see-saw events of a war that ends in Greek victory, no one sees the future in 1940. In the DTC in August 1945, the imprisoned Pound, struggling to hold an epic mirror up to a devastated Europe from his infinitesimally tiny, partial, oblique vantage on its broken ant-hill, heard that the Pacific War was over. The atomic bomb was a secret that surprised the whole world. Accustomed to B-29 bombings (“B-san, or Mr. B”), the surviving Hiroshimans had no idea what could have produced “the tremendous power of this inhuman bomb,” 2,000 times the force of a conventional B-29 load.31 Beside a mushroom cloud photograph, Time reported the end of this “greatest and most terrible of wars”—then judged that the war itself “shrank to minor significance” against that enormity.32 Emperor Hirohito’s radio broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender acknowledged its insuperable force: After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure … . [T]he enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives … . Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.33

What epos can poetry voice in a world which total war has brought in sight of “the total extinction of human civilization”? In face of this sudden exponential increase in force in all its dehumanizing power, how to speak of a postwar present that lays “more fearful responsibilities, more crucial liabilities, … on the victors even than on the vanquished” for a future no one can see?34 31

32

33

34

John Hersey, Hiroshima: A New Edition with a Final Chapter Written Forty Years after the Explosion (1946, 1985; New York: Vintage, 1989), 2, 62–63. “The Bomb/Victory/The Peace,” Time 46.8 (August 20, 1945). Pound cites the June 25 issue in Canto LXXIV.454. “Text of Hirohito’s Radio Rescript,” New York Times, August  15, 1945, 3; cf. Hersey, Hiroshima, 64–65. “The Bomb/Victory/The Peace.”

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John Hersey tells of one hibakusha (“explosion-affected” person) who, brought back to Hiroshima a month later, was “horrified and amazed” to see over the bomb site “a blanket of fresh, vivid, lush, optimistic green” springing up through asphalt and ruined foundations: Weeds already hid the ashes, and wild flowers were in bloom along the city’s bones. The bomb had not only left the underground organs of plants intact; it had stimulated them. Everywhere were bluets and Spanish bayonet, goosefoot, morning glories and day lilies, the hairy-fruited bean, purslane and clotbur and sesame and panic grass and feverfew.35

The green of postatomic Hiroshima takes over the blasted once-human world so quickly and heedlessly that its power to obliterate “human civilization” seems an uncanny counterpart of the bomb’s annihilating force. In The Pisan cantos, the poet finds comfort in the green world amid civilization’s ruins and the new enormity of force. Scarab-robe, pool, eyes “night green … as grape flesh and sea wave,” bambooiform grass blade, smell of mint, chrysalids’ “green splendor,” jade, “Mr Edwards superb green and brown,” “a new green katydid … emerald, paler than emerald,” eucalyptus, cypress, olive leaf turning in air, beech grove, poplars, pear trees: green glints and gleams in the intermittent monody that issues from the poet’s tent (C LXXIV.452, 454, 455). Green, color of hope, spring, regeneration, threads the interface between the everyday surround and the imprisoned poet’s mind. Pound intersperses notes on the fleeting sensible world with shards of memory, desire, metaphor, allusive thought (“How is it far if you think of it?” C LXXVII.485); voices of guards and prisoners mingle with creaturely presences and apparitions—ant and lizard, goddesses and lynx conjured by the poet in extremis, suffering exposure, dehydration, isolation, terror. The human “I” slips in and out of the lines. From “the seen” comes the poem, “the palpable / Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell” (C LXXXI.541). From a new, even more terrible waste land reaching from Europe to the Pacific, a voice still in colloquy with Eliot (and still revising him: “yet say this to the Possum: a bang, not a whimper”

35

Hersey, Hiroshima, 92, 69.

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C LXXIV.445) improvises jagged riffs in what the poet will remember from Washington as “the Pisan paradise.”36 Beside the postwar dreamscape that Pound helped Eliot carve from the Waste Land manuscript, sculpting lines and planes as Gaudier sculpted stone, the Pisan green marks a difference. The Waste Land’s parched spirits hear “dry grass singing”; in its barren world of wind-blown dead leaves, the water-dripping song is just an echo in the mind; a damp gust bodes rain that the Thunder seems to withhold. In The Pisan cantos, mist, cloud, rain, and wind evoke the real weather of the place so that the poem seems washed in watercolor. Where Eliot’s mythic Grail quest invokes a “peace which passeth understanding” by an ancient Sanskrit word that circumvents the English word corrupted by Versailles, the Pisan green world unfurls in the crevices of a Europe blasted to stony rubbish. Veering winds hurl the poet, “a leaf in the current,” onto a strand, a local world that exists only because the war exists, and on the bombed-out site of an economic paradise lost springs up a fortuitous paradise: the poem (C LXXXI.539). The quest for a modern philosophical paradise breaks up on a steel cage only to arrive in the prison camp’s green world, mirrored in the castaway poet’s mind, intertwined with memory, imagination, historical mirage: “The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders” (C LXXIV.445). Where The Waste Land ends suspended—will rains come to revive war-ravaged Europe?—in The Pisan cantos, nature with its ceaseless motion and activity weaves everything from insects to the changing light to the human world and its local manifestation in and as the poem into a seamless continuum. So the worldfaring poem’s intensive shorthand merges nature and culture: “Mt. Taishan @ Pisa” (C LXXIV.447); the grasshopper’s green casque outshimmers Paquin’s; Madame La Vespa’s “infant, green as new grass,” peeks from a neat mud shelter, then descends: “like to like colour he goes amid grass-blades”; “the mind swings by a grass-blade,” saved by “an ant’s forefoot” (C LXXXIII.552–553). Against The Waste Land’s human-centered dualism, its desolate horror felt in the grotesque “corpse you planted last year in your garden,” The Pisan cantos merge the prison camp into “τὸ πâν,” “toh pan, 36

Unpublished letter to “Somers,” 1949, Beinecke Library; cited in Froula, To Write Paradise, 167.

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the all,” where “πάντα ῾ρει,” everything flows (C LXXX.531; LXXXIII.549). A manmade hell shares space in world, mind, and page with an intermittent paradise, not “artificiel / but spezzato apparently,” collaboratively painted by nature’s brush and human thought: “sunset grand couturier” (C LXXIV.458; LXXX.536). With rival imperialist nations deploying total-war technologies around the globe, can the prison camp’s green world be more than sentimental escape, as critics sometimes charge?37 Does the poem’s opening elegy not implicate Pound in extreme violence, a “fascist of the final hour” whatever his pacifist intent?38 The poem invites such author-centered judgments, condemning or sympathetic, yet the evanescent “I” sustained by wasp and ant eludes (and perhaps “reads”) them. The machine warfare that exploded the bounds of battlefield and private house in 1914 exposed civilians and soldiers alike to violence “far from hot baths, poor man,” as Weil says of Hector.39 In 1945 the atomic bomb instantly destroyed not just its target, the army base at Hiroshima, but more than a hundred thousand civilian lives. The ant-like poet in the prison camp, mind swinging by a grass-blade, voices an altered human condition, a new mass vulnerability that embraces both human continuity with the natural world and the prosthetic war machines. The captive American poet’s self-portrait as “a lone ant from a broken anthill / from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor” recalls Virginia Woolf ’s selfportrait as “a gnat on a blade of grass” in a diary entry of August 17, 1938: So, at supper, we discussed our generation: & the prospects of war. Hitler has his million men now under arms. Is it only summer manoeuvres or–? Harold [Nicolson, MP] broadcasting in his man of the world manner hints it may be war. That is the complete ruin not only of civilisation, in Europe, but of our last lap. Quentin [Bell, Woolf ’s nephew] conscripted &c. One ceases to think about it—thats all. Goes on discussing the new room, new chair, new books. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?40 37 38 39 40

E.g., David Trotter, “Saved by the Ant’s Fore-Foot,” London Review of Books 27.5, July 5, 2005. See Casillo, “Fascists of the Final Hour.” Weil, “The Iliad,” 379. Woolf, The Diary, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 vols. (New York: HBJ, 1977–1984), vol. 5.162, August 17, 1938, my emphasis. Nicolson opposed appeasement. Quentin Bell’s brother, Julian, was killed fighting in Spain in July 1937.

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It was not summer maneuvers. We know, as Woolf and her friends did not, that on May  30 Hitler had signed a secret order to invade Czechoslovakia by October 1. On September 30, Germany, France, Britain, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement—the Munich Betrayal, the Czechs and Slovaks called it—authorizing Hitler to seize the rich resources and industrial zone of northern Czechoslovakia. The trans-species figures of artists who bear the struggle for the culture’s self-representation sketch minute, purposeful, local, sentient beings defenseless against the vast forces that threaten to silence all human voices, destroy all “scaled invention” (C LXXXI.541). Even more reduced than Frost’s oven bird of 1916, these self-portraits of 1938 and 1945 depict human agency—of nations, peoples, the artists—fast diminishing, in inverse proportion to the rapid, secret evolution of war machines capable of obliterating “human civilization.” Ant and gnat express a pervasive helplessness on either verge of the war after the war that was to have ended all wars. At the same time, as reflections of the human, these minute creatures pursuing mere life in green worlds somehow counter the annihilating force of total war. Human will, agency, and consequence find ironic mirrors in purposeful insect life; human awareness of past and future vanishes momentarily in the continuous present of the animate natural world. These wartime portraits of artists waving their antennae in the air suggest a minuter listening, as in Canto 80’s shadowy evocation of Virginia [Stephen] Woolf: “Horace C . … impersonated a sultan / of was it Zanzibar” (C LXXX.522).41 Pound’s “was it” leaves a blank for what he doesn’t know, nor can we be sure which of two similar hoaxes by Irish-born Horace Cole he remembers. In March  1905, Cole impersonated the Sultan of Zanzibar’s fictitious uncle, “Prince Mukasa Ali,” on a state visit to Cambridge.42 In February  1910, Cole and his party of young Britons, among them Virginia and her brother Adrian, masquerading in professional theatrical costumes and makeup as a delegation from the Emperor of Abyssinia led by his fictitious cousin “el Makalen,” paid a state visit to the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS 41

42

See Martyn Downer, The Sultan of Zanzibar: The Bizarre World and Spectacular Hoaxes of Horace De Vere Cole (London: Black Spring Press, 2010), chaps. 10–13. Cole “took up the paving in Bond St.” (Piccadilly); his “street demonstration / in Soho for Italy’s entry into combat in / 19 was it 15?” recalls “a boisterous march through Soho against Italy’s entry into the war” (C LXXX.522; Downer, Sultan, 188). Japan and the United States developed similar battleships. Downer, Sultan, 56. Cole’s plan to play the Sultan was foiled by the real Sultan’s visit to Buckingham Palace.

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Dreadnought. Launched in 1906, this state-of-the-art battleship with its revolutionary “all big gun” armaments escalated the naval arms race in reply to the Germans’ building of a world class navy, masterminded by Admiral Tirpitz. The rest, one might say, is history. The Dreadnought Hoax made Cole’s name. Both escapades, which are often confused, aimed to send up nationalist and imperialist military pride. Such lateral contexts of The Pisan cantos, with their diffuse historicist aesthetic, illustrate the maxim “Meaning is context-bound, but context is boundless.”43 The Pisan cantos in particular provoke awareness of boundless context, including things we can see that the poet could not. Pound conjures hoaxer Cole, but the aspiring artist in Cole’s 1910 troupe—not then “Virginia Woolf ”—is not on his radar. Her 1941 novel Between the Acts, set in June 1939 in an English village and written in the air corridor between London and a Continent “bristling” with Hitler’s massive war machines, is not circulating in the prison camp; other works such as Hersey’s Hiroshima and Burns’s The Galleria have yet to appear. But these and myriad other works share a composite comparative “present” and together form an indeterminate, discontinuous chorus, no ant or gnat alone.

Antennae of the race and a closed door: War, art, forms of time Artists are the antennae of the race. –Ezra Pound, “Henry James” (1918; LE 297) War: everyone is free, and yet the die is cast. It is there, it is everywhere, it is the totality of all my thoughts, of all Hitler’s words, of all Gomez’s acts; but no one is there to add it up. It exists solely for God. But God does not exist. And yet the war exists. –Jean-Paul Sartre, The Reprieve (1940–43)44 43

44

Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 67: “there is no determining in advance what might count as relevant, what enlarging of context might be able to shift what we regard as the meaning of a text.” Jean-Paul Sartre, The Road to Freedom: The Reprieve (1945, composed 1940–43), trans. Eric Sutton (New York: Knopf, 1947), 326. Jameson relates this passage to Althussser’s exposition of “History or the Real as an ‘absent cause,’ ” in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 55.

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In 1918, the year Pound “Began to investigate the causes of war, to oppose same” (SP viii), he noted advance signals of war—1870 and 1914, respectively— in Flaubert and James: Armageddon, the conflict? I turn to James’ A Bundle of Letters, a letter from “Dr Rudolph Staub” in Paris, ending: “You will, I think, hold me warranted in believing that between precipitate decay and internecine enmities, the English-speaking family is destined to consume itself and that with its decline the prospect of general pervasiveness … will brighten for the deeplunged children of the fatherland!” (LE 297)

Aligning James’s 1878 “diagnosis” of nationalist conflict decades before 1914 with Flaubert’s comment “If they had read my Education Sentimentale, this sort of thing [the War of 1870] wouldn’t have happened,” Pound proposes: Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists. If it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself; here the thing was done, the pages of diagnosis . … [T]here was emotional greatness in Henry James’ hatred of tyranny; … there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. (LE 297)

The epistolary form of “A Bundle of Letters” breaches the boundary between art and world. Each letter implies a correspondent; as a “bundle” they address an array of recipients, creating a hologram of many little worlds within the story and outside it, where the forces Dr. Staub contemplates hold sway. More strikingly than in James’s “Bundle,” real-world violence in the present tense shatters the aesthetic frames of Between the Acts and The Pisan Cantos. In  Woolf ’s novel and the village pageant it depicts, as in Pound’s poem, actualities gash the edge between the artwork and the wartime world. In Between the Acts, on the morning of the pageant Isabella reads a Times account of an actual gang rape of a fourteen-year-old girl by British soldiers at Whitehall in 1938, which led to the rapists’ trial and conviction, a medical abortion, and a further trial and acquittal of the physician. These actual events are not narrated in the novel but buried, or planted; allusion folds them into a fictive present. In the writer-director La Trobe’s pageant, unscripted rain, ambient noise, talk, movement—swooping swallows, lowing cows, chattering

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spectators—interrupt the performance, sometimes enhancing it or even saving it from disaster, intermittently merging it with the surrounding “real” world. The interpenetration of art and world culminates in La Trobe’s avantgarde transgression of the art/world boundary as mirrors bring the audience onstage. In novel, pageant, diary, and the quasi-diaristic Pisan cantos as in the real time of modern war, people wait trapped in the present for the future to show. In Woolf ’s diary there is no elsewhere, no exit from the theater of war (“ ‘theatre’ is good. There are those who did not want / it to come to an end,” C LXXVIII.497), so drastically does it invade civilian life: “Its the cold hour, this, before the lights go up … Yes, I was thinking: we live without a future. Thats whats queer, with our noses pressed to a closed door.”45 Where Dr. Staub compares national characters to predict Britain’s fall and Germany’s rise, Woolf, Pound, and the fictional La Trobe wave antennae in air replete with inconclusive signals. Like an insect or a radio receiver, they pick up the roaring planes that cut through the pageant’s closing ceremony, voices in the prison camp, news of Louis Till’s execution, the war’s end, the atomic bomb, changing weather and light. But the “door” remains closed. As if in response to the imprevidibility and momentousness of the real-world future, the artists jettison plots and plans to create—or, better, allow to emerge—aesthetic forms that are open and permeable to actualities. Incorporating the real-time suspense of diary and documentary, these works capture the moment-bymoment quotidian, the floating time of memory and imagination, current events reported or witnessed, “the cold hour” as secret plans guide war machines of immense destructive power. Breaking up the plot as in Between the Acts, or abandoning hope of a paradisal ascent to lay the poem open to chance and change as in The Pisan cantos, allows the infinite web of interfering temporalities crisscrossing any present to be felt between the acts, lines, words. On the festival day of Between the Acts as in the day-by-day prison camp, mysterious, uncanny, atemporal, utopian interior realms rise to the surface. There is something involuntary about these aesthetic forms, as if the artist’s task were to record “the singing 45

Woolf, Diary, 5.355 (January 26, 1941).

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of the real world,” as Woolf calls it; to let design emerge in the making, not by plan.46 Indeed, as the works open themselves to the chances, enormities, and hidden future of their wartime worlds, the human authors recede, hiding in the bushes and refusing thanks like La Trobe or vanishing into a gnat on a grass-blade, an ant waving a forefoot. The artists attune their antennae to a reality revealed only by the coming-into-being of the artwork. The aesthetic forms thereby created are not mere documents of their turbulent times but make things otherwise hidden visible and “perdurable,” like Yeats’s “great peeeeeeecock in the … / … proide ov his oiye” (C LXXXIII.554). Not only the future is hidden in The Pisan Cantos; the present is, too. As  Sartre’s Mathieu muses, to “see” the war “You would have to be everywhere . … I would have to be seen from everywhere, … with the eyes of war. But where are the eyes of war? … I see—and yet I grope blindly for my whereabouts, and each of my movements lights a bulb or sets a bell ringing in a world I do not see.”47 Mathieu sees, everyone sees, but no one is everywhere; no one more than glimpses this all-encompassing condition: “The war takes and embraces everything, war preserves every thought and every gesture, and no one can see it, not even Hitler . … [S]uddenly he caught a sight of it. It was a strange entity, and one indeed beyond the reach of thought.”48 There is human seeing, action, agency, but “acts” and “thoughts” occur in impenetrable darkness. Everyone is “free” yet no one can “add up” the war that is “everywhere,” “the totality” of everyone’s thoughts, words, acts. The war “exists solely for God. But God does not exist. And yet the war exists.”49 The inhuman agency once figured as Homeric gods devolves upon the allpowerful, unseeable, eyeless war. Despite Sartre’s third-person narrator, no omniscient eye trumps Mathieu’s vision of a war that includes everything yet is “seen” by no one and exists beyond mind and thought. The “authors” of The Reprieve, Between the Acts, the pageant, The Pisan Cantos exist, but their voices—narrative, epic, dramatic, lyric—abandon illusions of omniscience: divine muse, Tiresian 46 47 48 49

Woolf, Diary, 3.260 (October 11, 1929). Sartre, Road to Freedom, 324–325. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 326.

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prophecy, Providence, the fantasy of “encyclopedic” epic, all-seeing narrator or playwright. The war no one can see is first author of these created worlds. Knowing less than drugged beasts, pressed to a closed door, the “antennae of the race” open their works to invisible forces and ungraspable reality, ceding authority over their local, made worlds to the hidden, unaccountable war.

The Katyn massacre: Atrocity blindness Literature is news that STAYS news. –Ezra Pound (ABCR 29) Canto 77 opens in annalist-diary mode (“this day”), echoes Canto 74 (“Von Tirpitz … charm”), shifts (“But on the other hand”) to another memory (“Maukch … Katin”), and muses (“le beau monde … Kungfutseu”): And this day Abner lifted a shovel. … instead of watchin’ it to see if it would take action Von Tirpitz said to his daughter .. as we have elsewhere recorded / he said: beware of their charm But on the other hand Maukch thought he would do me a favour by getting me onto the commission to inspect the mass graves at Katin, le beau monde gouverne if not toujours at any rate it is a level of some sort whereto things tend to return Chung in the middle whether upright or horizontal “and having got ’em (advantages, privilege) there is nothing, italics nothing, they will not do to retain em” yrs truly Kungfutseu (C LXXVII.484; ellipsis and italics in original; cf. C LXXIV.463)

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The passage is a crux, a site where history crosses the mind of a poem that cannot “include” it, only cross paths with it, marking the place of something beneath the lines and white spaces with an X. To “read” it is to peer into “blanks … for the things” the antlike annalist-diarist-poet blindly writing the ungraspable war doesn’t know (C XIII.60). What brings together a man with a shovel, a German admiral and U-boat developer warning his daughter to beware of “their” charm, and an idea of the poet’s joining a commission “to inspect the mass graves at Katin”? The event marked by these crisscrossing thoughts is the massacre by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) of some 4,250–4,800 Polish officers at Katyn Forest between Moscow and Minsk in April and May  1940; some 17,000 other officers disappeared at the same time and were murdered and buried at sites found later.50 In 1939, the Soviets and Nazi Germany had colluded to destroy sovereign Poland and divided the country, but this criminal alliance did not endure. By 1941 Germany and the Soviet Union were at war; that July, the Germans invaded and took Katyn Forest. In February 1943 German Enigma messages conveyed the discovery of the mass grave.51 Hitler’s propaganda chief, Goebbels, lost no time in trumpeting the Soviet atrocity in hope of driving a wedge between the Allies. Stalin’s propagandists retaliated, noting the use of German-made bullets and generating a blizzard of fake “evidence,” lies, and disinformation to “prove” that the Nazis had murdered the officers not in spring 1940 (the actual date of the massacre) but in late 1941 after they invaded. The Soviet propaganda created doubt, for “No one who had lived under the German occupation was apt to believe the German description of the 50

51

Katyn was one of several sites in which the Soviets imprisoned and murdered Polish officers, only 4,000–5,000 of whose bodies had then been found. The Soviet commission chair, N. N. Burdenko, confided the truth to a Russian friend in 1946, adding, “If you start digging our Mother Russia you will find quite a few such excavations.” See J. K. Zawodny, Death in the Forest: The Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1962), 158. In 1992 Yeltsin gave Wałęsa Stalin’s signed order to exterminate “the former Polish officers” in three camps and 11,000 more prisoners in Ukraine and Belorussia, and Krushchev’s 1957 proposal to “destroy all records of the persons shot … a total of 21,857.” See Alexander Etkind et al. Remembering Katyn (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 6. Germany developed the Enigma machine from 1926; the Poles cracked the code for Wehrmacht messages from 1933–39 and shared their work with the British before Hitler invaded Poland (Kozaczuk, Enigma: How the Poles Broke the Enigma Code (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), chaps. 1–2, app. F). From 1941 the Allies’ decoding of Enigma messages had crucial military effect.

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discovery, nor would the allies.”52 To determine responsibility for the crime, an International Commission was formed “to inspect the mass graves at Katin”; it comprised distinguished scholars and experts in forensic medicine from twelve countries excluding Germany.53 The Commission arrived at Katyn Forest on April  28, 1943. Despite conclusive proof of Soviet guilt,54 Churchill and Roosevelt shielded their military ally during—and after— the war. Although Soviet prosecutors proposed to try the Germans for the Katyn crime at Nuremberg, the defense case changed their minds. Nor was a trial ever conducted in postwar Poland, governed under the Soviet boot, or elsewhere. For that reason, writes Benjamin Fischer, the Katyn massacre remains “a wound that refuses to heal,” an atrocity to which the world until recently has chosen to remain blind.55 In Pound’s sketchy reminiscence, “Maukch,” “an employee of the German consulate in Florence,”56 offered to nominate Pound for “the commission.” As Germany had no representatives on the International Commission, there must have been talk of Pound’s joining the “German Special Medical-Judiciary Commission,” which investigated alongside the International Commission and produced a separate report.57 Pound, 52

53 54

55

56

57

Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 16. He notes NKVD chief Beria’s confession, when a Polish general forming an Allied army requested officers from a camp whose prisoners Stalin had massacred, “we have committed a great blunder”; and he repeated that twice: “We have made a great mistake; we have made a great mistake” (150). Stalin’s destruction of Poland’s “brain and heart” suited Hitler, who had developed similar methods for his purposes, formulated in 1922, of annihilating the Jewish and Romani peoples, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and other threats to Nazi ambition. In December 1941, Hitler brought gas trucks to murder the Chelmno prisoners; in 1942, he turned five labor camps into death camps (80). See Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 17. The officers’ letters to their loved ones ceased in spring 1940; no documents found on the bodies were dated later than spring 1940; Soviet-made rope bound the officers’ hands to their heads; some corpses bore four-cornered Soviet bayonet wounds; the growth rings of the stand of young spruce trees over the mass grave—smaller than the surrounding forest—dated their transplanting to three years earlier. Hereditary lord Churchill expressed particular interest in the evidence of the spruces. See Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 90–95. Etkind’s detailed timeline marks the 2007 premiere of Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn; the 2010 judgment of the European Court of Human Rights “establishing a precedent in applying the standards of the Nuremberg law to victors in the Second World War (i.e. the Soviet Union)”; and the 2010 Russian Duma’s recognition of Katyn as “a crime of the Stalinist regime” (xxviii). The Kremlin maintained a “calculated policy of disinformation,” regularly duping visitors at a fake site (Khatyn, not Katyn Forest) (80–81). Richard Sieburth, ed., Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (New York: New Directions, 2003), 135n. “Maukch” would have had to communicate this suggestion to Pound between February and April 1943. (Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), glosses “Mauksh” as an Italian book dealer.) Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 18–19.

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of course, had no forensic expertise; might Hitler’s consulate have seen propaganda potential in the American expatriate’s lending his authority to exonerate the Nazis? Pound, for his part, would have felt the self-evident danger of joining this wartime commission—as the poet recalls, perhaps with some irony, from the American prison camp (“Maukch thought he would do me a favour”). Even with this context, it is hard to follow the passage’s thought sequence and rhetorical moves. A weird associative logic binds a DTC soldier reluctantly hoisting a shovel to the Katyn commission (Pound having declined to dig) by way of Von Tirpitz, whose U-boats were wreaking grave damage on Allied fleets. As the admiral warned his daughter against German naval officers’ “siren” charms,58 Pound thought to beware Maukch’s “charm” in the matter of a (German) remit to investigate Katyn: He frames that proposition as a siren song luring him to an act of witness that could make him an instrument of German propaganda against Stalin and the Allies, putting at risk the American citizenship he never renounced—even if (“But on the other hand”) the (charming?) Maukch thought to do Pound “a favour.” In this light, Pound’s “le beau monde gouverne … ‘and … / there is … nothing, they will not do / to retain ’em / yrs truly Kungfutseu” appears to link Katyn to the Bolsheviks’ systematic, ideologically rationalized, ongoing atrocities against Russia’s elite and, eventually, everyone the state found it convenient to label a “class enemy.” Between 1920 and 1922, the Bolsheviks murdered some fifty thousand Russian officers and officials in the Crimea alone. Stalin escalated the killing; by late 1941, the NKVD gulag held an estimated four million surviving “class enemies.”59 The Polish officers too, once the NKVD’s experimental brainwashing failed, became “class enemies” whose destruction would leave “a leaderless vacuum,” facilitating Soviet

58

59

Churchill reportedly said, “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril” (“U-Boat,” Wikipedia, December  23, 2015, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat). Pound links “charm” with the “ΣΕΙΡΗΝΕΣ” (sirens) whose deathly song Odysseus, tied to the mast, hears (C LXXIV.463), perhaps in parallel with his having resisted Maukch’s lure. Douglas Smith, Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), 209–210 & passim; chap. 19; 372.

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usurpation of Poland’s governance—a strategy Hitler adopted: “There should be only one master for the Poles, the Germans … All representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated.”60 The passage’s notational lines evoke Lenin’s doctrine that “war is not a conflict between individuals or states but between classes . … If the war promotes the interest of the proletariat […] such a war is ‘progress’, irrespective of the victims and sufferings which it entails”—a policy continued in the post1922 Soviet state’s need to keep manufacturing internal “class enemies” on whom to deflect resentment of the new rich Party elite.61 Does the poet follow Lenin and Stalin in justifying the destruction of the Polish officers with their “advantages, privilege” so that the Soviets (and Germans) can appropriate Poland’s land, wealth, and labor for economic programs he deems more just and humane? If so, his linking of Katyn to the Bolsheviks would seem to bespeak a stone-hearted reduction of “history” to the “real” war, the “bank war”—in which case, what matter who murdered the officers, or indeed the destruction of a sovereign nation.62 Does he summon “Kungfutseu” to countersign this justification of the massacre, or does Confucius’s principle of privilege grounded in virtue rather than noble birth together with the ideogram “Chung” signal not pusillanimous neutrality but a “middle” way between the dictators’ murderous extremes?63 A voice prophesying in 1904 “Sochy-lism is a-comin’ ” sounds in the poet’s mind and the passage reflects on the history it includes: “things have ends (or scopes) and beginnings. To / know and what follows will assist yr / comprehension of what precedes process / vide also Epictetus and Syrus” (C LXXVII.484–485). Despite these lines’ seeming equipoise, this turn from the killing fields and the politics of witness to the Stoic counsel that life is a fleeting illusion does not quite distance the poet from the responsibility of witness. Vide 60

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Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 127–129, citing T. A. Taracouzio, The Soviet Union and the International Law (New York: MacMillan, 1935), 32. Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 79, citing the Nuremberg trial record, original emphasis. See Smith, Former People, 235–239 on the concomitant shift in the meaning of “class” from an economic to “almost a racial category” (238). Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1971), 469. Cf. “and tovarish blessed without aim / wept in the rainditch at evening” (C LXXIV.450); “tovarish” (Soviet: comrade), 19th C borrowing of 16–19th C Polish towarczys, “companion,” a designation of knight-officers in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Army.

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Syrus? Syrus’s oft-quoted saying “iudex damnatur ubi nocens absolvitur” (“the judge is condemned when the criminal is acquitted”) returns us to the crime scene, the dead bodies, and the task of judging, as if the epic voyager were haunted by the violence behind the siren song—and the burden of judging it. That the poem brings Maukch’s abortive invitation to the fore at this crossing of history and literature, or “news that STAYS news,” opens the poem to the “atrocity blindness” Sven Lindqvist contrasts with Conrad’s indelible witness to King Leopold’s atrocities in Congo.64 Beside Conrad, the poet marooned on a broken ant-hill seems almost willfully blind. “History,” the war, is all around him; like Mathieu he can’t see. Called to bear witness, the poet who would “include” history bears his culture’s self-representation in himself and his art, not excepting its violence and violently enforced moral risk and failure.65 Yet the poem doesn’t bury the Katyn massacre. It flags it. Like the young spruce trees on the Polish officers’ mass grave, visibly younger than the surrounding forest, this crux of history and poetry calls attention to what it covers over. Floated amid blank spaces for what the poet doesn’t know—and doesn’t know he doesn’t know—“Katin” gives substance to his confessions of stone-heartedness and moral failure (“J’ai eu pitié des autres / probablement pas assez, and at moments that suited my own convenience”; the “Pull down thy vanity” passage), even as lines such as “woe to them that conquer with armies / and whose only right is their power” and “there / are / no / righteous / wars” recur to his mission to study war’s causes so as to prevent it (C LXXVI.480, 483; LXXVIII.503; LXXXI.540–541). Pound’s epic 64

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Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes, trans. Joan Tate (New York: New Press, 1996), 171–172. Activist Edmund Morel called Heart of Darkness “the most powerful thing ever written” on King Leopold’s violence in Congo (letter to A. C. Doyle, October 7, 1909, cited in Alan Simmons, “The Language of Atrocity: Representing the Congo of Conrad and Casement,” in Conrad in Africa: New Essays on Heart of Darkness, eds. Attie de Lange and Gail Fincham (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 106). Moody writes that Pound “approved the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia” and characterized war against Hitler as “war against a clean concept of money”; “That was his remarkable view of what was now at issue, not Hitler’s seizure and spoliation of Czechoslovakia, not that country’s loss of its freedom and independence, not the threat to other European countries from the militarization and mounting belligerence of Nazi Germany and not the betrayals of free nations by Britain and France in the vain hope of appeasing Hitler’s lust for conquest,” Moody, Ezra Pound, 265. See also Ben D. Kimpel and T.C. Duncan Eaves, “Some Curious ‘Facts’ in Ezra Pound’s Cantos,” ELH 50:3 (1983): 627-35.

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ordeal attests to the poet’s situation, whirled and tossed by veering winds—a blackout or blinding in face of an unseeable war, an occluded future that is not his alone. Shipwrecked by the century’s unprecedented violence, scarred by atrocity blindness, weeping Odyssean tears (“lachrymis ΔΑΚΡΥΩΝ,” (dakruon) C LXXVI.482), he depicts a chaotic modern Nemesis, even as the poem’s aleatory form, lines loosely netted around holes and blanks, ideological incoherence, and confessions of error signal its epic burden. For The Pisan cantos’ moral failures are the world’s. Pound’s “Katin” passage is an inconsequent reflection of Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s deliberate burial of the Katyn massacre during—and after—the war. The exiled Polish government in London “looked to Churchill and Roosevelt to see that truth and justice should triumph”; the Allies were led instead by the secret propaganda messages Stalin sent them beginning in April 1943.66 Churchill defended the Poles against Stalin’s slander but silenced London’s Polish press. “It was decided by the victorious Governments concerned that the issue should be avoided,” he wrote after the Nuremberg trials, “and the crime of Katyn was never probed in detail”; in 1952 he still declined to comment.67 Roosevelt and the American State Department likewise knew and suppressed the truth. Roosevelt commissioned an article by a career analyst of European affairs, then prohibited its publication and reassigned its author to Samoa; the State Department “lost” a crucial report.68 Aligned with the Allies’ tactical lies, secrecy, and silences, Canto 77’s crux of poetry and history opens from Katyn’s unhealed wound to the world-shaking violence of Lenin, Stalin, Putin, Crimea, Ukraine, and the formal inconclusiveness of modern Nemesis. “Pallas Δίκη sustain me,” Pound petitions the goddess of temporal justice, his poem a dark hieroglyph of a world-historical moment riven by intersecting vectors of imperial rivalries, total-war technologies, and moral capitulation to lawless dictators (C LXXVIII.499).

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Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 30, 34; see also Etkind, Remembering, xvii. Zaowdny, Death in the Forest, 74, 188. Zawodny details the Allies’ postwar suppression (Death in the Forest 169–197, esp. 178, 181, 185, 186); Etkind extends the account to 2010.

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The Italian cantos: “News” that STAYS news? Cantos 72–84 provoke thought on what philosophers call “moral luck,” the force of circumstance beyond the control of the one being judged. These cantos’ very existence depends upon Pound’s failed attempt to leave Italy for America in 1940, as the State Department advised that spring.69 Staying in wartime Italy meant living in the propaganda land that Mussolini, the “supreme head of book censorship,” had ruled with an iron fist for two decades, as Stalin and Hitler did theirs.70 William Shirer recorded in his diary on August  10, 1939, that, on returning to Germany from leave in Washington, New York, and Paris, he bought the Berlin/Rhineland newspapers and felt propelled into “the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet”: How completely isolated a world the German people live in. A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it. Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland … here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained … What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion.71

After listing Nazi papers’ hysterical headlines trumpeting faked atrocities, counterfactual “events,” and belligerent lies, the diarist continues: “You ask: but the German people can’t possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.”72

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Redman, Ezra Pound, documents Pound’s unavailing effort to return to America in 1940 (204–206). Ronald Bush shows that Pound was planning a suite of Italian cantos when he was arrested (“Ezra Pound’s Fascist ‘Europa,’ ” 215f; “Pisa,” in Ezra Pound in Context, ed. Ira B. Nadel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 265–268). With near absolute control of Italy’s communication media, Mussolini installed and/or censored editors, publishers, and printers and micromanaged the news, the post, book publishing, the theater, the cinema, the telephone, and everyday conversation. See Guido Bonsaver, Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), esp. 69, 231; Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities; and Peter Corner, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 563, emphasis mine. Ibid., 564. Hitler’s fake “news” prepared for the Nazi invasion of Poland by depicting Poland as the aggressor; after invading Hitler deported some 1.2 million Poles (Zawodny, Death in the Forest, 5).

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With foreign newspapers almost unobtainable, Pound, a foreigner residing in a country at war with his own, also dwelled in the cockeyed world of Fascist and Nazi propaganda. Indicted for wartime treason by his country, the maker of a contemporary epic that aspires to the condition of literature— “news that STAYS news”—had long been under the spell of Mussolini’s statecontrolled news.73 The Italian cantos, composed in the mayhem and terror after Mussolini’s fall and the American invasion, register the distorting force Mussolini’s “news” exerted on Pound’s poem. Canto 73 ventriloquizes through Cavalcanti’s voice and poetics an egregious propaganda piece in the Corriere della Sera that Pound evidently mistook for reliable news.74 Canto 72 Presenza allegorizes this distorting force: the poet feels himself suddenly “seized in such an iron grip / That I could move neither wrist nor shoulder / And I saw a fist … but saw no forearm / Holding me fast as a nail in the wall / This sounds foolish to anyone who has not been through it.”75 Meanwhile, Ezzelino’s spirit rages on, echoing Marinetti’s vow to replant the imperial Fascist flag in Ethiopia.76 The Italian cantos are described as the Cantos’ “moral nadir”; the “smoking gun” that proves Pound’s “absolute loyalty” to Mussolini; “militantly proFascist.”77 But their Dantescan dramatic scenarios, their dispersal of violent 73

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For example, British journalist Fuller, First of the League Wars, reported that General Badoglio banned all journalists, Italian and foreign, in Ethiopia. Mussolini filled the news void with his propaganda “triumph,” proclaiming Ethiopia “pacified” while secretly authorizing further atrocities toward that end: “Rome, July 8, 1936: To … Graziani. I once more authorize Your Excellency … systematically to conduct policy of political terror and extermination of the rebels and implicated populations. Without the law of tenfold retribution one does not cure the wound in good time” (telegram, cited in Richard Pankhurst, “History of the Ethiopian Patriots, 1936–1940.” www.linkethiopia.org/guide-toethiopia/the-pankhurst-history-library/1). See also Angelo Del Boca, The Ethiopian War 1935–41 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 213–214n2; and F. A. Ridley, Mussolini over Africa (London: Wishart Books, Ltd., 1935). See Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 215–217. Rainey and Bush (“Ezra Pound’s Fascist Europa”; “Pisa”) highlight Pound’s distress at Italian news reports and photographs of Allied bombing of Italian churches, temples, and other monuments. “Mi crede insulso chi non ha fatto la prova.” I cite Pound’s English translation (C LXXII.432–437). Pound composed the Italian cantos after Marinetti died in December 1944 and published them in early 1945; they were appended to The Cantos in 1987 and repositioned chronologically in 1989 (Rainey, Monument 213). Cf. Massimo Bacigalupo’s, “Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73: An Annotated Translation,” Paideuma 20:1-2 (1991); and Casillo and Russo’s in Casillo, “Fascists of the Final Hour,” 121–127. The British ousted Mussolini from Ethiopia in 1941. Sieburth, ed., Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos, xvi; Casillo, “Fascists of the Final Hour,” 121; Bush, “Ezra Pound’s Fascist Europa,” 215. All these critics offer nuanced readings, as does Sean Pryor, “The Trust and the Mistrust: Ezra Pound in Italy,” in Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust, and Deception, eds. John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist (Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate, 2013), 163–79.

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energies among the ghosts’ voices, the disembodied fist that slams the poet against the wall, the poet’s aside to the effect that no one who hasn’t experienced this hellish phantasmagoria can understand it, and Canto 73’s propaganda source call attention to the clashing forces that buffetted poet and poem amid the new world disorder. Though the poet designs the canto, not he but the ghosts of Marinetti (who fought in Africa and Russia) and Ezzelino rage and seek reembodiment so as to fight. Not he but Futurist Marinetti shouts “PRESENTE”—the scripted response to each name in the Fascist ritual roll call of dead fighters whereby the living affirm that their heroes’ spirits remain alive in them.78 “I sang war, you wanted peace,” says Marinetti sadly, then pronounces the poet “blind … to the things of today” before fading into “the hollow emptiness” (C LXXII.433). Blind to the things of today: many critics examine Pound’s work from the late 1930s through The Pisan Cantos in light of his possible stances as friend of Italy, friend of fascism, propagandist for Italy and/or fascism, hero-worshipping, gullible, willfully perverse creditor of Mussolini, and sane if at times almost psychotically vituperative proponent of Social Credit and inveigher against finance systems designed for private profit through appropriation of public resources and imposition of public debt.79 Less attention has been paid to what Pound knew or didn’t know—or couldn’t have known or actively fended off knowing—of Mussolini’s atrocities at home and abroad. What would Pound have known about the abduction and murder in 1924 of the brilliant young lawyer and opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti, who, eleven days earlier, had informed Parliament of “an unsettling national panorama of violence and criminal behavior” by the Fascist regime and proposed that the fraudulent elections be annulled, and who possessed documents of the regime’s corrupt and illegal dealings with Sinclair Oil?80 Or Mussolini’s murder, silencing, or exile of other rival leaders and critics of the

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Casillo, “Fascists of the Final Hour,” 101–102 and 260n15, citing Herbert Finer, Mussolini’s Italy, 397, 402. See excellent studies by Redman, Ezra Pound, Pryor, “Trust and Mistrust,” and Wendy Flory, The American Ezra Pound (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Mauro Canali, “The Matteotti Murder, 1924–2014,” Centro Primo Levi Online Monthly. primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/the-matteotti-murder-and-the-origins-of-mussolinis -totalitarian-fascist-regime-in-italy/ Retrieved June 9, 2015.

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regime? or his aerial bombing of civilians in Spain? or his horrific brutality in Ethiopia where, violating the Geneva Convention and flouting the League of Nations, his generals dropped chemical bombs to devastate the army, the civilian population, and the land?81 Although Mussolini hid his barbaric violence from the Italian populace, the assault on Ethiopia outraged the international press. Americans demonstrated in the streets; Roosevelt imposed oil sanctions82; a cabinet member noted, “I have not met anyone whose sympathy … is not with Ethiopia … and I suspect that the whole civilized world has the same point of view.”83 In 1934, Cole Porter’s “You’re the tops—You’re Musso—li—ni” was in the air; in 1935 his name was expunged.84 Certainly Pound drank the koolaid: “ ‘Presente!’ … Put down the slave trade, made the desert to yield / and menaced the loan swine” (C LXXVIII.499). But Pound was in Italy. How far was he Mussolini’s dupe, unaware of the actualities censored by the dictator’s iron fist? Did he actively fend off intelligence that might mitigate the blinding effects of Mussolini’s propaganda machine, which an American journalist described as “some dark blight on the human spirit, … a cold black shadow on the

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See Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 126f, Bonsaver, Censorship and Literature and his “Mussolini’s Fascism, Literary Censorship and the Vatican,” Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana), 31 (2008): 201– 212; special issue: Literature and Censorship: Who Is Afraid of the Truth of Literature? academia .edu/2492893/Mussolinis_Fascism_Literary_Censorship_and_the_Vatican See also Corner, The Fascist Party, Fuller, First of the League Wars, and Canali, “The Matteotti Murder.” Much remains to be done on this subject. Moody interweaves world events with Pound’s writings and considers whether and how Pound propagandized for Mussolini rather than the effects of Fascist propaganda on Pound’s (mis)judgments of events. Paul argues that Pound, following Mussolini’s neo-imperialist propaganda, “replaced the reality of colonized bodies with a classicizing image of a Roman body of state” (“Italian Fascist Exhibitions,” 77); she cites Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 126: “ ‘the slaughter in Ethiopia … combined old-fashioned savageries (decapitations, castrations, and burning and razing of civilian quarters) with industrial killing methods (aerial gas bombings and efficient open-grave executions) … more commonly associated with Hitler and Stalin’s soldiers’; it ‘was so out of keeping with Italians’ self-perception as the more “humane” dictatorship that it has been edited out of popular and official memory. Until 1995, the Italian government, and former combatants … denied the use of gas in East Africa’. ” See also Del Boca, chap. 17; Adolf Mignemi, “Fotographia e ideologia coloniale nell’esperienza d’Italia degli trente anni,” in Fotografie e storia dell’ Africa: atti del convegno internazionale, Napoli-Roma, 9–11 settembre 1992, ed. Alessandro Triulzi (Naples: Istituto universitaria orientale, 1995). Cf. Canto 40. Had small oil companies not subverted the sanctions, Mussolini said, “I would have had to withdraw from Abyssinia in a week.” See Diggins, Mussolini, 292. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 287.

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land”?85 Pound’s 1934 credo precedes the war on Ethiopia: “Any thorough judgment of Mussolini will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe … he wants to accomplish” (JM 33).86 Its incoherence— “thorough judgment” as an act of faith, excluding doubt, evidence, counterevidence?—conveys the psychic and moral pressures which anyone living in Mussolini’s Italy must have felt, and the terrible choice between knowing and believing under that duplicitous regime.87 As for literature or “news that STAYS news”: the gap between Pound’s epic ambition for his poem including history and Mussolini’s hidden atrocities and obfuscated “news” casts a peculiar light that reveals dramatic, rhetorical, and tonal subtleties in the poet’s colloquies with ghosts in his present-day Hell. For Sean Pryor, the poet’s aside on being nailed to the wall by a surreal fist seeks to “deflect doubt about the truth of that visitation,” “the validity of poetic invention,” and “the resurgence which the visitation and invention support. The canto half knows that not just its frame tale, but the dream which that tale celebrates, is incredible.”88 Yet if the fist allegorizes a forcible impressment of Pound, whose Vorticist pacifism “Marinetti” contrasts with his own Futurist belligerence, the play of voices also dramatizes doubt of the “news” of these roiling times—the other half of what the canto “knows.” As the canto deflects Italian violence onto Marinetti and Ezzelino, the poet tunes his antennae now

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Hamilton Basso, “Italian Notebook, 1938,” New Republic 95 (June  15, 1938): 147–149; cited in Diggins, “The American Writer,” 605. Diggins considers Pound’s work alongside Burns’s novel on the 1944 American “liberation” of Italy, The Galleria, which “expose[d] a cruel contradiction between the rhetoric of American idealism and the reality of the American performance”: “crimes” such as “the Badoglio collaboration with ex-Fascists, the exploitation of women, the ‘making of money out of human misery, … a deficient moral and humane sense in Americans as a people’ ” (Diggins, “The American Writer,” 612–613). Pound reportedly said in July 1944, “Wherever the British and Americans go, they make the best possible propaganda for Fascism.” See David Bradshaw and James Smith, “Ezra Pound, James Strachey Barnes (‘The Italian Lord Haw-Haw’) and Italian Fascism,” Review of English Studies n.s. 64.266 (September 2013): 690. Toward Pound’s “misplaced … trust,” “use and abuse of faith,” and “appeals to our trust,” Pryor argues, “we need to practice implacable doubt.” Pryor, “Trust and Mistrust,” 164, 179. Ibid., 176. For Pound’s incoherent relation to Fascism see also his ghostwritten letter for the London Times to the effect that “Pound never WAS fascist … Not only was he not fascist, he was ANTIsocialist and against the socialist elements in the fascist program.” Bradshaw and Smith, “Ezra Pound,” 692. Marinetti merged his Futurist Political Party with Mussolini’s Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, failed to get Futurism declared the state aesthetic, and persuaded Mussolini to ban Hitler’s traveling Degenerate Art exhibition. He fought in Ethiopia in 1935–36 and, despite ill health, spent four months on the Eastern Front in 1943.

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to one voice, now another, as if seeking a clear signal.89 “Go make yourself a hero again,” he tells Marinetti, “& leave the talking to me”: the poet will “sing of the eternal war / between light and mud”—not the material war but the bank war he sees as global war’s prime mover (C LXXII.432). So, in Canto 73 Cavalcanti: Corrispondenza Repubblicana (Republican Dispatch), the poet awakens “nell’aere perso”—in the waste air of Dante’s Hell (Inferno V.8)— to the voice of Cavalcanti, descended from the “third heaven” (of Venus) to glorify the raped and martyred Romagnola who leads invading Canadian troops into a minefield.90 Composed amid “confusion and terror” in an Italy dominated by Hitler and under Allied bombardment, this canto and its historical and  imaginative sources—the scenario of the poet waking in hell to  a fascist paean; fake “news” of the Romagnola’s retaliatory violence in wartime Italy  invaded by Axis and Allies; a verse form derived from Cavalcanti—resist monovocal reduction.91 What is arguably most striking in these “lost” (in several senses) cantos, then, is not only how estranged they are from actualities but the way their dialogic scenarios ventriloquize Fascist “news”—and violence—through Italian voices: Marinetti, Dazzi, Ezzelino, Galla Placidia, Cavalcanti, and the Romagnola. Pilgrim Dante speaks with and about the sinners he encounters in their orderly “circles of transgression” (li empi giri, Inferno X.5), and his frequent need of correction by his moral guide creates dialectical drama. Traveling with neither Aquinas-map nor Virgilian guide, Pound’s epic persona rigs a makeshift raft from chance materials and sails this fragile vessel in no “orderly Dantescan rising / but as the winds veer,” into a modern hell of interfering “voices” (C LXXIV.463).

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As Marinetti fades out, the poet tunes in “another note of the scale,” his friend, the (living) librarian and translator Manlio Torquato Dazzi: “You [Dazzi] wanting the past too much, he [Marinetti] the future”; Marinetti willed violence to excess; now Italy, invaded by the Nazis and bombarded by the Allies, suffers “more destruction than he wanted.” Marinetti’s spirit interrupts with “urgent” news: a white Italian skull sings in the Mekelle desert, “Alamain, Alamain / we will return” (C LXXII.427 [Italian], 433–434 [English]). Pound judged Cavalcanti “less likely [than Dante] to give ear to sophistries” (SR 97). Massimo Bacigalupo recounts nightly Allied bombings of Rapallo, which on December 31, 1944 “badly damaged” his grandparents’ house and killed four people next door; he relates these cantos to “the Fascist cause [Pound] espoused,” confirming Pound’s “willingness to let his poem take the form occasion offered,” (“Ezra Pound’s Cantos 72 and 73,” 20).

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Pound’s virtual triptych—Propertius’s roasting of martial empires over fires of love; aesthete Mauberley’s damp demise; The Cantos’ epic commitment to “history” with its unforeseeable, all but unbearable stresses—suggests why the “fascist” category cannot contain the cantos of 1944–45. The panels highlight not only Pound’s antithetical stances toward Propertius’s imperial RomeLondon and Mussolini’s neo-imperial Rome but compelling continuities. The Homage, that stunning early breakthrough in modernism’s comparative literature of the present, illuminates The Cantos’ many-voiced comparative dialectics, vertical and lateral, from Homer, Dante, and Cavalcanti to Possum, Marinetti, and Mussolini, to triangulate a vertiginous present. And, swept onto the rocks by history’s storms though The Pisan cantos are, Mauberley lives in their strange, haunting beauty, the more mysterious for its terrible surround. The lyric voice buried after 1918 wakes and sings amid history’s debris, in colloquy with Palgrave, gathering from the air a live tradition: “If the hoar frost grip thy tent / Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent” (C LXXXIV.560). “So that:” (C I.5): The winds that batter Pound’s worldfaring Cantos rage past its unstable last lines.92 Like Canto 1, the poem does not end; it opens. Its immediate comparative present flows from canto to canto through the poem into ours, still infinitely dispersed and, like the war, unknowable.93 The cantos of 1944–45 remain alive with questions. Touch them almost anywhere and epic forces leap off the page: ants and gnats confronting the double-edged sword of dizzying technological developments and ever more deadly war technologies; green worlds surviving amid climate crisis, dying oceans, dying species, a pervasive human infestation of the planet denied by governments, military forces, corporations; our machine world’s insatiable demand for oil at any cost—earthquakes, polluted oceans, endless war; unhealed wounds of territorial violence—Palestine/Israel, Persia/ISIS, Russia/Crimea and Ukraine, India/Pakistan, civilians everywhere; fake and manipulated “news,” from fabricated “facts” to “justify” the Iraq War to

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See Christine Froula, “Groundwork for an Edition of The Cantos of Ezra Pound,” (Diss.: University of Chicago, 1977) and Ronald Bush “ ‘Unstill, Ever Turning’: The Composition of Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments,” Text 7 (1994): 397–422. See Benjamin Wittes and Gabriela Blum, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones (New York: Basic Books, 2015).

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truth-telling journalists beheaded; technological modernity’s intensification of force’s “petrifactive” effect; omniscience become unimaginable as “blanks” spiral into epistemological black holes. Pound’s cantos give unspooling time a multidimensional form that extends the deep time of Homeric epic to an open present and future. There was no “damn long time” for Pound’s epic of modern war to approach the Iliad’s stark geometry of violence and virtue, but if its comparative present offers a moral, it may be the uncannily contemporary evocation of a posthuman green world in these famous lines: Pull down thy vanity, it is not man Made courage, or made order, or made grace, Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down. Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry. (C LXXXI.541)

Part Three

Pound’s Values

7

Ezra Pound and the Critique of Value Paul Stasi

Introduction If there is one consistency across the long and complicated intellectual career of Ezra Pound, it is his interest in the question of value. It animates his earliest critiques of the study of literature and it appears in what must be some of the last written words attributed to him, in the 1970 “Preface” to a New Directions reissue of Guide to Kulchur. “The struggle was, and still might be,” Pound writes, “to preserve some of the values to make life worth living” (GK 8). Later, in that same text, he defines “civilization itself ” as “a sane balance of values” (GK 137). Here Pound is using what the OED tells us is a nineteenth century (and predominantly American) coinage—values as “the principles or moral standards held by a person or social group”— but these values for Pound are always comparative, even when they address literary quality. The ABC of Reading, for instance, argues that one can only “estimate the value of one book in relation to others,” while the earlier “How to Read” offers a condensed reading list so that the novice won’t “lose his head or ascribe ridiculous values to works of secondary intensity” (ABCR 40; LE 38). A proper estimation of literary quality, Pound claims, can only emerge from comparison, which is why he railed against the philological (and, in his view, Germanic) origins of comparative literature, which failed to become the “study of ‘comparative values in letters’ ” he believed it was meant to be (LE 192). Burying itself “in ‘problems,’ ” literary study had “completely turned away from any sense of proportion between the ‘problems’ and vital values” (SP 192). “Take a man’s mind off the human value of the poem he is

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reading … switch it on to some question of grammar,” Pound proclaimed, “and you begin his dehumanisation” (SP  197). Pound’s argument here is against both specialization and compartmentalization, the separation of philology or grammar from a more holistic understanding of literature’s utility. Pound, for his part, famously did not adhere to modernity’s various disciplinary divisions, and so we find value reemerging as a central term in his more decidedly economic writings of the 1930s. Major Douglas’ superiority to all prior writers on economics, for instance, rests on his understanding of value: “Douglas saw the limitation of Marx’s value theory. He saw that if value arises from work, a vast deal of that work has already been done by men who can no longer eat its fruit, namely by the dead” (SP 278). Pound calls this labor “the cultural heritage” defined as “the whole aggregate of human inventions” including “ameliorations of seed, of agricultural and mechanical processes belonging to no one man” as well as more obviously cultural achievements such as “selected habits of civilized life” (SP 275, 63). Crucially, this cultural heritage is part of our collective life: “The overplus of what a group of men can do acting together, over and above the sum of what they can do acting alone, is a reality, and no system either of thought or action can be perfect or even reasonably just or complete if it refuse to take count of this reality” (SP 275). “Value in our time,” Pound argues “arises mainly from the cultural heritage,” which exceeds “the boundaries of private ownership” (SP 275, 63). Value is thus not only comparative, but also communal, and it is historically variable: In “our time”—that is the mid-1930s when these lines were written—value seems more heavily dependent on past labor than it was in previous historical eras. A similar assertion is made by the loosely affiliated set of German Marxists grouped under the rubric of Wertkritik, whose writings began appearing in West Germany in the 1980s but have only recently been translated into English. This work—along with the writings of Moishe Postone—poses significant challenges to what each, in various ways, terms “traditional Marxism,” and it does so through a reimagining of the central categories of capitalist social relations, value prime among them. Thus, we find Norbert Trenkle arguing that Marx’s main concern “was to demonstrate the irrationality, the inner contradictions, and hence the ultimate untenability of a society based on

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value. At its core, his theory of value is a critique of value … and, at the same time, essentially a theory of crisis.”1 Recentering their analysis of capitalism around Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit, Wertkritik thinkers, such as Robert Kurz, argue that capitalism has entered a terminal crisis precisely because of “a disproportionally rapid growth of fixed capital relative to [the] labor force as a result of the increasingly scientific character of production.”2 Technological innovation—itself a necessary result of the coercive laws of capitalism—gradually increases what Marx called the organic composition of capital: namely, the ratio of dead labor to living labor or, in a surprisingly similar formulation, what Pound called the cultural heritage. In this chapter, I would like to trace out some of the central arguments of these figures, not to track Pound’s precise agreement or disagreement with their theories, or to obscure the incoherence and often reactionary nature of his economic theories. What is of interest to me, instead, is the way this incoherence emerges from the irrationality constitutive of the capitalist social relations Pound relentlessly attacked. My aim is to demonstrate how recentering a discussion of capitalism around the question of value has important consequences for how we think about a range of concepts— history, temporality, the subject, the state, the role of production, and finance capital—all of which have relevance for Pound’s totalizing engagements. For Pound sought to overcome our modern “double discourse of value,” arguing, in admittedly unmediated fashion, for the necessary relationship between aesthetic value and economic forms, and he did so by grounding his critique of the modern world in a reading of the eighteenth century, imagined as one of Pound’s many precapitalist idylls from which the modern world had fallen. Curiously enough, though, when he set out to write directly about the eighteenth century, he did so via China and in a form strikingly different from the first half of his monumental epic, one that has served to alienate generations of readers from the middle section of The Cantos and has led to a series of tendentious arguments misreading The Pisan Cantos’s return to lyric 1

2

Norbert Trenkle, “Value and Crisis: Basic Questions,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen et al. (Chicago: MCM Publishing, 2014), 13. Robert Kurz, “On the Current Global Economic Crisis: Questions and Answers,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, 334.

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as a kind of apology for Pound’s political engagements. I would like to argue that the China/Adams Cantos represent, in some ways, Pound’s most serious attempt to bypass the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, and that the “return to lyric” of The Pisan Cantos represents, instead, a capitulation to the very form of capitalist culture he was attempting to overcome. In what follows, I will reread the China and Adams Cantos through the categories of history, the individual and the state as a way of thinking about how Pound imagined the “new table of values” he hoped Europe would find in its confrontation with the East. These values concern, primarily, the principles of good governance that emerge from Pound’s idiosyncratic understanding of Confucianism, but what is more important for our purposes here is the curious way they work to undermine the “double discourse of value” constitutive of capitalist modernity, a discourse that separates utility out of both aesthetics and economics. Pound, in contrast, restores utility to both discourses as he tries to heal the sutures of capitalist modernity’s value relation within the space of the poem itself. But first we must develop a more thorough understanding of the Wertkritik school to see how we can situate Pound in relation to their critique of capital’s valorization of value.

Production for production’s sake It has become commonplace to think of consumption as the hallmark of contemporary capitalism’s false consciousness. If only Americans could see themselves as producers rather than consumers, the argument goes, they would see through capital’s ideological veil. Marx, of course, seems to support this argument when he notes that production is the predominant moment in a larger cycle that also includes, as necessary moments, circulation and consumption. And yet, as Moishe Postone argues in his still underappreciated Time, Labor and Social Domination: capitalism, in Marx’s analysis, is a social formation in which social production is for the sake of production, whereas the individual labors in order to consume … Marx envisaged its negation as a social formation

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in which social production is for consumption, whereas the labor of the individual is sufficiently satisfying to be pursued for its own sake.3

Production is thus one of many concepts—labor is another—that, according to both Postone and the Wertkritik school, traditional Marxism has falsely hypostatized as the transhistorical position from which to critique capitalist social relations. Instead, we must see that production is simply one half of a binary that is fundamental to capitalism’s structure: production for production’s sake, labor for consumption’s sake. Production, that is to say, is indeed predominant, but only under capitalism, just as it is capitalism’s peculiar definition of value that produces a social order entirely mediated by labor. Postone is again helpful: “In Marx’s mature critique, the notion that labor constitutes the social world and is the source of all wealth does not refer to society in general, but to capitalist, or modern, society.”4 Marxism is thus more than just a critique of political economy; it is a critique “of the nature of modernity itself.”5 The critique of consumption outlined above is, then, fundamentally correct, so long as it does not take the producing subject as its transhistorical point of departure. The point, here, is that though some form of work is a transhistorical necessity, we must be very careful not to confuse the particular form of labor currently operative under capital with this more general notion of work. To view all labor, regardless of the social order in which it exists, as value-producing—and, subsequently, to conceive of capitalism primarily as a system that veils this truth and thus unfairly distributes the benefits of that value production—is to remain internal to the perspective of capitalist modernity itself. Stepping outside of this perspective requires submitting the capitalist understanding of labor, value, and time to a rigorous critique. It is precisely this critique that defines the work of both Postone and the Wertkritik school as anthologized in the 2014 collection Marxism and the Critique of Value. 3

4 5

Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996), 33. Ibid., 4. Ibid.

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Beginning, as I have noted, from the premise that Marx’s main goal “was to demonstrate the irrationality … and hence the ultimate untenability of a society based on value,” the texts in Marxism and the Critique of Value provide a striking analysis of capitalism’s “inner contradictions.”6 Prime among these is the contrast between material wealth and value. The book’s editors summarize this distinction clearly: “Two identical coats, for example, always represent precisely twice the material wealth of one; they will keep two people warm instead of one. But the two coats do not represent twice the value if they were made in a process more efficient than that used to manufacture the single coat.”7 Since value is determined by abstract social labor, it is tied directly to productivity: Two coats made more efficiently than one will contain the same amount of value and thus cost the same, despite being, in fact, two coats. This contradiction between material wealth and value is behind the coercive laws of competition that drive innovations in the process of production, all with the aim of capturing relative surplus value, and this process itself leads to the second of capitalism’s “inner contradictions.” Increases in productivity benefit individual capitalists by granting them relative surplus value, but since they tend to increase the organic composition of capital they also lessen the amount of actual value in any given commodity, as seen in the example of the coats above. What is good for the individual capitalist is thus bad for capital as a whole; the labor saved from technological innovation ends up reducing the total amount of value produced by the system itself. We encounter here the basis for Marx’s falling rate of profit, the gradual removal of living labor from the production process itself, the removal, that is to say, of the only means capital has of producing value. The dead labor of the past thus weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living, throwing workers out of the workplace to subsist in capital’s reserve army of the unemployed, and reducing capital’s ability to generate new value. At the same time, however, this rising organic composition of capital proves the increasingly social nature of capitalism itself. For technological

6 7

Trenkle, “Value and Crisis,” 13. Neil Larsen et al. “Introduction,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, xxiii.

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developments are never, simply, the result of individual ingenuity, requiring, at the very least, a well-developed infrastructure for their realization. And this is particularly true of the so-called third industrial revolution, which is the focus of much of the Wertkritik writing. Indeed, contemporary advances in technology, which are so busy hurling workers out of the production process and, thus, radically undermining the valorization of value, are themselves the product of “a socialized organization of science and technology” that has emerged, primarily, in service of this valorization process.8 Similarly, the state provides not only the structure for this socialized technology, but also the very preconditions for capitalist development itself,9 creating an “advanced social infrastructure” necessary for capitalism’s initial growth that yet stands “outside the law of value,” and is, therefore, productive “only in terms of society as a whole.”10 Capitalism, that is to say, fundamentally depends on areas of social life that exist outside of its value-producing structure, for the category of material wealth is capacious, including not only “material goods,” but also “knowledge, information, other immaterial goods, and their distribution,” which is to say all technological developments as well as society’s ability to implement them.11 The irony, of course, is that it is precisely these developing forces of production that point to the ultimate ability of capital to liberate us from what Robert Kurz calls the “torture of labor,” if only capital was able to see past its extraordinarily 8

9

10 11

Robert Kurz, “The Crisis of Exchange Value: Science as Productivity, Productive Labor, and Capitalist Reproduction,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, 35. Or I should say provided. One of the most provocative arguments of the book is made by Ernst Lohoff and it concerns the dramatic withdrawal of public funds in the last forty years or so. So long as workers were understood as part of capital’s reserve army, it made sense for the welfare state to take on the burden of supporting them until they would, once again, become useful. Now, however, with the increasing inability of capital to absorb the workers it has thrown out of the production process, these individuals become expendable: “The welfare state’s social safeguards, until now considered to be part of future as well as the current costs of enabling the productive exploitation of labor power, threaten to become, from the standpoint of capitalism as a whole, yet another of those notorious ‘misallocated resources’ … The ‘generosity’ with which those ‘let go’ were carried over until being rehired—under the premise that their having been let go was simply the temporarily conferred status of being a potential labor and commodity subject honoris causa—loses its material basis. The welfare state mutates into an authority in charge of selection and exclusion, one that must make the cut between valorizable and unvalorizable human material.” See Ernst Lohoff, “Off Limits, Out of Control: Commodity Society and Resistance in the Age of Deregulation and Denationalization,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, 161. Kurz, “The Crisis of Exchange Value,” 29, 30. Claus Peter Ortlieb, “A Contradiction between Matter and Form: On the Significance of the Production of Relative Surplus Value in the Dynamic of Terminal Crisis,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, eds. Neil Larsen et al. (Chicago: MCM Publishing, 2014), 84.

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narrow definition of value.12 Just as in the most teleological forms of Marxism, then, it is the development of the forces of production under capitalism that create forms of socialization that work against capitalism itself. The difference, of course, is that here these forms of socialization are not only those of labor, but also those of the technological developments of the third industrial revolution and the enormous socialized capital of the financial system. Wertkritik can thus help us think about the intertwined dependence of finance and productive capital. As Marx consistently maintains, though both merchant and commercial capital predate capitalist production—and are in fact two of its necessary preconditions—they nevertheless perform different functions after their real subsumption into capital’s valorization process. Credit, that is to say, becomes crucial to capitalist development once the valorization of value becomes the entire goal of production, for the individual capitalist needs to be able to keep the production process moving smoothly despite the inevitable disruptions that can occur, both in the purchase of raw materials and means of production, on the one hand, and in the realization of the commodity’s value in a sale on the other hand. Credit is thus a necessary adjunct of production.13 What emerges from this at one and the same time orthodox and iconoclastic interpretation of Marx—orthodox in its absolute fidelity to the labor theory of value and the falling rate of profit as internal to capitalism, iconoclastic in its jettisoning of the working class as the engine of social transformation—is a more adequate accounting of capitalism’s dual nature as a historical system amenable to social change that is, at the same time, defined by a rigid set of laws working themselves out with a kind of grim historical necessity. Capital,

12 13

Kurz, “The Crisis of Exchange Value,” 40. Furthermore, credit has played a crucial role in capital’s response to its ongoing crisis of value. We can turn, once again, to Robert Kurz to explain this phenomenon. As a result of the increasing organic composition of labor, the “dead” advance costs of the valorization of capital increased to a degree that increasingly made it impossible to finance these costs out of the generated profit itself … The result of this was a historical expansion of the credit system … More and more frequently, it became necessary to draw on future surplus value (in the form of credit) in order to be able to generate actual surplus value. See Kurz, “Current Crisis,” 334. The resulting deregulation of financial markets, “now frequently naively presented as a historical error … was in reality the only strategy that allowed for a further deferral of the collapse of the global system.” Ibid., 335.

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in their account, is an Althusserian process without a subject that we ourselves have built. This reading allows for the return of all those themes of alienation and abstract domination so often understood as “romantic anti-capitalism,” but it does so within a rigorous understanding of capital’s own internal laws. In this way, Wertkritik combines what we might think of as an Adornian defense of a subject increasingly swallowed up by laws of its own making, even as it imagines a future where this constitutive binary of agentless subject and oppressive social order is overcome. As Postone argues, “Overcoming alienation … involves the abolition of the self-grounding, self-moving Subject (capital) and of the form of labor that constitutes and is constituted by structures of alienation … Overcoming the historical Subject would allow people, for the first time, to become the subjects of their own social practices.”14 What Postone calls the “abolition of value,” then, imagines, as a necessary correlative, the development of a new form of subjectivity that would not be structured in opposition to the community but that would, in fact, be able to reclaim its relationship to a cultural heritage from which it is currently alienated.15 Developing this argument, which has significant points of contact with Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” Postone describes capitalist subjectivity via his understanding of the capitalist mode of universality, which is “abstracted from the qualitative specificity of particular individuals and groups.”16 Lurking behind this, of course, is the commodity’s dual nature as exchange value and use value, its mode of universality obscuring historical specificity in the name of a universalizing value. The problem, for Postone, is not however with universality itself, for alongside this first form of universality is a second sort, evident, for instance, “in the development of species-general modes of knowledge and capacities” that are structured according to capital’s valorization process but need not be.17 Postone thus links the overcoming of the opposition between an “abstract, homogenous” humanity “necessarily in opposition to concrete particularity” with “the reappropriation of the socially general knowledge and capacities that had been constituted historically as capital.”18 Reclaiming 14 15 16 17 18

Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 224. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 366. Ibid., 367. Ibid., 367, 373.

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this “socially general knowledge”—what I have been calling, after Pound, the cultural heritage—is, effectively, the same thing as understanding the subject as constituted not in opposition to community but rather in a dialectical relation to community. Past labor would lose its vampiric quality; the cultural heritage would become the grounds of a reconstituted social order. Overcoming the value relation, then, means overcoming the very grounds of individualized subjectivity as it relates to its own history. And it involves the valorization of areas of social life that currently stand outside of capital’s purview. Gathering up the threads of our argument, we can see that the basic opposition between use value and exchange value manifests itself as an opposition between material wealth and value, subjectivity and community, the present and the past. In each case, capital’s extraordinary dedication to an extremely narrow sense of value obscures its relation to the larger social order: capitalist value being only one part of material wealth, even as the individual is taken outside of the community while both the past and the future are sacrificed to the needs of the present. The valorization of value thus ignores both the full range of human values as well as the more basic fact of social utility. And it is this notion of utility that is central to Pound’s efforts in the China/Adams Cantos, where, I will argue, he makes his most sustained attempt to reclaim the labor of the past for a subjectivity understood as coterminous with the community in which it lives. In this sense, the China/ Adams Cantos undertake to abolish value as it has been understood within capitalist modernity.

A new table of values But as Postone argues, in his essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” the abolition of value must attack both sides of the abstract/concrete binary constitutive of capitalism fetishism: the duality, that is to say, of use-value and exchange, or abstract, value represented above in the tendency to fetishize production as the real bedrock of capitalism in contrast to either circulation or finance capital. Anti-Semitism, in Postone’s account, represents just such a onesided attack on capital’s abstract dimension, which it biologizes as international

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Jewry. The extermination camps are thus neither some epiphenomenal horror nor are they a distraction from the Nazi’s goal of world domination, but are, in fact, the clearest representation of its fundamental ideology: A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which “unfortunately” has to take the form of the production of goods, of use-values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination campus were not a terrible version of such a factory but, rather, should be seen as its grotesque, Aryan, “anticapitalist” negation. Auschwitz was a factory to “destroy value,” that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract.19

The corollary, of course, is that the concrete—the world of production— remains untouched. Quite obviously, Pound fell prey to this particular fetish, as his lifelong attack on finance capital not only rested on a kind of Jeffersonian or Physiocratic valorization of production—one that rhymes with his concomitant investment in concrete poetic images—but also, famously, took the form of an increasingly virulent anti-Semitism. Thus, the first Canto of the sequence generally known as the China/Adams Cantos begins neither in China nor in the United States but rather with the theme of usury: “And I have told you of how things were under Duke / Leopold in Siena / And of the true base of credit, that is / the abundance of nature / with the whole folk behind it” (C LII.257). The contrast, of course, is to “neschek”—the Hebrew word for usury—described as “a few big jews’ vendetta on goyim” and seen as the root cause of what Pound viewed as a European decadence. Clearly, Pound is here offering China as a kind of antidote for this decadence. In doing so he is making good on the argument of his 1914 essay “The Renaissance.” Asserting that “the first step of a renaissance, or awakening, is the importation of models for painting, sculpture or writing,” Pound hoped that America’s “literary and artistic barrenness” might be cured by the discovery of a “new table of values” (LE 214, 218, 215). “We must learn what

19

Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” in Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, eds. Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 313.

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we can from the past,” Pound argued, “we must learn what other nations have done successfully under similar circumstances” (LE 219). The Renaissance had discovered Greece, and “it is possible that this century may find a new Greece in China” (LE 215). The China/Adams Cantos offer us that “new table of values,” for which the earlier essay hoped. Yet, despite the anti-Semitism with which it begins, and its seemingly nostalgic look back to various forms of precapitalist agriculture, Pound’s turn to production never represents an interest in production for its own sake. Instead, here, we encounter a production that is always oriented toward utility. So, for instance, the Emperor Hsia Wen Ti is praised via the following lines: and HIAO OUEN TI the emperor published: Earth is the nurse of all men I now cut off one half the taxes I wish to follow the sages, to honour Chang Ti by my furrow Let farm folk have tools for their labour it is for this I reduce the said taxes Gold is inedible. (C LIV.277)

And a few lines later: Gold will sustain no man’s life nor will diamonds keep the land under culture … by wise circulation. Bread is the base of subsistence. (C LIV.277–78)

The phrase “by wise circulation” is obscure, but Terrell’s note sheds some light: “Hsia Wen Ti … ordered that the classical books be hunted out again and that scholars start studying them.”20 Again we see the intertwining of literary and economic values, as Pound suggests that good governance involves the circulation of knowledge in order to facilitate rational production oriented toward material wealth and well-being rather than the valorization of value. Throughout the China Cantos, then, Pound’s new table of values becomes clear: It is, broadly speaking, Confucianism, as Pound understood it. 20

Caroll F. Terrell. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1993, 215).

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Canto LII ends, for instance, with this list: “Call things by the names. Good sovereign by distribution / Evil king is known by his imposts. / Begin where you are said Lord Palmerston / began draining swamps in Sligo” (C LII.261).21 Indeed, the key note of these Cantos is repeated time and again—“Swine think of extending borders / Decent rulers of internal order” (C LIII.274)—as Pound articulates a lesson we might remember from the first appearance of Kung in Canto XIII: “And if the prince have not order within him / He can not put order in his dominions” (C XIII.59). A good sovereign has order within, and spreads order without, focusing on utility as production and distribution are understood to serve the common good and there is no seeming conflict between the interests of individuals and the interests of the state. Or, rather, bad leadership is virtually defined by its selfish nature, as the villains of these Cantos are those Emperors who hoard wealth for themselves, rather than distributing it to the people. The constant repetition of these values are, of course, behind the general distaste for this section of the Cantos, as Pound abandons the time-travelling juxtapositions characteristic of his earlier Cantos in favor of a new method of historical redaction that is simultaneously didactic and obscure.22 Indeed, as David Ten Eyck argues in his exhaustive study of the Adams Cantos, Pound’s “creative energy” is here “channeled into the mediation of a pre-existing text for the contemporary reader, rather than into original composition.”23 Pound thus seems to abandon poetic construction in favor of transmission even as he radically reduces the number of cultural artifacts his poem sets in circulation. The result is a group of poems that defies our understanding of aesthetics in both its form as well as its content, as Pound’s models are less the aesthetic examples articulated in his 1914 essay than the principles of good government outlined above. In both form and content, then, the China/Adams Cantos represent an attempt to imagine an alternative regime of value than that which dominates 21

22

23

Interestingly enough, there is no historical evidence that Lord Palmerston did any such thing. Mussolini did, however, a fact Pound loved to repeat. Palmerston is thus, in this moment, a cipher for Il Duce. I thank Jen Phillis for this observation. David Ten Eyck helpfully summarizes the general critical disdain for this section in his Introduction. See David Ten Eyck, Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). Ibid., 7.

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contemporary capitalist society, one that might encompass utility and natural wealth and that would be organized around the state, but that alternate form of value is not, as we might suspect, aesthetic. Indeed, the structure of the Cantos works decidedly against our modern conception of the aesthetic, for, as John Guillory has argued, an “examination of the historical record will reveal that, on the contrary, both aesthetics and economics were founded in contradistinction to the concept of ‘use value.’ ”24 Pound’s turn to utility, then, represents a rejection of the founding premises of both political economy and aesthetics as they emerged out of the more capacious eighteenth-century discourse of moral philosophy. For though the China section spans centuries, it culminates in eighteenth-century America, American history becoming, as Josephine Nock-Hee Park has argued, “an extension of Confucian China.”25 Eighteenth-century America, that is to say, is both the place where these values can be shown and also the historical moment where Europe began to turn against them. Pound returns to the eighteenth century in order to undo what Guillory, after Barbara Herrnstein Smith, calls “the double discourse of value.” And just as this discourse arose alongside the development of industrial capitalism and its attendant public sphere, so Pound’s idiosyncratic combination of dynastic China and revolutionary America attempts to regulate an emergent international public sphere itself built upon the structures of the world economic system.

Double discourse Guillory’s argument begins with moral philosophy, whose origins he locates in the emergence of civil society, itself the result of the “increasing importance of commercial, and later industrial, activity to modern nation-states.”26 Early capitalism thus both dissolves prior forms of social regulation and develops

24

25

26

John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 302. Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 42. Guillory, Cultural Capital, 304.

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a new one modeled on its own productive capacities: the discourse of taste, which Guillory argues was tasked with coordinating the emergent realms of consumption and production in order to produce a harmonious social order on the analogy of the work of art.27 No sooner is it articulated, however, than this harmony is seen to break down due to the manifest incommensurability between consumers’ and producers’ oft-divergent desires, a breakdown that is itself, according to Guillory, the origin of the economic conception of value. To make his case, Guillory turns to Adam Smith, who views the commodity as divided between its utility and its beauty and, in this way, explains why consumers might desire objects that they don’t manifestly need (one of the sources of incommensurability between the realms of production and consumption). For Smith, this is a good thing: “The pleasures of wealth and greatness … strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful … And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”28 As Guillory summarizes, for Smith “aesthetic disposition is the motor of economic production.”29 And yet this aesthetic of desire fails to explain another, more immediately important economic phenomenon: fluctuations in price, a fact that leads Smith, and classical political economy itself, back to the hidden abode of production in search of the labor theory of value. Consumption, in this way, becomes epiphenomenal, separated out from the notion of a value inherent in the commodity, a value that emerges from labor and is then subsequently realized in exchange. This has seemed so transhistorically true, even inside the Marxist tradition, that it has become impossible to see its immediate negative result: the separation of production from the satisfaction of needs. Production here becomes an autonomous realm of value—that production for production’s sake described by Postone above—which proceeds without any reference to

27

28 29

Not only was the discourse of taste one way to reveal the otherwise obscure order of this new social world. It was also was a “means of checking the greed and social irresponsibility which were historically associated with ‘luxury,’ with uncontrolled consumption. The discipline of taste was to take the place of the long since abrogated sumptuary laws of feudal society, but without inhibiting the expansion of the commerce and industry upon which the nation depended.” Ibid., 307. Qtd. in ibid., 311. Ibid.

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needs that might exist outside of its own sphere. What Guillory’s analysis allows us to see is that the idea of a production oriented toward needs emerged at the time when society was explicitly transforming production into an autonomous realm. The discourse of political economy was founded on the narration of this historical event as truth—and Marx’s basic insight was to historicize its concepts within the developing narrative of capitalism itself. In this reading, the labor theory of value becomes the expression of capitalism’s fundamental social relations, rather than a transhistorical fact capital happens to obscure; the labor theory of value is a theorization of production for production’s sake. Aesthetics, for its part, separates itself out from production entirely, as Nietzsche was perhaps the first to note, becoming a theory of consumption, or, as it is more typically called, reception. And it frames its own rejection of use value “by analogy to exchange value.”30 The link between production and consumption is, in this way, severed as each realm is understood outside of any notion of utility. In other words, though they represent production and consumption, respectively, political economy and aesthetics are each understood as autonomous discourses, both from each other but also from any notion of the larger social good. Pound’s turn to the eighteenth century, then, marks an attempt to return to a moment prior to both the separation of aesthetics from economics as well as the ideological occlusion of utility represented in these two discourses. His alternative regime of value seeks to combine use value and exchange value, production and circulation, and it is this combination that leads to some of his most noticeable incoherences. Indeed, for many readers Pound is, primarily, a Physiocrat, whose productivist economics rests on the belief “that nature cooperates in the act of production … In this tradition, value has a certain ‘natural’ quality that precedes value in use or value in exchange.”31 No doubt this is largely true, but it can’t entirely explain his theory of money, most often conceived of as “certificate of work done,” and his many subsequent schemes to avoid usury. For the certificate of work done is either an attempt to bring 30 31

Ibid., 317. Alec Marsh, “Poetry and the Age: Pound, Zukofsky and the Labor Theory of Value,” in Upper Limit Music: The Writings of Louis Zukofsky, ed. Mark Scroggins (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 104–105.

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“money once more into line with natural processes” by tying it to concrete labor or an effort to make money refer to “a relation between things of value” rather than something concrete.32 Similarly, Gesell’s stamp tax has been understood as an attempt to “dematerialize or disembody the medium of exchange” by having money consume itself, or as something that “enables money to recover its former transparency as an immediate measure of ‘real’ values.”33 What makes these radically different readings possible is the fundamental duality of Pound’s economics: his seemingly paradoxical attempt to simultaneously valorize circulation and production. Thus, the artist is often understood as a kind of premodern artisan: “The artist is one of the few producers. He, the farmer and the artisan create wealth; the rest shift and consume it” (LE 222). But this production rests, as Pound’s poetics continually attest, on the cultural heritage, which provides “a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man” (LE 42). These data make up our “permanent property” for “the property given to the race at large is precisely these data of the serious scientist and the serious artist” (LE 47). The artist, that is to say, labors for the public good; art is a form of social production designed for public consumption. Manual labor, on the other hand, is understood as a value in and of itself. This is why Pound can claim that “the minute I cook my own dinner or nail four boards together into a chair, I escape from the whole cycle of Marxian economics” (ABCE 26). Of course the naiveté of this statement should be transparent; it would only make sense if Pound had grown his own food and manufactured his own stove—that is, if he were one of those famous Robinsons Marx spent a fair amount of time debunking.34 Pound is wrong, that is to say, about Marx 32

33

34

Andrew Parker, “Ezra Pound and the ‘Economy’ of Anti-Semitism,” in Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 75; David Murray, “PoundSigns: Money and Representation in Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound and History, ed. Marianne Korn (Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1985), 184. Richard Sieburth, “In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/the Poetry of Economics,” Critical Inquiry 14.1 (1987): 153; Parker, “ ‘Economy’ of Anti-Semitism,” 75. Marx repeatedly uses the example of Robinson Crusoe to refute individualistic accounts of political economy. Marx writes: “Despite the diversity of his productive functions, [Robinson] knows that they are only different forms of activity of one and the same Robinson, hence only different forms of human labor.” His island is thus “bathed in light” and the contrast is to both the feudal world—where at least “the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour” appeared “as their own personal relations”—and capitalism where labor relations are “disguised as social relations between things.” See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 169, 170.

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just as he is wrong about the possibility of a producing individual escaping the conditions of contemporary capitalism. Nevertheless, we can easily see that Pound’s understanding of labor is similar to what we might desire from any postcapitalist social world in which labor would no longer be a social mediation but rather “sufficiently satisfying to be pursued for its own sake,” while social production—by which Pound means the cultural heritage, but also, and crucially, art—would be organized around consumption.35 Art, though, is never consumed by its use and so we begin to understand the importance for Pound of circulation, which is the desire to return works of art—conceived as a form of social production—to the public realm where they rightly belong.36 Thus, Pound calls the permanent class of goods, namely “scientific discoveries, works of art [and] classics,”—what we have been calling the cultural heritage—part of the res publica, translated as the “public convenience” or, more simply, the state, whose purpose is “to facilitate the traffic, i.e. the circulation of goods, air, water, heat, coal (black or white), power, and even thought” for the good of the people (SP  215, 214, 213). The state, in Pound’s estimation, has a responsibility to facilitate circulation— both of goods and of cultural works. And we can only judge the success of a particular state by comparing it with other states. Thus, when Pound claims that “aim of state education has been (historically) to prevent people from discovering that classics are worth reading” (SP 213), he does so by comparing the contemporary moment to the past: The capitalist imperialist state must be judged not only in comparison with unrealised utopias, but with past forms of the state; if it will not bear comparison with the feudal order; with the small city states both republican and despotic; either as to its “social justice” or as to its permanent products, art, science, literature, the onus of proof goes against it. (SP 214)

Again we see the shift from the aesthetic models envisioned in 1914 to the governance models characteristic of Pound’s mid-career.37 And yet even this 35 36

37

Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 33. And the same desire is at work in Pound’s theory of money. Thus, Pound “take[s] it that in the perfect economic state the cost of the money is reduced to almost nothing … [and] this cost is borne by the state, i.e. distributed so as to be a burden on no one in particular” (ABCE 55). The previous two quotations are from the mid-1920s: the first is a short piece called “Definitions” from 1925; the second, entitled “The State,” and nearly as short, dates from 1927.

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turn to governance is articulated in relation to the “permanent products” of a society, namely its cultural heritage. The China/Adams Cantos, thus, mark the place where Pound most directly engages in precisely the kind of comparison these quotations suggest. For in these cantos, as we have seen, Pound always reserves his highest praise for Emperors who promote the public good. In this vein, we read descriptions of good rulers: “YAO, CHUN, YU controller of waters / Bridge builders, contriver of roads / gave grain to the people / kept down the taxes” (C LVI.302) and bad rulers who “made no progress in letters” (C LIV.276). Similarly, we find John Adams arguing that there is “no more agreeable employment / than the study of the best kind of government” (C LXVII.392). To do this, Adams continues, “you must determine the end / (that is purpose)” (C LXVII.392). The state, that is to say, is defined by its utility, even as its representatives must be “in miniature a portrait of the people at large” (C LXVII.391). Thus, if the China Cantos, as I’ve noted, present a kind of eternal struggle between good and evil—the one characterized by order, stability and an emphasis on public good, the other by luxury, decadence, a lack of productivity, and a selfish desire for profit—a similar emphasis on publicmindedness structures the Adams Cantos. As Peter Liebregts argues, “The main thread of the Adams Cantos is John Adams’s integrity in his search to create possibilities for the advancement of human happiness in an ordered society.”38 Adams thus emerges as a kind of ideal Poundian subject, one whose goal to “retain what experience has found good” is meant to rhyme with Pound’s own efforts in the Cantos to reclaim an unalienated past for the needs of the present (C LXII.344). It is in this way, I think, that we must read the Adams Cantos’ seemingly curious emphasis on international trade. I say curious because despite the fact that Pound’s text covers the period of the American Revolution, the Revolution is not conceived of, primarily, as the exercise in state foundation we might expect. Park is again helpful: “Pound turned to the American Revolution and upended the narrative known to all American

38

Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 243.

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schoolchildren—that the upstart colony freed itself from imperial England. In Pound’s rendition, America’s revolution is a series of negotiations.”39 The success of the American Revolution, here, is determined by the level of international support, both diplomatically and also, and more importantly, financially, that it is able to attract. Thus, these Cantos offer us a series of vignettes of Adams overseas’ journeys, negotiating treaties over fishing rights and sugar and securing loans from Holland and France. Pound is presenting a kind of anti-isolationist America, just as the United States was assuming its role as the leader of a continually globalizing economy. The public sphere in which Adams participates is clearly an international one. Putting the two sets of Cantos together, then, we seem to encounter two competing models of governance. On the one hand, there is dynastic China, characterized by the stability that arises from internal order. On the other, we have the international efforts of John Adams to promote closer ties between the United States and the world around it. 40 But if the American Revolution is itself a series of negotiations, then the comparative nature of Pound’s inquiry into forms of statehood suggests that some kind of negotiation between these two ideals is necessary. A peaceful international order can only exist, these Cantos suggest, if individual states are well governed within themselves. The concentric circles that radiate out from leader to nation-state extend to world governance. By the eighteenth century, Pound seems to be saying, this engagement with the outside world had become a necessity. 39 40

Park, Apparitions, 55. An alternate route into these Cantos would be to take up the argument of Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing. Building on what Kenneth Pomeranz has called “The Great Divergence”—namely that moment in the nineteenth century when “the political and economic fortunes of two world regions up until then characterized by similar living standards diverged sharply”—Arrighi describes two distinct paths of capitalist development: the capital and energy-intensive development of Britain and the so-called “industrious revolution” of Asia which “mobilized human rather than non-human resources.” See Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Verso, 2007), 4, 34; the second phrase comes from Kaoro Sugihara, “The East Asian Path of Economic Development: A Long-Term Perspective,” in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, eds. G. Arrighi, T. Hamashita, and M. Seldon (New York: Routledge, 2003). Whereas the former was a “miracle of production,” the latter was a “ ‘miracle of distribution’ that created the possibility of a diffusion of the benefits of the miracle of production to the vast majority of world population through labor-intensive, energy-saving industrialization” (37; again the internal quotations are from Sugihara). Arrighi’s argument, ultimately, is that it is only by adopting elements of this “industrious revolution” that the West can try to control the destructive effects of the industrial revolution, a perspective that is ultimately incompatible with that of the Wertkritik authors who do not believe that capitalism can be saved from itself.

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Nevertheless, Pound’s ideal international public sphere seems to run up against the hero worship of these Cantos, one that rhymes with Pound’s investment in Mussolini and thus returns us to the very nation-state form Pound seems to wish to overcome. At the same time, however, Pound quotes approvingly the words of Chi Hoang Ti, “who referred to himself as the surplus / or needless bit of the Empire” (C LIV.275). Similarly, though the Adams Cantos are, clearly enough, organized around their titular hero, they nevertheless tend to “blur or eliminate personal pronouns that would allow [Pound’s] reader to gain a clear sense of which subject is responsible for a given speech or action.”41 No doubt, this blurring is part of the difficulty of these sections, even as the endless lists of Chinese Emperors and the extremely abbreviated way of describing their actions makes it nearly impossible to track precisely who is following whom in the vast sweep of Chinese history. But this is, exactly, the point. That is to say, the fundamental structure of this section of The Cantos is to deemphasize the personal, both at the level of content and at the level of form. What we find, instead, is an emphasis on the state and the community, on the one hand, and on those aspects of our social life— infrastructure, letters, order, stability—that tend to fall outside of capitalist means of valorization. The depersonalization of these Cantos, then, is of a piece with its attempted reappropriation of a cultural heritage capitalist modernity finds impossible to value. Furthermore, whereas the earlier Cantos, despite their celebrated method of luminous detail, ultimately seem to take place in Pound’s mind—the only space where the disparate materials they collect can be sufficiently collated in order to produce a set of meanings—these Cantos serve to efface the labor of Pound the poet. No longer the elaborate arranger of textual details that span centuries; Pound is, instead, a redactor of two main works: Moyriac de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de Chine and Charles Francis Adams’s Works of John Adams. Pound’s role, here, is reduced to a kind of facilitator or circulator of something that preexists him. The China/Adams Cantos, that is to say, prove that in our time value arises mainly from the labor of the past, for Pound, here, adds

41

Eyck, Pound’s Adams Cantos, 89.

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almost no new value to the works he summarizes. The Cantos themselves can best be understood as Pound’s effort to craft a poetic form that both acknowledges this historical fact and reclaims (some of) the alienated history of humanity in order to project a potentially unalienated future. This is why I do not view them as nostalgic, for the works of the past are not presented as the elements of an ahistorical collection. Rather they are meant to be useful. Eschewing both the autonomous aesthetic that would keep politics from his poetry—an aesthetic that rhymes with the notion of a lyric subject that is the seat of its own authority—and the Smithian aesthetics of production—wealth as something grand and beautiful—Pound insists, time and again, on utility as the true basis of value. And if one element of Pound’s rejection of the labor theory of value is to negate his own labor, a second concerns the ways in which these Cantos abolish the passage of empty homogenous time—that abstract measure of value undergirding the labor theory of value. The China Cantos move chronologically but also cyclically, presenting an eternal struggle that repeats itself within the diachronic passage of time. At the same time, they are marked by a consistent prolepsis—as for instance in the phrase “Genghis rising,” which appears a good 200 years before his actual arrival—which furthers the notion that some future event gives the sequence its meaning, in this case the turn to American history.42 Thus we find the passing of the baton that marks the transition between the two sections, as the eighteenth-century Chinese Emperor Kien (or, more accurately, Ch’ien Lung) comes to power just as John Adams is born. For their part, the Adams Cantos follow the chronology of their source material, the Collected Works of John Adams, and, in doing so, jump back and forth radically within the much shorter confines of Adams’ life. In each case, timeless values are set both within and against the linear passage of time, suggesting that different temporal moments have distinct weights, differing values.

42

Park writes, “the China Cantos constantly look ahead—key figures and events appear long before their historical moment. This prefiguring principle demonstrates the trajectory of the series, ultimately directing us to American history as an extension of Confucian China.” For instance, “Genghis is planted in the text in order to create a developing narrative, a trajectory that plots the Mongol invasion as” Western. Park, Apparitions, 42, 43.

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Here, then, are the core tenets of Pound’s alternative regime of value: an emphasis on past labor, rather than the labor of the present, a turn to communal forms, both in his understanding of the state and in the reclamation of the cultural heritage, a devaluing of the constructing poetic subject and an emphasis on the differential value of units of time that disrupts the abstract time on which capitalism’s valorization process rests.

Dove sta memora I have argued that questions of value span Pound’s career. The same is true of the view that different units of time have different weights, present in the “freedom from time limits” characteristic of the image’s presentation of an “emotional and intellectual complex” as well as the lines from Brancusi quoted approvingly in Canto LXXXV: “One of those days”, said Brancusi, “when I would not have given “15 minutes of my time for anything under heaven.” (C LXXXV.579)

This theme of what I will call “the value of time,”—particularly as it relates to individual experience and what might transcend that experience—is for Pound most often troped through recourse to Cavalcanti’s Donna me prega, and it is to the presence of this poem in this sequence and beyond that I wish to turn to by way of conclusion. “The medieval Italian poets brought into poetry,” Pound argues in his career-spanning essay “Cavalcanti,” “something which had not been … in the poetry of the troubadours. It is still more important … to understand that this quality, or this assertion of value, has not been in poetry since” (LE 150).43 This “assertion of value” consists in the “dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind, and the inferior thing ready for

43

The note in Literary Essays, written by T. S. Eliot, reads “As published in Make It New (1934), but the essay as a whole must be dated 1910–1931” (LE 149).

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instant consumption” (LE 151). Or, in the language of Canto XXXVI, where Pound translates Donna me prega: Where memory liveth, it takes its state Formed like a diafan from light on shade Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth Created, having a name sensate, Custom of the soul, will from the heart; (C XXXVI.177)

These lines are obscure, but the basic message is clear. As Ronald Bush has recently argued, drawing on Pound’s interest in Avicenna: “memory not only aids in the process of intellection, it also functions as an essential bridge to the world of perfect form.”44 Bush continues, “Pound’s [essay] implies that the contemplation of the intelligible form of Love involves a conjunction of the individual mind with something ‘superior to the soul’ and therefore a process in which the forms stored in memory can be said to be illuminated—charged with spiritual fire.”45 “This affirmation,” Bush concludes, “becomes the core of Pound’s vision of a Paradise within us—an imagination of a Love that wants neither to devour the world nor judge it, but merely to contemplate its perfections.”46 Bush is here talking about the presence of this poem in The Pisan Cantos, but when it confronts us in Canto XXXVI, it takes on a different register, appearing as it does between an anti-Semitic description of the decadence of “Miteleuropa” and a celebration of Martin Van Buren’s crusade against the banks. In the Eleven New Cantos of 1934, at least, Pound had yet to retreat to an internal Paradise. Instead, the translation seems to function, as Jody Enders has argued of Cavalcanti’s original, as “the presentation of a new method of inquiry.”47 For Enders, Cavalcanti is interested in “finding

44

45 46 47

Ronald Bush, “La Filosofica Famiglia: Cavalcanti, Avicenna, and the ‘Form’ of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos,” Textual Practice 24.4 (2010): 674. Ibid., 675. Ibid., 680. Jody Enders, “Rhetoric and Dialectic in Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna Me Prega’, ” Stanford Italian Review 5.2 (1985): 162.

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a method of arriving at truth,” that is presented not so much as a “position to be adopted” but rather “as an intellectual method to be shared.”48 The relationship the poem stages, then, between the immediate experience of love and the “fine thing held in the mind” that is its universal form rhymes with Pound’s efforts to distill timeless values from the historical examples his Cantos present. Something like this is suggested by Cavalcanti’s appearance in the midst of the Adams Cantos, alongside a passage from Adams’ diary: Read one book an hour then dine, smoke, cut wood in quella parte dove sta memora, Colonel Chandler not conscious these crude thoughts and expressions are catched up and treasured as proof of his character. (C LXII.353)

As James Wilhelm has argued, “here we have Adams nurturing his mind, acquainting himself with a vast body of facts and abstracting the basic forms that he will use to help forge America. The contrasting figure does not know how to use these ‘crude thoughts and expressions.’ ”49 A few lines later, Pound offers another phrase from Cavalcanti, following Adams’ summary of Benjamin Franklin’s interest in viniculture: I read Timon of Athens, the manhater must be (IRA must be) aroused ere the mind be at its best la qual manda fuoco [which sends fire]. (C LXIII.353)

Similarly, in Canto LXVII, Pound writes: foundation of every government in some principle or passion of the people ma che si sente dicho [that is felt, I say]. (C LXVII.391)

48 49

Ibid., 170, 174. James T. Wilhelm, “Guido Cavalcanti as a Mask for Ezra Pound,” PMLA 89.2 (1974): 336.

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If the first passage suggests the ways in which emotion leads us to discover the larger form to which some particular is related, the latter two emphasize the need for reason to be interested, for rational inquiry to be moved by some passionate commitment in order to find its true focus. In both instances, then, the motivating force of passion leads to a higher form of inquiry. Clearly, Pound understood his own poetic method in this fashion: motivated by passionate interest—“I have blood lust for what I have seen done to, and attempted against, the arts in my time” (SP 229)—he combed through a “vast body of facts” in order to illuminate his core principles. In The Pisan Cantos, however, we encounter a different form of Cavalcanti, in what are some of the most memorable lines in the entire epic: nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove sta memoria. (C LXXVI.477)

And this idea of “the quality of affection”—a phrase repeated throughout the sequence—is surely behind the famous lines where Pound claims that What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage (C LXXXI.540–541)

It has, of course, always been possible to read this return to lyric as a rejection of the more avowedly political nature of the rest of the preceding Cantos, despite the sequence’s unapologetic beginning. What I would like to suggest, here, is that it is precisely the formalism of these lines—which praise the quality of the affection, rather than its content—that marks a repersonalization of the ostensibly transpersonal nature of Cavalcanti’s lyric. For here memory remains internal to Pound the poetic subject, as the earlier method of the Cantos—the presentation of all the things Pound has in his brain—returns. The lyric quality of The Pisan Cantos turns its back on the method of the China/Adams sequence. Bush is correct, then, to find here a turn to the Paradise within, but in the terms of the argument I’ve been

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developing here, this appears as a regression, for it shows Pound abandoning his hopes for any larger transformation of the social order. We are thus in a better position to address what stands between China/ Adams and Pisa, namely the notorious Fascist Cantos, with their fullthroated defense of the fascist cause, first via Dante and then via Cavalcanti. Writing some of the purest poetic propaganda in a career characterized by various forms of advocacy, Pound turns Cavalcanti into a national hero, and in doing so rejects the international order he had been trying to celebrate in the Adams sequence. The return of the poetic subject in The Pisan Cantos is thus prefigured by the return of the national subject in the Italian Cantos. In  this way Pound abandons the formal structures that make the China/ Adams Cantos so promising. Of course, it is these same formal structures that make those Cantos so difficult to appreciate as poetry—for they are fundamentally anti-aesthetic. The Pisan Cantos, however, are lovely, in all their individualistic, unapologetic, fascist glory.

Coda: A-9 At the center of Louis Zukofsky’s epic poem is “A”-9, a poem that is significant for a number of reasons. It marks a transition within the larger work, as its “two halves serve as a link bridging the hiatus when Zukofsky suspended work on the poem during most of the 1940s,” and it seems to mark, as well, a shift from Marx, the presiding genius of the first half of the epic, to Spinoza.50 It does so, however, through an imitation of Cavalcanti, whose Donna me prega is retold from the perspective of the commodity, in language taken directly from Marx himself. Obviously enough, then, “A”-9 represents a continuation of Zukofsky’s lifelong dialogue with Ezra Pound. Recently Ruth Jennison has argued for “the homophonic subsumption of the individual by the collective voice” in Zukofsky’s lyric, showing how Zukofsky highlights the “systematic nature of commodity production” in contrast to

50

Jeffrey Twitchell, “Turning the Senses: Cavalcanti, Marx, Spinoza and Zukofsky’s ‘a’-9,” Sagetrieb 11.3 (1992): 58.

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Pound’s evocation of an “imaginary space outside of exploitation.”51 While Jennison’s argument tends to overstate the differences between the two poets— Pound less invested, particularly in the Cantos I have been discussing, in the past as a space of nostalgia; Zukofsky also interested in forms of timelessness and transcendence—her basic argument is right and it goes some way toward understanding the significance of Zukofsky’s innovation. For Zukofsky seems, in this way, to view Donna me prega as the site of Pound’s inability to truly attain anything like a communal or transpersonal understanding of his historical situation, while yet at the same time suggesting the ways in which Cavalcanti’s poem might be able to achieve what Pound had hoped it would. Just as fascism becomes a kind of reverse image of the kind of historical relation between leader and people we might want from a postcapitalist order—one that would not blindly fetishize democracy and its seemingly necessary relation to capitalist valorization—so here the commodity speaks of a potential alternate form of value found not in Ancient China or eighteenth-century America, but within its own form. “Hands, heart, not value made us,” Zukofsky writes, in a realization Pound searches for, but is never able to find.52

51 52

Ruth Jennison, The Zukofsky Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 116, 110. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978), 107.

8

Ezra Pound’s Effective Demand: Keynes, Causality, and The Cantos C. D. Blanton

Do you mean that the receipts of capital are greater than the amount it pays out in dividends? —Yes; that is an obvious statement of fact[.] –Exchange between J. M. Keynes and C. H. Douglas, May 1, 19301 Pound was proceeding by poetic intuition, and who knows, his may be the only comprehensible poetry to the twenty-first century, when a new economic order, unimaginable to us now, may have emerged from the present apparently irreconcilable dogmas[.] –Christine Brooke-Rose, 19712

The Mountain then and now In 1624, the Monte dei Paschi di Siena was chartered by the Grand Duke of Tuscany as “a bank, a fund, a[t] bottom an / institution of credit” on straightforward terms, duly recorded by Ezra Pound in 1937, in the first lines of The Fifth Decad of Cantos: that any citizen shall have right to deposit and to fruits therefrom resultant at five percent annual interest

1

2

Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Committee on Finance and Industry, Volume I (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931), §4488, 304. Christine Brooke-Rose, A ZBC of Ezra Pound (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 236.

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and that borrowers pay a bit over that for services (dei ministri) that is for running expenses and book keeping which shall be counted a half scudo per hundred per year (All of this is important)3

Descended from a late medieval monte di pietà—“the Mount of Pity (or Hock Shop) / municipal of Siena” (C XLII.8, 210), in Pound’s colloquial gloss—that the republic had maintained since 1472, the Bank was effectively designed to render landed value liquid, regulating the increasingly intricate financial relation between a developing urban social order and the agrarian base that provided the institution’s name. Depositors were to be guaranteed fixed returns, underwritten by the returns on the state’s pastoral holdings in the Maremma. Credit was to be made available on moderate and controlled terms, with rates of interest exceeding depositors’ returns by half a percent, the difference dedicated to overhead. The older Hock Shop had evaded theological proscriptions on usury by operating in the commercial space between large mercantile shipping concerns and smaller (primarily Jewish) moneylenders. The Monte dei Paschi would effectively secularize that compromise and render it systematic: FIXED in the soul, nell’ anima, of the Illustrious College They had been ten years proposing such a Monte, That is a species of bank—damn good bank, in Siena (C XLII.7; 209)

Organized to ensure circulation rather than profit and thereby to synchronize “the fruit of nature” with “the whole will of the people,” as Pound puts it a canto later, the institution remains today, as it was in Pound's time, the world's oldest operating bank (C XLIII.17; 218; 18, 218). For Pound, that venerable fact constitutes a crucial kind of evidence in itself. The “Mountain” had first found its way into his epic in 1934, in the concluding lines of Eleven New Cantos, where it served to gather the several increasingly disparate strands of the poem’s thematic interest, straining to 3

Ezra Pound, Canto XLII, The Fifth Decad of Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1937), 7; 209 . All page references are given to Faber and New Directions editions, respectively. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations follow the Faber printing.

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impose some figural connection between its poetics and its politics, between the crisis of the interwar present and the seemingly random historical material that Pound sought to wedge against it: Cosimo First guaranteed it. To pay 5% on its stock, Monte dei Paschi and to lend at 5 and 1/2 Overplus of all profit, to relief works and the administration on moderate pay.. that stood even after Napoleon.4

Literal enough on its own, the brief passage also serves an underlying architectural function, enabling the jagged association of two crucial events recollected in fragments: the first, a conversation with Major Douglas and his herald A. R. Orage, in the offices of The New Age in the years after the first war, prefaces the second, an oblique glance toward the quasi-Proudhonian monetary theories of Silvio Gesell that “sent shivers down the backs of Europe, Rothschildian and others” when “the small Tyrolean town” of Wörgl implemented a depreciating stamped scrip (Schwundgeld) in 1932 (SP 314). Said C.H. “To strangle the bankers...?” And Woergl in our time? (C XLI.55; 205)

And with that rough couplet, two of the poem’s most powerful tectonics— the eccentric theories of credit and money, respectively, that were to send it spiraling into idiosyncratic petulance—fuse in an iconic governing idea. Pound’s Mountain seems to rise, appropriately enough, at the point of their collision. But the Siena Bank also forms a double sign in a more general way. With the opening lines of the Fifth Decad, it has not only assumed a central and organizing place in the poem’s design, asserting Pound’s heavy rejoinder to the system of usury in its modern form, but also begun to mark a sharper historical antagonism, deriving from usury’s enshrinement and institutional codification in the Bank of England. First chartered in 1694 to fund naval investment for

4

Pound, Canto XLI, Eleven New Cantos: XXXI-XLI (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934), 55 (205).

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William III’s wars against France, the Bank of England had followed a plan sketched by William Paterson, establishing a private concern with power over public finance, authorized to make loans to the state and issue currency against government bonds. It represented, under Paterson’s description, “a society of private men … obliged, by their estates and interests, to strengthen and corroborate the public security of this Bank.”5 Older by decades, then, the Bank of Siena asserts an alternative model of money and credit with a claim to historical priority, a durable reproach manifested in a physical fact and narrated across the Leopoldine sequence of Cantos XLII-XLIV (published separately in The Criterion in April, as Pound’s Malatesta sequence had been fifteen years earlier).6 Here, Medicis, Habsburgs, and Bonapartes rise and fall, momentarily producing heroic figures of a recognizable Poundian type, from Cosimo to Leopold (Leopold I as Grand Duke of Tuscany, later Leopold II as Holy Roman emperor), while revolutions and continental wars rage around them. But it is in the Bank’s more pedestrian transactions that the sequence’s annalistic and polemical substance lies: in its small deposits and disbursements, its investments in local culture and public works, “on the security / mobile and immobile / of individual citizens / in the city or wheresoever REE- / sponsibility quocunque aliunde” (XLIII.17, 217).7 At issue is the difference between two categorically different scales of historical agency: one signed and ascribable, the other anonymous and diffuse; one referred to a property held, metaphorically as it were, by title; the other dispersed, held in common. The Mountain is thus less a symbol than a staff, upon which Pound composes the ground tone beneath the sequence’s most familiar turns of lyric reflection—the notorious plaints against Usura in Cantos XLV and LI, the lament for Tamuz-Adonis in Canto XLVII, the pristine imagism of the Seven Lakes in Canto XLIX—the organizing reference for all the poem’s mundane and almost interchangeable contextual detail. And though generations of readers have experienced such lyric interludes as momentary respites 5

6 7

William Paterson, “A Brief Account of the Intended Bank of England” [1694], in The Writings of William Paterson, Volume III, second edition, ed. Saxe Bannister (London: Judd & Glass, 1859), 84 . For Paterson’s later history of the Bank’s establishment, see The Wednesday’s Club Dialogues upon the Union [1717], in The Writing of William Paterson, Volume II, esp. 63–73. Pound, “Cantos XLII-XLIV,” The Criterion XVI.LXIV (April 1937): 405–423. The 1937 Faber printing varies, with the passage truncated after “-sponsibility” (17).

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from the turgid particularities of Poundian bookkeeping, each constitutes a kind of secondary evidence of the Bank’s organizing figurative power, the performative demonstration of its world without Usura, in which wool comes to market and sheep bringeth gain. It is the Bank itself that matters most, as Pound insisted in 1935: Three centuries of Medici wisdom went into the Monte dei Paschi, the only bank that has stood from 1600 till our time. Siena was flat on her back, without money after the Florentine conquest. Cosimo, first duke of Tuscany, had all the Medici banking experience behind him. He guaranteed the capital of the Monte, taking as security the one living property of Siena, and a certain amount of somewhat unhandy collateral. That is to say, Siena had grazing lands down toward Grosseto, and the grazing rights worth 10,000 ducats a year. On this basis taking it for his main security, Cosimo underwrote a capital of 200,000 ducats, to pay 5 per cent to the shareholders, and to be lent at 5 1/2 per cent; overhead kept down to a minimum and all excess of profit over that to go to hospitals and works for the benefit of the people of Siena. That was in the first years of the 17th century, and that bank is open today. It outlasted Napoleon. You can open an account there tomorrow. And the lesson is the very basis of solid banking. The CREDIT rests in ultimate on the ABUNDANCE OF NATURE, on the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep.8

It is still true that one might open an account at the Monte dei Paschi di Siena tomorrow. But there is perhaps little else that Pound would recognize in the Mountain as it currently stands. The institution on which The Cantos laid such stress has long since accommodated itself to a more conventional and contemporary array of financial services. In 1995, its traditional commitments to municipal charity and civic development were delegated to a separate nonprofit organization, Fondazione Monte dei Paschi di Siena, leaving the bank to reincorporate as a financial holding company under the name Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. By 1999, it had been listed on the Borsa,

8

Pound, Social Credit: An Impact (London: Peter Russell, 1951), 8.

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subsequently undertaking a strategy of aggressive expansion, acquiring a series of smaller regional banks. By the time of the recent financial crisis, overextended by hidden derivative contracts and caught in the pressure imposed by the declining value of the kind of government paper that Pound deplored, the bank faced its own capitalization crisis, ultimately requiring a series of public bailouts totaling billions of euros. When the European Central Bank imposed stress tests in 2014, the Mountain was judged the weakest major financial institution in Europe, left to pursue a desperate strategy of consolidation now complicated further by the recent Greek debt crisis. Paradoxically, it turns out, Paterson’s Bank of England is now a public concern, fully nationalized as a central bank in 1946 as a part of the Labour government’s postwar settlement. But despite infusions of governmental subsidy—indeed, despite the legacies of Cosimo, Leopold, and Pound—the Mountain is not. To the contrary, it seems the very emblem of the financial logic against which Pound railed: Usura made absolute, an instrument for the privatization of public credit, refined now to an even purer state. That historical irony underlies the paradox that I hope to crack open here. Writing in Eliot’s Criterion in 1935 on Gesell’s monetary theory, Pound himself suggested the historical interval required for a judgment on his poetic method: “In another eighty years a few people may begin to see that the present author’s insistence on Ideogrammic method has not been mere picking daisies” (SP 281). On the span of time needed, I will argue, he had it right. It is in fact now, eight decades on, that the ideogrammatic complications posed by the Mountain—first for the poem’s formal method, but more deeply for the conceptual and referential range that constitutes its historical ground—can be grasped in full force. My first and most basic claim can thus be straightforwardly stated. In the more recent history of the Monte dei Paschi, with its ultimate accession to the systematic forces of financialization that we have only now begun to see in full, it is possible not only to witness the final collapse of the ramshackle utopia imagined in The Cantos but also to begin to name its fatal contradictions. Indeed, I wish to suggest that it is now possible to do so for the first time, that there is something in this particular juncture of Pound’s thought that inclines the poem toward our present as fully as his, and in so doing sacrifices the poem’s famous claim to include history in one sense

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even while extending it in another. To put it another way, the history that The Cantos include changed fundamentally at Siena: It became ours. This assertion entails two deeper arguments in turn—the first political, the second philosophical—both emerging from the embedded logical transfiguration of The Cantos that the Mountain slowly effects. In plainer ways, needless to say, the destruction of Pound’s political ambitions has long been on display, made manifest in 1945 and the years following—in the iconic figure of Mussolini’s hanging corpse, most starkly—or in the haunting meditation on and in detention that forms the substance of The Pisan Cantos. On that scale of historical reckoning, weighed against the larger “wreckage of Europe” (C LXXVI.478) that Pound only slowly confronted, this latest phase in the Mountain’s history, comprising a dull register of corporate mergers and government bailouts, seems an afterthought at best, perhaps a simple irrelevance. But I want to suggest otherwise, arguing that the deferred interval between the more spectacular disaster of Pound’s politics in the 1940s and the stealthier unwinding of his economics adumbrates something decisive in The Cantos more generally, allowing us to glimpse, as in a negative image, a definitive turn in their epic practice. Readers have long recognized the practical incommensurability between Pound’s politics and his economics, of course, between the insistent volitionism of the idea statale and Social Credit’s crude version of a demandside economics, contrived to devolve agency to the commons by way of an augmented purchasing power. Premised on the fantasy of an eclipse of the labor theory of value as such, Pound’s idiosyncratic fascism imagines a new economic system that “bases value on the cultural heritage, that is to say on labour PLUS the complex of inventions which make it possible to get results” (J/M 36). The strange petulance with which Pound refers economics to politics, in the face of the mundane reality of Mussolini’s actually existing corporate state, seems to betray the poem’s most elemental incoherence, that structure of willed blindness that allows Pound to hear the idea of a “volitionist economics” as anything other than oxymoronic. It is easy enough, and obviously correct at one level, to observe that such incoherence derives proximately from Pound’s own autodidacticism, from what Peter Nicholls labels “the element of serious amateurism” that impels his increasingly fraught

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synthesis of poetics and polemic.9 But the very persistence of the difficulty across The Cantos, its emergence as a rhythmic or structural principle, should also suggest that the incoherence is a symptomatic effect, the residue of a prior disparity lurking in Pound’s historical materials. The problem is not just Pound, but lies rather in the need to give some definite conceptual shape to a set of facts that eluded his technique. The  difficulty will perhaps assume a different shape if we rename this basic agon of politics and economics dialectically, recalling the two incommensurable notions of historical agency that the Mountain seems to frame, as a relation between immediacy and mediation: between a structure of causality visibly reducible to the intention of an individual or corporate agency—the Medicis or the Mountain, Pound or the people—and one concealed in distances and absences, by abstruse calculations of value and exchange irreducible to a scholastic “just price” or by the mysterious power of what Marx (speaking too of the Bank of England’s establishment) terms “credit-money” to reduplicate itself as financial profit by a simple trick of abstraction and accounting.10 Whatever else it may connote, the difference between the half-lives of politics and economics thereby comes to mark an historical rhythm, short or long, according to which social and poetic effects are manifested. Heard in this register, it is the quality of immediacy upon which The Cantos so persistently insist that generates the phenomenological force of all the poem’s most memorable historical moments, from Malatesta in Rimini to Mussolini in Milan. Eighty years on, however, with the poem’s pathos drained in the manner of the Pontine Marshes and that immediacy long faded, it becomes necessary to read Pound differently, to fix instead on the complications of its original ideogrammatic act, better glimpsed in the Mountain’s more troubled sign. I want to argue that this emergence of mediation is more than a chronological given of literary history, then, more than some predictable fading of memory or dispersal of energy, more even than a mere formal effect. For the familiar Poundian tussle between politics and economics, between 9 10

Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), 3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 920.

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the poem’s conscious commitment to immediacy and its mounting but almost inadvertent technical reliance on mediation, is also the consequence of a procedural and logical scission within Pound’s poetics, one that assumes its most concrete cast in the Bank of Siena. With the Bank, I mean to say, Pound’s thought not only changes but also doubles back on itself, silently admitting a force of conceptual rationalization that lies categorically beyond the poem’s expressive range, even when the poem itself seems least rational. “Nothing is without efficient cause,” he insisted in 1933, attempting to assert Mussolini’s standing alongside Jefferson and Lenin as revolutionary founders, and in its classical manifestation the ideogram might be taken to stand as the evidence or trace of such causes (J/M 7). But Pound’s attempt to convert the Mountain into an ideogrammatic sign—a crudely rendered sketch of six pyramidally stacked boulders at the end of Canto XLII—betrays the difficulty unwittingly.11 No longer capable of providing “a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature,” in Ernest Fenollosa’s phrase, here the ideogram seems to gesture uncertainly to the logics of abstraction, deferral, and causal dispersal inherent within the bank’s structure.12 At the Mountain, efficient causes seem to withdraw from direct figuration or reference entirely, leaving Pound to confront and to acknowledge (but only implicitly) a mode of what Althusser termed structural causality, “a cause immanent in its effects” but not reducible to any one of them, a cause for which no strict image can be provided.13 The price of that (non-)admission, however, is severe. For it is accordingly at Siena that The Cantos begin to commit themselves to the systematic unwinding of a logic no longer exhausted by the calibrations of virtù and indeed no longer within the poet’s control or figurative grasp. “In nature there are no negations,” Pound once asserted through Fenollosa, but in the Mountain’s rendering of nature there are—displacements and abstractions interposed between a thing

11

12

13

Peter Makin notes that to form such a diagram, Pound has in fact “added further height not authorised in by the original” (which includes only three such shapes), as if aware of the ideogram’s slippage into commercial branding. See Makin, Pound’s Cantos (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 201. The version of Canto XLII printed in The Criterion includes only four elements, the fourth stacked atop a base of three (Pound, “Cantos XLII-XLIV,” 410). Ernest Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), 362. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), 189.

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and its value or sign—and those negations turn out to include the axiomatic movement of the economic logic Pound sought to resist.14 In this sense, the Mountain marks the end of an ideogrammatic method in its pure form, the moment at which even the Poundian image is committed to a concept and thereby rendered entirely mediate, withdrawn from superficial legibility. But it also, I will suggest, marks the moment at which Pound’s history intersects our own, framing not his present but ours, by way of a poetics attuned as if unconsciously to the force and fact of structural causality as such. Elsewhere, I have described the fate of Pound’s late poetics in terms borrowed from Erich Auerbach, as a division between foreground and background, expression and implication, suggesting that the haunting power of The Pisan Cantos in particular derives from Pound’s inability to reconcile or even fully acknowledge the categorical distance between variant causal logics.15 But if that is so, it is the Mountain that not only allows us to identify the logic that eludes the poem itself but also to insist that it remains properly dialectical, predicated on the determinacy of a rationality that holds sway whether grasped or not.

The method: From pagan to public works But this is first a problem of textual method. The documentary archive that forms the base and provides the substance of the Leopoldine Cantos and the Fifth Decad more generally is to be found in the nine-volume history of the Bank, compiled by its secretary, Narciso Mengozzi, and published from 1891 to 1925, itself based on manuscripts that Pound consulted in Siena’s Biblioteca Comunale and recorded down to the shelfmarks.16 Pound’s transcription is characteristically overexact and emphatic, leaving

14 15

16

Fenollosa, Chinese Written Character, 369. C. D. Blanton, Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92–93; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 12. Il Monte dei Paschi di Siena e la Aziende in Esso Riunite, 9 vols (Siena: L. Lazzeri, 1891–1925). For a more recent summation of the Bank’s founding and history in English, see Monte dei Paschi di Siena: Historical Notes (Siena: Monte dei Paschi di Siena, 1955).

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a textual space near the  beginning of Canto XLII, for example, for the place of the signature [“Loco  Signi”] that confirms the terms of the Bank’s charter adopted  by the city’s Collegio di Balia (“the Bailey,” for Pound) in July 1623, before reproducing and then glossing the “cross in the margin” that concludes  the document, even reprinting the notary’s authentication.17 The canto in fact forms a collage of the Bank’s founding paperwork, intermittently continued over the next two cantos, as the institution traces its way into later centuries. An earlier  document, from December  1622, specifies the deeper intention to which that deliberation  answers, seeming even to maintain the manuscript’s  lineation: “wd be we believe useful / and beneficent that there be place to lend licitly / MONEY to receive licitly money / at moderate and  legitimate interest” (C XLII.8–9; 210). The same report confirms the Grand Duke’s guarantee and  security, before reprinting the (corrupted) signatures of  his ministers Nicolo de Antille, Horatio Gionfiglioli, and Sebastino Cellesi  (C XLII.10; 212).18 Canto XLII concludes with the official decree (originally in Latin rather than Italian) of incorporation: “with public documentation / for public and private utility / foreseeing erection / legitimate and just, such a MOUNTAIN” (C XLII.12; 214). More than a decade on from the Malatesta Cantos, there is of course nothing at all surprising in the procedure. As a matter of textual practice, the establishment of the Mountain simply recapitulates the movement that Malatesta made possible, the intensively paleographical style of quotation that, as Lawrence Rainey has demonstrated, afforded “the poetic techniques essential to the formal repository of The Cantos,” breaking down modal boundaries between verse and prose and casting the poem across a complex referential field of “extended quotation.”19 As the formal answer to “the postbag” of Malatesta’s correspondence (or even to the labored wordless strains of “grnnh! rrnnh, pthg” with which Alberti’s Tempio assumes its shape as a temple full of pagan works), the opening cantos of the Fifth Decad seem to 17

18 19

Pound, Fifth Decad, 8 (210). For a full record and transcription of Pound’s sources, see Ben Kimpel and T. C. Duncan Eaves, “The Sources of Cantos XLII and XLIII,” Paideuma  6.3 (Winter 1977): 333–358; “The Sources of the Leopoldine Cantos,” Paideuma 7.1–2 (Spring & Fall 1978): 249–277. See Kimpeland Eaves, “The Sources of Cantos XLII and XLIII,” 339. Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4, 60.

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confirm the method without materially expanding it, shifting the poem’s gaze westward from Rimini to Siena but more deeply reinforcing its methodological claim to historical authority (C IX.37, 36). Pound himself remained anxious to underscore the link, quickly claiming the Mountain as the second supporting beam in the poem’s expanding architecture: There is no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe … No one has claimed that the Malatesta cantos are obscure. They are openly volitionist, establishing, I think clearly, the effect of the factive personality, Sigismundo, an entire man. The founding of the Monte dei Paschi as the second episode has its importance. There we find the discovery, or at any rate the establishment, of the true bases of credit, to wit the abundance of nature and the responsibility of the whole people. (GK 194)

Subtly, however, the language of Pound’s attempt to impose harmonic symmetry has already registered a deeper shift entailed in the poem’s transposition of keys. The factive power of Malatesta’s volitionism etches his personality into the legible surface of a monument that stands as the cumulative record of his effects. But the rhetoric of Social Credit adjusts the critical tenor, crucially deferring the interpretation of such facts to the provision of an intervening matrix, reaching after “true bases” that remain cloaked behind the visible edifice recorded in the poem’s documents. Already, Pound finds himself trafficking in abstractions. Hugh Kenner seizes on the disparity to explain “a kind of difficulty that will bulk larger and larger” as the poem expands, noting that its ability to “conserve the vigor of actual documents” fails to imply any corresponding grasp of the “abundance of nature” that manifests in the Mountain as such.20 These two cases are not quite alike … What you can go to see (yes, still: in Siena) looks like any other bank building. That is not what the words mean in the Cantos. What they denote in the Cantos is a perception about the true base of credit (the abundance of nature, the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep), and this we need to be told about. Though the facts are in the text we are not told.21 20

21

Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era: The Age of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 427, 428. Ibid., 428–429.

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What Kenner isolates as an aesthetic defect, however, is more precisely grasped as the emergence of a categorical difference: a transposition of referential objects that necessitates, in turn, an implicit transformation in denotative practice. In Rimini, the archival reconstruction of Malatesta’s Tempio had reduced the large abstractions of medieval theology to sensible emblems, discernible in every detail of Alberti’s design. The tendentious paganism of Pound’s reading thus narrows the poem’s hermeneutic amplitude, flattening abstractions into immanence, even while radically expanding its range of material reference. So understood, the proof of Malatesta’s pagan works, the demonstration of their power as pagan works, lies precisely in the fact that they can be sensed and immediately read without any particular exegetical qualification. By contrast, the Mountain signifies little more than a series of necessary displacements, metaphorical substitutions that banish grasslands and sheep, ultimately nature itself, from the sphere of poetic perception, replacing each with a political guarantee, in the shape of Cosimo’s security or Leopold’s reforms. Indeed, it is the very continuity of the poem’s formal technique that foregrounds a constitutive absence, obsessively piling up historical documents that have already lost any determinate contact with their sustaining sources in the pastures of the Maremma or with the labor that remained visible, quotable a few cantos earlier. By this logic, the decree of the Bank’s founding induces a transubstantiation, evacuating the very thing it purports to signify. “Thus BANK of the grassland was raised into Seignory” (C XLIII.18; 219), or a few lines later: A New Mount that shall receive from all sorts of persons from Luoghi public and private, privileged and non-privileged a base, a fondo, a deep, a sure and a certain the City having ‘entrate’ the customs and public income (C XLIII.18; 219)

The effect is divulged most tellingly in the terms that Pound cannot translate or edit into clarity: Luoghi, both places and companies; fondo, both foundation and fund; or entrate, both entries and incomes. In each case, a sudden lexical slippage intrudes not a figural sense but rather a second but more distant literalism, pitched on a more abstract plane of financial calculation where the Bank’s incorporation and its subsequent operations actually transpire.

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Meanwhile, a sequence of nominalized adjectives—deep, sure, certain—strains to offer an assurance that the Bank’s simple image cannot. The problem, then, is not that Pound’s method cannot explicate its facts, but rather that the style of the poem’s facts has been altered, drawn away from the zone of the sensuous, the immediate, or the volitional and lodged instead within an architecture—of credit, exchange, finance, value—composed of abstractions, observable only over time or in displaced effects. Beyond a sheaf of transcribed ledgers, a longer municipal chronicle, and the building preserved as the Palazzo Salimbeni, there is little for Pound’s method of historical realization to manifest, at least after the manner of Malatesta. But it is for just that reason that the poem’s notion of realization assumes a more expansive second sense. Against the litany of personal gestures that organize the narration of Malatesta’s career (devolving into the purely annalistic refrain that ends Canto VIII and launches Canto IX, for example), the Mountain imposes a longer rhythmic interval, echoed in a set of more distant events: currency negotiations with Florence in 1676, the suspension of imprisonment for debt in 1679, a loan of 4736 scudi to endow a college, the adoption of an easy money policy in 1680 (C XLIII. 20–21; 221). Indeed, by the end of Canto XLIII, that interval has stretched beyond the length of a century, as the founding acts of 1624 are rendered concrete in a series of public works: “Firenze 1749, 1000 scudi / for draining the low land / 2000 to fix Roman Road advance authorized up to 12,000” (C XLIII.22; 222). The particular details that Pound culls from the Bank’s records are unsurprising, of course. From Malatesta’s patronage of the arts to Mussolini’s draining of the swamps, the provision of public works forms one of his central refrains, progressively devolving the rarefied sphere of artistic production into the social infrastructure that underwrites it and ultimately de-privatizing the aesthetic as such. In this respect too, the Mountain’s long history of municipal reinvestment, its accumulation of rare artworks on the city’s behalf (now vested in the control of the Fondazione), seem to reiterate and answer the demonstrative logic of Malatesta. But the departure from the simple public expenditure of the Tempio is equally crucial. In the Mountain’s case, value is incorporated differently, expressed by way of what Douglas labels “real (as distinct from financial) capital,” in the form of an “increment of association”

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or unearned return on the accumulation of past production, congealed as an ongoing “cultural dividend” realized only over time.22 Derived gradually as the lingering residue of past labor (but currently monopolized in private hands), such an increment contributes an ever greater share of current production, in Pound’s scheme, correspondingly diminishing the need for labor itself. The temporalization and transmission of the cultural heritage as a recuperable dividend promises a categorical hedge against the abuses of modern credit and a counterprinciple to interest—“an extension of the increment of association; a hook-up with the accumulation of all past inventiveness”— but only when distributed to a public of shareholders, by way of either the social credit or a public good.23 Rendered in such an infrastructural shape, however, the Mountain’s work also testifies more quietly to a displacement of the ground of value, a slow transformation across time that amounts to pure negation: nature’s present abundance translated as a mode of historical investment, subject to the very formula of appreciation or depreciation by which Usura renders art imprecise. Natural production is both recovered and fundamentally denatured, aesthetic volition itself depersonalized and deferred, perversely realized only according to the parodic inversion of a principle of interest, transfigured from the abstract to the concrete. Paradoxically, then, the realization of a founding act in 1624 is displaced as well, suspended over a century and a half as Pound’s sequence tracks the longer set of effects that comprise the Bank’s actual significance, across the transition from Medici to Habsburg authority in the mid-eighteenth century (“Public debt at the end of the Medici / scudi 14 million / or 80 million lira pre-war” (C XLIII.22; 222)) and into the Leopoldine era. Anaphorically recorded in near excruciating detail, the Mountain’s attenuated effects sprawl into a mass of apparently unrelated detail, as Pound attempts to enumerate the reforms with which Leopold salvaged the Bank from usury’s menace: that wished state debt brought to an end; that put the guilds under common tribunal; that left names only as vestige of feudal chain; 22 23

C. H. Douglas, The Monopoly of Credit (London: Chapmen & Hall, 1931), 79. Pound, Social Credit, 7.

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that lightened mortmain that princes and church be under tax as were others; that ended the gaolings for debt; that said thou shalt not sell public offices; that suppressed so many gabelle; that freed the printers of surveillance and wiped out the crime of lèse majesty; that abolished death as a penalty and all tortures in prisons which he held were for segregation; that split common property among tillers; roads, trees, and the wool trade, the silk trade, and a set price, lower, for salt; plus another full page of such actions Habsburg Lorraine (C XLIV.28; 227–228)

As nearly as any sequence in The Cantos, that list encompasses Pound’s affirmative program and design, his prescription of a policy (quoting the Bank’s history yet again) “to keep bridle on usury” (C XLIV.28; 228). But the very proliferation of “such actions” disperses their force, scattering nature’s abundance into an array of tenuously dislocated events and into asyndeton. Despite Pound’s repeated insistence that an “increment of association is not usury”—that it is in fact the instrument with which usury is forestalled—the  Mountain’s original ideogram seems to absorb a host of metonymic  effects, lashed together in a scattered list of policies bound only by their common  source in the record of Leopold’s reign.24 Pound’s defense against usury turns out to consist of a series of ad hoc gestures and adjustments, each answering (cryptically) to some principle, certainly, but not (visibly) to the same one. Incongruously enough, even the sequence’s famous culminating turn underscores the perverse effect: while  Usura offers itself easily enough to lyric distillation in Canto XLV, couched in the mesmerizing negative of “hath no man” or “came not by usura”  (C XLV.29, 229), the increment of association with which The Cantos endeavor to meet it all but dissolves the pristine clarity of the ideogram itself. That which is “CONTRA NATURAM” lends itself to depiction easily enough, but nature’s abundance does not. 24

Ibid., 5.

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What I am suggesting, then, against Pound himself, is that there is a mystery, an obscurity, in The Cantos and that it begins just here, that its arrival in fact is the importance of the Monte dei Paschi’s emergence as the poem’s second episode. Read as Malatesta’s deferred fulfillment and antistrophe, the Mountain arises as the ideogram that throws the ideogrammatic method into crisis, that renders transparency of representation impossible by focalizing a set of effects impervious to strict representation precisely because they have been scattered and leveraged over time. Less an effect in itself than the emblem of a conditioning force, the metonymic mark of a system and a logic nowhere susceptible to the kind of telling Kenner demands and Pound elsewhere privileges, the Bank of Siena presides over, but also induces, a radical revision of Malatesta’s founding gesture. Far from marking a conscious or deliberate shift in Pound’s method, however, that turn happens within the poem’s historical materials as such, inhering (as it were) in the very documents so carefully collated. At the explicit level of the poem’s surface, such a revision divides The Cantos in half, as we will see, inaugurating a second cycle in Pound’s thought, driven by the cluster of topical obsessions already signaled: with banking and credit, money and association. But each of those thematic refrains circles around a logical difficulty that Pound lacks a ready way to name, a generative impossibility at the core of his late style. In fact, on Pound’s own account, this moment on which the poem pivots lies not where most readers have assumed, in the Usura canto itself, but rather a few pages later. Having addressed himself, at the beginning of Canto XLVI, to his great interlocutor Eliot and summarized the crimes of the postwar period, Pound suddenly returns from the Mountain to Paterson’s Bank of England its lurking formal antithesis: 17 years on this case, and we not the first lot! Said Paterson: Hath benefit of interest on all the moneys which it, the bank, creates out of nothing. (C XLVI.33, 233)

Pound’s source for Paterson’s line, in this case, is to be found in a predictable place, though one that originates far from Siena: Christopher Hollis’ The Two

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Nations, a 1935 tract sympathetic to Social Credit.25 With the lines that follow, however, a different source intrudes upon the poem: The Macmillan Commission about two hundred and forty years LATE with great difficulty got back to Paterson’s The bank makes it ex nihil (C XLVI.34; 233)

As usual, Pound’s footnote is ostentatiously included in his text, but in this case it directs readers to an archive more mundane than Malatesta’s postbag or even the collection of Siena papers: the report of the parliamentary Committee on Finance & Industry, chaired by Hugh (Baron) Macmillan and empanelled in 1929 to investigate the causes and complexities of the ongoing economic slump, delivered to Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government in 1931. Mentioned but once in The Cantos, the report nonetheless signals the previously unannounced influence of a counterforce in the poem’s present, the documentary reconstruction of the Bank of England’s history and policy against which Pound’s own history of the Mountain is to be weighed, a rough synecdoche for orthodox economics as such.26 Formally, the sudden appearance of the Macmillan Committee opens a contradiction. At the very moment of Pound’s summation, his oratorical recapitulation of what The Cantos have always been saying, the emergence of a buried source seems to divide the poem’s manifest documentary content, embodied in the Mountain, from its deeper and more authentic referential range—from what it has not yet managed to say. But this deeper latent source also troubles the method of figuration on which Pound has depended all along, summoning a reference for which no ideogram can be proffered. To that degree, the moment also provides a conceptual crux, plotting the convergence between the poem’s explicit range and its more cryptic shadow-text, the moment at which usury declares itself: 25

26

Christopher Hollis, The Two Nations: A Financial Study of English History (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1936). Committee on Finance & Industry, Report (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931). For the Committee’s summation of monetary systems and central banking operations, see 1–18; on the founding and history of the Bank of England, see 25–33.

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This case, and with it the first part, draws to a conclusion of the first phase of this opus, Mr Marx, Karl, did not foresee this conclusion, you have seen a good deal of the evidence, not knowing it evidence […] This case is not the last case or the whole case, we ask a REVISION, we ask for enlightenment in a case moving concurrent, but this case is the first case: Bank creates it ex nihil. Creates it to meet a need, Hic est hyper-usura (C XLVI.34, 233–234)

In fact, Pound’s summation does reinitiate the poem, from the revisitation of Tiresias that opens Cantos XLVII to the rescoring of Usura that closes the sequence in Canto LI. But the naming of hyperusura (“Hic Geryon est. Hic hyperusura” (C XLVI.35, 235)) also portends a conceptual conundrum, caught in the mild elision of Pound’s grammar: the Bank (of England) creates credit out of nothing, but does so “to meet a need.” At the simplest level, the poem’s account of cause has shifted. Effects no longer answer to nature or derive from prior substance, but instead precede their causes, anticipating and therefore straining to represent a necessity no longer available to present perception at all, a necessity felt only as an abstraction of the market, reducible to no particular agency or intention. This is the moment, then, for which a Poundian poetics has no sign, its encounter with the force of a systematically aniconic latency lodged in its very object. The larger theoretical problem is simple, of course, inasmuch as Pound’s method refuses even the possibility of such a negation. What the ideogrammatic method fails to render, however, turns out to lie in the poem’s nearer present, that of England’s Bank rather than Siena’s, along with the vast system of real abstractions that refuse signification in their turn. And it is that odd disequivalence, I wish to suggest, that ensures the poem’s approach to our present as well. If it remains impossible, finally, to impose coherence on Pound’s explicit text, reconciling its unsynthesized elements into transparency, it still remains not only possible but also necessary to complete its thought.

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“A case moving concurrent”: Pound’s effective demand On May 1, 1930, C. H. Douglas appeared to testify before the Macmillan Committee, at Orage’s suggestion.27 Scheduled between the appearances of Treasury official and monetary theorist R. G. Hawtrey, an exponent of the established Treasury View (maintaining the ineffectiveness of fiscal policy even against an economic downturn), and representatives of the Trades Union Congress General Council, Douglas’ statement filled the committee’s docket for the day. It took a largely predictable form, concentrating on the rough outlines of the program already sketched in the series of works that entranced Pound: Economic Democracy (first serialized in The New Age in 1919), Credit-Power and Democracy (1920), and Social Credit (1924). Perplexed by the anaesthetizing cycle of underconsumption and residual debt that plagued the postwar years, and spurred by the fear of Soviet alternatives, Douglas had fixed his analysis on the structural shortfall between aggregate income generated by any particular firm and the total wages recirculated as purchasing power by the firm’s workers, the resultant wastage of effective demand (exaggerated in a sluggish production cycle), and the need for some mechanism to convert privately held credit into something like a public entitlement, offered in lieu of the social fiction of money to make up the disparity. “Social Credit,” in such a scheme, simply names a mathematical margin, a difference in the  equation between financial and real capital, in Douglas’ terms, between money and the true increment of association. By 1930, as the Macmillan Committee convened, Douglas’ “A + B  theorem” had long beguiled Pound, as it had first beguiled Orage, assuming an explicit pivotal position in the meditation on force and value that unfurls from Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega” in Canto XXXVI. Two cantos later, surveying the debris of the postwar years, Pound had incorporated his own extended paraphrase of  Douglas’ postulate, affording it a comparable power of illumination: “and the light became so bright and so blindin’ / in this layer of paradise / that the mind of man was bewildered.”28 27 28

Minutes of Evidence, Volume I, 295–307. On Orage, see §6, 298–299. Pound, Eleven New Cantos, 40 [190].

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The epiphanic memory of that meeting in the offices of The New Age marks the persistent coordinate by which Pound measures the construction of his case: seventeen years, by the time he completed the Siena drafts in 1936. But Douglas’ reception before the committee was more tepid, mixing standard courtesy with the barely concealed skepticism of the MPs and academic economists who formed its ranks, all struggling to grasp the eccentric suggestion that credit might be freely offered by the state to bridge a slump in demand; that money supply might be generously expanded without immediate inflationary effect; that an apparent crisis of employment might be brushed aside by reconfiguring and ultimately dismantling the banking and financial sector as such. His testimony left no discernible imprint on the committee’s ultimate recommendations, published a year later, forcing Douglas to include his written testimony (without the cross-examination that followed) as an appendix to his next volume; none of his simplistic policy recommendations seem to infiltrate the panel’s discussion at all.29 But at least one of the committee’s members seems to have heard something else lurking in Douglas’ home-grown political economy—crude and practically unworkable to be sure, simplistic and dangerously reductive in its theoretical tendencies, but not for that quite wrong. By 1930, J. M. Keynes had been slowly subjecting his own first postulates—inherited from what he would later term the “classical economics” of Smith and Ricardo, of his teachers Marshall and Pigou—to ever-greater skepticism.30 The publication, by the end of the year, of A Treatise on Money would register those emergent doubts and theoretical hesitations more systematically, as Keynes began to dispute the Ricardian presumption of the market's defining tendency toward stable equilibrium and to argue that an imbalance between savings and investment (unthinkable under an orthodox model) might produce an effect resembling underconsumption, forcing the market into a state of general reticence and structural underemployment.31 29 30

31

Douglas, Monopoly of Credit, 89–128. Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936), 4–22. Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume I: The Pure Theory of Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1930), 171–184.

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The fuller implication of the Keynesian account of underconsumption would develop more gradually, in 1936 eventuating in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and its proposal of a “non-Euclidian geometry” for the “non-Euclidian world” that classical political economy had comprehensively failed to describe.32 There, Keynes’ frank dismissal of Say’s principle that “supply creates its own demand,” his countervailing insistence on a “principle of effective demand” that might in some circumstances prove insufficient and tend accordingly to “bring the increase of employment to a standstill before a level of full employment has been reached,” and his demonstration that classical economics had conceived only “a special case” of economic circumstances (leaving its prescriptions powerless over the historically “infinite range of values” on which employment levels might depend at any given moment), all effectively met and theoretically overwhelmed the more modest and muddled founding observations of a program like Social Credit.33 For that reason alone, it seems odd to juxtapose Keynes and Douglas, placing the central figure in modern economic thought alongside one of its more notorious cranks. Or rather, it would seem odd, had Keynes not regularly insisted on some version of the comparison. For the origins of the Keynesian model, it is worth remembering, lie not only in the act of partial apostasy through which the postulates of classical political economy were reduced to mere instances of a larger and previously uncognized sphere of determinate macroeconomics, subject to forces and rules that might not apply in the microeconomic frame of the single actor or firm, but also in the partial heresy that it (often wryly) embraced in the process, a heresy bringing him uncomfortably close to the cranks. Already, in the first volume of his money treatise, Keynes acknowledges the departure from orthodoxy, noting for example that J. A. Hobson’s dissident account of overproduction and the Credit Cycle retains “some affinity to my own,” even as it fails to isolate the crucial lag between savings and investment as a distinctively

32 33

Keynes, General Theory, 16. Ibid., 18, 30–31, 28, 26.

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monetary issue.34 In the second, he is more expansive, tacking humorously between the conventional wisdom of “the bankers, who at least maintain a certain sanity of demeanour by holding on tight to rough rules-of-thumb which they have learnt from experience” and the contrary clamor of “the most distinguished body of persons in the world, the Army of Heretics and Cranks, whose numbers and enthusiasm are extraordinary,” only to allow finally that “the fierce discontent of these heretics is far preferable to the complacency of the bankers.”35 Needless to say, Keynes was not ready (in 1930 or subsequently) to switch his allegiances and abandon the bankers for the cranks, but he insists that the heretic remains “an honest intellectualist” who “deserves respect”—and also deserves an answer to the question that classical economy cannot, by its very nature, pose: “the heretics are calling attention to a real defect in the present arrangements when they complain that the banks are not, and cannot be, influenced in their lending policy, under the present régime, primarily by the object of maintaining the optimum level of employment.”36 Here, of course, is the nub of what would, with The General Theory, become the Keynesian revision: what might be described as the belated recognition not merely of the larger social frame shaped by political economy but also of a previously unimagined mode of social agency eclipsed in its arcane technical equations. A depressed level of employment bespeaks an underutilization of the purchasing power. Not enough is being spent, and therefore too little needs to be produced, suggesting that the normal provisions of credit have lost their mediating force. The cold laws of political economy have thus somehow forgotten their own efficacy, mistaking or simply failing to see ways in which supply and production present secondary effects of demand and consumption. Making the same point more aggressively in 1936, Keynes ventured to isolate the moment in intellectual history that first allowed such a constitutive forgetting, 34 35

36

Keynes, Treatise on Money, I: 178. Keynes, A Treatise on Money, Volume II: The Applied Theory of Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1930), 215, 216. Ibid., 216, 222.

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returning to the disputes between Ricardo and Malthus over the axiomatic principle of Say’s Law: Ricardo conquered England as completely as the Holy Inquisition conquered Spain. Not only was his theory accepted by the city, by statesmen and by the academic world. But controversy ceased; the other point of view completely disappeared; it ceased to be discussed. The great puzzle of Effective Demand with which Malthus had wrestled vanished from economic literature. You will not find it mentioned even once in the whole works of Marshall, Edgeworth and Professor Pigou, from whose hands the classical theory has received its most mature embodiment. It could only live on furtively, below the surface, in the underworlds of Karl Marx, Silvio Gesell or Major Douglas.37

Concluding his own argument against orthodoxy hundreds of pages on, Keynes returns to expand this historical account, cautiously rehabilitating a few ideas once banished together with the mercantilist or physiocratic systems that spawned them, but which, again, turn out to be not altogether wrong. Briefly remembering Malthus and Hobson, figures who sensed but could not prove the classical model’s limitations, Keynes notices the heretics and cranks once more. He singles out Gesell, praising at length both his repudiation of “the classical hypotheses” and his abandonment of Marx in favor of Proudhon, before declaring that “[t]he idea behind stamped money”—proposed to restore to money the quality of depreciation common to other commodities and thus to encourage circulation—“is sound.”38 But it is with Douglas that he concludes: “Since the war there has been a spate of heretical theories of underconsumption, of which those of Major Douglas are the most famous. The strength of Major Douglas’ advocacy has, of course, largely depended on orthodoxy having no valid reply to much of his destructive criticism.”39 Caustically dismantling Social Credit’s simplified depiction of the purchasing power’s degeneration, sketched in the “A + B theorem,” Keynes praises and damns at once:

37 38 39

Keynes, The General Theory, 32. Ibid., 355, 357. Ibid., 370–371.

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Major Douglas is entitled to claim, as against some of his orthodox adversaries, that he at least has not been wholly oblivious of the outstanding problem of our economic system. Yet he has scarcely established an equal claim to rank—a private, perhaps, but not a major in the brave army of heretics—with Mandeville, Malthus, Gesell, and Hobson, who, following their intuitions, have preferred to see the truth obscurely and imperfectly rather than to maintain error, reached indeed with clearness and consistency and by easy logic, but on hypotheses inappropriate to the facts.40

“[T]he essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right,” T. S. Eliot observed in 1933.41 The heretic retains “an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth,” Eliot suggests, more powerful “than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything” (24–25). Regularly, Keynes’ contemptuous but never quite dismissive treatment of Douglas and Social Credit absorbs the same distinction, seeking to salvage dogmatic value from the surrounding autodidactic mass, moderated only by the unpleasant discovery that it contains something indispensable, down to the famous Keynesian suggestion that “digging holes in the ground” (made first by Douglas in 1924) might constitute valuable policy, preferable to mining for precious metals, and comparable to the construction of pyramids or cathedrals.42 For what is most crucial to recall, and what is most easily forgotten in the wake of Keynesianism’s hegemony through the century’s middle decades, is that while Keynes remains temperamentally aligned with the classical economists that he cites respectfully only to demolish, he is also—on the largest and simplest question at least: that of underconsumption as a causal problem—firmly among the heretics. While Douglas left no visible trace in the Macmillan Committee’s final report, then, he seems to exert a paradoxical force on the body of economic thought that developed from it, providing as useful a name as any for the

40 41 42

Ibid., 371. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber, 1934), 24. Keynes, General Theory, 128–131. For Douglas’ earlier suggestion that “[f]ailing an alternative, one should dig holes and fill them up again,” see Social Credit, 21.

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underlying theoretical difficulty that the committee was called to address: the dilemma of underconsumption, theoretically impossible under the orthodox canons that were in the process of being discarded. In 1924, Douglas had invoked Keynes’ recognition of “the need for innovation”—offered in A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)—in the understanding of currency and monetary policy to preface his own more radical proposal of the general or the social credit.43 In 1930, the full Committee hesitated at such a leap, largely confining its attention to monetary questions, accepting the government’s charge “to inquire into banking, finance, and credit” in the interest of “the development of trade and commerce and the employment of labour,” surveying the nation’s monetary policy and laying out guidance to the Bank of England’s governors with unanimous dispassion.44 But its final report famously expanded that original brief in a now famous appendix, largely authored by Keynes and signed by some half of its members. There, Keynes and his cosignatories ventured beyond the unanimous recommendation to embrace two less expected positions. They first abandoned the Ricardian orthodoxy of free trade by suggesting “[c]ontrol of imports and aids to the export industries” (192), before urging “[d]omestic enterprise assisted by State action, or subsidies to private investment at home” (192): a program, in other words, of state credit and public works. As  a practical matter, it was this last recommendation that marked the definitive repudiation of Say’s Law, decisively rejecting the officially ruling assumption that even in a situation of underconsumption, public spending would merely crowd out private investment. By the end of 1931, the run on European banks had forced policy ahead of the Committee’s recommendations and forced Britain off the gold standard. But the Macmillan report stands nonetheless as a milestone not only in the history of economic thought, but also in twentieth-century political history, the first provisional intimation of the challenge to classical economics— soon to be reformulated in bitter disputes between Cambridge and the London School of Economics, pitting Keynes' students against the likes of Lionel Robbins and F. A. Hayek or (later) against a purer monetarism and 43 44

C. H. Douglas, Social Credit (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924), 200. Committee on Finance & Industry, Report, vi.

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its neoliberal progeny. It stands, indeed, as the rough sketch of a series of questions that, even in an era of floating currencies and flexible accumulation, persist with us still. To all of this, the mildly pathetic appearance of Major Douglas seems to form a comic footnote at best. But Keynes was not the only one to exploit the juxtaposition’s satirical possibilities. In Canto XXII, Pound introduces Douglas for the first time, recounting a 1919 discussion of the culpability of armaments manufacturers in the slaughter of the late war and the rising cost of postwar living, involving Douglas, Pound, and “the renowned Mr. Bukos,” “the economist consulted of nations” (C XXII.101, 102). The reference is to Keynes, of course, marking his only direct appearance in the poem. Mocked by Douglas and Pound as “an orthodox economist,” speaking of a labor shortage with millions out of work, the recent author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace is harangued by Pound (“I went on plaguing Mr. Bukos”) and painted as the personification of political economy’s blindness (in the guise of “Mr. H. B.,” J. A. Hobson appears similarly in the following lines) (C XXII.102). The scornful tone is one to which Pound would return over the years, gradually displaced from Keynes himself to his metonymic representation in the Macmillan Committee. In February  1932, he wrote of “The Macmillan Report (old stuff.) I only read it a few weeks ago because I supposed it wd. be BUNK, and it was” (L/BC 72). Three years later, he acknowledged the report’s “belated, but official recognition of the sanity required of governments, a low elevation.”45 Even on Radio Rome, he continued to hold forth ambivalently on the Committee’s work, reading Canto XLVI over the air in February 1942 and providing a gloss: “The MacMillan Commission [sic] sat after the other war to look into the sins of the British Financial system” (RSWII 34). Keynes himself recurs in the Rome addresses more frequently, treated with greater venom when Pound recurs again to the same conversation with Mr. Bukos (while removing the pseudonym) in April  1943 or, three months later, uses the economist’s profession of “orthodoxy” to insinuate a set of anti-Semitic associations (RSWII 284, 364).

45

Pound, “American Notes,” New English Weekly 8.1 (October 17, 1935).

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Reducible to ephemeral anecdote when taken individually, these passing instances and stray details seem to perform a different work when read cumulatively. Retrospectively, they place the Keynesian account of Versailles and its Carthaginian Peace at the origin of “the first phase of this opus” even as the second war rages, while using (in a programmatic inversion of Keynes’ own irony) the more respectable academic figure as Douglas’ foil, something like the work’s lurking antagonist. Read accordingly, Pound’s “seventeen years on this case” also bracket the interval between the critique of the Paris Peace Conference and the full emergence of Keynesian macroeconomics, a movement shadowed in almost every particular: from Pound’s programmatic turn to economics in 1930–31, as the Macmillan Committee convened, to the near simultaneous appearance in London of the General Theory and the Fifth Decad a few years later.46 The basic point is not merely, of course, that Keynes and the Macmillan Committee provide a kind of surreptitiously antagonistic source for Pound’s increasingly unhinged thought, though as I have suggested already, that is true. Nor is it that, insofar as it retains any fundamental coherence at all, Pound’s economic theorizing tends to move in grooves parallel to the Keynesian turn, shifting attention and explanatory power from production to consumption, supply to demand, all while attempting to survey the disastrous effect of the last war.47 As Tim Redman has noted, and as Leon Surette has demonstrated more extensively, that is true as well, though Pound’s implacable hostility to the private provision of credit blinded even the poet to the fact that, as Surette puts it, “the Keynesian revolution took place in the midst of Pound’s economic evangelism”— and rendered it largely obsolete.48 The deeper point is rather that Pound

46

47

48

On the intensification of Pound’s economic interests in 1930–31, see Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. 76–92. “But in 1918 we knew in London that the problem of production was solved, and that the next job was to solve distribution and that this meant a new administration of credit. I don’t think there was any ambiguity about that” (J/M 48). Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 57–58; Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to Anti-Semitism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 4 . On Pound’s paradoxically antipathetic relationship with Keynes more generally, see Surette, “The Keynesian Revolution and Social Credit,” 108–135.

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manages to embed such coordinates as an historical matrix in his work, without quite seeming to recognize or acknowledge the fact at the poem’s explicit and ideogrammatic surface. I have suggested already that with the appearance of the Mountain, The Cantos begin to move in two distinct planes: one ideogrammatically marked and exhaustively documented, the other withdrawn from apparent representation but nonetheless forcefully registered as a set of displaced effects—that something like Usura begins to provide its method as well as its object. But it is now possible to refine the claim, while explaining the strange agonistic persistence of Keynes and all he entails at the poem’s most crucial junctures. Over the seventeen years between 1919 and 1936, in the conceptual nullity of the postwar present, what emerged was a new conceptual problem, sufficient to trouble orthodoxies of all sorts: a withdrawal of apparent causes, and with it a dialectical revision of the modes of historical causality as such. What disappeared, one might say, was the fantasy of historical agency, whether measured in Malatesta’s heroism or confidently expressed in Say’s Law, an underlying illusion of a political efficacy referable to individual action or decision. What vanished, in Pound’s terminology, was volition as such. What appeared in its place was the universalizing concept of an agency of a different sort, no longer strictly tethered to the particular but dispersed along the indefinite serial unity of an economy that seems to move on its own. The problem of effective demand, in either Keynes’ version or Douglas’, marks just that limit: A market generates an intentional structure but presumes no particular subject of intention, instead devolving constitutive determinations of value anonymously, into every particular and none at all. It is, in that regard, an expression without a voice, attached to a collective aggregate that remains entirely abstract, effectively disembodied, even as it continues to produce concrete effects. In another register, of course, effective demand also names our own structural dominant, the variable element that seems to determine what Althusser would have termed the specific structure of our own historicity, expressed in the form of recent excess (as financial instruments reproduce and metastasize to fuel new cycles of overconsumption) or of a systemic lack (as we

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confront the specter of pre-Keynesian austerity once more).49 Indefinite in its edges and restricted to no particular polity or place, in Siena or anywhere else, the structure of such a collective agency is manifested in every exercise of the purchasing power but irreducible to any single event or decision, unbound from nature’s abundance and impervious to the ideogram’s expressive technique. It is just that incommensurability, a structural noncorrelation of apparent cause with observed effect, that twists the ideogram against itself, opening gaps and negations in Pound’s nature, splaying his poem’s expressive surface from its historical depth. And of course, it is just those negations that send the poem spiraling into conspiracy, in an ever more frenzied search for the missing agents behind events. The Cantos themselves, by such a reckoning, form an “economic consequences of the peace” by other and almost accidental means, as symptomatic enactment rather than analytic, a frenzied and desperate attempt to answer economics with politics: a category error redeemed as a poetics. By that logic, however, Pound also remains legible against himself, and it is in this second dialectical plane that the poem reaches, oddly, beyond itself as well, from a present that he failed to represent to the one that now confounds us, even as he inadvertently, or even unwillingly, offers the method of its presentation. In his very failure to press economic agency into visibility, one might say, Pound generates “a new answer without a question” and “a new latent question contained by default in this new answer”—an “oversight,” as Althusser would have it, without a “sighting,” etched into the poem’s deep historical grid even when unvoiced.50 Or to put it another way, he divulges a concept for which his poem lacks a knowledge. The fact, then, that Pound somehow fails to depict even the Mountain, watching his own art thicken as the image dissipates and spreads before him, also allows us to see what the sign would otherwise obscure: those basic historical coordinates that The Cantos underscore without thinking. In any meaningful sense, Pound lacked a notion of what we would now call finance capital, the cumulative and systematic recalibration of the historical

49 50

Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 108. Ibid., 24.

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field that might still succeed where Napoleon failed and topple the Monte dei Paschi, that has already undermined it from within. At best, Usura is simply his name for that lack, an attempt to describe or represent a fact of a qualitatively different order, a methodological placeholder for a concept felt only as an effect. But in the same movement to name Usura, Pound’s poetics begin to generate a method of displaced representation, adverting to capital’s essential quality of mediation by not quite noticing it. In effect, our present is the content of that oversight.

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Notes on Contributors Charles Altieri is Professor of English and holds the Rachael Anderson Stageberg Endowed Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of many books, including Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity (Cornell University Press, 2013), and Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Cornell, 2015). C. D. Blanton is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Christopher Bush is Associate Professor of French and Co-Director of the Global Avant-garde and Modernist Studies cluster at Northwestern University. He is the author of Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford University Press, 2010) and is currently completing The Floating World: Japoniste Aesthetics and Global Modernity for Columbia University Press. Christine Froula is Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Gender Studies at Northwestern University and Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She has published widely on interdisciplinary modernism, feminist and gender theory, and genetic criticism, including A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Selected Poems, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos, Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity, “Sex” (James Joyce in Context), “Proust’s China” (Modernism/Modernity), “War, Empire, and Modernist Poetry, 1914–1922” (Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the

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First World War), “War, Peace, Internationalism” (Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group), “The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind,” and (in process) “Unwriting The Waves” and “ ‘Dangerous Thoughts in Bloomsbury’: Fictions of Empire and British Aestheticism.” She is currently working on twenty-first-century adaptations of ancient and modernist classics and, with Helen Wussow, on an anthology of Bloomsbury drama. Aaron Jaffe is Professor of English and the Director of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society at the University of Louisville. He works on modern and contemporary literature and culture, with a special interest in modernism and cultural and aesthetic theory. His publications include The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism (Minnesota University Press, 2014), The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center, coedited with Edward Comentale (Indiana University Press, 2014), and “Total Unconscious: Jameson, Conrad and James,” Henry James Review, 36.3 (Fall 2015). Josephine Park is Associate Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Cold War Friendships: Korea, Vietnam, and Asian American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2016). Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, a fellow of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, and one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature. He has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers such as Beckett, Pound, and Joyce. His recent books include Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (Les presses du réel, 2010), Crimes of the Future (Bloomsbury, 2014), and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He has edited A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Wiley, 2013) and 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University

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Press, 2015). His forthcoming publications in 2016 are Think, Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human (Fordham University Press) and The Pathos of Distance (Bloomsbury). Paul Stasi is Associate Professor of English at SUNY Albany. He is the author of Modernism, Imperialism and the Historical Sense (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and the coeditor, with Jennifer Greiman, of The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire (Bloomsbury, 2013). His work has appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Historical Materialism, Comparative Literature, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, Twentieth Century Literature, and La Habana Elegante.

Index Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 108 aesthetics 79, 94, 106, 186, 188, 194, 196, 199, 213, 214, 215 Althusser, Louis 209, 229, 230 Anthropocene 54–71 anti-Semitism 127, 128, 182–4, 227 Auerbach, Erich 210 Bacon, Francis “Baldy” 62–5 Bank of England 203–4, 206, 217, 218, 219 Bel Esprit 52, 58–9 Benjamin, Walter 45–7, 61, 129–31 Bernstein, Michael André 89–90 Broch, Hermann 121 Brooke-Rose, Christine 201 Buddhism 114–15, 123 Bunting, Basil 133 Bush, Ronald 196, 198 Casanova, Pascale 107 Cavalcanti, Guido 126, 195–200 China 24, 32–4, 41–4, 75–7, 78, 79, 83, 94, 101–4, 109, 124, 130, 175, 183–6, 192, 200 Chinese Written Character (See also Fenollosa) 27–30, 48–9, 76, 123–5, 137, 209 Coetzee, J.-M. 129–30 comparative literature 107–8, 132 Confucius (Kung; Confucianism) 31–2, 78, 100, 104, 109, 121–2, 124, 125, 130, 132, 176, 184, 186 cosmopolitanism 79, 81, 97, 98, 129, 133–4 cultural heritage 174–5, 181, 182, 189, 190, 193 Damrosch, David 107 decadence 6–8, 13, 16 deep time 45–70 Derrida, Jacques 125, 126–7, 131, 133

digital humanities 21–44 Diogenes 133–4 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 13 Douglas, C. H. 130, 174, 201, 203, 214–15, 220–1, 222, 224–7, 228, 229 Eliot, T. S. 60, 148, 217, 225 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 133 Enders, Jody 196–7 Engels, Friedrich 114 epic poetry 140–4 Ewick, David 87, 89 fascism 77, 78, 79, 84, 93, 94–100, 105–6, 109, 126, 128, 129–30, 132 Feldman, Matthew 129 Fenollosa, Ernest (See also Chinese Written Character) 75–7, 80, 81, 84, 85, 94–6, 102–3, 104, 109, 120–5, 209 Flusser, Vilém 48–9, 68–70 Frobenius, Leo 109, 128 Gandhi, Mahatma 117 Gesell, Silvio 130, 189, 203, 206, 224, 225 Gitelman, Lisa 42–3 Guillory, John 186–8 Hakutani, Yoshinobu 84 Hegel, G. W. F. 114, 120, 123 Heidegger, Martin 126, 129, 133 Hofmann, Reto 97, 105–6 ideogram 27–8, 82, 83, 100, 123, 125–6, 130, 209, 216, 217, 218, 230 ideogrammic (ideogrammatic) method 28–31, 78, 82, 125, 206, 208, 210, 217, 219, 229 image (Imagism) 3–19, 78, 83, 84, 85, 90–1, 94, 124, 130, 210, 214 impressionism 16 Itō, Michio 80

250 Japan 75–106, 109 Jennison, Ruth 199–200 Joyce, James 111, 112 Kenner, Hugh 212, 217 Keynes, J. M. 201, 221–7, 228, 229 Kitasono, Katue 78, 80, 81–4, 89, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98–9 Kittler, Friedrich A. 44 Klein, Lucas 123, 124 Kodama, Sanehide 81 Kōri, Torahiko 80 Kume, Tamijūrō 80 Kurz, Robert 175, 179 Lacis, Asja 45–7 Liebregts, Peter 191 Loos, Adolf 110–11 Lowell, Amy 4–5 Lubbock, John 55–6 Malatesta 132, 204, 208, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 229 Marx, Karl 114, 130, 174–81, 187–90, 199, 208, 219, 224 media studies 42–4, 45–70 Monte dei Paschi di Siena (Bank of Siena; Mountain) 201–19, 229, 230, 231 Moody, A. David 109 Moretti, Franco 23, 25, 34–41, 43–4 Mussolini, Benito 135–8, 125, 126, 142–3, 163, 207, 208, 209, 214 Naitō, Konan 77, 103 Nicholls, Peter 90–1, 207 Nietzsche, Friedrich 125, 128, 131, 133–4 Nishiwaki, Junzaburō 80 Noguchi, Yone 79–80, 84 noh 78, 80, 81, 85, 86–94, 97, 121, 122 North, Michael 79, 106 Okakura Kakuzō (Tenshin) 77, 95, 96 Orage, A. R. 203, 220 Orientalism 78, 79, 104, 105, 121

Index Paideuma 85, 93, 124 Paleolithic cave art 60–2 Park, Josephine Nock-Hee 186, 191–2 poetics aleatoric 152–5, 161 epiphanic 3–6, 8 constructivist 3, 8, 11, 15–19 public value of 7, 17–19 phanopoeia 8–12, 15–17, 18 melopoeia 8, 12–17 Postone, Moishe 174, 175–7, 181, 182, 187 Pound, Ezra ABC of Economics 189 ABC of Reading 24–5, 28–30, 173 “Arnold Dolmetsch” 15–17 “Balatella” 9 Canto I 113 Canto IV 93 Canto XIII 185 Canto XXII 227 Canto XXXVI 126, 196, 220 Canto CV 113 Cathay 122 “Cavalcanti” 195 China/Adams Cantos 32–4, 41–2, 44, 176, 182, 183–6, 191–4, 197, 198 “Doria” 14–15, 17 Eleven New Cantos 202 The Fifth Decad of Cantos (XLII - LI) 201–4, 210–19, 228 Guide to Kulchur 22–3, 25–7, 30–2, 173 “Homage to Sextus Propertius” 137–8, 139–40, 168 “How to Read” 24–5, 173 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 53, 137–8, 139 “In a Station of the Metro” 85 Italian Cantos 162–8 “Liu Ch’e” 9–10 Malatesta Cantos 211, 212 The Pisan Cantos 60–1, 87, 89, 126, 128, 129, 135–9, 142, 144, 147–51 175–6, 195–6, 198–9, 207, 210 relation to Eliot 49–54, 57–60 “The Renaissance” 183 “The Return” 11 “The Seafarer” 113

Index “The Serious Artist” 22–3 Social Credit 205, 215 The Spirit of Romance 109–10, 115–16 “Three Cantos” 88, 89 Twelfth Canto 45–70 Quinn, John 67–8 Rainey, Lawrence 211 Rank, Otto 144 Redman, Tim 228 risk, economic 62–70 Rock, Joseph 109 Rushdie, Salman 108 Salguero, C. Pierce 115 Sartre, Jean-Paul 154 Saussy, Haun 123, 124 Saval, Niki 108 Scappettone, Jennifer 46 Sherry, Vincent 6–8, 13, 17 Smith, Adam 187, 194 Soviet Union 158–9 Stalling, Jonathan 123, 124 Surette, Leon 228 symbolism 6

Tagore, Rabindranath 109, 116–20 Ten Eyck, David 185 Trenkle, Norbert 174 Upward, Allen 121–2 Vorticism 78, 83, 85, 93, 94 VOU movement 81–2, 83, 99 Weil, Simone 141–2, 145 Wertkritik School 174–81 Wilhelm, James 132, 197 Williams, William Carlos 121 Woolf, Virginia 149–51, 153 Between the Acts 151, 152–5 world literature 108, 134 WWII 138, 141–5, 150–1 Bombing of Hiroshima 146–7, 149 Katyn Massacre 155–61 Rape of Ethiopia 142–3, 165 Yeats, W. B. 86, 87, 89, 109, 112, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 141 Yoshiro, Yukio 98 Zukofsky, Louis 199–200

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