1The Cantos is a work in which the invention of history and memory are inseparable from the invention of ways of saying, a work whose mode of organizing history is indissociable from its modes of organizing language. History in The Cantos, I would like to argue, is a function of the poem’s orality, of its rhythmic activity: a prosodic construction or continuum, whose ways of making sense are indissociable from its ways of sounding associations, by means of line, grouping, accent, consonance. As Christine Froula has shown in her study of Pound’s “errors,” Pound’s transformation of his source materials depends crucially on the production of semantic effects through rhythm and sound echoes. As such, The Cantos takes its place in the context of the wide variety of rhythmic inventions of early twentieth-century literature, from Claudel to Williams to Khlebnikov In this paper, I will seek to study some aspects of Pound’s orality in The Cantos, as a way of understanding the poem as a mode of subjectivation in language, as a subjectivation of history.

2I am using the notion of orality in the sense in which Henri Meschonnic has defined it: seeking to redefine the notion outside of the binary opposition between the oral and the written, Meschonnic understands by orality “the semantic primacy of rhythm and prosody in certain modes of signifying, written or spoken” (Etats 125 ; my translation); in keeping with this approach, Dessons and Meschonnic propose that literature is “maximal orality” (Dessons 45 ; my translation). The notion of orality as mode of signifying is of fundamental importance to the study of The Cantos, because it makes it impossible to separate off the poem’s “polyphonic style” or “formal innovations” from its “content” or “politics”, according to a traditional dualist paradigm still active in recent criticism of Pound.

3Pound’s orality is a critical problem for The Cantos because of a dominant tendency to spatiale his work. This tendency springs, obviously, from the metaphors Pound himself used to describe the poem, in particular the notion of ideogrammic method; likewise from the intensive use in The Cantos of visual devices, including, of course, ideograms. The Cantosis commonly and characteristically described as a collage, a comparison which usefully gestures towards contemporary art movements but serves to obscure the inseparability of the visual and the oral in the poem. Significantly, Marjorie Perloff affirms that in The Cantos, “Time […] becomes space” (20), and seeks to make the absence of time in The Cantos one of its distinguishing characteristics, as against the discursive temporality of traditional lyric, the narrative temporality of epic. Yet the modes of rhythmic organization in The Cantos, its effects of recurrence and consonance, produce a subjective time, a time of reading inseparable from the temporality of memory in the poem; the poem’s temporality is thus a function of its orality, and an essential aspect of the subjectivity it defines.

Subjectivity in Pound

4I would like to make use of the notion of orality as a way of talking about the kind of subjectivity which The Cantos produce. I will be taking the notion of subjectivity, again, in the specific sense in which Meschonnic understands it. Building on the work of the French linguist Emile Benveniste, who defined the system of forms—deictics, tense, expressions of modality—by which any speaker appropriates language and constructs himself or herself as subject, Meschonnic has proposed the notion of a poetic subject, defined as an appropriation or transformation of language which extends to all the elements of discourse, in which rhythm, speechsound, grammar, lexicon function inseparably from each other. For Meschonnic, the primary signifier of this appropriation of language is rhythm, which he understands, not as a form, but as a system of markers, a mode of organization of meaning—and so of the subject—in discourse (Critique 73-74) Defined thus, as an activity of language, as a transformation of language, the poetic subject is radically historical, radically social.

5Any discussion of subjectivity in The Cantos thus requires an examination of the practices of language which specify the poem, and the theory of language which these practices imply—not to be confused with Pound’s overt theoretical statements, which appear to involve a denial of subjectivity. The demand for precision, for clear definition, for a natural correspondence between word and thing in Pound’s critical and poetic writings involves an assimilation of language to nomenclature, a version of the sign theory of language, which makes it impossible to conceive of language as subjective activity. It is thus perfectly logical that cheng ming or right naming is understood by Pound as the foundation of the well-ordered authoritarian state.

6Subjectivity is a central problem in Pound criticism. A longstanding tradition has used the notion of “objectivism” to explain Pound’s poetic practice; a tendency towards philosophical realism has worked to deny subjectivity in Pound’s epic, as for example in the work of Hugh Kenner, who in The Pound Era saw The Cantos as “validated […] by the unarguable existence of what exists” and described Pound’s enterprise as an act of “naming.” If critics have tended to endorse Pound’s theory of language, reading him through the lense of the theory of the sign, it is because the content-form dichotomy underlies the distinction between the political or ethical and the aesthetic which has governed approaches to Pound’s work. More recent accounts of The Cantoshave sought to place the politics at the center of the poem, while claiming, as have Robert Casillo and Charles Bernstein, that The Cantos functions in a manner diametrically opposed to Pound’s intentions, making use of modes of language which Pound condemned and attributed to “Jewishness.” To the extent that they continue to define the work in terms of “formal innovations” (A Poetics 125), however, such approaches make it impossible to understand the poem as the discovery of a voice, or to posit a subj ect of The Cantos, produced by the poem and its reading, and distinct from the individual Pound and his ambitions.

7Another critical dichotomy which has characterized discussion of The Cantos is that of coherence and incoherence, which defines the terms according to which the poem has been described as a failure. Early commentators like Kenner insisted on effects of unity; more recent critical accounts have stressed disjunction. Charles Bernstein describes The Cantos as “a disintegration into the incommensurability of parts” (My Way 161). Bob Perelman’s The Trouble with Genius contains a fascinating discussion of the figure of subjectivity which emerges from Pound’s writings, which he describes in terms of an exacerbated opposition between individual and society. The basic argument relies on a correlation between the artist’s separateness and the internal discontinuities of the text: Perelman understands Pound’s writing as a “refusal to communicate” (58) exemplified by the use of foreign languages and ideograms; the ideogrammic method itself is defined as “a never-ending gesture of verbal discontinuity designed to evoke masterful artistic distance” (54).

8Yet this insistence on fragmentation and disjunction neglects important aspects of the poetics of the text. The example chosen by Perelman to illustrate the primarily disjunctive effects of Pound’s writing, a passage from “Canto IV” (16), appears, when read from the point of view of orality, rather to exemplify extremely dense verbal patterning, inseparably semantic and phonological. The proper nouns of the passage are linked, not only to each other, but to the common nouns that surround them: “Ecbatan” is motivated by “Cabestan”, “Adige” by “Regina”, while “Garonne” appears to derive from “golden rain”; the association between “Adige” (a river in Italy) and “images” makes the river an image of the poem itself, functions as an affirmation of its continuity realized through speechsound. In spite of the fact that Pound understood the ideogram as an essentially visual device, to which he opposed the conventional character of the phonetic sign, one could argue that the ideogrammic method functions in The Cantos as a mode of orality, at least in so far as it depends on rhythmic and verbal links between signifiers, insofar as it sounds the continuities of its discontinuities. If the mode of organizing history in The Cantos is inseparable from its orality, it is an epic not only in Pound’s sense of a “poem including history,” but in the sense which Meschonnic gives to the notion of epos (referring to its Homeric meaning of “word”, akin to Latin vox), as the “story” of a voice discovering itself (Politique du rythme 358-359). In order to suggest further how orality determines the writing of history in Pound’s text, I would like to talk about several passages from The Pisan Cantos, chosen essentially from the opening pages of “Canto LXXIV.”

Indirect enunciation

9The problem of subjectivity is central to The Pisan Cantos. The poems describe and enact a search for self, an attempt at self-definition and self-justification, involving both the rehearsal of past events and the appropriation, through language, of the physical space of the present. Subjectivity is thematically central, most obviously in “Canto LXXIV,” where Pound’s speaker identifies himself from the beginning with a loss or absence of identity, with the anonymous. The first occurrence of a marker of the first person singular in “Canto LXXIV” serves to associate the speaker with Odysseus, the man of many identities (1.₂₄); but Odysseus himself is here associated with the punning version of his name, “ou tis” meaning “no one” (1.₂₃), which he uses to trick Polyphemus in book IX of the Odyssey; Odysseus’s words are translated further on as “I am noman, my name is noman” (1.₆₃), a statement which Pound’s speaker appears to apply to himself.

10The value of the Greek expression “ou tis”, repeated several times in the opening pages of “Canto LXXIV” is motivated or determined by its syntactic and rhythmic treatment: detached from the attributive construction in which it occurs in the Odyssey, displaced to and isolated at the right margin, repeated twice, at 1._61-62, “ou tis” appears to function as a thing heard rather than a thing said, as a call addressed to the speaker, as a faint inner voice, a thrown voice or textual ventriloquism, a disembodied voice, the voice of an absent speaker. Pound’s poem makes use of the space of the page to invent a specific mode of orality; yet paradoxically, this device has the effect of dividing the speaker from his language, of erasing the subject. In this sense, the quotations in The Pisan Cantos both are and are not quotations: they figure in the text as the involuntary suggestions of memory—as what the speaker’s memory conjures up in response to a context. When Pound quotes from Villon the phrase “absoudre, que tous nous veuil absoudre” (1.₉₇), the line cannot be read unambiguously as a request for pardon; and yet it functions as a re-enunciation, in that its meaning is entirely colored, determined, subjectified by the speaker’s situation, as well as by the links and associations produced by the text.

11The speaker’s self-identification as an absence is paralleled by forms of grammatical absence in The Pisan Cantos, the frequent suppression of the pronoun “I” on the one hand, the use of indirect modes of reference on the other. The elision of the subject pronoun is most marked where the speaker describes the present situation; continually, reference to objects perceived is made without reference to the perceiver, by means of existential sentences, as in “and there was the smell of mint under the tent flaps” (1.₁₂₀). In other cases, the subject pronoun is summarily and agrammatically suppressed, as for example in the most evident reading of the line “surrounded by herds and cohorts looked on Mt Taishan”; elsewhere, the elision of “I” determines a syntax in which the expression of emotion is nominalized, as in “nox animae magna from the tent under Taishan.” Similarly, Pound introduces what seems to function implicitly as a subject complement without marking overtly the relation to the speaker of the poem; the expression “a man on whom the sun has gone down” (1.₁₇₈) can only ambiguously be associated with “I” and thus floats into association with other figures, such as the prisoner Till executed for rape and murder, with whom the speaker is thus covertly identified.

12The elision of “I” gives rise to the use of oblique modes of reference to the speaker, who uses foreign forms of the deictic pronouns or common nouns, also foreign, to designate himself; the plural form of the first person pronoun, as in the closing line of “Canto LXXIV,” “we who have passed over Lethe” creates a similar effect. Yet these indirect forms of self-description are motivated by forms of consonance which produce continuities in the text. According to Caroll F. Terrell, Pound uses the Russian word “tovarish,” meaning “comrades,” to refer to himself in an early passage of “Canto LXXIV,” which reads: “and tovarish blessed without aim/wept in the rainditch at evening” (1.₁₈₄; Terrell 369). Here “tovarish” provides a verbal link, through the repetition of the phonemes \sh, tsh\ between “Taishan” and “rainditch”, situating the speaker of the poem between the two poles of air and earth, sacred mountain and degraded historical world. A similar effect can be observed in a later passage of “Canto LXXIV,” which describes a view of the tower of Pisa: “at sunset/ch’intenerisce/a sinistra la Torre/seen through a pair of breeches” (1._207-210). Here the speaker’s presence is again marked indirectly, as a form of absence, in that it is suggested only by means of the verb forms “intener-isce” and “seen”; the speechsounds of these forms are densely reiterated in the set of words which describe the sight, “sunset,” “sinistra,” even “breeches,” in such a way that the passage suggests the disappearance or absorption of the seer in the seen. Continually then, lexical and grammatical gestures which imply the erasure of the speaker’s identity are organized in the text by rhythmic and prosodic effects which specify Pound’s language.

Private language

13The problem of subjectivity is also implicit in the discursive mode adopted by The Pisan Cantos. The poem appears to function as interior monologue, as the mimesis of a ruminating mind. Kenner noted that it was written in what he called “free-running monologue,” commenting that “it was the right form now for memory” (476); Paul Morrison, who reads The Pisan Cantos as a “lyric interlude,” sees them as functioning according to John Stuart Mill’s definition of lyric speech as determined by “the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener” (quoted in Morrison 41). The use of interior monologue would thus seem to involve a withdrawal from overt communication; Bob Perelman describes the Pisan Cantos as a “solipsistic space” (74). The poem’s discursive mode would seem to explain its use of obscure allusion. And yet, even as Pound’s writing multiplies indecipherable references to persons and places, it also inscribes the presence of the reader in the text by means of parenthetical identifications—a clear derogation from the basic rules of interior monologue—which elucidate the reference of anaphoric forms a posteriori, or the identity of persons referred to elliptically, as by their initials.

14Here again the construction of subjectivity in the text is inseparable from its modes of orality. Pound’s parentheses function indissociably as the invention of a syntax specific to his text, as an example of what Gérard Dessons has called “oral syntax” as opposed to logical syntax, in that word order is determined by considerations of rhythmic or intonational emphasis rather than canonical order (so-called cleft sentences are a common example of this). In “Canto LXXX” Pound quotes several lines of verse and comments: “Whoi didn’t he (Padraic Colum)/keep on writing poetry at that voltage?” (510). Placed between parentheses at the end of the line, the proper noun “Padraic Colum” is syntactically, graphically, and rhythmically highlighted; at the same time, the poet’s name enters into multiple paronomastic relations with the description of his destiny, “keep on writing poetry.” Rather than as private language excluding communication, then, the text functions as an invention of communicative processes, a transformation of the reader’s relation to language.

15The use of unexplicited abbreviations in lieu of proper nouns is likewise an aspect of the voicing of the text. Bob Perelman understands Pound’s abbreviations as effecting a “heroic separation” (67) both from the reader and from language itself, as a way of reducing and purifying language compromised by its implication in the social. This suggestion accounts for the appearance of the initials L. and P., which commentators have understood as referring to Laval and Pétain, in “Canto LXXVI” (474); the French leaders are glossed in the poem as “gli onesti” (“the honest ones”) and associated with what can only be described as an obscene paradise. But the use of abbreviation is inseparable here from its oral and visual effects; it is also motivated by the poem’s continuum of sound. The initials “L.” and “P.” are disposed in such a way as to echo visually the initial capitals of the expression “Le Paradis”; their placement defines an architectonic space, bounded at bottom left by the right angle of the “L.” At the same time, the abbreviated “P.” (as opposed to the word “Pétain”) rhymes with both “Paradis” and “pitié”. Pound’s line is continually a way of organizing speech-sound relations, of sounding these relations. Here again, what appears to be a withdrawal from intersubjective relation functions as a way of voicing meaning, of bringing the reader’s body into the poem.

History and orality

16The effects of orality which specify The Pisan Cantos serve to define a theory of history. The historical particulars mentioned in the beginning of “Canto LXXIV” are consistently identified, through divers forms of rhyming and consonance, with words of mystical or theological import; the poem aims thus at inscribing the historical in the theological. The first occurrence of the word “Pisa” in “Canto LXXIV” is placed immediately after a series of words containing initial \p\ and \i:\, all associated with the divine: “principio”, “paraclete”, “verbumperfectum” (1._76-78); the locale of the speaker’s imprisonment and of his poem is thus identified with divine speech. History is organized paronomastically: the reference to Salamis (1.₁₆₁) offered by Pound as proof that “the state can lend money” and similarly the evocation of Lenin (1.₁₆₆) are closely linked with the quoted phrase “sunt lumina” (1.₁₅₅), a recurrent motif which affirms the revelation of the divine in the particular; further on in the text, the bizarre expression “coitu illuminatio” immediately precedes and determines a reference to Manet. These associations function as the revelation of divine order in the matter of language itself.

17Similar effects serve to organise the poem’s theory of history in conjunction with its construction of subjectivity. The oblique modes of self-designation in “Canto LXXIV” function as pivotal terms in the chains of signifiers which the poem constructs. The opening of the canto appears to be constructed partially around the relation between two recurrent phrases: “ou tis,” which describes the speaker’s degradation and loss of identity, and the ideal “city of Dioce,” become a dream “now in the mind indestructible” with the fall of Mussolini. “Ou tis,” with its consonantal frame \t-s\ is anticipated and reiterated by the series of \t\-\s\ words used to describe the political ideal, at 1.₁₁, first, then at 1.₁₉₇ and ₂₀₂: “city,” “Dioce,” “terraces,” “stars,” as well as the adjective, “indestructible,” which marks the speaker’s adherence to it. Other recurrent words share the same consonantal frame, notably the central terms of Pound’s theological vocabulary, “sinceritas” (1.₇₇), Pound’s word for correct denominations, and “tensile” (1.₁₅₃), used to describe the divine light; at the same time, “ou tis” appears to echo the name of the prisoner Till, whose death is arranged by the state; “les six potences” (1.₉₆) is another significant link in the chain. Coupling “ou tis” and “city of Dioce”, the poem identifies the fascist city with anonymity; this ambivalent relation can be read in at least two ways, as associating the speaker’s loss of identity with the collapse of Mussolini’s Italy, the ostensible meaning of the poem—or as suggesting, implicitly, frag-mentarily, that desubjectivation is an essential corollary of Pound’s ideal state.

18The poem’s association of “ou tis” and the “city of Dioce” might appear to be a chance effect were it not confirmed by other analogous relations. Pound’s translation of the Odyssean “ou tis” as “I am noman, my name is noman” (1.₆₃) is slightly discordant: he renders the grammatical word “tis” by the lexical word “man” (“ou tis” is more properly “no one”); he also writes “noman” as one word, as though it were a name. Doing so, however, he puts “noman” into relation with its quasi-anagram, OMNIA, which appears, three pages later at 1.₁₅₆, in capital letters, as part of a quotation from Johannes Scotus Erigena, which Pound presents as “sunt lumina […] OMNIA.” Here again Pound has rewritten the original text, which Gilson’s Laphilosophie au Moyen Age gives as “Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt” (Pound translates “all things that are are lights”); the formula describes, according to Gilson, Erigena’s notion of the theophany, which understands all creation as the revelation of divinity (Gilson 214).

19Pound’s reformulation of Erigena’s text substitutes an oral syntax for a logical syntax, inverting subject and predicate, thus making “OMNIA” the “focus” of information. At the same time, “lumina” is placed next to “OMNIA,” in such a way as to mark and construct the paranomastic relation between the two words, while “OMNIA” written in capitals and isolated within the line functions as a rhythmic-visual figure of totality. The poem identifies the word “name”, a central notion in Pound’s theory of language, and the words “lumina” and “omnia,” realizing thus one tenet of Erigena’s philosophy, the idea that all bodily or corporal beings are signs of the intelligible (Gilson 214). At the same time, the link constructed between “noman” and “OMNIA” identifies the loss or negation of self with an absorption into divine totality. The Pisan Cantos, the section of The Cantos which is most clearly anchored to a historical situation, enacts a de-historicisation, a denial of history inseparable from a denial of the subject, particularly problematic in the context of the events of the war and Pound’s role in them.

20It does so, however, by means of a radical subjectivation of language, which is at the same time a radical historicization: appropriating discourses belonging to widely different cultural and historical moments, the poem inscribes them in a system of relations which determines a specific, subjective semantics. Bob Perelman describes the use of foreign words in The Cantos as following from Pound’s need to distinguish and separate himself fromhis reader (67). Seen as a function of the poem’s orality, Pound’s multilingualism appears rather as a way of producing semantic connections, semantic series articulated by the repetition of speechsound and letter, rhymes which cannot be produced with the words of any one language, as that for example, in “Canto LXXIV,” between English “sun” and Latin “sunt”; semantic relations which do not exist apriori, but are discovered and motivated by Pound’s poem. A further example of this mode of functioning appears in a previously quoted passage from “Canto LXXIV”: “at sunset/ch’intenerisce/a sinistra la Torre/seen through a pair of breeches” (1._207-210). The poem here describes a visual relation between the tower of Pisa and a pair of pants; at the same time, its lineation rhymes—almost improbably—the Italian word “intenerisce”, which, according to Terrell, Pound has borrowed from Dante’s Purgatorio, and the colloquial English word “breeches” (Terrell 370). The passage thus affirms in different manners simultaneously a relation between high culture and ordinary life, in such a way as to suggest, perhaps, a link between the specific subject of the poem and the subject of history, between what the poem does and what so-called ordinary language does.

21Pound’s fascist ideology is clearly inseparable from the poetics of his text. Not only is this ideology “embodied in the poem’s metaphors and images,” as Robert Casillo has noted (328); it organizes even the vocalic and consonantal composition of the poem. By continually subsuming the historical in the affirmation of an immanent divine presence, “Canto LXXIV” supposes a desub-jectivation of language entirely consonant with authoritarian politics. At the same time, however, the poem, through its invention of specific modes of orality, enacts linguistic individuation, its highly determined semantic series organize a specific history in language. The poetics of The Cantos is thus fundamentally opposed to Pound’s politics; but not simply, as Casillo and others have suggested, because the text is characterized by ambiguity or indeterminacy; on the contrary, Pound’s language is—at least partially, locally—radically motivated and thus radically subjective, by the same token radically social. For this reason, the poem cannot be seen simply as a record of fragmentation as critics have suggested; its writing of history produces the continuity of its discontinuity, a continuity which Pound himself theorizes in an article on Williams when he remarks, speaking about the supposedly “formless” writing of Aeschylus, Lope de Vega, and Flaubert, that “[t]he component in these great works and theindispensable componentis texture” (Essays 395). Read for texture, read as orality, Pound’s poem can also be understood as the story of a voice inventing itself in the discourses of history, as an epic of voice.