Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros' as Twentieth-Century Epics (Cross Cultures 88) (Cross Cultures)

Ambition and Anxiety Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

88 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Ambition and Anxiety Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Derek Walcott’s Omeros as Twentieth-Century Epics

Line Henriksen

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2149-5 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

For my mother and brother

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1 2 3 4 5 6

Homer and Genre Dante and Christian Epic Epic Anxiety and Imperialistic Epic Metonymic Epic Caribbean Epic Metaphoric Epic

Works Cited Index

ix xiii 27 49 105 163 231 263 299 313

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Acknowledgements

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H I S B O O K is about the ambition to accomplish a major project and the anxiety that is apparently inevitably brought about by that ambition. Such anxiety is probably best countered by the knowledge that whatever we take on, we need never do alone: indeed, the principal act of presumption might be the very belief that we could ever do it alone. So, too, with this book, which is in fact a compilation of input from innumerable sources. Some are mentioned with due diligence in the footnotes that follow; I am happy to be able to thank the many others, whose support and contributions have been more personal and direct, here. My primary debts of gratitude are owed to Charles Lock for providing unfailingly enthusiastic and insightful supervision of the doctoral dissertation that forms the basis of this work and for bringing new intellectual inspiration (!) to Copenhagen, and to Tabish Khair, who took the initiative of forwarding the original manuscript to Editions Rodopi. At Rodopi, Gordon Collier edited this volume and provided all sorts of technical assistance, including the compilation of the index, for which I am very grateful. As examiners of the original doctoral dissertation, Jerome McGann and the now late Max Nänny gave me much valuable feedback and criticism as well as encouragement. I had hoped to see Nänny again and thank him in person for his example and interest. Unfortunately that was not to be. My first encounter with Walcott’s work was brought about by Bruce Clunies Ross, whose special course on Omeros was one of the most gratifying experiences of my time as a student. Martin Leer, with his vast knowledge of matters Caribbean and beyond, has been a constant source of inspiration. I want to thank Lars Håkon Svensson, who shared useful insights into Virgil scholarship with me, and A.D. Moody, who was in charge of my first introduction to Pound studies. Lene Østermark–Johansen has been a mentor to me since my ambitious student days; Christopher Gray was my guide to Trinidad and West Indian poetry. To Ann, Christian, Eva, Gorm, Jon and

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Justin, colleagues and fellow Ph.D. students in the English Department at the University of Copenhagen, goes gratitude for a golden age of friendship and music. Derek Walcott has allowed me to quote from the unpublished drafts of Omeros, as well as from his published work. Grateful acknowledgement is given to New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works of Ezra Pound: The Cantos (Copyright © 1934, 1937, 1940, 1948, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1963, 1966, and 1968 by Ezra Pound); Collected Early Poems (Copyright © 1976 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust); Jefferson and/or Mussolini (Copyright 1935, 1936 by Ezra Pound; renewed 1963 by Ezra Pound. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Company); Literary Essays (Copyright 1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound); Personae (Copyright © 1926 by Ezra Pound); Pound/Joyce (correspondence) (Copyright © 1967 by Ezra Pound); Selected Letters 1907–1941 (Copyright © 1950 by Ezra Pound); Selected Poems (Copyright © 1920, 1934, 1937 by Ezra Pound); Selected Prose 1909–1965 (Copyright © 1960, 1962 by Ezra Pound, Copyright © 1973 by the Estate of Ezra Pound); The Spirit of Romance (Copyright © 1968 by Ezra Pound); Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose: Contributions to Periodicals (Copyright © 1991 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust); Previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound (Copyright © 2006 by Omar S. Pound and Mary de Rachewitz; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd.). I am grateful to Penelope Laurans–Fitzgerald, who has kindly granted me the permission to quote from the unpublished Robert Fitzgerald/Ezra Pound correspondence. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, has granted me permission to quote from Mark Musa’s translations of Dante’s Commedia: Dante’s Inferno (1995); Dante’s Purgatory (1981); and Dante’s Paradise (1984) in the Indiana Critical Edition. Kathryn James and her colleagues at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, were of great assistance, as were the staff at the West Indiana Collection in the J.F.K. Library at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine Campus. I am grateful to the Danish Research Agency, who contributed to the publication of this volume, and to the Queen Mother Ingrid’s Roman Fund, which made it possible for me to write the opening chapters at the Danish Academy in Rome. The University of Copenhagen provided me with a Ph.D. stipend and financed my trips to Trinidad and New Haven.

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Passages in this book have previously been published in World Literatures Written in English (now Journal of Postcolonial Studies) 39.1 (2001): 86–96; Concentric (Taipei) 27.1 (January 2001): 131–49; and Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire (University of Western Ontario) 17.34 (Autumn–Winter 2000): 310–33. To my new colleagues at the Copenhagen Business School go thanks for support in the final stages of this process. Finally, I want to thank Kristian for offering me the quiet space and sanity that makes all the difference.

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Introduction

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H E “ R E C E N T P A S T is littered with the fragments of failed epics,” argues a reviewer of Derek Walcott’s Omeros in 1990. Among these failures, he adds, Omeros has nevertheless “found success.”1 In Modern Epic (1996) Franco Moretti likewise identifies a lack of unquestionably successful modern representatives of the epic genre. According to Moretti, the modern epics “are masterpieces, of course; but often, as people used to say of Faust, flawed masterpieces.” Sometimes, Moretti adds, “they are semi-failures.”2 One of Moretti’s “flawed masterpieces” is Ezra Pound’s the Cantos, which presumably also figure centrally among the “failed epics” discarded by Walcott’s reviewer.3 The Cantos and Omeros share a generic heritage through which the two twentieth-century texts are associated with what are canonically and conventionally the most important poems of the Western literary tradition: the Homeric poems, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Commedia and (in the English tradition) Milton’s Paradise Lost. The two poems represent two stances within twentieth-century poetics and two approaches to the epic genre: one apparently a semi-failure, the other a success. That the question of genre and specifically of the epic is paramount to our discussion of both Walcott’s and Pound’s

1 Michael Heyward, “Homer in the New World,” Washington Post Book World 20.45 (11 November 1990): 1. Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux and London: Faber & Faber, 1990). 2 Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, tr. Quintin Hoare (London & New York: Verso, 1996): 5 (emphasis Moretti’s). 3 Ezra Pound, The Cantos. Throughout these pages I quote from the Fourth Collection Edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1987). Reference to a canto is given in roman numerals, followed by a slash and a page reference in Arabic numerals. References to a chapter in Walcott’s Omeros are given in capital roman numerals, followed by a section number in minuscule roman. A reference to Pound’s Canto 1, page 3 is thus given as “I/3,” a reference to section three of Omeros 1 as “I, iii.”

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work is one of the arguments of this study. That the Cantos also occupy a significant position within Walcott’s epic is another. While illuminating differences in modern poetics, a comparative study of the Cantos and Omeros enables us to identify a continuity that is not only intrinsic to but even constituent of the question of genre. The Cantos occupy a central position within the canon of modernism: a colossal and elitist, partially unintelligible, work still awaiting a readership properly equipped for full comprehension. Much of the early scholarship on the poem concentrated on glossing its many references to disparate fields including early American politics, the Italian Renaissance, Douglasian economics and Chinese history. Believing that Pound’s verse requires its own reading strategy, scholars such as Hugh Kenner, Eva Hesse, Christine Brooke–Rose and Marjorie Perloff have been prominent in explicating the characteristics of Pound’s method, and have taught us how to read Pound.4 Recent studies tend to concentrate on ideology and on the poem’s inclusion of economics and politics. Tim Redman focuses on Pound’s relationship to Italian fascism, while Paul Morrison places the Cantos in the ideological context of the politics of T.S. Eliot and Paul de Man.5 Of special interest for the present study have been the focus on error and epic authority in the Cantos in Christine Froula’s To Write Paradise (1984) and on examinations of Pound’s poetic, an early representative of which is Herbert Schneidau’s Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (1969).6 The direction within Pound’s studies suggested by Schneidau is expanded by Max Nänny and more recently by John Steven Childs.7 Whereas the Cantos have been subjected to decades of detailed specialist study and are the object of shelves of monographs, a critical tradition conSee: Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1951); Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: U of California P , 1971); Christine Brooke–Rose, A Z B C of Ezra Pound (London: Faber & Faber, 1971); New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Eva Hesse (London: Faber & Faber, 1969); Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1985). 5 Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1991); Paul Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man (New York & Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996). 6 Christine Froula, To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s “Cantos” (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1984); Herbert Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 1969). 7 Max Nänny, “Context, Contiguity and Contact in Ezra Pound’s Personae,” E L H : A Journal of English Literary History 47.2 (1980): 386–98; John Steven Childs, Modernist Form: Pound’s Style in the Early Cantos (London & Toronto: Associated U P , 1986). 4

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cerning Omeros is still in the making. Walcott’s epic has mainly been tackled via the reading strategies of postcolonial studies. The poem is thus principally studied with a focus on extra-literary issues of West Indian identity, while linguistic descriptions of Walcott’s oeuvre and poetic are, with a few exceptions, lacking. A tendency within some postcolonial criticism to celebrate the texts of the periphery as subversive rather than to analyse them as literary is exemplified by the only monograph on Omeros, Robert Hamner’s The Epic of the Dispossessed (1997).8 Paula Burnett’s Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (2000) similarly sets out with a confessed desire to celebrate Walcott’s oeuvre: to her, the epithet “epic” primarily becomes an adjective of praise.9 More rigorous approaches to Walcott’s oeuvre are found in the works by Rei Terada, who focuses on Walcott’s reliance on metaphor and paradox, and Victor Questel, whose doctoral dissertation represents the first thorough study of Walcott’s poetic. Due to the author’s early death, the dissertation remains unpublished.10 The doyen of Pound studies, Hugh Kenner, has provided an a posteriori prophecy of the Cantos, suggesting that the poem was to be anticipated: Perhaps it was inevitable that some day an American should fuse the epic bard with the epic subjects, Renaissance poet with Homeric hero, so clearly do all the specifications converge: poet as musician, as sculptor, as economist; hero as traveller, as role-player, as observer of “many men’s manners.” 11

Omeros, on the other hand, seems to provide the answer to a predication or desire expressed by the English colonial historian James Anthony Froude after his visit to the West Indies in 1888:

8 Robert Hamner, The Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” (Columbia & London: U of Missouri P , 1997). 9 Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville: U P of Florida, 2000). 10 Rei Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Boston M A : Northeastern U P , 1992); Victor D. Questel, “Derek Walcott: Contradiction and Resolution: Paradox, Inconsistency, Ambivalence and their Resolution in Derek Walcott’s Writings, 1946–76” (doctoral dissertation, St. Augustine: University of the West Indies, 1979). For other exceptions to the rule that Walcott’s work tends to be celebrated rather than analysed, see Joseph Farrell, “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 247–73, and Charles Lock, “Derek Walcott’s Omeros: Echoes from a White-throated Vase,” Massachusetts Review 41.1 (Spring 2000): 9–31. 11 Kenner, The Pound Era, 265–68.

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY If ever the naval exploits of this country are done into an epic poem – and since the Iliad there has been no subject better fitted for such treatment or better deserving it – the West Indies will be the scene of the most brilliant cantos.12

An epic of the West Indies and one written by an American poet are indeed what we have before us. The juxtaposition of the Cantos and Omeros illuminates the increasing specialisation of literary scholarship: the Cantos are by definition a work of (American) modernism, while Omeros belongs to postcolonialism. Such disciplinary categories necessarily obscure important features of the texts, one of which is that of genre. Without a focus on genre, and given the present division of literary departments into modernist and postcolonial studies, there is no reason why the Cantos and Omeros need ever meet. In The Architext: An Introduction, Gérard Genette concludes his analysis of centuries-long attempts to establish laws for the relationship between genres, themes and modes by confirming our general ignorance: Genres can cut across modes […], perhaps the way individual works cut across genres – perhaps differently […] In this area, indeed, that is all we know, and undoubtedly even that is too much.13

Despite this premise of ignorance, Genette does, in the course of his analysis, suggest that an investigation of the question of genre must start with the epic and, consequently, with Homer.14 This book takes its point of departure precisely in the Homeric poems and finds its definition of genre as family awareness in a reading of the Iliad. The definition of genre as lineage supports Genette’s suspicion that the concept of genre depends on models and tradition. The Homeric heroes identify themselves through reference to their ancestors, and, in a parallel fashion, a text defines its generic loyalties by pointing to the predecessors who have produced related compositions: those who are the literary fathers of the poet and his poem. The first poem to provide such generic identification is Virgil’s Aeneid, which, like most subsequent poems in the tradition, identifies Homer as its progenitor. Identity is lineage, James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses (London: Longmans, Green, 1888): 9–10. Also cited by Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry, 183. 13 Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley & Oxford: U of California P , 1992): 71. 14 Genette, The Architext, 70. 12

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and with Virgil’s written epic of Rome, genre, too, becomes lineage and the awareness of literary predecessors. From Pietro Pucci’s Odysseus Polutropos (1987) I borrow the second theoretical point of departure for my discussion – the definition of literature as inherently allusive and formulaic.15 The very poeticality of individual phrases may very well consist in their having been used before. Together with its focus on lineage, the oral epic’s reliance on formulae thus allows us to identify the epic poem as occupying a special position not only within the literary field but also within the field of genre theory. To the modern poet approaching the epic, the elaboration of the genre represented by Dante’s Commedia remains crucial. In Dante, subsequent epics find an explicit concern with themselves as texts involved in relations of literary lineage that reflect the Homeric concern with blood-lines. Dante’s reading of his epic predecessors defines Homer as lord of the highest song, “segnor de l’altissimo canto” (Inf., iv, 95), and as a leader of other poets. The “altissimo” with which Dante describes Homeric song is also used with reference to his Virgil, who is defined as “altissimo poeta.” The adjective of supremacy thus links Homer and Virgil: martial Homeric song and the great poem of Rome.16 In the Renaissance, the epic consolidated its position as the most prestigious of literary genres, the composition that would represent the culmination of a poet’s work, crowning his career.17 Northrop Frye defines the epic of the Renaissance as “a narrative poem of heroic action, but a special kind of narrative. It also has an encyclopaedic quality in it, distilling the essence of all the religious, philosophical, political, even scientific learning of its time, and, if completely successful, the definitive poem for its age.”18 The poet who attempts to write such a “definitive poem” for his age is thus applying for acceptance in the family of supreme poets. It is precisely this prestige attached to the genre that brings about what I call epic ambition, and its 15 Pietro Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos: Intertextual Readings in the “Odyssey” and the “Iliad” (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1987). 16 Dante describes the Aeneid as “l’alta [...] tragedia” (Inf., xx, 113); addressing Odysseus in Inferno 26, Dante’s Virgil refers to the merits of the Aeneid’s “alti versi” (Inf., xxvi, 82). While he allows Statius to repeat the Thebaid’s definition of Virgil’s poem as “divina” (Purg., xxi, 95), Dante reserves the adjectives “sacrato” and “sacro” for his own poem, specifically for its final canticle, Il Paradiso (Par., xxiii, 62; xxv, 1). 17 Northrop Frye, Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966): 5. 18 Frye, Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, 3.

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shadow: anxiety. Whether we base our definition of the epic and its Homeric origins on Bakhtinian genre theory or on research into oral composition, the epic word enjoys a special status that depends on the divine authority of its rhapsode. Crucial to the oral epic is, indeed, its relation to the muse who concedes its authority; the fact that the epic is an authoritative text provides another major reason for both epic ambition and anxiety. Stephen Sicari coined the concept of “epic ambition” in his monograph Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World (1991). The overall purpose of Sicari’s reading is different from mine, but I am happy to recycle his concept and employ it with a slightly different focus. Sicari focuses on the Dantean influence in Pound’s poem, arguing that Pound organises his poem into a “satisfying whole” on the basis of an “epic figure of the wandering hero” found in Dante.19 To Sicari, the concept of epic ambition refers to Pound’s “relentless efforts to earn for himself as poet a position of dominance over his culture.”20 In the present study, the term is not primarily used with reference to the poet’s relation to his culture but chiefly in the context of genre and the poet’s relation to his generic predecessors. The poet who entertains epic ambition is aiming for inclusion among the greatest of poets. Involved in this most ambitious of poetic enterprises are the inevitable risks of failure and arrogance: of having overestimated one’s abilities and taken on more than one can master. Consequently, in the modern age epic ambition is accompanied by what I call “epic anxiety,” this time borrowing a term from Harold Bloom to refer to the fear that arises as the poet faces the grandiosity and immodesty of his project and makes explicit efforts to distance himself from the initial ambition, denying that the text before us claims to be an epic.21 The Commedia, identifying presumption and humility as the moral versions of ambition and anxiety, adds these now central topoi to the modern variety of the epic genre. With the Commedia, Dante combines the classical epic and the Christian sublime, defined by Erich Auerbach as a sermo humilis or humble speech. In Dante’s version, humility is epitomised by the poet–pilgrim’s initial reluctance to follow Virgil through the otherworld and his claim that he lacks the necessary authority: “Io non Enea io non Paulo sono,” Dante– 19 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World (Albany: State U of New York P , 1991): x and xi. 20 Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition, ix. 21 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1973).

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pilgrim protests; “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.”22 Dante’s denial of his own credentials builds on the classical rhetorical topos of alleged modesty. In the context of the project before Dante, the topos progresses from modesty to paradox. Ambition and concomitant anxiety go with the epic genre, as do the risk of failure and the accusation of vanity and presumption. Dante may add the connotations of the sermo humilis to the epic, but the topos remains paradoxical: is it at all possible for the epic poet to be humble? Like Dante, the modern poet attempts to anticipate the problem, and the accusation, by including in his poem a repentant denial of epic ambition, which is discarded as presumptuous. The palinode with which the poet revokes his earlier statements thus assumes moral connotations and becomes an epic topos, suggesting that a conversion resulting in humility has occurred. Because a collective reading of the poems by Dante, Pound and Walcott enables us to define recantation as an epic topos with inevitable allusive and formulaic connotations, the poet’s self-doubt and declaration of regret paradoxically become additional indications of his desire to belong to the family of grand epic poets, and eventually turn out to be the final proof of his epic ambition. Dante leaves his descendants an ambiguous heritage: he succeeds in crowning his epic with a Paradiso and in authorising himself as “poet–prophet of the Commedia,”23 yet he combines this accomplishment with a focus on Christian humility. The pagan genre has become Christian; with its inclusion of a claim for autobiographical conversion, it has been novelised. Paradise Lost provides a more stringent combination of the poems of Homer and Virgil and the Biblical narrative, yet it is the Commedia’s establishment of what I call tertiary epic that has ensured the survival of the genre. It is to Dante and not to Milton that the modern epic poets turn, and it is Dante’s model with its final Paradiso that they wish to copy. Mikhail Bakhtin provides us with another framework for our discussion of genre and the epic. His characterisation of the epic as inherently monologic may, as many critics are indeed eager to point out, remain a retrospec22 Inf., ii, 32. I quote the text of the Commedia from Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Petrocchi, commentary by Umberto Bosco & Giovanni Reggio, 3 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1988). Mark Musa translates the line with a focus on each “I”: “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul” in Dante’s Inferno, ed. & tr. Musa (Indiana Critical Edition; Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1995). A technical note at this juncture: unless a translator is expressly identified in the text or footnotes, translations from the French and the Italian are my own. 23 Peter S. Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1999): 31.

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tive literary construct and an anachronistic foil for his description of the polyphonic novel. Nonetheless, Bakhtin’s concept of novelisation, too often overlooked by those who are quick to reject his work, throws light not only on the abstract discussion of genres but also on the specific texts before us. Bakhtin defines the epic as monologic and authoritative; David Quint connects it to empire and hegemonic politics.24 Indeed, due to Pound’s association with Benito Mussolini, the Cantos provide an excellent case with which to test the genre theories presented by Bakhtin and Quint. The affiliation of the Cantos with Italian fascism is another reason for Walcott’s epic anxiety, and a reason why he finds it necessary to stress that Omeros is not an epic. Intertwined with a generic definition of the epic and a description of the crucial elaboration performed by Dante, I identify a series of topoi that link Walcott and Pound to each other and to their predecessors. The comparative study of the two texts also involves a focus on the relation between them: i.e. on the echoes of the Cantos in Omeros. Roman Jakobson’s distinction between the linguistic poles of metaphor and metonymy (or selection and combination) makes it possible for us to bring to the fore the differences that come out in the juxtaposition of the two works. The poetic directions represented by the Cantos and Omeros may in fact be identified as that of metonymy and that of metaphor respectively. Although starting from the same generic point of departure, the two texts place themselves at the opposite ends of Jakobson’s spectrum, something that is reflected in all aspects of their verse, including metre, rhyme, syntax, stylistic preferences and compositional process. This observation is supported by the drafts of the two poems, those of Omeros having, to my knowledge, not been studied before. The present study thus becomes a vindication of the pertinence of Jakobson’s observations to the study of poetic craft. When considered against the background of experimental texts discussed by Moretti, it may be argued that one reason for the success of Omeros is the restraints that are placed upon it by a regular metre and a division into books, chapters, sections, tercets and lines (largely hexameters), reminding us that in a discussion of the need for style, Oscar Wilde found it useful to quote Goethe’s identification of the master: “It is in working within limits

24 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Michael Holquist & Caryl Emerson (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981); David Quint, Epic and Empire (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993).

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that the master reveals himself.”25 Pound scholars, on the other hand, find that the Cantos set out to question the very parameters mastered by Walcott and should be read with entirely different criteria; Froula thus argues that the actual success of Pound’s poem lies in its inclusion of error and in what she reads as its refusal to establish authority. Rather than attempt to reconstruct the ideal reading conditions for either poem, it is my concern to illuminate their inherent similarities and differences: similarities that are largely dictated by the requirements of genre, and differences that frequently turn out to be clear-cut contrasts, all the more striking since they may be observed in two poems that are united by their choice of genre. The work of both poets tends to throw up paradoxes. On the paradox surrounding Pound, Charles Olson writes: In Pound I am confronted by the tragic Double of our day. He is the demonstration of our duality. In language and form he is as forward, as much the revolutionist as Lenin. But in social, economic and political action he is as retrogressive as the Czar.26

Olson assumes that (reactionary) politics may be separated from (revolutionary) poetry. As we shall see, Pound’s elitism, his tendency towards insinuation, and the fear of conspiracy characterising his politics are inherent in the revolutionary form of his poetry. The paradox that Walcott is seen as representing is epitomised by a poem from In a Green Night, the first collection of his to be published outside of the Caribbean: I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?27

Richard Dwyer has defined the paradox within which critics tend to place Walcott as cliché: 25 Wilde adds: “and the limitation, the very condition of any art is style.” Wilde is translating and discussing Goethe’s “in der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.” Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), repr. in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: W.H. Allen, 1970): 300. 26 Charles Olson, Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths, ed. Catherine Seeley (New York: Grossman, 1975): 53. 27 Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa,” in Walcott, In a Green Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962).

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY Walcott is seen as living a kind of schizoid life, divided between the allegiance of much of his verse to British literature, the classics, and now, American culture, while his plays cling to the accents of Trinidad and aspire to give his region’s people the heroes that V.S. Naipaul claims they deny themselves.”28

The paradox established between European classicism and Caribbean identity is highlighted by criticism that reads Walcott primarily as a West Indian and secondarily as a poet. The elaboration in Omeros of the epic is thus seen as subversive, as a postcolonial refraction of the Homeric poems, regardless of Bakhtin’s observation that any secondary rewriting of a primary genre is necessarily ideological and involves irony. Not only should the study of the epic take the Homeric poems as its point of departure, but, more specifically, it must also focus on the central issues relevant to the early representatives of the genre: the recycling of topoi and formulae. The present study aims at documenting Pucci’s claims that the literary allusion is related to the oral formula and that literature is inherently allusive and thus, in the final analysis, formulaic. Ultimately, I wish to show that a supposedly subversive and postcolonial work shares with a modernist poem associated with fascism characteristics that we may trace to an exiled poet of medieval Florence and to the celebrated poet–vates of Augustan Rome. Literature is allusion; genre is lineage. 

This study has four interdependent foci: genre, epic, the Cantos, and Omeros. It is my argument that the epic plays a special role within the field of genre, and that the Cantos are relevant to our reading of Omeros. Pound’s fascism and the alleged failure of the Cantos presumably figure among the reasons for Walcott’s epic anxiety and his insistence that Omeros is not an epic. Such disavowal of the epic ambition is, however, itself a modern topos of the genre. This book is divided into six chapters: the first focuses on Homeric epic and on the questions of genre, orality and lineage; the second on Dante and his reading of Odysseus and the topoi constructed around sailing, craftsmanship, guidance and presumption. The influence of Dante is central to twentieth-century poetry; apart from rewritings by Pound and Walcott, I discuss Richard Dwyer, “One Walcott, and He Would Be Master,” in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington D C : Three Continents, 1993): 322. 28

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elaborations on Dantean passages in verse composed by poets associated with our two central epic poets: namely, T.S. Eliot and his The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1935–1942), and Seamus Heaney’s Station Island (1984). Chapters three and four focus on Pound and the Cantos. Chapter three combines Quint’s thesis that the epic is inherently political and imperialistic with the issue of the politics of the Cantos. I approach the discussion through the question of the authority of a twentieth-century rhapsode. Chapter four reads the Cantos as a poem constructed around metonymy, applying this observation to the area of deixis. Chapter five centres on the politics of representation in Walcott’s epic, while chapter six discusses the text as a formulaic epic of metaphor and identifies a recurrent presence of Pound’s oeuvre within that of Walcott.

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1

Homer and Genre

It is Homer who has chiefly taught the other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. — Aristotle, Poetics How can the epical be defined without any reference to the Homeric model and tradition? — Genette, The Architext

THE LINEAGE OF GENRE

I

N B O O K 2 0 O F T H E I L I A D , the Greek warrior Achilles and his Trojan counterpart Aeneas face each other in a duel on the plain before the city of Troy. Aeneas thrusts his spear at Achilles, but the Greek hero remains safe behind his famous shield, fabricated by the best of smiths, Hephaestus, God of fire and crafts. Aeneas’ shield, on the other hand, is penetrated by Achilles’ first launch. Achilles then draws his sword, and at this stage little doubt remains as to the outcome of the duel: Homer tells us that “Achilles with his sword-stroke at close quarters / might have slashed the other’s life away.”1 Here the gods intervene. Already when Aeneas was wounded by Diomedes in Iliad 5, Aphrodite and Apollo made sure that his life was spared.2

1 Il., xx, 288. Homer, The Iliad, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (1974; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1984). A.T. Murray’s translation, as revised by George E. Dimock, goes: “the son of Peleus in close combat would with his sword have robbed Aeneas of life.” Homer, The Iliad, tr. A.T. Murray, 2 vols. (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P & London: William Heinemann, 1988). 2 Il., v, 312–454. At v, 312–17, Aphrodite shelters Aeneas with her robe and carries him away from the battlefield. At v, 344–46, Apollo bears Aeneas off in a dark cloud. Finally, at v, 449–54, Apollo places Aeneas in the god’s own temple, where Leto and Artemis heal

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Now Poseidon covers Achilles’ eyes with mist and Aeneas is removed from the battleground.3 The Trojans will lose the war, and eventually Troy will be destroyed. But Aeneas will – and must – survive. More is at stake than the life of one man: “His fate is to escape, / to ensure that the great line of Dardanus / may not unseeded perish from the world.”4 At the beginning of the duel, Aeneas had introduced himself to Achilles. He did so by telling “the story of our race”: by identifying himself as a scion of Dardanus, son of Zeus.5 Dardanus was the grandfather of Tros, who had three sons. The King of Troy, Priam, is the grandson of Tros’ eldest son, Ilus. Priam is the father of both Paris, who abducted Helen and thus caused the Trojan war, and Hector, the Trojan hero that Achilles will eventually defeat. Anchises, on the other hand, is the grandson of Ilus’ brother Assaracus, and Aeneas is Anchises’ son by Aphrodite. Anchises and Priam, and their respective sons, thus belong to different lines within the house of Troy. And Zeus’ preference is now shifting toward the offspring of Anchises: For Zeus cared most for Dardanus, of all the sons he had by women, and now Zeus has turned against the family of Priam. Therefore Aeneas and his sons, and theirs, will be lords over Trojans born hereafter. (Il., xx, 304–306)6

Only a few descendants of Dardanus will survive the war at Troy. Among these, the greatest future awaits Aeneas.7 So does the task of prolonging the line of divine heritage into that future. him. In the meantime, Apollo makes “a figure of illusion, / Aeneas’ double” (Fitzgerald), “a wraith in the likeness of Aeneas’ self” (Murray), which enters the battle and around which Trojans and Greeks continue to fight. 3 Il., v, 319–23. 4 Fitzgerald’s translation of Il., xx, 300–302. Murray has: “it is ordained unto him to escape, that the race of Dardanus perish not without seed and be seen no more.” 5 Fitzgerald’s translation of Il., xx, 214. Murray uses “lineage” here. 6 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray gives us: “For at length hath the son of Cronos come to hate the race of Priam; and now verily shall the mighty Aeneas be king among the Trojans, and his sons’ sons that shall be born in days to come.” 7 According to the Aeneid, Aeneas’ father, Anchises, and his son, Ascanius (also called Iulus), escape with Aeneas. Homer gives us no information about the fate of Anchises. In Aeneid 3 we learn that Helenus, son of Priam, becomes a slave of Pyrrhus (or Neoptolemus), son of Achilles, but is freed when Pyrrhus is killed by Orestes. Hector’s widow, Andromache, is enslaved by Pyrrhus and freed together with Helenus. The two marry and

Homer and Genre

3

Consequently, Homer states that the “great line of Dardanus” must be saved. The Greeks are to win the war; in the 11th book of the Odyssey, we learn that they will go on to sack the city of Troy. It follows that if Aeneas is to be lord of “Trojans born hereafter,” he will have to go elsewhere to found his reign. Apart from these prophecies of Aeneas as head of a new Trojan reign-in-exile, Homer reveals no specific details of the destiny awaiting Aeneas and the defeated Trojans.8 The epic story of the Trojan lineage is continued approximately 600 years later, and in Latin rather than in Greek, when Virgil makes Aeneas the founder of Rome and the hero of Virgil’s own epic poem: the Aeneid fulfils Poseidon’s prophecy and ensures that the race of Dardanus does not perish. At the same time, lineage now connects Virgil’s contemporaries to the Homeric heroes: Virgil presents Aeneas as the ancestor from whom the line of Julius Caesar and his adoptive son Augustus, contemporary of Virgil, springs. Through the Trojan Aeneas, now the father of Latin Rome, a historical political character is thus related to Troy and the Iliad. The line that linked Aeneas to Zeus and Aphrodite within the Homeric epic is hereby used not only to provide the Roman emperor with a divine, mythical heritage but also to connect one poem to the other. Homeric blood-lines become literary lineage, or, as we shall see, genre. The Greek terms that Homer’s translators variously render as “line,” “race,” “family,” “lineage,” or “birth” are geneê (Ionian and epic for genea) and genos, forerunner of our ‘genre’. The Liddell–Scott–Jones Lexicon of Classical Greek glosses both geneê and genos as “race, family, stock, generation, offspring.”9 Leonard Charles Muellner, on the other hand, finds a consistent semantic contrast between the two terms: geneê is used for “long-range lineage or complete ancestry,” whereas genos denotes “immediate ancestry.” According to Muellner, the Lexicon obscures the contrast, which is, he stresses, “not noticed elsewhere.”10 found Little Troy. In Aeneid 5 we hear of a Politës, grandson of Priam and thus another surviving Dardan. Acestës, who founds a new colony in Sicily, is “a Dardanian / divine in lineage.” Book v, 923–24 in Fitzgerald’s translation of the Aeneid (1983; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). The line in Virgil’s text is v, 711. 8 See Od., xi, 533, where Odysseus tells Achilles of the fate of the latter’s son, Neoptolemus, after the sack of Troy. 9 My discussion of the ancient Greek is indebted to the invaluable Perseus Project, ed. Gregory R. Crane at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. July 2004. 10 Leonard Charles Muellner, The Meaning of Homeric EYXOMAI Through its Formulas (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft; Innsbruck: Wolfgang Meid, 1976): 77.

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With its focus on complete ancestry, geneê suggests that the line of ancestors is ultimately traceable to one first beginning. This understanding of lineage is reflected in metaphors of origin, including those of birth, springs and sources. This is the line that Aeneas may trace back through Anchises, Assaracus and Dardanus to a divine origin. The importance of short-term ancestry – or parentage – implicit in genos, on the other hand, surfaces in the Homeric names, which often include genealogy. Odysseus’ name, Oduseus, means ‘man of pain’, and is an epithet of the grandfather who named him.11 ‘Telemachus’ means ‘to fight far away’, but Telemachus never fights far away; the name is an epithet of his father, Odysseus.12 Later tradition concedes that after his return to Ithaca, Odysseus has another son by Penelope, Ptoliporthes, or alternatively a daughter, Ptoliporthe.13 Through Telemachus’ union with Nestor’s granddaughter, Polycaste, tradition also grants Odysseus a grandson: Persepolis.14 ‘Ptoliporthe(s)’ and ‘Persepolis’ may be traced to the same etymology: both mean ‘destroyer of cities’ and refer to Odysseus, who sacked Troy and is respectively the father and grandfather of the children.15 The names thus point to the child’s father or ancestor: genealogy is identity. Genos and geneê are used in proximity towards the end of the presentation that the Trojan Glaucus gives of his lineage in Iliad 6. It is this story that makes Glaucus’ opponent, Diomedes, realise that the two are connected through the friendship of their grandfathers, Bellerophon and Oeneus, and that consequently they should not fight each other. Glaucus’ words to Diomedes are: 11 The story of Odysseus’ name is told at Od., xix, 406–409. “Man of pain” is suggested as the meaning of Oduseus by Murray; see his footnote in Homer, The Odyssey, tr. A.T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1995), vol. 1: 17. Jesper Svenbro suggests “child of wrath” as an alternative translation of Oduseus; Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, tr. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1993): 69. 12 Svenbro, Phrasikleia, 68–69. 13 Phrasikleia, 70–71. 14 Hesiod, “Catalogues of Women and Eoiae,” xii, in Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, tr. Hugh G. Evelyn–White (Loeb Classical Library; 1936; Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1995); W.B. Stanford & J.V. Luce, The Quest for Ulysses (London: Phaidon, 1974): 59. Stanford and Luce also report of a Perseptolis born to Telemachus by Nausikaa and of traditions identifying Homer as the son of Telemachus by either Polycaste or Nausikaa. 15 Svenbro, Phrasikleia, 70–71.

Homer and Genre

5

Hippolochus it was who fathered me, I am proud to say. He sent me here to Troy commanding me to act always with valour, always to be most noble, never to shame the line [genos] of my progenitors, great men first in Ephyra, then in Lycia. That is the blood and birth [geneê] I claim. (Il., vi, 206–11)16

For genos, which Fitzgerald here renders as “line of my progenitors,” Murray gives us “the race of my fathers.” With “blood and birth,” Fitzgerald has reversed the word order of Homer’s “haimatos” (of haima, ‘blood’) and “geneês” (of geneê). The line is formulaic and found also at Il., xx, 241, where Fitzgerald unites the two in one gloss: “these are the blood-lines I claim.”17 Murray’s “this is the lineage and the blood whereof I avow me sprung” follows Homer’s word order; the verb ‘to spring’ stresses origins. With Plato, Aristotle, logic and writing, the field of signification of genos is expanded to include ‘sex’, ‘gender’, ‘class’, ‘sort’, ‘species’ and ‘kind’. Geneê, however, remains an epic and archaic term and does not take on the new denotations.18 In Homer, the two terms occur forty-eight (geneê) and thirty-six (genos) times respectively. Once we move to Plato, we find that geneê becomes almost insignificant, with only fourteen occurrences, compared to the 572 times that Plato employs ‘genos’.19

16 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray’s version of the same passage goes: “But Hippolochus begat me and of him do I declare that I am sprung; and he sent me to Troy and straitly charged me ever to be bravest and pre-eminent above all, and not bring shame upon the race of my fathers, that were far the noblest in Ephyre and in wide Lycia. This is the lineage and the blood whereof I avow me sprung.” 17 The Greek formula used at Il., vi, 211 and xx, 241 is “tautês toi geneês te kai haimatos euchomai einai.” At xx, 241, Murray gives us “this then is the lineage and the blood wherefrom I avow me sprung”; at vi, 211 we find a variant, “this is the lineage and the blood whereof I avow me sprung.” 18 The Liddell–Scott–Jones Lexicon at The Perseus Project mentions a use of geneê/genea for ‘class, kind’ in metaphysical contexts, but the usage is evidently limited and represented by merely two instances. 19 These figures are based on the collection of ancient Greek and Roman material in the Perseus Project database. The forty-eight Homeric instances of geneê/genea represent a seventh of a total of 354 occurrences of the term in the ancient literary Greek texts recorded. Thirty-seven of these are in the Iliad. The thirty-six occurrences of genos in Homer make up a modest count compared to a total of 2,573 appearances in the Perseus

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In his reading of Plato’s Republic, Eric Havelock portrays the kind of thought possible in an oral, Homeric community and illuminates the dependency of analysis and logic on the technology of writing: just as poetry itself, as long as it reigned supreme, constituted the chief obstacle to the achievement of effective prose, so there was a state of mind which we shall conveniently label the “poetic” or “Homeric” or “oral” state of mind, which constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its rearrangement in sequence of cause and effect.20

Havelock argues that “the preserved epos can therefore deal only with people, not with impersonal phenomena”:21 an observation in keeping with the identification of a close bond between the Homeric genos and the family. The introduction of writing, on the other hand, allows for abstractions and for the categorisation of individuals according to induction: in other words, for a genos that refers to an abstracted class or species. Homeric identity is tied to lineage, whereas Platonic identity depends on isolating and defining the thing per se.22 This process of isolation requires an ability to abstract: to divide and collect specifics in categories and species. It is precisely the technology of writing that allows Plato and his contemporaries to perform this process of fixation. Genres may now be established without any reference to the blood-lines of geneê. In the oral community, conversely, the nomoi and ethe are presented and are put on record not as a system of law, public and private, but as a plurality of typical instances which have the coherence proper to an organic but instinctive pattern of life. To organise them in a system, in their genera and species and categories, would be to create a one out of the Homeric many. This was to be a task reserved for the Greek mind of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ.23

From designating the offspring’s relation to his predecessor and family, genos comes to denote groups or species, and becomes the Latin genus, and our ‘gender’ and ‘genre’. The history of the term thus involves the shift from corpus. Aristotle uses ‘genos’ 361 times and does not employ geneê/genea at all. The Perseus Project, July 2004. 20 Eric A. Havelock, A Preface to Plato (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963): 46–47. 21 Havelock, Preface to Plato, 167. 22 Preface to Plato, 217–19. 23 Preface to Plato, 185.

Homer and Genre

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oral to written culture, and allows us to trace our tendency to group texts in abstract categories from the line that defines Glaucus according to the fame of his predecessors. The new sense that genos adopts with writing liberates it from the close tie to the family that geneê maintains. The Homeric usage of the two largely synonymous terms is an indication not only of the significance of the epic focus on ancestry, which is indeed stressed by the very need for two terms and a consequent differentiation between long-term and immediate lineage, but also of the intimate and necessary relation between any category (or genre) and lineage in the oral tradition, from which the epic genre traces its ‘geneê.’24 In an oral culture, identity is established by lineage. Jesper Svenbro formulates the relation between identity and the geneê/genos in this way: “In Homeric society, relations are understood in terms of parentage, to such an extent that the question ‘Who are you?’ becomes equivalent to ‘What is your genealogy?’ [‘Quelle est ta généalogie?’]”25 With variations and reversals, the tradition of rewriting the Homeric epics that begins with Virgil’s Aeneid repeats passages from the Odyssey and the Iliad, rendering these traditional topoi. This rewriting of episodes creates a relationship of ancestry among the epic poems, reflective of their general occuation with lineage. When Virgil continues the geneê of Dardanus and links Augustus to Aeneas, and Augustan Rome to Troy, he begins a tradition of establishing intertextual genealogy, affiliating himself with Homer, and the Aeneid with the Iliad and the Odyssey. A geneê line thus links epic to epic – and Walcott’s Omeros to Homer’s Iliad. Innumerable attempts have been made to define the epic as a literary genre. If we apply the question to the poems themselves and read within them for markers of generic identity, they will reveal that being an epic ultimately means belonging to the geneê of Homer. Just as Aeneas may trace his lineage back to an origin in Zeus, the modern epic in the Western tradition will define itself as a member of the family of poems that springs from a Homeric origin. A crucial step in this process of epic self-definition through intertextual genealogy is identifiable in Dante, who not only employs allusions and referSee Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982; London & New York: Routledge, 1988). 25 “Dans la société d’Homère, les hommes comprennent leurs rapports en termes de parenté, de sorte que la question ‘Qui es-tu?’ équivaut à ‘Quelle est ta généalogie?’”; Jesper Svenbro, La parole et le marbre: Aux origines de la poétique grecque (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1976): 123. 24

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ences to link his Commedia to the Aeneid, but also renders Virgil a character within his poem and calls him patre, ‘father’. Dante’s relation to Virgil thus personifies the mechanisms of genre, which Homer has enabled us to define as lineage or genealogy. By identifying its genealogy, Dante’s poem declares and makes explicit its own ambition of inclusion within the epic tradition. The question that we may wish to ask of any text: namely, “quelle est ta genre?” is by Dante answered explicitly through an identification of literary predecessors: “Voilà ma généalogie!”

ALLUSIVE FORMULAE The major breakthrough in modern Homeric scholarship came with Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s studies of the orality of the Homeric poems, which they define as the results of a traditional and highly formulaic compositional process significantly different from that of writing.26 The focus on the formula revolutionises the prevalent Romantic view of Homer as poetic genius; Walter Ong argues that “the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to disvalue, namely, the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier – to put it more bluntly, the cliché.”27 Gregory Nagy argues that when dealing with “the traditional poetry of the Homeric (and Hesiodic) compositions, it is not justifiable to claim that a passage in any text can refer to another passage in another text.”28 Nevertheless, Pucci sees the formula and its repetition as the result of an intertextual practice particular to the Homeric poems: “the recycling of formulaic expressions completely conceals their eventual allusive intention; the reworking of variations opens so many allusive possibilities that it dissipates the force of any 26 Parry’s work is collected in The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Lord is the author of The Singer of Tales (1960; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1971) and Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1991). Cedric Whitman defines the work of Parry and Lord as the “second great turning point in modern Homeric scholarship”; Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1958): 4. The first turning point was F.A. Wolf’s démontage of the idea of Homer as one individual in his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), translated into English only recently by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most and James E.G. Zetzel (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1985). 27 Ong, Orality and Literacy, 23. 28 Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans (Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1979): 42.

Homer and Genre

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single one.”29 The formulaic method makes of the Homeric texts, taken separately or together, one intricate web of allusion.30 Towards the end of his study, Pucci states that all the language of Homer is allusive: to different degrees, all the epic language plays constantly with references in a ludic display of intertextual noddings, winks, and gestures […] This signifying level, that of the allusive sense, is unknown to the characters, may also fully or in part escape the intention of the poets, and constitutes an implicit addition for the reader to decode in order to interpret the text. What we call literature is nothing else but this.31

If we agree with Pucci in defining literature as “nothing else but” an allusive practice of “intertextual noddings,” we no longer need to discuss intertextuality as a particular feature to be isolated within the literary field. Any discussion of literature necessarily involves intertextuality, without which there would be no literature. While defining all Homeric poetry as allusive, Pucci dispenses with the idea of one referent being original and the basis of another. He is thus in agreement with Nagy, who argued that one Homeric passage could not be seen as referring to another. Not even in Homeric epic can we isolate a first occurrence of a given formula and define it as the origin of others: not even Homer was Adam.32 With the association of the formula and the allusion, Pucci diminishes the consequence and relevance of the contrast between oral and literary epic: what we have before us and study are indeed texts. Pucci refers to both a ‘reader’ and the ‘text’ of Homeric epic. The characteristics of the Homeric poems are the results of the traditional process of oral composition: “vir29 Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, 19. On the formula, Pucci comments: “Our model – the formula – is extrapolated from a diction that did not single out the formula as its component but that endlessly created and repeated patterns of numberless variety, composition, and structure. When we now define and outline the formula in a rigid way we do so by a decontextualization and a simplification that necessarily distort the process of living Homeric diction” (239). 30 Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, 239. 31 Odysseus Polutropos, 240. 32 Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us that the “speaker is not the biblical Adam, dealing only with virgin and still unnamed objects, giving them names for the first time” and that “something created is always created out of something given”; Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, tr. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1986): 93 and 120.

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tually every distinctive feature of Homeric poetry is due to the economy enforced on it by oral methods of composition”33; nevertheless, our very ability to study the Iliad and the Odyssey depends on their having been committed to writing. With the letter, the poems have become literature: i.e. writing, abounding in references and allusions “for the reader to decode.” The formula, which Parry defines as “a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea,”34 represents a Homeric characteristic to be imitated by would-be descendants. With the written epic, of which Virgil is the most prominent early representative, formulaic repetition in identical form, central in Homer for mnemonic reasons, becomes variation. Maurice Bowra describes the new role played by the formula in Virgil: Even when he follows Homer in using the oral device of repetition, Virgil goes his own way and makes variations on a given form. For him the artifices of oral poetry are valuable for their archaic elegance; their beauty is no longer functional.35

The formula has become ornamental, yet it still serves the function of identifying the poem itself as related to the poems of Homer, which depended entirely on the oral-formulaic method. The technology of writing revolutionises poetic composition. In Virgil, the scroll now performs the function of memorisation which, for the Homeric singer, had meant reliance on the combination of metre and formulae. The formulae upon which oral composition had depended become aesthetic and allusive variations: their purpose is to achieve a poetic effect suggestive of the Homeric model. This observation should not, however, lead us to postulate a Virgilian epic that is liberated from indebtedness to the past. Just as there is no non-allusive text and no literature without an intertext, there would be no Virgil without a Homer. Bakhtin, indeed, reminds us that “any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances.”36 The central questions raised by the oral epic involve issues of lineage, origins and formulae. If genre is ultimately lineage and all writing allusive and

Ong, Orality and Literacy, 21. Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, 270. 35 Maurice Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (1945; London: Macmillan & New York: St. Martin’s, 1972): 4. 36 Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 69. 33 34

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thus formulaic, these observations turn out to be relevant to literature as such. They remain inescapable in our discussion of Homer’s descendants.

ORAL POETICS For a further understanding of the epic genre, we will now turn to the view of poetic craft and mission presented in the Homeric poems. With what words do Homer and the singers he depicts refer to their own activity? A consideration of archaic poetics will involve issues of authority, originality and a discussion of an apparent oxymoron: the ‘oral text’. The oral origins of the epic genre are implicit in the very term we use for the genre; epos shares its etymological root with the Latin vox and is thus, in Ong’s words, “grounded firmly in the vocal, the oral.”37 Whereas the genre itself is linked to the voice, the illustriousness associated with it is tied to the ear. Indeed, Nagy traces kleos (‘glory’), a key term in Homer and in the identifications performed by epic song, from the verb kluô, ‘to hear’.38 Consequently, glory, or fame, is “that which is heard.”39 The Iliad tells of Achilles’ kleos, but it does more than that: the poem itself is the main instrument for the perpetuation of that glory. The song is not only the medium for the allocation of glory; in epic diction kleos designates the epic tradition itself.40 The muses put the singer in touch with the kleos of the past, which he hears. Because he goes on to sing of it, “that which is heard” becomes glory: “the Hellenic poet is the master of kléos […] it is the poet himself who uses the word to designate what he hears from the Muses and what he tells the audience. Poetry confers glory.”41 Homer’s term for the singer is aoidos; the song itself is aoidê. The singer’s relation to his song and its tales is presented as religious, and the most frequent epithet of aoidos is theois: ‘godlike’, ‘divine’, ‘inspired’, ‘sacred’. The song is divine, too; in Odyssey 8 Odysseus promises to spread praise of King

Ong, Orality and Literacy, 13–14. See Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1974) and The Best of the Achaeans. 39 Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 16. 40 The Best of the Achaeans, 97. 41 The Best of the Achaeans, 16. 37 38

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Alcinous’ bard, Demodocus, since “the god has with a ready heart granted you the gift of divine song.”42 The aoidos never presents himself as the producer of his own work, but simply as transmitting to his audience the song that he receives from the muses. It is through this gift of the muses that the singer is able to sing of that of which he has no personal knowledge. Seeing the world around him might serve as a source of distraction for the singer, and, as Nagy notes, “a thing like blindness cannot help but serve as a proof, a veritable emblem, of his artistic independence.”43 Accordingly, the singer relates what he hears, not what he sees. The authority of oral epic is linked precisely to this religious relation between song and reality: the song is divine, the singer merely an instrument of the muses’ inspiration. The singer’s lack of personal involvement is an ultimate indication of the truth and authority of his song. Minna Skafte Jensen observes, of the Slavic singers interviewed by Lord, that The singers are full of pride and self-respect, but they do not claim any kind of originality, not even in details; on the contrary, they categorically label any change as a mistake […] The ideal of originality is non-existent; it would clash with the dominant ideal of the true story.44

The archaic oral (ideally also blind) poet that we meet within the poem presents himself as receiving the song directly from the muses. Singers after Homer, including Plato’s Ion, are often referred to as rhapsodes. They tend to present themselves as performers of a song that was first granted to 42 Murray’s translation of Od., viii, 498. Fitzgerald has “the grace of heaven has given us a song” in Homer, The Odyssey, tr. Robert Fitzgerald (1961; London: Harvill, 1996). 43 Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 17. 44 Minna Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question and the Oral-Formulaic Theory (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1980): 68. We should differentiate carefully between the application and status of the idea of ‘originality’ in classical and post-Romantic poetics respectively. Skafte Jensen employs the term in its modern signification: an ‘original’ composition is supposedly neither dependent nor derivative, but proceeds directly from its author. This is a sense that the term has taken on since the eighteenth century: Dryden’s “I have added some original papers of my own” is the first instance of ‘original’ signifying ‘first-hand’ or ‘done by the person himself’ recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary. The classical usage of ‘original’, on the other hand, centres on the backward glance of the geneê: an interest in lineage and the awareness of origin. Thus singers may precisely claim ‘originality’ by referring their song to a predecessor, a tradition, or the muse. We thus witness a shift not only in semantics but also in poetics, with the Romantic claim to ‘originality’ (direct and individual inspiration) replacing the classical understanding of poetry as ‘original’ precisely because its origin is elsewhere.

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Homer; another guarantee of authority thus becomes the song’s participation in a tradition. Nagy writes: the references made by an archaic poem to its composer, or ‘author,’ are not so much a personal attempt by the poet to identify himself but rather a formal reflection of the poetry upon its own importance: the archaic poem presents itself retrospectively as something transmitted by the ultimate poet.45

Plato’s Ion bases his authority on Homer, Nagy’s “ultimate poet,” who has thus replaced the muse. The song is the result of, and belongs to, the tradition – not to the individual singer or to his abilities or training. Within this poetic discourse, the song’s ultimate origin is always the muse. When describing the formulaic techniques with which the oral epics are constructed, Albert Lord identifies “a generation of ‘singers’ who are reproducers rather than re-creators.”46 Lord thus differentiates between various classes of performer. Svenbro likewise discerns the divinely inspired singer (the aoidos), who creates and transforms the song as he sings, from the later rhapsode, who performs a Homeric text that he has learnt by heart: Despite the fact that they recite orally, those who have by now learnt the version of the Homeric text are no longer singers: they are rhapsodes. In the final instance, they always depend on the written word, on the material stability of the text.47

Svenbro bases his description of the rhapsode on Plato’s Ion, who comments on, interprets and defends the Homeric song; Socrates defines Ion’s task as that of “an interpreter of the poet’s thought to his audience,” adding that “to do this properly without knowing what the poet means is impossible.”48 Svenbro argues that in order for Ion to defend and interpret a fixed, memorised Homeric song, the song must have been written down. Neither Skafte Jensen nor Nagy, however, follows Lord in distinguishing between the rhapsode and the Homeric aoidos: Nagy argues that it is “simplistic and Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, 5–6. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 137. 47 Svenbro, La Parole et le marbre, 15. “Malgré leurs récitations orales, ceux qui désormais apprennent la version du texte homérique ne sont plus des aèdes: ce sont des rhapsodes. En dernière instance, ils dépendent toujours de la parole écrite, de la stabilité matérielle du texte” (emphasis Svenbro’s). 48 Plato, Ion, 530, C, tr. W.R.M. Lamb (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P & London: William Heineman, 1962). 45 46

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even misleading to contrast, as many have done, the ‘creative’ aoidós with the ‘reduplicating’ rhapsoidós.”49 Etymology defines the rhapsode as “he who sews together [rhápto] the song(s) [aoidé].”50 To Skafte Jensen, the aoidos is “clearly felt as the second half of the composite [rhapsoidos],” which combines rhaptéin (‘stitching, sewing’) and the song, aoidê.51 Skafte Jensen quotes a scholium to Pindar, which connects the etymology of ‘rhapsode’ to the Panathenaic contest of Homeric recital, of which Plato’s Ion is indeed a candidate:52 Others say that earlier the poetry was transmitted in separate parts, and that each of the competitors sang any part he wished to; since a sheep was produced as the prize for the winners they were called arnodes (i.e. sheep-singers) at the time; but afterwards, when the two poems had been introduced, and the competitors were sort of mending the parts one to another and going through the complete poetry, they got the name of rhapsodes (i.e. stitch-singers).53

The thesis that the Panathenaic contest provides a recital of a continuous story from Trojan epic by various singers, each stitching his episode on to the preceding one, shares key features with the theory formulated by Nagy, according to which the etymology of ‘Homer’, Hómeros “can be explained as ‘he who joins together’.”54 What is joined together by Homer is the epic song-cycle, the kúklos, which “had once served as a metaphor for all of Homer’s poetry.” The etymologies of archaic poetics thus tend to depict the poems as wholes created out of pre-existing components and to associate the compositional process with the activity and craftsmanship of the carpenter who joins together the parts of a wheel, or the tailor who stitches pieces of cloth together: “the making of the kúklos by the master poet Homer appears to be a global metaphor that pictures the crafting of the ultimate chariotwheel by the ultimate carpenter or, better, ‘joiner’.”55 Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1992): 42; Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question, 122. 50 Nagy, Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 61. 51 Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question, 122. 52 The Homeric Question, 147. 53 Scholium to Pindar’s Nemean Odes, ii, 1, quoted in Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question, 148. 54 Nagy, Poetry as Performance, 74. 55 Poetry as Performance, 74–75. Nagy bases most of his work on the study of such metaphoric etymologies: “For my own approach to Homeric Questions, diction is the pri49

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15

This metaphor of the epic poet as tailor or carpenter, creating a whole of disparate parts, might serve to describe Ezra Pound’s understanding of the challenge facing the modern epic poet; he saw his task as that of creating a meaningful whole out of the innumerable pieces and fragments of modern and recent history. In this reading, the epic poet is the one who fits the parts together, and the epic poem itself is an all-encompassing whole. The disagreement about whether the aiodos should be differentiated from the rhapsode is associated with the contention of Lord and Svenbro that the rhapsodes had access to Homer’s poems in written form: i.e. as texts. Skafte Jensen and Nagy, on the other hand, urge us to expand our view of orality and embrace the idea of an ‘oral text’ of Homer. When referring to the song as ‘text’, Skafte Jensen and Nagy intend to depict it as fixed and stable. According to this argument, centuries of traditional oral transmission do not necessarily result in an unlimited range of song variants in performance and infinite ‘story-paths’; on the contrary, they lead to increased identity. Skafte Jensen writes: “Each new performance will be a recreation in the sense that the song will be modified according to the given situation, but it will at the same time be a ‘rehearsal’, a step in the process towards fixation of the song in the singer’s memory.”56 The term that Skafte Jensen and Nagy both employ for this gradual fixation of the song is ‘textualisation’. Nagy applies an “evolutionary model” to the process of oral textualisation: I continue to describe as text-fixation or textualization the process whereby each composition-in-performance becomes progressively less changeable in the course of diffusion – with the proviso that we understand text here in a metaphorical sense.57

Nagy’s proviso demonstrates that even the leading scholar of the metaphorics of ancient poetics may be blinded by catachresis; understanding “text [...] in a metaphorical sense” implies that a ‘literal’ and primary meaning may be assigned to the term, and that this literal meaning would be that of our written text. Etymologically, of course, the ‘text’, from Latin texere, is the result of a process of weaving; it is the textile, the woven fabric. In order to conceive of an ‘oral text’, we need to broaden our understanding of both mary empirical given” and “the purpose of connecting the etymology of a Homeric word with its current usage in the Homeric poems is to establish a continuum of meaning within tradition”; Nagy, Homeric Questions (Austin: U of Texas P , 1996): 2, 9 (emphasis Nagy’s). 56 Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question, 42. 57 Nagy, Homeric Questions, 40.

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orality and writing; we do not, however, have to use the term ‘text’ metaphorically but, rather, to dispense with the catachresis that recognises only the ‘text’ that is written (or printed) on paper. When insisting on a ‘text’ of orality, Skafte Jensen and Nagy regard the metaphor that unites composition and weaving as independent of writing: song, too, may be “visualized as a web, a fabric, a textile.”58 Nagy believes the metaphor of “weaving the song” to be archaic, and “in fact so old as to be of Indo-European linguistic provenience.”59 Svenbro, however, points out that we do not find metaphors identifying song and weaving in archaic poetics preceding Pindar and Bacchylide. The example that Nagy cites to back his claim is, indeed, from Pindar. In The Craft of Zeus, written with John Scheid, Svenbro observes that “in the two Homeric poems [...] there is not a single passage in which the author explicitly characterizes either his own song or that of a fellow bard as a ‘fabric’.”60 Svenbro sees the post-Homeric metaphoric linkage between poetry and weaving as the result of a process in which the singer becomes a professional. Whereas Hesiod and Homer used aoidê (‘song’) and humnos (‘hymn’) for the activities of the singer, the fifth century B C introduces specific terms for poetry; poiêma (‘anything made or done’) and poiêtikos (‘capable of making’, ‘productive’, ‘creative’) begin to signify poetic work.61 In Homer, poieô had denoted ‘making’ and ‘constructing’, as when a child builds a wall of sand or the craftsman Ikmalios makes a chair.62 For Svenbro, the choice of ‘poiêsis’ (a ‘making’, ‘fabrication’, ‘creation’, ‘production’) for the poet’s work reflects his need to assimilate his profession to that of the artisan: Through metaphors that define discourse not only as something “woven” but also as a “construction,” [the choral poets] insisted so much on the materiality of discourse that – in about 450 B. C. – they ended up being called poietai (“artisans,” “producers,” “builders”); thus Homer himself could finally begin his career as a “poet.”63 Nagy, Poetry as Performance, 65. Poetry as Performance, 64. 60 John Scheid & Jesper Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, tr. Carol Volk (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1996): 112. 61 Jeffrey Walker, “Before the Beginnings of ‘Poetry’ and ‘Rhetoric’: Hesiod on Eloquence,” Rhetorica 14.3 (Summer 1996): 246. 62 At Il., xv, 363 and Od., xix, 57 respectively. Other occurrences of the verb are at Od., xiv, 272 and xvii, 207. 63 Scheid & Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus, 121–22. See also Svenbro, La Parole et le marbre, 188–89; 205–207. 58 59

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According to Svenbro, the coining of the name for the rhapsode as he who stitches the song together likewise belongs to this period and reflects the process through which the work of the singer is assimilated to that of the craftsman. The different perceptions of the role of the rhapsode reflect the gap between the singer’s own claims about the origins of his song and our actual knowledge of the formulaic tradition and technique. Whereas Svenbro distinguishes between singer and rhapsode, Nagy and Skafte Jensen see the two as identical: rather, they stress the fact that the aoidos is also a rhapsode. As we meet him in the Odyssey’s depiction of Demodocus and in the Homer who addresses the muse, the Homeric singer bases his poetic on the religious gift of the muses. Later rhapsodes will tell us that their song belongs to a tradition and stems from Homer, the ultimate poet, who in turn received it from the muse. The issue of authority explains the discrepancy between the rhapsode’s claim and our knowledge of his technique. The truth-value of all oral song depends on the alleged lack of personal involvement on the part of the singer; he can never argue that he created the song himself, since its very authority depends on its being the gift of the muses. The transferral of poieô from the sphere of carpentry to the composition of song indeed reflects the poet’s nascent ability to say “I made (i.e. I wrote) this,” and the concomitant loss of the authority and truth-value of his poetic statement. It is only so long as he refuses to be its author that the singer can claim that his song is authoritative. The post-Homeric epic poet is thus faced with the challenge of establishing – or claiming – the authority which is an inherent and defining feature of the genre. Virgil chooses to follow the Homeric model and refer to the muses and the pagan gods; Dante takes another, bolder, step and claims that he was commissioned to write the Commedia when visiting Paradise. To the modern poet, the very aspiration to compose a poem in a genre that claims authority involves such ambition – or, in Dantean/Eliotian terms, such presumption – that the inevitability of failure presents itself from the outset. To overcome it, a step must be taken outside the genre itself; the risk of failure can only be overcome by irony. 

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The etymological identification of the (written) text with the woven web or fabric suggests that we dwell on the use of weaving in the Homeric poems to consider their recurrent (indeed, formulaic) images of weaving women. Weaving is defined by Svenbro and Scheid as the reconciliation of the horizontal and the vertical and is seen as a trope of the structure that makes opposites meet.64 Scheid and Svenbro refer us to Pliny the Elder’s description of papyus as fabricated by the gluing together of horizontal and vertical fibres, and argue for a Roman connection between this woven paper and the use of metaphors of weaving for the writing process: “the fact that the same Romans who developed the metaphor of language weaving were in constant contact with this ‘woven’ papyrus undoubtedly produced a scriptural orientation in their use of the metaphor.”65 The canonisation of textus rather than its rival synonym huphos (‘web’) may be due to the chiasmus of the letter ‘X’, present within textus as an ideogram of its reconciliation of opposites.66 In a Homeric context, however, it is suggested that the association of discourse with weaving is always concerned with persuasion and the interested manoeuvering of others: “whenever someone ‘weaves’ his words, he is inevitably defining their recipient as Other (stranger, enemy), placed at the antipode of the Self”;67 “to Homer any verbal construction is necessarily selfseeking.”68 On only one occasion does Homer use weaving to describe speech: namely, when Priam tells of Odysseus’ and Menelaus’ visit to the Trojans’ court and their attempt to persuade him to hand over Helen: But when they began to weave the web of speech and of counsel in the presence of all, Menelaus in truth spake fluently, with few words, but very clearly.69 64 “The fundamental gesture of weaving is this interlacing of the warp and the woof of which spoke Plato in The Statesman”; Scheid & Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus, 5. 65 Scheid & Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus, 147. 66 The Craft of Zeus, 154–55. 67 Svenbro, La Parole et le marbre, 202: “du moment que quelqu’un ‘tisse’ ses paroles, il définit inévitablement leur destinataire comme Autre (étranger, hostile), situé à l’antipode du Même.” 68 Svenbro, La Parole et le marbre, 206: “Pour Homère, toute construction verbale est nécessairement intéressée.” 69 Murray’s translation of Il., iii, 212–15. Fitzgerald does not reproduce the metaphor of weaving, translating thus: “When each of them stood up to make his plea, / his arguments before us all, then Menelaus / said a few words in a rather headlong way / but clearly.”

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Svenbro and Scheid see Odysseus’ and Menelaus’ speech as an attempt to put forward the wish to reclaim Helen without offending the Trojans: “the request of the two Greeks must establish an equilibrium between two contradictory demands, opposed to each other like the warp and the woof in a tightly woven fabric.”70 The verb huphainô, ‘to weave’, occurs in both Homeric poems, but is especially frequent in the Odyssey.71 It denotes the production of webs, including the weaving of counsel, plans, plots, snares and schemes, performed not only by the polumêtis Odysseus,72 but also by the King of Lycia (Il., vi, 187), Nestor (Il., vii, 322 and ix, 93), Penelope’s suitors (Od., iv, 678) and Odysseus’ protector, Athena (Od., xiii, 301 and 386). The poem’s principal web is, of course, that woven by Penelope; the shroud that she works on in the daytime and unravels at night unites the cunning of the hand – the tekhnê that produces the fabric – and the cunning of the mind – the mêtis that creates the scheme.73 All the women in the Homeric poems, including goddesses and nymphs, weave.74 They are also schemers: Circe uses magic to turn men into beasts and to keep Odysseus with her; for a while, Calypso manages to achieve the same through simple seduction. On Olympus, Hera seduces her husband Zeus in order to distract his attention from the battle-scene (Iliad 20), while Athena is specifically goddess of mêtis. Only one Homeric woman is not explicitly scheming, nor does she weave: young Nausicaa. Scheid & Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus, 114. Seventeen of the twenty-four occurrences are in the Odyssey. 72 The epithet polumêtis occurs frequently in both Homeric poems, for instance at Od., viii, 165; xvii, 192; xix, 500; Il., viii, 152; x, 488. It defines Odysseus as a possibly cunning man of many counsels or devices. 73 The formula used at Od., ii, 93–95; xix, 139–40; and xxiv, 128–30 unites the weaving of a fabric and the creation of the scheme. The lines in Odyssey 2 are translated by Murray as “and she contrived in her heart this guileful thing also: she set up in her halls a great web, and fell to weaving – fine of thread was the web and very wide”; Fitzgerald has, “here is an instance of her trickery: / she had her great loom standing in the hall / and the fine warp of some vast fabric on it.” For the connection between women and mêtis, which she glosses as “cunning intelligence,” see Ingrid E. Holmberg, “The Sign of M H T I Σ ,” Arethusa 30.1 (1997): 1–33. 74 In the Iliad, both Helen (Il., iii, 125) and Andromache (Il., vi, 456; xxii, 440) weave. The formula that Hector uses when he tells Andromache to stop worrying and instead go and sit by her loom is identical to the one with which Telemachus sends Penelope away in Od., i, 356–58. In the Odyssey, Calypso weaves (Od., v, 62), as do the nymphs (Od., xiii, 103), while Circe walks around her loom (Od., x, 222). 70 71

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The scheming, wilful character of women in epic, in many cases reflective of an urge to possess the male, reappears in Virgil’s Dido and Tasso’s Armida, and also in Eden, where Milton goes further than merely holding Eve responsible for the Fall. We overhear her fantasise about a possible overthrow of male dominance with the scheming mind-set characteristic of epic women: [...] But to Adam in what sort Shall I appear? shall I to him make known As yet my change, and give him to partake Full happiness with me, or rather not, But keep the odds of knowledge in my power Without copartner? so to add what wants In female sex, the more to draw his love, And render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesirable, sometime Superior; for inferior who is free? (PL., I X , 816–25)75

If we turn to our modern epics, Pound’s portrayal of Circe in Cantos 39 and 47 fits the archaic model of woman as possessive and scheming. Moreover, the Cantos pick up the claim of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon that Helen is responsible for the Fall of Troy, so that the epithets helandros and heleptolis, which render Helen ‘destroyer of men’ and ‘destroyer of cities’ respectively, find their way into Pound’s Canto 7, whereas the epithetic Homeric reference to Odysseus as ptoliporthos (‘destroyer of cities’) is left out.76 In the Cantos, Odysseus is primarily adventurer and wanderer, whereas Helen is accredited with the destruction of Troy. In Epic and Empire (1993), Quint defines the epic as the genre of the Western male.77 The epic’s portrayal of women is thus inherently problematic; Walcott’s treatment of the figure of Helen in Omeros is indeed one of the features that support our definition of the poem as epic. 

75 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge (Norton Critical Editions; New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1975). 76 Odysseus is ptoliporthos at Il., ii, 276; x, 363 and Od., viii, 3; ix, 504; ix, 530. 77 Quint, Epic and Empire, 29.

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ILIADIC LINEARITY AND SECONDARY EPIC Within the Graeco-Roman epic tradition, the position of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey remains unique. In contrast to the Homeric poems, all later epics of the tradition have been composed through writing.78 The only long epic to survive intact from the period between Homer and Virgil is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. Brooks Otis reads this solitary survival as an indication of the general failure of the epic genre during these centuries and adds: “the heroic age had passed and no later poet could revive it without subjecting it to a very profound metamorphosis.”79 78 The geneê discussed in this book is the one that traces its line to the first, Homeric components of the Graeco-Roman epic tradition. For the orality of the Anglo-Saxon epic and parallels between Beowulf and Homeric poetry, see John Miles Foley, Traditional Oral Epic: The “Odyssey”, “Beowulf”, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley: U of California P , 1990). The first essay to apply Milman Parry’s findings to Anglo-Saxon poetry was that of Francis P. Magoun, Jr., “The Oral-Formulaic Character of Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry” (1953), repr. in Essential Articles for the Study of Old English Poetry, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. & Stanley J. Kahrl (Hamden C T : Archon, 1968): 317–51. For a fundamental criticism of the assumption on the part of traditional classical scholarship that Greek civilisation represents the birth of (superior) Western culture and arose without precedents or connections to an outside world, see the monumental work of Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (London: Free Association Books, 1987), vol. 1 of 3. Bernal argues for the validity of an “ancient” model, according to which Greek culture is the result of colonisation by Egyptians and Phoenicians around 1500 BC. This argument challenges the assumption that Greek civilisation is the result of a combination of Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and indigenous subjects. Bernal refers to the latter (prevalent) model as “Aryan” and dates it to the nineteenth century; it is intimately associated with Romanticism, racism and antisemitism. The Aryan model is seen as linked to an effort to promote the Greeks at the expense of the Egyptians: “it became increasingly intolerable that Greece – which was seen by the Romantics not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood – could be the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites” (27, 29). The belief that Homeric epic arises fully mature and independent of outside influences to become the ancestor of European culture and an isolated Western literary tradition is thus questioned and placed within the context and politics of the Aryan model. Bernal’s argument that Greek civilisation depends on Egyptian and Phoenician expansion and culture has consequences similar to those following from the studies of orality, which demonstrate that Homeric epic is not the work of one genius poet but the result of centuries of oral tradition and transmission. Both arguments upset the status of Homeric epic as born in isolation, an epitome of Greek culture and Western civilization. See also Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 1996). 79 Brooks Otis, Virgil: A Study of Civilized Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963): 15.

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With Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B C ), the rewriting of stock episodes becomes a characteristic of the epic genre. We may say that the genre becomes overtly concerned with intertextuality, or simply, and with Pucci, that it becomes conscious of itself as literature. Quint argues that it is precisely this “particular consciousness of tradition” lying behind the “epic continuity [that] distinguishes a so-called ‘literary’ epic from the orally inherited Homeric poems.”80 Homeric epic tells the story of the community, the tale of the tribe. Virgilian epic is a highly self-conscious composition that sees itself as linked to a parallel literary tradition or geneê. Scholars have stressed the special position that the Homeric poems occupy within this tradition by establishing categories of primary and secondary or authentic and literary epic.81 Bakhtin’s distinction between primary (simple) and secondary (complex) speech genres creates a similar differentiation. The primary speech genres have achieved their form in an “unmediated speech communion”: i.e. in a purely oral tradition. Secondary genres not only “absorb and digest” the primary ones; the act of absorption includes an ideological evaluation of the genre.82 This distinction reflects the shift from Homeric to Virgilian epic; the transition performed by the latter is stressed by Quint: The Aeneid had, in fact, decisively transformed epic for posterity into both a genre that was committed to imitating and attempting to “overgo” its earlier versions and a genre that was overtly political […] From now on, future epic poets would emulate the Aeneid itself along with the Homeric epics.83

In contrast to the primary, simple and orally composed Homeric epic, we thus have a secondary, complex and ideological–political Virgilian epic, composed in writing. The striking similarities that nevertheless link Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674) to each other and to the Aeneid and the Homeric poems are the results of the family awareness that constitutes genre: the individual poem’s concern with identifying itself as a member of the geneê of epic poems. 80 Quint, Epic and Empire, 8. The phrase “epic continuity” was coined by Thomas M. Greene; see his The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 1963). 81 See C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Milton (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1942), and Bowra, From Virgil to Milton. 82 Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 62. 83 Quint, Epic and Empire, 8.

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Even poems written as anti-epics and with a critical–parodic attitude to the tradition that they are seeking to overthrow remain tied to it. Quint studies a series of long poems, including Lucan’s Pharsalia (65 A D ), which adopt a critical attitude to the Aeneid and imperial epic. These poems point to the shortcomings of, and dangers inherent in, the authority that the genre both enjoys and establishes. Nevertheless, Quint reaches the conclusion that these attempts at overcoming the epic are likewise presented within the constraints of the genre; the Pharsalia may be a black sheep, but it nevertheless belongs to the family.84 The principle behind this apparent paradox is the one that disables us from criticising metaphysics without using its very concepts, a principle that Jacques Derrida identifies as inherent in “a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself.”85 Derrida argues: We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely that which it seeks to contest.86

Elsewhere, however, Derrida identifies the point where a text defines the genre to which it believes itself to belong as a point that necessarily escapes this definition. Derrida calls this “the law of the law of genre”: “the trait that makes membership inevitably divides, the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole.”87 Consequently, the text cannot criticise that to which it belongs; it cannot both employ and distance itself from the language that belongs to and defines the genre. With an apparent paradox, only the point where the text formulates an explicit desire to belong escapes this definition. When the text comments on itself and makes explicit its wish for generic membership, it internalises the paratext.88 It is aware of and talks about itself; Quint, Epic and Empire, 8–9 and 11. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1978), repr. in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London & New York: Longman, 1988): 112. 86 Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play,” 111. 87 Derrida, “The Law of Genre” (1979), tr. Avital Ronell, rev. Derek Attridge, in Acts of Literature, ed. Attridge (New York & London: Routledge, 1992): 227–28. 88 The paratext is a term coined by Gérard Genette to denote title-pages, colophons, etc: the parts of the book that do not constitute the text proper, but which point to the 84 85

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in this process, neighbouring words become images of words placed within what Bakhtin calls intonational quotation marks. Bakhtin suggests that the high poetic genres may be criticised and subverted through parody and irony, with “parodic–ironic re-accentuation.”89 The sacred and authoritarian may be expunged and secularised through parody, irony and quotation marks that exist not inside but outside the utterance. While parody provides a possibility of criticism, this criticism is formulated in extra-textual features: in emotive intonation. This inclusion of irony involves what Bakhtin calls a novelisation of the genre. In Bakhtin’s understanding of genre history, the genre of parody is that of the novel, which he defines as “essentially not a genre.”90 When other genres exhibit irony, they become novelised. Often it is this generic transformation that secures their survival. In the process, they have, however, become something other than what they wanted to criticise: they have left the family. With the notion that once the genre is novelised, it is essentially no longer a genre, we return to Derrida’s observation that the criticism of the genre cannot be carried out from within it, but involves a metalanguage and a novelisation that exceed the boundaries of the very genre that the text wishes to comment on. The primary/secondary opposition contrasts political Virgilian epic with the non-political Homeric poem, implying that the Aeneid transforms an Iliadic opposition of Greeks vs. Trojans into an opposition not only of Trojans and Latins, but also of an ‘us’ vs. a ‘them’. The Iliad, indeed, expresses no explicit contempt for the Trojans; on the contrary, Achilles tells us that he has no personal dislike of Aeneas: “As for myself, when I came here to fight, / I had no quarrel with Troy or Trojan spearmen: / they never stole my cattle or my horses.”91 Quint, however, refers us to Polybius’ reading of Iliad 4, which finds an opposition with ideological markers in Homer’s description of Trojans and Greeks; Greek silence and self-control are contrasted with the noise and war reading strategy with which the text wishes to be received. See Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1997). 89 Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 80. Such re-accentuation leads either to stylisation or to parody. 90 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 132. 91 Fitzgerald’s translation of Il., i, 152–54. Murray has “I came not hither to fight by reason of the spearmen of Troy, seeing they are no whit at fault toward me. Never harried they in any wise my kine or my horses.” Quint talks of “the impartiality for which Homer is famous, an impartiality that is also a sympathy for Greeks and Trojans alike”; Quint, Epic and Empire, 48.

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cries of the Trojans, suggesting that the Greek warriors form a unity and control the situation whereas the Trojans do not.92 Fitzgerald’s translation of the relevant episode echoes T.S. Eliot’s rendering of Dante’s Inferno, reminding us that behind The Waste Land’s “a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many”93 lies not only Dante’s “sì lunga tratta / di gente, ch’i’ non averei creduto / che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta,”94 but also Homer: [...] The troops were mainly silent; you could not have believed so great a host with war-cries in its heart was coming on in silence, docile to its officers, – (Il., iv, 428–31)

The Trojan army, by contrast, is anything but quiet: The Trojans were not silent: like the flocks that huddle countless in a rich man’s pens, waiting to yield white milk, and bleating loud continually as they hear their own lambs cry, just so the war-cry of the Trojans rose through all that army – not as a single note, not in a single tongue, but mingled voices of men from many countries. (Il., iv, 433–38)95

92 Polybius writes: “the Romans fell upon their foes, raising their war-cry and clashing their shields with their spears as is their practice, while there was a strange confusion of shouts raised by the Carthaginian mercenaries, for, as Homer says, their voice was not one, but ‘mixed was the murmur, and confused the sound, / Their names all various’.” Quoted from Polybius, The Histories, X V , 12, 8–9, tr. W.R. Paton (Loeb Classical Library; London: William Heinemann & New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925): vol. 4. 93 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1963): ll. 62–63. 94 Inf., iii, 55–57. Musa translates: “an interminable train / of souls pressed on, so many that I wondered / how death could have undone so great a number.” 95 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray: “and the rest marched on in silence; thou wouldst not have deemed that they that followed in such multitudes had any voice in their breasts, all silent as they were through fear of their commanders” and “but for the Trojans, even as ewes stand in throngs past counting in the court of a man of much substance to be milked of their white milk, and bleat without ceasing as they hear the voices of their lambs: even so arose the clamour of the Trojans throughout the wide host; for they had not all like speech or one language, but their tongues were mingled, and they were a folk

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This opposition between unity, sameness and self-control on the one side and disorder, difference and a lack of control on the other is significantly widened in the Aeneid and schematised by Virgil’s ekphrasis of the battle of Actium depicted on Aeneas’ shield. In the shield’s representation of Augustus’ confrontation with Cleopatra and Anthony, Quint finds “an ideology of empire that informs the Aeneid and that Virgil bequeathed to subsequent literary epic”: an ideology that defines otherness and suggests that “single entity implies a single master,” thus calling both for empire and for emperor.96 Quint argues that the empire backed by the (Virgilian) epic is not only Western but also “an all-male business, a patriarchy that is marked by the use of ‘patribus’ to describe the senators and thus by the repetition ‘patribus/patrium’.”97 In the Aeneid, the focus on the geneê, central to primary epic, is shifting towards an interest in the father-figure and the head of state, reflecting a focus on the immediate ancestry of the genos, as in the depiction of the three generations of Anchises, Aeneas and Ascanius/Iulus. At the same time, lineage links historical time to mythic time, and Julius Caesar to Aeneas’ son Iulus, from whom Caesar traced his line.98 Milton, on the other hand, sings “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”99 when he writes an epic of the origin from which the race will spring, rather than of the race that traces its genos back to an origin. In Paradise Lost, only Eve is able to trace her lineage in terms that recall Homer: “Adam, from whose dear side I boast me sprung.” Adam, on the other hand, learns to see himself as “the source and spring / of all corruption.”100 The tracing of lineage, which is both a concern of the story told in the Aeneid and a feature by which Virgil attaches his own work to that of Homer, is continued in Dante’s Commedia. The self-awareness with which Virgil links his work to Homer’s primary epic makes it possible for scholars to define his poem as secondary. Dante adds another level of self-awareness to the genre, however, and thus transgresses its boundaries, establishing what I shall call summoned from many lands.” Quint, Epic and Empire, 26, mentions the passage and refers to Polybius, xv, 12. 96 Quint, Epic and Empire, 21 and 27. 97 Epic and Empire, 29. 98 Marcel Le Glay, Jean–Louis Voisin & Yann Le Bohec, A History of Rome, tr. Antonia Nevill (Oxford & Cambridge M A : Blackwell, 1996): 140. 99 PL., i, 16. 100 PL., ix, 965 and x, 832–33.

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tertiary, or novelised, epic. Virgil himself plays a central role in this process of novelisation: it is through the inclusion of the Roman poet as a character within the Commedia that Dante formulates his views on genre and literary parentage. Quint sees teleological linearity as a characteristic of Iliadic narration.101 The epic genre as such is to a high degree structured in a linear fashion; the dominance of that principle is reflected in the focus on, and of, the geneê, which in English is indeed rendered as ‘lineage’. Narrative and metrical continuity are other joint features that support a description of the epic genre as linear. In a discussion of possible metaphoric etymologies behind oimê, the term used in Homer to describe the story told in song, Marcello Durante suggests that the term should be explained as ‘thread’, finding support for this argument in the fact that the metaphor expresses that “condition of organic continuity which is inherent in the narrative genre.”102 This epic continuity is also reflected in the fact that Virgil’s poem was written on a scroll, which allows the reader to turn back only with difficulty.103 Iliadic linearity or continuity is reflected in the poem’s use of lists, as in the Catalogues of Ships (Il., ii. 494–759) or of Trojans (Il., ii. 816–77). Conjunctions such as kai, te, autar and de, translatable as ‘and’ or ‘but’, albeit with varying degrees of implicit contrast, are frequent within these lists, as in the narration as such. In a description of epic diction, Lord notes that in “a style in which actions or things are added one to another in series, the conjunction plays a large role, and the most common patterns for the beginning of the line naturally begin with a conjunction.”104 Lists, catalogues and parataxis are elements of a poetic structure centred on the regular verse scheme of Homeric and Virgilian hexameters and the Miltonic iambic pentameter. As Quint puts it, “epic loves a parade.”105 Contemporary adaptations of the epic tradition focus on a later metrical development: Dante’s terza rima, with which, John Freccero argues, Dante adds a Quint, Epic and Empire, 134. Or: “la nozione del filo o della corda esprime quella condizione di continuità organica che è immanente al genere narrativo.” Marcello Durante, Sulla preistoria della tradizione poetica greca, vol. 2 of 2: Risultanze della comparazione indoeuropea (Rome: Ateneo, 1976): 179. 103 Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997): 48. On the different reading practices resulting from the use of the scroll and the codex respectively, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Nature (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1979): 88–89. 104 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 41. 105 Quint, Epic and Empire, 31. 101 102

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dimension of conversion and autobiography to the temporal regularity of the epic metre.106 With the Aeneid, ideological implications are added to the linear structure. Teleological linearity becomes constitutive of narration; only the end-oriented narration of the winner creates a proper narrative: Narrative itself thus becomes ideologically charged, the formal cause or consequence of that Western male rationality and historical identity that epic ascribes to the imperial victors. Epic draws an equation between power and narrative.107

The political secondary epic is composed by those who have a story to tell and a history to identify with. That history must be one of victory. In this way, the epic becomes the teleological narration of winners and empire: on the example of the Greek victory at Ilium, of Achilles taking Hector’s life, follow Aeneas’ killing of Turnus and Augustus’ defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra. Centuries later, Tasso depicts Christian crusaders engaged in war against Muslims, and Milton gives us good angels defeating evil ones. Narration itself is seen as constitutive of power and order: “the equation of power and the very possibility of narrative is a defining feature of the genre.”108 Whereas Pound was hoping that Mussolini would provide the victory to be celebrated by the Cantos, Walcott explicitly distances his poem from the history of winners: for instance, when characterising his hero as “quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son” (LXIV , i) and defining him through a series of negations supposedly intended to contrast the fisherman with his Homeric warrior namesake. As we shall see, the politics of the epic turn out to be intrinsic to Walcott’s poem, too, despite his explicit claim that the opposite is the case. Moreover, the theme of humility implicit in the description of Achille as “quiet” turns out to be a topos of the modern epic and thus another feature that, rather than distancing the poem from the epic, identifies it as such. 

106

John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard

U P , 1986): 260–65. 107 108

Quint, Epic and Empire, 45. Epic and Empire, 15.

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Skafte Jensen suggested that the Homeric poems were performed in their entirety as part of the Panathenaic contests. When it comes to the process through which they were written down, she presents a theory of dictation that follows the thesis of the so-called Peisistratean recension. The dictation is supposed to have taken place in Athens in the sixth century B C : the initiative for recording the Iliad and the Odyssey in writing is much more likely to have come from outside the tradition than from anybody within it [...] The only natural solution to the problem of economy is to imagine a rich patron who undertook to have the poems written down. In archaic Greece such a person would be a tyrant.109

Skafte Jensen identifies Peisistratos, tyrant of Athens from 560 to 527 B C , as this patron from outside the tradition. With his “evolutionary model,” Nagy, too, considers the pan-Hellenic festival at Athens to be the context for the definitive period in the evolution of the songs and “highlight[s] the involvement of the Peisistratidai – Peisistratos and his sons – who traced themselves back to the heroic-age Peisistratos, son of Nestor (as portrayed in Odyssey Book 3) and who ruled Athens as tyrants during the second half of the sixth century B.C.E.”110 Peisistratos’ rule at Athens seems to have been decisive for the poems as we know them today. Skafte Jensen warns against paying heed to the notion that the Peisistratidai traced their lineage to Nestor’s son, who joins Telemachus on the journey to Sparta in Odyssey 3. Instead, she suggests that Nestor’s son was assigned a role in the poem, and presumably also named Peisistratos, in order to please the patron.111 In fact, studies of oral performance and composition note that the oral rhapsode is not only able to but, indeed, tends to shape his song according to his audience.112 Skafte Jensen argues that the Homeric poems “are poems about the power of Athena and the glory of her favourites, the city of Athens with its ruler Pisistratus.”113 This reading implies that the political affiliations that are usually considered to be characteristic of secondary epic may be detected in Homeric epic as well. Both the collection of the various Homeric songs in one cycle and their dictation and transcription are the results of political and hegemonic initiatives. 109 110 111 112 113

Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question, 93 and 94. Nagy, Homeric Questions, 42–43. Skafte Jensen, The Homeric Question, 168. The Homeric Question, 42. The Homeric Question, 171 (emphasis Skafte Jensen’s).

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Even the conventional secondary epic, linear, teleological and reflective of hegemonic politics, must, however, be novelised in order to succeed and survive. Bakhtin observes that, without sufficient novelisation, a genre becomes parodic. It would appear that Quint’s and Bakhtin’s own imperialist and monologic epics are precisely the results of what Genette calls “a deductive activity superimposed on an initial activity that is always inductive and analytical”;114 such epics exist primarily in theory, because in order to avoid becoming a stale cliché, the actual poem will always include elements of novelisation and polyphony. This thesis is illustrated by a Renaissance epic that made every effort to conform to the epic genre: Gian Giorgio Trissino’s L’Italia liberata dai goti (1547–48). Trissino is explicit in his dedication: the poem is modelled on the examples of Homer and Dante and aims at establishing a parallel between the Roman emperor Justinian, who liberated Italy from the Goths, and Charles V, Trissino’s contemporary and the recipient of his poem.115 To a greater extent than the Aeneid itself, Trissino’s poem is, and wants to be, an imperialistic epic, untainted by ambiguities or suggestions of circularity and romantic adventure. Here, apparently, we have the quintessential epic. The emperor, however, is reported to have paid little attention to Trissino’s gift. The poem was unreadable and a failure; according to Sergio Zatti, “the excessive proximity to the model eventually rendered [Trissino’s epic] an involuntary parody.”116

ROBERT FITZGERALD: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY HOMERIC RHAPSODE In the thirty-third component of the volume Midsummer from 1984, Derek Walcott presents us with an old man immersed in the world of Homeric epic: he thinks of the unburied men by the Scamander, and at night his shadow walks among “the Trojan and the Greek commanders.”117 His relation to the world of epic is determined by the craftsmanship with which he conGenette, The Architext, 66. Gian Giorgio Trissino, “Al Clementissimo ed Invitissimo Imperatore Quinto Carlo Massimo,” in L’Italia liberata dai goti (1547–48; London, 1779): xxxi–xxxv. 116 Sergio Zatti, L’ombra del Tasso: Epica e romanza nel Cinquecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1996): 70: “l’eccesso di prossimità al modello ha finito per crearne l’involontaria parodia.” 117 Walcott, Midsummer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux and London: Faber & Faber, 1984). 114 115

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fronts language. The “grooves in [his] forehead” are thus “cut by declining keels,” a pun suggesting that the old gentleman is involved in the declension of (Greek or Latin) nouns for synecdochic parts of the ship, and he is associated with the “hammer[ing] at the shield / of language.” Towards the end of the poem, it is, however, not lines by Homer but the hexameters of Virgil’s epic that are invoked by a clause that the old man finds in a dictionary: Entering a door-huge dictionary, he finds that clause that stopped the war yesterday; his pulse starts the gavel of hexametrical time, the V’s of each lifted blade pull from Connecticut, like the hammers of a piano without the sound, as the wake, reaching gravel, recites in American: “Arma virumque cano…”

Despite its references to the world of Iliadic epic and the following component’s opening invocation of the Homeric sea, “Thalassa! Thalassa!,” Midsummer 33 ends with the first words of the Aeneid in Latin, suggesting that it was Virgil’s poem that “stopped the war yesterday.” The position of “yesterday” at the end of a clause and at the middle of a line here prefigures its appearance six years later in Omeros, in a passage to which we shall return: “it was not Hector’s / but Achille’s hand yesterday” (XXIX /i). The voice that recites from the Aeneid “in American” is that of Robert Fitzgerald, the Connecticut-based poet and translator of both Homer and Virgil. Walcott’s poem is dedicated to Fitzgerald, who died in January 1985, shortly after the publication of Midsummer. Just as the poem combines references to the Iliad and a quotation from Virgil, its metaphors provide a coupling of poetic scenery and the activity of writing that is typical of Walcott, as when “each crabwise hand / feels for its lance, and grips it like his pen.” This largely static poem elaborates a number of metaphorical identities, inserting Homer’s commanders, Virgil’s phrase and Fitzgerald as translator and old man in the same universe. The epics of Homer thus merge with the diction of Virgil’s hexameter, and Fitzgerald is united with the Greek and Latin epics that he translated. Behind “Arma virumque cano” lie Homer and Troy; both Homer and Virgil come to us through their translator, Fitzgerald. Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of the two Homeric poems (his Odyssey appeared in 1961, his Iliad in 1974) and the Aeneid (1983) are deservedly rec-

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ognised, earning Fitzgerald a number of awards.118 He was associated with and admired by the poets central to this study, his version of the Homeric poems being particularly relevant to Walcott’s Omeros. This study considers Fitzgerald to be a key representative of twentieth-century translations of the ancient epics and chooses to combine the Loeb renditions by A.T. Murray (as revised by George E. Dimock) and H. Rushton Fairclough (revised by G.P. Goold)119 with Fitzgerald’s versions of both Homer and Virgil. The translator of Homer may be placed next to the ancient rhapsode as another craftsman involved in the process of epic circulation. Indeed, the many variants of translations of the poems that coexist in English (or in any other language) reflect the innumerable variations of versions-in-performance that were once presented by the Homeric rhapsodes. The translator thus finds a place among the singers and performers who have developed and transmitted the poems through the centuries. Through a process of gradual (oral) textualisation, Homer’s songs have journeyed from their oral, multiple and variant beginnings towards a point in time when one version was transcribed and thus fixed in writing. New stages of variation and growth are reached as the process of translation carries the poems over into several other languages (including Modern Greek), each translation building on that of its predecessors while creating new variations. Fitzgerald went to see Pound in Rapallo in 1932 and has described the meeting in his essay “Gold and Gloom in Ezra Pound,” in which Fitzgerald “trie[s] to suggest what it has been like to be a writer twenty-five years younger, and interested, during Pound’s lifetime.”120 The two poets shared an enthusiasm for translation, an activity that constitutes an integral part of Pound’s poetic and is foregrounded in the opening canto’s reference to the specific Renaissance Latin translation through which Pound is rewriting (indeed, translating) the Nekuia. In “Mirroring the Commedia,” Fitzgerald thus discusses Pound’s influence on Laurence Binyon’s translation of Dante’s

118 Fitzgerald’s Odyssey received the first Bollingen Award for Translation in 1961; his Iliad won the first Harold Morton Landon Award for the Translation of Poetry in 1976. In 1984 Fitzgerald received another Landon Award for his Aeneid. 119 Virgil, Aeneid, in Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols. (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1999). 120 Robert Fitzgerald, “Gold and Gloom in Ezra Pound,” first published in Encounter (July 1956), repr. in Fitzgerald, The Third Kind of Knowledge, ed. Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald (New York: New Directions, 1993): 145.

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work.121 Seamus Heaney published a eulogy to Fitzgerald in the New York Review of Books and dedicated his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, The Cure at Troy (1990), to the memory of Fitzgerald.122 Walcott’s dedication of Midsummer 33 to Fitzgerald is almost contemporary with the translator’s death. Walcott’s debt to Fitzgerald does not, however, end with Midsummer; on the contrary, the influence of Fitzgerald’s translations turns out to be pivotal in Omeros. Fitzgerald’s translation of the Iliad not only supports observations of a general linearity inherent in Homer’s poem;123 it also presents a series of metaphors that suggest that the poetic landscape of the epic conceals lines of poetry. Walcott has always exploited such metaphoric clusters, which we shall also see him cultivate in Omeros. Fitzgerald’s text may thus be used as a foil in order to illustrate the characteristics of Walcott’s rendition of central Homeric formulae. In Homer, thalassa often appears in the formulaic phrase “para thina thalassês,” which is also found in the variant “para thin’ halos”; both are rendered by Murray as “along the shore of the sea.” Fitzgerald gives us “along the line of surf,” e.g., at Il., xxiv, 12, where Achilles is made “to wander / distractedly along the line of surf.”124 Later, when Achilles decides to return to battle, he passes “along the surf-line with a shout / that split the air.”125 By preferring “line of surf” or “surf-line” to “shore of sea,” Fitzgerald’s phrases add to a general conception of the Iliad as centred on linearity; their tentative suggestion that lines of poetry may be found on the sea-shore is elaborated by Walcott, who goes one step further with metaphors that expressly indicate that (Homeric) poetry is found in the sea. Fitzgerald, “Mirroring the Commedia: An Appreciation of Laurence Binyon’s Version,” first published in Paideuma (Winter 1981), repr. in Fitzgerald, The Third Kind of Knowledge, 241–60. 122 Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (London: Faber & Faber, 1990); “In Memoriam: Robert Fitzgerald,” New York Review of Books (17 December 1987). 123 In Fitzgerald’s translation, soldiers at war form “battle lines” (Il., ii, 387), “Achaean lines” (Il., ii, 439) and “bloody lines” (Il., iv, 82). The armies advance “spear by spear and shield by shield in line” (Il., xiii, 130) and “line by compact line” (Il., xiii, 800). Not only men line up, but also huts, ships, oarsmen, waves, cranes, sheep and women at Il., ii, 680; iii, 3; 198; vi, 294; viii, 220; ix, 360; xiv, 34. 124 Fitzgerald’s translation of Il., xxiv, 12. Murray has: “roam distraught along the shore of the sea.” The formula used is “para thin’ halos.” 125 Fitzgerald’s translation of Il., xix, 40–41. The formula at stake is “para thina thalassês.” Murray has “goodly Achilles strode along the shore of the sea, crying a terrible cry.” 121

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The sea thus reflects the regular sound of the epic metre when Walcott’s protagonist confronts Omeros with “‘I have always heard / your voice in that sea, master” (LVI , iii), reminding us, as Ong does, that the epos is also ‘voice’. Walcott’s passage continues: [...] when I was a boy your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked along the curled brow of the surf; the word “Homer” meant joy, joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars, in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees. (L V I , iii)

Achilles’ wandering “along the line of surf” now becomes Walcott’s “along / the curled brow of the surf.” The implication that poetry may be found in the landscape is here transposed to another part of the scene, as the sound of the sea expands to involve the sound of the trees, the leaves of which ultimately become pages. When the leaves become pages, poetry, that which is heard, becomes connected to the book, that which is read. The association of pages and leaves takes us to the Aeneid, where the Sybil writes verses on leaves and Aeneas addresses her: But now commit no verses to the leaves Or they may be confused, shuffled and whirled By playing winds: chant them aloud, I pray.126

Aeneas considers the spoken or chanted words, which will be gone as soon as pronounced and confided only through proximity, safer than words written on leaves, which may last but may also be dispersed. The Sybil writes her verses on the folium, as in English they appear on a ‘leaf’. Whereas each leaf remains singular, separate from the others, and may be “whirled / by playing winds,” pages are joined together and belong to a book. The Latin pagina stems from the verb pangere, ‘to join together’; pagina refers to strips of papyrus fastened together. The “word ‘Homer’” rising in Walcott’s “pages of rustling trees” thus belongs neither to orality nor to the single leaves of oracular Sybilic writing, but to the book. The etymology of pagina, that which is 126 Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, vi, 117–19 translates vi, 74–76 of Virgil’s text. The Loeb Classical Library text of the Aeneid translated by Fairclough has: “Only trust not your verses to leaves, lest they fly in disorder, the sport of rushing winds; chant them yourself, I pray.”

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joined together, may be placed next to Nagy’s theory that Hómeros is the great joiner; here the Homeric craftsman no longer joins together the wheel of song, however, but the pages of the book of epic. In the poem’s invocation of Omeros, Walcott associates the sea, poetry, the book, and Homer. Fitzgerald remains present, too, as the mediating rhapsode behind the “surf lines”: [...] Only in you, across centuries of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye shut from the sunlight. (I I , ii)

The parchment is made from goatskin and connects the (Atlantic) sea to the fleece of Odysseus’ men, to which the lines of surf are here compared. The white shambling sheep take us not only to Polyphemus’ massacre of Odysseus’ men (the association of the lighthouse and Homer’s one-eyed giant being formulaic in Omeros), but also to a line from Fitzgerald’s Iliad: “a flock of silvery sheep in line.”127 At first Omeros’ association of the “surf lines” and the sheep is auditory as the speaker catches “the noise / of the surf lines”; it becomes visual as it is subsequently based on the similarity of the whiteness of surf and fleece. The lines involved in the “surf lines” consequently include the lines of written poetry, as read. Walcott’s association of the sea with Homeric poetry reaches its climax with the fabulous “scanned the opening line / of our epic horizon” (II, ii). For this metaphor, too, we find a matrix in Fitzgerald: not only when Antilochus “scanned the battle-line,”128 but also in the episode where Achilles leaves his comrades and goes to the shore to talk to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, there “scanning the endless sea.”129 The first book of Fitzgerald’s Aeneid contains a line that seems especially suggestive of Walcott’s phrase – “scanning horizons under the open sky.”130 Another remarkable use of “scanning” is found in Fitzgerald’s Aeneid 6, where Anchises, in the underworld, watches the lines of his future descendants, thus combining the Fitzgerald’s translation of Il., iii, 198 (cf. Murray: “a great flock of white ewes”). Fitzgerald, Il., xv, 574, which Murray renders as “glancing warily about him.” 129 Fitzgerald, Il., i, 350; cf. Murray: “looking forth over the wine-dark deep.” 130 Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, i, 213, a translation of Ae., i, 154–55. Fairclough has: “looking forth upon the waters.” 127 128

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focus on scanning, with its associations of reading, and the family line, the genos that becomes genre: “His own were those he scanned now, all his own / descendants, with their futures and their fates, / their characters and acts.”131 This is the view of the genos that Milton furthers in Paradise Lost: the prophetic glance cast into the future by the father who observes and counts his descendants, rather than the Homeric genos/geneê with which the descendant enumerates his predecessors or identifies one original ancestor. In all these instances, Fitzgerald places lines in the poetic landscape and makes the characters scan these: they scan the sea, the battle-line, or the horizon under an open sky. When Walcott inserts “opening” before “line” and “epic” before “horizon,” he has taken the association one step further to merge the sea and poetry in a potent metaphor. Whereas the “noise / of the surf lines” is auditory and describes the sound of the sea as it reaches the coast, the horizon line remains silent and visual: scanning its opening line involves opening the book of Homer. While translating the Odyssey, Fitzgerald lived in Greece, “on Homer’s sea”; he has suggested that “the constant visual presence of those seascapes may have had something to do with the way in which that poem came to be.”132 A particular intimacy connecting the sea and Homeric poetry is indeed suggested, not only in Fitzgerald’s interview with Edwin Honig, but also in the translations themselves, albeit mostly implicitly. Working as a translator, Fitzgerald is allowed to take fewer liberties than is Walcott in his poetry; from the very outset of his career, Walcott’s metaphors have explicitly associated the sea and poetry. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer, expressive of a poetic intuition similar to Walcott’s, provide Walcott with a confirmation that the association of sea with poetry may actually be authoritatively Homeric. Through Fitzgerald, Walcott may thus add a Homeric touch to metaphors that are intrinsic to his oeuvre: the Walcottian notion that the sea holds poetry is confirmed by the principal twentieth-century translator of both Homer and Virgil, providing Walcott with an additional reason for referring to the horizon as epic.  131 Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, vi, 915–17, a translation of Ae., vi, 681–83. Fairclough has: “was counting over the full number of his people and beloved children, their fates and fortunes, their works and ways.” 132 Edwin Honig, The Poet’s Other Voice: Conversations on Literary Translation (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1985): 108.

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ODYSSEAN CIRCULARITY The forefather of the martial secondary epic poem establishing nationhood and defining winners and losers is the Iliad: of the two Homeric poems, it is the song of Achilles’ wrath and the Trojan war that represents the archetypal epic. Whereas the Iliad may be seen as characterised by an overall linearity, Homer’s Odyssey is governed by an alternative structural principle: that of the circle, suggested by keywords associated with the idea of return and the homecoming of the nostos. Odysseus’ journey home from Troy to Ithaca is paralleled by a series of rival nostoi, one of which is Telemachus’ departure from Ithaca in search of news of his father: with the son away from Ithaca and the suitors preparing an ambush for him at the neighbouring island of Asteris, a second homecoming is threatened. The stories of Nestor and Menelaus are nostoi, too, as is the disastrous return of Agamemnon, which is used for both implicit and explicit comparisons with Odysseus’ unknown destiny.133 In the Nekuia of Odyssey 11, Agamemnon’s ghost conveys the story of his death. He seizes the occasion to ask for news of his son Orestes: But tell me, have you any word at all about my son’s life? Gone to Orkhómenos or sandy Pylos, can he be? or waiting with Meneláos in the plain of Sparta? (Od., xi, 458–60)134

The reference to Pylos and Sparta links Orestes to Telemachus in a parallel which is similar to that connecting Agamemnon and Odysseus.135 The dead parent’s anxious enquiry about the son’s whereabouts is repeated a few lines 133 In the opening book of the Odyssey, Zeus meditates on Agamemnon’s unhappy nostos, whereupon Athene reminds him of Odysseus, still “a castaway / upon an island in the running sea” (Od., i, 49–50, Fitzgerald’s translation). In Pylos Nestor tells Telemachus of Agamemnon’s tragic homecoming (Od., iii, 254–75), and in Sparta it is Menelaus who tells Odysseus’ son of Agamemnon’s death as related to Menelaus by Proteus (Od., iv, 90– 92; 512–37). Odysseus’ conversation with Agamemnon in Hades is at Od., xi, 385–464. Finally, Odysseus himself compares his own destiny to that of Agamemnon in conversation with Athene upon arrival at Ithaca at Od., xiii, 383–85. 134 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray gives us: “But come, tell me this, and declare it truly, whether perchance you hear of my son still alive in Orchomenus it may be, or in sandy Pylos, or perhaps with Menelaus in wide Sparta.” 135 Out of twenty-seven occurrences of “Pylos” in the Odyssey, twenty are concerned with Telemachus.

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later when Achilles’ ghost asks of news of his son Neoptolemus. The question involves the issue of lineage and is indeed equivalent to “is my geneê continued?” This is the forward glance of Anchises, scanning his descendants in the underworld, a topos which is to be repeated frequently in Dante’s Commedia. In Inferno 10, Cavalcante Cavalcanti thus requests to know from Dante whether his son Guido is still alive. Since Dante is able to walk through Hell, Cavalcante assumes that Guido can do so as well: piangendo disse: “Se per questo cieco carcere vai per altezza d’ingegno, mio figlio ov' è? e perché non è teco?.” (Inf., x, 58–60)136

he started weeping: “If it be great genius that carries you along through this blind jail, where is my son? Why is he not with you?”

The episode is related to Aeneas’ meeting with Andromache in Little Troy. Seeing Aeneas alive, Hector’s widow immediately thinks of Hector: “Your face, /can it be real? And you real, messenger, /coming before me? Goddessborn? Alive? / Or if sweet daylight left your eyes forever, / where is my Hector?”137 The implication of Andromache’s question is, on the one hand, that if Aeneas is dead and approaches her as a ghost, he may have the knowledge of the dead and know of her husband’s destiny. On the other hand, her question suggests that if the dead Aeneas may visit her, so might the dead Hector, who would presumably be even more eager to see her again. In the Nekuia of Odyssey 24, Agamemnon is given the last word on the parallel yet crucially different destinies of Odysseus and himself. He announces that Penelope (in contrast to his own wife and murderer Clytemnestra) is the key to Odysseus’ happy nostos and therefore also to his kleos: “O fortunate Odysseus, master mariner and soldier, blessed son of old Laërtês! The girl you brought home made a valiant wife! True to her husband’s honor [kleos] and her own, Penélopê, Ikários’ faithful daughter! The very gods themselves will sing her story for men on earth – mistress of her own heart, Penélopê! (Od., xxiv, 192–98)138 The translation is Musa’s. Book iii, 420–24 in Fitzgerald’s translation of the Aeneid. The lines in Virgil’s text are iii, 308–12. Fairclough gives us: “Are you a real form, a real messenger, coming to me, goddess-born? Are you alive? Or if the light of life has left you, where is Hector?” 138 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray has: “Happy son of Laertes, Odysseus of many 136 137

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In the Odyssey, Penelope’s kleos is rendered deathless; one of the poem’s raisons-d’être is, in Murray’s version of the above, to be a “song full of delight in honor of constant Penelope.” Towards the end of the poem, Agamemnon thus introduces and defines the story that we have been listening to. Pucci notes that the Odyssey’s circular movements do not come full circle: Through its use of the epithet polutropos, which replaces the name of Odysseus in Od. 1.1 and suggests that the return of the hero is made up of many voyages (turns), and of the epithet hupotropos, “turning back,” which is Odysseus’ own description of his return (Od. 22.35), the text unambiguously undercuts the metaphysical myth of a “return to the same.”139

Pucci’s reading pays special attention to the fact that the poem’s opening does not introduce its hero with the usual epithets, polumêtis or polumechanos (‘resourceful’ and ‘inventive’);140 instead, Odysseus is characterised as polutropos, ‘a man of many turns, much-turned, much-travelled’: “engaged in a movement of re-turn (hupotropos, Od. 22.35) that will not end with his landing at Ithaca [...] his journey has already been a sort of centrifugal movement, endlessly drifting away from home.”141 Odysseus is a character of spiral motion. More than any other Homeric hero, the figure of Odysseus has indeed travelled again and become not the literary homecomer but the wanderer par excellence. In Pucci’s reading, he is even “conscious of having to journey again.”142 Among long narrative poems, Quint identifies a tendency to challenge the epic’s teleological narration of winners in poems that reject Iliadic linearity and instead take as their point of departure the Odyssean wandering.143 The devices, truly full of all excellence was the wife you won. How good of understanding was flawless Penelope, daughter of Icarius! How well she kept before her the image of Odysseus, her wedded husband! Therefore the fame of her excellence shall never perish, but the immortals shall make among men on earth a song full of delight in honor of constant Penelope.” 139 Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, 128. The opening line’s polutropos is by Fitzgerald translated as “skilled in all ways of contending”; Murray has: “of many devices.” 140 The epithets of Odysseus include: polumêtis (‘of many counsels’), polumêchanos (‘resourceful’), poluainos (‘much-praised’), polutlas (‘much enduring’), ptoliporthos (‘destroyer of cities’), talasiphronos (‘patient of mind’) and poluphronos (‘inventive’). 141 Pucci, Odysseus Polutropos, 14. 142 Odysseus Polutropos, 14. 143 Quint, Epic and Empire, 34–40.

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tradition of romances as epitomised by Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1483) and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516–32) focuses on adventure and endless digression, on tempting women, enchanted islands and supernatural incidents, and this to such a degree that, though they may see themselves as descendants of the Odyssey, it does not seem pertinent to identify these Renaissance tales of Orlando as participants in the tradition discussed here. When choosing their literary forefathers, the twentieth-century poets with epic ambitions ignore or (in the case of Pound) even discard this tradition of romance.144 When reading the Odyssey, they do not turn to the elements of the adventurous and picaresque; instead, they focus on the topoi of homecoming and the visit to the underworld, both of which are read primarily through Dante, so that a moral angle and dimensions of individual conversion become foregrounded. In a passage from Odyssey 10, cited by Pound in Greek in Canto 39 and translated as the first lines of Canto 47, Circe tells Odysseus to “go the road / to hell” to seek advice from Tiresias in Hades. Circe here predicts that Odysseus is to undertake another journey: namely, the visit to the underworld that follows in Book 11, the Nekuia. When Odysseus tells King Alcinous of this episode, Circe’s advice has already been taken, and Odysseus is able to tell of his visit to the underworld. The journey to the region of the dead is the episode with which the Cantos open: Circe’s speech in Odyssey 10 is given in Cantos 39 and 47 and the action that follows in Odyssey 11 in Canto 1. Consequently we have already been to Hades with Odysseus and Tiresias in Canto 1 when we receive an admonition to journey to hell in Canto 39. The visit in the book’s opening pages was indeed “aforesaid by Circe” (I/3).145 Circe’s is a foretelling of “another journey” completed within the poem: a journey to Tiresias, who prophesies not only Odysseus’ nostos (in Pound’s synthesis, “‘Odysseus / ‘Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, / ‘Lose all companions’”146), but also yet “another journey”:147 144 Pound does so quite explicitly when discussing the romances of the cinquecento in The Spirit of Romance (1910; London: Peter Owen, 1970): “In Italy the songs of deed are not supposed to be indigenous, and after one has fallen back in sheer exhaustion from the later Italian embroiderings on them, one might wish they had never been imported” (66); “if any modern really enjoys reading, Bembo, Poliziano, Sanazzaro, Ariosto, or even Tasso, let him stand forth and praise them” (238). 145 Fitzgerald gives us “foretold for us by Kirkê”; Murray “of which Circe had told us.” The line is Od., xi, 22. 146 I/4–5.

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But after you have dealt out death – in open combat or by stealth – to all the suitors, go overland on foot, and take an oar, until one day you come where men have lived with meat unsalted, never known the sea, nor seen seagoing ships, with crimson bows and oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight. The spot will soon be plain to you, and I can tell you how: some passerby will say, “What winnowing fan is that upon your shoulder?” Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf and make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon: a ram, a bull, a great buck boar; turn back, and carry out pure hekatombs at home to all wide heaven’s lords, the undying gods, to each in order. Then a seaborne death soft as this hand of mist will come upon you when you are wearied out with rich old age, your country folk in blessed peace around you. And all this shall be just as I foretell. (Od., xi, 118–37)148

Fitzgerald makes Tiresias promise Odysseus a “seaborne death”; Murray gives him a death “away from the sea.” W.B. Stanford translates Homer’s ex halos with “off the sea” and observes that the phrase is ambiguous.149 It is not clear how Odysseus will die, only that before doing so, he will travel again. Quint stresses that a death by water robs the epic hero of a grave 147 “Another journey” is Murray’s translation of “allên [...] hodon” at Od., x, 490. Fitzgerald has “a strange way round.” 148 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray has: “But when you have slain the suitors in your halls, whether by guile or openly with the sharp sword, then go abroad, taking a shapely oar, until you come to men that know nothing of the sea and eat their food unmixed with salt, who in fact know nothing of ships with ruddy cheeks, or of shapely oars, which are a vessel’s wings. And I will tell you a most certain sign, which will not escape you: when another wayfarer, on meeting you, shall say that you have a winnowing fan on your stout shoulder, then fix in the earth your shapely oar and make handsome offerings to the lord Poseidon – a ram, and a bull, and a boar that mates with sows – and depart for your home and offer sacred hecatombs to the immortal gods who hold broad heaven, to each one in due order. And death shall come to you yourself away from the sea, the gentlest imaginable, that shall lay you low when you are overcome with sleek old age, and your people shall be dwelling in prosperity around you. This is the truth that I tell you.” 149 W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954): 87–88.

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monument.150 In the next chapter, we shall see Dante give Odysseus a death by water in a passage that Eliot developed in an eventually discarded passage of The Waste Land. The oar carried inland epitomises Odysseus’ last journey: it involves a final definition of home, and death. In another meeting in Hades, the oar refers explicitly to the tomb. Odysseus meets the dead but unburied sailor Elpenor, who asks to be buried. In Pound’s Canto 1 the passage is rendered thus: “Heap up mine arms, be tomb by sea-bord, and inscribed: “A man of no fortune, and with a name to come. “And set my oar up, that I swung mid fellows.” (I /4)

Pound is translating Homer through Andreas Divus’ Renaissance text in Latin, but adds to the text a feature from later developments in printing: italics set off the words that are to be inscribed on Elpenor’s tomb. Homer’s text in Fitzgerald’s translation goes: and build a cairn for me above the breakers – an unknown sailor’s mark for men to come. Heap up the mound there, and implant upon it the oar I pulled in life with my companions. (Od., xi, 75–78)

Murray has: heap up a mound for me on the shore of the gray sea, in memory of an unlucky man, that men yet to be may know of me. Do this for me, and fix upon the mound my oar with which I rowed in life in the company of my comrades.

A mound, a tomb, with the oar as a mark or a sign: these we find in the Greek, in the Latin, and in our translations.151 Neither Homer nor Divus considers that words may be inscribed on Elpenor’s grave. The inscription is Pound’s. Quint, Epic and Empire, 29. The Latin text of Andreas Divus that Pound is translating has: “Sepulchrumque mihi accumula cani litore maris, / Viri infelicis, et cuius apud posteros fama sit: / Haecque mihi perfice, figeque in sepulchro remum, / Quo et vivus remigabam existens cum meis sociis.” As quoted in Pound, “Early Translators of Homer,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1954): 259. 150 151

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We find a similar passage in Homer – that in which Hector imagines Achilles’ tomb at Hellespont. Fitzgerald’s translation of the passage goes: One day a man on shipboard, sailing by on the wine-dark sea, will point landward and say: “There is the death-mound of an ancient man, a hero who fought Hector and was slain.” Someone will say that someday. And the honour won by me here will never pass away. (Il., vii, 87–91)

Murray has: And some one shall some day say even of men that are yet to be, as he saileth in his many-benched ship over the wine-dark sea: “This is a barrow of a man that died in the olden days, whom on a time in the midst of his prowess glorious Hector slew.” So shall some man say, and my glory [kleos] shall never die.

The imagined words of the passer-by are presented in the form of direct speech. The difference between Fitzgerald’s and Murray’s translation is one of deixis; Fitzgerald’s speaker is explicitly pointing landwards from the sea with his “there is the death-mound” and cannot possibly be reading out words inscribed on the mound on land. Murray’s “this is a barrow of a man that died” is less clearly distant from the actual mound. Nagy argues that “Hektor is described as imagining the words that implicitly call out from what sounds like an imaginary epitaph”: “when Hektor is imagining that someone will say the words that he proceeds to quote, these words follow formal conventions that can be verified on the basis of genuinely attested early poetic inscriptions.”152 The real (imaginary, of course, since it is Hector himself who is eventually killed by Achilles) kleos of Hector will be established by the epic poem itself, by the very voice that in the song pronounces the words which the Trojan hero hopes will be spoken by posterity. Pound’s epithet of Elpenor is presented as an inscription, in italics, within the representation of the sailor’s direct words. As we shall see, Pound’s poem makes explicit use of typographical features; his poetry is not composed solely for the ear but also for the eye. Murray and Fitzgerald both present the remark of Homer’s passer-by within quotation marks and introduce it with a colon. Pound takes this usage – already removed from that experienced by 152

Nagy, Homeric Questions, 36 (emphasis Nagy’s).

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the audience of an oral epic-in-performance – one step further, as he adds an inscription and prints it in italics, thus rendering explicit the features of printing that Murray and Fitzgerald use without drawing any attention to them. The line on Elpenor’s tomb is given a life of its own within the Cantos. In the Pisan Cantos, “of no fortune and with a name to come” refers to the poet’s own predicament and to his fellow prisoners in the D T C camp, who are “men of no fortune and with a name to come” (LXXX /528). Pound here combines the line with another Homeric phrase, which is likewise rendered formulaic and used to epitomise the poet’s circumstances in Pisa: Odysseus’ naming himself “no-man” (“ou tis”) in order to escape from Poluphemos.153 Within the Cantos a web is created of phrases, many of which are (rewritten) citations, which achieve significance by their very inclusion and repetition in the poem. They are repeated and recombined in the poem in such a way as to suggest that, like the Homeric epics, Pound’s epic is constructed of formulae. Pucci’s words, “all the epic language plays constantly with references in a ludic display of intertextual noddings, winks, and gestures,” describe Pound’s poetic as well as Homer’s. In Canto 23, the oar returns as Pound employs Tiresias’ prophecy of Odyssean homecoming and closure once again in the formula “where a man might carry his oar up” (XXIII / 108). With this new variant, Homer’s imperative (“take an oar”) becomes an internalised expression of longing: of the modern wanderer’s desire to remain with the beloved in an earthly paradise in the Ligurian hills, and, perhaps, of his knowledge that he will have to travel again. 

The Iliad’s warriors Hector and Achilles return as rival fishermen in Omeros. Walcott’s Hector is not killed in combat but dies in a road accident. While in the Iliad we heard Hector fantasise about a grave for Achilles, Walcott follows Homer in assigning a grave to Hector himself: At night, the island reversed its elements, the heron of a quarter-moon floated from Hector’s grave, rain rose upwards from the sea (X L V I , iii)

153

See L X X I V /439; 440; 444; 453; 460; L X X X /527; 528; 430 and L X X X I X /594.

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45

The drafts of the poem contain a variant for the second line of this tercet; initially, the moon did not float “from Hector’s grave” but simply “above” the island. In the early versions of the poem, Hector does not die but leaves St. Lucia to work in Florida. Once Walcott decides that Hector is to die as did his Iliadic counterpart, he introduces a character by the Cyclopean name of Maljo–Statics, who eventually emigrates to the U S A ; at one stage of composition, it was, however, Hector and not Maljo–Statics who had let himself be corrupted by hard work in the U S A and whose “woman now is the dollar” (LXIII , i).154 Chapters 45–46, which tell of Hector’s death, are added to the poem at a late stage of composition. For Hector to die is an end that fits the Homeric parallel. So does his grave. As “from Hector’s grave” replaces “above it,” Omeros conforms to the narration of the Iliad, whose closing lines describe Hector’s funeral. Omeros thus joins in the Iliadic irony; like the Iliad itself, it now assigns to Hector the grave that in Iliad 7, we had overheard Hector himself preparing for Achilles. Fitzgerald’s Iliad ends: In a golden urn they put the bones, shrouding the urn with veiling of soft purple. Then in a grave dug deep they placed it and heaped it with great stones. The men were quick to raise the death-mound, while in every quarter look-outs were posted to ensure against an Achaean surprise attack. When they had finished raising the barrow, they returned to Ilium, where all sat down to banquet in his honour in the hall of Priam king. So they performed the funeral rites of Hector, tamer of horses. (Il., xxiv, 796–804)155

154 When Chapters 45 and 46, and with them Hector’s death, are included in the poem, the name of Hector in what is now L X I I I , i is replaced by that of Maljo–Statics. Chapter 20, which narrates the story of Maljo’s election campaign, is one of the last passages to be added to the poem: although a digression from the main story-line, it serves the function of providing a referent for the mention of Maljo–Statics in Chapter 63. 155 Fitzgerald’s translation. Murray gives us: The bones they took and placed in a golden urn, covering them over with soft purple robes, and quickly laid the urn in a hollow grave, and covered it over with great close-set stones. Then with speed heaped they the mound, and round about were watchers set on every side, lest the well-greaved Achaeans should set upon

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Hector’s funeral is described in Omeros as well, and the oar that the Odyssey associated with the grave and death reappears. It is Achille who stands by his rival’s coffin and who, with a focus on negation similar to Walcott’s characterisation of Achille through a series of negations in LXIV , i, does not pronounce the prayer that Walcott prints:156 Now his voice strengthened. He said: “Mate, this is your spear,” and laid the oar slowly, the same way he had placed the parallel oars in the hull of the gommier the day the African swift and its shadow raced. And this was the prayer that Achille could not utter: “The spear that I give you, my friend, is only wood. Vexation is past. I know how well you treat her. You never know my admiration, when you stood crossing the sun at the bow of the long canoe with the plates of your chest like a shield; I would say any enemy so was a compliment (X L V I , i)

Achille places an oar in Hector’s coffin and compares it to a spear. It is thus implied that behind the apparently plain oar of the West Indian fisherman lies the weapon of an Iliadic hero. A heroic world of spears and battles has apparently been deflated to one of modest wooden oars: colonial warfare has become peaceful West Indian humility. The parallel, however, involves irony, since the oar that replaces the warrior’s spear remains one of the faithful metonyms of epic poetry. The oar connects the sea to death and associates the funeral of Omeros’ Hector with the tomb of Pound’s Elpenor, and Omeros with the Cantos and the Odyssey. In the reappearance of the oar, poetry reveals itself as inherently and inescapably allusive and formulaic. Through a repetition that is more than just reference, the oar epitomises the poetic process. If literature is “nothing else but” allusion, it is the allusiveness of recurrence that renders the oar poetic. When, at Hector’s funeral, Achille’s battle is over, the echo of Pound’s them before the time. And when they had piled the barrow they went back, and gathering together duly feasted a glorious feast in the palace of Priam, the king fostered of Zeus. On this wise held they funeral for horse-taming Hector. 156 See p. 259 below for the full quotation from L X I V , i.

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formula for peacefulness, “where a man might carry his oar up,” resonates in Walcott’s simple line: Achille had carried an oar to the church and propped it outside with the red tin. (X L V I , i)

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2

Dante and Christian Epic

So how should I presume? — Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

LO MIO MAESTRO E ’L MIO AUTORE: THE AUTHORITY OF A CHRISTIAN EPIC

T

of Dante’s Hell is the Malebolge, literally the ‘evil pockets’. In the eighth of these ten bolge, Dante–pilgrim and his guide, Virgil, meet two Homeric heroes, Odysseus and Diomedes. Dante is filled with desire to talk to the Greeks, but Virgil tells him bluntly to step back and leave the talking to him: HE EIGHTH CIRCLE

ma fa che la tua lingua si sostegna.

but see to it your tongue refrains from speaking.

Lascia parlare a me, ch’i’ ho concetto ciò che tu vuoi; ch’ei sarebbero schivi,

Leave it to me to speak, for I know well what you would ask; perhaps since they were Greeks perch’ e’ fuor greci, forse del tuo detto.” they might not pay attention to your words.” (Inf., xxvi, 72–75)

Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio do not find satisfactory any of the many hypotheses proposed to explain why the Greeks might ignore words addressed to them by Dante.1 According to one such thesis, the need for Virgil to mediate between Odysseus and Dante arises from a simple language barrier separating Dante from the Greeks; this is indeed the Commedia’s first depiction of a conversation with a character who speaks neither Italian nor Latin. When in the following canto Dante meets his contemporary, Guido Bosco & Reggio, “Commentary,” in Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, ed. Bosco & Reggio, vol. 1: 386. 1

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da Montefeltro, Virgil urges the pilgrim to open the conversation: “You speak to him; this one is Italian.”2 Dante’s translator Mark Musa has here chosen to stress with italics the deixis of personal pronoun and demonstrative determiner, thus inserting an implied comparison into Dante’s line: “this one is Italian” presupposes that “that one,” a previously encountered soul, was not. That other shadow is presumably Odysseus. Musa’s translation thus provides support for the argument that Virgil addresses Odysseus because, unlike the pilgrim, he understands Greek. More importantly, however, Virgil’s mediation between Odysseus and Dante reflects the relation of lineage that links the three characters and the poems that they represent. Dante and the Middle Ages did not have direct access to the Homeric poems. As we shall see, the story that Odysseus is about to narrate demonstrates that Dante’s knowledge of Greek epic is indebted to a number of Latin texts: the Aeneid, Statius’ Achilleid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as well as Horace’s Epistles and Cicero’s De officiis.3 As the pilgrim and his guide find themselves face to face with the Greek heroes, the text mimics Dante’s approach to Homer and the dependency of his version of Odysseus’ story on classical Latin texts, including Virgil’s Aeneid. Through his own epic, which opened with six books modelled on the Odyssey followed by six Iliadic ones, Virgil had played a significant role in the transmission of the Homeric poems, thus assuming the very role that he takes on in the Malebolge meeting: with him, classical Rome mediates between medieval Italy and ancient Greece, just as the Aeneid stands between Dante–poet and Homer and between Dante–pilgrim and Odysseus. Virgil’s medieval reception saw the Roman poet as a prophetic figure; his pages were believed to hold the secrets of the future. More than any other poet, Virgil embodied the figure of the vates.4 The reason for this conception of the Latin poet could be found in his poetry: the Aeneid does indeed ex2 Inf., xxvii, 33. The Italian goes: “Parla tu; questi è latino.” By “latino,” Dante intends la lingua del sì, Italian; Latin he calls “grammar.” De Vulgari Eloquentia (I, i, 2–3) defines the vernacular as “that which infants acquire from those around them when they first begin to distinguish sounds” and adds that there “also exists another kind of language, at one remove from us, which the Romans called ‘gramatica’.” Dante Alighieri, De Vulgari Eloquentia, tr. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1996): 3. 3 Giorgio Padoan, Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse: Tradizione classica e intendimento medievale in Dante (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1977): 170, 178; Bruno Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale (1942; Rome & Bari: Laterza, 1983): 92. 4 See Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (1595), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1973): 98.

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plicitly predict the future of Rome and the fortune of Augustus. Since the poet had already included such prophecies in his text, medieval readers found it natural to take this procedure one step further and identify a prophecy of the birth of Christ in the fourth Eclogue.5 Ronald R. MacDonald contends that, by popular accounts of Dante’s time, Virgil was implicitly seen as escaping time and history through his prophetic gifts, as avoiding the very fate that Dante’s conception of [his] character seems to resubject him to, the tragic fate of having been born too soon, of missing through an accident of history the New Dispensation in the form of a saving belief in Christ.6

The portrait of Virgil provided by Dante differs largely from that of the vates; unlike that of his contemporaries, Dante’s Virgil is not a Christian prophet but primarily a pagan poet of epic. He is allowed, and is able, to accompany the pilgrim, but only to the Earthly Paradise. From here he must return to Limbo, where he and other pagan poets dwell in a state of insatiable desire. The task of guiding the pilgrim through Paradise is assigned to Beatrice. The characteristics of Dante’s reading of Virgil are made clear from the pilgrim’s very first meeting with the Roman poet in the dark forest in Inferno 1. The pilgrim asks the figure before him whether the latter is alive and receives this response: Rispuosemi: “Non omo, omo già fui, e li parenti miei furon lombardi, mantoani per patrïa ambedui.

“No longer living man, though once I was,” he said, “and my parents were from Lombardy, both of them were Mantuans by birth.

Nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi, e vissi a Roma sotto ’l buono Augusto nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi.

I was born, though somewhat late, sub Julio, and lived in Rome when good Augustus reigned, when still the false and lying gods were worshipped.

Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia, poi che ’l superbo Ilïón fu combusto. (Inf., i, 67–75)

I was a poet and sang of that just man, son of Anchises, who sailed off from Troy after the burning of proud Ilium.

It is with a keyword from the Aeneid, patrïa, that Virgil refers to Mantua, the native town of his parents. Quint identified patribus/patrium as central terms Ae., i, 257–302; vi, 756–886; viii, 626–731. Ronald R. MacDonald, The Burial-Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1987): 68. 5 6

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in Virgilian epic. The elaboration of the epic performed by Virgil’s Aeneid had rendered the genre both political and ideological. Virgil’s text is associated closely not only with empire, but also, according to Quint, with “Western male rationality and historical identity.”7 The focus on the patrium epitomises the intimate association of the father-figure and the state; Augustus would indeed be referred to as pater patriae.8 From Mantua, the focus of Virgil’s speech moves south, to Rome; from the local we are taken to the national and imperial. The adverbial phrase “sub Iulio” serves as an indicator of both time and place, positioning Virgil’s birth during the historical reign of Julius Caesar and within the geographical expanse of the Roman Empire. Julius Caesar was the last leader of the senatorial Republic; shortly before his assassination he was proclaimed dictator for life; posthumously he was made a god. His family, the Caesars of the Julia clan, maintained that they could trace their line from Aeneas’ son Iulus, and through him back to Venus, a claim that Caesar rendered an integral part of his propaganda.9 In the Aeneid, Virgil suggests that lineage connects Julius and Iulus; Dante’s introduction of Julius in the opening canto of Inferno consequently establishes a link to the Aeneid and its prophecies of a grand future for Iulus and Julius alike: [...] From that comely line The Trojan Caesar comes, to circumscribe Empire with Ocean, fame with heaven’s stars. Julius his name, from Iulus handed down10

Back in the dark forest, Virgil goes on to inform the pilgrim that he lived in Rome under the reign of Caesar’s adoptive son, “’l buono Augusto”: Octavian, who became the first Roman emperor under the name and title of Augustus. From the time of the poem’s composition, Augustus had been associated with the Aeneid: Servius’ commentary on Virgil’s epic had explicitly defined the intention of Virgil as being “to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus through his ancestors.”11 Quint, Epic and Empire, 45. Le Glay, Voisin & Le Bohec, A History of Rome, 225. 9 A History of Rome, 139–45. 10 Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, i, 384–87. The lines in Virgil are i, 284–88, rendered by Fairclough as “From this noble line shall be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall extend his empire to the ocean, his glory to the stars, a Julius, name descended from great Iulus!” 11 Quoted in A.J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scholar, 1984): 15. 7 8

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Finally, the pilgrim, and Dante’ readers, learn that the subject-matter of the Roman poet’s song was that of Aeneas, whom the text associates with the burning of “proud Ilium” – Troy. At the very opening of Dante’s poem, pride is associated with pagan epic, and it is implied that this is a quality which is ultimately punished. Through the depiction of Odysseus’ shipwreck, Dante will integrate this theme into the Commedia’s elaboration of the epic genre. With Virgil’s presentation of himself and his work, the theme of Troy, which was the quintessential matter of (Homeric) epic, and that of Rome and empire, the stuff of Virgilian epic, appear among the first tercets of Dante’s poem. Dante’s guide is the pagan poet of the Roman Empire; his subjectmatter is found in the world of Trojan epic, which consequently becomes Dante’s own point of departure as well. Dante responds with appropriate humility and reverence as he names the poet who stands before him: “Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?,” rispuos’ io lui con vergognosa fronte.

“Are you then Virgil, are you then that fount from which pours forth so rich a stream of words?” I said to him bowing my head modestly.

“O de li altri poeti onore e lume, vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

“O light and honor of the other poets, may my long years of study, and that deep love that made me search your verses, help me now!

Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore, tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore. (Inf., i, 79–87)

You are my teacher, the first of all my authors, and you alone the one from whom I took the beautiful style that was to bring me honor.

With the notion of “fount,” Dante assigns to Virgil the position that our conception of primary and secondary epic assigns to Homer: Virgil is the source from which the “stream of words” springs, the ancestor in whom the family has its roots. The notion takes us back to the Homeric theme of lineage, specifically to the geneê that was concerned with origin and birth. When the pilgrim expresses the hope that his study of and love for Virgil’s work will serve him in the presence of the Roman, the Aeneid itself comes to function as mediator between Dante and Virgil. Virgil’s poem will play the same role in the Malebolge, where Virgil bases his speech to Odysseus on the Aeneid in the hope, he declares, that his “alti versi” (“lofty verses,” Inf., xxvi, 82) have earned him the liberty to speak to the Greeks.

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Dante not only defines Virgil as “maestro” (Musa’s “teacher”), but also as “autore” (‘author’), a term that possessed specific connotations of authority in the Middle Ages. In the fourth treatise of the Convivio, Dante discusses two possible etymologies of autore. According to one, the term derives from auieo, ‘to bind’, a sense that, according to Dante, refers specifically to the art of the poets: “it is applied only to poets who have tied their words together with the art of the muse.”12 The other sense comes from the Greek autentin: “which in Latin is equivalent to ‘worthy of trust and obedience.’ And thus ‘author’, which is derived from this word, is used for any person who deserves to be trusted and obeyed.”13 Classical and biblical writers are such authorities deserving to be trusted and obeyed. A.J. Minnis defines the medieval auctor as “someone not merely to be read but also to be respected and believed” and observes that the “thinking we are investigating seems to be circular: the work of an auctor was a book worth reading; a book worth reading had to be the work of an auctor.”14 As we saw in the previous chapter, it was precisely because oral epic did not depend on the craftsmanship of the individual poet that it held authority. Homer based his authority on that of the muses; Virgil follows Homer and turns to the muse at the opening of his literary epic, rendering the invocation of the muse a literary topos. The implications of its claim, however, remain crucial: the epic is an authoritative text and its authority is bestowed upon the poet by the gods. At the outset of his poem and journey, we now find Dante associating his own authority with that of the Roman poet. The reference to Virgil as autore and therefore as guide is thus a variation on an epic topos; its claim is that Dante’s authority springs from that of Virgil. In a gesture similar 12

Alighieri, Dante’s Convivio, I V , vi, tr. William Walrond Jackson (Oxford: Clarendon,

1909): 210.

Alighieri, Dante’s Convivio, I V , vi, 210. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 10 and 12. Milton returns to Dante’s speech to Virgil with a noticeable amount of daring, as he makes Sin address the pilgrim’s words to Satan: Thou art my father, thou my author, thou My being gav’st me; whom should I obey But thee, whom follow? Thou wilt bring me soon To that new world of light and bliss, among The gods who live at ease, where I shall reign At thy right hand voluptuous, as beseems Thy daughter and thy darling, without end. (PL., ii, 864–70) 13 14

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to the one with which Dante now connects himself to the poet of Rome, to whom the muse had transmitted the Aeneid’s “alti versi,” the oral rhapsodes had based their authority on that assigned to Homer. The insertion into Dante’s poem of a Virgil referred to as patre and autore combines the epic topos of the genos (which the Aeneid had already associated with a paternity reflective of the state) with the authority that was earlier derived from the muses. The muse, upon whose authority the poem depends, becomes a character within that text: a poet–guide. A new poetic topos is thus established, a synecdoche of epic lineage and of genre itself. In Dante’s Virgil, literary genealogy (indeed, genre itself) is personified; when the pilgrim addresses the Roman as “lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore,” genre becomes constitutive of authority. Dante’s meeting with Virgil articulates the literary lineage of genre while personifying the allusive force that establishes literature. We may remember, however, that Derrida’s “law of the law of genre” had identified the moment when a text identifies the genre to which it claims to belong as necessarily escaping that identification. Rendering the older poet a character within the new poem entails a meta-discursive shift; it is through personification that Dante is able to define not only genre but also the dependency of any word on that of a predecessor. A formulation is thus given to the evasive concept of genre, but within Derrida’s “internal pocket larger than the whole.” The Aeneid made the rewriting of stock topoi an explicit characteristic of the epic genre, which was thus transformed into a self-conscious composition, expressly presenting itself as the member of a literary family, a genos. Through such variation on ancient topoi, the secondary literary epic added self-awareness, ideology and the possibility of irony to the primary epic of Homer. When Dante makes Virgil a character within the Commedia, he is personifying the generic continuity that Quint defined as a constituent of secondary epic. This formulation of genre entails a novelisation of the text: a supplementary degree of reflexivity, through which the Commedia transgresses the boundaries of both primary (Homeric) and secondary (Virgilian) epic. The result is a tertiary epic that enacts the mechanisms of genre. Dante’s personification of the relation of genre, his “internal pocket larger than the whole,” thus constitutes the point where the constraints of genre are broken. The enactment of genre created by the meeting with Virgil is a variation on the topical epic concern with lineage, yet the episode no longer belongs to the epic, but is itself constitutive of a new genre: tertiary epic (in Bakhtinian terms, a non-genre).

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The meeting with Odysseus in the Malebolge is not the pilgrim’s first encounter with the world of Greek epic. At the beginning of their journey, Virgil and Dante pass through Limbo. Here they meet Homer, who, sword in hand, leads the way for three Roman auctores: Horace, Ovid and Lucan. Homer is defined as sovereign poet; the sword that he carries identifies Greek epic as martial verse. A few lines later, the superiority of Homer’s song is likened to the flight of the eagle, symbol of the Roman Empire.15 Dante thus presents Homeric epic as the supreme leader of other poets, concerned with war and associated with empire. Homeric song is here seen as representative of the first of the themes that in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante defines as worthy of treatment by the most illustrious of styles: the song of arms.16 Had he not for the time being left their company in Limbo in order to guide Dante, Virgil, too, would have been part of this group of poets led by Homer. Another Roman auctor is likewise, and conspicuously, absent – Statius, to whom Dante has assigned a new and controversial destiny, claiming that the classical poet converted and died a Christian. Accordingly, Statius does not belong among the pagan poets in Limbo; Dante and Virgil Dante’s lines are: Così vid’i’ adunar la bella scola di quel segnor de l’altissimo canto che sovra li altri com’aquila vola. (Inf., iv, 94–96) Musa has: “So I saw gathered there the noble school / of the master singer of sublimest verse / who soars above all others like the eagle.” 16 De Vulgari Eloquentia identifies three kinds of subject matter as worthy of depiction in the most illustrious of styles: salvation, love, and virtue, treated mainly through the description of “prowess in arms, ardour in love, and control of one’s own will” (I I , ii, 7; Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. & tr. Botterill, 53). At Inf., xx, 113, Dante makes Virgil himself refer to the Aeneid as “my high tragedy” (“l’alta mia tragedìa”). Virgil’s epic is thus presented as the epitome of the most illustrious of styles; in De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante defines the tragic as the higher style, whereas the lower style is that of the “comic” (I I , iv, 5; Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. & tr. Botterill, 57). Dante’s use of generic terms is, however, to undergo a development; in The Epistle to Cangrande, which accompanies the presenting of Paradiso to the count of Verona, “comoedia” is defined as a genre that involves a progression from bad to good: “It differs, then, from tragedy in its subjectmatter, in that tragedy at the beginning is admirable and placid, but at the end or issue is foul and horrible […] Whereas comedy begins with sundry adverse conditions, but ends happily.” See Dante Alighieri, “Epistola X: To Can Grande della Scala,” in Dantis Aligherii epistolae: The Letters of Dante, ed. & tr. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920): 200. 15

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meet him among the saved souls expiating their sins in Purgatorio 21. Conversion enables Statius not only to join the two on their journey but also to remain with Dante in the Earthly Paradise after Virgil’s departure. The meeting with Statius is another of the many episodes in the Commedia in which poetic debts and merits are recognised and literary lineage is identified. The Homeric focus on family lineage, traced through the juxtaposition of blood and line, is here shifting towards literary lineage, associating reading and father-figures. The metaphors of origin are not assigned to Homer but to Virgil. To Dante, who had no direct access to the Homeric poems, primary epic remains Virgilian. Virgil’s epic functions as a mediating point of reference on further occasions; when Statius presents himself to the pilgrim and his guide, the Aeneid is foregrounded once again. Statius refers to the influence of Virgil’s poem on his own verse: Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, che mi scaldar, de la divina fiamma onde sono allumati più di mille;

The spark that kindled my poetic ardor came from the sacred flame that set on fire more than a thousand poets: I mean the Aeneid.

de l’Eneïda dico, la qual mamma fummi, e fummi nutrice, poetando: sanz’ essa non fermai peso di dramma. (Purg., xxi, 94–99)

That was the mother of my poetry, the nurse that gave it suck. Without that poem, my verses would have not been worth a thing.17

In Inferno 1, Dante called Virgil “fount”; Statius confirms Dante’s definition with another metaphor of origin: the Aeneid is the flame from which flew the sparks that lit Statius’ own fire. The definition of the Aeneid as “divina fiamma” (Musa’s “sacred flame”) is influenced by Statius’ Thebaid, where reference is made to the “divinam Aeneida”; Statius ends his poem with the wish that the Thebaid may live, not to “rival the divine Aeneid, but [to] follow afar and ever venerate its footsteps.”18 Dante thus makes Statius repeat an adjective that is by convention attached to Virgil’s poem, and specifically so 17

Musa’s translation in Dante’s Purgatory (Indiana Critical Edition; Bloomington: Indiana

U P , 1981).

Statius, Thebaid, xii, 816–17, tr. J.H. Mozley (Loeb Classical Library; London: William Heinemann & Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1969). ‘Divina’ was added to the title of Dante’s poem in the 1555 version printed by the Venetian Giolito. During its early centuries, the poem was distributed under the generic title Commedia (or Comedia). See “1. Titolo” in Valerio Mariani’s “Commedia” entry, in Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. Umberto Bosco (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996), vol. 2: 79–81. 18

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in Statius’ own work. Dante never refers to his own poem as divina, but does call its final canticle sacred: Paradiso, with its vision of God, is Dante’s “sacrato poema” (Par., xxiii, 62), his “poema sacro” (Par., xxv, 1). The rhyme “fiamma – mamma – dramma” connects the meeting with Statius to the tercets in Purgatorio 30 that make up Dante’s reaction to seeing Beatrice again. This is also Dante’s farewell to a Virgil who has already had to leave. Here the same rhyme reappears, albeit in a different sequence: volsimi a la sinistra col respitto col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,

[I] turned to the left – with all the confidence that makes a child run to its mother’s arms, when he is frightened or needs comforting –

per dicere a Virgilio: “Men che dramma di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi: conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma.”

to say to Virgil: “Not one drop of blood is left inside my veins that does not throb: I recognize signs of the ancient flame.”

Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre, Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi (Purg., xxx, 43–51)

But Virgil was not there. We found ourselves without Virgil, sweet father, Virgil to whom for my salvation I gave up my soul.

The metaphor of poetic paternity involved in the address of Virgil as “sweet father” (“dolcissimo patre”) here includes that of maternity, approximating Virgil to the feminine muse of Homeric epic: the pilgrim turns towards Virgil as a child towards its mother. Statius also referred to Virgil’s work with metaphors of maternity: the Aeneid was his mother and his nurse (“mamma / fummi, e fummi nutrice”). Statius’ “divina fiamma” referred to the Aeneid; in Purgatorio 30, “l’antica fiamma” (“the ancient flame”) is Dante’s love for the Beatrice who is now present before him once again. The line echoes Virgil’s own work, as it takes us to Aeneid 4, where Dido realises that she is falling in love with Aeneas. Her words are “agnosco veteris vestigia flammae,” which Fitzgerald renders as “I recognize / the signs of the old flame, of old desire.”19 Dido’s passion will have fatal consequences; Aeneas deserts her, thus escaping the dangers of her passion. Instead, he enters a union of benefit to the state through marriage with the Latin princess Lavinia. Upon realising that she has been betrayed, Dido commits suicide. Not only the suicidal passion discarded by Virgil but also the political marriage that he celebrates is, 19

The addition of “of old desire” as an apposition of “flame” is Fitzgerald’s own, at iv,

31–32 in his Aeneid. Fairclough’s translation of Ae., iv, 23 goes: “I feel again a spark of that

former flame.”

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however, superseded by Dante’s carità. In the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice is to submit the pilgrim, her dedicated lover, to a thorough moral cross-examination, eventually making him confess and repent his sins. Once he has wept before her, Dante’s love for Beatrice, the force and originally physical nature of which had resurfaced as he recognised the “signs of the ancient flame,” is converted into a new love of God. At the threshold of Paradise, Dante compares his own passion to that of Dido, in a final gesture acknowledging Virgilian epic as he is about to leave it behind. Virgil has guided Dante to the Earthly Paradise, but can accompany him no further. To Dante, the authority of the pagan epic model remains circumscribed; the authority that Dante is about to claim for himself and his poem exceeds that which Virgil assumed when he told the story of Rome and her mythical foundation. In the final canticle, Dante’s poem will depict a paradisiacal vision of God. In this context, the example and parentage of Virgil no longer suffice as guarantees of the poet’s authority. Already in the opening cantos, we were told that authorities beyond Virgil were involved in the journey and that these had granted Virgil the mandate to guide Dante, and Dante the permission to undertake the journey. The initiative was taken by “tre donne benedette”:20 the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucy, and Beatrice, of whom the last had descended to Limbo to ask Virgil help her friend find his way out of the dark forest. Behind Virgil’s literary guidance, Dante places divine authority. When the Infernal boatman Charon is unwilling to admit the living pilgrim aboard his ferry, Virgil may thus choose to ignore his protests: E ’l duca lui: “Caron, non ti crucciare: vuolsi così colà dove si puote ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare.” (Inf., iii, 94–96)

And my guide, “Charon, this is no time for anger! It is so willed, there where the power is for what is willed; that’s all you need to know.”

Towards the end of the journey, a new mandate is bestowed upon the pilgrim, this one granted directly by the highest of sources: apostolic saints tell Dante to reproduce in writing what he sees and learns in Paradise. After a prolonged theological examination conducted by the saints Peter, James and John in Paradiso 24–27, Peter admonishes the pilgrim to tell the world what has been revealed to him. Already in Paradiso 24 John had revealed to Dante that his body had remained on earth after his death, thus settling a theological dispute. The pilgrim is told to carry this information back to the world: 20

Inf., ii, 124. Musa: “three such gracious ladies who are blessed.”

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“explain this to your world when you go back.”21 Peter S. Hawkins notes: “Instead of a biblical proof text about John’s body, the poet offers the saint’s ipssisima [sic] verba!”22 As the saint tells him to reveal what he has seen, the pilgrim becomes not only poet but also (self-appointed) prophet. At the end of the sequence, Peter expresses disgust at his followers in the Papacy. This verdict, too, is one that the Apostle wants Dante to reveal to the world: “open your mouth down there / and do not hide what I hide not from you.”23 Hawkins defines this passage as “a tour de force of self-authorization”: “Dante charges himself through the figure of St. Peter to produce his own Book of Revelation”; indeed, the “disciple now called by Christ to feed his sheep, to be the church’s rock, to hold the keys of a kingdom against which the powers of hell cannot prevail, is none other than Dante.”24 At this stage, the authority of Virgil, the epic poet of Rome, has been replaced entirely by that bestowed upon the poet–pilgrim by the apostles. 

The Commedia’s elaboration of the epic genre transforms it radically: with Dante’s poem, the epic becomes both novelised (or tertiary) and Christian. The novelisation is achieved through the meeting with the paternal poet– guide: an enactment of the mechanisms and relations of genre that takes the epic genre to a new level of reflexivity. The Homeric focus on family lineage, which with Virgil became a concern over paternity as a mirror of the state and empire, is rewritten in the meetings with poetic father-figures, meetings in which the poet defines his own artistic lineage. The meeting with Virgil thus signifies not only genre but also literature. A new epic topos to be rewritten by would-be descendants has now been added to the genre. By breaking its bounds and rendering it a non-genre, Dante’s augmentation of the epic has ensured its survival. Through the pilgrim’s meeting with Virgil, Dantean epic has outlived the Aeneid. With the addition of the poet’s confrontation of his own sins and a resultant conversion as well as a vision of Paradise, he has also transformed Par., xxv, 129; Musa’s translation in Dante’s Paradise (Indiana Critical Edition; Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984). The Italian goes: “e questo apporterai nel mondo vostro.” 22 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 92. 23 Par., xxvii, 65–66. The Italian has “apri la bocca, / e non asconder quel ch’io non ascondo.” 24 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 35 and 34. 21

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our expectations of the genre. The second step in Dante’s transformation of the epic genre becomes the Christian reading of the Homeric/Virgilian journeys to the Underworld, which are rewritten with a new focus on introspection, repentance and conversion. As was the case in Homeric epic, authority remains a crucial aspect of Dante’s narrative, not least because the claims Dante makes exceed those of his predecessors. When he appoints Virgil his autore, Dante claims that his own authority springs from his relation to Virgil’s text. In the final canticle he will base his authority on a mandate received from apostolic saints. He thus makes more audacious claims for his own authority than does any predecessor. The final steps, the vision of Paradise and the self-appointment as prophet, are taken without any reference to the Virgilian model. Instead, Dante bases himself on the authority of Scripture. The revolutionary nature of that final claim is largely overlooked by modern descendants, who tend to focus on the rewriting of what become the quintessential Dantean topoi: the meeting with Virgil and the visit to the underworld.

PRESUMPTION AND DEATH BY WATER On their way from Troy to a new homeland in Italy in Aeneid 3, Aeneas and his fellow Trojans arrive on the island inhabited by Polyphemus, Homer’s one-eyed Cyclops, who killed a number of Odysseus’ men.25 Here they meet Achaemeides, a Greek soldier left behind by Odysseus, and are warned of the imminent Cyclopic danger. The Trojans are thus able to benefit from the experience of the Greeks and avoid the danger that befell Odysseus’ crew: they hurry to leave the island, taking Achaemeides with them. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid provides a hasty and parodic summary of the Aeneid’s narrative of Aeneas’ journey to Italy, to which he adds his own variations on the story. One of Ovid’s additions is another Greek survivor of Troy, Macareus, placed on the Italic coast off Circe’s island. Ovid’s Macareus meets Virgil’s Achaemeides and tells the latter of his adventures in the service of Odysseus after escaping from Polyphemus. A memorable part of this time was spent with Circe, in whose service Ovid places a number of girls not found in Homer’s version of the episode. Pound’s depiction in Canto 39 of how Odysseus and his men “all heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat 25

See Od., ix, 105 ff. and Ae., iii, 613 ff.

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leopards” (XXXIX /193) thus picks up from Ovid’s version of the tale rather than from Homer’s. According to Ovid’s Macareus, Odysseus and his men spent a year with Circe. Eventually their captain decided that it was time to leave: But when we had lost the habit of moving from place to place, and had become slow and settled, we were ordered to take to the sea again, to set sail once more. Circe, the Titan’s daughter, had told us of the dangerous voyagings, the long, long journey and the perils of the cruel sea, that remained for us to endure. I confess that I was thoroughly frightened at the prospect and, having reached this shore, firmly remained here.26

This is the last the reader of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses hears of Odysseus’ journey from Troy. When Dante’s Virgil encounters Odysseus in the Malebolge, he is eager to hear the Greek make up for this lack of news and asks Odysseus “where / he lost himself through his own fault, and died.”27 Virgil is aware that the Greek hero set off from Circe’s island, but not of where his journey took him next. Odysseus, on the other hand, turns out to be familiar with the Aeneid, to which he refers as he commences narrating at the very point where Ovid had ended his tale: gittò voce di fuori e disse: “Quando

the flame took on a voice and said: “When I

mi diparti’ da Circe, che sottrasse me più d’un anno là presso a Gaeta, prima che sì Enëa la nomasse,

set sail from Circe who, more than a year, had kept me occupied close to Gaëta (before Aeneas called it by that name),

né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,

not sweetness of a son, not reverence for an aging father, not the debt of love I owed Penelope to make her happy,

vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto e de li vizi umani e del valore (Inf., xxvi, 90–99)

could quench deep in myself the burning wish to know the world and have experience of all man’s vices, of all human worth.

In the words of Giorgio Padoan, “we are faced with a most interesting chain of poetic narration that links Virgil, Ovid and Dante, each author bringing the story forward from the exact point where the preceding poet had left

26 27

Ovid, Metamorphoses, xiv, 436–40, tr. Mary Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955). Inf., xxvi, 84. The Italian has “dove, per lui, perduto a morir gissi.”

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it.”28 Dante’s addition differs from those of his predecessors, however; he does not allow for more sequels, but silences the Greek hero once and for all. Whereas both Virgil and Ovid prepare further Mediterranean adventures for Odysseus, supplying variations and new characters where Homer had allowed for such addition, Dante adds a telos of finality to the story and gives Odysseus his first death by water. Pound attempts to insert himself into this tradition. One of the several functions of his Canto 1 is that of connecting its author to the chain identified by Padoan. Due to the finality of Odysseus’ story in the Commedia, Pound’s Canto 1 cannot, however, continue the story where Inferno 26 had left off; instead, it opens where Dante began, with the departure from Circe. With a rewriting of Odyssey 11 which remains faithful to the Homeric storyline, Pound corrects Dante and once again tells the story the way Homer did: from Circe, Pound’s Odysseus journeys not towards the Strait of Gibraltar but to the underworld. In Hades, new journeys will be predicted, and Odysseus can thus once again enter the cycle of returning interrupted by Dante. In all ten of the Malebolge circles, fraud is punished; the eighth bolgia specifically punishes fraudulent speakers. Odysseus and his Iliadic companion Diomedes are depicted as enveloped in an “antique flame” that is compared to a tongue, suggesting that the sinners are burning in a fire that, through the law of il contrapasso (the rule according to which the punishment will reflect the sin), parallels the ardour of their cunning eloquence. Dante’s classification of Odysseus as a fraudulent speaker may be traced from the Aeneid’s definition of him as “fandi fictor Ulixes,” “fable-forging Ulysses” or “inventor of deceitful speeches.”29 In Ovid, Odysseus is characterised in a similar vein: as the two quarrel over Achilles’ armour, Ovid’s Aiax describes the Ithacan in the following terms: “He finds it safer, then, to engage in wordy battles than in armed combat: for his prowess in oratory matches mine in war and strife, but I am not ready with my tongue, any 28 Padoan, Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse, 178: “ci troviamo di fronte dunque ad una interessantissima concatenazione di narrazioni poetiche, che vede allineati Virgilio–Ovidio– Dante, ciascuno portando innanzi il racconto dal punto preciso dove l’aveva lasciato l’autore precedente.” Aeneas names the island close to Sicily and Circe’s Aeaea “Gaeta” after his nurse at Ae., vii, 1–4. Ovid refers to the island as Gaeta at Met., xiv, 157. 29 Ae., ix, 602. “Fable-forging” is from Fairclough’s translation; “inventor of deceitful speeches” from Jeremy Tambling, Dante and Difference: Writing in the “Commedia” (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1988): 17. Fitzgerald calls Odysseus an “artful talker” (Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, ix, 840).

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more than he is with his hands.”30 Furthermore, Ovid has Odysseus characterise himself through the story of how he persuaded Agamemnon and Clytemnestra to sacrifice their daughter at Aulis: “It was I who, by my words, persuaded the soft-hearted parent to consider the good of the state […] I was also sent to the girl’s mother, who had to be, not encouraged, but cunningly tricked into agreement.”31 Dante’s justification for making Odysseus burn in hell is thus the Greek’s deceitful speech, his notorious ability and tendency to persuade through the forging of a fable. Responding to Virgil’s request that he relate his final journey, Odysseus demonstrates how he persuaded his men to aid him, thus exceeding the limits placed upon man by God, and trespassing beyond the confines of the known world: the Pillars of Hercules, which the Middle Ages placed at the Strait of Gibraltar. Odysseus’ speech to the sailors stresses the Greek concern with lineage and the genos: Considerate la vostra semenza: fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.” (Inf., xxvi, 118–20)

Consider what you came from: you are Greeks! You were not born to live like mindless brutes but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge.’

Musa not only translates the reference to origins in Odysseus’ seductive speech (“what you came from” for the ‘seed’ of semenza) but also provides an identification of this origin (“you are Greeks!”). He thus succeeds in associating the focus on genos/semenza with Greekness and epic origins. Semenza also takes us to Statius’ appraisal of Virgil’s flame, and the seme (‘seed’/ ‘semen’) of his ardour. The metaphor of origin that Dante employs to point to literary inheritance and influence here operates within its Homeric context: that of lineage and the geneê of blood and tribe. The effect of Odysseus’ words is immediate: Li miei compagni fec’ io sì aguti, With this brief exhortation I made my crew con questa orazion picciola, al cammino, so anxious for the way that lay ahead, che a pena poscia li avrei ritenuti; that then I hardly could have held them back; e volta nostra poppa nel mattino, de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo, sempre acquistando dal lato mancino. (Inf., xxvi, 121–26) 30 31

and with our stern turned toward the morning light, we made our oars our wings for that mad flight, gaining distance, always sailing to the left.

Innes’ translation of Met., xiii, 9–12. Innes’ translation of Met., xiii, 187–88 and 193–94.

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The oars that become wings remind us of Tiresias’ prophecy that Odysseus will meet a people who know nothing of the “shapely oars, which are a vessel’s wings.”32 The comparison of the oar and the wing with its juxtaposition of the flight and the sea voyage is thus topical; it is also catachrestic, as the Greek pteron denotes not only the feather but, by metaphoric extension, also the wing and anything like the wing, including oars. The parallel is expanded as Odysseus defines his own final journey as a “mad flight.” In the metaphoric cluster created around the sea voyage and the flight, Freccero sees a reference to Icarus’s flight towards the sun and Daedalus’ construction of a temple to Apollo, which was, according to Virgil, built by “remigium alarum”: the oarage of Daedalus’ wings.33 The association generated by the references to Icarus and Daedalus is one of presumption, likewise invoked by Odysseus’ choice of the adjective “folle,” “mad,” in l. 125. Indeed, Odysseus’ journey is more than just a classical voyage with oars comparable to a flight with wings: it is also “mad.” This keyword is repeated when Dante returns to the theme of Odysseus in Paradiso; from the heights of heaven, the pilgrim watches the point where Odysseus left the known world behind when embarking upon what, on this occasion, Dante chooses to call his “varco / folle”: to Musa his “mad route” (Par., xxvii, 82–83). Virgil’s question to Odysseus, “where / he lost himself through his own fault, and died,” had anticipated the fatality of the story we are to hear, a forewarning corroborated by Odysseus’ own use of the qualifier “folle.” Odysseus’ end comes from a mountain that rises on the horizon before his ship after five months’ sailing on the ocean beyond Gibraltar. This is the Mount of the Earthly Paradise, which Dante and his contemporaries placed at the south pole, beyond the limits of human movement. At the foot of the mountain lies Purgatory. At the opening of the Commedia, the pilgrim found himself in a similar position, in front of the Monte del Bene, which he made a vain attempt to climb. In Freccero’s reading, the experience in the forest teaches Dante that in order to ascend he must first descend; the journey to God goes intra nos. The Dantean Odysseus, by contrast, is the presumptuous pagan, who tries the direct flight, and is punished for it:

32 Murray’s translation. Fitzgerald has: “oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight.” See full quotation on p. 41. 33 Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 16. The phrase “remigium alarum” is used of Daedalus at Ae., vi, 19.

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Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto; Our celebrations soon turned into grief: ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque from the new land there rose a whirling wind e percosse del legno il primo canto. that beat against the forepart of the ship Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l’acque; a la quarta levar la poppa in suso e la prora ire in giù, com’ altrui piacque, infin che ’l mar fu sovra noi richiuso.” (Inf., xxvi, 136–42)

and whirled us round three times in churning waters; the fourth blast raised the stern up high, and sent the bow down deep, as pleased Another’s will. And then the sea was closed again, above us.”

The pagan hero’s admission that his will was subjected to that of “Another” (“altrui”) indicates another crucial Dantean addition to the epic genre: it now includes Scripture and considers the journey intra nos to be imperative. It is the notorious deceitfulness of the Ithacan’s eloquence that enables Dante to place Odysseus specifically in the eighth malebolgia. In De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante discusses the construction of the tower of Babel in terms that remind us of Odysseus’ mad flight: “Incorrigible humanity, therefore, led astray by the giant Nimrod, presumed in its heart to outdo in skill not only nature but the source of its own nature, who is God.”34 The sin of Odysseus is precisely that of Nimrod – leading others astray by persuading them to presume to challenge God. To Dante, however, Odysseus is more than just one among a number of lost souls, each the embodiment of a specific sin and with a story to tell. Odysseus becomes a foil for Dante himself: his last journey provides a parallel to Dante’s own endeavour. The story that Odysseus tells the pilgrim and his readers is not one of fraudulent speech but a tale of presumption: of a mad flight that becomes fatal. Of Odysseus’ death and the references to Icarus and Daedalus invoked by the oars that become wings, Freccero writes: “If Ulysses is shipwrecked and if the wings of Daedalus seem rather to recall Icarus, it is because the regressus that both stories came to represent is, in Dante’s view, philosophical presumption that is bound to end in failure.”35 Projecting that specific character-defect, philosophical presumption bound to end in failure, on to the pagan hero, Dante is able to associate himself with the opposite trait, spiritual humility that is, paradoxically, bound to succeed. 34 35

Botteril’s translation of De Vulgari Eloquentia (I, vii, 4), 15. Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 18.

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The rhyme “cammino – mattino” used in the opening of Odysseus’ speech (at Inf., xxvi, 122 and 124) takes us to the very opening of the poem, where it is used with reference to Dante’s own journey. When the pilgrim is first presented with the project ahead of him, he expresses fear that such a journey may be “folle.” Disturbing questions of presumption and the risk of failure are present to Dante from the very outset: Ma io, perché venirvi? o chi ’l concede? Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono; me degno a ciò né io né altri ’l crede.

But why am I to go? Who allows me to? I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul, neither I nor any man would think me worthy;

Per che, se del venire io m’abbandono, temo che la venuta non sia folle. (Inf., ii, 31–35)

and so, if I should undertake the journey, I fear it might turn out an act of folly –

Via the keyword “folle,” Dante’s own journey is associated with that of Odysseus, and, via the Ithacan’s mad flight, with the presumption and fatal flight of Icarus. That identification, however, is denied and thus apparently overruled by the pilgrim’s protest. Indeed, when both poem and journey begin with an explicit objection on the part of the pilgrim, the wish must be to counter accusations of presumption on the part of both Dante–pilgrim and Dante– poet, who should instead, it is implied, be associated with the opposite quality, humility. Nonetheless, Dante’s denial, “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul,” specifically links him, on the one hand, to the hero of the Aeneid, who visited the underworld in Book 6, and, on the other, to the “man in Christ” who was enraptured to Paradise and whom tradition identifies as Paul himself: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise – whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows – and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter. On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.36

If the denial “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul” specifically and paradoxically links the pilgrim Dante to both Aeneas and Paul’s “man in Christ,” it also 2 Corinthians 12:2–5; New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, revised standard version, ed. Herbert G. May & Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford U P , 1973). 36

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links the poet Dante to the epic poet Virgil and the apostle St Paul. The risk of presumption and failure thus involves all three of the journeys that face the poet–pilgrim: the inner and the outer journeys through the otherworlds, as well as the writing of a poem that combines Virgil’s epic with the Bible. The alleged non-identification is, of course, reversed by the journey undertaken in the poem. Dante–pilgrim indeed becomes an Aeneas within a poem written by a Dante who places himself next in line after Homer and Virgil. With Paradiso and the inclusion of the vision of God, both epic poems are superseded, with Dante–pilgrim becoming a Paulinian “man of Christ” and Dante–poet the writer of divine words of prophecy, in an Auerbachian figura adding a New Testament to the Old one constituted by the texts of antiquity.37 Indeed, the initial denial explicitly identifies the two traditions with which the poem claims affiliation and which it will combine: heroic epic poetry and biblical writing. Behind the apparent modesty reigns a wholly different mode; Hawkins feels a need to confess that “boldness and risk infuse Dante’s entire enterprise, a sense of almost reckless presumption that never ceases to astonish me.”38 Freccero reads the story of Dante’s Odysseus as the depiction of philosophical presumption bound to end in failure; Tambling sees Odysseus as Dante’s defeated alter ego: “Ulysses begins as the Other to Dante, but becomes his mirror […] making it possible to leave him behind.”39 Within the fictional universe of the poem, Dante’s aborted ascent of the Monte del Bene in Inferno 1 parallels Odysseus’ mad flight, which ends in shipwreck. On the level of writing, the parallel is between the mad flight and the risk involved in Dante’s ambitious project: the writing of an epic that combines the connotations of generic supremacy expressed in the admiration for Homer and Virgil with the writing of Paradise and the vision of God. In the second book of De Vulgari Eloquentia, presumption is discussed as an issue in poetic composition. Dante rages against those who presume to write of the most illustrious of topics without sufficient technique or knowledge: And this should suffice to refute the foolish claims of those who, devoid of technique and knowledge, relying on ingenuity alone, lay hands on the noblest topics, those that should be sung in the highest style. Let them lay

37

Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Neue Dantestudien (Istanbul: Istanbuler Schriften, 1944):

11–71. 38 39

Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 11. Tambling, Dante and Difference, 18.

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such presumption aside; and, if nature of their own incompetence has made them geese, let them not try to emulate the star-seeking eagle.40

The likening of the eagle that seeks the stars to the song “sung in the highest style” reminds us of the Homer of the “altissimo canto,” whose song was compared to the eagle in Limbo.41 The risk of presumption, epitomised by Odysseus’ mad flight, confronts poets, too, especially those who, like Dante himself, attempt to walk in Homer’s footsteps. Paradise Lost performs a similar concatenation of the presumption ascribed to a character and the poet’s ambition. Milton’s character of extreme presumption is, of course, Eve, defined in De Vulgari Eloquentia as “presumptuosissimam Evam.”42 In Milton’s reading, Odysseus’ mad flight is paralleled by the “fatal trespass done by Eve” (PL., ix, 889). When Milton has Adam address Eve with “bold deed thou hast presumed, advent’rous Eve” (ix, 921), he combines a central term from the poet’s invocation of the muse and its characterisation of his song as “advent’rous” (i, 13) with one from the poet’s admission of the daring involved in his telling of heavenly matters: “Into the heav’n of heav’ns I have presumed” (vii, 13). Milton also adopts Dante’s keyword ‘folly’ and has the Son employ it of man43 and Adam of himself. In the latter instance, ‘folly’ is associated with a metaphorical departure of a vessel that reminds us, again, of Dante’s Odysseus: Greatly instructed I shall hence depart, Greatly in peace of thought, and have my fill Of knowledge, what this vessel can contain; Beyond which was my folly to aspire. (PL., xii, 557–60)

If at the outset of his journey Dante admits fear that his endeavour might, like the final journey of the Greek hero, be folle and end in failure, the poem and its vision offer a fundamental relativisation of this fear. Odysseus’ journey is an act of presumption bound to end in failure; Dante’s is evidently not 40 41 42 43

Botteril’s translation of De Vulgari Eloquentia (I I , iv, 11), 59. See fn 15, p. 56 above. De Vulgari Eloquentia (I, iv, 4). Botteril has “the most presumptuous Eve” (9). Milton’s lines at PL., iii, 150–54 are: For should man finally be lost, should man Thy creature last so loved, thy youngest son Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joined With his own folly?

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so. Dante’s “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul” will be the first in a series of ostensible disclaimers repeated by modern epics to such an extent that their apparent humility will come to be the ultimate epitome of the genre. By being the first to voice the allegation of presumption, albeit only to deny it, the texts attempt to protect the poets from the caveat that seems to go hand in hand with taking on that most illustrious of styles, the epic poem. To distance himself from Odysseus’ presumption, Dante associates himself with the traits of modesty and humility. In “Sacrae scripturae sermo humilis” (1941) and “Sermo Humilis” (1944), Erich Auerbach defines the style of the sermo humilis as a new Christian sublime.44 The quality of humility is also stressed in the citation from Corinthians 2 given above: “On behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.” If the Christian will pride himself only in his own weakness, it follows that he must refer to his strength, if at all, with modesty. Auerbach cites an early commentator on the Commedia, Benvenuto Rambaldi da Imola, who contrasts pagan discourse with the divine language of Beatrice: “the divine style is sweet and plain, not lofty and proud as that of Virgil and the poets.”45 The sermo humilis is preferable to that of Virgilian superbia because it is grounded in the humility of Christ. Yet it is sublime, as the incarnation makes Christ both sublime and humble: The incarnation as such was a voluntary humiliation illustrated by a life on earth in the lowest social class […] It was crowned by the cruelty and humiliation of the Passion […] this complex of ideas forms the first foundation of the Christian humilis motif; it relates directly to Christ himself.46

44 The shorter and earlier of the two essays, “Sacrae Scripturae sermo humilis” (1941), was written in French and appears in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romaniscen Philologie (Bern & Munich: Francke, 1967): 21–26. The second, longer, essay, “Sermo Humilis” (1944), was written in German; it appears in English in Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, tr. Ralph Manheim (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1993): 27–66. Ernst Robert Curtius notes that, as a literary topos, humility is pre-Christian: “In the pagan Rome of the Empire, then, formulas of self-disparagement were current which could be taken over by Christians”; Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (1953; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1990): 84. 45 Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” 66. 46 Auerbach, “Sermo Humilis,” 41–42.

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Auerbach stresses the fact that the style of the sermo humilis was “a radical departure from the rhetorical, and indeed from the entire literary, tradition,”47 and adds: with the political stagnation of the declining Roman Empire, pagan rhetoric had long been deprived of the themes which gave it vitality. Drained of its life blood, it had succumbed to a rigid formalism. Christianity gave it new life, at the same time changing its character. The keynote now was humilitas.48

Humility became the defining element of a new Christian sublime. With the initial appointment of a guide, Dante announces that the themes of humility and modesty are central to his text. The implication is that only by displaying the humility needed to rely upon and follow an authority may the pilgrim complete the voyage and the poet the writing. When telling the story of his first meeting with Virgil, Dante–poet in his diegesis stresses the modesty of Dante–pilgrim; when I addressed Virgil, he tells us, I was “bowing my head modestly.”49 In the next canto, that modesty is reinforced by the poet’s own claim to be neither Aeneas nor St Paul. The definition of another poet as autore and patre, however, does involve a paradox, since Dante soon outgrows the need to follow Virgil, and leaves him behind. If he is able to manage without the counsel of the autore to whom not only he but a number of other souls encountered in the otherworld declare their poetic debt, Dante’s own work must be outdoing that of Virgil. Not only is he to be guided by authorities higher than Virgil, but his own work is to make Dante himself an autore of even greater importance. The humility displayed thus remains a mere pose. To the authority that had been crucial to the epic since its oral beginnings, Dante adds moral issues of humility and, by implication, its partner in dichotomy: presumption. The success of Dante’s journey and vision will betray the provisory character of his epitome of a humble sublime, the non-identification of “I am not Aeneas, I am not Paul.” Dante does indeed presume to be both Aeneas and Paul, constructing this presumption upon an allegedly divine authority fashioned by and for himself within the poem. The notions of hubris and presumption, conversely, are projected onto the pagan Ithacan, whom Dante condemns first to a death by water and then to the flames of 47 48 49

“Sermo Humilis,” 37. “Sermo Humilis,” 53. Inf., i, 81 in Musa’s translation. The Italian text has “con vergognosa fronte.”

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the Malebolge. Dante thus ensures that the polutropos Odysseus, to whose adventures both Virgil and Ovid had provided sequels, is silenced. It is now Dante who defines the structures within which the epic genre may develop. While pagan presumption suffers shipwreck, new authority is assigned to the Christian poet and pilgrim. Hawkins compares the gesture of Dante to that of Napoleon, “seizing the crown from the pope’s hands and placing it securely on his own head.”50 With a feigned denial of identification, reminiscent of Paul’s “on behalf of this man I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast,” Dante voices his own fears of being folle and thus manages to associate himself with the virtue of humility. With Dante’s reluctance in the selva oscura, the classical topos of affected modesty is made a component of the epic and expanded to include the new Christian quality of the humble sublime. Dante manages to make outrageous claims for his own authority while priding himself on Christian humility – a paradox is placed at the core of his text and of the epic genre. THE RETURN OF PHLEBAS Odysseus’ shipwreck breaks the narrative chain that linked Dante to Ovid and Virgil and to Tiresias’ prophecy of Odysseus’ final journey in Odyssey 11. A model for the wreckage is provided by the Aeneid. In Virgil’s first book, the fleet of Trojans is struck by a storm, visited upon them by the gods. As is the case with the ship captained by Dante’s Odysseus, that of Aeneas is whirled around three times; in Fitzgerald’s translation, the passage goes: [...] Three times the eddying sea Carried the ship around in the same place Until the rapid whirlpool gulped it down.51

In Fitzgerald’s last line, readers of Eliot will recognise an echo of the final line of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “till human voices wake us, and we drown,” combined with the “whirlpool” of another Eliotian passage – the one that Phlebas the Phoenician enters as he passes “the stages of his age and youth” in the “Death by Water” section of The Waste Land: Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 89. Fitzgerald’s Aeneid, i, 161–64. The passage is Ae., i, 116–17, which Fairclough translates as “the ship is thrice on the same spot whirled round and round by the wave and engulfed in the sea’s devouring eddy.” 50 51

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Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and the loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. (The Waste Land, ll. 213–21)

The ten lines that relate the drowning of Phlebas’ bones are presented on the page in a way that suggests that the half-lines should be combined to form full lines so that the stanza comes to consist of two tercets plus a couplet, tied together by the end-rhymes “fell – swell” and “Jew – you.” Tercets are constructed in the very same way when characters engage in dialogue in Walcott’s Omeros: here, too, the layout splits full lines into half-lines. The lines thus suggest a variation on the Dantean stanza form: tercets interconnected by end-rhyme, though not, as Dante’s were, regulated within an aba bcb cdc rhyme-scheme. The section is what remains of a longer, eventually discarded, passage in which Eliot attempts to rewrite Dante’s Odysseus episode. Like Dante’s Odysseus, Eliot’s sailor transgresses the limits of known geography, passing “the farthest northern islands.”52 Then a mountain of ice appears, as a parallel to the apparition of the mountain of the Earthly Paradise on the horizon before Dante’s Odysseus, and Eliot’s hero prepares himself for his fate in Dantean terms: And if Another knows, I know I know not, Who only know that there is no more noise now.53

The capitalised “Another” is Dante’s “altrui”; it subordinates Eliot’s sailor to the divine will that ended the voyage of the pagan hero in Inferno 26. Eliot’s “I know I know not, / who only know that” is modelled upon Dante’s “cred’ ïo ch’ei credette ch’io credesse.”54 The conjugation of Italian verbs here gives us a present tense and two past subjunctives in the third and the 52 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego C A , New York & London: Harcourt Brace, 1971): 67. 53 Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript, 69. 54 Inf., xiii, 25. Musa: “I think perhaps he thought I might be thinking.”

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first person respectively, variation rendering Dante’s line considerably more interesting than Eliot’s verbal repetition. Pound cut “Death by Water” down to the ten lines concerning Phlebas: lines that had already been published in 1920 as the last lines of the Frenchlanguage poem “Dans le restaurant.”55 Phlebas has a French past of his own, independent of Eliot’s attempt at re-creating Dante’s Odysseus as a North American adventurer. The title of the fourth section of The Waste Land, “Death by Water,” connects Phlebas to Madame Sosostris’ Tarot cards in the poem’s first section: the “famous clairvoyante” tells her listener to fear “death by water” and names his card as that of the drowned Phoenician sailor. The parenthesis “(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)” links Phlebas to Shakespeare’s Tempest and Ariel’s song of sea-change: Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.56

Ariel is merely teasing Ferdinand. No one actually drowns during the tempest that opens Shakespeare’s play and which presents us with another storm closely related to the Aeneid and the shipwreck of its opening. The appearance of Eliot’s “whirlpool” in Fitzgerald’s translation of the Virgilian model for Dante’s shipwreck points to the chains of epic connections which unite the shipwreck of Virgil’s Trojans and Eliot’s Phoenician sailor. The central link is here occupied by Dante’s version of Odysseus’ final journey. Another link is Shakespeare’s adaptation of the initial Aeneidic shipwreck for The Tempest. The procedure reminds us (following Pucci) that intertextuality, and allusion, is literature. And that drowning sailors are the stuff that literature is made of. Dante’s Odysseus constitutes a union of the three great epic poets, Homer, Virgil and Dante, around a cluster of sailing and shipwreck. Between Eliot’s “Death by Water” and Fitzgerald’s translation of the first book of the Aeneid lies Odysseus’ Malebolge shipwreck; through the mediation of Dante and his rewriting of Odysseus’ final journey, Eliot is indebted to Virgil, and Eliot, Ara Vos Prec (London: Ovid, 1920). William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.397–403, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan & Alden T. Vaughan (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1999). 55 56

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Fitzgerald to Eliot. Fitzgerald’s “whirlpool” points to the new turn that the epic topos of the sea voyage takes with Eliot. Dante made the journey head firmly for a final and fatal telos, in shifting the focus of the epic motif of sailing from adventure to presumption. Through his reading of Dante, Eliot transfers the focus of the journey’s end yet again, this time from shipwreck to drowning. The shipwrecks that Homer and Virgil involve their heroes in are never fatal. It is with Dante’s Odysseus that the voyage ends in midocean, and with Eliot’s Phlebas that the epic sea voyage is reformulated as a Death by Water. Having made the pagan sailor and hero go down at sea, Dante attaches new connotations to the topical epic voyage: it becomes a Christian journey towards a vision of God. This is the journey that Eliot undertakes in Four Quartets. “Death by Water” relates a belated drowning: when his bones enter the whirlpool, Phlebas is already “a fortnight dead.” In Walcott’s Omeros, we witness another belated death: the drowning of a character who belongs to the past. The section that marks Major Plunkett’s discovery of the death of the predecessor whom he paradoxically decides to call his son is one of the shortest in the book, its four tercets assimilating it to the size of Eliot’s “Death by Water”: On what hill did he pause to watch gulls follow a plough, seabag on one shoulder, with his apple-cheeked sheen? This was his search’s end. He had come far enough to find a namesake and a son. Aetat xix. Nineteen. Midshipman. From the horned sea, at sunrise in the first breeze of landfall, drowned! And so, close his young eyes and the ledger. Pray for his repose under the wreath of the lilac ink, and the wreath of the foam with white orchids. Bless my unbelief, Plunkett prayed. He would keep the namesake from Maud. He thought of the warm hand resting on the warm loaf of the cannon. And the crown for which it was made. (X V I I , iii)

Gulls link the two passages. Plunkett’s contemplation of synecdoches (the drowned sailor’s warm hand and the crown of empire) parallels Eliot’s admonition that we “consider Phlebas.” The imperative mode of Eliot’s “consider” is reflected in the grammatical form of Plunkett’s prayer; “close / his

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young eyes,” “pray for his repose” and “bless my unbelief” employ verb forms that may be read as either imperative or subjunctive. Dante, who had no direct access to the Homeric poems, found his Odysseus in the works of Virgil and Ovid. He, in turn, presents us with a Greek hero who is able to refer to the Aeneid and begins to embrace the possibility of a Christian God – albeit only after having been defeated fatally by that “Another.” When our twentieth-century epic rhapsode, Fitzgerald, makes part of Virgil’s Trojan fleet go down in the whirlpool that had swallowed up Dante’s Odysseus, the medieval Odysseus reappears in the text that had played the role of mediator between Dante and ancient Greece: the Aeneid. Mediating between Dante and Fitzgerald’s Virgil is Eliot’s Waste Land, as well as his unsuccessful attempt at creating his own Dantean Odysseus. Eliot’s text comes to occupy a central position in the allusive web of twentieth-century English-language poetry and becomes a point of mediating reference, as was Virgil’s Aeneid to Dante and his Statius. Eliot’s “Death by Water,” itself the result of Eliot’s interaction with Dante’s poem, thus remains central when Dante’s Odysseus finds his way to the Caribbean and receives another belated burial, now as a nineteen-year-old midshipman, three centuries dead. One of the routes that Odysseus has travelled to the Caribbean goes through The Waste Land. THE CRAFTSMAN’S ODYSSEY The twentieth century’s fascination with Dante may be traced partly to the inviting parallel between the modern metropolis and the Dantean Inferno: this is the analogy suggested by The Waste Land, which associates London with Dante’s Hell. Next to references to infernal landscapes, rewritings return to the topos of the poet as father-figure and guide and employ the meeting with Virgil as a synecdoche of Dante’s oeuvre and of literary lineage – indeed, of genre itself. The Commedia thus presents itself as a rival to the Odyssey’s position as the influence at the core of the twentieth century’s masterpieces. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is one central text in which references to and rewritings of the two poems occur in proximity. In Omeros, the boundaries between them become increasingly blurred. Homer and Dante are thus woven together as Omeros, the poem’s persona for Homer, instructs the main character that

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[...] there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise. For both, the “I” is a mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft carries the other to cities where people speak a different language, or look at him differently, […] but the right journey is motionless; as the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart – with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand knows it returns to the port from which it must start. (L V I I I , ii)

It follows from Derrida’s “law of the law of genre” that if the poem is able to refer to itself explicitly as an odyssey, it must be more than an odyssey. The employment of the term in the poem thus contradicts and undermines its ability to define itself as such. Omeros is, indeed, more than an odyssey. With the claim that “there are two journeys / in every odyssey,” Walcott is adding Dantean dimensions to the primary Homeric voyage. One odyssey is epitomised by a Homeric voyage to foreign countries. The other is the Dantean journey intra nos, undertaken with the help of the pen and a handful of navigational metaphors. Or vice versa: Dante’s inner journey itself represents a journey through unknown realms, and the Middle Ages found metaphoric, moral and metaphysical implications in Odysseus’ wanderings: “to be lost at sea […] meant to be turned towards worldly affairs, dominated by an internal, bitter restlessness.”57 Minnis tells us that, by the fourteenth century, “scriptural auctores were being read literally, with close attention being paid to those poetic methods believed to be part of the literal sense; pagan poets were being read allegorically or ‘moralised’ – and thus the twain could meet.”58 In a similar vein, Walcott eventually conflates his “two odysseys” through the envelope-rhyme “raft – craft”: “raft,” the vessel at sea, comes to

57 Padoan, Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse, 181–82: “Errare sul mare […] significava essere volti alle cose terrene, dominati da una interna, amara inquietudine.” 58 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 6.

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denote the poet’s desk, while “craft” exploits an apparent pun uniting the artist’s craftmanship and the odyssey vessel. If Dante’s journey is also an odyssey, a fitting conclusion of any odyssey becomes the vision of Dantean Love. It thus need not surprise us that Omeros’ reference to multiple odysseys is not followed by a series of Homeric allusions, but by references to the Commedia. Behind “the right journey” lies the “diritta via” of the Inferno’s opening tercet.59 Walcott’s concluding focus on the verb ‘to move’ is an explicit, if somewhat facile, reference to the final line of Paradiso. Walcott uses the verb intransitively and as a predicate of both “the sea” and “love,” whereas Dante’s muovere is transitive: the Commedia ends with the vision of “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”60 The second of Walcott’s two odysseys is that of the “actual craft.” The adjective “actual” tells us that also the inward journey took place with the help of a craft, but evidently one that was not ‘actual’. ‘Craft’ refers to work carried out by someone who employs his hands. Our first written testimonies of ‘craft’ used of vessels date from the seventeenth century; the vessels are seen as the requisites of the fisherman’s craft. With an ellipsis, the term eventually comes to denote all ships or boats. Walcott’s adjective “actual,” however, implies that the vessel is the primary denotation of “craft.” Pound’s first canto includes the same pun on ‘craft’. In a translation from the opening of Odyssey 11, Odysseus sets sail and leaves Circe’s island in a boat that she has lent him: [...] and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. (I /3)

“Circe’s this craft” refers to the ship that Odysseus is sailing in and which does indeed belong to Circe, as well as to the wind that fills the sail and renders it a “bellying canvas,” thus making sailing possible. Behind the winds we may, with Hugh Kenner, detect the breath that is our very psyche.61 In an oral culture, it is the singer’s breath, his psyche, that creates the song. As the breath fills the poet’s canvas, the craft denotes both ship and song, and Circe, the pagan sorceress, becomes goddess of both.

59 60 61

Inf., i, 3. Musa: “the straight path.” Musa’s translation of Par., xxxiii, 145, “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.” Hugh Kenner, “Blood for the Ghosts,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Hesse, 332.

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Canto 1 translates the Renaissance Latin translation of Homer by Andreas Divus in a specific printing which Pound names at the end of the canto: “In officina Wecheli, 1538” (I/5). The canto thus epitomises the Renaissance book and its many-layered text. Through the bellying canvas, Pound nevertheless includes the dimension of Homeric epic as a sung song rather than a written canto.62 The cluster of metaphors uniting the sea voyage and the craft of the writer now includes the breath of the singer, while the gesture of opening the poem by setting out to sea establishes a parallel with a long tradition of describing the compositional process in terms of nautical metaphors. Dante thus compares his writing, throughout the Commedia, to a voyage at sea, while Milton generally reserves mention of the epic expanse of the sea to the level of imagery, which abounds in navigational similes. Satan’s passage through the abyss is thus compared both to a flight with wings and a voyage at sea, again uniting the elements of Odysseus’ mad flight.63 As in Milton’s poem, in Dante the sea first and foremost represents a metaphoric field. The sea voyage stands for both pilgrimage and writing process in such lines as “for better waters, now, the little bark / of my poetic powers hoists its sails”64 and the opening of Paradiso 2, where we learn that

62 Dante coins the word ‘canto’ to designate the 100 sections into which he divides his poem: “Di nova pena mi conven far versi / e dar matera al ventesimo canto”; “Now I must turn strange torments into verse / to form the matter of the twentieth canto” (Inf., xx, 1–2). The term is borrowed from the Latin cantus. For each of the poem’s three major sections, Dante uses “cantica,” from the Latin canticum: ma perché piene son tutte le carte ordite a questa cantica seconda, non mi lascia più ir lo fren de l’arte. (Purg., xxxiii, 139–41) Musa: “but now I have completed every page / planned for my poem’s second canticle – / I am checked by the bridle of my art!” Through Ludovico Ariosto, Edmund Spenser adopts Dante’s ‘canto’ for the divisions of his Faerie Qveene: “The which for length I will not here pursew, / but rather will reserue it for a Canto new” (I V , ii, 54); Spenser, The Faerie Qveene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London & New York: Longman, 1977). 63 PL., ii, 629–43. 64 Purg., i, 1–2 in Musa’s translation. The Italian has “Per correr miglior acque alza le vele / omai la navicella del mio ingegno.” Dante’s predicament in Inferno 1 is described with another sea metaphor as he compares himself to a swimmer who “now safe upon the shore, out of the deep, / might turn for one last look at the dangerous waters”; “uscito fuor del pelago a la riva, / si volge a l’acqua perigliosa e guata” (Inf., i, 23–24).

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both pagan gods and Muses are participating in the composition process. On this occasion the reader, too, is out at sea: O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, desiderosi d’ascoltar, seguiti dietro al mio legno che cantando varca,

All you who in your wish to hear my words have followed thus far in your little boat behind my ship that singing sails these waters,

tornate a riveder li vostri liti: non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse, perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti.

go back now while you still can see your shores; do not attempt the deep: it well could be that losing me, you would be lost yourselves.

L’acqua ch’io prendo già mai non si corse; I set my course for waters never travelled; Minerva spira, e conducemi Appollo, Minerva fills my sails, Apollo steers, e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. and all nine Muses point the Bears to me. (Par., ii, 1–9)

Odysseus’ mad flight once again hovers in the background as Dante claims that he is heading for “waters never travelled.” This Dantean invocation and introduction returns in Thrones de los Cantares, the last full book of the Cantos, which Pound closes with the translation: “You in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there!” (CIX /788). Metaphors of sea voyaging appear frequently in Dante’s prose. The journey at sea is used to describe mortal life and the poet’s own exile, as in the Convivio, where he confesses to have been a “ship without sail and without rudder, wafted to divers havens and inlets and shores, by the parching wind which woful poverty exhales.”65 The nautical metaphor, which aligns the compositional process of poetry with the sea voyage, is frequent in Roman poetry and, according to Ernst Robert Curtius, “extraordinarily widespread throughout the Middle Ages.”66 The metaphor appears especially in introductions and may be varied to reflect generic exigencies: “The epic poet voyages over the open sea in a great ship, the lyric poet on a river in a small boat.”67 The catechrestic ‘craft’ thus enables the poet writing in English to concentrate into one gloss the association of sailing and writing that Dante performs through metaphors such as “the little bark / of my poetic powers”

65 Convivio, I , iii, 5 in Walrond Jackson’s translation. The Italian text has “legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a diversi porti e foci e liti dal vento secco che vapora dolorosa povertade”; Alighieri, Convivio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1993). 66 Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 129. 67 Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 128.

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(“la navicella del mio ingegno,” Purg., i, 2) and “my ship that singing sails these waters” (“mio legno che cantando varca,” Par., ii, 3). Once the intimate relation of poetry to the work of the craftsman implicit in the Greek poieô recedes into the background and the poet becomes an artist, a new metaphoric cluster may be created through the association of poetry, the craft and the boat. As we shall see in chapter four, Pound’s modernist attempt to “make it new” involves a call to avoid semantic ambiguity (hence both puns and metaphors). The fact that his Canto 1 nevertheless includes the pun on ‘craft’ not only reveals to us the omnipresence of catachrestic troping, blinding us to the craftsman’s presence within the ship; it also indicates the importance of this specific metaphor within Pound’s poetic. Influenced by such novelists as Gustave Flaubert and Ford Madox Ford, Pound insisted on identifying writing with craftsmanship, making the association of ‘writing’ and ‘craft’ an issue of modernist poetics. Ultimately, Pound’s poetic thus pleads for the term to be returned to etymology. The paratext of Omeros also puns on ‘craft’; the poem is dedicated to “my shipmates in this craft” – Walcott’s brother Roderick and his publisher Roger Straus. As we enter the text, the pun establishes a reference to the substantial paratext of The Waste Land and Eliot’s dedication of that poem to “Ezra Pound, il miglior fabbro.”68 Eliot is repeating the stilnovist Guido Guinizelli’s epithet to the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio 26. Longfellow’s Divine Comedy from 1865 translates the Guinizellian epithet as “of the mother tongue a better smith.” Pound, like Wicksteed in the Temple Edition, prefers to render “il miglior fabbro” as “the better craftsman.”69 Pound’s various prose descriptions of Daniel associate his verse with the demands that Pound himself was making of a new poetic, and thus betray Pound’s identification with the troubadour: at times Pound presents Daniel as a veritable alter ego. Concerning the lack of recognition of Daniel, Pound writes, in The Spirit of Romance (1910):

68 Eliot, The Waste Land, second edition (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923). Eliot wrote the dedication by hand in Pound’s copy of the first edition of the poem, which had been published by Boni & Liveright in 1922. All editions following the 1923 reprint have printed the dedication to Pound. See Maria Rosa Menocal, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth: From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1991): 105. 69 Pound renders “fabbro” as “craftsman” in the chapter on Arnaut Daniel in The Spirit of Romance. The Temple edition’s Carlyle–Wicksteed translation is used in the Modern Library edition of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (New York: Random House, 1950).

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There is a noticeable element of insinuating elitism in this sympathy for Daniel’s contempt for a “familiar vocabulary”; Daniel is described as a poet who, in implied contrast to certain others, and evidently like the author himself, avoids conventional solutions. From The Spirit of Romance’s chapter on Daniel, we furthermore learn that Pound’s fascination depends on an appreciation of the troubadour’s “technical skill in rimes, and more especially in onomatopoeia”: precisely, on his craftsmanship.71 Pound establishes a trinity in which Daniel’s is the part of the technician or the craftsman, Guido Cavalcanti presents the clearest vision and images, and Dante is the master of simile and the author of the long poem that it was Pound’s ambition to parallel with the Cantos. María Rosa Menocal has underlined the ambiguity of Dante’s definition of Daniel as il miglior fabbro. She argues that the epithet represents a circumscription of the troubadour’s talent rather than general praise; Daniel is a clever craftsman, but Dante’s poem and language reveal greater ambition and ability.72 Eliot’s description of Pound thus becomes an equally ambivalent appraisal; Pound may be the better craftsman of the two, but he ignores a sphere that to Eliot is as essential as it was to Dante. When reviewing Personae, Pound’s collection of poems from 1926, Eliot presents a critique that will characterise the dialogue between the two in the years that follow: “we are left with the question (which the unfinished Cantos make more pointed) what does Mr. Pound believe?”73 Menocal speculates that Dante might have put the same question to the predecessor that he has chosen to define as il Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 25. The Spirit of Romance, 28. Pound’s discussion of Daniel has its point of departure in De Vulgari Eloquentia where Dante defines Daniel as a poet of unrhymed stanzas. Pound reconciles Dante’s troubadour without rhyme and his own craftsman of rhyme: “In the forms of Arnaut Daniel’s canzoni I find a corresponding excellence, seeing that they satisfy not only the modern ear, gluttonous of rhyme, but also the ear trained to Roman and Hellenic music, to which rhyme seemed and seems a vulgarity” (22). 72 Menocal, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth, 98–104. 73 Eliot, “Isolated Superiority,” The Dial 84.1 (1928): 7. 70 71

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miglior fabbro. Menocal and Eliot both demand of poetry abilities in excess of those of craftsmanship implicit in the etymology of the term; the written word is supposed to involve the sacred Word. Indeed, this expectation is supported by the addition of “divina” to the title of Dante’s Commedia and implied in the elaboration with which Dante presents himself in the poem as authoritative prophet. The tendency to read Dante’s epithet to Daniel (and Eliot’s to Pound) with a too uncritical focus on “miglior” rather than on “fabbro” is indicative of the key in which the modernist tradition has read Dante. In the meeting between Dante and Daniel, poets and critics first and foremost find testimony to the younger poet’s debt to the older, a relation which becomes a parallel to Dante’s relationship to Virgil.74 The critical re-evaluation of a literary tradition, which may indeed be Dante’s primary concern in Purgatorio 26, is thus overlooked entirely. On Dante’s evaluation of literary predecessors, Hawkins writes: “At the same time he delivers kudos, he invariably establishes the limits of those he meets, as well as his own superiority to them. He is always moving, quite literally, beyond.”75 The ultimate irony in Eliot’s use of the epithet from Purgatorio 26 consists in the implication that if Pound is Daniel, then Eliot himself is either Guinizelli or, more likely, Dante himself, on his way to outshining the predecessor and his work. Like Dante, Eliot may thus make the Pound–Daniel figure expiate his spiritual limitations in the “refining fire” of Purgatory. The desperation of the Sibyl, under whose speech the dedication is printed on the page, and the “Horror!” of Conrad’s Kurtz, who inhabits the preamble in the drafts, render these paratextual spirits inhabitants of a Hell, suggesting that Eliot is consigning his Poundian figure to an infernal realm. 

Here I am referring to critics of Eliot and Pound and not of Dante. See Froula, To Write Paradise, 53: “T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land Pound helped put into final shape not long after he himself had made the formal and stylistic breakthroughs entailed in the writing of Canto IV, dedicated that poem to him with the words Dante had used of the troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel: miglior fabbro, ‘the better craftsman.’ Probably no one, not even Eliot, has influenced twentieth-century poetry more strongly than Pound, through his practical criticism, both in published essays and in informal collaboration with other artists, through his innovative poetic theory, and most of all through his untiringly exploratory and inventive poetic practice.” 75 Hawkins, Dante’s Testaments, 57. 74

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When Walcott and other poets of his generation recycle the by now conventional pun on ‘craft’, its field of connotations includes not only a reference to the history of The Waste Land and Eliot’s debt to Pound, but also one to Dante and Daniel. The fact that the modern reader tends to consider both Eliot’s and Dante’s definitions of their predecessors as craftsmen to be unconditional appraisals is to a large extent due to the success of Pound’s poetic imperatives and their influence on the poetics and criticism of following generations.76 Associated with Pound’s various critical ‘Don’ts’ was his insistence on the identification of writing with craft. In the context of his understanding of avant-garde poetry, the phrase ‘the better craftsman’ must necessarily be conceived of as the ultimate compliment. Like the etymology of the Greek poieô and poiêma, the phrase claims that the poet, rather than being divinely inspired, is essentially a worker and a maker. Between Pindar’s definition of the poet as craftsman and Pound’s insistence on technique and craftmanship, however, stands the literary heritage of the poet who coined the phrase “il miglior fabbro” and used it in a highly specific context. When Dante presents himself as poet, he considers himself not just craftsman but recipient of the sacred Word. “Il miglior fabbro” may be grouped with Dante’s address to Virgil as “lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore” and to Guinizelli as “il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior”: “father of me / and father of my betters” (Purg., xxvi, 97–98). The three dead poets, Daniel, Guinizelli and Virgil, make up a group of poetic predecessors of particular centrality in Dante’s work. His addresses to predecessors, especially his identification of these as father-figures, signal the dependency of any text on that of earlier writers and the web of allusion in which any work that rewrites elements from the Commedia involves itself. To the modern poet who rewrites the meeting with Virgil or Daniel, Dante with his Commedia becomes miglior fabbro, as well as duca, segnore, maestro, padre, 76 Heaney has characterised himself as “a member of the generation whose poetic ABCs included ‘A Few Don’ts for Imagists’” in The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber & Faber, 1988): 37. On Pound’s insistence on craftmanship, see Olson’s notes from his visits to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths: “There is no need in his case to teach him basketweaving, machine tooling, or carpentry. His craft is there, and society can still use his gift for language if it wants to” (46); “said I had not yet accomplished the craft he had worked on when he was much younger. Acknowledged my respect for his insistence on craft” (80).

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autore, guida. The rewritings of Dante that we shall now consider focus precisely on these meetings and their identification of a literary father-figure. Geography favours Walcott as a poet of epic: with Omeros we return to the Homeric epic of islands and the sea. Always keen on puns, particularly those that include a reference to writing, Walcott exploits the ambiguity of ‘craft’. On the one hand, he refers the reader to Dante and Daniel and the central position assigned to Dante’s phrase by Walcott’s immediate ancestors, Eliot and Pound; on the other, he takes us, through the sea-going vessel, to Homer and the epic of the sea. With its ability to unite the voyage at sea and the process of poetic creation, the pun on ‘craft’ repeats a classical topos that is foregrounded throughout Dante’s Commedia. MEETINGS WITH VIRGIL AND BEATRICE Three passages in Omeros rewrite Dante’s meetings with literary fatherfigures. In a passage rich in such reminiscences and inclusive also of the elder Hamlet and Dante’s Limbo, Walcott’s persona, who is called Derek like the poet, meets the ghost of his father. When the father leaves the son, this occurs in a line worthy of the Commedia: [...] I watched him walk through a pillared balcony’s alternating shade. (X I I I , iii)

These lines end the first of the poem’s seven books and may be compared to the close of Seamus Heaney’s Station Island (1984), where James Joyce leaves the pilgrim: The shower broke in a cloudburst, the tarmac fumed and sizzled. As he moved off quickly the downpour loosed its screens round his straight walk.77

We are also taken to Eliot’s rewriting of a meeting with a Virgil-figure – “some dead master” – in the “Little Gidding” section of his Four Quartets (1942). It is presumably Yeats who leaves Eliot’s persona behind: The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn.78 77 78

Seamus Heaney, Station Island (London: Faber & Faber, 1984): section X I I . T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” I I , in Collected Poems 1909–1962.

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Heaney’s shower even seems to mimic the daybreak in Eliot, just as the “tarmac” of the parking lot where he meets Joyce takes us to the “asphalt” of Eliot’s walk with the “compound ghost.” The keyword in these versions of leave-taking is Eliot’s “faded”; we are witnessing a gradual disappearance that, after the end of the conversation, brings the text itself to a halt. This is a typically Dantean situation, occurring repeatedly when a meeting and a canto come to an end as yet another soul disappears. This is how Inferno 15 and the meeting with Brunetto Latini, another poetic father-figure, ends: Poi si rivolse, e parve di coloro che corrono a Verona il drappo verde per la campagna; e parve di costoro quelli che vince, non colui che perde. (Inf., xv, 121–24)

Then he turned back, and he seemed like one of those who run in Verona’s race across its fields to win the green cloth prize, and he was like the winner of the group, not the last one in.

The archetypal Dantean model behind the lines from Eliot, Walcott and Heaney is, of course, Arnaut Daniel, to whom Eliot’s “refining fire,” found in lines preceding the ghost’s fading finale, refers.79 The final line of Purgatorio 26 goes: Poi s’ascose nel foco che li affina.

Then in the purifying flames he hid.

Heaney’s Station Island presents a number of variations on such Dantean disappearances. William Carleton’s departure, which ends section two, seems modelled on that of Latini: “He turned on his heel when he was saying this // and headed up the road at the same hard pace,” whereas the departure of Heaney’s friend Strathearn in section seven picks up the keyword from “Little Gidding”: “And then a stun of pain seemed to go through him // and he trembled like a heatwave and faded.” Since the twelfth century, Station Island, known also as St Patrick’s Purgatory, has been the scene of a Roman Catholic pilgrimage. In the long poem Station Island, Heaney’s persona partakes in these days of fasting, prayer and ritual pilgrimage: the twelve stations in the poem become twelve sections of visionary meetings and confrontations with deceased countrymen, including family members and friends killed during the Ulster conflict, as well as earlier

Eliot has “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / where you must move in measure, like a dancer”; “Little Gidding,” I I . 79

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Irish writers.80 Five sections are composed in tercets, and in each an extra line is added at the very end of the section; with this elaboration of the stanza-form, Heaney underlines the close relation of his tercets to Dante’s metre and of the poem to the Commedia. Donald Davie has called the poem “insistently Dantesque”: “especially because it is structured, like much of the Divine Comedy, around dialogues in oratio recta between the poet–pilgrim persona and the ghosts of some recently dead.”81 We have already seen Eliot mediate between Dante and Walcott as Dante’s Odysseus is drowned once again with Plunkett’s new-found son. As is the case in Omeros, the Dantean presence in Heaney’s poem is often mediated by Eliot. This is the case with lines such as Heaney’s “my arms were open wide / but I could not say the words” (Station Island, IV), reminding us of Eliot’s hyacinth girl: “Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden, / your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / living nor dead” (The Waste Land, ll. 37–40). Behind Eliot’s hyacinth girl lies the memory of an early love portrayed in terms of the Vita Nuova’s Beatrice. Heaney’s open arms, however, also take us to the triple attempt of Dante–pilgrim to embrace his old friend Casella in the antePurgatorio. The embrace is in vain: Casella’s dead spirit is merely a shade.82 The failed embrace is an epic topos; Dante’s episode refers to Aeneas’ unsuccessful attempt at embracing Anchises in the world of the dead.83 Behind Aeneas and Anchises in the underworld lie, of course, Homeric episodes: Odysseus’ meeting with and unsuccessful embrace of his mother, Anticlea, in Odyssey 11 and Achilles’ attempt to embrace the ghost of Patroklos in Iliad 23.84 Instead of an unsuccessful embrace, however, Heaney’s line expresses a modern inability to speak of which Eliot is indeed a conspicuous representative.

80 Stefan Hawlin, “Seamus Heaney’s ‘Station Island’: The Shaping of a Modern Purgatory,” English Studies 73.1 (February 1992): 37; Arthur E. McGuinness, “Seamus Heaney: The Forging Pilgrim,” Essays in Literature 18 (Spring 1991): 63. In an essay on Eliot and Ovid Mandelstam’s readings of Dante, Heaney describes the composition of Station Island, admitting that he hoped “that Carleton could be a sort of Tyrone Virgil and Kavanagh a latter-day County Monaghan Cavalcanti”; Heaney, “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet,” Irish University Review 15.1 (Spring 1985): 18. 81 Donald Davie, “Responsibilities of Station Island,” Salmagundi 80 (Fall 1988): 58. 82 See Purg., ii, 76–84 and Purg., xxi, 130–32 for unsuccesful Dantean embraces. 83 Ae., vi, 700–702. 84 See Od., xi, 206–208 and Il., xxiii, 99–101.

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Several of the Dantean elements employed in Heaney’s poem turn up again in Omeros. When Heaney’s pilgrim meets an old school-friend, the priest Terry Keenan, he exclaims “I’m older now than you when you went away,” and admits to “feeling a strange reversal” (Station Island, IV ). In Omeros 12, the ghost of Derek’s father similarly points out that the living son is now older than the father was when he died, connecting this observation to the idea of reversal. Since the father of Omeros’s Derek also wrote poetry, Walcott can employ the term ‘reverse’ and openly exploit a pun that Heaney’s “reversal” only hinted at: and the calling that you practise both reverses and honours mine from the moment it blent with yours. Now that you are twice my age, which is the boy’s, which the father’s?” “Sir” – I swallowed – “they are one voice.” (X I I , i)

Both Walcott and Heaney choose to summon the ghost of James Joyce and to assign to him the role of poetic (Virgilian) father-figure. In the final section of Station Island, Heaney’s pilgrim completes the stations and leaves the island. As he steps upon firm ground again, a hand is holding his: I stepped on ground to find the helping hand still gripping mine, fish-cold and bony, but whether to guide or to be guided I could not be certain

The guiding hand that itself seems to be asking for guidance, and which, in a further paradox, appears only after the pilgrim has completed the stations, belongs to Joyce. The fact that the old man “seemed blind” evokes the mythic blindness of Homer, which in Omeros Walcott will recycle through the blindness of Seven Seas. In their evocations of Joyce, both Heaney and Walcott focus on the novelist’s voice, a focus that remains suggestive when we remember the common roots of ‘voice’ and epos. Heaney writes of Joyce’s voice: His voice eddying with the vowels of all rivers came back to me, though he did not speak yet, a voice like a prosecutor’s or a singer’s (Station Island, X I I )

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“The vowels of all rivers” takes us to Finnegans Wake (1939), evoked by Walcott in the exclamation “Anna Livia!” (XXXIX , iii). Derek addresses Joyce as “Muse of our age’s Omeros, undimmed Master / and true tenor of the place!” Like ‘actual’ in “actual craft,” the premodifier in Walcott’s “true tenor” suggests semantic ambiguity. The term ‘tenor’, from Latin tenere, ‘to hold’, is assigned to the leading argument of a discussion: from here it comes to denote the voice that sings the dominant melody in a piece of music. “True tenor of the place,” in implied contrast to possible ‘false tenors’, suggests dominance on Joyce’s part. The semantics, however, remain broad and vague – until the term is clarified by what seems to be the punch-line of a pun that never finds its true tenor: Joyce guides the main characters and “the Dead” around him (“Mr. Joyce led us all”), neither on an inner journey nor on a journey to other realms, but in song. The epithet “true” creates alliteration and raises expectations of a pun that the phrase does not satisfy; “tenor” simply refers to Joyce’s famous voice and musicality, evoked also by Heaney’s “a voice like […] a singer’s.” The Dantean keyword “master” that Walcott here assigns to Joyce had been employed by Heaney to refer to his old teacher, Master Murphy, in Station Island V. Heaney calls Joyce “father,” another of Dante’s epithets for Virgil. He goes on to address Joyce with a reference to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a text strongly influenced by both the Commedia and the Vita Nuova: [...] “Old father, mother’s son, there is a moment in Stephen’s diary for April the thirteenth, a revelation set among my stars – that one entry has been a sort of password in my ears, the collect of a new epiphany, the Feast of the Holy Tundish.” “Who cares,” he jeered, “any more? The English language belongs to us. You are raking at dead fires, a waste of time for somebody your age. The subject people stuff is a cod’s game, infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage. You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangent. When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own frequency, echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements, elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.” (Station Island, X I I )85

Once again the sea offers the poet a metaphor for writing. Here it is the acts of swimming and diving that parallel the poet’s exercise of his craft. The younger poet not only expresses his debt to the older poet; he is also exhorted and reproached by the latter and encouraged to end one poetic life and begin a new one. This is the voice of Joyce that Heaney likened to that of the prosecutor. Heaney neither places himself as a parallel to Joyce, a Dante next to a Virgil, nor does he push the older poet into a refining fire in the manner of a Dante who has long ago surpassed a Daniel. The central model behind the guide who questions the pilgrim and exhorts him to change direction is Beatrice, who examines Dante over 181 lines, from Purg., xxx, 55 to xxxi, 87, in the Earthly Paradise. This is the opening of Purgatorio 31: “O tu che se’ di là dal fiume sacro,” volgendo suo parlare a me per punta, che pur per taglio m’era paruto acro,

“You, standing there, beyond the sacred stream,” she cried, not pausing in her eloquence and turning now the sword point of her words

ricominciò, seguendo sanza cunta, “dì, dì se questo è vero; a tanta accusa tua confession conviene esser congiunta.” Era la mia virtù tanto confusa, che la voce si mosse, e pria si spense che da li organi suoi fosse dischiusa.

toward me, who had already felt its blade, “speak now, is this not true? Speak! You must seal with your confession this grave charge I make!” I stood before her paralyzed, confused; I moved my lips, my throat striving to speak, but not a single breath of speech escaped.

Poco sofferse; poi disse: “Che pense? She hardly paused: “What are you thinking of? Rispondi a me; ché le memorie triste Answer me, now! Your bitter memories in te non sono ancor da l’acqua offense.” have not as yet been purged within this stream.” Confusione e paura insieme miste mi pinsero un tal “sì” fuor de la bocca, al quale intender fuor mestier le viste. (Purg., xxxi, 1–15)

My fear and deep chagrin, between them, forced out of my mouth a miserable “yes” – only by ears with eyes could it be heard.

85 In the version of the poem printed in Heaney, New Selected Poems 1966–1987 (London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1990), the explicit references to Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Stephen’s diary and the Holy Tundish) have been deleted.

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Beatrice reproaches the pilgrim for allowing himself, after her death, to be attracted by “agevolezze” and “avanzi”: ‘allurements’ and ‘vantages.’86 Only once the pilgrim has cried and fainted with repentance is he ready to enter the waters of Lethe and forget the sins of his past. Then he may look in Beatrice’s eyes and see the light of her smile – and commence the last part of his journey, which is to take him through Paradise. Joyce’s admonition to Heaney’s pilgrim thus combines two Dantean moments: the meeting with the Virgilian guide and father-figure and the confession brought about by the severe examination by Beatrice, Dante’s second guide. This scene is not mentioned explicitly in the modern rewritings of the Commedia; Dante’s conversation with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, however, does play a crucial role when modern poets focus on the Dantean issue of conversion. It is Beatrice who governs Dante’s repentance: a role that most modern poets in the tradition assign to a Virgilian guide or fatherfigure. The functions of Dante’s two guides are thus conflated.87 Heaney and Walcott agree to add Joyce to the chain of literary fatherfigures that already connected Virgil and Dante and pointed back to Homer as father of primary epic. We may speculate that the position assigned to Joyce is one that both Pound and Eliot entertained ambitions of filling. The choice of Joyce has significant generic implications; with Ulysses, a novel is added to the list of literary authorities that had so far consisted of long poems: the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Commedia. Whereas Walcott’s use of Joyce is governed by punning and parody, Heaney’s humility towards his compatriot renders the latter a Beatrice-figure, suggesting that the conversation may lead to a poetic conversion. Another Dantean model for the possible conversion resulting from this examination and implied repentance is Dante’s announcement at the end of the Vita Nuova of a poetic rebirth, and his declaration that he will now dedicate himself to saying of Beatrice what

86 Purg., xxxi, 28. The full tercet goes: “And what allurements or what vantages upon the forehead of the others showed, / that thou shouldst turn thy footsteps unto them?” (Purg., xxi, 28–30). The translation is that of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1867). Musa simply renders the two terms as “other things.” 87 In Paradiso 31, St. Bernard takes the place of Beatrice and becomes Dante’s third guide, remaining with the pilgrim until the end of the poem and helping him contemplate the Trinity and the Divine Light.

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was never said of another woman, thus foreshadowing the project of the Commedia.88 The meetings of Walcott’s persona with his father and Joyce make up brief episodes in Omeros and may be ranged chiefly alongside Dante’s encounters with a Daniel, a Latini or a Guinizelli. The longest and most important rewriting in Omeros of the meeting between Virgil and Dante is Derek’s meeting with Omeros, who reminds him that “ […] a drifter is the hero of my book.” “I never read it,” I said. “Not all the way through.” The lift of the arching eyebrows paralyzed me like Medusa’s shield, and I turned cold the moment I had said it. “Those gods with hyphens, like Hollywood producers,” I heard my mouth babbling as ice glazed over my chest. “The gods and the demi-gods aren’t much use to us.” “Forget the gods,” Omeros growled, “and read the rest.” Then there was the silence any injured author knows, broken by the outcry of a frigate-bird, as we both stared at the blue dividing water, and in that gulf, I muttered, “I have always heard your voice in that sea, master, it was the same song of the desert shaman, and when I was a boy your name was as wide as a bay, as I walked along the curled brow of the surf; the word ‘Homer’ meant joy, joy in battle, in work, in death, then the numbered peace of the surf’s benedictions, it rose in the cedars, in the laurier-cannelles, pages of rustling trees. Master, I was the freshest of all your readers.” (L V I , iii) 88 See Alighieri, Vita Nuova, xlii. Virgil’s third Georgic, in which Virgil presents his intention of praising Caesar in a future work, provides a model for Dante’s declaration. Virgil’s lines may be read as an announcement of the project of the Aeneid: “Yet anon I will gird me to sing Caesar’s fiery fights, and bear his name in story through as many years as Caesar is distant from the far-off birth of Tithonus”; Virgil, Georgics, iii, 46–48, in Eclogues; Georgics; Aeneid, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols. (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1999).

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The element in Walcott’s rewriting that allows him to call himself Homer’s (and by implication also Dante’s) freshest reader is the audacious claim never to have read the Odyssey, at least “not all the way through.”89 The line reminds us of Dante’s claim to be neither Aeneas nor Paul.90 The apparent modesty in Walcott’s demonstration of literary ignorance thus becomes a rewriting of an epic and Dantean topos: that of affected modesty. The superlative of “the freshest of all,” on the other hand, defines the speaker as related to a Dante who goes where no one else has gone. The claims of the passage thus unite Dantean humility and presumption. The sea has here become an image of poetry and of epic grandeur, in the final analysis representing metaphoric openness, or vagueness. Derek claims that to him Homer is primarily a voice heard in the sea, perhaps in the regularity of the surf’s meeting with the beach, a regularity that we may place next to that of the epic metre. Together Derek and Omeros visit the volcano of St. Lucia, La Soufrière, where Walcott places his Malebolge. Central among the sinners condemned to suffer in the volcano are those who betray St. Lucia by selling the island to the tourist industry. Like Dante, however, Walcott has found room for his fellow poets in this hell. It is the meeting with these colleagues that opens his mind for introspection: In one pit were the poets. Selfish phantoms with eyes who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces in nature and men, and smiled at their similes, condemned in their pit to weep at their own pages. And that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft. Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling towards the shit they stewed in; all the poets laughed, jeering with dripping fingers; then Omeros gripped my hand in enclosing marble and his strength moved 89 In interviews, Walcott has insisted on having read neither the Homeric poems nor the Aeneid – a claim that Mary Fuller defines as “disingenuous, coming from an Oxfordeducated [sic] writer of epic”; Fuller, “Forgetting the Aeneid,” American Literary History 4.3 (Fall 1992): 518. 90 Curiously, we find another parallel in Edwin Honig’s interview with Robert Fitzgerald, who confesses not to have read any translations of Homer before encountering the Greek text: “Well, another footnote I might add here is that by the sheer accident of skipping my freshman year in high school, I never read Palmer, and I never read any translation of Homer, in fact, before I read Homer in Greek”; Honig, The Poet’s Other Voice, 114.

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY me away from that crowd, or else I might have slipped to that backbiting circle, mockers and self-loved. […] But the ice-matted head hissed, “You tried to render their lives as you could, but that is never enough; now in the sulphur’s stench ask yourself this question, whether a love of poverty helped you to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?” (L V I I I , iii)

The eyes “of that sightless stone” refer to the bust of blind Homer. The “other eyes” thus involve the blind singer’s vision, upon which epic authority was based. Walcott’s sightless stone is also connected to Pound’s insistence that the Venus statue at Terracina be re-erected: I surrender neither the empire nor the temples plural nor the constitution nor yet the city of Dioce each one in his god’s name as by Terracina rose from the sea Zephyr behind her and from her manner of walking as had Anchises till the shrine be again white with marble till the stone eyes look again seaward (L X X I V /448–49)91

Pound’s is a refusal to surrender his paganism (the temples plural) as well as his fascism (the empire and the city of Dioce). It is an insistence on writing an epic that is not the Christian epic of Beatrice’s carità, but a pagan epic of 91 See also “with the Goddess’ eyes to seaward / by Circeo, by Terracina, with the stone eyes / white toward the sea” (X X X I X /195) and Pound’s “Credo” (1930): “Mr. Eliot who is at times an excellent poet and who has arrived at the supreme Eminence among English critics largely through disguising himself as a corpse once asked in the course of an amiable article what ‘I believed’ […] Given the material means I would replace the statue of Venus on the cliffs of Terracina. I would erect a temple to Artemis in Park Lane. I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy […] I believe that postwar ‘returns to christianity’ (and its various subdivisions) have been merely the gran’ rifiuto and, in general, signs of fatigue.” Pound, Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber & Faber, 1973): 53.

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the love of Aphrodite, whom Anchises recognised “from her manner of walking,” and of Venus, the return of whose stone eyes to Terracina would epitomise the combination of pagan love, vision and the Mediterranean sea. Walcott’s passage rewrites not only a Dantean Malebolge but also, as did Station Island, Beatrice’s moral examination of Dante. The stone eyes take us to Pound as well as to Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” whose “commanding form / holds you in its gaze. Henceforth your life must change.”92 The theme of conversion, of a life that must change, thus returns; Walcott’s persona admits to having been tempted to join the “backbiting circle,” defining his own sins as “pride in my craft” and a tendency to elevate himself. But this identification remains a temptation – Omeros saves the poet: “his strength moved / me away from that crowd.” Walcott’s pilgrim thus manages to escape the harshest allegations; his Soufrière Malebolge is, as Eliot said of Pound’s, primarily a hell for other people, or other poets. Omeros does, however, force him to confront one moral question that concerns his own complicity, as a poet, in the power structures involved in representation: rendering the lives of others, he is told, “is never enough.” Heaney’s pilgrim, too, has to confront the problem of representation, by Heaney formulated more harshly and with a more personal and specific focus. Heaney dedicated “The Strand at Lough Bay” in the 1979 collection Field Work to the memory of his cousin Collum McCartney, who was murdered by Protestants. The poem opens with an epigraph from Purgatorio 1. In Station Island, Heaney’s pilgrim is confronted with McCartney’s ghost and forced to face the accusation of having exploited the cousin’s death in his art: “You saw that, and you wrote that – not the fact. You confused evasion and artistic tact. The Protestant who shot me through the head I accuse directly, but indirectly, you who now atone perhaps upon this bed for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio and saccharined my death with morning dew.” (Station Island, V I I I )

92 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in Selected Poems, tr. Albert Ernest Flemming (New York & London: Methuen, 1986). In the German, the two last lines of the poem go “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern”; Rilke, Ausgewählte Werke (Leipzig: Insel, 1938).

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When Walcott’s poet–narrator asks himself whether he succeeded in employing the eyes “of the sightless stone,” the confrontation remains poetic and abstract, referring to the visionary eyes of blindness that see a light beyond metaphor. Walcott’s persona is given food for thought, but we are far from Dante’s fainting upon being faced with his own sins. Heaney’s accusation of himself, on the other hand, is specific and personal and refers to an extra-literary, historical event: his cousin’s death. A different weight is consequently assigned to the resultant repentance. Heaney is accused of whitewashing pain and death with his art, Walcott of betraying the people of St. Lucia when representing them in his verse. They both choose Beatrice’s examination of Dante in the Earthly Paradise as the matrix for these confrontations, yet assign the role of prosecutor to a Virgilian poet–guide: a Joyce in one case, and a Malebolge-soul in the other. Freccero argues that autobiography presupposes conversion.93 Dante’s conversion and salvation are initiated by the vision of Hell and Purgatory; it is, however, Beatrice’s examination that completes his repentance and allows him to drink of Lethe. In Omeros, characters and island gradually heal; the poem’s end includes a conversion in which Derek rediscovers his love for the island and finds poetic humility. Both Heaney and Walcott thus give us personae who admit to human and artistic limitations; and both poets present these confessions within the literary topos established by Beatrice’s examination of Dante. Whereas Heaney’s expression of regret involves personal grief, Walcott’s poet–pilgrim only partially admits to his guilt. Walcott is primarily rewriting a literary, after Dante also epic, topos. Lawrence Lipking defines the poetic confession as an “initiation”: the poet’s re-reading of his own work leads to the discovery of “another meaning in it” which becomes “the essential action in bringing about a new stage of poetic life.”94 Dante had first achieved such initiation with the Vita Nuova, in which he finds the new direction that his work is to take. Lipking’s claim that “the most remarkable single trait initiations share is that each ends with a prophecy of greater works to come” indeed seems modelled on the example of Dante and the Vita Nuova’s announcement of the Commedia.95 In the life of the ideal poet, the moment of initiation is followed by Lipking’s Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 25. Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1981): 185. 95 Lipking, The Life of the Poet, 19. See, however, fn 88, p. 92 above for the Virgilian model for this topos. 93 94

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“new stage of poetic life”: by the poet’s main work, which is eventually crowned by the grand epic poem: At one time the prestige of the epic led many poets and critics to believe that nothing but an epic could conclude a career. Thus the history of poetry is strewn with the wreckage of failed careers – poets whose epics were never finished.96

Northrop Frye makes a similar point: The epic [as understood by the Renaissance] is not a poem by a poet, but that poet’s poem: he can never complete a second epic unless he is the equal of Homer […] To decide to write an epic of this kind is an act of considerable courage, because if one fails, one fails on a colossal scale.97

With the narration of Odysseus, Dante shows his awareness of the danger that both Lipking and Frye see as inherent in the epic ambition: failure. Frye’s other point is likewise repeated by Lipking: the epic concludes a poetic life; the Aeneid, Lipking contends, “does not encourage a sequel.”98 If we add the example of the Commedia to the arguments of Frye and Lipking, we may argue, first, that the epic that crowns a poetic life should itself be crowned by a Paradiso and, secondly, that a Paradiso can only be a culmination: the final work of a poetic life. Having accomplished the epic and its Paradiso, the poet must recede into silence. Kenner defines the idea of “one’s life being co-extensive with one’s work of art” as Pound’s “most tenacious heritage from the 1890’s”: “Pound hoped to become, while writing the poem in public, the poet capable of ending the Cantos.”99 In the Commedia, Dante gives a Christian dimension to the moment of initiation and makes it a topos of conversion. A new topos is thus added to our expectations of the epic genre. The poem that crowns the poet’s life must now include a conversion, modelled upon the initiation with which the young poet re-reads and dismisses his early work in order to find his own poetic voice. Freccero defined conversion as a prerequisite for autobiography. Christian epic may thus be defined as autobiographical and inclusive of a conversion and a vision of Paradise, after which is silence.

96 97 98 99

The Life of the Poet, 68. Frye, Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, 3. Lipking, The Life of the Poet, 92. Kenner, The Pound Era, 377.

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Omeros has been praised as the accomplishment of the impossible: the composition of a successful twentieth-century epic. By concluding his epic, Walcott fulfils an expectation of the great poetic life and succeeds where many have failed. Towards the end of Omeros, Walcott reaches the other crucial stage of Lipking’s poetic life: the initiation with which the poet rejects his earlier work. Walcott’s initiation is modelled on the Dantean topos of conversion. Yet, as Omeros is followed by the publication of Bounty (1997), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), and plays, both Homeric and Broadway, the expectations that epic “does not encourage a sequel” and that conversion leads either to “a new stage of poetic life” or to silence are disappointed.100 The epic poem is no longer the crowning work of the oeuvre, the poem upon which follows only the eulogy, written by another and younger poet. Initiation and conversion no longer occupy crucial positions within the poetic life, but are literary and epic topoi to be recited, and parodied. Walcottian epic does not represent the culmination of the poet’s life; it is neither published posthumously, as was Virgil’s, nor left open to accusations of failure, as was Pound’s. It is simply one among many genres within which the poet works during a career. Davie suggests that Heaney is rare among modern poets because he “emerges from his prolonged encounter with Dante not daunted nor abashed.”101 Heaney’s rewriting of Dante is characterised by submission and the recognition of his own complicity in the pain of Ulster. In Station Island, however, he remains concentrated on purgatorial reproof and confession, and does not move on to redemption and visions of a Paradise. If after Dante the writing of an epic involves adding Paradise to Purgatory, Heaney’s omission of a paradisiacal conclusion involves a rejection of the epic genre. Dante’s epic is, like that of Virgil, a political and imperialist poem; writing an epic involves taking an ideological stand and assuming open political responsibility. Where drinking of Lethe and moving on to a paradisiacal finale will

100 Since the publication of Omeros in 1990, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in New York and Faber & Faber in London have published not only the above-mentioned poetic works but also The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1993). In 2002, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published two of Walcott’s earlier plays, first performed in 1992 and 1989 respectively, in the volume Walker and the Ghost Dance, and, in the same year, the early plays collected in The Haitian Trilogy (Henri Christophe, Drums and Colours, and The Haytian Earth). In 1998 the musical The Capeman, written by Walcott and the composer Paul Simon, had a brief run on Broadway. 101 Davie, “Responsibilities of Station Island,” 64.

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reflect epic ambition and have political consequences, Heaney remains with the self-accusations and repentance of a purgatory. 

Pound writes his Malebolge in the two Hell Cantos, 14 and 15. The sequence opens with the line that introduces Dante’s descent into Hell proper in Inferno 5: “io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto.”102 Pound’s is a hell peopled by politicians, profiteers, financiers, betrayers and perverters of language, preachers and obstructors of distribution and knowledge. The vision of the condemned evokes disgust, contempt and repudiation in Pound’s persona, but no acknowledgement of potential complicity on his own part. The journey out of hell, from darkness to light, is undertaken with the help of the neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, who is defined as guide. The simple introductions of speech, “and I said” and “and my guide,” clearly mimic Dantean diction: and I said, “How is it done?” and my guide: This sort breeds by scission, This is the fourmillionth tumour. In this bolge bores are gathered, Infinite pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox. (X V /65)

Having ascended from the dark, Pound’s persona collapses, “blind with the sunlight” (XV /67), a parallel to the end of Inferno, where Dante, once again at the exit from hell, sees the light of the stars: “and we came out to see once more the stars.”103 Despite his lifelong involvement with Dante, Pound never rewrites the scene from the Commedia which Heaney and Walcott present as the Dantean episode par excellence: the meeting with Virgil. Plotinus may resemble a guide and be referred to as such, but he is not addressed deferentially as ‘father’ or ‘master’: Plotinus does not become a Virgil to Pound. The late Cantos combine Paradiso fragments with Confucian philosophy; it is through a neopla102 The line is Inf., v, 28, in Petrocchi’s text: “Io venni in loco d’ogne luce muto.” Musa has “I came to a place where no light shone at all.” 103 Musa’s translation of Inf., xxxiv, 139. The Italian text goes: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.”

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tonic intellectual light that Pound hopes to create his paradise. The template for Cantos 14–15 may be Dantean, but the choice of Plotinus as a guide is primarily an indication of the importance of neoplatonic light in Pound’s poem; we are not witnessing an attempt to engage more profoundly with the Dantean topos of the literary father-figure. The Dante who opens Paradiso 2 warning his readers that not all of them will be able to follow the ship of his song knows where he is about to take that reader; within the fiction of the Commedia, the vision and the journey precede the writing. With Pound and Canto 1, the matter is entirely different. Pound wrote his poem in public, and his endeavours to complete it with a Paradiso became a parallel public struggle: “As to the form of The Cantos: All I can say or pray is: wait till it’s there. I mean wait till I get ’em written and then if it don’t show, I will start exegesis. I haven’t an Aquinas-map; Aquinas not valid now.”104 When Pound’s Odysseus puts out to sea in Canto 1, he is embarking without knowledge of where his voyage will take him. Eva Hesse stresses this point: the hero, steering by periplus rather than by an Aquinas map, does not actually know which course to set in order to reach his Ithaca. Unlike Dante, who embarks upon a conducted tour of first hell, then purgatory, and finally paradise, and has only to follow the schema, Odysseus–Pound strikes out into the unknown in the mere hope of reaching Ithaca and paradise, but with the possibility of shipwreck and ultimate failure remaining with him all the time as an essential element of the whole venture.105

The neoplatonists claimed that a guide was not needed for the attainment of a vision of divine light.106 If we read the Cantos through the eyes of Dante, Pound may, like the Dantean Odysseus, be seen as revealing the true nature of his ambition when he embarks on a journey towards light (or the island of the Earthly Paradise) without displaying the humility involved in following a guide. Freccero described the difference between Dante’s journey and Odysseus’ mad flight as “quite literally the journey through hell, the descent intra nos which transforms philosophical presumption into a journey of the mind 104

Ezra Pound, Selected Letters 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: New Directions,

1971): 321. 105 Eva Hesse, “Introduction,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Hesse, 17. The journey “by periplus” is glossed in Canto 59: “periplum, not as land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing” (L I X /322). 106 Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 9, 18–19.

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and heart to God.”107 There is no journey intra nos in Pound’s visit to hell in Cantos 14 and 15. As Eliot was indeed quick to point out, “Mr. Pound’s Hell, for all its horrors, is a perfectly comfortable one for the modern mind to contemplate, and disturbing to no one’s complacency: it is a Hell for the other people, the people we read about in the newspapers, not for oneself and one’s friends.”108 Introspection is found in the Pisan Cantos, but is not associated with Pound’s reading of Dante. The case of Pound presents us with an attempt to reach light through neoplatonic and philosophical striving but without the Christian guide that Dante had made a central topos of the modern epic. Pound’s is a descent to hell that elicits contempt and repudiation on the part of his poet-persona but neither identification nor introspection. Dante would, of course, have argued that such a project could only fail. In 1968 the by then 788 pages of the Cantos are given a conclusion, not by Pound himself but by his publisher.109 The poet has abandoned hope of composing the final great paradisiacal canto to complete his epic. Instead we get lyrical fragments: That I lost my center fighting the world. The dreams clash and are shattered – and that I tried to make a paradiso terrestre.

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 18. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber & Faber, 1934): 43 (emphasis Eliot’s). 109 For the publication of Pound’s Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII, see Peter Stoicheff, “The Interwoven Authority of a Drafts & Fragments Text,” in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in “The Cantos,” ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997): 213–31. 107 108

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Sicari reads the recantation in the context of Rock-Drill and Thrones, arguing that it is primarily the verb ‘to make’ that the palinode wishes to correct: “The proper verb, we now know, is ‘see’.”110 With this reading, Sicari presupposes that Pound still believes in a paradise, but one to which the individual may gain access with the mind’s eye and not one that poet may create or reflect in his work. With the verb ‘to make’ for the (failed) composition of an earthly paradise, Pound aligns himself with medieval English poetics, and the definition of the poet as ‘maker’.111 The term was also used of God and by Milton: “Thou also mad’st the night, / Maker Omnipotent.”112 Dominant in the passage, however, is also the personal pronoun ‘I’, which comes to serve as the poet’s signature. The pronoun ‘I’ has been conspicuously absent from the Cantos; here it is highlighted by the capitalisation of the initial letter – and word – in “I have tried to write Paradise.” We might, however, also call attention to the adjective “terrestre”: earthly. In Canto 1, Odysseus’ setting-out to sea was presented as a parallel to the composition and reading of Pound’s epic poem. If the Odysseus who went down to the ship on the opening page is seen as a figure of the poet, the aspiration to “make a paradiso terrestre” identifies him not with the Homeric but with the Dantean Odysseus, who went beyond the Pillars of Hercules, surviving that act of hubris long enough to see the Island of the Earthly Paradise appear on the horizon before him. Eva Hesse assumed that Pound would, like the Homeric Odysseus, sail for Ithaca. Instead, he followed the example of Dante’s model and aimed for the Earthly Paradise. Any reader as familiar with Dante as Pound will know that that project is inherently presumptuous and potentially fatal, and that its natural consequence might very well be either a death by water or a palinode. 

Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition, 211. Sidney writes: “But now let us see how the Greeks named it, and how they deemed of it. The Greeks called him ‘a poet,’ which name hath, as the most excellent, gone through other languages. It cometh of this word poiein, which is ‘to make’: wherein I know not whether by luck or wisdom, we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling him ‘a maker’: which name, how high and imcomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by my partial allegation”; Apology for Poetry, 99. 112 PL., iv, 724–25. 110 111

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The title of Walcott’s Omeros points to Homer, to Joyce’s Ulysses, to Pound’s Cantos and, through each of the latter, to the Commedia. Omeros is composed in tercets, at times also in terza rima. When he tries to assure his senile mother that she has a lot to remember, we learn that the main character is called Derek, just like the poem’s author: “Mama, I’m your son […] You have two, and a daughter […] Their names are Derek, Roddy, and Pam” (XXXII , i). This passage may be read as a reference, deflated and thus parodic, to Dante’s meeting with Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise and her calling him by name: “Dante, perché Virgilio se ne vada, non pianger anco, non piangere ancora; ché pianger ti conven per altra spada.” (Purg., xxx, 55–57)

“Dante, though Virgil leaves you, do not weep, not yet, that is, for you shall have to weep from yet another wound. Do not weep yet.”

Dante is quick to assure his readers that he had no choice but to include his own name in the sacred poem: “I turned round, hearing my name called out, / which of necessity I here record.”113 It is this passage that allows us to refer to the protagonist of the Commedia as Dante(–pilgrim); similarly, and on the basis of his conversation with his mother, we might call the speaker of Omeros Derek. Beatrice’s examination of the pilgrim in the Earthly Paradise turns out to be central to modern rewritings of Dante. Dante has indeed placed a new Christian topos at the centre of the epic text, a topos, moreover, that comes to determine the structure of the genre. We now expect the modern epic to include a moral turning point, with possible consequences for the poet’s future oeuvre, and we expect that turning point to come about through a moral examination of the poet-persona carried out by a figure of authority. As the poet-persona distances himself from the self he was when he began his story and poem, the topos of conversion comes to decide the overall progress of the narrative. Consequently, it cannot be rewritten merely as a digressive episode. Pound argued that the Commedia is not an epic at all. Nevertheless, he focused the Cantos’ rewriting of Homer on the visit to the underworld, a 113 Purg., xxx, 62–63. The Italian goes: “mi volsi al suon del nome mio, / che di necessità qui si registra.” Note that the third person of the Italian “si registra” seeks to conceal Dante as author of the sentence; Musa’s “which of necessity I here record” might be rendered as “which of necessity is recorded”: i.e. with a passive and thus agency-neutral construction.

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focus dictated primarily by Dante. Pound also planned to crown the epic that he was writing in public with a Paradise: a thoroughly Dantean ambition and expectation. Yet the turning point of repentance that Dante defined as crucial to his vision of Paradise appears only at the very end of Pound’s poem, as lines of regret presented as fragments: a recantation after which is silence. Instead of distancing the poet-persona from a younger self, Pound’s lyrical fragments become a palinode of the entire poem. There is apparently no second life for the poet to commence, no new life which would allow him to complete the poem. Or rather: that new life is one of silence. Thus, Pound’s silence does not follow upon the successful achievement of that most ambitious of genres, the epic, but appears within it, as the speaker faces the presumption of the project undertaken. In that reading, the conversion of Pound’s persona places him next to Heaney’s poet-persona in Station Island, unable or unwilling to let self-accusations be followed by a Paradise that ultimately belies the sincerity of the humility confessed. The move from Homeric to Virgilian epic involved a shift from oral religious song composed by generations of traditional singers to the composition in writing by one named poet. The following centuries expanded the implications of Virgil’s example to raise expectations of an ideal poetic life of which an epic is the only fitting conclusion. Pound struggled to find not only a voice and position for the poet in the twentieth century, but also a form to give to the modern epic. Walcott, by contrast, succeeds where many would argue that Pound fails, but his epic is no longer the great poem after which follows only silence. Rather than being a divine vates or modernist fatherfigure, Walcott makes a career as a professional poet. A craftsman more true to etymology than was Pound’s fabbro, he offers his readers lyrical poetry, plays, lyrics for a Broadway musical, and an epic. Lipking looks to the poet’s work for proof of his poetic sincerity: “The poet who claims to have entered a new stage of life brings a witness who cannot lie: the evidence of the poems.”114 Walcott’s post-1990 work thus contradicts the claim for conversion made by the last books of Omeros. The conversion of his poet-persona is simply an epical and Dantean topos.



114

Lipking, The Life of the Poet, ix.

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I ask a wreath which will not crush my head — Homage to Sextus Propertius Also it ain’t an epic. — Pound, 7 May 1924

I

N 1 9 1 0 P O U N D D E C L A R E D that the “Divina Commedia must not be considered as an epic,” adding that “to compare [the Commedia] with epic poems is usually unprofitable.”1 Nonetheless, it is my hope to show the usefulness of precisely such a comparison; indeed, I believe it profitable to consider not only the Commedia but also Pound’s own Cantos and Walcott’s Omeros as epic poems. The three texts are thus seen as members of one family, and the Cantos and Omeros as descendants of the Homeric line that Dante changed for good. This is a thesis, however, that takes us into a controversial area of genre theory and into contested fields of Pound and Walcott scholarship. As “perhaps the largest problem in Pound studies,” Froula identifies “the question of the poem’s form in its dimensions as a modern epic.”2 With Omeros the picture is similar; Joseph Farrell finds a “considerable anxiety among critics and on the part of the poet himself about the generic affinities of Omeros.”3 Walcott himself made a point of disclaiming the epic character of Omeros, confiding to the New York Times that he does “not think of it as an epic”:

1 2 3

Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 153. Froula, To Write Paradise, 7. Farrell, “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” 250–51.

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY Certainly not in the sense of epic design. Where are the battles? There are a few, I suppose. But “epic” makes people think of great wars and great warriors. That isn’t the Homer I was thinking of [...] One reason I don’t like talking about an epic is that I think it is wrong to try to ennoble people. [...] History makes similes of people, but these people are their own nouns.4

To Walcott, an epic is a bellical poem that ennobles people: his understanding of the genre seems based primarily on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. This dismissal of the epic includes a rejection of history, and we are thus taken to Pound’s famous definition of the genre: An epic is a poem including history. I don't see that anyone save a saphead can now think he knows any history until he understands economics.5

D.J.R. Bruckner, “The Poet Who Fused Folklore, Homer And Hemingway,” New York Times (9 October 1990): B1. Implicit in Walcott’s argument is a protest against the definition of West Indians as a people “without history,” an argument put forward by V.S. Naipaul, who had claimed in The Middle Passage that the West Indies had no history. In its entirety, the passage goes: “The history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies”; The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America (London: André Deutsch, 1962): 29. Naipaul’s argument builds on James Anthony Froude’s experience of the West Indies as related in The English in the West Indies, whose “there are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own” (Froude, The English in the West Indies, 304) Naipaul uses as motto for his book. See J. Edward Chamberlin, Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1993): 38–44. Eric R. Wolf used the phrase for the title of his Europe and the People Without History (1982). In his preface to the 1997 reprint of the volume, Wolf states that he had intended the title “to be ironic, but that irony was lost on some readers. My intent was to challenge those who think that Europeans were the only ones who made history” (x). The view of history challenged by Wolf is precisely that of a Western European historical teleology exemplified by the epic and its geneê: “Many of us even grew up believing that this West has a genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (1982; Berkeley & London: U of California P , 1997): 5. 5 Pound, Literary Essays, 86. 4

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Whereas Walcott’s understanding of the epic involves war and metaphoric writing (similes), to Pound an epic is in the final analysis a poem of economics. Both definitions, however, focus on the question of history. Pound’s association with Italian fascism and a theory of economics that involves antisemitism gives us cause to assume that Walcott’s rejection of an epic of history includes a desire to distance himself from Poundian epic and politics. Unable to accept the definition of the Commedia as an epic poem, Pound preferred to refer to Dante’s text as “a great mystery play, or better, a cycle of mystery plays.”6 Apart from the perhaps excessively inclusive ‘long poem’, the generic alternative to ‘epic’ favoured by contemporary critical discourse is ‘novel.’7 John Figueroa talks of the “novelistic structure of a mosaic kind” in Omeros, and argues that the poem is “much more a novel than an epic.”8 Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune is intimately related to the epic genre as represented by the Odyssey; nonetheless, the poem was released with a dust cover that defined it as a “verse novel.”9 Despite the fact that Omeros and Fredy Neptune are, like their Homeric and Virgilian precursors, composed in masterful narrative verse, Walcott and Murray take care to dissociate their poems from the epic predecessors to which they seem most obviously related. This eagerness reveals a sphere of unease surrounding the epic genre, an apprehension that is prompted particularly by suggestions that the poet has entertained epic ambitions. It is this unease that I refer to as epic anxiety. AN EPIC OF ECONOMICS In 1934 Pound defined the ideal epic as written by a poet who has understood the mechanisms of economics. A brief look at the role played by economics in the Cantos should suffice to show that this definition of the epic genre is also a description of Pound’s own poem-in-progress. The Cantos present the poet’s idea of both history and economics, and as such represent Pound’s bid at a modern epic – including economics.

Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 154. “The epic, as a poem both narrative and encyclopaedic, is to be distinguished from the long poem which is simply one or the other.” Frye, Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, 3. 8 John Figueroa, “Omeros,” in The Art of Derek Walcott, ed. Stewart Brown (Mid Glamorgan: Poetry Wales, 1991): 193, 197. 9 Les Murray, Fredy Neptune (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998). Similarly, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (New York: Vintage, 1998) bears the subtitle “A Novel in Verse.” 6 7

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Notions of economics were included in the Cantos from the very beginning. Over the years, issues of finance came to play an increasingly central and explicit role in the poem. Pound’s 1934 definition of the epic seems to have matured in parallel with the poem and to reflect the priorities that were emerging in his thinking during the process of composition. The issue of money is thus moved a bit closer to the foreground already in the rewriting of the Ur-Cantos, which had been published in Poetry in 1917 under the heading “Three Cantos.” The three highly Browningesque poems were reworked substantially to become the opening components of the Cantos, and were published as such in A Draft of X V I . Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of some Length in 1925. In “Three Cantos,” the poet addresses Robert Browning and the aesthetic tradition in an attempt to find his own voice and poetic stance. The poet has placed himself on the steps of the old custom-house (the Dogana) in Venice and compares these to the palace steps in Browning’s Sordello (“I muse this on a ruined palace-step / at Venice”):10 Your “palace step”? My stone seat was the Dogana’s curb, And there were not “those girls,” there was one flare, one face.11

The method is one of nostalgia; Pound has already relied on it in “Provincia Deserta” (1915), in which the poet walks through Southern France and attempts to gain access to the world of the troubadours who once inhabited the landscape. Here it is Venice that is supposed to connect the speaker to another poet of the past – Browning. As in “Provincia Deserta,” the diction centres on deictic shifters and a contrasting of “I/you” and “now/then,” held together by the geographical “here.” In the revised version of the canto published in 1925, the focus is no longer on the dialogue with Browning but on the fact that the poet sits on the Dogana curb and not in a gondola, because he cannot afford a passage in the latter.12 The nostalgia that would see Venice primarily as a door to the 10 Robert Browning, Sordello, iii, 676–77, in The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Roma A. King, Jr., vol. 2 (Athens: Ohio U P , 1970). Pound’s “those girls” refers to Browning’s “let stay those girls” (iii, 698). 11 Pound, “Three Cantos,” Poetry 10.3 (June 1917): 116. 12 The development from Ur-Canto to Canto 3 is studied in detail in the fifth chapter, “Stages of Revision,” of Ronald Bush’s The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1976).

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past is attenuated; Venice is now to a greater extent a place of the present, but one in which the poet finds himself immobilised by financial circumstances: III I SAT on the Dogana’s steps For the gondolas cost too much, that year, And there were not “those girls”, there was one face, And the Buccentoro twenty yards off, howling “Stretti” (I I I /11)

These lines deserve to be compared with a passage in the fourth chapter of Walcott’s Omeros; indeed, it seems that a further elaboration of Pound’s conversation with Browning may be found where we would least expect it. Walcott divides each chapter in Omeros into three sections, headed by Roman numerals. Not only the initial “I sat” but also the numeral that introduces this third section of chapter four reminds us of Pound’s Canto 3 and its graphic layout: III I sat on the white terrace waiting for the cheque. Our waiter, in a black bow-tie, plunged through the sand between the full deck-chairs, bouncing to discotheque music from the speakers, a tray sailed in one hand. (I V , iii)

The whiteness of Walcott’s terrace repeats the Venetian marble steps, and the sailing tray reminds us of the gondolas of which the bow-tie reflects the colour. The discotheque music is reminiscent of the singing members of the Venetian rowing club Il Buccentoro. The issue of money, finally, returns with the awaited “cheque”: the bill. “Cheque” is employed in an American usage (as “restaurant bill”), but spelled according to British convention (American English would have “check”), which renders the rhyme with “discotheque” visual as well as auditory. The two passages carry similar weight and play identical roles in the two poems. Since specific claims of authority accompany the epic genre, the question of the identity of its poet–narrator, the voice that says “I” within the poem, remains crucial. In Pound’s Canto 3 and Walcott’s Chapter 4 respectively, we witness the first appearances of the poems’ poet–narrators

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as characters: both poems here introduce us to a narrating “I” with a body. In Canto 1, Pound pointed to the text from which he was translating Homer with the line “I mean, that is Andreas Divus”; in Canto 2, he used the firstperson possessive pronoun in another discussion with Browning: “But Sordello, and my Sordello?” In Pound’s text, the poet’s “I” has so far appeared as the voice of an editor or possibly as that of the poem itself – as an “I” above and in control of the text, but not as a figure within it. In Canto 3, this “I” appears with a body. To a greater extent than does Pound, Walcott allows his poet–narrator to walk through the poem and to interact with its other characters. When this Derek makes his first explicit appearance, waiting for a bill on a white terrace, the episode turns out to be related to Pound’s first appearance as a physical character within the Cantos, watching not the Caribbean sea but the waters of Venice from the steps of the Dogana building on the Canal Grande. 

Four months before Pound warned against finding indications of epic ambition in the forthcoming Draft of X V I . Cantos, insisting that “it ain’t an epic,”13 he published Canto 12 in the January 1924 issue of the transatlantic review. The canto contains the poem’s first explicit discussion of economics, with a focus on money, interest and high finance. The anecdotal descriptions of the financial manoeuvrings of Baldy Bacon and José María dos Santos culminate in a verdict that, with its list of noun phrases, is related to Pound’s Hell Cantos: Bored with their proprieties, as they sat, the ranked presbyterians, Directors, dealers through holding companies, Deacons in churches, owning slum properties, Alias usurers in excelsis, the quintessential essence of usurers, The purveyors of employment, whining over their 20 p. c. and the hard times, And the bust-up of Brazilian securities (S. A. securities), And the general uncertainty of all investment Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950): 189. 13

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Save investment in new bank buildings, productive of bank buildings, And not likely to ease distribution, (X I I /55)

The identification of the directors with usurers is stressed by the hyperbolic phrase “quintessential essence,” which reflects and enacts the suspicion that a crisis in economics leads to a crisis in language.14 Usury is seen as uncontrolled growth, paralleled by an uncontrolled usage of language, here represented by the hyperbole and tautology. The bank buildings that are productive merely of new bank buildings thus epitomise Pound’s criticism of the supposedly unrestrained and non-transparent growth accomplished by the sections of high finance that he defines as usurious. In the Hell Cantos he tells us: “this sort breeds by scission, / this is the fourmillionth tumour” (XV /65). By 1939 Pound will argue that “U S U R Y is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of nations.”15 The definition of usury as a tumour or cancer involves a discourse of dichotomies such as disease and sanity or dirtiness and cleanliness, identifiable also in Pound’s prose. The essay on Cavalcanti thus identifies “two maladies, the Hebrew disease, the Hindoo disease” and argues that “between those diseases, existed the Mediterranean sanity.”16 Despite his initial claim that the poem he is writing “ain’t an epic,” the themes that Pound identifies by 1934 as critical to the epic genre – namely history and economics – turn out to be prominent already in the first installment of cantos. The indictment of usury thus appears as an integral part of a theory of economics and is assigned its own central position in the vision of history that the poem is to present.

That usury leads to a crisis in the arts is argued in Canto 45: “with usury the line grows thick” (XLV/229). Pound glossed the line in a letter to his Italian translator Carlo Izzo: “means the line in painting and design”; The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 301 (emphasis Pound’s). Brooke–Rose reads Canto 45 as an exorcism, “static and repetitive”: “The process becomes more and more rapidly alternating […] and this mimes Pound’s view: ‘Usury is a cancer, finance a disease’”; Brooke–Rose, A Structural Analysis of Pound’s Usura Canto: Jakobson’s Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse (The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1976): 16 and 13. 15 Pound, Selected Prose, 268 (emphasis Pound’s). 16 Pound, Literary Essays, 154. 14

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The economic analysis in Canto 12 reflects Pound’s adherence to C.H. Douglas’ theory of Social Credit, which sees distribution as the crucial link in the economic chain. In the “ABC of Economics” (1933), Pound writes: Probably the only economic problem needing emergency solution in our time is the problem of distribution. There are enough goods, there is superabundant capacity to produce goods in superabundance. Why should anyone starve?17

Pound’s question points to an absurdity and injustice of capitalism. With Douglas he chooses to see the problem as one inherent in the financial system; the money in circulation does not suffice to buy the goods produced. In his exposition of Social Credit, Hugh Kenner quotes from Douglas: “The sum of the wages, salaries and dividends distributed in respect of the world’s production, even if evenly distributed, would not buy it, since the price includes non-existent values.”18 Marx would argue that the discrepancy between wages and prices is due to the money taken out of the system as profits, whereas Douglas, as paraphrased by Kenner, identifies the nonexistent values as “costs amortized over and over again, but still carried on the books; and all waste; and all inefficiency; and all bank charges.”19 From the definition of bank charges as non-existent value blocking the financial system, the transition to the verdict on usury is straightforward. It is usury, a tendency within the system, that is the evil and not the system: i.e. capitalism, as such. With a phrase of Mussolini’s, quoted by Paul Morrison, we may argue that the focus on usury enables Pound to seem revolutionary while remaining reactionary;20 Burton Hatlen, David Murray and Morrison all agree on this Pound, Selected Prose, 204. C.H. Douglas, Economic Democracy (1920), quoted in Kenner, The Pound Era, 305. 19 Kenner, The Pound Era, 307. 20 Il Duce’s “I am a reactionary and a revolutionary” is judged by Morrison to be “as good a characterization of Italian Fascism as any”; Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 9. Jeffrey Herf studies another cultural paradox of modernism and fascism: “the embrace of modern technology by German thinkers who rejected Enlightenment reason”; Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1984): 1. In 1965, William Empson commented on the charge made by Conor Cruise O’Brien that W.B. Yeats was a fascist: “Surely the first point to get clear is: ‘So were all the great writers in English in the first half of this century, except Joyce’”; Empson, “A Time of Troubles” (1965), in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: Hogarth Press, 1988): 344. 17 18

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reading. The central objection to Pound’s reading of usury is in Hatlen’s formulation: this concept of “usura” does allow Pound to recognize and condemn some of the major abuses of capitalism; thus The Cantos is in some serious ways a poem of “social protest.” Yet it should also be noted that talking about “usura” rather than “capital” allows Pound to see these social ills as revealing, not that the system of private ownership itself is fundamentally flawed, but rather that certain unscrupulous groups are manipulating this system for their own advantage.21

David Murray reaches the same conclusion: An examination of the difference between Pound’s overall view of history and Marx’s shows how he side-stepped the idea of the need for, and historical inevitability of, real structural changes in societies. Calling the present system “usury” or “usurocracy” rather than “capitalism,” he personalizes the issues and sees history in conspiratorial, rather than economic determinist, terms.22

Like the analyses of Murray and Hatlen, that of Morrison depends on a Marxian reading of economics: Social creditism allows for the expression of popular resentment against capitalist practices – the compulsion to continuous labor, the creation of artificial scarcity and demand, the concentration of economic power – without striking at the heart of capitalist property relations themselves. For “a man interested preeminently in the arts,” moreover, it has the added advantage of providing for a fully coherent, if undermotivated, narrative of economic justice.23

Morrison traces his own reading to Theodor Adorno’s observation that bourgeois antisemitism works toward “the concealment of domination in production”; antisemitism focuses, Morrison adds, “on the operations of finance capital, not capitalist modes of production.”24

21 Burton Hatlen, “Ezra Pound and Fascism,” in Ezra Pound and History, ed. Marianne Korn (University of Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1985): 168. 22 David Murray, “Pound-Signs: Money and Representation in Ezra Pound,” in Ezra Pound and History, ed. Korn, 187. 23 Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 50 (emphasis Morrison’s). 24 The Poetics of Fascism, 9. Morrison is quoting from Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), tr. John Cumming (1972; London & New York: Verso, 1979): 173. Adorno and Horkheimer add:

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Pound shows some sympathy for Marx’s thought, but finds his economics insufficient: Marx has aroused interest far less than the importance of his thought might seem to have warranted. He knew, but forgot or at any rate failed to make clear, the limits of his economics. That is to say, Marxian economics deal with goods for sale, goods in the shop. The minute I cook my own dinner or nail four boards together into a chair, I escape from the whole cycle of Marxian economics.25

In his capacity as Pound’s commentator, Hugh Kenner goes further and brushes Marx aside with anecdotal wit and some condescension. The paragraph that Kenner dedicates to Marx in his chapter on Douglas reads: Mr. Marx, Karl, alias Charlie Mordecai, supposed that the discrepancy between costs and wages was explained by profits. But Douglas’s equation is not unbalanced by profits; the man who founds or organizes or supervises performs, Douglas saw, economically useful service, of which the so-called “profit” is the wage. And Mr. Marx also supposed that values are “masses of congealed labor time.”26

The introductory verbs inform us that whereas Marx was working within mere hypotheses, Social Credit carries prophetic insight: Marx “supposed,” Douglas “saw.” The quotation marks around the “so-called ‘profit’” render this crucial feature of Marxism (and capitalism) virtual; together with the epithet “so-called,” the quotation marks reduce the term to an image of a word. While appearing to be glossing Pound, Kenner furthers the insinuation found in citations from the Cantos, which he reproduces without quotation marks. “Mr. Marx, Karl” is thus borrowed from Canto 46’s “Mr Marx, Karl, did not / foresee this conclusion” (XLVI /234); the first name “Karl” postmodifies and identifies the surname, distinguishing this Marx from the other Marxes with whom he may supposedly be confused. “Charlie Mordecai” is from Canto 71. It is Kenner who chooses to equate the two with an “alias,”

The productive work of the capitalist, whether he justifies his profit by means of gross returns as under liberalism, or by his director’s salary as today, is an ideology cloaking the real nature of the labor contract and the grasping character of the economic system. And so people shout: Stop thief! – but point at the Jews. (173–74) 25 Pound, Selected Prose, 209. 26 Kenner, The Pound Era, 309.

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which we have indeed just seen Pound employ in Canto 12’s description of “deacons in churches, owning slum properties, / Alias usurers in excelsis.” Implicit in the identification of “Mr. Marx, Karl” with “alias Charlie Mordecai” are connotations of falsity and a lack of integrity, suggesting that someone who has changed his name can hardly be an authority in the Dantean sense of “worthy of trust and obedience.” The Cantos do indeed associate false names with false prices, an evil in Poundian economics; within Pound’s poetic as well as in his economics, the issue of the ‘true’ proper name parallels the theory of the ‘just price’: just as metaphors upset ‘precise definition’, usury undermines the financial system. Canto 50 combines the focus on the name, economics and cleanliness: And Ferdinando Habsburg (but of the House of Lorraine) which is the true name of the clean part of that family got back a state free of debt coffers empty but the state without debt (L /248)

The “true name,” the “clean” family and the debt-free state evidently go together. Usury and metaphor alike, on the other hand, involve false names, or worse: no names. United with Pound in the fight not only against usury but also against unnamed agents of power, we find Benito Mussolini, whose “words still stand uncancelled,” as quoted by Pound in Canto 78: “wherein is no responsible person having a front name, a hind name and an address” “not a right but a duty” those words still stand uncancelled, “Presente!” and merrda for the monopolists the bastardly lot of ’em (L X X V I I I /493)

“We are tired of a government in which there is no responsible person having a hind name, a front name and an address” was an aphorism of the fascist party quoted also in the “ABC of Economics.”27 The second aphorism, “not a right but a duty,” is a fascist definition of freedom and translates the slogan “La libertà non è un diritto: è un dovere,” which Pound had

27

Pound, Selected Prose, 231.

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printed on his stationery. The phrase is used as epigraph of the essay “Carta da visita” (1942), published in English as “A Visiting Card” in 1952. Another gloss on Pound’s, and Kenner’s, “Charlie Mordecai” is the pyramid that appears in Canto 34:

CITY OF ARRARAT FOUNDED BY MORDECAI NOAH

(X X X I V /171)

As in Canto 46’s “Mr Marx, Karl,” we here have a surname postmodified by a first name. Combined with “Noah,” “Mordecai” reveals itself as Semitic. An intratextual reference thus links Canto 34 (“Mordecai Noah”) to Canto 71 (“Charlie Mordecai”) and Marx to his Jewish heritage. Kenner’s prose brings the two into closer proximity, explicitly uniting “Marx” and “Mordecai” in one noun phrase. The insinuation is stronger in Kenner, whose “alias” implies that Marx has attempted to conceal his Semitic background. Citing phrases that only a devoted reader of the Cantos will recognise as quotations from Pound, especially as these appear without quotation marks, Kenner’s text presents itself as a gloss on Marx, and not on Pound’s Marx. Kenner’s Pound Era is built of quotations from the Cantos which, depending on our view of Pound’s authority, undermine or support Kenner’s exposition. His diegesis thus approaches free indirect discourse. It also employs a special Poundian stylistic and argumentative device: the “ideogrammic method,” which juxtaposes ‘facts’, supposing that their very juxtaposition will bring about a revelation of relations in the reader. The last line in Kenner’s paragraph on Marx, “and Mr. Marx also supposed that values are ‘masses of congealed labor time’,” demonstrates the ideogrammic method. The initial “and” is typical of the style of both the Cantos and The Pound Era; while linking two sentences in simple parataxis, it implies that a logical – or absurd – connection exists between Marx’s supposition and the preceding statement about the “so-called ‘profit’.” A fear of conspiracies involves the inclination to find concealed connections among disparate factors. Kenner’s, and Pound’s, conjunctions of parataxis suppos-

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edly signal the disclosure of larger associations and relations. The paratactic juxtaposition of the ideogrammic method thus becomes the syntactic presentation of conspiracy theory. “Masses of congealed labor time” is a quotation from the first chapter of Das Kapital. Marx’s assertion that these “masses” equal “values” is left unglossed; the verb “supposed,” however, signals that the thesis is faulty. Kenner’s paragraph is not only an exposition of Pound’s Marx, but a characterisation of Kenner’s own “Mr. Marx, Karl, alias Charlie Mordecai,” concealed in free indirect discourse. Within his account of Douglas and Social Credit, Kenner’s paragraph on Marx helps him brush aside the rival argument represented by Marx: an argument that leads not to antisemitism but to a critique of the system of capitalism as such. Although constructing his prose out of citations and syntactic devices from the Cantos, Kenner goes a step further than does Pound, dismissing Marx entirely and presenting him as a man of failed suppositions. To Kenner around 1970, Douglas remains as visionary as he did to Pound in the early 1920s. Canto 22 (1928) provides us with a discussion among Pound, Douglas and the “orthodox economist” John Maynard Keynes.28 “C.H.” is Douglas, “Bukos” is Keynes, and the “H.C.L.” is the high cost of living: And C. H. said to the renowned Mr. Bukos: “What is the cause of the H. C. L.?” and Mr. Bukos, The economist consulted of nations, said: “Lack of labour.” And there were two millions of men out of work. And C. H. shut up, he said He would save his breath to cool his own porridge, But I didn’t, and I went on plaguing Mr. Bukos Who said finally: “I am an orthodox “Economist.” Jesu Christo! Standu nel paradiso terrestre Pensando come si fesse compagna d’Adamo!! (X X I I , 101–102)

The lines in corrupted Italian dialect (“standu” for stando; “fesse” for facesse, “Jesu Christo” for Gesù Cristo) translate as “Jesus Christ! Standing in the earthly paradise, wondering how to make a companion for Adam!!” The For the identification of Bukos with Keynes, see Kenner’s note in The Pound Era, 304 and Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 46. 28

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lines read as a reaction of outrage, stressed by the exclamation marks, to the ignorance displayed by the “orthodox economist” who talks of a lack of labour while millions are unemployed. Keynes is thus revealed as (rather, reveals himself to be) the advocate of an inadequate version of economics based on a denial of facts. Furthermore, the definition of Keynes as “orthodox” (another classification disguised as self-identification) may carry antisemitic connotations. The canto implies that another economist, John Hobson, tried to keep Douglas’ book off the market on the grounds that “it would make my own seem so out of date” (XXII /102) – an indication of Pound’s tendency, identified in the preceding quotation from David Murray, to see history in conspiratorial terms. Redman notes that both A.R. Orage, editor of the New Age and responsible for introducing Pound to Douglas, and Douglas himself likewise tended “to see conspiracies among bankers and financiers.”29 These observations seem all the more pertinent in the light of Redman’s argument that “Hobson’s views form an essential background to Social Credit, a background that was only twice acknowledged by Douglas.”30 Pound is thus turning the relations of debtor/creditor around, while using conspiratorial conjecture to support his argument. The anecdote of the meeting between Keynes and Douglas is followed by the lines in Italian dialect, which present themselves as a reaction to Keynes’ statement or, rather, to its absurdity. This juxtaposition of passages may be paralleled by the lines on light that follow Canto 38’s exposition of Douglas’ “A and B” theorem: the observation that the wages paid by a factory do not suffice to buy the goods produced in the same place. Here we are witnessing the text’s approval of the statement made or, rather, of the clarity of the mind performing the analysis: A factory has also another aspect, which we call the financial aspect It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends which are power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices or values, financial, I mean financial values It pays workers, and pays for material. What it pays in wages and dividends stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less, per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less 29 30

Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 66. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism, 59.

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than the total payments made by the factory (as wages, dividends A N D payments for raw material bank charges, etcetera) and all, that is the whole, that is the total of these is added into the total of prices caused by that factory, any damn factory and there is and must be therefore a clog and the power to purchase can never (under the present system) catch up with prices at large, and the light became so bright and so blindin’ in this layer of paradise that the mind of man was bewildered. (X X X V I I I /190)

The analysis is concerned with the discrepancy between the final price of a product and the expenses incurred by the factory that produced it. Owing to a “clog” in the system, the collective purchasing powers of the workers: i.e. the wages received, will always be insufficient for them to buy all the products produced. Marx would argue that it is profit that makes the price of a product in excess of the actual costs. In Pound’s exposition, the system is congested not only due to wages and the cost of raw materials but also due to dividends and bank charges: features of finance rather than of capitalism. This is a didactic form of poetry that places the reader in the position of a student who is to be convinced by the argument presented. The lines combine analysis and direct mimetic speech (“damn blast your intellex”): to Pound, characteristics of a new poetic and elements that in chapter four we shall identify as distinctive of a poetic of metonymy. It is to the clarity of insight displayed in this process of analysis that the text responds with the vision of the clear light of a Dantean paradise. The presence of the poet is found not only in the “I” in “financial, I mean financial values” but also in the white space that separates one part of the text from the other. The rhapsode of this epic has become the editor who organises the text on the page and controls our reading. This is done by letting a lesson in finance be followed by a vision of paradise, thus anticipating or, rather, attempting to guide our reaction to the analysis. A vision of paradise may, the poem argues, be achieved precisely through an understanding of economics, and a modern Poundian epic is concerned with both. 

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In Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917), Pound’s Roman poet is keen to distance himself from Virgilian song of war and empire: Out-weariers of Apollo will, as we know, continue their Martian generalities, We have kept our erasers in order. [...] Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations, Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman celebrities And expound the distentions of Empire, But for something to read in normal circumstances? For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?31

The themes here attributed to Roman epic are “Martian generalities” (with a pun on ‘general’), “Roman reputations” and “celebrities,” “the distentions of Empire” and “historical data”; its poets are Virgil and Ennius, the author of the Annals. Propertius aligns himself with the Alexandrian Callimachus, who favoured the shorter epic and admitted that “the Telchines [...] grumble at my poetry, because I did not accomplish one continuous poem of many thousands of lines on [...] kings or [...] heroes, but like a child I roll forth a short tale.”32 Propertius thus promises to sing of “Grecian orgies” and “dance” rather than of war, predicting indeed that, “weary with historical data,” the companions of the Muses “will turn to my dance tune.” Few readers, however, would accept that the work that Pound goes on to compose, the Cantos, represents “something to read in normal circumstances,” nor need we define Omeros as composed to a “dance tune.” Indeed, Walcott may have told the New York Times that he does not “like talking about an epic,” yet such dislike of the epic genre does not necessarily prevent the poet from writing one. Pound’s definition of the epic as a poem covering history and economics included a generic definition of his own poem-in-progress. Once he had provided his own definition of the genre, Pound could, despite early disavowals, Pound, Homage to Sextus Propertius (1917), in Selected Poems 1908–1969 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). 32 Aetia, 5, in Callimachus, Aetia – Iambi – Lyric Poems – Hecale – Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems – and Other Fragments (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P & London: William Heinemann, 1975). Callimachus composed his poetry in Alexandria between 278 and 240 B C . 31

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admit to entertaining epic ambitions. Walcott, on the other hand, dismisses the epic primarily on the grounds that it is concerned with “great wars and great warriors.” Apart from presenting a rejection of a Poundian epic involving history, Walcott, like Propertius, is declining to espouse Iliadic and Aeneidic epic. Callimachus had articulated an analogous dismissal; as far as the epic is concerned, the generic disclaimer turns out to be a topos. Hand in hand with epic ambition goes epic anxiety. Within genre theory, few questions seem to raise such heated debate as that of the epic. Quint’s definition of the genre as imperialist applies not only to historical subject-matter but also to style: according to Quint, the epic incorporates or annexes other less linear genres. Lipking makes a similar comparison between the Aeneid and empire: “The Aeneid preserves the older epics by incorporating them within its fabric, as a great empire must aim not so much to conquer and destroy other nations as to colonize them into part of itself.”33 We find an example of such formalist imperialism on the part of the text in Inferno 24, where Dante includes a metamorphosis in his own poem. Dante is engaged in a competition with the classics, which he wins, since the metamorphosis he describes is more intricate than any depicted by Lucan or Ovid.34 The episode represents an incorporation of a genre of circular digression within an overtly teleological poem. The rival genre’s alternative structural principle of metamorphosis is overcome by and included in the linear epic: the governing principle of Ovid’s poem is reduced to an episode, thereby becoming a new epic topos. Dante’s poem thus meets our expectations of epic by annexing rival genres and points of view; similarly, we shall see how the Commedia emphasises the political need for a strong emperor, thus conforming to another rule of epic imperialism. To Bakhtin, however, it is the novel and not the epic that has the capacity to incorporate other genres. He distinguishes between the epic and the novel as part of a broader differentiation between the novel and all other literary genres – those that he defines as poetic. The differentiation is fundamental and categorical, yet mitigated by the concept of novelisation: Bakhtin presents the novel not as a deductively defined genre but as a discourse of dialogism and polyglossia which may influence the poetic genres, thus undercutting the authority of their monoglossia.35 33 34 35

Lipking, The Life of the Poet, 78. Bosco & Reggio, “Commentary,” in Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, vol. 3: 354. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 7.

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The poetic genres as represented most capaciously by the epic employ the direct word, whereas the novel depends upon indirect speech, which it combines with voices from the rhetorical genres to produce a continually citational, mixed discourse.36 The many voices of the Bakhtinian novel are thus also the voices of other genres, and parodies of these, included in an allabsorbent text. It is from the contrast between the direct and the indirect word that Bakhtin moves to a differentiation between the monologic poetic and the heteroglot novelised text. A non- or pre-novelised epic is defined as realised in authoritarian monologic discourse.37 This definition of the monologic depends, however, on the opposition to novelisation and is performed with the retrospective eyes of literary history. Bakhtin’s point of departure remains the polyphonic, democratic novel. The description of the limitations of the orally based direct poetic word presupposes that the literary field will be taken over by the polyphony of novelistic writing, which will eventually reveal the monologic status of the poetic genres. Consequently, poetic epic discourse is identified by a contrast or, in the negative, as that which does not aspire to the openness of the novel. It is only in the juxtaposition with the novelised word that the poetic word exhibits its limitations. When confronted with Bakhtin’s own focus on the dialogic character of the single word, our identification of the monologic poetic meets another significant obstacle; the definition of any living ideological sign as two-faced, Janus-like, encourages us to identify polyphony, dialogism and ambiguity in a text, but prevents us from describing its monologic character.38 An epic genre that is defined primarily in the negative as characterised by a lack of novelisation presents us with a similar difficulty. Bakhtin, indeed, admits that monoglossia remains a relative term: “monoglossia is always in essence relative. After all, one’s own language is never a single language.”39 The problem may be illustrated by the example of the Aeneid and its reception. Quint’s definition of the epic genre as linear, teleological, imperialBakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 50–53. The Dialogic Imagination, 18. In his essay on the epic, Bakhtin stresses that the observations made cover all higher genres until the Middle Ages. 38 See also “word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant”; V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik, in The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994): 55 and 58 (emphasis Voloshinov’s). 39 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 66. 36 37

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istic and closed is based primarily on the Aeneid. Michael C.J. Putnam protests against the dominant critical view of Virgil’s poem as “a grandly imaginative reinforcement of Augustan ideology and power structures,” arguing instead that “Virgil’s is a poem that at once sustains the discourses of political power and questions them as well.”40 Putnam’s argument focuses on a reading of ambiguity in the poem’s final scene of violence: Aeneas’ killing of Turnus, who has begged for mercy. Putnam argues that “the killing of Turnus does not make peace customary but war. It glorifies a tradition of irrationality, not control.”41 Putnam’s argument builds on Adam Parry’s essay “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid” (1963), in which it is contended that the Aeneid expresses “not a sense of triumph, but a sense of loss”42 and that “Aeneas is not just Augustus. There is also the possibility of his being Augustus’ bitter enemy, Mark Antony.”43 Towards the end of the article, Parry reaches the conclusion that “we hear two distinct voices in the Aeneid, a public voice of triumph, and a private voice of regret.”44 Putnam admits that his remains one among many possible readings: This is not to maintain that the accomplishments of historical Rome do not elicit Virgil’s sympathetic praises. They do, and grandly, but the undercurrent of hatred and violence, especially martial violence, that courses through Roman history cannot be gainsaid. At the end of the Aeneid it holds center stage in the character of the hero himself.45

Parry and Putnam thus argue for a focus on the open-ended ambiguity of a work that has been read primarily as closed and unequivocal. The argument has consequences for genre theory, since our definition of novelistic polyphony depends on our ability to contrast such openness with the closed imperialistic monoglossia of the secondary epic, of which the Aeneid remains our representative par excellence. A deconstructive reading will find moments of ambiguity, contradiction and openness in any text, since such instability is the prerequisite of the linguistic sign. The suitability of a term such as mono40

Michael C.J. Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence (Chapel Hill & London:

U of North Carolina P , 1995): 2 and 3.

Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid, 21. Adam Parry, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” in Virgil: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Steele Commager (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice–Hall, 1966): 111. 43 Parry, “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” 115. 44 “The Two Voices of Virgil’s Aeneid,” 121. 45 Putnam, Virgil’s Aeneid, 22. 41 42

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glossia will always be relative and will depend on comparison – on the fact that we have texts next to which the Aeneid does indeed stand out as closed and imperialistic. Our inability to distinguish stylisation from parody by other than metadiscursive approaches (intonation) is another factor that makes it impossible to define discourse as unequivocally poetic, or epic. Bakhtin is aware of this problem, too: “after all, one need only emphasize ever so slightly the conventionality in stylized discourse for it to take on a light overtone of parody or irony.”46 With a slight change of intonation, the boundary line of the stylised and authoritative word of poetic discourse has been crossed and the poet has become the speaker of a parodic image of a word, pronounced within intonational quotation marks. While defining the epic as imperialistic, authoritarian and monologic, both Quint and Bakhtin present ways of escaping its connotations of violence and dominance by establishing alternative categories of protest and reaction. Quint gives us the anti-epic, Bakhtin the novelised epic. Froula may thus define the Cantos as an epic, yet argue that “the early manuscripts show that Pound began his epic in reaction against the traditions of war and conquest in which the Western epic has its origins.”47 Moretti finds Bakhtin’s theory inadequate when it comes to describing the openness of modern epics such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – and the Cantos.48 Farrell calls definitions of the epic such as Bakhtin’s “absurdly one-dimensional” and argues that A good deal of the modern theoretical discourse that concerns itself with epic, notably, the classic formulations – descended from Schiller – of Hegel, Lukács, Auerbach, and Bakhtin, shows a pronounced tendency to employ a discursive caricature of the genre as a foil for the less strictly defined, formally and culturally heterogeneous, and “open” characteristics of other genres, especially the novel.49

Neither Farrell nor Moretti takes into consideration Bakhtin’s concept of novelisation, and they both ignore his focus on the influence that genres exert on each other. The gap that Moretti identifies between classic and modern instances of the epic genre could, indeed, easily be explained and 46 47 48 49

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 65. Froula, To Write Paradise, 6. Moretti, Modern Epic, 56–57. Farrell, “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” 258.

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bridged by the notion of novelisation. Bakhtin stresses the fact that the monoglossia he observes in the epic will always be relative, as will the opposite concept of playful and liberating heteroglossia. Neither language nor literature offers us clear-cut categories: the crucial and useful insight in Bakhtin’s genre theory is his description of the way in which genres develop by being influenced by other genres. To refuse to be influenced or develop is to grow stale and become a parody: in order to survive, the epic, or any other genre, must allow itself to be undermined generically. It follows that a primary task of Bakhtinian genre criticism must be the study of the generic implications of the relative degrees of monoglossia or dialogism that may be observed in a given text. Modern poets evidently feel a need to dissociate themselves from the implication of power and hegemony attached to the epic. Dantean and Miltonic epic ambition has been replaced by epic anxiety. With Pound’s adherence to Benito Mussolini and the Cantos’ affiliation with Italian fascism, the American poet dedicates his poem explicitly to a totalitarian regime, thus living up to all the expectations of the epic genre and ambition entertained by genre theorists. Writing in 1982, Frye argues that “in our day [...] the ‘Antichrist’ social complex is encapsulated for us in the word ‘totalitarian’.”50 Pound’s association with Italian fascism provides ample reason why Walcott and other contemporary poets exhibit such strong concern to dissociate their poems not only from the Cantos but from the epic genre as such. THE COMMEDIA AS IMPERIALISTIC EPIC In chapter two, we saw Dante transform the pagan epic into a Christian poem, associating the authority inherent in the genre with that of Scripture. The move entailed aligning himself, first, with the authority of classical poets and subsequently with that of apostolic writers. Dantean epic claims to be biblical writing, yet the Commedia is also political, ideological and imperialistic, and thus satisfies Quint’s expectations of the genre. About the empire, Northrop Frye writes: As social conditions change to those of empire, however, it becomes more and more obvious that the ruler is the one essential force that holds the contract together. Hence he begins to take on divine qualities, as the 50

Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1982): 99.

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY adopted son or, as in Egypt, the incarnation of his god. It is at this point that Jesus’ principle, that one should render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s (Mark 12:17), runs into trouble. Sooner or later there will be a Caesar who will demand what is due only to God, that is, divine worship.51

Dante found the need of his time to be the exact opposite of that outlined by Frye. Since the end of the eleventh century, popes had been wearing imperial insignia; the Church was increasingly demanding the secular power that was due to Caesar.52 Dante placed himself centrally among the writers who called for a limitation of the power of the Church and the placing of secular leadership in the hands of the emperor. Dante’s political prose work De Monarchia was attacked frequently throughout the fourteenth century and remained on the papal index from 1554 to 1881.53 De Monarchia shares with the Commedia the political view that the Church should renounce money and jurisdiction: what the world needed, according to Dante, was a universal Roman Empire. Achieving that objective, however, depended on the Roman emperor, and after the death of Frederick II in 1250, the throne was empty. In Inferno 1, Virgil prophesies the future of the “umile Italia,” Musa’s “fallen Italy,” which is to be saved and avenged, we are told, by a mysterious greyhound, “il veltro”: Molti son li animali a cui s’ammoglia, e più saranno ancora, infin che ’l veltro verrà, che la farà morir con doglia.

She mates with many creatures, and will go on mating with more until the greyhound comes and tracks her down to make her die in anguish.

Questi non ciberà terra né peltro, ma sapïenza, amore e virtute, e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro.

He will not feed on either land or money: his wisdom, love, and virtue shall sustain him; he will be born between Feltro and Feltro.

Di quella umile Italia fia salute per cui morì la vergine Cammilla, Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute.

He comes to save that fallen Italy for which the maid Camilla gave her life and Turnus, Nisus, Euryalus died of wounds.

Questi la caccerà per ogne villa, fin che l’avrà rimessa ne lo ’nferno, là onde ’nvidia prima dipartilla. (Inf., i, 100–11)

And he will hunt for her through every city until he drives her back to Hell once more, whence Envy first unleashed her on mankind.

Frye, The Great Code, 94. Joan M. Ferrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy” (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1984): 29. 53 Ferrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 129. The Spanish Inquisition condemned several passages of the Commedia. 51 52

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Camilla, Turnus, Nisus and Euryalus are characters from the pagan and imperial stories of Rome; their deaths are depicted in the last books of the Aeneid. The fact that it is the Roman poet of empire, Virgil, who associates the “umile Italia” to be restored with these characters from the Aeneid suggests that it is the Roman Empire as epitomised by Virgil’s poem that will be reinstated through the advent of the veltro. In Dante’s time, such restoration inevitably entailed restricting the powers of the Church.54 Maurizio Palma di Cesnola has demonstrated that Dante’s composition of the Commedia reflects a continual attempt at naming the veltro, the secular saviour in whose political capabilities Dante and his readers may place their hopes. The three canticles offer at least two, perhaps three or more, identifications of the veltro; the climax of this gradual exegesis is found in Dante’s meeting with his ancestor Cacciaguida in the middle cantos of Paradiso. The following outline of this process of identification is greatly indebted to Palma di Cesnola’s study from 1995: Semiotica Dantesca: Profetismo e diacronia.55 The composition of Inferno 1 is dated to 1304–1305. During these years Dante may have been the guest of the lords of Montefeltro.56 The vagueness of the prophecy voiced by Virgil would have allowed Dante to let the lord of Montefeltro believe himself to be the veltro celebrated by the poem; the rhyme-word of “veltro” is the equally enigmatic “feltro” (‘felt’), which the lord of “Monte-feltro” may have read as referring to his own county.57 The Italian term refers to a cloth made of wool and is as mysterious in this context as is the English ‘felt’. Attempts have been made to explain the connection between veltro and ‘felt’ as an indication of the humble origins of the coming saviour.58 Palma di Cesnola, however, argues that at this stage, in the poem’s opening canto, our attempt to identify the veltro is bound to be futile: “Dante leaves an open space which was presumably not written in order to

Ferrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 116. Maurizio Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca: Profetismo e diacronia (Ravenna: Longo, 1995). 56 Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 64 and 89. 57 Musa translates “feltro” with a proper noun of place: “Feltro.” This reading is indebted to Dante’s later misspelling (at Par., ix, 52) of ‘Feltre,’ a town in Veneto, as “Feltro,” an apparent slip that is part of Dante’s project of identifying il veltro with Cangrande. Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 64. 58 Bosco & Reggio, “Commentary,” in Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, vol. 1: 15. 54 55

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be interpreted unambiguously.”59 The poet himself was probably not able to fill in that open space yet. The prophecy establishes a replica and appropriation of Virgil’s prophecy, in the fourth eclogue, of “the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall at last cease and a golden race spring up throughout the world!”60 Since the fourth century, Virgil’s prophecy had been interpreted as a vision of the coming of Christ.61 The prediction of the coming of the veltro may thus be read as a prophecy of the kind that MacDonald sees as characteristic of Virgil’s medieval reception. Its vagueness is congruent with the place in which it is pronounced: the selva oscura where Dante finds himself kept at bay by passions and allegorical beasts, and specifically in need of reason and divine intervention. The journey is to teach Dante to identify and name that which in the opening can only be allegorical and unidentified; he is taught to read the name of secular salvation and thus to write it. During Dante’s composition of Purgatorio, Henry VII was preparing to enter Italy to be crowned emperor at Rome. The exiled poet placed his political hopes in Henry, expecting him to re-establish the empire and restore order in Italy. By the time Dante composes the middle cantos of Purgatorio, Henry has thus become his veltro: “by the Autumn of 1308 the veltro has acquired a name and Dante sees himself as the one who, as another Virgil, and like him as the instrument of God, has been its unknowing prophet.”62 Having found himself a veltro, Dante presents his reader with a second prophecy. The final canto of Purgatorio mirrors the foretelling in the first canto of Inferno and provides us with further puzzling information. Beatrice 59 Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 72: “ne fa un vaticinio aperto, che non fu probabilmente scritto per essere interpretato in modo univoco.” 60 Virgil, Eclogue, iv, 8–9, tr. Fairclough. 61 See Bosco and Reggio’s gloss on the reference of Dante’s Statius to, and translation from, the Eclogues at Purg., xxii, 70–72, and the description that Dante’s Statius provides of Virgil: Facesti come quei che va di notte, che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova, ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte (Purg., xxii, 67–69) Musa: “You were the lonely traveller in the dark / who holds his lamp behind him, shedding light / not for himself but to make others wise.” 62 Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 78: “nell’autunno 1308 [...] il Veltro ha acquisito un nome e Dante si sente – un po’ ad immagine di Virgilio, e pure lui strumento della volontà divina – colui che ne è stato l’ignaro profeta.”

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predicts the coming of the heir of the eagle, which is a Roman symbol of empire. In Limbo, Homer was likened to the eagle: like the flight of the bird, his song soared above that of all others. In a phrase whose enigmatic character equals that of Virgil’s first presentation of the veltro, Beatrice announces the arrival of an emissary from God: Non sarà tutto tempo sanza reda l’aguglia che lasciò le penne al carro, per che divenne mostro e poscia preda;

The eagle that sheds feathers on the car that would become a monster, then a prey, will not remain forever without heirs;

ch’io veggio certamente, e però il narro, a darne tempo già stelle propinque, secure d’ogn’ intoppo e d’ogne sbarro,

I tell you this because I clearly see those stars, already near, that will bring in a time – its advent nothing can prevent –

nel quale un cinquecento diece e cinque, messo di Dio, anciderà la fuia con quel gigante che con lei delinque. (Purg., xxxiii, 37–45)

in which five hundred, ten, and five shall be God’s emissary, born to kill the giant and the usurping whore with whom he sins.

Musa’s translation has left out the indefinite article before the numeral in “un cinquecento diece e cinque,” ‘a five hundred ten and five’. If converted into roman numerals, ‘515’ becomes ‘DXV ’, which the earliest commentators on the Commedia identified as an anagram of ‘DVX ’, Latin for ‘leader’.63 Bosco, Reggio and Palma di Cesnola agree that the only likely reading of the numeral is to identify Henry VII as DVX , heir of the eagle. In August 1311 Henry dies, and with his death collapses not only Dante’s hope of an Italy under imperial leadership but also the prophetic structure of the Commedia. Dante is forced to re-interpret his own prophecy and to insert a key to a new reading in the text. He assigns the task of presenting this new reading and new identification of the veltro to his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the pilgrim meets in the Heaven of Mars. In Paradiso 15, the haste with which the star that is Cacciaguida rushes to meet the pilgrim is compared to the eagerness with which Anchises received Aeneas in Elysium:64 Ferrante finds this reading in the text of one of Dante’s contemporary commentators, L’Ottimo Commento della Divina Commedia, testo inedito d’un contemporaneo di Dante, ed. Alessandro Torri (Pisa: Capurro, 1827). Another reading adds the 515 to 800, the year when the Empire was brought back to the West, to arrive at 1313, the year when Ludwig was crowned emperor. Ferrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 118–19. 64 The reference is to Ae., vi, 684–88. 63

130 Sì pïa l’ombra d’Anchise si porse, se fede merta nostra maggior musa, quando in Eliso del figlio s’accorse. (Par., xv, 25–27)

AMBITION AND ANXIETY With like affection did Anchises’ shade rush forth, if we may trust our greatest Muse, when in Elysium he beheld his son.

The comparison establishes a paternal relation between Dante and his ancestor and renders Dante–pilgrim an Aeneas and Dante–poet a Virgil; the episode is framed by the epic tradition and its concern with blood and lineage. Dante, indeed, admits that his meeting with Cacciaguida made him indulge in the emotion upon which we have seen Odysseus base the seduction of his men: pride in lineage. O poca nostra nobiltà di sangue, se glorïar di te la gente fai qua giù dove l’affetto nostro langue,

Ah, trivial thing, our pride in noble blood! That you can make men glory in you here on earth where our affections are weak-willed,

mirabil cosa non mi sarà mai: ché là dove appetito non si torce, dico nel cielo, io me ne gloriai. (Par., xvi, 1–6)

will never again amaze me, for up there where appetite is always in the right, in Heaven itself, I gloried in my blood.

The view of Homeric lineage as dependent on blood-lines is here combined with the medieval notion of nobility. Cacciaguida defines himself as Dante’s root (“radice,” Par., xv, 89; “piota,” xvii, 13), a metaphor of origin similar to the “fonte” that we have seen used of Virgil. Paradiso 15 ends with an association of ancestry and empire: Cacciaguida’s reference to his own service under Emperor Conrad during the second crusade. Dante addresses Cacciaguida with three anaphoric phrases, similar to the two with which he spoke to Virgil in the dark forest.65 The “tu” with which Virgil was addressed is replaced by the more reverent and solemn “voi.”66 Like Virgil in the Earthly Paradise, Cacciaguida is Dante’s “padre mio.”67 See p. 53 for the quotation from Inferno 1. Io cominciai: “Voi siete il padre mio; voi mi date a parlar tutta baldezza; voi mi levate sì, ch’i’ son più ch’io. (Par., xvi, 16–18.) Musa: “I began: ‘You are my sire. / You give me confidence to speak. You raise / my heart so high that I am more than I.” 67 Dante calls Virgil “dolcissimo patre” at Purg., xxx, 50. We may note that Virgil is “patre,” Cacciaguida “padre.” The difference in spelling is determined by the rhyme: “patre” is found at verse-end and tied to “matre” and “atre” by rhyme. 65 66

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Furthermore, the rhyme “volume – lume” that was employed at Dante’s first meeting with Virgil is repeated as within a light (“lume”) Cacciaguida tells Dante of his readings in God’s book (“volume”).68 The book (or ‘volume’) of Virgil is thus associated with, yet superseded by, that of God. In Paradiso 17, Cacciaguida turns to matters of the future and to the exile that is awaiting Dante. In the ancestor’s prophecy of the poet’s sojourn with the lords of Verona, the Scaligeri’s, the imperial eagle reappears: Lo primo tuo refugio e ’l primo ostello sarà la cortesia del gran Lombardo che ’n su la scala porta il santo uccello (Par., xvi, 1–6)

Your first abode, your first refuge, will be the courtesy of the great Lombard lord who bears the sacred bird upon the ladder.

On the coat-of-arms of the house of la Scala, the imperial eagle was placed next to the stairs to which the family name refers. During the years of exile, Dante stayed twice with the Scaligeri’s: as guest of Bartolomeo della Scala in 1301–1302 and of Cangrande della Scala in 1310–18.69 Cacciaguida speaks in splendid terms of the future of Cangrande: Le sue magnificenze conosciute saranno ancora, sì che ’ suoi nemici non ne potran tener le lingue mute.

Knowledge of his munificence will yet be spread abroad: even his enemies will not be able to deny his worth.

A lui t’aspetta e a’ suoi benefici; per lui fia trasmutata molta gente, cambiando condizion ricchi e mendici;

Look you to him, expect from him good things. Through him the fate of many men shall change, rich men and beggars changing their estate.

68

E seguì: “Grato e lontano digiuno, tratto leggendo del magno volume du’ non si muta mai bianco né bruno,

solvuto hai, figlio, dentro a questo lume in ch’io ti parlo, mercé di colei ch’a l’alto volo ti vestì le piume. (Par., xv, 49–54) Musa: “Then he went on: ‘A long-felt, welcome thirst / born from perusal of that mighty book / whose black and white will never altered be, // you have assuaged, my son, within this flame / from which I speak to you, thanks be to her / who gave you wings to make this lofty flight.” 69 Giorgio Petrocchi, Vita di Dante (1983; Rome & Bari: Laterza, 1993): 94 and 189. Bosco and Reggio suggest that the Scaligeri family added the eagle to the stairs on their seal when they were made Imperial Vicars in 1309. Bosco & Reggio, “Commentary,” in Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, vol. 3: 287.

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e portera’ne scritto ne la mente di lui, e nol dirai”; e disse cose incredibili a quei che fier presente.

Now write this in your mind but do not tell the world” – and he said things concerning him incredible even to those who see them all come true.

(Par., xvii, 85–93)

Whereas in the first canto of Inferno and the last of Purgatorio Dante leaves us unable to name both veltro and DVX , there is no uncertainty in the central canto of Paradiso about the identity of the coming saviour. Cangrande is identified as a man of hope both for the future and for the empire, and his association with the latter is stressed through his connection to the eagle. What remains unclear, however, is what deeds he is to accomplish; the “cose / incredibili” (‘things incredible’) revealed to the Paradisal audience are not transmitted to Dante’s readers.70 The prophecy is placed at the very centre (Par., xvii, 70ff.) of the thirtythree canti of Paradiso, which Dante dedicated to Cangrande della Scala. Fortunately for the poet, Cangrande was already associated with the empire in his capacity as imperial vicar of Verona and Vicenza. Dante receives further help from onomastics: “Cangrande” means ‘great dog’, which further supports the retrospective identification of the lord of Verona with the greyhound/veltro.71 Through a convenient coincidence, Dante is able to present the reader with a hunter–guide (‘Caccia–guida’) who praises a great hound (‘Can–grande’).72 Etymology thus suggests that the prophecy of the veltro was from the outset intended to refer to Cangrande della Scala and that the lord of Verona was on Dante’s mind when he composed Inferno 1 in 1305. In 1305, Cangrande was only sixteen years old. It seems to have been by the time of Dante’s composition of Paradiso 9 that he decided to make Cangrande his veltro: in Cangrande Dante has found his man, and just as Henry had in 1515 been dressed in the clothes of the Veltro after the fact, Dante’s task is now to make the young lord of Verona wear these same clothes, even if this operation will be more complex.73

Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 117. See Inf., i, 100–11. 72 “Un Cacciaguida che tesse le lodi di un Cangrande”; Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 115 (emphasis Palma di Cesnola’s). 73 Palma di Cesnola, Semiotica Dantesca, 111: “egli ha trovato in Cangrande il proprio uomo, e come Arrigo nel 515 aveva rivestito a posteriori i panni del Veltro, adesso si 70 71

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The historical Cangrande della Scala did not leave much trace of himself. In the Enciclopedia dantesca, Girolamo Arnaldi states that Cangrande does to a certain extent owe his fame to the Commedia.74 Joan M. Ferrante accepts the identification of Cangrande with the veltro but argues that he does not have the political scope within Europe to be Dante’s DVX as well.75 Ferrante prefers to identify the DVX with Ludwig of Bavaria, who had himself crowned emperor in Rome in 1326. Ferrante’s objection, however, looks to an historical situation for a reading of the poem’s prophecies, and not to the circumstances of the poem’s composition. The crowning of Ludwig took place seven years after Dante’s death. As historical circumstances did not suggest any self-evident emperor, veltro or DVX to Dante, he had to name and crown one himself: the poem needed an emperor. Cangrande may have been too insignificant a figure to wear the clothes of the DVX , but at the time of Dante’s composition of Paradiso, he seemed to be the only candidate left; even if the lord of Verona did not have the stature to satisfy Dante’s political vision, he would suffice for that of the poem. Placed in the central canto of the poem’s climactic canticle (which was, furthermore, dedicated to the same Cangrande), Cacciaguida’s prophecy is given a position which further stresses the importance that Dante has decided to assign to the lord of Verona. In the case of Cangrande della Scala, the Commedia has fulfilled our expectations of an epic in the Homeric line, bestowing kleos on the imperial vicar of Verona and Vicenza to the extent that the poem represents our principal (indeed, practically sole) access to his glory. Exile made Dante dependent on a number of Italian lords, especially the Lord of Verona, whom he consequently presented with Il Paradiso. The relation and its consequences for the poem have much in common with the role played by Peisistratos, under whose tyranny singers performed the Homeric poems at the Pan-Hellenic festivals of Athens. Skafte Jensen and Nagy argued that a role was assigned to Nestor’s son Peisistratos in Odyssey 3 in order to please the host of the festival. The intrusion of historical matters into the poem is, however, not rendered explicit in Homer; the Odyssey makes no connection between Nestor’s son and the Athenian tyrant. tratterà di farli indossare, anche se l’operazione sarà ben più complessa, al giovin signore di Verona.” 74 Girolamo Arnaldi, “Della Scala, Cangrande,” in Enciclopedia dantesca, ed. Bosco, vol. 2 of 6, 357. 75 Ferrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 119.

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Augustus played an explicit role both within the Aeneid and in the circumstances of Virgil’s composition of the poem. Servius’ commentary states that with the Aeneid, Virgil intended “to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus through his ancestors”:76 an understanding of the poem congruent with the proem of Virgil’s third georgic, in which he declares that he intends to praise Caesar: “Yet anon I will gird me to sing Caesar’s fiery fights, and bear his name in story through as many years as Caesar is distant from the far-off birth of Tithonus.”77 In the description of the Battle of Actium in the ekphrasis of Aeneas’ shield in Aeneid 8 and in Cacciaguida’s prophecy of the magnificence of Cangrande, we see the intrusion of the historical time of writing into the supposedly mythic time of epic. Whereas the presence of Peisistratos and Augustus was necessitated by the power structures surrounding the composition of Homer’s and Virgil’s poems respectively, Dante himself named the secular saviour who might fulfil his political vision. In choosing to place this identification within a prophecy, he repeats a celebrated Virgilian topos. Whereas Virgil places his prophecy of an historical event (the Battle at Actium) in mythic time, Dante makes Cacciaguida issue an historical prophecy in historical time; the pilgrim’s journey takes place in 1298, seven years prior to the composition of the first canti of Inferno.78 The gap in time allows Dante to predict historical events such as his own exile, which occurs in 1300. The prophecy concerning Cangrande, however, touches upon the time subsequent to that of writing and remains hypothetical and subject to non-fulfilment. In Paradiso’s Heaven of Jupiter, the imperial eagle returns, composed of and by divine souls. The Heaven of Jupiter epitomises Justice, and the eagle’s presence suggests that the Roman Empire represents divine justice. The formation of the eagle follows upon that of a cross in the Heaven of Mars: a transition indicating that the sacrifices of Christ and the martyrs served divine justice as embodied in the Empire.79 Associating Homer with this eagle, Dante presents Greek epic as another representative of martial and imperial poetry, just as his Virgil is explicitly a poet of the Roman Empire. Dante saw the Romans as a chosen people and the Roman Empire as The translation is provided by Minnis in Medieval Theory of Authorship, 15. Virgil, Georgics, iii, 46–48. See also fn 88, p. 92 above. 78 “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” signifies, among other things, the thirty-fifth year of Dante’s life: the year 1298. 79 Ferrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 53. 76 77

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destined to save the world;80 his Paradise is described as a well-functioning, idealised Rome.81 Quint’s definition of the epic as political and representative of an ideology of empire thus extends to the Commedia and to Dante’s reading of his epic predecessors, Homer and Virgil. Dante’s poem claims scriptural authority. Yet it is also a political poem reflective of imperial ideology. Its author remains the loyal son of Virgil and of Rome. Palma de Cesnola demonstrates that Dante’s composition of the Commedia is more open than might be imagined by the reader who admires its apparently inevitable structure. Pound was one such reader, identifying a major difference between his own project and that of Dante: “I haven’t an Aquinas-map; Aquinas not valid now.”82 The Commedia’s incorporation of contemporary history includes the identification of a political character who may save Italy through restoration of the Roman Empire. It also involves Lipking’s risk of epic failure, as historical factors are beyond the poet’s control and the emperor upon whom he bases his prophecies may die before the poem is completed. Dante set out without knowing whom to identify as veltro and chose to veil that uncertainty in enigmatic prophecies, whereas Pound counted on the structure of his poem to reveal itself as his composition developed: in the lines preceding those on the lack of an Aquinas-map, Pound writes: “As to the form of The Cantos: All I can say or pray is: wait till it’s there. I mean wait till I get ’em written and then if it don’t show, I will start exegesis.”83 Like the Aeneid, the Commedia is a poem about Rome. Dante’s prophecy of the DVX and the connection of the latter to the Roman Empire take us to the core of twentieth-century epic anxiety. Emilio Gentile writes of pre-war Italy that “along with the myth of the Duce, the myth of Rome was the most pervasive belief in the whole Fascist symbolic universe.”84 Large sections of the Cantos were written in Italy during the 1930s, when the rhetoric surrounding Il Duce was filled with reminiscences of the Roman DVX . Pound’s prose of the period expresses hope and conviction that Mussolini will establish order in an Italy that remains Dante’s, and Virgil’s, umile Italia. Giovanni Giurati, who served as secretary of the Fascist party, identified MussoFerrante, The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 16. The Political Vision of the “Divine Comedy,” 45. 82 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 321. 83 Emphasis Pound’s. 84 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, tr. Keith Botsford (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1996): 76. 80 81

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lini precisely with Dante’s veltro: “you are the Hound whose advent Dante prophesied.”85 Dante kept searching for an Augustus to complete the political vision of his poem and its prophecies. He seized upon Cangrande della Scala, whom history would eventually identify as politically insignificant. Resident in Italy since 1924, two years after the Fascist March on Rome, Pound did not have to search far for a political figure willing, indeed anxious, to assume the robes of the DVX . THE CANTOS: QUOTATION MARKS AND THE AUTHORITY OF MODERNIST EPIC In one of the first monograph studies of the Cantos, Daniel Pearlman defined the “crux of Cantos criticism” as “the question as to whether this physically enormous, sprawling poem has major form – an over-all design in which the parts are significantly related to the whole.”86 Like Homeric scholarship, which was for decades split between Unitarians and Separatists,87 critics of Pound may be divided into those who find such overall major form in the Cantos and those who see the poem as ultimately incoherent and fragmentary. Pearlman names the two scholarly positions ‘integrative’ and ‘disintegrative’ respectively, and declares his own loyalty to and sympathy with the former group. Commenting on Pound’s poem-in-progress, George Seferis writes in 1939: “The view which one must accept, if one feels it worth while to follow this epic, is that, when all is linked in the consciousness of the ‘rhapsodist,’

85 Giovanni Giurati to Benito Mussolini, 10 March 1923, quoted in Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 140. In correspondence with me, Valerio Lucchesi, Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, relates that in the 1930s a teacher of Italian literature at the Liceo Ginnasio Forteguerri in Pistoia would draw his students’ attention to the parallel between Mussolini and Dante’s veltro, suggesting that Mussolini’s role as the political and moral saviour of Italy was similar to that envisaged by Dante for il veltro. Lucchesi adds that the teacher was “using a current rhetorical hyperbole to convey his fascist sympathies, and, at the same time, to cast light and actuality on an obscure page of medieval literature”; the “comparison had an encomiastic purpose and, given its noble literary origin, appealed to the better educated sections of the pro-fascist public.” 86 Daniel Pearlman, The Barb of Time: On the Unity of Pound’s “Cantos” (New York: Oxford U P , 1969): 3. 87 Lord, The Singer of Tales, 8.

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the absence of historical link is unimportant.”88 Seferis not only assumes that the poem is an epic but also that the reader’s efforts are only rendered worthwhile by a final linkage of the poem’s many voices into a whole. The disintegrative critic, for whom judging the poem incoherent entails considering it a failure, thus accepts Seferis’ premise. Both the (integrative) view that the Cantos hold “major form,” and the (disintegrative) one that conceives of the poem as a structural failure thus perceive the text as an epic, thereby subjecting it to Lipking’s rule that the writing of an epic involves the risk of incompletion and failure. Schneidau warns us against looking for unity in the Cantos: “Study of Pound’s writings has convinced me that even by the most hostile evaluation his mind was never so disorganized as to prevent him from imposing ‘form’ on the Cantos if he had wanted to.”89 Schneidau suggests instead that we consider the poem as a compendium. This notion corresponds to the poem’s tendency towards paratactic conjunction, joining one thing to the next in a structure where all elements are of equivalent value. What Schneidau intends by “form” seems to be a structure of teleological development: a Dantean ascencio towards Paradise or a (Homeric) narrative causality suggested by the expectation of narrative coherence raised by the conjunction “so that” which links Cantos 1 and 17. Another crux of Cantos criticism remains ideology. Bakhtin identifies epic discourse as monologic and authoritative; Quint associates the written epic with the ideology of empire. With Pound’s adherence to fascism and the indictment for treason, his poem presents itself as an excellent ground on which to test the genre theories of Bakhtin and Quint and the correlation they establish between genre and ideology. That connection indeed merges the two pivotal issues of Pound studies: the question of major form and that of the poet’s fascism. Like Quint, Peter Brooker finds that the question of major form is one also of ideological burden.90 Brooker sees the search for order implied in Pound criticism as an ultimately fascist concern:

George Seferis, “The Cantos” (1939), in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell (New York: Gordian, 1973): 78. 89 Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real, 143. 90 Peter Brooker, “The Lesson of Ezra Pound: An Essay in Poetry, Literary Ideology and Politics,” in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, ed. Ian F.A. Bell (London: Vision, 1982): 28. 88

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We may note, with Brooker, how Pearlman’s avowal of an integrative reading of the Cantos assumes the form of a credo: “I believe that what I outline here as the major form of the Cantos is a rational, harmonious structure that strikes one with a sense of its inevitability.”92 Likewise, Pearlman refers to Kenner as a critic who “believes in the essential unity of the poem,”93 while Kenner himself seems unwilling to provide an unequivocal answer to the question of the poem’s form: a poem including history will contain not only elements and recurrences but a perceiving and uniting mind that can hope one day for a transfiguring vision of order it only glimpses now, and that in carrying simple themes to a massive simultaneous orchestration will achieve the poem’s end in discovering its own richest powers. Joyce saw Ulysses as a whole and worked at opening and closing episodes simultaneously; Pound hoped to become, while writing the poem in public, the poet capable of ending the Cantos.94

Brooker compares the critical conviction that the Cantos evince unitary major form to Pound’s own declaration of trust in Mussolini’s ability to create order. We may indeed find a parallel between Pearlman’s announcement that he believes in the major form of the Cantos and a statement of Pound’s on Mussolini from 1933: “Any thorough judgment of MUSSOLINI will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe the man means, what you believe that he wants to accomplish.”95 Hayden White defines the position of the fascist as “in essence authoritarian”; the fascist bases his prescriptions for actions “on the unquestioned authority of the charismatic leader” and does not “regard it as necessary to establish the authority of [his] cognitive positions on either rationalist or scientific grounds.” Thus, although the fascist “may offer specific theories of society and history, these theories are not regarded as being responsible to Brooker, “The Lesson of Ezra Pound,” 24. Pearlman, The Barb of Time, 31. 93 The Barb of Time, 9. 94 Kenner, The Pound Era, 376–77. 95 Pound, Jefferson and / or Mussolini: L’idea statale; Fascism as I have seen it (1933; New York: Liveright & London: Stanley Nott, 1935): 33 (emphasis Pound’s). 91 92

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criticism launched from other positions, to ‘data’ in general, or to control by the logical criteria of consistency and coherence.”96 Morrison’s observation that fascism is “a term that notoriously resists definition” may be explained by this (pseudo-) religious aspect and ambition of the movement:97 by the fact that its point of departure is not a critical analysis of society but a dedicated belief in the personal abilities of its leader. Following Walter Benjamin, Emilio Gentile sees the rites of fascism as a sacralization of politics and demonstrates that “the uniting factor for early Fascism was a common experience of faith – interventionism and war – lived through in a state of exhilaration and vitalism.”98 The motto of the Fascist Youth (Fasci giovanili) was indeed “Believe, Obey, Fight.”99 Massimo Bacigalupo, who has identified the Cantos’ many references to local Italian phenomena, states that “Pound was militantly pro-fascist and anti-Semitic from about 1930 onwards” and that the Cantos are, “among other things, the sacred poem of the Nazi–Fascist millennium which mercifully never eventuated.”100 The poem does make explicit its adherence to Italian fascism and includes elements of antisemitism. Consequently, a logical next move for our discussion would seem to be to join John Lauber, who bluntly defines the Cantos as “fascist epic.” Lauber’s definition is based on the following argument: The Cantos are totalitarian and fascistic not only in such aspects as their praise of Mussolini or their anti-Semitism but in their basic ideology: in their paranoid interpretation of history, seeing in every event the signs of a “usurocratic” conspiracy and the agency of the “enemy”; in their concern for the unmasking of culprits; in their intense authoritarianism and elitism [...]; in their “aesthetic” view of politics, judging a leader by his vision [...]; in their admiration for the inseparably associated virtues of the Will, of action, and of hardness.101 96 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1973): 23. 97 Morrison adds: “The historical referent is unproblematic (the Italian Fascists, unlike the majority of reactionary political movements in interwar Europe, actually designated themselves so), but a referent does not a definition make”; The Poetics of Fascism, 5. 98 Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 20 (emphasis Gentile’s). 99 The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, 63. 100 Massimo Bacigalupo, The Formed Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Columbia U P , 1980): x. 101 John Lauber, “Pound’s Cantos: A Fascist Epic,” Journal of American Studies 12.1 (April 1978): 21.

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Lauber’s definition of the Cantos as ideological and inclusive of “praise of Mussolini,” “intense authoritarianism” and a “paranoid interpretation of history” is, however, hard to reconcile with the following description of A Draft of X X X Cantos put forward by Allen Tate: The secret of his form is this: conversation. The Cantos are talk, talk, talk; not by anyone in particular to anyone else in particular; they are just rambling talk. At least each Canto is a cunningly devised imitation of a casual conversation in which no one presses any subject very far. The length of breath, the span of conversational energy, is the length of a Canto [...] Each canto has the broken flow and the somewhat elusive climax of a good monologue: because there is no single speaker, it is a many-voiced monologue [...] [The Cantos ] are not about Italy, nor about Greece, nor are they about us. They are not about anything. But they are distinguished verse.102

Whereas Lauber defines the Cantos as “totalitarian and fascistic,” Tate argues that the poem is “distinguished verse” but “not about anything.” The distance between the two evaluations not only involves different readings of Pound’s politics and poem (as well as a distance in time: Tate’s remark is from 1936), but also dissimilar views of the status of the poetic word. The kernel of the argument, however, is the question of major form, and thus of Seferis’ rhapsodist and the authority that he may or may not establish and claim. It does indeed seem appropriate that it is the Greek poet and Nobel laureate who reintroduces the epic rhapsode into our discussion. It is with the unifying ability of the poem’s rhapsode and his monologue that we must open our investigation, since any adherence to the thesis of the Cantos as a fascist epic depends on the authority of its rhapsode. The task of Seferis’ hypothetical rhapsode is to create order – to unite the endless, interrupted conversations perceived by Tate and to make of them a “many-voiced monologue.” In Republic 3, Plato identifies parts of the Homeric poems as passages where “the poet himself is the speaker and does not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking.”103 For these parts of the poem, Plato uses the term “(haple) diegesis,” translated as ‘simple’ or ‘pure narration’. Our search for an epic rhapsode thus becomes a search for his diegesis. These parts of pure narration are differentiated from Allen Tate, “Ezra Pound” (1936), in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Russell, 67. Plato, Republic, I I I , 393a, tr. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P & London: William Heinemann, 1982). 102 103

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those of “mimesis,” with which Plato identifies the passages in Homer where the poet “delivers a speech as if he were someone else”: i.e. presents “a narrative that is effected through imitation.”104 The conventional translation of Plato’s “mimesis” is ‘imitation’, recalling Tate’s view that “each canto is a cunningly devised imitation of a casual conversation.” From its Homeric origins and through Virgil, Dante, Milton and Tasso, epic poetry is characterised by a clear demarcation of the interchange between dialogue and narration. To Plato, Homeric epic contains only these two, easily distinguishable, forms of narration: the poet speaks either in his own voice or in that of one of the characters. The boundary between the two modes is clearly marked by the diegesis, as with the Dantean formula “Ed io a lui,” (“and I to him”) or phrases of Milton’s such as “and him thus answered soon his bold compeer” or “whereto with speedy words th’Archfiend replied.”105 Tate’s view of the Cantos as a collection of imitated rambling conversations suggests that the poem reflects a series of images of speech. Pound’s Imagist criticism calls for a “direct treatment of the ‘thing’,” but, as Genette points out, “mimesis in words can only be mimesis of words”:106 what may be treated directly in a poem is words, speech, conversations. If the text is to present direct images, these must be images of speech or simply of words. Each voice may be considered a synecdoche or, in Pound’s terms, a “symptomatic” or “luminous detail,” supposedly pointing to a whole:107 a worldview represented by the specific diction and discourse. It is then up to the reader to connect part to whole – to deduce what world-view is characterised by a given image of speech. The discussion with Browning entertained in the Ur-Cantos, of which the early cantos preserve a few fragments, likewise indicates that the Poundian image is one of dramatic speech. We shall return to Pound’s Imagist poetic and the poem’s use of synecdoches of speech in the following chapter. Plato, Republic, I I I , 393c and 392d. PL., i, 127; 156. Mindele Treip has compared the punctuation of the 1667 version of the first book of Paradise Lost with the manuscript and observes that the colons that introduce direct speech in the manuscript are changed to full stops: “the alternative signs mean the same thing; once the convention has been decided, the signification of each mark stays constant”; Treip, Milton’s Punctuation and Changing English Usage 1582–1676 (London: Methuen, 1970): 84. 106 Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1980): 164. 107 Pound, Selected Prose, 22. 104 105

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Plato’s mimesis is a dramatic term referring to dialogue or direct speech. I shall also employ the term for Pound’s citations from written sources. When a literary passage is represented within quotation marks, it is linguistically and graphically indistinguishable from direct speech; there is no linguistic difference between the presence of dialogue within diegesis and a quotation from a text, whether that be the diaries of an American president, the odes of a Chinese philosopher-poet or a song by a Provençal troubadour, inserted into another. Only framing diegesis may tell us whether the inset was originally spoken or written. Quotation adds explicitness to the intertextuality that is literature. Pound employs quotations throughout his work, and his use of quotation marks displays great idiosyncrasy. Quotation marks perform the task that Dante’s meeting with Virgil exemplified: the move into so-called metadiscourse, in which the text demonstrates its awareness of itself and other texts as texts. When placed within quotation marks, the framed word becomes an image of a word. On quotation marks in general, and with specific bearing on Pound, Geoffrey Hill writes: In Pound’s use of quotation marks in Homage to Sextus Propertius and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [...] the effect is not that of avoiding the rap but rather of recording the rapping noise made by those things which the world throws at us in the form of prejudice and opinion [...] “Inverted commas” are a way of bringing pressure to bear and are also a form of “ironic and bitter” intonation acknowledging that pressure is being brought.108

Pressure is brought to bear, but the changes created by this pressure are expressed in intonation: in extralinguistic features that the written word records only with quotation marks or “inverted commas.” Whereas Bakhtin focuses on the subversive qualities of parodic or ironic citation, Hill here reminds us that the move into irony may also be a step towards prejudice, opinion and bitterness. A poem of “rambling talk” that is “not about anything” apparently assumes no authority. Yet Tate’s seemingly paradoxical “many-voiced monologue” has affinities with Bakhtin’s notion of a novelised epic characterised by dialogism: i.e. by diegesis that includes the unidentifiable mimesis of

Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (Oxford & New York: Oxford U P , 1984): 142–43. 108

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others and may be taken over by such other voices.109 Does the diegesis of Pound’s rhapsode establish a monologue through which the poem may speak with authority, or is he overcome by the disjunctive force of the many voices and their “rambling talk”? And on what grounds, if any, does the rhapsode – and the poem – claim authority? Narrative authority is achieved or claimed by the one voice ordering and framing the many voices. The authority of Pound’s epic rhapsode depends on his ability to establish diegesis that contains the images of dramatic speech; the issues involved in a study of this interconnection of voices include quotation, authoritative diegesis or framing narration, and dialogism. We may wonder how a novelised text characterised by the anarchy that Bakhtin finds in the discourse of the novel could manage to retain the kind of authority implied by a notion such as “fascist epic.” A draft of what was then the third of the initial Three Cantos illustrates the development of Pound’s poetic exploration of the conventional differentiation between dramatic dialogue and simple narration: Dark blood he drank then, And spoke: Lustrous Odysseus, saying that I should Return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, Should lose all my companions, foretold me the ways and the signs.110

This is simple narration performed by Odysseus; Canto 1 rewrites Odyssey 11, which is one of the four books in the Odyssey told directly by Odysseus. Genette’s application of Plato’s terms ‘mimesis’/‘diegesis’ would allow us to define this as diegesis contained within Odysseus’ mimesis; Genette operates with “degrees of diegesis,” arguing that “whether the narrative be taken charge of by Homer or by Ulysses is simply to transfer the problem.”111 We should remember, however, that in Plato the term ‘diegesis’ covers only 109 Dialogism, or free indirect discourse, presents itself as mimesis concealed within diegesis, a second rival voice dismantling the authority of the narrative voice. Semantic and metalinguistic features differentiate parts of the discourse from those otherwise characterising the narration, suggesting that these parts involve concealed quotations from an unidentifiable speaker or source: diegesis quoting a mimesis that can no longer be traced, and the boundaries of which can no longer be identified with certitude. 110 Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Copyright © (2006) by Omar S. Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz. Published with permission from New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. 111 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 164.

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those passages where “the poet himself is the speaker and does not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking.” In Pound’s rewriting, Odysseus’ mimesis includes that of Tiresias, which becomes reported speech (“saying I should”). The passage is, however, not wholly conventional; the colon after “and spoke” stands out, identifying the direct address of “Lustrous Odysseus” as Tiresias’ mimesis. Corrections made in pencil on the draft change the passage to And spoke: " Lustrous Odysseus, " shalt Return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, lose all companions. Foretold me the ways and the signs.112

Through deletion, Tiresias’ reported speech becomes direct speech. The move has necessitated a change in punctuation. Nevertheless, this version is not entirely conventional either: once again, “Lustrous Odysseus” is foregrounded, this time by being the only phrase placed within quotation marks. The last half-line, “Foretold me the ways and the signs,” returns to reported speech. The final version of this passage is that of Canto 1. It deletes “foretold me the ways and the signs” and places all of Tiresias’ speech within quotation marks: And he strong with the blood, said then: “Odysseus “Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas, “Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. (I /4–5)

In his final rewriting and translation of Divus’ text, Pound thus remains within the conventions of punctuation, clearly separating direct from reported speech. Throughout the canto, mimesis is clearly introduced by colons and a narrative frame spoken by Odysseus: “and I cried in hurried speech:”; “and he in heavy speech:”; or “and he strong with blood said then:” At the end of the canto, however, quotation marks disappear: “ Lose all companions.” And then Anticlea came. Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus, Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Copyright © (2006) by Omar S. Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz. Published with permission from New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. The stage of composition rendered here reflects the text created through incorporation of the corrections made in red and black pencil on the typescript first quoted. 112

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In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away And unto Circe. (I /5)

“Lose all companions” ends Tiresias’ speech, held within the framing narration of Odysseus’ mimesis. With “lie quiet Divus,” however, a new “I” is introduced, addressing Homer’s translator with an imperative, and informing us that Odysseus’ speech was contained not only within that of Homer, but also within that of Divus, thus adding another frame to the telling of the tale. We have apparently shifted to a new layer of narration, voiced by a speaker who performs a metanarrational identification and names his Homeric source. It is tempting to identify this voice as the diegesis of the text’s rhapsode, who would thus be speaking here in his own voice. With “and he sailed, by Sirens,” the narration apparently resumes from “and then Anticlea came.” Odysseus’ first-person “I” is now, however, a third-person “he.” A new speaker has taken over, and we find ourselves unable to place the half-line “and then Anticlea came.” The shift from Odysseus to the new speaker may take place either before or after “and then Anticlea came.” The phrase is an instance of what Childs calls “condensation” and identifies as a stylistic characteristic of the Cantos.113 The fragment or phrase of condensation points both backwards and forwards and we are unable to stabilise its ambiguity. “And then Anticlea came” may be the last clause in the story told by Odysseus, or the first in that of the new speaker. No quotation marks delimit Odysseus’ tale from this new layer of narration. Canto 1 thus suggests that strict adherence to punctuative conventions and the consequently clear delimitation of the relations of direct and reported speech are characteristic of Divus’ Homeric text. When we leave the world of archaic epic as this is adopted and translated into the Renaissance, the shifts and boundaries between voices and modes – between dialogue and narrative frame – are no longer consistently marked. The shift is accompanied by a lack of punctuative demarcation, making it impossible for the reader to pinpoint the exact stage at which Odysseus ceases to speak and the new voice takes over. With the voice addressing Divus: i.e. the “I” that renders Odysseus’ firstperson “I” a third-person “he,” a potential rhapsode has presented and positioned himself as the speaker of a narration that frames that of Odysseus’ “I” 113

Childs, Modernist Form, 72–87.

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and thus has major authority. This is the voice that we may tentatively refer to as the diegesis of the poem’s rhapsode. 

The Malatesta Cantos represent a major change in Pound’s compositional process. These are the first cantos to include prose; once he had developed a technique for working from historical prose documents, Pound rewrote the cantos he had already composed.114 Cantos 8–11 tell of the Renaissance prince of Rimini, Sigismundo Malatesta, and include a selection of letters, chosen by Pound from Italian archives, some with a heading and a fragmentary ending, others with a fragmentary opening and a signature at the end. Lawrence Rainey has demonstrated that the selection is made by Pound according to a specific agenda – an observation that confirms Bakhtin’s rule that the transferral of primary speech genres into secondary genres necessarily includes an element of ideological evaluation and parody. At the end of Canto 8, the sequence of (prose) letter fragment following upon letter fragment is interrupted, and we come across a passage in narrative verse, reporting events from the year 1433: And the wind is still for a little And the dusk rolled to one side a little And he was twelve at the time, Sigismundo, And no dues had been paid for three years, And his elder brother gone pious; And that year they fought in the streets, And that year he got out to Cesena And brought back the levies, And that year he crossed by night over Foglia, and . . . (V I I I /32–33)

This is the end of the canto. Like the very first canto of the volume, which ended with “so that” and a colon, it ends with a suggestion that the narration is incomplete. Canto 9 resumes: O N E year floods rose, One year they fought in the snows, Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1991): 4. 114

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One year hail fell, breaking the trees and walls. Down here in the marsh they trapped him in one year, And he stood in the water up to his neck to keep the hounds off him, And he floundered about in the marsh and came in after three days, That was Astorre Manfredi of Faenza who worked the ambush and set the dogs off to find him, In the marsh, down here under Mantua, And he fought in Fano, in a street fight, and that was nearly the end of him; And the Emperor came down and knighted us, And they had a wooden castle set up for fiesta, And one year Basinio went out into the courtyard Where the lists were, and the palisades had been set for the tourneys, And he talked down the anti-Hellene, And there was an heir male to the seignor, And Madame Ginevra died. (I X /34)

The anaphoric construction “and that year [...]/ and that year” of Canto 8 is taken up again in the repeated “one year [...]/ one year” in Canto 9. The diction of the two passages is similar, suggesting that they are narrated by the same speaker, with Canto 9 as the direct continuation of Canto 8. Both passages are narrated in a plain past tense; most lines open with an “and,” reminding us of Lord’s observation that epic diction tends to be paratactic.115 Canto 9 includes a first-person pronoun: the “us” of “the emperor came down and knighted us.” This plural first-person pronoun is used regularly throughout Canto 9. Sigismondo Malatesta and his younger brother, Domenico, were knighted in the fall of 1433. We can assume, then, that Domenico is the speaker of the canto. The narrator of Canto 8 employs a practically identical diction, but not the first-person pronoun; Canto 8 refers to Domenico and Sigismundo’s elder brother, Galeotto, without reference to Domenico: i.e. as “his elder gone pious,” not as “our elder.” The speaker of Canto 8 thus seems ulterior to Domenico of Canto 9, rendering Domenico’s first-person “us” as a third-person “them,” in a structure parallel to that of Canto 1, where Odysseus was replaced by a second 115

Lord, The Singer of Tales, 41.

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speaker rendering his “I” as a “he.” There are no explicit indications that the speech of Domenico is contained within that of Canto 8. Nevertheless, we may assume that Canto 8 is told in rhapsodic diegesis, whereas Canto 9 consists of narration performed within Domenico’s mimesis. Canto 9 continues: And old Sforza bitched us at Pesaro; (sic) March the 16th: “ that Messire Alessandro Sforza is become lord of Pesaro through the wangle of the Illus. Sgr. Mr. Fedricho d’Orbino Who worked the wangle with Galeaz through the wiggling of Messer Francesco, Who waggled it so that Galeaz should sell Pesaro to Alex and Fossembrone to Feddy; and he hadn’t the right to sell. And this he did bestialmente; that is Sforza did bestialmente as he had promised him, Sigismundo, per capitoli to see that he, Malatesta, should have Pesaro” And this cut us off from our south half and finished our game, thus, in the beginning, And he, Sigismundo, spoke his mind to Francesco and we drove them out of the Marches. (I X /34–35)

The plural first-person pronouns and possessives (“bitched us”; “cut us off from our south half”) identify the speaker as Domenico. The passage inserted within quotation marks is from a contemporary chronicle by Gaspare Broglio, a comrade-in-arms of Sigismundo.116 The colon after “March the 16th” places Broglio’s text within Domenico’s narration; Domenico is quoting from Broglio, and maintains some of the chronicler’s expressions in Italian. The combination of two languages and the repetition and italicisation of “bestialmente” all point to the passage as an image of language rather than to its referential function. The parenthetical “sic” of line 2 is the only indication that someone, perhaps a rhapsode, is present outside Domenico’s narration. This “(sic),” however, differs radically from the paratactic chronicling of Canto 8, which we just identified – tentatively – as rhapsodic diegesis. Canto 9 constitutes narration contained within the mimesis of a character who participates in the actual events. Domenico’s paratactic diction, howCarroll F. Terrell, A Companion to “The Cantos” of Ezra Pound (1980; Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1993): 44. 116

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ever, is identical to that of Canto 8, which presents itself as the diegesis of an external rhapsode. The rhapsode of Canto 8 thus seems to have assimilated his diction to that of Domenico or a contemporary chronicler. The simple narration presents itself as an image of speech, in this case an image of the narration of the Renaissance chronicler. We find similar paratactic diction in the “Razo” with which Pound opens his essay on Arnaut Daniel.117 Pound is here imitating the syntax, diction and vocabulary of the medieval razos or vidas of the troubadours. Pound’s razo is written in a parodic prose, as the voice of the medieval prosaist takes over that of the twentieth-century poet–critic. Canto 8 is the result of an identical practice, as rhapsodic diegesis becomes an image of paratactic Renaissance chronicling. We are left with the scriptorial/editorial “(sic)” – either Domenico’s comment on his own reading of Broglio’s documents, or an addition made by an ulterior reader, and writer, editing a text by Domenico. In the latter case, the “(sic)” presents itself as a possible all-embracing zone of diegesis ordering the poem’s other images of speech. In Canto 1, Odysseus had to ward off the ghosts who flocked around him: Unsheathed the narrow sword, I sat to keep off the impetuous impotent dead, Till I should hear Tiresias. (I /4)

Further down on the same page we find And Anticlea came, whom I beat off

With the imperative of “lie quiet Divus,” the rhapsode has assumed the tone that Odysseus employed when sending away the eager ghosts. If “lie quiet Divus” is spoken by the rhapsode, his diegesis has been influenced by Odysseus’ speech. In Canto 8, the diegesis likewise resembles that of Domenico or the chronicler Broglio. Canto 9’s parenthetical “sic” suggests that the many voices have been arranged by an editor. Is this “(sic)” the only trace left of the modernist rhapsode? We shall return to Pound’s parentheses in the next chapter.  117

Pound, “Arnaut Daniel” (1920), repr. in Literary Essays, 109–15.

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In The Fifth Decad of Cantos X L I I – L I (1937), we find a canto that presents itself as the most monologic component of the poem so far. It is the only canto introduced by what appears to be a title, or an image of one: W I T H Usura With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting that design might cover their face, with usura hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall harpes et luz (X L V /229)

Whereas the earlier Cantos 12 and 22 had involved the judgement of individual usurers, Canto 45 constitutes the poem’s central indictment of the evil itself. The canto is composed in an archaic diction unusual for Pound’s poem. Provided we disregard the inclusion of Latin and Old French, we may argue that Canto 45 is rendered consistently in one voice. In the edition of Pound’s Selected Poems edited by Kenner and Hayden Carruth and issued by New Directions in 1957, a “Note defining usury” was added at the end of the book.118 The note was also printed as a Poundian “gist” in Impact 1960, now reprinted in Selected Prose 1909–1965, edited by William Cookson.119 With the New Directions 1970 edition of the Cantos, the footnote is added to Canto 45: N.B. Usury: A charge for the use of purchasing power, levied without regard to production; often without regard to the possibilities of production. (Hence the failure of the Medici bank.)

Integrative readers, including Kenner and Brooke–Rose, assume that Canto 45 provides us with an authoritative voice holding a key to our reading of the poem and enabling us to find order in its polyphony. Ten years after its first inclusion in the long poem, Canto 45 was published separately by Pound’s companion Olga Rudge in the leaflet If This Be Treason, which was distributed in the hope that it might support the poet’s case against the indictment for

118

Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London: Rupert Hart–Davis, 1963):

107–108. 119

Pound, Selected Prose, 323.

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treason.120 This separation of the canto from the rest of the volume suggests that it may be read independently of the context – not as an integral part of the fifty-one cantos at that time known to Pound’s readers, but as a separate item distilling the poet’s thought. Integrative readings typically place Canto 45 next to Cantos 36, Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti’s philosophical canzone d’amore, and 39, a Chinese lyric of stillness and natural order. These supposedly transcendental cantos of light, intellectual love, right government and precise definition present the values threatened by usury as described in Canto 45. Brooker sees Canto 36 as an attempt to achieve authoritarian control of language and argues for the identification of a Poundian urge toward monologism: The suppression of contingency [...] is the linguistic equivalent of the timeless “dimension of stillness” the Canto otherwise seeks to define. The ideological implications of organicist criteria here therefore carry through questions of form to questions of language, Pound seeking in this instance to exercise an authoritarian control which will confine and atomize discourse.121

The use of archaisms and the anaphoric structure of litany identify Canto 45 as an image of a primary speech genre inserted as an element of collage into the poem, something Bakhtin argues cannot be done without making the inserted text an image of language and adding suggestions of irony and parody to its reception within the new context. By its very inclusion in the novelised text, the footnote that accompanies the canto is likewise unable to achieve authority as a gloss on usury. Within the Cantos it can only be an image – or a parody – of a footnote. As such, it is related to the central modernist parody of a conventional paratext: the notes that Eliot added to The Waste Land when the poem was first published as a book. Brooker connects Pound’s apparent ambition of assigning a major form to his poem with a blind trust in Mussolini. Despite this awareness of ideology, Brooker’s reading of the so-called transcendental cantos shares with the readings performed by integrative critics the assumption that these cantos may be read as primary genres. Brooker, like Brooke–Rose and Kenner, thus disregards the insertion of each primary genre into the new, secondary context and reads these for their monologic value and not as images of mimesis. 120 If This Be Treason figures as item A59 in Gallup’s bibliography of Pound. The volume was printed in Siena in 1948. 121 Brooker, “The Lesson of Ezra Pound,” 30.

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Froula identifies a similar shared bias in the otherwise very different readings performed by Kenner and Ian Bell: Kenner desires that the poem should be a locus of curricular authority so that he may affirm it as such, and Bell, that the poem should claim to be a locus of curricular authority so that he may reject it as such. Both, in other words, project upon the poem the authority of a sacred book, successful or failed.122

Froula’s own reading of the poem appreciates its incoherence and refusal to meet our expectations of major unitary form. She thereby attempts to avoid seeing the text as subject to criteria of epic success or failure. Froula defines the Cantos as an anti-epic, and argues that “its failure to resolve into a story, paradoxically, is its story”: “Pound’s consciously polemical modes of historywriting do not simply reject an objective perspective but rather call into question the possibility of historical objectivity.”123 Froula argues that the Cantos’ incoherence and inclusion of errors constitute the poem’s success and that the errors actually define the poem: “His stance toward the errors in the text reflects a radical transformation of our three-thousand-year-old Western tradition of epic authority.”124 Canto 45 is linked to Canto 51, which is the final canto of the third volume of the poem: Fifth element; mud; said Napoleon With usury has no man a good house made of stone, no paradise on his church wall With usury the stone cutter is kept from his stone the weaver is kept from his loom by usura (L I /250)

Napoleon’s connection to the context is semantically and syntactically unclear. Like “and then Anticlea came,” “said Napoleon” is placed between elements, with punctuation (rather, the absence thereof) that refuses to stabilise a reading: another element of condensation resulting in ambiguous reading. The line refers to Canto 34: French army 500 thousand, the Russian 298 thousand, But counting on space and time. 122 123 124

Froula, To Write Paradise, 164 (emphasis Froula’s). To Write Paradise, 154, 158 (emphasis Froula’s). To Write Paradise, 162.

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“The fifth element: mud.” said Napoleon. (X X X I V /165–66)

Not only the definite article premodifying “fifth element” but also the quotation marks have been deleted in Canto 51, and the punctuation marks that provide the line in Canto 34 with a syntactic structure have been replaced by paratactic semicolons. In Canto 34, the quotation marks differentiate the noun phrases “the fifth element” and “mud” from the framing diegesis “said Napoleon.” The colon tells us that the two elements are equated within Napoleon’s enunciation. Canto 51 has condensed the phrase by rendering its syntax paratactic, at the expense of the semantic connection between the three elements. Canto 51 repeats extensive passages from the Usury Canto, yet with variations and without archaisms. In this new context, the Usury Canto is preceded by translated fragments from Guido Guinizelli and the muddy reference to Napoleon, and it is followed by indications of how to tie a fly for fishing, a reference to a speech by Adolf Hitler, one to Geryon, the monster who is killed by Hercules and becomes Dante’s figure of usury and fraud, and finally a Chinese ideogram, Cheng Ming, which Pound translates as “precise definition.” Canto 45 has thus been absorbed among the other elements of which Canto 51 is constructed. As an image of the authoritative voice of litany, Canto 45 is an image of a primary speech genre, an image of monologic speech. In Canto 51 it has been appropriated by the poem’s heavily novelised diegesis, just as Napoleon’s remark has lost its quotation marks and thus its identity as mimesis introduced by the diegetic “said Napoleon.” The novelisation is so overwhelming that we may doubt the suitability of the term ‘diegesis’; when the diegesis consists of other voices to this extent and at the same time contains no quotation marks, the mimesis within it remains so free that we cannot identify any ‘simple narration’. The many voices have taken over the monologue. This process is repeated throughout the poem. Citations are presented more or less directly, as images of primary genres, removed from one context and presented in another, as synecdoches of diction. They are then repeated and appropriated by the poem, no longer inter- but intratextual references, and gradually they become the unidentifiable voices of a novelised universe where every word is at the same time a quotation and an image

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and where the precise boundaries and shifts between voices elude our mapping. Reading Canto 45 as a component of authority involves isolating it from the book in which it appears, and considering it instead as a primary speech genre, a litany indeed; we thus lose the image of a litany inserted into a completely new, heavily novelised secondary speech genre. Likewise, the ideogram, Cheng Ming, is inevitably rendered as an image of a word amidst the unceasing absorption and appropriation of other voices. No matter how dangerously authoritarian Brooker may find its message, within the Cantos a Chinese call for “precise definition” is unable to maintain the authority it held within a putative monologic Chinese diegesis. The same observations are relevant to the recantation found among the lyrical fragments that end the book: “And I am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere” (CXVI /810). Derrida’s admonition that we cannot take a text’s overt generic reference to itself at face value reminds us that the point at which the text explicitly claims to be a failure necessarily evades the very label it provides. If the Cantos are a failure, Canto 116 must be a success. The fragment cannot, however, escape its own position within the secondary text. It thus remains an image of the conventional epic recantation. Indeed, the palinode is the faithful companion of the epic: Virgil demanded the destruction of the Aeneid and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women rejects the depiction of women in Troilus and Criseyde.125 The first literary recantation recorded also centres on the portrayal of women: according to legend, the Greek poet Stesichoros was blinded by Helen for calling her a whore in a

125 See: Suetonius, The Lives of Illustrious Men, tr. J.C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P & London: William Heinemann, 1970); Lipking, The Life of the Poet, 83; Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, tr. Jean Starr Untermeyer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983). Broch’s novel–poem gives us: “that which he had long known, long suffered, long understood was wrung from him, escaping him in a tiny, inadequate expression of the inexpressible, looming large as the aeons, escaped him in a moan, in a cry: ‘Burn the Aeneid!’” (149–50) and “never! never would he be fit for it, he who was incapable of any help, unwilling for any service, he the mere word-maker who must needs destroy his work because the humane, the round of human action and the human need for help, had meant so little to him that everything which he should have retained and depicted in love was never written down, but simply and uselessly transfigured and magnified to beauty; what presumption to think that under such circumstances he could be ordered to watch, while the veritable watcher, the announcer of the voice had still to come!” (191).

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poem composed in the epic tradition. He withdrew his words in a palinode, and Helen permitted his sight to be restored.126 The palinode denies the status of the epic and attempts to retract its words. Yet, by its recurrent appearance in the proximity of the epic, the recantation becomes a marker of the very ambition that it wishes to distance itself and the poet from. The epic anxiety of the recantation thus comes to reveal and define the epic status of the original text. Like that of Stesichoros, Chaucer’s palinode is revamped in a later work; Virgil’s recantation of the Aeneid, on the other hand, is to be found in the biographical tradition surrounding his poem. Pound’s recantation differs from these earlier instances of the palinodic topos by being placed within the poem itself. 

The Cantos absorb other literary genres, including historical prose documents and letters, the litany and the footnote, as well as direct speech. By their very inclusion in the poem’s universe of citation, these primary texts are made into images of discourse. The appropriation includes the lyrical recantation and the celebrated voice of regret in the Pisan Cantos. Morrison points to the paradox that Pound received his greatest recognition, the Bollingen Prize, for the Pisan Cantos, which were appreciated for their essentially lyrical and private character: Given his personal circumstances, Pound had reason to be grateful for the award. Given the cultural and historical ambitions of his poem, however, he had reason to question his good fortune. Hence, yet another of the ironies to which his career was given: the Pisan Cantos is celebrated in conformity with the aesthetic criteria the larger poem utterly rejects.127

Morrison goes on to associate this irony with the question of genre: [Hugh Selwyn Mauberley] is generally taken to be Pound’s farewell (or good riddance) to his own earlier aesthetic and aestheticizing self, but what Mauberley would banish, the Pisan Cantos effectively recuperates [...] The 126 Stesichorus’ palinode is the point of departure for Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998), whose opening sections, “Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?” and “Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros,” and specifically the three Appendixes revolve around the palinode and Stesichorus’ blinding by Helen. 127 Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 44.

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The Bollingen prize, as Morrison points out, identifies the Pisan Cantos and their “lyricization of epic” as the climax of the book. However, as Pound adds Section: Rock-Drill de los Cantares (1955) and Thrones de los Cantares (1959) (and eventually Drafts and Fragments [1969] and the Olga Rudge “Fragment” [1966]) to his poem, the Pisan Cantos are returned to a position of only relative significance within the volume as a whole. As Pound continues the composition after Pisa, the Cantos resume their epic course. Despite her criticism of the search for major form implicit in the studies by Kenner and Bell, Froula finds herself identifying a paradise in the Cantos, and this precisely in the Pisan Cantos, to which, she argues, the recantation’s “let the wind speak / that is paradise” (Notes for CXVII et seq./816) refers. In Froula’s reading, Pisa represents “the discovery of the paradiso terrestre that Pound had sought so long and so erringly, in the inferno of the prison camp.” She is thus able to argue that “from a vantage point outside this epic autobiography, it is possible to see what Pound from within could not: that the fragments, both the ‘spezzato’ paradise and the ‘errors and wrecks’ that are the final poem, in their very partiality make cosmos more truly than any dream of totality could do.”129 Froula and Morrison both identify a paradox in the clash between Pound’s epic ambition and the lyric moments of Pisa. Froula’s argument, however, involves a second paradox: the poem is an antiepic, yet its fragments “make cosmos.” Neither Pisa nor the recantation fragments are readable out of context. Quint’s theoretical framework allows us to argue that as the private sighs of Pisa are inserted between the covers of the larger book, the lyrical mode is colonised by the epic. Returning to the epic, we are, however, returning to the question of authority.

128 129

Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 39. Froula, To Write Paradise, 167 and 168.

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Whenever the Cantos reach out for a voice of authority, be it through litany, archaism, rhetorical pathos, the plain narration of the Renaissance chronicle or the authority of the private sigh, the result remains an image of the voice of authority. Only a reading that ignores this novelisation of the text and the omnipresent possibility of irony involved in the revoicing of other voices may identify and indict a stance of authority. The apparent monologue of what we assume to be the poem’s unifying rhapsodic diegesis is constantly disrupted by the mimesis of other voices. If the Cantos contain a rhapsode or, rather, are contained by one, he is forever busy trying on other voices. In the parenthetical “sic” we found the diegetic trace that may frame and hold all the other voices, including those of the Renaissance chronicler, Odysseus, and Divus. But the parenthesis, too, presents itself as an image of the editorial conventions of the scribe, hence as another image of language. Nonetheless, integrative readings find authority in Pound, and see him as an authority, if not a prophet, both on economics and on literary history.130 This reading of authority is achieved by seeing Pound as Ion saw Homer: as the ultimate aoidos, who receives a profound insight from the muse. The role of rhapsode is thus assigned to the critic himself. The aoidos is thus able to say “I have seen what I have seen” (II/9) but “I cannot make it cohere” (CXVI /810), and leave it to the clever critic to establish coherence. In this fashion, the Cantos position themselves as a sacred epic text that exerts authority for those who believe, while Kenner’s The Pound Era (1971) becomes the compulsory, and authoritative, vade mecum. Readers who do not see Pound as an authority on history and remain critical of his economics may nevertheless admire the text’s refusal of stability, thus agreeing with Tate’s 1936 claim that the Cantos are distinguished verse because they are rambling talk, or with Froula’s that their literary value depends on their inclusion of error. Hill describes Pound’s predicament as one inherent in the poetic word: “Modern poetry, we may suggest, yearns for this sense of identity between saying and doing [...] but to Pound’s embarrassment and ours it discovers itself to possess no equivalent for ‘hereby’.”131 Poetry lacks the ability of Austin’s performative utterance to have changes come about in “the so-called real world in which marriage ceremonies are genuinely performed, committee meetings truly take place 130 Brooke–Rose explicitly calls Pound’s work that of a visionary. See her “Lay me by Aurelie: An Examination of Pound’s Use of Historical and Semi-Historical Sources,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Hesse, 243. 131 Hill, The Lords of Limit, 153–54.

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and money is real.”132 Pound’s verse, like all modern verse, can only be distinguished talk: it can say but never do. If the Cantos constitute a problem for the contemporary poet suffering from epic anxiety, the poem also reserves one for the literary critic. Bakhtin praises novelisation and dialogism as the voices of democracy. Deconstruction enables us to dismantle any voice that reaches for authority; in the case of Pound, however, anti-democratic discourse is not formulated in the explicit monologic diegesis of the authoritative rhapsode but in the infinite voices of interrupted conversations and under the guise of parody, irony and prejudice. Morrison points to the risk involved in a too facile identification of the monologic with the authoritarian/totalitarian: The tendency to identify fascism with the “monologic” reaffirms the opposition between the liberal–constitutional and the fascist–dictatorial state, which is itself an article of both liberal and fascist faith, but the binarism is generalizable only at the cost of suppressing “contrary voices” within and between fascist movements themselves.

He goes on to state what seems to be the core problem of the politics of modernist style, a problem that is probably represented even better by the Cantos than by the drafts of The Waste Land: Contrary to conventional wisdom, which makes of fascism a dispensation different in kind from our own, it is entirely possible “to do the police” – or an unholy amalgamation of the quasi-constitutional and quasi-police state – “in different voices.”133

When Brooker argues that in Canto 36 Pound is “seeking [...] to exercise an authoritarian control which will confine and atomize discourse,” he is trying to identify, and indict, a monologic stance in the Cantos.134 In order to do so, he has had to ignore the irony of novelisation: the “rapping noise” that Hill heard in Pound’s use of quotation marks. Hill added the observa132 Andrew Bennett & Nicholas Royle, Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (London & New York: Prentice Hall, 1999): 216. Hill’s essay on Pound is also a reaction to J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. Hill borrows the title of his essay from Austin, who writes: “Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond; Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1955; London & New York: Oxford U P , 1962): 10 (emphasis Austin’s). 133 Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 6. 134 See the quotation given on p. 151.

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tion that hand in hand with irony goes prejudice. If Pound’s quotation marks are used with prejudice – as were those we observed lacking in Kenner’s discussion of Marx – it is in the evasive sphere of intonation that his fascism is located. Intonation also involves insinuation.135 Morrison warns us that “the police state is invoked in order to construe the polyphonic as the ‘radical’.”136 This is the problem represented by Bakhtinian genre theory: the definition of the radical novel depends on the existence of a monologic epic, which remains, however, a retrospect literary construct. A study such as Putnam’s, which focuses on the ambiguities of our monologic, imperialistic epic par excellence, Virgil’s Aeneid, risks upsetting not only genre theory but also, and more importantly, its ideological implications. Another challenge to Bakhtinian genre theory is the modernist poem that manages to do Mussolini in so many voices that juridical authorities cannot press a verdict on their author but prefer to consider him insane. The anarchy of the many voices and the possibility of irony enable the poet to formulate grand claims and accusations, while avoiding commitment to a clear stance. The appropriated citation, which leaves the voice always also that of someone else; the unclear shifts between voices, which make it impossible to decide when one voice stops talking and another takes over; the fragment of condensation that points both backwards and forwards; and the personal pronoun pointing to more than one antecedent (to which we shall return in the next chapter) – all these are syntactic features that refuse to take a authoritative or monologic stance. So does the acclaimed technique of the “ideogrammic method,” which remains not only, as Guy Davenport puts it, a technique that restores relationships,137 or part of “the mystical mode of contemplation,” as argued by Hesse,138 but is primarily a technique of insinuation. The resultant text may offend ad infinitum while it carefully avoids establishing the authoritative monologue that would entail a clear assumption of responsibility. This is precisely the observation that our central Homeric rhapsode, Robert Fitzgerald, makes in a private letter to Pound,

135 Christopher Ricks, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber & Faber, 1988) includes a discussion of the “traditional possibilities of assassination by intonation” (188). 136 Morrison, The Poetics of Fascism, 14. 137 Guy Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Hesse, 157. 138 Hesse, “Introduction,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, 48. In “Lay me by Aurelie,” Brooke–Rose argues that “even in his prose, [Pound] does not argue in an Aristotelian manner but ideogrammatically” (242).

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written as a reaction to the transcript of Pound’s Rome broadcasts, which Fitzgerald had read through “with a kind of disbelief”: Don’t talk to me about loyalty to the republic of letters. You’ve abused that loyalty like every other. You’ve written well and tried to trade on it to get you out of the trouble you provoked for yourself. You are in S. Elizabeth’s because you and your lawyer chose to plead insanity rather than stand up to a trial. If there was something you wanted to fight for aside from yourself you could have fought for it then. If your mind was sick then you belonged in S. Elizabeth’s. If it wasn’t, then you were craven not to stand trial on your indictment. There wasn’t, and isn’t, anything Promethean about you. You don’t have to stay there, and you know it. You know that if you are sick you can be released in wardship. If you are not sick then you can face a judge, or if you believed your own rot about fighting for the Constitution you could face a trial, as better men have done.139

In his essay on Pound, written a year later, Fitzgerald softens the charge, trying to make sense of “one of the poorest productions ever thrown off by a man of genius.”140 Fitzgerald notes that “by the mercy of contemporary psychology – to say nothing of common sense – the author [...] would surely be held not responsible for his words” and then observes “a further irony” in Pound’s claim to insanity as of 1945: If he should be declared sane now, he is by implication committed to the position that he was sane when he wrote his scripts for Radio Roma, and on that premise he seems to have a choice of admitting his offence or of being convicted of it.141

Fitzgerald addresses Pound as an American citizen and speaker on the Rome broadcasts. As Hill’s focus on the lost identity between poetic saying and doing demonstrates, Pound could not be tried in his identity as poet. The example of Flaubert shows, furthermore, that even in the extraordinary case when the modern poetic word has been taken to court, the text’s free indirect discourse and novelisation disable the court from delivering a verdict

139 Robert Fitzgerald, letter to Ezra Pound, 28 November 1954. Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Used by permission of Penelope Laurans Fitzgerald. 140 Fitzgerald, The Third Kind of Knowledge, 143. 141 The Third Kind of Knowledge, 144.

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of criminal behaviour on the author.142 On Pound as author of the Rome broadcasts, Hill writes: The moral offence of his cruel and vulgar anti-semitism does not call into question the integrity of his struggle; neither does the integrity of the struggle absolve him of responsibility for the vulgar cruelty. The essential culpability of his wartime broadcasts was not their eruption into “that stupid suburban prejudice,” as he self-indulgently called it, but their “insufficient desperation,” as Richard Reid has acutely observed. The more important word here is “insufficient.” “Saeva indignatio” is no guarantee of verdictive accuracy, or even of perception; and it is lack of attention, or “care,” which brings Pound to the point of “signing on the dotted line” for the rulers of the darkness of this world – not in spite of, but through, the mundane struggle, the “being bound” to push on with the matter in hand, no matter what, where the matter is the “heavy bodies,” the “solid entities,” the “compacted doctrines.”143

Froula defines the ideogrammic method as dependent upon a construction of meaning “in collaboration with the reader: If this collaboration fails, so does that dimension of meaning, along with the poetic of metaphor designed to create it. The ‘authority’ of the text is thus diffused between author and readers.”144 The reading of the Cantos and its ideograms depends on what the reader infers from the juxtaposition of its ‘facts’; on what we decide is suggested by Kenner’s “And ....” Eventually, it also depends on whether we believe that Pound’s quotation marks imply subversive parody and irony, or (“suburban”) prejudice. Our reading has focused on the novelised word. Such a reading invalidates Pound’s epic project, leading us to conclude that he is neither an authoritative rhapsode nor, as the Bollingen award suggests, a romantic lyricist, but a parodic novelist. The Cantos cannot, then, be Lauber’s “fascist epic.” Novelisation frees Pound from the implications of the authority that at moments (which we shall consider more closely in the next chapter) the poem claims to assume. 142 Pound’s case has a parallel in the 1857 trial against Gustave Flaubert, which has been defined as a trial against the free indirect discourse of Madam Bovary. See Stina Teilman, “Flaubert’s Crime: Trying Free Indirect Discourse,” Literary Research / Recherche Littéraire 17.33 (Spring–Summer 2000): “the lack of an authorial narrator in Madame Bovary made the novel reiterate the element of irresponsibility to be found in now-outlawed anonymous texts” (82). 143 Hill, The Lords of Limit, 154–55. 144 Froula, To Write Paradise, 158.

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Insisting upon reading the poem as a successful epic involves the assumption that the poem’s rhapsode has received visionary insight and authority and that the poem is readable by intuitive and elect readers such as Hugh Kenner. Another elect reader favoured by the poet himself was Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, alias the Boss, who manages to make sense of the Cantos at first sight: M A Q V E S T O ,”

said the Boss, “è divertente.” catching the point before the aesthetes had got there (X L I /202)

Much in the manner of the saviour-greyhound to whom Giurati had compared him, Pound’s Mussolini here catches the scent of a poem that others fail to read.



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We talk of the odour of music and the timbre of a painting because we think we suggest what we mean and are too lazy to undertake the analysis necessary to find out exactly what we do mean. — Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris”

THE INHERITANCE OF IMAGISM

I

“The Impact of Translation” (1986), Seamus Heaney describes his own “feeling of collusion” at sharing with Czesław Miłosz’s translator, Robert Pinsky, the “unabashed abstract nouns and conceptually aerated adjectives” of Miłosz’s poem “Incantation.”1 Heaney confesses that the poem created such excitement in him because it “did things forbidden within an old dispensation.” The dispensation violated by Miłosz’s abstract nouns is that of Pound’s “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste,” first published in March 1913 in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry, of which Pound was foreign editor. Indeed, in the same article Heaney characterises his own generation of poets as one that grew up with Pound’s list of Don’ts. He thus suggests that a series of negative imperatives occupies the centre of twentieth-century poetics. Imagist views on poetry and language have come to be associated with modernist poetics, more specifically with that of Pound. Natan Zach defines the bulk of Imagist work as “far from exciting”; yet, like Heaney, he finds that the poetic imperatives laid down by Pound have had an impact: “were it not for the doctrine with which it is associated, [Imagism] would probably N THE ESSAY

Heaney, The Government of the Tongue, 37. “The Impact of Translation” was first published in the Yale Review 76.1 (Autumn 1986): 1–14. 1

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attract little critical attention today.”2 Peter Jones, on the other hand, argues that “imagistic ideas still lie at the centre of our poetic practice.”3 The poetry associated with Pound’s Imagism was published in Poetry in 1913 and in the 1914 anthology Des Imagistes. Fifteen years later, Pound admitted that there had hardly been any ‘movement’ as such; the name of Imagism was primarily “invented to launch H.D. and Aldington before either had enough stuff for a volume. Also to establish a critical demarcation long since knocked to hell.”4 Despite the possible insignificance of Imagism as a literary movement and Pound’s later wish to slight the project, the anecdote of Heaney’s reaction to Miłosz’s poem testifies to the strength of Pound’s dictum, the trespassing against which provided a thrill of daring in Heaney, whom, with Harold Bloom, we might compare to a son contemplating a literary patricide.5 If reacting to epic ambition with anxiety, contemporary poets may display similar anxiety when going against the modernist poetic associated with the Imagist imperatives. John Holloway states that “Eliot and Pound must surely leave a permanent mark on English verse, but did not re-orientate it once and for all.”6 Poets such as Heaney, Les Murray and Walcott have had to confront, if only to discard, the inheritance of modernism and the clear-cut imperatives of Pound’s poetic propaganda.7 The history of Imagism may, as Kenner puts it, be “a red herring”;8 nonetheless, the doctrine associated with the ‘movement’ is significant not only thanks to the tendency towards autocensorship it may have generated in a poet such as Heaney, but also since it

2

Natan Zach, “Imagism and Vorticism,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature ed. Malcolm Bradbury & James McFarlane (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin,

1890–1930, 1991): 230.

Peter Jones, “Introduction,” in Imagist Poetry, ed. Peter Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972): 14. 4 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 213. 5 Bloom’s concern is the “battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads”; Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 11. 6 John Holloway, “The Literary Scene,” in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. Boris Ford, vol. 7: From James to Eliot (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 105. 7 In “Pound Devalued” (1974) Les Murray writes: “after having once long ago thought Pound’s interminable heaping up of recherché allusion intriguing, I now believe that old Ez was a pathetically colonial, phony-rumbustious biblioholic from Philadelphia who made a lot of noise, did a crucial piece of editing on Eliot’s Waste Land, but never achieved poetry in his own right”; Murray, The Paperbark Tree: Selected Prose (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992): 14. 8 Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 58. 3

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provides us with a starting point for a description of Pound’s poetic – and epic – of metonymy. METAPHOR AND METONYMY Not only Pound’s Imagist imperatives but also the poetic underlying the Cantos may be characterised with the help of Roman Jakobson’s description of the language pole of metonymy. Herbert Schneidau’s essay “Wisdom Past Metaphor” (1976) was the first to confront Pound’s poetic with the distinction between the two linguistic poles of metaphor (or similarity) and metonymy (or combination) formulated by Jakobson.9 Schneidau reaches the conclusion that the principle of metonymy dominates Pound’s poetry: indeed, the ‘newness’ of Pound’s verse may be found in its exploitation of the pole of combination at the expense of that of selection. Jakobson’s work builds on a differentiation originally made by Ferdinand de Saussure, who argues that “the relations and differences between linguistic items fall into two quite distinct kinds” and that these “correspond to two different forms of mental activity, both indispensable to the workings of a language.”10 Jakobson claims that The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively.11

Saussure identifies the two axes as functioning in praesentia and in absentia respectively. The syntagm thus connects units of language in praesentia: contiguous elements are combined in sequence. Associative relations, on the other hand, replace elements and operate through memory or in absentia.12 Jakobson adds the observation that the syntagm is arranged and governed by 9 Herbert Schneidau, “Wisdom Past Metaphor: Another View of Pound, Fenollosa, and Objective Verse,” Paideuma 5.1 (1976): 15–29. 10 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, tr. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983): 121. 11 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska & Stephen Rudy (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1987): 109–110. 12 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 122.

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combination and in contiguity, whereas the associative process functions through selection and on the basis of similarity.13 The system is expanded with the notion that the syntagm may also be ordered by metaphor or similarity (which gives us metre and parallelism) and the associative link created through metonymy; though working through substitution, the process of association may depend on contiguity as well as similarity and result in metonymic tropes. Jakobson links the two poles with two language functions: the poetic and the prosaic. Metaphor is identified as the pole of “least resistance” for poetry, whereas metonymy is seen as the linguistic factor constituent of prose.14 Jakobson is here concerned with two specific kinds of writing: romantic poetry and realist prose. That the ties are ultimately conventional is stressed by Jakobson in his answer to his own somewhat rhetorical question, “is it then possible to limit the range of poetic devices?” “Not in the least,” Jakobson insists, “the history of arts attests to their constant mutability.”15 Scholars have indeed observed a tendency in modernist writing towards a reversal of the generic affiliation of the two poles: as represented by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, the modernist novel is organised with a preference for metaphor.16 Modernist verse, by contrast, tends to avoid similarity on the level of the syntagm, and features metonymy and synecdoche as its dominant tropes. Charles Altieri finds a propensity for metonymic troping throughout the works of modernism, from the ironic metonyms of Flaubert’s apricots to Prufrock’s having already known “them all”: all the metonymic details of a dismal life.17 Altieri argues:

Jakobson, Language in Literature, 98–99. Language in Literature, 114. 15 Language in Literature, 369. 16 See David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). In modernist novelists, Lodge observes “a general tendency to develop (either within the individual work, or from one work to another) from a metonymic (realistic) to a metaphoric (symbolist or mythopoeic) representation of experience” (177). Lodge expands on the argument in “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. Bradbury & McFarlane, 481–96. Lodge’s adaptation of Jakobson’s distinction is circumscribed, however, by his attempt to combine it not only with I.A. Richards’ concepts of tenor and vehicle but also with the ‘literal’. 17 Charles Altieri, “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry,” PMLA 91.1 (January 1976): 103, 106. 13 14

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Where Coleridge had distinguished between the analytic understanding which sees difference in similarity and the poetic imagination which discovers similarity amidst differences, these poets take their stand with analysis.18

Altieri’s “these poets” refers to Pound and William Carlos Williams.19 His reference to Coleridge is to Biographia Literaria, which describes “that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination” as revealing “itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image.”20 This process of reconciliation is carried out through a focus on similarity, or metaphor. The task of “philosophical disquisition,” on the other hand, is defined by Coleridge as “just distinction”: “in order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy.”21 Or, we may add, of metonymy. The ‘Image’ suggested by the name of the Imagist ‘school’ begs to be taken as the point of departure for our assessment of the relation of Pound’s poetic to Jakobson’s language poles. The Imagist manifesto defined the Image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”22 The “complex” is supposed to give a “sense of sudden liberation.” Pound adds: “I use the term ‘complex’ rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we might not agree absolutely in our application.” The gloss on the “complex” provided by the reference to Hart remains vague, however, especially since Pound goes on to modify it with a concession that avoids defining the possible points of disagreement. ‘Complex’ springs from plecto, meaning ‘to plait’ or ‘interweave’. The term implies that in the Image more elements are interwoven. In “A Few Don’ts,” Pound claims that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol”;23 in a letter from January 1915 to Harriet Monroe, he argues that “language is made

Altieri, “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry,” 110. “Objective Image and Act of Mind in Modern Poetry,” 111. 20 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (London: Dent & Sons; New York: Dutton, 1975): 174 (ch. X I V ). 21 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 171 (ch. X I V ; emphases Coleridge’s). 22 Pound, “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste,” Poetry 1.6 (March 1913): 200. 23 “A Few Don’t’s By an Imagiste,” 201 (emphasis Pound’s). 18 19

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out of concrete things.”24 The two remarks seem to agree that poetry and language consist of respectively “natural objects” and “concrete things” and that these are the elements interwoven in the complex. It is not clear, however, whether the symbolic value that is assigned to the “natural object” extends to the “concrete things.” In an interview with Pound, also in the March 1913 issue of Poetry, F.S. Flint remarks that the Imagists “held also a certain ‘Doctrine of the Image,’ which they had not committed to writing; they said that it did not concern the public, and would provoke useless discussion.”25 Flint’s comment stresses what Pound’s evasiveness suggests: that at this stage a specific “Doctrine of the Image” is neither evident nor central to the new poetic. Schneidau reaches the same conclusion, stating that “no visualization requirement nor theory of the Image is listed among the points agreed upon by Pound, H.D., and Aldington, nor recorded by Aldington in his reminiscences of the movement.”26 Despite the claim that “it is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works,”27 the Image simply seems to have been inherent in the name that Pound took over for his school from T.E. Hulme.28 Other aspects of poetic language are more important to him, aspects regarding which he puts forward clear judgements and rules. Pound is thus more specific when the discussion turns to the avoidance of superfluous words. The Imagist should “use absolutely no word that [does] not contribute to the presentation.”29 When presenting Harriet Monroe with the first poems defined as Imagist, three pieces by H.D., Pound describes Doolittle’s work as “objective – no slither; direct – no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination.”30 The field of metaphor is thus described as one to be used, if at all, with caution and analytic scrutiny. Next to adjectives, abstractions should be avoided as well, reminding us that it was Miłosz’s “abstract nouns and conceptually aerated adjectives” that violated the explicit Imagist rules so familiar to Heaney. Through Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 49. F.S. Flint, “Imagisme,” Poetry 1.6 (March 1913): 199. 26 Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real, 8. 27 Pound, “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste,” 201. 28 On the 1909 Imagist ‘movement’ of T.E. Hulme, see Zach, “Imagism and Vorticism.” 29 Flint, “Imagisme,” 199. 30 Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 11. 24 25

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the avoidance of an excess of adjectives, abstractions and metaphors, the Imagist achieves precision; Pound boasts of an Imagist ability to reduce a poem of fifty words to one of ten.31 Another crucial feature of Imagism stressed in the earliest presentation of the ‘school’ is free verse. The Imagist should “compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”32 Free verse is specifically defined as not building on “external symmetry”: “you will hear the people, one set of them, raging against form – by which they mean external symmetry – and another set against free verse.”33 Another poetic element of symmetry is likewise discarded: “I have no especial interest in rhyme. It tends to draw away the artist’s attention from forty to ninety per cent of his syllables and concentrate it on the admittedly more prominent remainder.”34 A foregrounding of the line-end implies that the rest of the text is less important; Pound’s poetic explicitly seeks to weed out elements that may be defined as “excessive” or as “not contribut[ing] to the presentation.” Unrhymed free verse does not force the poet to add “excessive” elements in order to complete a metre, nor does it stress the line-end, suggesting that other parts of the line are of minor significance. Free verse thus avoids the metaphoric shift of regularity and repetition that Jakobson has identified as constituent of the poetic function; the metaphoric axis is explicitly not brought to bear on that of the syntagm. In 1913, Pound’s main interests were lexical precision and free verse and not any “Doctrine of the Image.” As we have seen, free verse entails a poetic of metonymy. The focus on reduction, on the other hand, conceives of language as condensable and enables us to define Pound’s interest in precision as not only inherently metonymic but specifically synecdochic, the synecdoche being a trope of metonymy. In 1915, the poet May Sinclair provides another description of Imagism. Like the first manifesto, her account opens with a series of negations: “It is not Symbolism. It has nothing to do with image-making. It abhors imagery.” Sinclair defines the Image as “not a substitute; it does not stand for anything but itself. Presentation not Representation is the watchword of the school.”35 Sinclair’s statements deny the symbolic value of the image: “in no case is the 31 32 33 34 35

Flint, “Imagisme,” 200. “Imagisme,” 199. Pound, Selected Prose, 31. Selected Prose, 42. May Sinclair, “Two Notes,” The Egoist 2.6 (June 1915; New York: Kraus, 1967): 88.

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Image a symbol of reality (the object); it is reality (the object) itself. You cannot distinguish between the thing and its image.” Sinclair ends her “Note” by defining Imagists as Catholics, compared to Protestant Victorians: The Victorian poets are Protestant. For them the bread and wine are symbols of Reality, the body and the blood. They are given “in remembrance.” The sacrament is incomplete. The Imagists are Catholic; they believe in Trans-substantiation. For them the bread and wine are the body and the blood.36

“A Few Don’ts” did not deny symbolic value to the Image (“the natural object is always the adequate symbol”). The declaration that “language is made out of concrete tings,” however, resembles Sinclair’s focus on the ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ rather than the symbolic. The two years that separate “A Few Don’ts” from Sinclair’s article may explain the difference not only in clarity but also in the evaluation of the symbolic value of the Image. By 1915 Imagism has been taken over by Amy Lowell, and Pound is collaborating with Wyndham Lewis on the promotion of Vorticism. The writings on the Vortex include new definitions of the Image, of which we now find both a subjective and an objective version: The Image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then “subjective.” External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene of action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original. In either case the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy [...] By “direct treatment,” one means simply that having got the Image one refrains from hanging it with festoons.37

The distinction between “subjective” and “objective” had already been accentuated in the promotion of a “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective.”38 The new term, “vortex,” denotes both the Image, which is “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas,” and the mind that produces it. “Cluster of fused ideas” thus takes over the role of the 1913 complex. 36 37 38

Sinclair, “Two Notes,” 89. Pound, Selected Prose, 344–45. Flint, “Imagisme,” 199.

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The objective and subjective images are defined by being respectively like and unlike the external world. Yet neither functions uniquely on the axis of metaphor. The subjective image is the result of an elaboration of the external world in which the relation between the two is symbolic: i.e. defined by (subjective) contiguity. As such it may be compared to Eliot’s “objective correlative,” which is defined as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”39 Eliot is concerned with the text as a formula of an emotion – a relation which Hans Osterwalder defines as metonymic because “concrete circumstances ‘in praesentia’ cause a particular feeling.” Osterwalder finds a high degree of similarity between Eliot’s objective correlative and the Poundian Image, of which he observes that “an object is not defined by reference to a paradigm of generic terms but by a syntagm of actions.”40 The objective image, on the other hand, resembles the external world, of which it maintains the “essential or dominant or dramatic qualities” and is a purged, synecdochic version. Sinclair’s definition of the Image as “not a substitute” suggests that it provides reference neither in absentia nor in praesentia. Yet her claim that “the thing and its image” are indistinguishable may be read as an indication of a general blindness to metonymy; it is tempting to regard Sinclair’s equation of the elements of the Image as an unawareness on her part of metonymy as the substitution of elements in praesentia. We thus return to Jakobson’s warning that “metonymy, based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation.”41 The general need for reduction is, as we noted earlier, synecdochic and thus ultimately metonymic. Pound’s use of the word “essential” takes us to the Image as synecdoche, while the adjective “dramatic” conceives of poetry as mimesis and the text as the speech performed by a persona. Whereas the initial description of an “intellectual or emotional complex” remains open for both metaphoric and symbolic evaluation, the “objective” image defined in 1915 remains synecdochic. Symbolic value is relegated to the “subjective”

39

Eliot, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber & Faber, 1975):

48 (italics Eliot’s). 40 Hans Osterwalder, T.S. Eliot: Between Metaphor and Metonymy: A Study of His Essays and Plays in Terms of Roman Jakobson’s Typology (Bern: Francke, 1978): 35. 41 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 113.

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image, while Pound’s insistent calls for “objectivity and again objectivity” allow us to place the objective image at the centre of his poetic.42 Schneidau and Max Nänny have demonstrated the applicability of the pole of combination to the study of Pound’s poetry and poetic.43 If in the following passage we replace Jakobson’s “language disturbance” with “poetic,” and “aphasic” with “poet,” Jakobson’s description of metonymically oriented speech may indeed strike us as relevant to our study of the Cantos: In this type of language disturbance, sentences are conceived as elliptical sequels to be supplied from antecedent sentences uttered, if not imagined, by the aphasic himself or received by him from the other partner in the colloquy, actual if not imaginary.44

Whereas Nänny concentrates on Pound’s early poetry, Schneidau focuses on his poetic. Both imply that their findings are pertinent also to the Cantos; Nänny notes that “metonymy and synecdoche, that is, the two tropes which are ‘widely employed by aphasics whose selective capacities have been affected,’ are pervasive in Personae and will become the dominant tropes in The Cantos tropes in.”45 That Nänny’s proposition still remains to be further verified and expanded may be due to the fact that the tropes of synecdoche and metonymy only cover part of the linguistic field privileged in poetic reliance on the pole of combination. The remainder of this field is concerned with those elements of language to which critics trained in identifying metaphor remain most blind; Jakobson, indeed, notes “an amputated, unipolar scheme” on the part of scholars, who tend to concentrate precisely on that line of study which proves of “least resistance”: that of selection, or (metaphoric) tropes.46 A study of the poetic exploitation of the axis of combination includes not only an identification of metonymic tropes, but also features such as syntax (or a lack of the same), reference and deixis. In an attempt to re-introduce metaphor as a focal point for the study of the Cantos, Sylvan Esh dismisses Nänny’s claim that Pound’s verse is domiPound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, 49. Schneidau, “Wisdom Past Metaphor”; Nänny, “Context, Contiguity and Contact,” 386–98. 44 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 101. 45 Nänny, “Context, Contiguity and Contact,” 394 (italics Nänny’s). Nänny cites from Jakobson, Language in Literature, 101. 46 Jakobson, Language in Literature, 114. 42 43

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nated by the metonymic pole, accusing Nänny of considering Pound to be aphasic.47 This despite Nänny’s unequivocal statement that “I do not maintain, nor does Schneidau, that Pound actually suffered from an aphasia of the similarity-disorder kind.” What Nänny does maintain is that “Pound’s mental make-up and predilections as well as his innovative strategies of reforming an excessively metaphorical poetic tradition pushed him close to the metonymic pole.”48 The reception not only of Jakobson’s work but also of that of Nänny and Schneidau is circumscribed by what Charles Lock defines as a “‘philosophical determination’ to preserve the literal as the opposite or the alternative to the metaphorical.”49 Lock argues that the fact that “the opposition metaphor/metonymy is still ascribed to Jakobson, and treated as a mere ‘theory’, one of thousands of hypotheses about language and signs, is a tribute to the energy devoted by philosophers to the continuing legitimation of the literal.”50 The association between metaphor and poetry on the one hand, and metonymy and prose on the other, may be conventional. Jakobson nevertheless defines parallelism as constituent of the poetic function. In the form of metrical and acoustic repetitions and similarities, parallelism operates on the axis of metaphor. Repetitions and similarities, however, are always also connected in contiguity and thus on the axis of combination, whether temporally as when voiced, or spatially as when viewed on the page. The assumption that a removal of metaphor creates a non-literary poetic may best be countered by Eliot’s rejection of the assumption that the abandonment of conventional metrical parallelism has established a poetry that is ‘free’. Eliot argues that vers libre is a “preposterous fiction” and points out that there is no line, ‘free’ or not, that cannot be scanned.51 Vers libre operates with metrical parallelisms that differ from those of the pentameter, but that does not free it, neither from scansion nor from parallelism. Although the combination of the axes of contiguity and similarity in Pound’s poetry differs from the practice of a primarily metaphoric poetic, neither parallelism nor ‘literariness’ have disappeared; the two simply operate where the reader 47 Sylvan Esh, “Pound and Jakobson: The Metaphorical Principle in the Cantos,” Paideuma 22.1–2 (1993): 129. 48 Nänny, “Context, Contiguity and Contact,” 388. 49 Lock, “Debts and Displacements: On Metaphor and Metonymy,” Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 29 (1997): 332. 50 Lock, “Debts and Displacements,” 325. 51 Eliot, Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 31–32.

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accustomed to a metaphoric poetic is not likely to look for them. As Jakobson states, “when an actor tears off his mask, makeup is sure to be forthcoming.”52 MIMESIS AND DIEGESIS: A POETRY OF PRESENTATION Rather than dealing with the relations between the elements interwoven in the ‘complex’ or ‘Image’ and the possible symbolic value of these, Pound’s central statements in the writings on Imagism are concerned with the way in which the Image or ‘thing’ is displayed. First and foremost, the manifesto insists on directness and on the establishment of direct ‘presentation’. We have already seen Pound praise H.D.’s poetry for being “objective” and “direct.” He went on to tell us that the poet should aim for a “direct treatment of the ‘thing’.”53 The verb with which Pound defines writing that produces such “direct treatment” is ‘present’; the stance to avoid, conversely, is that of description, to which one of the manifesto’s negative imperatives is attached: “Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can.”54 A Shakespearean metaphor is thus discussed as an instance of presentation: When Shakespeare talks of the “Dawn in russet mantle clad” he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.55

Pound’s differentiation between ‘presentation’ and ‘description’ reflects the distinction between ‘showing’ and ‘telling’ or ‘scene’ and ‘summary’ formulated in aesthetic theories of the novel after Henry James. We are thus taken to a recurrent topic in the genre and novel theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.56 Whereas ‘showing’ presents speech or events directly, as in drama, ‘telling’ reports speech (and events) and is performed by a narrator (explicit or implicit). Jakobson, Language in Literature, 370. Flint, “Imagisme,” 199. 54 Pound, “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste,” 203. 55 “A Few Don’ts By an Imagiste,” 203. 56 See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983): 3– 86, and Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1986): 124. According to Booth, “the legitimate defense of the new soon froze into dogma” (25). 52 53

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According to this aesthetic school, the novel should aim at ‘showing’, which is identified as the stance of (dramatic) presentation. ‘Telling’, on the other hand, is to be avoided. Paradoxically, the novel should be dramatic; ‘showing’ creates a ‘scene’, whereas ‘telling’ is thought to achieve a pure (or poor) ‘summary’. The presence between reader and text of a narrator who controls our experience of what is read is to be avoided: the dominance of the Jamesian scene is combined with what Genette calls a “pseudo-Flaubertian transparency of the narrator.”57 In linguistic terms, the dichotomy of showing and telling may be reduced to that between direct and reported (or indirect) speech. It also shares features with the distinction between mimesis and diegesis, with which Plato sets up “a practical classification of the genres, which comprises the two pure modes (narrative, represented by the ancient dithyramb, and mimetic, represented by the theater), plus a mixed or, to be more precise, alternate mode, which is that of the epic.”58 As we saw in the preceding chapter, Plato defines Homeric epic as a mixed genre on the basis of its alternation of passages in which the rhapsode performs the speech of one of the characters (imitation or mimesis) and passages in which he speaks in his own voice (pure narration or haplé diegesis).59 Genette finds in Plato’s reading of Homer a distinction between “direct speech” and “narration,” and defines mimesis as “direct speech in the manner of drama” and diegesis as “narrative mediated by the narrator,” categories that resemble those of ‘scene’ and ‘summary’.60 Plato discusses mimesis and diegesis as lexis, manners of speech, whereas Genette considers them modes: we thus move from a concern with speech, based on Plato’s interest in rhapsodic and dramatic impersonation, to a focus on linguistic issues not present in Plato. Plato is concerned with whether the rhapsode imitates the speech of the other or not, not with the fact that Homer’s narration of Agamemnon’s words transforms these into indirect speech. This transformation, however, is observable in Plato’s transcriptions in the Republic, where he reproduces Homeric mimesis as diegesis. If we add Genette’s insights to this transformation, Homer’s rhapsode has become a narrator. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 166. Genette adds, “mimesis [is] defined by a maximum of information and a minimum of the informer, diegesis, by the opposite relationship.” 58 Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, tr. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia U P , 1982): 129. Genette elaborates on this discussion of genres in The Architext. 59 Plato, Republic, I I I , 392d; Genette, The Architext, 8–9. 60 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 163. 57

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Genette sees the differentiation between mimesis and diegesis as reflective of natural aspects of language and thus as dependent on linguistic properties, specifically the categories of direct and indirect speech.61 As support for this argument, Genette refers to Émile Benveniste, who sees the French verbal tenses as reflecting two distinct systems: The tenses of a French verb are not used as if they belong to one system; they make up two distinct and complementary systems [...] These two systems establish two different levels of enunciation, which we refer to as the level of history and that of discourse respectively.62

Benveniste defines histoire as dependent on the third person and the aorist tense. Genette aligns the tense – or “system” – of Benveniste’s histoire with that of narrative and ultimately with Plato’s diegesis. Since English has no parallel to the French aorist (passé simple), Benveniste may define the mode more narrowly in French than is possible in English. Benveniste’s discours, on the other hand, presupposes a speaker and a listener and thus involves the first and second persons, as well as the present, perfect and future tenses and deictic shifters such as here, now, yesterday, today.63 The two systems may also mix: Moreover, the historical enunciation and that of discourse may at times meet in a third type of enunciation, in which the discourse is reproduced as an event and transferred onto the level of history; this is what we usually call “indirect discourse.”64

When combined with historical narration, direct discourse becomes indirect. Indirect discourse thus involves an amalgamation of two speakers, the words of one reproduced by another. Indirect speech occupies the position of “un troisième type d’énonciation,” placed between histoire and discours, as is the Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, 131. “Les temps d’un verbe français ne s’emploient pas comme les membres d’un système unique, ils se distribuent en deux systèmes distincts et complémentaires [...] Ces deux systèmes manifestent deux plans d’énonciation différents, que nous distinguerons comme celui de l’histoire et celui du discours.” Émile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique génerale (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), vol. 1: 238 (Benveniste’s emphasis). 63 Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique génerale, 242. 64 “Indiquons par parenthèse que l’énonciation historique et celle de discours peuvent à l’occasion se conjoindre en un troisième type d’énonciation, où le discours est rapporté en termes d’événement et transposé sur le plan historique; c’est ce qui est communément appelé ‘discours indirect’.” Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique génerale, 242. 61 62

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epic between drama and the dithyramb. Plato used the ‘thirdness’ of epic to define the genre as such; when it comes to the relation between discourse, narrative and indirect discourse, matters are more complex, however: narrative inserted into discourse is transformed into an element of discourse, discourse inserted into narrative remains discourse and forms a sort of cyst that is very easy to recognize and to locate [...] Discourse can “recount” without ceasing to be discourse, narrative cannot “discourse” without emerging from itself. Nor can it abstain from it completely, however, without falling into aridity and poverty: this is why narrative exists nowhere, so to speak, in its strict form.65

At this stage of Genette’s analysis, the classes of discourse and narrative have become parallels to Plato’s categories of mimesis and diegesis. The narration of discourse equals indirect speech. Genette, however, places narrative as a mode within discourse, which is itself also a mode: “discourse [...] is the broadest and most universal ‘natural’ mode of language, welcoming by definition all other forms; narrative, on the other hand, is a particular mode, marked, defined by a number of exclusions and restrictive conditions.”66 Our attempt to align Pound’s discarded ‘description’/‘representation’ with Genette’s narrative mode or Benveniste’s histoire is, however, confronted with a somewhat paradoxical difficulty. Benveniste argues that in historical enunciations, “events seem to tell themselves”;67 nonetheless, Genette calls narrative a mode of discourse. Brooke–Rose comments that “it may seem contradictory to talk of a revolt against the author’s intrusions and at the same time to cite a Structuralist’s dictum that in the Narrative Sentence ‘no one speaks’.”68 Genette defines Benveniste’s “historical narration” as “narrative in the pure state, as it may be conceived ideally” and as marked by “the rigorous expunging of any reference to the instance of discourse that constitutes it”;69 in the quotation given above, Genette stated that “narrative exists nowhere, so to speak, in its strict form.” When contrasting “the objectivity of narrative and the subjectivity of discourse”70 or the “autonomy of Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, 141. Figures of Literary Discourse, 141. 67 “Les événements semblent se raconter eux-mêmes.” Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique génerale, 241. 68 Brooke–Rose, “Narrating without a Narrator,” Times Literary Supplement (31 December 1999): 12. 69 Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, 139. 70 Figures of Literary Discourse, 138. 65 66

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narrative” and the “dependence of discourse, the essential determinations of which (who is ‘I,’ who is ‘you,’ what place is referred to by ‘here’?) can be deciphered only in relation to the situation in which it was produced,”71 we are thus dealing with an ideal construct: since narrative is ultimately a mode of discourse, even the most transparent narrative will always be anchored in a place and a speaking ‘I’. In Plato’s reading of Homer, events are precisely not telling themselves, but are related by the rhapsode, who speaks in his own voice. Diegesis is contained within the discours of the rhapsode. Benveniste argues that we pass from discourse to historical narration instantly;72 Genette places the narrative mode within that of discourse, which is to say that, even though in Benveniste’s ideal historical mode events seem to relate themselves, in actual language-use someone is always speaking. Indeed, Pound discards the narrative mode precisely in order to avoid the dominance of a narrator’s evaluations. In Pound’s letter to Monroe, the directness achieved through presentation was combined with the avoidance of adjectives (“direct – no excessive use of adjectives”), which are evidently viewed as elements of evaluation on the part of a narrator (whether transparent or not). Consequently, they are to be shunned. With a further paradox, we shall see Pound’s verse of presentation claim to have written itself. The discussion of modes and their linkage to different aesthetic preferences remains paradoxical; Genette points out that narrative and discourse “are almost never to be found in their pure state in any text: there is almost always a certain proportion of narrative in discourse, a certain amount of discourse in narrative.”73 It is Genette’s hope to find linguistic backing for a differentiation which remains relative, if not virtual. In the preceding chapter, we saw the Cantos exploit not only varying degrees of (free) indirect discourse but also the reader’s wish to identify the speaker of a specific passage. The discussion of mode takes us to a similar conclusion: central among the concerns of reader and text remains the question: ‘who is speaking?’ Kenner sums up the modernist exploration of these ambitions of showing and presenting: Flaubert had wanted the artist, lonely as God, to be somewhere outside his work, which is impossible: impossible because words are said by somebody; because – at the furthest remove from the intimacies of

71 72 73

Figures of Literary Discourse, 140. Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique génerale, 242. Genette, Figures of Literary Discourse, 140.

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Metonymic Epic breath – a bicycle saddle and handlebars, even when no sculpturing hand molests their shapes, denote by their power to combine into a bull’s head a possibility some human eye has seen (Picasso saw it, 1943). Art does not “happen.” The vision that made it is part of it [...] part of the picture is the mind that conceived it [...] All ways of telling the same story are homeomorphic, even the way that ingeniously lets us suppose that the teller has been removed. Pound’s generation, Joyce’s, Eliot’s, exploited the possibilities of this fact. Pound makes no effort to vanish; he is quite frankly a character in the Cantos: “I sat on the Dogana’s steps,” commences the third Canto, “I” meaning the person who is elsewhere called “ego scriptor cantilenae.” Or not quite that person but his homeomorph; that person, rather, in his public role, “E.P .,” homeomorphic to Ezra Loomis Pound, as various caricatures are homeomorphic to a portrait. This is called a persona.74

We return to “ego scriptor cantilenae” later in this chapter, and to the influence on Pound of novelists such as Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce. For now, we shall turn from the reading of the Imagist manifesto to a consideration of how the calls for direct treatment, free verse and reduction are reflected in the actual verse associated with the ‘school’. DES IMAGISTES In the 1914 anthology Des Imagistes, Pound was represented by a series of very brief poems evolving around the presentation of visual elements and similes. One of these poems is “Fan-Piece, for her Imperial Lord”:

O

of white silk, clear as frost on the grass-blade, You also are laid aside.75 FAN

Sounds are combined carefully. The opening “O” (which provides a visual representation of the open fan) and “f” are repeated by “of” in “O fan of.”76 “Clear” begins where “silk” ends: [lk] becomes [kl]. If pronounced in American English, “grass” picks up the [ræ] + sibilant of “clear as”; “frost” repeats the sequence of [r] + vowel + sibilant. The internal rhyme “blade – laid” Kenner, The Pound Era, 33. The Imagist poems by Pound that follow are reprinted from Collected Shorter Poems (1968; London: Faber & Faber, 1984), which reproduces the text of Personae: Collected Shorter Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). 76 If ‘f’ is pronounced [v], we still have a repetition of ‘o’ + labial–dental fricative. 74 75

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places a focus on “aside,” without whose ‘asideness’, the two last lines would have created a rhyming couplet.77 As suggested by the rhymes, the poem deals with repetitions and relations of similarity. The first simile compares the clarity of the fan’s silk to that of frost on a grass blade. “Clear” postmodifies both “silk” and “fan,” since the fan is made of silk and the silk is the fan; the two are tied in a metonymic relation. The second comparison deals with the fan as a whole and is rendered explicit by the adverbial “also,” linking the fan to an unidentified second element in a relation of similarity. The suggestion that the apostrophised fan and another “you” share the experience of being laid aside tells us that the image is engaged in metaphoric parallelism: the fan is compared to someone who remains unknown to us but may be associated with the “her” of the title. The metaphor and the title both suggest a context of which the reader remains ignorant. The direct address, “you,” identifies the piece as an instance of dramatic speech. “Liu Ch’e,” from the same series, displays a similarly meticulous concern with sound and a metonymic focus on the placement of elements: T H E rustling of 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.

The sounds of “silk” are spread throughout the poem, until “clings” in the last line repeats all sounds; if [ŋ] is omitted, “clings” reads “silk” backwards.78 The [i:] of “leaves” is foregrounded in “heaps,” “beneath” and the singular “leaf.” Like “Fan-Piece,” “Liu Ch’e” ends with an adverbial of place: “to the threshold,” which, like “aside,” deals with positioning and displays a metonymic concern. The fan was “laid aside” before the element with which or whom it was compared was revealed; here the final adverbial suggests a static We may note that on the occasions when Pound does use a rhyme, he chooses one that is not conventionally acceptable in English verse: “significantly, the complete identity of two measures, as in greed/agreed, lava/palaver, unnerve us/nervous, etc., is not even accepted as an approximate rhyme according to the conventions of English verse”; Geoffrey N. Leech, A Lingusitic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969): 92. 78 Note, however, that the ‘s’ of “clings” is voiced and transcribes as [z]. 77

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clinging to the threshold. Both adverbials imply that the reader is witnessing a process that has been interrupted or “discontinued.” The colon bridging ll. 5 and 6 functions like the explicit ‘like’ or ‘as’ of the simile and suggests that likeness unites the “wet leaf” and “she the rejoicer of the heart.” That the relationship between the last line of the first stanza and the final line evolves around similarity is stressed by “that,” which makes the subordinate clause in the last line a postmodification of “leaf.” Without “that,” the line could be read as a new main clause registering another metonymic/synecdochic detail: “she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them: / a wet leaf clings to the threshold.” The last line, however, is not an independent clause but a noun phrase, which the colon places as an apposition of, and consequently in a metaphoric relation to, “she.” The repetition of “leaf,” which is given first in the plural and then in the singular, is paralleled by the number of lines. The isolation of the last line, in which “leaf” is in the singular, is contrasted with the preceding five lines, in which “leaves” is in the plural, and which, like the leaves, “scurry into heaps.” As a threshold, the white blank between ll. 5 and 6 divides the plural and the singular “leaf/-ves.” “Threshold” is, however, the final word of the poem. On the page it is placed “beneath” the white dividing line and thus already underneath the heap of leaves. Like its companion pieces, “Liu Ch’e” is based on the lack of definition or identification of a central element. Both elements of the metaphor are identified (“she” and “leaf” respectively), but we miss an antecedent for the personal pronoun “she,” of which we get a postmodification (“the rejoicer of the heart”), but no referent. If we assume that the Chinese contains a proper noun, the title may provide this antecedent. The lack of a referent underlines the notion of the Orient as exotic; the uncertainty of reference foregrounds the poem’s status as a translation of a text of which we lack both cultural and linguistic context. Furthermore, the reference to a missing antecedent is characteristic of the speech patterns of Jakobson’s similarity disorder, in which the speaker displays a preference for metonymy over metaphor. We interpreted Pound’s call for “direct treatment” as a dislike of explicit narration that describes or comments. In “Liu Ch’e” someone narrates that “There is no sound of footfall” (my italics). In a similar passage concerned with China, this time from the Cantos, Pound gives us:

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Rain; empty river; a voyage, Fire from frozen cloud, heavy rain in the twilight (X L I X /244)

The noun phrases are linked by paratactic semicolons and commas, creating a list. Syntax thus depends on punctuation. The list makes up a concentrated instance of presentation or “direct treatment of the ‘thing’.” Indeed, the canto opens: “For the seven lakes, and by no man these verses.” This is a poetry that claims to have written itself. In “Liu Ch’e,” on the other hand, someone is describing the scene to us; while “there is” suggests that this is narration, the present tense signals direct discourse.79 Genette placed narration as a mode within discourse: we thus have an instance of narration/ description performed by a speaker whose heart was made joyful by the “she.” “Fan-Piece” addressed the fan directly (“O fan”) and was presented as direct discourse. The “also” linked the fan to the speaker. The use of the third-person “her” in the title, however, suggests that the title is a diegetic comment made by an editor who transforms “my imperial Lord” into “her imperial Lord.” Alternatively, the pronoun may simply indicate the speaker’s subordination to “her Imperial Lord,” and that she refers to herself in the third person as an indication of submission. The explicit presentation of a similarity relation is typical of these poems. Nänny argues that when he does want to establish a similarity relation, Pound tends to make use of a simile (by means of “like,” “as – as”) rather than a metaphor. In other words, he uses a more syntagmatic form than metaphor, a form in which the similarity-relation is made explicit, lifted to the verbal surface, subjected to an external contiguity relation.80

The explicitness of the simile’s ‘like’ may be expressed by other sentence elements: here we have seen the adverb “also” (“Fan-Piece”) and the colon (“Liu Ch’e”) identify the construction as metaphoric. Explicit rendition of a similarity relation is also the procedure in “In a Station of the Metro,” the best-known of Pound’s Imagist poems:

79 80

Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative, 140. Nänny, “Context, Contiguity and Contact,” 395.

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IN

A

STATION

OF THE

METRO

T H E apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.

In the poem’s first appearance, in Poetry, the two lines were divided by a colon; in subsequent versions a semicolon is used. The poem’s title consists of a prepositional phrase functioning as an adverbial of place; each of the two lines is made up of a noun phrase followed by an adverbial. The poem contains no verbs. The syntactic role of predicator is assigned to the (semi) colon that separates (or unites) the two lines. Whereas the semicolon implies that the comparison or association concerns the two lines and consequently the cores of their noun phrases, namely “apparition” and “petals,” a colon would narrow the focus so that “petals” is compared with “faces.” The focus on the petal or leaf suggests synecdoche – that the leaf refers to the bough (or even the tree) as a whole. The faces in the metro do not, however, represent the crowd; on the contrary, they stand out from it, as do the petals from the black bough. The leaves that “scurry into heaps” in “Liu Ch’e” are precisely disconnected leaves and not part of any whole. The part is not representative of a whole; the interest is in the part as separate and distinct. Sinclair’s remark that the Image is not a substitute thus becomes more relevant than it seemed at first reading. The 1914 anthology also contains poems without similes. “Ts–ai Chi’h” goes: T H E petals fall in the fountain, the orange-coloured rose-leaves, Their ochre clings to the stone.

The poem’s three lines are separated by commas that refuse to allow us to construe l. 2 as unequivocal. It seems most plausible to read “the orangecoloured rose-leaves” as an apposition that postmodifies “petals.” The graphic layout of the lines supports this reading. The two independent clauses are linked by the pronoun “their” in l. 3, which connects “ochre” to “petals”/“rose-leaves.” Alternatively, l. 2 may be seen as connected to l. 3 and postmodified by the latter. This equivocal status presents l. 2 as an element of condensation: a phrase or line that remains ambiguous, in that it

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may be connected both to the preceding and to the following line. Childs has identified such elements of condensation as characteristic of the Cantos.81 In “Ts–ai Chi’h,” elements are not involved in any similarity relation; on the contrary, “petals,” “leaves” and “their” refer to the same item. The connection between poem and title is unclear. Both ll. 1 and 3 end with an adverbial of place and evolve around present-tense verbs, “fall” and “clings.” In “Liu Ch’e” and “In a Station of the Metro,” “petals” seemed to be particulars (i.e. not further divisible) and not synecdochic (i.e. not representing the whole of which they are part). Here the nominalisation of colour in “their ochre” inserts “petals” in a hierarchy of wholes and parts, as the colour that clings to the stone becomes a part of the petal. Pound’s poems in Des Imagistes reveal a strict concern with sound: we find assonance, alliteration and internal rhyme, but, conspicuously, no endrhymes, as exemplified by “aside” in “Fan-Piece.” The poems focus on noun phrases, adverbials of place and particulars that stand out from rather than represent the whole. Most poems centre on an explicit (metaphoric) similarity relation. Davenport connects the “apparition” in the metro to the vision of spring in Persephone’s underworld.82 This reading involves a focus on those of Pound’s determiners that imply familiarity and presence; “these faces” and “the crowd” suggest that both reader and poet are familiar with the specific faces and crowd. The context to which the determiners refer has, however, been removed. The Imagist call for reduction thus expands to cover the poetry’s relation to a context; the poems largely build on the suggestiveness created by an ellipsis that separates deictic determiner from antecedent. The publication of “A Few Don’ts By An Imagiste” was followed in April 1913 and also in Poetry by Pound’s own Contemporania series. These poems take as their title either an occasion or a reference to a place. With the occasion for a title, the poem is placed as a synecdoche within a genre, whereas the place name suggests a metonymic concern with in praesentia surroundings, as is the case in “The Garret”: C O M E , let us pity those who are better off than we are. Come, my friend, and remember that the rich have butlers and no friends,

81 82

Childs, Modernist Form, 72–87. Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” 152.

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And we have friends and no butlers. Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried. Dawn enters with little feet like a gilded Pavlova, And I am near my desire. Nor has life in it aught better Than this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together.

The poem combines two stances which are characteristic of the series and which furthermore link it to the poetry of the troubadours: the direct address of the poem itself, reflecting the troubadour convention of the envoi, and the alba, the motif of lovers woken up by dawn. “A Few Don’ts” had indeed called for historical awareness: the Imagist should write “in accordance with the best tradition.”83 The first stanza concentrates on anaphorae, chiasmi and repetitions, which are here indeed repeated petitions. The repeated use of the conjunction “and” creates paratactic linkage, conjoining the elements in praesentia. This preference for the pole of combination is reflected in l. 1 where “than” is used as a conjunction: “than we are” becomes a parallel to “those who are,” while a reading of “than” as a preposition would have created a relation of hypotaxis or subordination, as in “better off than us.”84 The second stanza opens with a metaphoric personification of “dawn,” combined with a synecdochic detail, “little feet.” The troubadour motif of the alba is combined not only with the Shakespearean metaphor “dawn in russet mantle clad” that Pound praised for its directness, but also with the Homeric Eos who has rosy fingers.85 Pound’s dawn, on the other hand, has “little feet.” The phrase unites the epic rosy-fingered Eos and the lyrical alba.86 The simile that follows is part of the personification of “dawn” and compares the sun to a “gilded” ballet dancer. The comparison is not based Flint, “Imagisme,” 199. With reference to Nänny, Osterwalder defines hypotaxis as functioning on the axis of metaphor and parataxis on that of metonymy in T.S. Eliot: Between Metaphor and Metonymy, 23. 85 The Homeric formula “êmos d’êrigeneia phanê rhododaktulos Êôs” occurs eleven times in the Odyssey. At Od., iii, 491, Fitzgerald translates: “when the young Dawn’s finger tips of rose / opened in the east”; Murray: “As soon as early Dawn appeared, the rosyfingered.” 86 Homer’s Achilles, of course, has swift feet, to which I shall return in chapter six. 83 84

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on colour, as if the sun reflected Pavlova’s golden dress, but on movement: on “little feet.” In Homer, dawn has rosy fingers, to the troubadours it is white; to Pound it has little feet, as do his new free-verse poems.87 The proper noun, Pavlova, is used as a synecdoche of dancers. As in the short Imagist poems with Chinese titles, the metaphoric element, the comparison “like a gilded Pavlova,” is introduced by an explicit sentence element, “like.” The abstraction “desire” for the lover in bed is a metonymic shift, as is the focus on proximity: “I am near.” The “hour of waking together” is appositional of, and linked by anaphora to, the “hour of clear coolness.” The two are identical, and both particulars of “life,” which they do, however, not represent as synecdoches, but from which they stand out, like the petals on the bough, since life has not “in it aught better.” Through metonymic details, of which the title provides the first example, the poem characterises a way of living. These details become synecdoches referring to a whole. The title thus provides more than an identification of place; to live in the garret, have friends but no butlers and wake up near one’s desire are all particulars that characterise a way of life opposed to that lived by those who are linked to the opposite synecdoches: i.e. have butlers, and who, by logical inference, presumably neither live in the garret nor wake up near their “desire.” “The Garret” is built around anaphorae and paratactic syntax. Being a syntactic instance of repetition, the anaphora creates parallelism through spatial or temporal contiguity and thus functions principally on the axis of metonymy. The poem’s main trope is the characterising synecdoche. “FanPiece” and the short poems with Chinese titles, on the other hand, evolve around visual images engaged in explicit comparisons or equations. In both groups we notice the occurrence of a particular that stands out from its surroundings rather than representing them: the hour of waking together, or the petal. At work here is the poet of Coleridge’s analytic understanding who, as paraphrased by Altieri, sees difference in similarity and focuses not on the identical but on the extraordinary.

87 Pound uses “dawn” with reference to the beginning of the poetic tradition in the Romance vernaculars, arguing that “Romance literature begins with a Provençal ‘Alba’.” Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 11. In Canto 3, “dawn” is connected to the burning of Troy: to the beginning of the Western epic tradition. The dawn of “The Garret” may thus identify Pound’s free verse as representative of another new literary beginning.

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Schneidau connects Pound as poet of personae to the discussion of presentation versus description/commentary: “it is Pound the speaker, not Pound the author, who ‘comments’.”88 The mimetic directness of dramatic speech may thus include elements of ‘telling’ or narration. As Schneidau demonstrates in his reading of “The Garret,” also from Contemporania, a persona’s speech becomes a synecdoche characterising the particular speaker. With its opening direct address of the poem itself and its use of the firstperson pronouns, “we” and “I,” “The Garret” identifies itself as an instance of direct, dramatic speech. The image conveyed by the poem is consequently an image of speech. To Pound, the synecdoche is not only a poetic device with which an effect of the real is achieved, but also a new “scholarly method”: that of the “luminous detail” introduced in the article series “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911–12): Any fact is, in a sense, “significant.” Any fact may be “symptomatic,” but certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence, and law [...] The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment.89

The focus on presentation rather than commentary corresponds to that found in the writings on Imagism; the “luminous detail” will develop into the synecdochic or “objective” Image. When the “luminous detail” gives insight into “circumjacent conditions” and their causes and effects, it is precisely an insight into the metonymic workings of elements around a synecdochic centre that is identified. “Direct presentation” thus entails that the reader is to make the link between synecdochic or luminous detail and the whole of which it is a symptom and thus infer what characterisation is implied by the detail. FROM THE NOVEL TO IDEOGRAMS: SYNECDOCHE AND PREDICATION An important influence on Pound’s poetic and its insistence on reduction and presentation was the novelist Ford Madox Ford’s propagation of pre-

88 89

Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real, 31. Pound, Selected Prose, 22–23.

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cision and of language as ‘real’ and not symbolic. On Ford’s avowal of a poetic in which images are not substitutions for things, Pound says in 1910: I would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than with any man in London. Mr. Hueffer’s beliefs about the art may be best explained by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in the glamour and associations which hang near the words. “Works of art beget works of art.” He has much in common with the French symbolists. Mr. Hueffer believes in an exact rendering of things. He would strip words of all “association” for the sake of getting a precise meaning.90

The modality of the phrase “he would strip” reveals an awareness on Pound’s part that Hueffer/Ford’s, as well as his own, ambition of getting beyond associations to an “exact rendering of things” and a “precise meaning” remains illusory.91 Nonetheless, such precision of signification is presented as the objective of writing; the stance of imprecision, on the other hand, is associated with Yeatsian symbolism and subjectivity, which Pound here sees as opposed to the “world as reality” and consequently rejects. For an impression of the warnings against “association” issued by Ford, we may consider a paragraph from a letter of his to H.G. Wells from 1903: Elizabethans! – Oh Lord: what single one of them, except Shakespeare, cd. express a clear thought clearly? – No, sir: their vocabulary seems better than ours because we are creatures of association – precisely because we consider a ploughed field “Nature.” – We have been taught to consider Elizabethan words as “poetical” – & so we do [...] as soon as is practicable we sh’d get into our pages every slang word that doesn’t (in our selective ears) ring too horribly . . . We must do that or we shall die, we & our language [...] Consider, oh my friend, these points – for, very justly, you make the sense of language so important a part of yr. scheme: what we want is rather to cultivate that “sense” than to increase our vocabularies with obsolete words that are attractive merely because they’re allusive.92

The shift from “ploughed field” to a “Nature” that is placed within quotation marks is defined as one of “association” and is therefore to be avoided: Pound, “Status Rerum,” Poetry 1.4 (January 1913): 125. Ford Madox Hueffer changed his name to Ford Madox Ford in June 1919, “partly to oblige a relative & partly because a Teutonic name is in these days disagreeable.” Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Richard M. Ludwig (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1965): 93. 92 Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 18–19 (emphasis Ford’s). 90 91

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we recognise the fear of abstraction that finds its way into Heaney’s reading of Miłosz. Despite his ambition to express “a clear thought clearly,” Ford is likewise forced to place the very “sense” that he is searching for within brackets; similarly, Wells’s desire to “cultivate” this sense undermines the unequivocal status of the passage’s semantics as the metaphors stored within the term return us to the associative “ploughed field.” Finally, we may observe that it is apparently not clarity but the poetic function of language (namely, rhyme) that has attached the epithet “attractive” to Ford’s italicised “allusive.” The poetic function and the (catachrestic) mechanisms of metaphor accumulated in language are, indeed, hard to escape. In a letter to Pound from 1920, Ford discusses an article that he is to write for the Dial; “vers libre” is evidently the term with which he now refers to the ‘new’ poetry: I think it important that we should agree on a formula for vers libre, nonrepresentationalism and other things before I go any further. We want some manifestoes. I mean, I might tread on some of your or X or Y or Z’s corns without in the least doing it intentionally unless as you would say you or someone puts me right. You forget that it is six years since I poured oil on these eaux puantes and I don’t so hell of a well remember who were Imagists and what it was all about.93

By 1920, “who were Imagists and what it was all about” matters less. Nevertheless, to both Ford’s and Pound’s minds, a new poetry is now in circulation, reflective of a poetic that it would be possible to describe in terms of a formula. Along with “vers libre” the keyword is here “non-representationalism,” in which the prefix ‘non-’ does what the elimination of ‘re-’ did in “A Few Don’ts” – establishes a dichotomy in which ‘non-representationalism’ or ‘presentation’ oppose the rejected pole of ‘representation’. In a letter to Iris Barry, Ford refers to his own “preachings to people not to write ‘about’ things but to write things.”94 The idea of ‘writing things’ may be reformulated, as was Pound’s insistence on “direct presentation,” as a call for ‘showing’ over ‘telling’. Ford’s views of the narrator abide by the same rule: the remark “I mean my Novelist ‘I’ to be inaccurate now & then” shows us that the diegesis that embraces his novel is really mimesis.95

93 94 95

Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 118. Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 87 (emphasis Ford’s). Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 150 (emphasis Ford’s).

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In “The Prose Tradition in Verse” (1914) Pound praises Ford’s “insistence upon clarity and precision, upon the prose tradition; in brief, upon efficient writing – even in verse.”96 “Efficient writing” is defined as characterised by “clarity” and “precision,” by the ability to select the right word: “Wordsworth was so busied about the ordinary word that he never found time to think about le mot juste.”97 The Flaubertian “mot juste” suggests an idea of language in which no word may be substituted for another; selection is performed once and for all, and only the axis of combination is open to variation.98 If the focus on precision and mimesis associates Pound with Ford, the preference for the synecdoche takes us to another novelist: James Joyce and his concern with the trivial and with seeing the universal in the particular. To Pound, Joyce represents the culmination of prose writing;99 Pound calls Joyce a “realist” and praises his “clear hard prose,”100 thus connecting the Irish novelist to a keyword of the new poetic: clarity was employed as a Pound, Literary Essays, 377. Pound, Literary Essays, 373. 98 “Like the mot juste, which as a ‘bound form’ (Jakobson) is syntagmatically embedded in the verbal context to such a degree that any substitution by any other word from a paradigm of equivalents is impossible, Pound’s propensity to avoid metaphors and analogies also reinforces the contiguous or syntagmatic axis of his poems”; Nänny, “Context, Contiguity and Contact,” 395. The term mot juste appears in a letter from 1876 from Flaubert to George Sand; see Lettres choisies de Gustave Flaubert, ed. René Dumesnil (Paris: Jacques & René Wittmann, 1947): 149. The insistence on precision that we find in both Ford and Pound is to Flaubert tied up with the inseparability of form and content: “If you knew precisely what you wanted to say, you would say it well” (“Si vous saviez précisément ce que vous voulez dire, vous le diriez bien”). Lettres choisies de Gustave Flaubert, 115 (emphasis Flaubert’s). Ford played a part in establishing Flaubert’s phrase as a key term in modernist poetics. In a 1916 letter from the front to Joseph Conrad, he writes: “An R.F.A. man has just come along & explained that the ‘rain has put the kybosh on the strafe’ so there, my dear, you have the mot juste. But it is fairly sickening all the same”; Ford, Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 72. The first occurrence of the phrase recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1912 and appeared in the New York weekly The Nation. The author of the second, from 1915, is Pound: “my head is a squeezed rag, so don’t expect le mot juste in this letter”; Pound, Pound / Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York: New Directions, 1970): 44. 99 Ford: “personally I’m quite content to leave to Joyce the leading novelist-ship of this country, think he deserves the position, and hope it will profit him”; Letters of Ford Madox Ford, 143. 100 Pound, Literary Essays, 399–400. 96 97

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central term of praise in Ford’s tautological “clear thought clearly” and appears throughout Pound’s prose, in which ‘clear’ is often associated with ‘clean’ (presumably not only semantically but also by the reverse rhyme).101 The three monosyllables in “clear hard prose” remind us of Imagism and especially of the early poems of H.D., which make frequent use of the adjectives ‘hard’ and ‘clear’.102 According to Pound, Joyce “gives the thing as it is”: a claim that evokes the Imagist focus on the “direct treatment of the ‘thing’.”103 Pound’s appraisal of Joyce’s awareness of the mundane details in Dubliners resembles a celebration of a command of metonymic elements conceived in contiguity, a command which Pound sees Joyce as combining with a synecdochic shift and thus an ability to see the details as representative of a whole, of the “universal”: “the author is quite capable of dealing with things about him, and dealing directly, yet these details do not engross him, he is capable of getting at the universal element beneath them.”104 The metonymic details thus become synecdoches, parts referring to a whole. Pound continues: “I think that [Joyce] excels most of the impressionist writers because of his more rigorous selection, because of his exclusion of all unnecessary detail.” Selection and exclusion become elements in a process of (synecdochic) reduction through which precision is achieved. The process is one of condensation – indeed, of synecdoche – and reminds us of the alleged Imagist ability to reduce a fifty-word poem to one of ten. From the novel, modernist poetry borrows the tendency to focus on and characterise through details. The concern is metonymic and synecdochic. Joyce’s writing epitomises this new detailed writing, but Pound detects the focus already in Henry James and describes it in terms that remind us of Altieri’s definition of Pound and Carlos Williams as analysts:

Leech, A Lingusitic Guide to English Poetry, 89, defines the reverse rhyme as connecting two terms that share initial consonant (cluster) and vowel. 102 See H.D.’s “Garden” (“you are clear / O rose, cut in rock, / hard as the descent of hail”); “Hermes of the Ways” (“the hard sand breaks, / and the grains of it / are clear as wine”); and her poems of sea flowers, including “Sea Rose” (“can the spice-rose / drip such acrid fragrance / hardened in a leaf?”) and “Sea Lily” (“sand cuts your petal, / furrows it with hard edge, / like flint / on a bright stone”). H.D., Collected Poems 1912–1944, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983). 103 Pound, Literary Essays, 400. 104 Literary Essays, 401. 101

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The synecdochic detail (or part) is supposed to take us to the universal (the whole). The Imagist insistence on directness, however, entails that the detail must be presented without any evaluative links identifying the universal behind the specific particular. Evaluation is a process of narration or exposition, of ‘telling’ the reader what the poem is supposed to ‘show’. Revealingly, the process through which details are interpreted and made to disclose a given significance is rendered explicit in a footnote in a rewriting of a Chinese poem, one of the components of Cathay (1915) reprinted in Collected Shorter Poems and also picked out for discussion by Schneidau. Synecdoches presented in the (mimetic) direct speech of a persona are here supplemented by a diegetic note that links part to whole through a metonymic “therefore”: THE JEWEL STAIRS’ GRIEVANCE T H E jewelled steps are already quite white with dew, It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings, And I let down the crystal curtain And watch the moon through the clear autumn. By Rihaku (Li T’ai Po) NOTE. – Jewel stairs, therefore a palace. Grievance, therefore there is something to complain of. Gauze stockings, therefore a court lady, not a servant who complains. Clear autumn, therefore she has no excuse on account of weather. Also she has come early, for the dew has not merely whitened the stairs, but has soaked her stockings. The poem is especially prized because she utters no direct reproach.

From these details, presented without any superimposed elements of evaluation but nonetheless functioning as synecdoches, we arrive at the ideogrammic method of the Cantos. This is often associated with Pound’s fascination with the view of (poetic) language as centred on movement and action formulated in the essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for

105

Pound, Literary Essays, 298–299.

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Poetry,” written by Ernest Fenollosa in 1908, edited and published by Pound in 1920.106 Fenollosa takes as his point of departure the thesis that the Chinese characters represent a language of icons, in which the link between signifier and signified is not arbitrary. Fenollosa is concerned with the written text; he entirely disregards the dimension of performance and the written character’s connection to an oral realisation. Pound hopes to find in Fenollosa a linguistic basis for an iconic and necessary link between signifier and signified, a link that would indeed truly enable us to write the ‘thing’. Fenollosa defines ‘poeticalness’ as dependent on time and causation. In the sequence of the sentence he finds a parallel between ‘nature’ and language: “The sentence form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. It was not we who made it; it was a reflection of the temporal order in causation.”107 The verb plays a crucial role in this process of causation; Fenollosa argues that transitive verbs reflect a superior ‘imageness’ or ‘poeticalness’, a thesis that Brooke–Rose defines as “rubbish from beginning to ending.”108 Indeed, on closer examination, the insight of Fenollosa’s theories and their actual relevance to the Cantos turn out to be overestimated. Ronald Bush argues that “the ideogrammic method changed the Cantos more in theory than in fact [...] while the Cantos’ technique altered slightly, the new theory achieved the prominence of an official program.”109 Schneidau calls the ideogrammic method “overdiscussed”: The ideogram is usually understood as a mere juxtaposition of particulars held together in a vaguely analogic relationship: even Pound tended to talk this way when he was trying to explain it very simply, as in his ABC of Reading. In this view it simply accords with the modernist tradition of nonpredication or nondiscursiveness. But Fenollosa’s ideograms do make predications of the objective kind, and the great majority of his examples

106 Ernest Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in Pound, Instigations (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1920): 357–88. 107 Fenollosa, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” 366. 108 Brooke–Rose, A Grammar of Metaphor (1958; London: Mercury, 1965): 224. 109 Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, 13. Bush adds: “The greatest disservice done by Pound’s avowal of the ideogrammic method was to distort our perception of the Cantos so that a structural device seemed more prominent than the form of the whole. Those who accepted Pound’s assertions viewed the Cantos as a non-comparable experiment rather than as a long poem belonging to a tradition of long poems” (14–15).

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Schneidau’s “nondiscursiveness” stands for what we have earlier called ‘nonrepresentationalism’. We identified “nonpredication” in “In a Station of the Metro,” where a colon replaced the verb phrase. The ideogrammic method aims at achieving not merely analogy, but predication through juxtaposition. The success of the method depends on the reader and on whether we choose to read the colon as a verb creating predication or as an equation mark establishing metaphoric or metonymic analogy. Critical expositions influenced by Fenollosa argue that we should see the colon as a predicator. Treip, however, informs us that the interpretation of punctuation marks depends on a consensus among readers: “once the convention has been decided, the signification of each mark stays constant.”111 To Froula’s observation that the communicative success of the ideogrammic method depends entirely on the reader, we may add, with Treip in mind, that a predicative reading of colons depends entirely on whether a new convention can be established through a consensus among Pound’s readers. Fenollosa’s study of Chinese ideograms may have identified nuanced relations. If, however, we confront what are assumed to be Pound’s poetic elaborations of the theory, the ideogrammic method seems more mythical than critical. As argued in the preceding chapter’s discussion of Kenner’s reading of Pound’s Marx, its focus on relations tends to become insinuative. Upon closer analysis, we find that the ideogrammic method of the Cantos has its root in Pound’s preference for the synecdoche as well as in his search for presentation over narration, rather than in an attempt to achieve in practice what Fenollosa had described in theory. In The Spirit of Romance, Pound writes (1910): “The apt use of metaphor, arising, as it does, from a swift perception of relations, is the hall-mark of genius”: thus says Aristotle. I use the term “comparison” to include metaphor, simile (which is a more leisurely expression of a kindred variety of thought), and the “language beyond metaphor,” that is, the more compressed or elliptical expression of metaphorical perception, such as antithesis suggested or implied in verbs and adjectives.112

110 111 112

Schneidau, Ezra Pound: The Image and the Real, 62–63 (emphasis Schneidau’s). Treip, Milton’s Punctuation and Changing English Usage 1582–1676, 84. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 158.

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These lines pre-date Pound’s encounter with Fenollosa’s work. The idea of metaphoric perception has not yet been transposed to the field of predication and juxtaposition. Already here, however, the “language beyond metaphor” is associated with ellipsis and compression, as if a condensation of context could liberate us from metaphor. If we return to the negative imperatives of Imagism, we might now redefine these as representative of a call for ellipsis and an exploitation of the pole of combination. The move “beyond metaphor” may thus be read as a preference for metonymy. The paragraph from The Spirit of Romance continues with a discussion of adjectives and epithets: we find adjectives of two sorts, thus, adjectives of pure quality, as: white, cold, ancient; and adjectives which are comparative, as: lordly. Epithets may also be distinguished as epithets of primary and secondary apparition. By epithets of primary apparition I mean those which describe what is actually presented to the sense or vision.

The claim that a certain use of language (here adjectives of “pure quality” and epithets of “primary apparition” – in other words, adjectives that are not comparative) involves “the sense or vision” takes us to Pound’s reading of the poetry of the duecento. Of Guido Guinizelli, Pound writes: the preciseness of the description denotes, I think, a clarity of imaginative vision [...] The Tuscan poetry is, however, of a time when the seeing of visions was considered respectable, and the poet takes delight in definite portrayal of his vision.113

The metaphysical overtones of a “language beyond metaphor” are connected to this idea of vision. Thirty-eight years later, in a prison camp in Pisa, the metaphysical hope of moving beyond metaphor returns: Wisdom lies next thee, simply, past metaphor. (L X X X I I /540)

Jakobson warned us that masks tend to cover make-up. Like the lover in the garret, who was “near [his] desire,” to Pound in Pisa wisdom is to be found “next thee”: reached through contiguity, not similarity. The step past metaphor and into ellipsis and vision becomes a move into metonymy. 

113

Pound, The Spirit of Romance, 105.

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AMBITION AND ANXIETY FROM IMAGISM TO CANTO 4: WHO IS SPEAKING?

In the discussion of “The Garret,” we saw how the troubadour’s alba lent itself to an association with the Homeric Eos, combining Greek epic and Provençal lyric. Canto 4 performs a similar accumulation and combination of classical and Provençal elements. One of the figures involved in this layering is Actaeon. Transported from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Pound’s work Actaeon is first given centre stage in an Imagist lyrical poem, to become in Canto 4 once again a motif within an epic. The early Imagist poem thus prepares material for the epic. In “The Coming of War: Actaeon,” published in Poetry in March 1915, we may observe Pound developing characteristics that will recur in the Cantos: namely, the use of elusive particulars and an equally elusive speaker: A N image of Lethe, and the fields Full of faint light but golden, Gray cliffs, and beneath them A sea Harsher than granite, unstill, never ceasing; High forms with the movement of gods, Perilous aspect; And one said: “This is Actaeon.” Actaeon of golden greaves! Over fair meadows, Over the cool face of that field, Unstill, ever moving Hosts of an ancient people, The silent cortège.

The opening “image” connects the poem to Imagism. The poem contains only two finite verbs, “said” and “is.” With its brief lines consisting of noun phrases, it is an ideal illustration of ‘presentative’ or ‘objective’ verse, which in Canto 49 we saw reduced to a list of noun phrases. The poem contains a series of instances of condensation: lines that may be associated with both the lines that precede and those that follow. In ll. 3–5, “golden” may both

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postmodify “light” and premodify “cliffs,” and at the opening of the poem we wonder whether it is only “Lethe” that postmodifies the “image,” or whether the entire poem is “an image of ....” Sounds are distributed with a care similar to that observed in the earlier poems: the [i:] of “sea” is repeated at line-end in “Lethe, fields, beneath, ceasing, greaves, field, people.” The consonants alliterate regularly, with a focus on [f] and [g]. In ll. 6 and 7 we recognise “beneath them” from “Liu Ch’e,” employed again at line-end, and here followed by “a sea” where “Liu Ch’e” had “a leaf.” Both “sea” and “leaf” repeat the [i:] of “beneath,” while the distribution of the lines on the page enacts this ‘beneathness’. If we interpret direct treatment as a rejection of narration, “The Coming of War: Actaeon” seems to offer prime exemplification of this. We are presented with a series of glimpses or images, with no commentary or evaluation attached. In ll. 13–14, the list of noun phrases is broken by the past tense of “and one said,” which introduces an element of direct speech in the present tense, “this is Actaeon.” The next line repeats “Actaeon” and associates the name with a descriptive postmodification and an exclamation mark: “Actaeon of golden greaves!” “Lethe” suggests forgetting and consignment to the underworld. The list of nouns may present us with the vision of someone who has drunk of Lethe; the nouns are presented without a definite article and thus as if seen for the first time: apparently everything is new information. The only noun that is treated differently and presented as not new is “fields,” premodified first by a definite article and then by a demonstrative adjective in l. 17’s “the cool face of that field.” Davenport contended that the lyrical landscapes and girls of Pound’s poetry are always connected to the myth of Persephone and the paradisiacal fields of Elysium. This suggestion is connected with Davenport’s thesis that the lyrical stances or fragments of the Cantos are always part of the epic: these words are not primarily lyric; nor are they a detail of memory, as they would be in Wordsworth, nor the epiphany of a visionary state, as they would be in Yeats. They are lines from an epic poem, their muse is Calliope, and their concern is with men in action.114

The definite article of “the fields” suggests that the term refers to a known context, yet the poem itself does not identify any referent or context. Follow114

Davenport, “Persephone’s Ezra,” 158–59.

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ing Davenport’s advice, we may assume that the context is one of myth and epic and that the “fields” referred to are those of the underworld, with which the reader is expected to be familiar. The demonstrative article in “the cool face of that field” (like that used of “these faces in the crowd” in “In a Station of the Metro”), on the other hand, implies situational and thus oral reference – that the fields (or faces) may be identified based on the speaker’s physical presence in the fields or the metro respectively. We may speculate that the poem is spoken by an Actaeon who has drunk of Lethe and is oblivious even of his own name. The “high form” thus introduces the poem’s speaker, who is unaware of his own identity; the speaker is the listener. The name is then echoed by an epithet that defines Actaeon, hence the poem’s speaker, summoned to the speaker’s own mind by association. Albert Cook has remarked that “Pound applies himself to endowing the visual image with a precision that is so elusive as to suggest some vagueness quite contrary to precision.”115 In “The Coming of War: Actaeon,” we find that not only the link between the part and the whole but also that between the parts themselves may be obscured. Here that vagueness is exploited to convey (or present) the impression of a speaker who has drunk of Lethe and consequently sees everything as new. Actaeon returns in Canto 4’s rewriting of Metamorphoses 3.116 In Ovid, Actaeon becomes an inadvertent witness to Diana bathing. The goddess transforms him into a stag and he is chased and killed by his own hounds. In Canto 4, the episode follows upon that of the metamorphoses of the sisters Procne and Philomela, also from Ovid.117 Philomela is raped by Procne’s husband, Tereus, who cuts out her tongue to prevent her from telling of his crime. Like female epic characters before her, Philomela sits down to weave, 115

Albert Cook, “Rhythm and Person,” in New Approaches to Ezra Pound, ed. Hesse,

358.

The passage in Ovid is Met., iii, 138–252. Met., vi, 426–674. Philomela had already appeared in The Waste Land, where the cry “Ityn” is “Jug”: Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, “Jug Jug” to dirty ears. (The Waste Land, ll. 97–103) 116 117

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and creates a picture of the deed. Upon seeing the image on her sister’s woven cloth, the enraged Procne kills Itys, her own son by Tereus, and feeds him to his father. The sisters escape Tereus’ revenge by turning into birds. The story shares with that of Actaeon a focus on the metamorphosed character’s lack of speech: Actaeon “longed to cry out: ‘I am Actaeon! Don’t you know your own master?’ but the words he wanted to utter would not come – the air echoed with barking”118 whereas Philomela’s “dumb lips could not reveal what had happened.”119 Pound combines the story of Procne and Philomela with another murder with a cannibalistic edge: the story of the troubadour Guillem da Cabestanh, who loved Soremonda and was killed by her husband Raimond de Chateau, the latter then serving Cabestanh’s heart to her. Davenport adds laconically: “Soremonda dropped from a tower window.”120 Pound makes birds fly about the tower, crying out the name of Procne’s dead son, who suffered a fate identical to that of Cabestanh.121 The drafts of Canto 4 reveal that quotation marks represent a field of intense concern for Pound within the process of composition. The interweaving of Soremonda’s fall from the tower and the swallows’ cry undergoes a series of changes in which the relation between narration and direct speech is constantly upset. In the following, I shall concentrate on the relations between (rhapsodic) narration and direct speech as these are modified by the addition and removal of quotation marks in a number of the several drafts that exist of the passage. The passages discussed and quoted here are reproMet., iii, 229–31, tr. Innes. Met., vi, 574, tr. Innes. Shakespeare reproduces the tragedy of Philomela in the story of Lavinia, daughter of Titus Andronicus. Lavinia is raped and both her tongue and her hands are cut off to prevent her from sewing images of the deed as well as talking of it. The girl communicates of the crime by pointing to a copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Her father’s revenge mimics the cannibalism of Ovid’s story: he kills the rapists and serves a pie made from their bones to their mother. We recognise Pound’s “’tis” in Shakespeare’s “why, there they are, both baked in this pie, / whereof their mother daintily hath fed, / eating the flesh that she herself hath bred. / ’tis true, ’tis true, witness my knife’s sharp point.” William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): V.iii.59–62. 120 Davenport, Cities on Hills: A Study of I–XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (Ann Arbor M I : U M I Research P , 1983): 128. 121 According to tradition, Philomela turned into a nightingale and Procne into a swallow. The identification of Philomela with one of the swallows that fly around Pound’s tower may thus be ambiguous. 118 119

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duced as holographs at the end of this chapter. An early draft of the story (Figure 1) goes: 1 A black cock crows in the sea-foam

....

Itys and Polhonac

:

. Cytherean

!

Ityn

Flebiliter, et ter flebiliter Ityn, 5 "And she went toward the window, and cast her down . " " And she went toward the window ... the swallows crying " How like you the dish " he said , And she " None better ." , dish He said:" It is Cabestan’s heart in the flavour ". 10 said" So well, my taste, that I will take of none other " Will spoil that taste with none other , " Walked past him and cast her down .

...

ste

& 15

went to the

[

illegible

Ityn, et ter flebilier

] window &

, Ityn

cast her down

, 122

Polhonac is the seat of the Viscount of Polignac, whom Pound is presumably confusing with Raimond de Chateau.123 The parts that resemble narration and are written in its characteristic past tense are here included in quotation marks, suggesting that “and she went toward the window and cast her down” is mimetic: a fragment of conversation or rhapsodic song overheard, or a quotation from a text. At the beginning of l. 9, “he said” is added in ink. Like “and she” in l. 8, it allows us to identify ll. 7–11 as dialogue. A second draft (Figure 2) gives us: 1 The black cock crows in the sea–foam

.

" Ityn, et ter flebiliter ,

Ityn , Ityn , "

And she went toward the went toward the window, ---- the swallows crying --122 Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Typescript in Box 70, folder 3097. Copyright © (2006) by Omar S. Pound and Mary de Rachewitz. Published with permission from New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. 123 Froula, To Write Paradise, 25–26. The establishment of a genetic text of Canto 4 forms the core of Froula’s book. Froula refers to Soremonda’s husband as Raimond de Castel–Roussilon.

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“

5 It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish . " " I thought as much ." and she went toward the window in Polhonac, and held to the slim white stone bar breaking the window arch , 10 And the wind out of the hills by Rhodez caught the turn of her sleeve , — — — the swallows crying — — —

A B

Ityn

..

!

Acteon

:124

Quotation marks here present the relation of diegesis/mimesis as opposite to that of the earlier draft. The line in Latin is now placed within quotation marks, which identify it as speech or a citation. The line is a partial quotation from Horace’s Ode “The Delights of Spring,” which includes the line “Ityn flebiliter gemens”: “groaning mournfully over Itys.” Horace’s definition of the bird that moans “Itys” as an ill-fated avenger enables his translator, C.E. Bennett, to identify the bird with Procne and translate ‘avis’ (bird) with ‘swallow’: “Making tearful moan for Itys, the ill-fated swallow builds her nest.”125 This version of Canto 4 meets our expectations of narrative conventions: the lines in the narrative past tense are presented without quotation marks, whereas the dialogue marked by the present tense of “it is Cabestan’s heart” and the first person of “I thought as much” is framed by brackets. Only the present tense of l. 1. contradicts our perception of “the black cock crows” as part of rhapsodic narration. In the first version, the narration of Soremonda’s fall from the window was presented as mimesis, whereas the Latin cry for Itys was part of the diegesis. In the second version, the opposite is the case. The first passage introduced direct speech via “he said”; the dialogue in the second draft is left unintroduced.

124 Ezra Pound Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Box 70, folder 3099. Copyright © (2006) by Omar S. Pound and Mary de Rachewitz. Published with permission from New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. 125 Horace, “The Delights of Spring,” in The Odes and Epodes, I V , xii, tr. C.E. Bennett (Loeb Classical Library; London: William Heinemann & Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1968).

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A third draft (Figure 3a/b) has: 1

A black cock crow