Ezra Pound’s The Cantos: An Experimental History Collage
“The artist is always beginning,” declared Ezra Pound (1885-1972) in his essay “How I Began” (1913), “Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery, is of little worth” (707). This statement and his countless other maxims (with “make it new!” being probably the most iconic one) firmly attest to Pound’s determination to reject the mainstream aesthetics with his propagation of Modernist poetry. Such endeavour to innovate is best encapsulated in his epoch-making literary work – The Cantos (1915-1962) – a multilingual and allusive modern epic poem, richly conflicted, notoriously complex and difficult, and distinctively written in the collage technique (Nelson 81-2). Focusing on the first sixteen cantos, this essay argues that the collage technique, which combines the ideologies and techniques of Imagism and Vorticism (both movements founded by Pound preceding The Cantos), challenges and redefines the notion of coherence on the semantic and syntactic levels of the poem. Next, the main part of the essay enquires into how these experiments with coherence enable Pound to re-examine the role of history in poetry, question the importance of intertextuality, and maximise the capacity of the epic genre. This essay ultimately demonstrates how all the aforementioned experiments destabilise the reading experience and advocate a new relationship between the poet and the readers.
Prior to the examination of how the collage technique experiments with the notion of coherence in The Cantos, it is crucial to explicate the relationship between the collage technique, Imagism, and Vorticism in order to gain a clear understanding of the characteristics and the inherently experimental nature of the collage. Scathingly denouncing the mainstream fin de siècle Victorian poetry as “a horrible agglomerate compost” with “vague diction, twisted syntax, conventional imagery, and clumsy rhythm” (Bornstein 24), Pound in the March 1913 issue of Poetry promoted Imagism as an alternative. Upholding the direct, precise, and economic presentation of the material, he maintained that an “image” presents “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Beasley 38). With Pound strenuously objecting to the hypothesis that Imagism derived from French Symbolism (Perloff 178), and stating in his work Gaudier-Brzeska (1916) that “Imagisme is not symbolism” (84), a careful distinction between the two movements is pivotal to identifying the key traits of Imagism and how they become fundamental elements of the collage technique. While Symbolism is a suggestive art of indirect expression, Imagism is an objective art of direct presentation. Although both aesthetics demand the reader to participate in the imaginative act of the poet, the former expands and prolongs consciousness “to include perceptions hitherto unexpressed”, while the latter integrates consciousness “by investing a moment of time with universal import” (Pratt 20). Uninterested in the “purposeful inexactitude of the Symbolists’ use of metaphor”, Pound’s Imagism is distinguishably a condensed “metonymic organisation relying on causal and spatial contiguity” (Childs 35-6). In fact, his replacement of metaphor with metonymy is not only discernible in the Imagist doctrine, but also in his advocacy of Vorticism, in which he specifies that “the image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (Gaudier-Brzeska 92). Both the “VORTEX”, which is further defined as “the point of maximum energy”, and the Imagistic image as a “complex in an instant of time” signify the metonymic way of presenting facts: radical deletion, condensation, and juxtaposed fragmentation – all are distinctive features contributing to the collage technique central to The Cantos.
Deletion, condensation, and fragmentation are the three essential qualities of the metonymic collage technique that challenge and redefine the notion of coherence on the rhetorical, semantic, and syntactic levels. Rooted in the Imagistic tradition, a metonymic representation is achieved by the “deletion of certain elements of the constituting signifieds and the elevation, through the interaction of signifiers, of a resulting signified, the ‘complex’” (Childs 43). Moreover, this process of deletion and elevation is largely attributed to Imagism, as Childs continues: “it is in the ‘direct treatment’ of the thing signified that the nature of this process is made clear” (43). On the rhetorical and semantic levels, such cases of deletion are evident in Pound’s predisposed use of compound nouns. In the last three stanzas of Canto II, “wave-cords”, “wing-joints”, “rock-hollows”, and “sea-fowl” all undergo deletion of the possessive “of” and reversal of position (from “cords of the waves”, “joints of the wings” etc.). Another group of compound noun structures such as “glass-glint” and “half-dune” undergo deletion of the adjective marker (“glass-glint” instead of “glassy glint”), while “wave-runs”, “rock-slide”, and “tide-rips” are instances of heavy nominalisation with the verb functions abandoned, as they are indeed equivalent to “the wave runs” and “the rock slides”, etc. (Childs 47). The agglomeration of these “complex” resulting signifieds is a process of condensation of fragmented meanings, in which the deletion of linguistic elements signalling the logical relations, be it subordination, modification, or subject/predicate, in between the juxtaposed words creates a linguistic indeterminacy (in Perloff’s terminology) where every word becomes a fragment that juxtaposes with others. This condensed bed of deletions therefore challenges coherence on the level of the Saussurian concept of linguistic sign: the semantic coherence between the signifier and the signified is displaced and unsecured under the metonymic nature of the signification process.
Syntactic coherence is also challenged by fragmentation between lines, stanzas, and cantos in the work. Consider the beginning lines of Canto VII:
Eleanor (she spoiled in a British climate)
'Ελανδρος and Ελέπτολις, and poor old Homer blind, blind as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge;
rattle of old men's voices.
And then the phantom Rome,
marble narrow for seats
"Si pulvis nullus..." said Ovid, "Erit, Nullum tamen excute." Then file and candles, e li mestiers ecoutes; Scene – for the battle only, –but still scene,
Pennons and standards y cavals armatz Not mere succession of strokes, sightless narration,
And Dante's "ciocco," brand struck in the game.
Un peu moisi, plancher plus bas que le jardin.
“Contre le lambris, fauteuil de paille,
“Un vieux piano, et sous le baromètre...”
(Canto VII, lines 1–18)
Coherence between lines is exiguous: the ironic comment (“spoiled in a British climate”) on Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204), one of the most powerful queen consorts in Western European history, is immediately followed by two Greek puns on the name “Eleanor” (“Ελανδρος and Ελέπτολις” as “man-destroying and city-destroying”) which are traditionally referred to Helen of Troy (Terrell 29). With the conjunction “and” at the end of line 2, the juxtaposition between the first two lines is then followed by an unrelated remark about Homer on line 3. The subsequent lines, each invoking a different subject matter from a different culture and time in history, are mostly noun phrases linked by “and” and sometimes only commas. Verbs that indicate actions each subject does and the logical relations in between the subjects are absent. With all these unbridged transitions amid lines, syntax yields to parataxis, as “Pound juxtaposes concrete particulars that he considers meaningful in the conviction that they will speak for themselves” (Nadel 9). Such unexplained, fragmentary juxtapositions are also found between stanzas. Under the theme of metamorphosis, the narration of Canto II permeates with “sea-changes” which juxtapose stories from different traditions and of various subject matters with each other (Cookson 6). The first four lines feature three versions of Sordello and Pound’s question of their intertextuality; lines 5 to 22 present a catalogue of various sea imageries from different cultures; line 23 to “spread wet wings to the sun-film” (33) portrays a myth of Tyro, one of the queens Odysseus meets in Book XI of the Odyssey; “And by Scios,/ to left of the Naxos passage,” (34-5) introduces another sea-change to Acoetes’ account of meeting Dionysus the Greek God of grape harvest as recorded in the 3rd book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; “Fish-scales over groin muscles,/ lynx-purr amid sea...” (116-7) presents Pound’s own invention of the myth of Ileuthyeria, a sea nymph fleeing from a “band of tritons” (127); while line 130 till the end of Canto II returns to Tyro with an Imagistic dream-like ending. Similar paratactic linkages are found between cantos. The final “So that” on the last line of the first Canto is neither semantically nor syntactically coherent to the beginning of Canto II (“Hang it all, Robert Browning,”). Some critics recognise this absence of logical relation between the two cantos and suggest that “So that” indeed opens Canto XVII (the first canto of the second block, Cantos 17-27), which begins with “So that the vines burst from my fingers” (Kenner 419). Others believe “So that” still points forward to Canto II, but with the assertion that such conjunction evidences “extreme deletion and fragmentation”, and it is the second line (“there can be but one ‘Sordello’”) instead of the first which follows “So that” (Childs 44). All these abrupt and unexplained transitions between lines, stanzas, and cantos challenge syntactic coherence with the deletion of conjunctions and predicates that signify the relationships between fragments, opening a limitless set of possible interpretations of the raison d’être of and logical relations between the condensed fragments which are often already semantically incoherent within themselves beneath their metonymic reference to the world.
The technical experiments with semantic and syntactic coherences enable Pound to experiment with the way of representing history and to re-examine its role in poetry. Pound wrote: “An epic is a poem including history” (Literary Essays 86). A large proportion of the fragments in The Cantos are in fact allusions and references to historical figures and events from different literatures, cultures, and histories. With the absence of logical relations propelled by the semantic and syntactic incoherence, the histories evoked in the fragments are presented in the form of collage. The Cantos is therefore a history collage, which, in Perloff’s explanation quoting Pound’s words, “retains fidelity to the literal events but brings those events into the reader’s circle by transforming the history lesson into a kind of VORTEX, from which and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (188). Such Vorticist representation of history is clearly illustrated in Canto VIII, which provides a holistic and detailed portrayal of Sigismundo Malatesta (1417-68), Lord of Rimini, Fano and Cesana, a famous condottiere and patron of the arts. His identity as an ideal patron of the arts is created by Pound quoting his letter to Giovanni de’ Medici about funding the painter Piero della Francesca generously, “never lacking provision” (53). After that, Sigismundo’s life as a condottiere leading the armies of Florence and Venice is portrayed in lines 57-81. What follows is a fragment of his love poetry towards his mistress Isotta degli Atti: “Ye spirits who of olde were in this land/ Each under Love, and shaken” (83-4) and subsequently a 7-line condensation of another letter (from the original 18 lines of prose) by Sigismundo to Medici regarding his renewed alliance with Venice (Perloff 183). After this letter, readers encounter a descriptive passage of the wedding of Bianca Visconti to Francesco Sforza “under the plumes” (99), a memory recalled by Sigismundo of his alliance and friend Sforza (Terrell 39). Ultimately, the lines from “And the Greek emperor was in Florence” (116) to the end portray the social background of violence and disorder against Sigismundo’s positive achievements in the politics and arts. Each of the aforementioned sections portrays one aspect of Sigismundo’s life – military leader, patron of the arts, lover, friend, and a man of success amid controversies. According to Clark Emery, the aim of Pound’s history is to “recapture the intensity of life being lived” and “to bring the reader into history instead of bringing history to the reader”; readers will receive fragmentary information
of the event or figures, and being as “confused or ignorant or misled as the original actors, will often have to speak the language of the time, the dialect of the place” (94). Therefore, abbreviations such as “shd.” and “wd.” for “should” and “would” appear in Sigismundo’s intimate letter to his friend-supporter Giovanni de Medici. His love poem is written in the Romanticist diction, while his condensed political letter is translated in economical language with precise terms such as “At 7,000 a month” (93) and “2,000 horse and four hundred footmen” (94).
With Pound’s technique of re-presenting history as realistic, almost filmic, shots or palpable real-life scenes instead of an objective record as in history books, the issue of intertextuality is brought into question and re-examination since historical facts are no longer simply reiterated under the principle of absolute fidelity, but are selected, reinterpreted, and juxtaposed in anachronistic and anatopistic sequences. Canto II introduces the juxtaposition of three versions of “Sordello” (2-3) which fragment among themselves. Sordello the Italian troubadour of the 13th Century, the fictionalised version of Robert Browning’s long historical poem Sordello, and Pound’s “Sordello” present a conglomeration of identities that evolve along the course of time. The problem of intertextuality is foregrounded, in which Pound questions the difference between a poem presenting fictionalised history (the Sordello as depicted in Browning’s Sordello) and a poem “objectively” including history (as suggested by Pound’s biographical quote “Li Sordels si fo di Montovana”(4)) (Beach 35). The beginning of Canto VII, as quoted above in the paragraph about syntactic incoherence, embodies an encyclopaedic range of allusion and reference written in diverse languages, and the way those historical references are juxtaposed prompts a re-examination of the necessity and power of intertextuality. The catalogue of the first ten lines includes: an historical allusion to the destructive force of Eleanor of Aquitaine; the perilous beauty of Helen of Troy; Homer’s “ear of the sea-surge” (5) (c.f. “polyphloisboio”, a Greek word Homer often uses to describe the ‘loud-roaring’ sea); and Ovid’s advice on how to meet girls by sitting closely with them on the “marble narrow for seats” (8), with lines 9-10 advising readers that “if there be no speck of dust, well, flick it off anyway” in Latin, as quoted from Book I of Ars Amatoria by Ovid (Terrell 29-30; Cookson 19). The catalogue continues with fragmented descriptions of different subjects and direct quotes from various literary works in Old French, Provençal, Italian, and French. This massively inclusive and discontinuous syntagm of fragments from different literary works in different cultures and epochs, exiguously linked by “ands” and commas, could be interpreted as inviting infinite intertextual linkages between every piece of reference, allusion, and the text. Echoing line 11 of Canto II, the second line of Canto VII features two Greek puns on the name “Eleanor” traditionally referred to Helen of Troy. Its juxtaposition with the Eleanor of Aquitaine in the first line creates an unusual intertextual relationship between the two figures based on their identical names, implying that the epithets of the Helen of Troy (“man-destroying and city-destroying”) could also be applied to the Queen Eleanor in line 1. While the Greek puns portray old voices worrying about how dangerous beauty could be, Pound intriguingly quotes Ovid’s instruction on how to attract girls in the Roman theatre from lines 7 to 10. Two antithetic attitudes towards relationship between men and women are juxtaposed here: the former serious and ironic, while the latter more light-hearted and entertainment- intended. The “sightless narration” (14) is paratactically linked with Dante’s “ciocco” by the conjunction “and” (15), yet it could easily, and more properly be referred back to “poor old Homer blind” in the third line (Childs 66). In such a history collage, the image, which has to “arrest the tension of competing materials while functioning as an element of reference and allusion”, “links different times together, one supplementing not cancelling the other” (Nadel 3). These competing materials, i.e. the different fragments of histories and literary works, may share the same subject, theme, or simply identical names of the figures involved, or even nothing, either explicitly or implicitly, devoid of chronological and cultural restrictions. Such process of supplementation is achieved by having these fragments juxtaposed on the same plane for readers to make novel comparisons of the similarities and differences between the attitudes, perspectives, and values implied in each fragment. Intertextuality is thus escalated onto a new level by such metonymic treatment of history and references – a level of epistemological expansion which Pound endeavours to achieve in his modern epic.
Such epistemological expansion across languages and cultures poses extreme difficulties to the reader. Pound once wrote to a reader: “skip anything you don’t understand and go on till you pick it up again. All tosh about foreign languages making it difficult. The quotes are all either explained at once by repeat or they are definitely of the things indicated” (Cookson xxiii-xxiv). In fact, many readers are dissatisfied and perplexed by the magnitude and sophistication of The Cantos. Some critics have attacked it as “a shifting heap of splinters” or a “nostalgic montage without unity, a
picaresque of styles” (Nadel 9). Readers in general may be frustrated by the great difficulty of understanding the work, of understanding Pound’s audacious experiments with semantic and syntactic incoherence and a multitude of fragmented historical and literary allusions in more than forty languages and cultures. Nevertheless, Pound is indeed inviting readers to acquire a better and more knowledgeable position of deciphering the immensity of the poem by continuously assigning them an active role in completing the ambiguous holes in the work. Canto VIII features a series of word play, with the first seen in the ellipses in the Italian version of the address in the letter form Malatesta: “...hanni de/ ...dicis/ ...entia” (8-10). The absent parts of the words are believed to be Pound’s faithful rendition of the obliteration caused by the wax wafer of the original letter (Terrell 37), while Perloff interprets such absence as Pound’s insistence on the readers’ participation to fill in the blanks (182). In fact, such “blanks” permeate the entire poem – the logical blanks created by the semantic and syntactic incoherence, and the epistemological blanks of unfamiliar languages, histories, literary works, and the limitless intertextual relationships fermented in between the fragments. Pound’s invitation to the readers to have a joint production of his epic could be rendered as his experiment of reassessing the relationship between the author and the reader, a forerunning attempt decades before the New Critics. Such inviting experiment of empowering us as active agents in our reading experience, as are all other experiments, entails risks. Even if we are interested to fill in the absent parts of the Italian words in the letter in Canto VIII, are we always willing to fill in all the puzzling blanks in between the incoherent lines and unintelligible languages without feeling baffled, uneducated, and ignorant of so many cultures and histories around the world? The esoteric nature of The Cantos poses a hidden yet oppressive threat to Pound’s experiment of empowering the readers to “make the history new” with him.
To conclude, as a history collage originating from the aesthetics of Imagism and Vorticism, The Cantos exhibits Pound’s experiments with the notion of coherence in the semantic and syntactic levels by presenting images and events with metonymic techniques such as deletion, condensation, and fragmentation. Under the collage method of presentation, history is enlivened and resuscitated, while exponential possibilities of different intertextual relations are created between fragments. All these experiments pose great challenges to the hermeneutical process of the work. Despite the perplexing discouragement brought by the difficulty of understanding the pluralistic languages and encyclopaedic range of allusions entailed in the text, readers are invited to play an active role in witnessing and exploring different histories and cultures around the world and completing unknown gaps of the past as modern global historians.
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