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Poetry as Re-Reading
American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method
By MING-QIAN MA Northwestern University Press Copyright © 2008 Northwestern University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8101-2485-1
Chapter One The "present" essay is but a tissue of quotations. -Editor's note from
Critique (1969) for the first version of Jacques Derrida's text, reproduced in
Dissemination The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. -Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text
A "No Man's Land": Postmodern Citationality in Zukofsky's "Poem beginning 'The'"
In his essay titled "American Poetry, 1920-1930," which addresses the issue of the imagistic diction employed by his modernist precursors Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and H.D., Louis Zukofsky makes the following observation: "Whatever one's preferences, the diction of these poets remains their fully varied material"; and he quickly adds, "which includes quotations from sources apparently useful in preserving poetry wherever it is found." Zukofsky's description of modernist poetics as, among other features, a poetics of quotation, teleologically selective and artistically mimetic, points toward his own rethinking of modernist praxis. As Rainer Nägele proclaims, "Radical thought emerges from the deepest immersion into tradition. It is never a creation ex nihilo, but the effect of translation and interpretation." If this is true, then Zukofsky, himself a "brilliant disciple" of the Pound tradition, is also, and to no lesser degree than Pound or his contemporaries, an ambitious innovator. With his own poetics "rooted in Pound's 'Grand Collage,'" Zukofsky's critical insight into the modernist tradition-a tradition that Michael André Bernstein describes as "carrying" a "load of embedded quotations," the interaction of which "constitutes a central thematic concern and narrative convention"-foregrounds a concomitant inquiry beyond the parameters of modernism. More specifically, it is an inquiry that explicitly anticipates a postmodern perspective, one articulated in his poetry through an exploration of what Hugh Kenner describes as the "strange possibility" that "whatever is sayable has already somewhere been said." "Poem beginning 'The,'" in this sense, marks Zukofsky's departure from the modernist poetics of citation oriented toward "a conceptual reorganization and a new linguistic encoding of the real world" to a postmodernist poetics of intertextuality, of a "generalized citationality" featuring, in the poet's own words, "chorál out / of random input," which is "made / with an assemblage of naught."
In his ABC of Reading, Pound begins the section titled "Exhibits" with a statement that might be read as an encapsulated and yet systematic theorizing or rationalizing of the modernist use of quotations. He writes:
The ideal way to present the next section of this booklet would be to give the quotations WITHOUT any comment whatever. I am afraid that would be too revolutionary. By long and wearing experience I have learned that in the present imperfect state of the world, one MUST tell the reader. I made a very bad mistake in my INSTIGATIONS, the book had a plan, I thought the reader would see it.
The issue at stake here is not what but how to quote. It is, in other words, an issue of methodology. Designed primarily to educate, to enlighten, to communicate, Pound's poetics, however he may describe or define it, is intended in light of this passage to be the poetics of "exhibits." In the Poundian project of "Make it new," in which the antecedent for "it" points, as Leonard Diepeveen observes, to "the past poetic/political tradition," to exhibit is to quote, in that quotation is, ideally for the poet, the most eloquent and most effective form of articulation bodying forth a built-in "plan." Semantically self-evident and communicatively self-sufficient, quotations constitute, in the Poundian scheme of things, the methodological underpinning of the imagist aesthetic. Not only do quotations, for instance, provide the most viable (i.e., the most direct) routes to Pound's "direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective," but they also satisfy the need "to use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation." For economically, quotations, due to their concreteness and precision, help to achieve what Pound calls the "maximum efficiency of expression" by saving the modernists from the burden and embarrassment of "saying the same thing with less skill and less conviction"; rhetorically, they establish for the poet "a strategic position" in a given context, functioning as "luminous details"; and ideologically, quotations "bear true witness" to cultural and historical manifestations, thus presenting what Diepeveen describes as "a formalist, a-temporal version of originality." Such a description seems even more apt in light of Pound's conception of the nature of poetry. For one thing, "logopoeia," asserts Pound, "does not translate, though the attitude of mind it expresses may pass through a paraphrase." For another, poetry, as "the most concentrated form of verbal expression," will not allow the verbiage of paraphrase. Commenting on "how complete is Mr. Eliot's depiction of our contemporary condition" in Prufrock and Other Observations, for instance, Pound emphatically draws one's attention to Eliot's "method of conveying a whole situation and half a character by three words of a quoted phrase." "Great poets," Marianne Moore recalls Pound saying, "seldom make bricks without straw. They pick up all the excellences they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries and then set their own inimitable light atop the mountain."
Somewhat similar is Eliot's theorizing of the modernist use of quotations, whose aesthetic premises consist of two principles: a "historical sense [as] a perception, not only of the past-ness of the past, but of its presence," as he writes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," and a "conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." Such a diachronic trajectory opens, by its all-embracing "oneness," a synchronic field in which a new synthesis takes place. "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work," remarks Eliot in "The Metaphysical Poets," "it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.... In the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes." Equally amalgamated into new constellations are quotations, and how this is done, according to Eliot in "Philip Massinger," suggests a poet's quality. He writes:
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows; immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
Much, however, of what Pound has originally envisioned as the poetics of exhibits remains, to a great extent, only ideal or "too revolutionary." When applied "in the present imperfect state of the world," such "directness of presentation" has to be compromised, made less direct with modifications; that is, the poetics of exhibits, of showing, of presentation, must be supplemented by and, in turn, subordinated to, a poetics of commentary, of telling, of representation. Pervaded by what Michele J. Leggott calls "the spirit of breezy opinionation," the modernist use of quotations in Pound and Eliot thus follows, by necessity, a method, which is a quadruple formula characterized by the "coincidence" of what Meir Sternberg labels as the four "universals" defining the working mechanisms of quotations: "representational bound, structural framing, communicative subordination, and perspectival montage or ambiguity."
To quote is, first and foremost, to serve the purpose of representation. The referential function of the quoted material is appropriated in a given context in order to illustrate, to prove, to argue, to annotate, or to exemplify a particular point highlighted in an overall scheme of representation. And whichever the specific case might be, "the evocation of the past always occurs in such a way as to illuminate the present," as Herbert Grabes points out; "The situation presented in the poem forms the common meeting-point for all the levels and phases of reality evoked by quotations." As a means of achieving Pound's "triumph of total meaning over detail," or as a way to establish his "new synthesis," a quotation thus circumscribes a representational bound at two mutually reciprocal levels: local/microcosmic and universal/macrocosmic. While functioning as what Jennifer Clarvoe calls a "local, small scale introduction to the dynamics of the poem as a whole," a quotation also asserts, by the same token, that "the particular and local bears universal significance without forfeiting its concreteness." A case in point is Pound's use of quotations from Confucius. At the center-whether thematic or structural-of "Canto XIII," for instance, is posited the Confucian ethics of order, an idea that represents or, according to Albert Gelpi, "speaks for the side of Pound which is conservative, traditional, sexist, mandarin, rationalist," and an idea that Pound, expediently enough, has summarized and appropriated from The Great Digest in order to articulate his own sociopolitical concerns:
If a man have not order within him He can not spread order about him; And if a man have not order within him His family will not act with due order; And if the prince have not order within him He can not put order in his dominions.
With the Confucian ethics of order thus centrally established, all the quotations in the poem are then deployed, both strategically and rhetorically, to pertain to this Confucian social philosophy, each favoring "order" from a different angle, and each articulating a strong, individual sense of initiative and moral responsibility, regardless of one's sphere of application or social position. Tseu-lou's personal view of "I would put the defences in order" is juxtaposed with Khieu's royal standpoint: "If I were lord of a province / I would put it in better order than this is"; and Tchi's emphasis on humbleness-"I would prefer a small mountain temple, / With order in the observances, / with a suitable performance of the ritual"-is endorsed by Kung himself, who then further specifies it in terms of moderation: "Anyone can run to excesses, / It is easy to shoot past the mark, / It is hard to stand firm in the middle." Whichever way one may pursue, to restore and maintain order, one must, as Kung's reprimand of Yuan Jang states perspicuously, "get up and do something useful." Dominating Pound's own thinking, such a Confucian position on order and action has become, as Gelpi observes, "an early formulation of Pound's maxim of translating 'ideas into action.'" In this sense, Lawrence Rainey is right when he claims that in The Cantos "the new culture is presented as a ritual recovery of quotations. New culture and new poem are consecrated in a ceremony that ratifies and is ratified by quotations, as if citation were the discursive counterpart to the theme of human and cultural regeneration."
The modernist preoccupation with quotations as representational bound entails, in turn, a structural patterning, an organizational interaction between two kinds of texts that have been named respectively "host" and "found" or "frame" and "inset." Though they are presented as integral parts of the host texts, quotations as found texts or insets nonetheless demand that they maintain their own status, and that they must be identified and acknowledged in one way or another in the host text or its overall frame. In other words, "their boundaries-their beginnings and ends-must be clear." Consider the following excerpt from "Canto VI":
What you have done, Odysseus, We know what you have done ... And that Guillaume sold out his ground rents (Seventh of Poitiers, Ninth of Aquitain). "Tant las fotei com auzirets "Cen e quatre vingt et veit vetz ..."
The image for quotations as found texts thus employed in the modernist praxis becomes, rather fittingly, that of a legal immigrant: a permanent resident in a host country with an alien registration number, documented either semiotically, or photographically, or discursively, as the case might be, by way of quotation marks, italics, foreign words, or various forms of notes and indexes. For the modernists, to maintain such a distinction or boundary is a psychological imperative, in that their intention in the use of quotations is not simply to "draw upon a canonic tradition," as Michael André Bernstein contends, so much as to "seek to establish one," one that is based on what Pound believes to be "a return to origins ... a return to nature and reason." This return, however urgent and powerful in its ambition, finds itself in need of a sign of confirmation. Manifestos and programs aside, it needs, in other words, a visual or formal facade to buttress, by showcasing, its own sense of unquestionable and undeniable literalness or actuality authorized as well as authenticated by history and tradition. If, as Diepeveen argues, "for most quoting poets the quotation is a fact, not a symbol," modernist poetry, by its grand "synthesis of heterogeneous 'origins,'" presents such a fact, demonstrating that it not only makes history anew but also, and more importantly, makes history.
Yet for the modernist message to be communicated, quotations have to forfeit their independence in use in order to facilitate the construction of a textual hierarchy. In this respect, the modernist use of quotations takes on an explicitly Emersonian overtone. "Whatever the formal autonomy conferred by [the frame]," argues Sternberg in the same vein, "the inset is communicatively subordinated to the frame." Hence the paradox: the inset's textual territory is acknowledged in the frame only to be invaded, its sovereignty is recognized only to be violated, and its original context is accepted only to be recontextualized. "The supreme control lies with the frame," with its specific "norms and premises," writes Sternberg, for "to quote is to mediate, to mediate is to frame, to frame is to interfere and exploit." Successful communication in modernist poetry results, then, from the successful colonization of the found texts by the host texts.
Out of this communicative subordination emerges the perspectival montage or ambiguity. The modernist montage, however, is hardly an entirely random mosaic; and in Pound's work the selection and the arrangement of quotations, never arbitrary to begin with, constitute in fact what Andrew Kappel describes as the poet's "vast programmatic shuffling and sifting of world literature into a usable selective order." Nor is the ambiguity completely opaque; for a quotation, once colonized, "[exhibits] an intrinsic integrity in a new context provided by Pound's poem," and its original context, now having been exploited, helps the quotation "[make] its point as it stands" by offering "the missing links that make the [host text] intelligible." Take Pound's portrait of Henry James in "Canto VII":
And the great domed head, con gli occhi onesti e tardi Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion, Grave incessu, drinking the tone of things, And the old voice lifts itself weaving an endless sentence.
This excerpt corresponds almost word for word to Pound's personal memories of the novelist related in his essay "Henry James," and later in the essay Pound exalts James as a literary figure of global significance:
As Armageddon has only too clearly shown, national qualities are the great gods of the present and Henry James spent himself from the beginning in an analysis of these potent chemicals; trying to determine from the given microscopic slide the nature of the Frenchness, Englishness, Germanness, Americanness.... We may rest our claim for his greatness in the magnitude of his protagonists, in the magnitude of the forces he analyzed and portrayed.
The image Pound paints here of James is, "only too clearly shown" indeed, that of a classical literatus dealing with his subjects from a transnational or transcontinental perspective, an image whose magnitude finds its articulation in the canto not only in James's stylistic grandeur ("drinking the tone of things, / And the old voice lifts itself / weaving an endless sentence") but also in his physical massiveness ("And the great domed head ... / Moves before me, phantom with weighted motion"). A context as such then naturalizes, so to speak, the two quotations from Dante and Virgil. Originally referring to Sordello, for instance, "con gli occhi onesti e tardi" ("with eyes honest and slow") adds to and completes, in physical as well as moral terms, James's otherwise faceless image, and "Grave incessu" ("solemn movement"), which describes "Homer, Horace, and Ovid, three of the four great shades of antiquity approaching Dante and Virgil (Virgil himself being the fourth)," identifies James as one of them, accepting and inducting him into a historical-literary summit. With their original contexts providing matching personal attributes (physical, moral, artistic) and an allegorical gathering of literary giants (Homer, Horace, Ovid, Virgil, Dante), both quotations contribute, in a way, to Pound's view that recognizes and recontextualizes James as part of that grand tradition. In what Sternberg terms "transpacity," then, "mimetic and perspectival interference go together," which in turn renders quotations "specific" or even "self-explanatory." Such is the case with "Canto VII." In this version of modernist poetics, quotations thus employed, as Clarvoe notes, "anchor the poem to implied confirmation."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poetry as Re-Reading by MING-QIAN MA Copyright © 2008 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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