1Surrealism was not central to Pound’s poetics; but it is possible to argue that Pound was a Surrealist without quite knowing it. According to the usual taxonomies of twentieth-century art, Pound stands almost diametrically opposed to the Dadaist/Surrealist movement: if Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton work to obliterate normal meaning, Pound works to intensify meaning, to kindle concrete particulars into ideogrammic blazes of meaning. But nonsense and excessive sense are extremes that tend to converge, as is clear to anyone who compares the methods of Finnegans Wake with those of “Jabberwocky”; by trying to overload every syllable with maximum meaning, Joyce sometimes verges on the textures of Dada—Tom Stoppard brilliantly hinted at this truth when, in Travesties (1974), he outfitted Joyce in a coat covered with little bits of paper that Tzara had cut up in order to generate a Dada poem (56). Similarly, Pound’s prismatic method of constructing poems according to a private hyperlogic turns out to bear close resemblance to the methodical alogic of the Surrealists.

2Pound was fairly indifferent to Surrealism except for one moment in his career, from 1936 to 1938; but during those years he was obsessed with Surrealism, to the extent that almost everything he saw or heard seemed to him surreal. But Pound’s intellectual engagement with Surrealism actually began some years earlier, in 1930, when he wrote an essay, “Epstein, Belgion and Meaning,” an important essay worth quoting at length:

As to surrealism, Pater and Co. mixed up artistic discussion. […] There was a period when the symbolistes,‑etc., discussed each art in terms of some other. There was (under various names) a puritanical period (call it that to forestall abuse) when some few dozen men agreed to discuss, or tried to discuss the separate arts in their own terms. As far as this concerned the plastic arts, few painters and sculptors were strong enough to meet the (perhaps excessive) demands.

A traditional hunger for literary values returned. […] There is a Cosimo Tura in Bergamo which Arp has probably never seen. Arp’s admirers will probably admire it more than any spectators have during the intermediate period.

I am not making that statement in a fit of irrelevance. I mean to imply that anyone who has for a quarter of a century held to an admiration for thirteenth-century poetry and fifteenth-century painting has very little difficulty in adjusting himself to surrealism—surrealism that comes after a period of aesthetic purism (Picasso, Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier, Brancusi).

I cannot conceive a surrealist objecting on aesthetic grounds to Cavalcanti’s

I seem to see a lady wonderful

Spring forth between her lips, one whom no sense

Can fully tell the mind of, and one whence

Another, in beauty, springeth marvellous,

From whom a star goes forth… (“Ballata V” Translations107)

Though Luigi Valli intent on making Guido into a protagonist of a forbidden sect has nothing but contempt for the obvious statement and wants to -translate it by a secret “code.”

One could, I think, consider Guido surrealist, in a sense that Bertrand de Born was not. […] The surrealists are making a fresh start with a hitherto undigested content. […] They may or may not want to own an ancestry or to co-ordinate themselves with precursors or with other art of similar phase.

Not by the reason, but ‘tis felt, I say.

Beyond salvation, holdeth its judging force,

Maintains intention reason’s peer and mate… (“Cavalcanti’s Canzone” Transla-tions137)

occurs in Guido’s triumph of melodic symmetry, and, let us admit, does not go quite so far as to deny reason altogether. It asserts a reality outside the -scholastic logic.

The surrealists also assert an external reality. In the morass of Berkeleyian-Berg-sonian subjectivo-fluxivity they have perhaps chosen a good moment to do so. (Zinnes 164-66)

3There is a quite respectable theory of Surrealism that can be teased out of these comments. It has four main premises:

4(1) Surrealism is the opposite of “aesthetic purism”: Surrealist art confuses and smears together different realms of being, different textures, different artistic media. Therefore a Surrealist painting is an attempt to coopt literary values into the field of the visual—to erase the boundary that separates one artistic medium from another. One might even say that a work by Ernst or Dalí tries to realize a sort of logopoeia on a canvas by creating a feeling of discursive delirium by purely pictorial means. Pound’s emphasis on the cross-media aspects of Surrealism follows immediately from Apollinaire, who coined the term Surrealism in 1917 in a program note to the Satie-Picasso-Cocteau -ballet Parade; as Apollinaire put it, “The cubist painter Picasso and the boldest of choreographers, Léonide Massine, have effected it, consummating for the first time the alliance of painting and dance, of plastic and mime, which is the sign of the advent of a more complete art. […] From this new alliance, for until now stage sets and costumes on one side and choreography on the other had only a sham bond between them, there has come about, in Parade, a kind of super-realism [sur-réalisme].” At the very origin of Surrealism, then, is the notion that all arts are one art—a single vortex funneling into the spectator.

5(2) Surrealism represents an attack on logic, on the sequence of cause-and-effect, on common notions of propriety, on grammar itself. In the Cavalcanti ballata, a woman emerges from another woman’s lips like a personified speech-balloon in a comic strip; out of this secondary woman there springs a tertiary woman; the tertiary woman emits a star; the star, in turn, has a message concerning the salvation of the poet’s soul. Instead of presenting a picture of a lovely woman who says something, Cavalcanti spangles the whole process of talking with a series of interposed entities, as if to prolong and adorn the moment by inventing a little cosmos of vice-speakers to transmit, through a potentially infinite series of interlocutors, the ultra-cherished words. Pound insists that this passage cannot be explained by recourse to a code, either a private code or some public body of doctrine such as the angelology of Thomas Aquinas; it is an enigma that can only be felt, not reasoned out. In a later part of this same essay, Pound deplores the inadequacy of “monolinear sentence structure” in trying to describe either the physical world that scientists study or the works of such complicated artists as Cocteau or Epstein; Pound wishes to find a way of writing a better sort of art criticism—“We are as capable or almost as capable as the biologist of thinking thoughts that join like spokes in a wheel-hub and that fuse in hypergeometric amalgams” (Zinnes 166). Here, I think, Pound is hoping to devise a Surrealist form of art criticism, in which the critic like the artist can leap from one topic to the next without regard for the common decencies of argumention—though whether there exists a central hub to which all the spokes are joined is not clear either in the art of the Surrealists or in Pound’s criticism.

6(3) Surrealism is not an artifact of the twentieth century, but an aesthetic modality available at all times and places. Cosimo Tura and Guido Cavalcanti were Surrealists centuries avant la lettre; the taste for mad pullulations of form, the relish of the elegantly misbegotten, may come and go, but can never be extinguished. Indeed the works of Cosimo Tura and Hans Arp form what Pound calls a “subject-rhyme” (Selected Letters210), a repeat in time, a luminous transhistorical connection that gestures toward certain invariances, certain universals in art, in the human condition itself. In his later criticism Pound creates many more precursors for the Surrealists: he compares Vivaldi to Dalí (Shafer 456), Max Ernst to Grosseteste on light (Guide to Kulchur77).

7(4) The character of Surrealism is essentially materialistic and objective. This is a startling observation, since we’re accustomed to think of Surrealism as a post-Freudian movement devoted to bringing to light the obscurest fauna of the unconscious mind, those blinking malformed creatures least available to conscious inspection. But André Breton’s famous definition of Surrealism as “Pure psychic automatism” (1: 328) permits different constructions -depending on different stresses: emphasize psychic and you have our normal sense of Sur-realism; but emphasize automatism and you suddenly have a version of Surrealism compatible with Futurist love of machines and Neoclassicist doting on spiffy and impersonal process, aesthetics cleansed of all sentiment. Indeed Pound’s Surrealism, liberated from the “morass of Berkeleyian-Bergsonian subjectivo-fluxivity,” provides a fascinating extension of the objectivism that Wyndham Lewis had put forward in Time and Western Man (1927). There Lewis argues that the general dreck and slime of much twentieth-century art and science resulted from a refusal to accept the discipline of fact: we pretend that it is so if you think so, but in truth the universe is not a construction of the human mind. In 1930 and thereafter, Lewis kept refining his invective against subjectivity, particularly that of James Joyce:

As developed in Ulysses, [the internal method] robbed Mr. Joyce’s work as a whole of all linear properties whatever, considered as a plastic thing—of all contour and definition in fact. In contrast to the jelly-fish that floats in the centre of the subterranean stream of the “dark” Unconscious, I much prefer, for my part, the shield of the tortoise, or the rigid stylistic articulations of the grasshop-per… The ossature is my favourite part of a living animal organism, not its intestines. (Satire and Fiction47)

[T.E. Hulme and I] preferred something more metallic and resistant than the pneumatic surface of the cuticle. We preferred a helmet to a head of hair. A scarab to a jelly-fish. (Blasting and Bombardiering104)

8Pound noted, quite brilliantly I think, that Surrealism is an art of externals: carapace, chiton, and skeleton are part of the regular vocabulary of Surrealist art: to fetishize the hard bits of organic life is the first stage toward the -methodical misassemblages of Surrealism. Lewis prefers to keep the scarab, the tortoise-shell, and the grasshopper distinct from one another, whereas Max Ernst prefers to juxtapose palps, beaks, and thorax-segments from unrelated creatures; but both Lewis and the Surrealists tend to esteem an art of rigidly incised surfaces. When Ernst mineralizes the texture of his canvas by means of frottage and decalcomania, he seems to be trying to turn his painting into an artificial physical object—not an image of a thing but a thing in its own right. As Pound put it in 1937, “Max Ernst, Miró Salvador Dali have lived in, and created, this hyper-materialistic world” (Shafer 415).

9During the period of 1936 to 1938, Pound developed his theory of Surrealism and even tried his hand at Surrealist practice, or something near akin.

10What seems to have sparked Pound’s interest in Surrealism was, oddly enough, the experience of listening to music. There were two periods of Pound’s life when he was intensely engaged with music: first in the late teens and early twenties, when he wrote music criticism for The New Age, composed his opera Le Testament, and published his book on George Antheil; second in the late -thirties, when he organized concerts in Italy and wrote a number of wide-ranging, carefully considered essays on music. In these essays he recasts his 1930 theory of Surrealism as an extension of his rapidly developing theories of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and ideogram. There is a kind of poetry that attempts to be music without pitch, or with only the suggestion of pitch; there is a kind of poetry that attempts to cast images on the visual imagination; there is a kind of poetry that solders together concrete particulars in order to point to some abstract meaning unavailable to other linguistic procedures. Perhaps the endpoint, the reductio ad absurdum, of these poetries is Surrealism, with its disturbing transgressions of the boundaries that separate artistic media, and its predilection for strange amalgams of concrete particulars. For example, when in 1936 Pound wrote a review of the Venice Biennial of Music for the B.B.C. magazine The Lis-tener, he heard Bartók’s fifth quartet and considered it a path-breaking, important work, “warm with humanity”; but when he heard Honegger’s second quartet, his imagination broke out in a visual delirium:

Whether he [Honegger] admires Tchelitchew’s paintings I don’t know. But every-thing that the surrealists in ignorance discovered, but might have taken from the mediæval Flemish mystics, is common both to surrealist airiness and to this piece of Honegger’s.

The incongruities, the distasteful detail, which these so very, very annoyed young men hurl into painting, and then carry into the ultimate beauties of colour and of line composition, is present in Honegger’s A minor Quartet [actually D and G]. Not a fuzzy moonbeam, but a razor-edged moonbeam. Not necessarily a bull’s legs on a duck, but an aerial mermaid three parts carburetter, with tentacles of an octopus, resolved in pale blue, ash pink and steel platinum. (Schafer 404)

11Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, with its knives, its knife-edged mélanges of fish and insects and men, seems to govern Pound’s imagery; but the stress on engines and exotic metals owes more to Futurism than to the medieval Flemish mystics. The complex of moonbeam-razor-mermaid-carburettor-octopus, audible to Pound in Honegger’s snazzy quartet, is worth contemplating: the trick is to combine fragile archaic lyricism (moonbeam, mermaid) with something sharp, chugging, technologically acerbic. (Honegger actually does just this in the quartet’s second movement.) Compare this complex with Pound’s famous 1934 prototype of the ideogram:

But when the Chinaman wanted to make a picture of… a general idea, how did he go about it?

He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint?

He puts… together the abbreviated pictures of

ROSE CHERRY

IRON RUST FLAMINGO

That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does… when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases. (ABC21-22)

12(I should say immediately that this explanation bears no relation to any actual Chinese character for red.) The violent abutment of rose-rust-cherry-flamingo has much the same texture as moonbeam-mermaid-carburettor-octopus: the metallic and the beastly, the flamboyant and the commonplace, are rudely juxtaposed.

13But of course there is a difference. Rose-rust-cherry-flamingo is a riddle that can be solved. What do these four things have in common?—the color red. In constructing an ideogram for red, it is necessary to find things that have absolutely nothing in common except color: if the components were, say, rose-strawberry-plum, the abstraction to be derived might be the botanical family rosaceae instead of the color red. But some heaps of particulars may turn out to be simply heaps of particulars, without any obvious or occult theme behind them. Pound wrote in 1917, “I do not think one can use to any advantage rhythms much more tenuous and imperceptible than some I have used” (Liter-ary Essays13); and in the 1930s he investigated the limit of tenuity of ideograms as well: the point where juxtapositions of mismatched things fail to converge into meaning, but only huddle together in discord, bask in their unrelieved flimsiness. Do mermaid and carburettor and octopus permit themselves to be coordinated into a single idea, or do they remain a chaos? If Honegger’s quartet is truly Surrealist, presumably there is no code by which a theme can be teased out. A Surrealist work, then, is essentially a lapsed ideogram, an ideogram in the absence of an idea.

14In most of Pound’s other writings about Surrealism during the period 1936-38, he explicitly relies on the ideas of the painter and poet Francis Picabia. In his 1937 essay “D’Artagnan Twenty Years After,” Pound praises Picabia extravagantly: “Picabia is the only man I have ever met who has a genius for handling abstract concepts. […] Picabia was the dynamic under Dada. It is you might say ‘footless’ to present surrealism without its mental état civile—merely because 66 pages of Picabia were locked in a cellar” (Selected Prose458-59). Whether or not Picabia was the dynamic under Dada and Surrealism, he was certainly the major influence in Pound’s understanding of the dynamic of Dada and Sur-realism, and indeed most of the tenets of Pound’s theory of Surrealism come directly or indirectly from Picabia.

15The crucial documents for our purposes are a series of interviews that Picabia gave in New York in 1913, and Picabia’s astonishing book Jésus-Christ Rasta-quouère (1920). Pound was enthusiastically recommending the book to Wyndham as early as 1921 (Selected Letters166); I don’t know when Pound first read the New York interviews—he doesn’t seem to mention them until 1938 (Guide to Kulchur134)—but I suspect that he knew them before he wrote his 1930 essay on Epstein and Surrealism. For example, when Pound speaks of the Surrealist assertion of external reality, the liberation from the morass of subjectivity, he seems to echo not only Wyndham Lewis but also Picabia, who told the New York interviewer that “The new expression in painting is ‘the objectivity of a subjectivity,’” dissociated from all sensory pleasure (Écrits 22). Of course neither Dadaism nor Surrealism yet existed in 1913, but Picabia was, according to Pound, a man in advance of his time.

16In “D’Artagnan Twenty Years After,” Pound claims that the renewal of liter-ature during the early twentieth century can be understood by studying two publications: the magazine Blast and Picabia’s Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère (Selected Prose458). (Pound defines rastaquouère as a foreigner whose means of support are unknown; other dictionaries give such definitions as shabby adventurer or doubtful member of the nobility; one possible translation of Picabia’s title would be Jesus Christ the No-Account Count). Pound quotes a passage from Picabia’s book to illustrate Picabia’s creative insolence—a passage that might be translated as follows: “I would like to fabricate an “artistic” automobile in rosewood, mixed with Pink pills. The tires would be of steel and the ball bearings in rubber, as a piece of -FUTURISM it wouldn’t be bad” (Selected Prose458; Écrits 251). This degenerate car, in which each component is made of exactly the most useless material, anticipates the fur-lined cups (by Meret Oppenheim) and breasts of crystal that would -feature so largely in the Surrealist movement; Picabia assaults the concept of an intelligible and operative whole, as the car breaks down into a jumble of expensive but tensely wrong junk. The carburettor, so to speak, is connected to the octopus, not the fuel line; the idea of an automobile is at once proposed and resisted, just as, in a misconceived ideogram, the components refuse to synthesize.

17The materialist character of Surrealism can be seen in Picabia’s loving attention to rosewood, rubber, steel—the very fact that the materials are all wrong for their intended purpose elevates them beyond functionality into a pure immanence of matter. Throughout Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère Picabia exalts -materiality and attacks the subjective, the merely conceptual. His least favorite organ is the brain, and he finds various ways of demeaning or squashing it: he says that, after a long conversation with a friend about aesthetics, “our delirium lasted nearly an hour, until our brains were transformed more or less into pulp, and permitted us to confirm the nothingness of all physical or metaphysical theories!”; later a detached brain is mistaken “for a pair of buttocks”; furthermore, our feelings and beliefs are essentially mechanical and pathological—“love is purely a chemical reaction” and “you are put under the domination of epidemic values: the neurosis of love, the neurosis of art, the neurosis of belief in a god” (Écrits 242, 253, 245, 257). Words and ideas count for little in this hypermaterialized universe: at one point Picabia notes that “the word light does not exist, but light exists”; it is true that later he reverses this by saying “the word light exists, light doesn’t exist” (Écrits 242, 248), but this statement doesn’t serve to revalorize the abstract and ideal, only to confirm the vanity of language as a tool for intelligence about the world around us. Aporia is, for Picabia as for Beckett, a device for denying the prowess of the reasoning mind, for -collapsing superstructures of speculation into the general detritus of things.

18There is one passage in Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère where Picabia’s aesthetic is stated as an explicit doctrine—a passage in which Picabia quotes, in slightly changed form, from Gabrielle Buffet’s preface:

“The public’s error is to regard modern works as a rebus to which one must discover the key.

“There isn’t any rebus at all. There isn’t any key at all. The work exists, its sole raison d’être is to exist. It represents nothing except the desire of the brain that conceived it. Nature’s inventions charm us without there being any question of reasoning or of a raison d’être.

“The artistic pleasure that can procure modern works for us is of the same order. One must regard modern works as one regards a tree, a flower, a landscape. There’s nothing to be understood that isn’t legible to everybody. The spectator feels a lively deception when he ascertains just how simple the process of compre--hension is. He is ready to find himself the victim of a bad joke,‑etc. (Écrits 251)

19Ten years later, in 1930, Pound would scorn Valli for seeking codes to decipher the proto-Surrealist poetry of Cavalcanti. Pound was intrigued by the notion of an art that didn’t represent anything in particular, that didn’t mean anything in particular, an art without keys, an art without locks, an art that was simply an extancy. In his early writings on Imagism, Pound insisted that the poet must write for readers to whom “a hawk is a hawk” (Literary Essays9)—a hawk that isn’t a symbol of predatory fury, or of solitary pride, just a plain hawk. Pound liked the notion of learned readers, but hoped to have an audience far broader than that of graduate student specialists—just as Schoenberg and all the other difficult Modernists hoped that people would approach their work simply and immediately, without analytical charts, skeleton keys, tables of correspondences, reader’s guides, and so forth.

20And yet, Pound was not altogether easy about an art that resisted interpretation, an art that was so hypermaterial as to be completely opaque. The Cantos are, among other things, a long invective against materialism; one of the central villainesses of the whole project is Madame Y∆H, Mrs. Matter, who erects a skeleton on a throne in “Canto XXX.” Another chief villainess is Circe, if indeed Circe isn’t just another name for Madame Y∆H. Circe might be described as the presiding spirit of Surrealism, insofar as Surrealist art is a continual stream of incoherent mutations, metamorphoses without any clear purpose or goal—a series of women bubbling out of one another’s mouths, for example. In “Canto XXXIX”—the chief Circe canto, published in 1934, just when Surrealism was starting to occupy much of Pound’s thinking—we are offered a picture of the utter listlessness of Circe’s palace, a Bower of Sloth:

Fat panther lay by me

Girls talked there of fucking, beasts talked there of eating,

All heavy with sleep, fucked girls and fat leopards,

Lions loggy with Circe’s tisane,

Girls leery with Circe’s tisane (XXXIX 193)

21Beneath all the exciting perversions, blasphemies, abruptions, and shapeshifts of Surrealism, there seems to lie inertia. Ultimately, for Pound, art can only be redeemed by an idea: without an idea there is no ideogram, without some apparatus of locks and keys art collapses into inanition. In the poetry Pound wrote in the later 1930s, such as “Canto XLVIII,” he seems to experiment with transitions that almost show a Surrealist inconsequence:

They say, that is the Norse engineer told me, that out past Hawaii

they spread threads from gun’ale to gun’ale

in a certain fashion

and plot a course of 3000 sea miles

lying under the web, watching the stars

while she bought 2 prs of shoes

2 veils; 2 parasols; an orchid (artificial)

for which I was presented with a new kind of net gloves

made like a fishnet; so the day was not wholly wasted […]

where they scratch six feet deep to reach pavement

where now is wheat field, and a milestone

an altar to Terminus with arms crossed

back of the stone […]

Falling Mars in the air

bough to bough, to the stone bench,

where was an ox in smith’s sling hoisted for shoeing (XLVIII 242-243)

22The complex here includes a web strung over a boat to provide Cartesian coordinates for navigating by the position of stars; and veils and fishnet gloves, as described in a letter from Olga Rudge; and a remnant milestone; and a sling for lifting an ox. All these concrete particulars concern, in one way or another, the concept of net or grid. If there is an ideogram in the passage, it is extremely tenuous; but perhaps the reader might interpret this canto by saying that the spatial articulations by which we all ascertain our place in the world may become traps that tangle us and ensnare us. If this is the ideogram that Pound intends, it is an ideogram that doesn’t point to a preexistent word in any language, but instead gestures at an original meaning, a new word. But it is hard to be certain that we should read this passage ideogrammically—that is, -looking for a difficult but available meaning—or Surrealistically—that is, resting content with a text that is, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, a piebald fisc unkeyed.

23At last Pound came to consider that the purpose of Dadaist/Surrealist movement was to cause hilarity through destruction. As he put it in his final important essay on the subject, in the tenth chapter of Guide to Kulchur (1938):

Picabia got hold of an instrument which cleared out whole racks full of rubbish.

“Europe exhausted by the conquest of Alsace Lorraine.” The transposition of terms in idées reçues.

The accepted cliché turned inside out. a, b, c, d; being placed

b, d, c, a,

c, b, d, a,‑etc., in each case

expressing as much truth, half truth or quarter, as the original national or political bugwash.

That anyone should have tried to use Picabia’s acid for building stone, shows only the ineradicable desire of second-rate minds to exploit things they have not comprehended.

After Dada there came a totally different constructive movement. (Guide to Kulchur87-88)

24This passage shows the materialistic character of Dadaism/Surrealism in a somewhat different light. The artist who confronts an exhausted post-war world, a bankrupt culture devoid of sanctity or goal or idea, has to make do with inanimate matter. Given this situation, one possible response—Pound’s own response—would be to try to reenergize the culture by finding the remnants of a vital tradition from antiquity; but another response—Picabia’s response—is to horrify the culture by displaying the gangrene as vividly as possible. Picabia, according to Pound, illustrates the deadness of dead ideas in dead heads by introducing random permutations into cliché formulas, thereby producing a sort of lysol-bath for lies. A stupid sentence cannot be made more stupid by twisting its terms around; but the original stupidity can be made more manifest. An example of this subversion by inversion can be found in a passage from Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère that Pound quotes in his 1937 essay “D’Arta-gnan Twenty Years After”; Pound begins by remembering his favorite line of Picabia’s, the one about Alsace-Lorraine, also cited three times in the Cantos (LXXXVII 570; XCVII 678; CIII 733):

“Europe exhausted by the conquest of Alsace Lorraine.” Poor beings, felled by the hundreds for the glory of a ventriloquist. (Picabia Écrits 257)

There are far fewer

things in heaven and earth

than are dreamt of

in our philosophy (Picabia, Écrits 252)

Even if Picabia’s sole virtue were corrosive, which I don’t for a moment grant, Europe in 1919-22 needed ammonia, it needed an eau de Javel triple strong, and a man who could cut the barnacles off Picasso, Cocteau, Marinetti, pitilessly but with consummate good humour was an asset to Europe. (Selected Prose459)

25Picabia turns Hamlet’s wisdom upside-down to make the satirical point that our ideas have multiplied and thinned out, evacuated themselves, lost all ballast of reference to the real world.

26Pound gives no examples of Dadaist scrambling of sequence, whereby a, b, c, d becomes b, d, c, a or c, b, d, a; but the Cantos themselves contain a number of examples of this sort of permutation. As early as “Canto XIV” (1925), Pound imagines hell’s politicians with bodies reconstructed according to the best Picabian principles of corrosion:

Faces smeared on their rumps,

wide eye on flat buttock,

Bush hanging for beard,

Addressing crowds through their arse-holes (XIV 61)

27Here we have a systematic transposition of head and rump: the human physique dismantled and reconstituted backwards, according to some sequence such as d, c, b, a.

28But it is important to remember that dismemberments of logical sequence in Pound’s work may have no satirical point whatsoever, and may pertain not to Dadaism or Surrealism but to the atemporality of the aesthetic experience itself. For Pound, history exists in the mind not as a chronology, not as a tightly wound filmstrip to be unspooled consecutively from the earliest written records to the present moment; instead, history exists as a tissue of subject-rhymes, recurrence-patterns—more like a poem written by time itself than like a -linear curriculum of cause and effect. Therefore in the Cantos Pound uses a method uncannily similar to Picabia’s, a method of retrograde permutation and other scramblings of event sequence, but only occasionally with an intent similar to Picabia’s.

29In February 1928 Pound tried to explain the Cantos to Yeats, who -remembered his explanation as follows:

For the last hour we have sat upon the roof […] discussing that immense poem […] I have often found there brightly printed kings, queens, knaves, but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order. Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer, a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, mediaeval or modern historical characters. […] He has scribbled on the back of an envelope certain sets of letters that represent emotions or archetypal events—I cannot find any adequate definition—A B C D and then J K L M, and then each set of letters repeated, and then A B C D inverted and this repeated, and then a new element X Y Z, then certain letters that never recur […] and all set whirling together. (A Vision3-5)

30Pound was exasperated with the attention that Yeats’s description received: “CONFOUND uncle Bill YEATS’ paragraph on fugue… more wasted ink due his ‘explanation,’ than you cd. mop up with a moose hide.” And yet, given the fact that in the previous year Pound had described the Cantos to his father in similar terms, I suspect that Yeats’s often unreliable memory wasn’t too gross a travesty of what Pound said. There are many ways in which the Cantos aspire to be music; and it is only one of the many paradoxes of twentieth-century art that Picabia’s hypermaterial method, in which things loom large and the order of things, the significance of things, the ideas behind things, mean little, should converge with Pound’s method of uncovering the abstract fugues that govern human events. To connect Paris’s abduction of Helen with Pieire de Maensac’s abduction of De Tierci’s wife (V 18) might be part of a rastaquouère farce in the manner of Offenbach; or it might be part of a serious attempt to shore up the ruins of history (VIII 28) by finding deep reverberations in the midst of chronicles where all seems scattered, thin, helpless, fleeting.

31One of Picabia’s wisest observations occurs near the beginning of Jésus-Christ Rastaquouère:

The thoughts of the heart, the thoughts of the soul, the thoughts of the brain, are just so many automatic chemical reactions; the current that makes them act comes from yourselves, from the sun, or from the Big Dipper; the Big Dipper recites, the sun recites, and we recite our digestions and indigestions. Your reflec-tions, dear little girl readers, even if they are anti-reason or anti-truth, are just so many conventions, founded on an absolute which is still only a convention. (Écrits 241)

32Picabia pretends, as he says in his dedication, that his book is addressed to an audience of little girls, evidently a rather unsophisticated group. But here his satire turns against Picabia himself, for the calculated outrages of his own style—Picabia’s own anti-rational, anti-veridical discourse—have a strongly conventional aspect. Tires of steel and ball bearings of rubber can be generated through fairly easy, straightforward procedures of imagination. Indeed Picabia’s aperçu operates as a kind of warning posted in 1920 for the whole Surrealist movement that would soon originate and quickly evolve: for Sur-realism, even quite good Surrealism, often seems derived from a mechanical application of illogic. Retrograde sequences, mismatches of form and substance, can be achieved without great genius: Surrealism, despite its utter disdain for convention, itself became a body of conventions. Surrealism feels its way toward a place where (in Breton’s fine phrase) “opposites are not perceived as contradictions” (2: 846); but often Surrealistic opposites are perceived as contradictions, a machine-cranked array of oxymorons, where tires and ball bearings simply exchange their substances.

33Perhaps this helps us to understand why Pound thought that the Surrealists were expert in destruction but not so gifted at construction: the conventions by which the Surrealists operated were, in the end, just as flimsy as the less flamboyant conventions of older art. Coleridge’s famous distinction, in Biographia Literaria, between Imagination and Fancy may also help to illuminate some of the more doubtful aspects of the Surrealist aesthetic:

The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former co-existing with the conscious will… It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create… it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. (304-5)

34I understand Surrealism as a deliberate reversal of prestige between Imagina-tion and Fancy. By Imagination Coleridge means something simple, unitary, utterly novel; by Fancy Coleridge means some artificial recombination of preexisting objects “emancipated from the order of time and space,” from -logical sequence. Imagination, by Surrealist standards, disappoints in that it lacks any frisson of incongruity, as we can see from Coleridge’s examples (84-85): as a sample of the highest working of Imagination he gives Shakespeare’s line “What! Have his daughters brought him to this pass?” (KingLear III 463); as a sample of Fancy he gives Thomas Otway’s line “Lutes, lobsters, seas of milk, and ships of amber” (Venice Preserv’d V 369). The line from King Lear has no Surreal aspect whatever; but the line by Otway sounds extravagantly Surreal, especially because Coleridge has misremembered it in a Surrealizing way: Otway actually wrote “Lutes, laurels, seas of milk and ships of amber.” The phrase ships of amber shows exactly the same mismatch of form and substance as tires of steel; and the juxtaposition of lutes and lobsters foreshadows both Lewis Carroll and André Breton. Coleridge here pre-indicts the entire Surrealist movement for its reliance on mechanical operations of associative memory, as the l-t-s of lutes generates lobsters by means of an echo-ricochet.

35Pound labored to dehistoricize Surrealism. I am trying to go one step further, by dehistoricizing the very theory of Surrealism. Furthermore, I believe that we are still living today in an essentially Dadaist or Surrealist intellectual milieu, and that anything we can do better to understand these art movements will help us to articulate our world. Dadaism and Surrealism may or may not retain their importance in painting and literature: even the elderly Ezra Pound was once moved to scrawl “dada/deada/what is deader/than dada” (Friedman 280). But Poststructuralism strikes me as profoundly Surrealist, perhaps even Dadaist. Fredric Jameson, Douglas Crimp, and others, have effected a sort of posthumous Surrealization of the whole field of art: if all art inhabits a continuous present, and there exist no possible bases for a taxonomy of art or for judgments of congruity and incongruity, then all art, from the Iliad to Titian’s Venus to the symphonies of Schnittke, consists of bizarre and fortuitous conglomerations of elements. In other words, every art work is failed ideogram, in which juxtapositions of mismatched things fail to converge into meaning, but only huddle together in discord, bask in their unrelieved flimsiness. Sur-realism gave Pound a name for the botch that he feared that the Cantos would comprise, as well as a secret justification for that botch.