resembling pound: mimesis, translation, ideology

Resembling Pound: Mimesis, Translation, IdeologyAuthor(s): JOSEPH KRONICKSource: Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 2, FIN DE SIÈCLE PERSPECTIVES ON TWENTIETH-CENTURYLITERATURE AND CULTURE (spring, 1993), pp. 219-236Published by: Wayne State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23113571Accessed: 10-04-2016 15:04 UTC

REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:http://www.jstor.org/stable/23113571?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted

digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about

JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Wayne State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCriticism

This content downloaded from 130.39.62.90 on Sun, 10 Apr 2016 15:04:27 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

JOSEPH KRONICK

Resembling Pound: Mimesis, Translation, Ideology

In the discussion of justice that opens Plato's Republic, a surprising procession of topics comes before us, including economics, cooking, art, and thievery. On the basis of a definition of justice as "paying back what one has received from anyone,"1 Socrates leads his inter locutors through a series of analogies, and it is not long before educa tion, fables, and mimesis are introduced. For there to be a just state, we must educate our children in the love of wisdom. This education

proceeds by the telling of fables [muthoi] and is mimetic in character: "Do you not know, then, that the beginning in every task is the chief thing, especially for any creature that is young and tender? For it is then that it is best molded and takes the impression that one wishes to stamp upon it?"2

Arguing by analogies that link economics, justice, and cooking, Socrates soon insists that everything begins by mimesis, the molding or impression that stamps an image upon the soul. The opposition between nature (physis) and art (poiesis) is annuled. Mimeticism is a production, at once economic and theatrical. Jacques Derrida, in an essay on Kant's third Critique, has called the proximity of mimesis and oikonomia "economimesis," and following him, Philippe Lacoue Labarthe has written, "Mimesis has always been an economic prob lem; it is the problem of economy."3 The introduction of economics into a discourse on mimesis may proceed by analogy, but it is dic tated by a certain idea of man—it was Aristotle who said only "man" is capable of mimesis. Only the being capable of speech can produce art; therefore, to speak of mimesis is to speak of translation and ide ology—the resemblance between languages and between communi ties or nations—and ultimately of the grounds of resemblance itself. These grounds may be said to be the foundation of humanism in a tradition stemming from Plato and Aristotle and leading to Ezra Pound, for whom the problem of mimesis has always been a problem of economy.

Once mimesis has been termed production, justice is no longer a rendering of what is due but a problem of language and making the measurement of words and coins more exact. The debasement of coin

Criticism, Spring 1993, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, pp. 219-236 Copyright © 1993 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48202

219


220 Joseph Kronick

—it begins when the design ceased to be cared for"—and of lan guage—the just word "throws a vivid image on the mind of the reader"—is a consequence of the failure to understand process, which for Pound is learned from nature.4 He writes in Canto 74:

the wind also is of the process, sorella la luna

Fear god and the stupidity of the populace, but a precise definition

transmitted thus Sigismundo thus Duccio, thus Zuan Bellin

(74/425)

The linkage of coinage and words ties Pound to Aristotle and the tra dition that grounds production in nature and in the free activity of man. This analogy between nature and art is to be understood in terms of mimesis as the doubling of nature and as dependent upon a speaking being. The tradition that analogizes art as a second nature is founded upon the distinction between physis (nature) and techne (craft). Physis is that which arises out of itself; it is a self-revealing process, whereas techne is the material or supplementary process of revealing and involves a kind of violence. The mimetic, then, presup poses a certain violence to nature necessary for the supplementary birth of a community or nation.

Therefore, when, in conjunction with mimesis, we speak of ideol ogy and translation, terms drawn from the social realm on the one hand and the linguistic on the other, we need to keep in mind that the binding power of ideology lies in its ability to confirm the identity of a community and that translatability presumes identity between languages. This explains the regularity with which the concepts of mimesis and representation appear in definitions of ideology. Theo dor Adorno defined it as "socially necessary appearance," Louis Al thusser as the "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real con ditions of existence," and Hannah Arendt as the subjugation of reality to "laws of 'scientifically' established movements with which through the process of imitation it [the mind] becomes integrated."5

Mimeticism functions as an instrument of identification. Mussolini's

Italy imitates Rome. For Pound, the fascist movement signaled a rep etition of Italy's greatness during the Quattrocento, and the sign of it could be seen in bookshop windows. Gone are "Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto," and in their place are translations of Kipling, Dostoievsky, H. James, Hardy, and even "indifferent, yellow


Resembling Pound 221

literature" (J/M 84). Pound's official entrance into Italian journalism began with the call for translations. The renovation of learning that signals a new Paideuma, "the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of a period" (GK 57,) would, in large measure, come about by transla tion, the appropriation of one culture by another.6

In pursuing the issue of ideology in Pound by way of translation and mimesis, I wish to suggest that the appeal of interpreting ideol ogy through a framework of cultural symbology lies, to a great ex tent, in the power of narrative. Whether we argue that Pound's anti Semitism and fascism can be explained historically or we take Pound's aesthetics as infused with fascistic devotion to order and au

thority, we invariably assume the identity between mimesis and nar rative. A certain logic binds imitation, which I take to be a mode of fashioning, with fiction or narrative discourse. This logic is that of semblance, which dictates that mimetic representation bridges the di vision between verbal and non-verbal, between language and the given or phenomenal. Mimetic theories of representation have to state themselves in narrative.

Assumed to lie behind mimetic narrative is the identity not only between mimesis and knowledge but between language and thing by virtue of the signifying function, so we can say, with Pound, that meaning or sense is translatable. I am turning to a question of the re lation of language to experience consistently raised not only by Pound, but also by his near contemporary, Walter Benjamin. In "On the Mimetic Faculty," Benjamin derives mimesis from nature: "Nature creates similarities," but, he goes on to say, "The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man's."7 This gift rests upon an archaic "compulsion" "to become and behave like something else," but mimetic behavior achieves its "highest level" in language, the "canon according to which meanings of non-sensuous similarity can be at least partly clarified" (OWS 163; 161). What is it that language imitates? Language, it seems. If the same thing can be said in different langauges, then non-sensuous similarity ties the spoken and the signified, the written and signified, as well as the spoken and the written (OWS 162). The mimetic element in language lies in its char acter as a material remainder of a non-sensuous similarity that ap pears to belong the conceptual realm and even the unconscious. When Pound turns to Calvalcanti's poem "Donna mi prega," the ma terial trace is language itself:


222 Joseph Kronick

nothing matters but the quality of the affection—

in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind

dove sta memoria ["where memory lives"] (76/457)

If non-sensuous similarity ties writing to the signified, language can not be said to represent mimetically the signified but can only com municate itself; the likeness is between words and not between word and what it represents or signifies. Therefore, the mimetic does not appear in the form of representation—this would be to limit it to on omotopoeia—but manifests itself in the "semiotic element" of lan guage, above all, in reading and writing: "Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similar ity appears" (162). In writing and reading, language does not aim at communication but achieves its highest level as the revelation of non sensuous similarity, that is, the linguistic being of language. This is why translation does not aim to convey the meaning of the original but to decompose the original by translating literally, word for word, thereby separating grammar and meaning.8

We are verging on the messianic motif in Benjamin. He grants to language the capacity to secure the infinite for history. For if the mi metic flashes forth in the semiotic, it does not reveal the logos, the word identifying thought and thing, but reveals the linguistic and mimetic grounds for narrative and, therefore, history.

My excursus into Benjamin is intended to establish the bond be tween mimetic theories and narrative, we might even say the mimetic link between logos and mythos. But I would now like to turn to an es say by Pound of 1918 where he offers what may be called an alle gory of the origin of myth:

Our only measure of truth is, however, our own perception of truth. The undeniable tradition of metamorphoses teaches us that things do not always remain the same. They become other things by swift and unanalysable process. It was only when men began to mistrust the myths and to tell nasty lies about the Gods for a moral purpose that these matters be come hopelessly confused. Then some unpleasing Semite or Parsee or Syrian began to use myths for social propaganda, when the myth was degraded into an allegory or a fable, and that was the beginning of the end. And the Gods no longer walked in men's gardens. (LE 431)



Pound's remarks on the tradition of metamorphoses bring him very close to Aristotle. We need only remind ourselves that Aristotle calls the command of metaphor "the perception of resemblances" (1459a9) and that Pound translates it as "the swift perception of relations" to see that the demarcation between the mimetic faculty and the use of metaphor is uncertain. This doubling links mimesis to aletheia, truth or unveiling. If mimesis is a linguistic activity, the making of meta phor or resemblances, it displays the poet's identification with divine making, a resemblance that lies in the power of production and not in the thing produced.

Mimesis is the production of analogies and is itself analogy, Aris totle's prime example of metaphor. The mimetic activity is not imita tion but is tied to logos, aletheia, and to physis, the unveiling of na ture.9 We can even say mimesis passes by the mouth and is the fac ulty properly possessed by the poet, the maker of myths. Such is the case in Pound's conflation of the prophet Elijah (here "Elias") with Odysseus' taunting of the Cyclops and with an Australian myth of Wanjina, a rain-god whose mouth was removed for talking too much, and Ouan Jin ("Wen jen"; Chinese for "writer") in Canto 74:

and Rouse found they spoke of Elias in telling the tales of Odysseus

"I am noman, my name is noman but Wanjina is, shall we say, Ouan Jin or the man with an education

and whose mouth was removed by his father because he made too many things

whereby cluttered the bushman's baggage (74/426-27)

A creation of clutter, "the bane of men moving (74/427), wrecks the economy of just measure. Invoking himself as a man "of no fortune and with a name to come" (74/439), Pound joins with Elijah, Odys seus, and Wanjina as wandering men of letters (Ouan Jin) for whom, to quote one of his favorite phrases, "Dichten=Condensare" (ABCR 92). Translation, a crossing of borders, is a mimetic activity, for both belong to the faculty of production.

We find the same conjunction of translation, fable, and mimesis in Pound's allegory of the origin of myths:


224 Joseph Kronick

The first myths arose when a man walked sheer into "nonsense," that is to say, when some very vivid and undeni able adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar. Thereupon, after bitter experience, perceiv ing that no one could understand what he meant when he said that he "turned into a tree" he made a myth—a work of art that is—an impersonal or objective story woven out of his own emotion, as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words. That story, perhaps, then gave rise to a weaker copy of his emotions in others, until there arose a cult, a company of people who could understand each other's nonsense about the gods. (LE 431)

Walking into nonsense is an experience for which there is no word. Nevertheless, it gives birth to myth and is also a fall. Language ceases to communicate itself; logos becomes mythos or story.

Pound's allegory closely resembles his famous account of the com position of "In a Station of a Metro" as a "one image poem ... a form of super-position, that is . . . one idea set on top of another" (GB 89). Pound's "super-position" suggests a hierarchical and spatial form, as if the instant is not temporal but a palimpsest or the stratified layers of a geological site. Telling us how he destroyed a "thirty-line poem" about his "metro emotion" because it was a "work 'of second inten

sity,'" he presents the famous "hokku-\ike sentence:—

'The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough.'"

He concludes, "In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the pre cise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective" (GB 89). The poem is not so much the figurative rendering of the faces he saw emerging from the station but is the translation of the sensuous into the non-sensuous or

inward thing. Yet the poem as it moves from "apparition" to image proves to be as much a temporal crossing as it is a mimetic doubling. Resemblance is contained not in the imitation of the emotion but in

the transformation or crossing that displaces one image with another. Pound distinguishes the image, "that which presents an intellectual

and emotional complex in an instant of time" from the "mimetic or representational part" of a poet's work (GB 86; and see "A Few Don'ts" [1913] in LE 4]). This insistance upon the presentational as opposed to representational quality of the image reflects more than Pound's bias toward phanopoeia or language as visual image. He



writes, "The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language" (GB 88). For critics following Hugh Kenner, such statements indicate Pound's belief that the image embodies what it represents, but in mimesis there must be an original doubling in order for the thing to make its appearence. We must distinguish this doubling from a mere acknowledgment of process, for Kenner and other critics after him have remarked on Pound's insistence that

poetry reveal the latent energy in nature, as in Kenner's remark on the "Metro" poem: "For Pound's Imagism is energy, is effort. It does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation. . . . The 'plot' of the poem is that mind's activity, fetching some new thing into the field of conscious ness."10 For Kenner, the Metro traveller's station is a double of Kore's or Persephone's underworld. The faces of the people exiting the sta tion and Kore's departing Hades are brought together in the poet's consciousness. Kenner reads imagism as the originary doubling that makes super-positioning the movement of aletheia. To do so, he must introduce mythic narrative, super-imposing it upon Pound's own nar rative of the poems' composition.11 For Kenner the content of the poem, what it says, is external to the way it is said: "the poem is not its language" but "exists ... in this language"; it makes the poem visi ble as a rope makes visible a knot.12 This metaphor corresponds to Plato's distinction between lexis, the manner of saying, and logos, what is said.

A mimetic theory that does not distinguish logos from lexis, a mi metic theory such as that propounded by Benjamin, does not con ceive of mimesis as simulacrum but as language. This resembles Pound's views in the following: "Works of art attract by a resembling unlikeness. Colloquial poetry is to real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. In every art I can think of we are dammed and clogged by the mimetic" (SP 41-42). Pound attacks mimetic art as a slavish effort to reproduce the likeness of the original, but his con cern is with stoppage or blockage, not with resemblance. So con ceived, the only true mimetic form would be translation, the archive of non-sensuous or linguistic correspondences. That which prevents translation, prevents the circulation of words, is the enemy.

The suggestion that mimesis is directed toward language would place the Cantos at the furthest remove from the dialogic discourse defined by Bakhtin, but Pound's text appears to be, if not heteroglos sic, at least a veritable Babel of languages. In fact, for many critics, it is the infrequent appearances of the monological "I," "ego scriptor"


226 Joseph Kronick

(76/458), that leads to the Cantos' incoherence. Bakhtin's argument that the poetic image-as-trope exhausts itself in the play of word and object, to the exclusion of the other or social discourse, appears to deny Pound's Cantos the heterogeneity of the novel. However, his notion of the object in artistic prose proves his dialogism belongs to a reflexive theory that fails to confront radical alterity. For Bakhtin, "the object is a focal point for herteroglot voices among which [the prose writer's] voice may sound; these voices create the background neces sary for his own voice."13 Such a hermeneutics seeks the dialogical resolution of heterogeneous voices in which languages are said to be "dialogically implicated in each other and begin to exist for each other."14

I introduce Bakhtin, in part, to draw Pound s Cantos into a dis course on narrative but largely to address the question of alterity or otherness, both in Pound's works and in his critics, particularly those who claim that his texts provide the means for a self-critique of their own ideology. Such readings, especially when they focus on analo gies between language and money, writing and the "Jew," themselves construct a reflexive system that, rather than undo Pound's ideology, reconfirm ideology insofar as they fail to address the mimetic basis of language. In other words, readings that treat the Other as the nega tive in a reflexive system are producing allegories, narratives that confuse the contingent and metonymic with the mimetic and meta phoric. If it is argued that the Jew is the Other in Pound's works, an enabling other that allows for the chain of substitutions between money and language, then such readings are treating metonymy, the substitution of one signifier for another, as metaphor, the resem blance between one signified and another. I by no means intend to imply that the critics whom I discuss share Pound's ideology but that they mirror the production of ideology they help expose in Pound's texts. To make such an argument, we need to examine Pound's writ ings on economics and the ideogram.

A glance at Pound's writings in economics will yield enough analo gies between money and writing to leave little doubt as to the logic that joins the two together. In this he participates in a discourse link ing words to coinage that has been the subject of numerous studies since Derrida's "White Mythology." But for Pound, the corruption of money was one with the corruption of books, and he blamed both on Jews. In a radio speech, Pound said, "Cabala, for example, anything to make the word mean something it does NOT say."15 And in 1942 he writes, "Not a jot or tittle of the hebraic alphabet can pass into the



text without danger of contaminating it. . . . Cabbala, black magic, and the whole caboodle . . . always destroying the true religion, de stroying its mnemonic and commemorative symbols" (SP 320). To say that the presence of the Hebrew alphabet contaminates any text is tantamount to saying all texts are contaminated, except perhaps those that do not have a material basis, spoken poetry and unwritten mu sic. ("Only spoken poetry and unwritten music are composed without any material basis, nor do they become 'materialized'" [SP 307].) Ap parently, Pound believed we can, indeed, say what we mean but only if our writing bears within it a link to natural processes, as does he ideogram.

If we turn to the Fenollosa essay, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, we find that hieroglyphs are symbols of thought with "no basis in sound" (CWC 8). The pictorial basis of language in cludes the sentence whose "form was forced upon primitive men by nature itself. . . . [I]t was a reflection of the temporal order in causation" (CWC 12). The ideogram would be the true mimetic lan guage, both imitating nature and partaking of natural processes. He offers a natural theory of language based upon metaphor, "the re vealer of nature": "Relations are more real and more important than the things which they relate" (CWC 23, 22). In a note, Pound cites Ar istotle in his own translation: "Swift perception of relations, hallmark of genius." It is but a short step from metaphor as the revealer of rela tions to money as the medium of exchange.

Pound's economics were founded on the belief that distribution,

not production, is the problem. He turned to C. H. Douglas's social credit program, which dictates that the state lend, not borrow, money or credit slips to allow purchasers to consume the goods that manu facturers produce in abundance but are unable to sell. For Pound, the task of the just state is to make goods available, and to do so it must exercise its sovereign right to coin money, but the state abdicates its responsibility when it gives this right to a central bank. Money "is a certificate of work done within a system, estimated, or 'consecrated,' by the state" (SP 311). Economics, like language, must have a mate rial basis, a natural basis, or else it is contaminated by metaphysics or, in his venomous phrase, "the Jewish poison."

After Douglas, Pound turned to Silvio Gesell, whom he credits with inventing counter-usury, a money that loses value if it is hoarded [Schwundgeld="withering currency"]. Gesell devised a mon etary system in which a stamp would be afixed to money itself at one per cent of the face value. If the money was not spent within a set


228 Joseph Kronick

period of time, another stamp would have to be purchased to main tain the value of the note. It would make no sense to hoard money because the money would eventually consume itself in the cost of stamps. As a "representation" or "money picture" of extant goods, Ge sell's stamp scrip would measure the durability and diminishment of perishable goods—it would be a money having its basis in nature (SP 277). However, it would have to exist in "just proportion," Pound in sists, with a fixed money so that a basis for measurement between ex tant goods and available money can be maintained. As a representa tion or picture of extant goods available, money would have the sta tus of writing, a representation with a material basis in nature. We find a certain metaphorics set up that allows us to perceive Pound's corpus as a single entity uniting aesthetics, economics, and anti-Sem itism. It is but a small step from an economics based upon a mone tary device, stamp scrip, that not only represents extant goods but shares their organic quality, to a theory of language based upon le mot juste, even as an economy is based upon just prices.

Andrew Parker has discussed how stamp scrip and the ideogram serve as supplements compensating for the abstractions of phonetic language and money, and, at the same time, are undermined by the figural elements they were meant to exclude—stamp scrip depends upon a fixed monetary system, and the ideogram, as writing, is not free from arbitrariness. For Parker, Pound's hatred of Jews is a hatred of writing. If the written sign is arbitrary and differential, then writing is "Jewish," since both the sign and Judaism confirm the absence of an original presence that would provide a stable site for Being.16

The equation of Judaism and writing fails to question the mimetic character of literature. Derrida has written of the tradition beginning with Plato that binds mimesis and metaphor to aletheia, or unveiling, a feature that, as Derrida says, puts mimesis on a par with mneme, since it, too, "is an unveiling (an un-forgetting), aletheia."17 Mimesis also sets up a relation between two terms, which is how we more generally define metaphor. Turning to Fenollosa, we find, "the Chi nese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second work of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative po etry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue" (CWC 24). The first work of metaphor is nature, the second ideogram matic writing. It conforms to the classic concept of mimesis as the doubling of physis, nature. Fenollosa departs from Aristotle in claim ing that writing, not the voice, is the property best suited to imitation



(cf. Aristotle's Rhetoric: "for words represent things, and they [poets] had also the voice at their disposal, which of all our organs can best represent [mimetikotaton] other things" [1404a21-22]). Mimesis pro duces likenesses but not identity. This may be why Aristotle singles out analogy as metaphor par excellence.

Again, we can turn to Pound and his critics to find the same order governs his thinking of writing and of economics—it is circulation. Richard Sieburth also pursues the analysis between stamp scrip and the ideogram, noting how both are thought to share "the properties of natural objects (perishability, velocity, cyclicity, and so on)" and that both function as symbols "adequate to (or, etymologically, 'equal to') what [they] represent."18 Sieburth contends, however, that whereas the ideogram is said to possess a natural connection to what it represents, paper money, as distinct from precious metal, has no such natural or material bond but, and this is why Pound preferred it, possesses an arbitrary relation to what it represents. Its only relation is that imposed by the will. Lacking a material basis, money is like spoken poetry. Moreover, its hoarding is a perversion since its value rests on its power of exchange—hence, Pound's attack on the "stability racket, meaning a fixed set of prices, i.e. an unchanging re lationship between wanted and/or needed goods and a unit of money" (GK 48). The error that Sieburth makes, as do most critics who write on Pound and money, is to treat the analogy between money and language as a semiological system capable of revealing the order of nature. In other words, to argue on the basis of analogy is to confirm the continuum between Being and representation or "a general representability of being."19 Invariably, these critics character ize Pound as nostalgically longing to overcome the separation of money and commodity, word and thing.20 The means of closing the gap, according to Sieburth, is Pound's volitionist economics, that is, an economics based on the will of the state as embodied in the

leader: Jefferson and/or Mussolini. Pound constructs a hierarchical order rooted in natural processes that ensures a continuum between the will and the material basis of economy and culture. But this order is undercut by the very metaphors it is built upon. We have already seen the conflict between his condemnation of usury and his concept of writing. The gaps in distribution can only be closed by the imple mentation of a system of notation—stamp scrip or a fiduciary mone tary system—which is dependent on the abstract, unnatural system of notation or writing. Pound's call for exact naming, a Confucian imperative for correct rule, means that even his own name is already inscribed in scripture—the book of Ezra to be precise.


230 Joseph Kronick

Pound's railing against Jews and usury, typically in language that associates both with filth, feces, and—let us add misogyny to Pound's sins—the feminine, is the bad faith of the poet who wishes to exclude from his own work the incestuous production of the same out of the same—money out of money in usury, texts out of texts in the Cantos—upon which his work depends. As Sieburth says, Pound thought he could write the Cantos on credit. He had hoped that after getting all the elements down, however "enigmatically and abbreviat edly," to come back and make some sort of design later (see SL 180). Sieburth remarks, the "Cantos are not a fiction, but a dispensation of likenesses, a disposition of facts given by history, an arrangement of verities that inhere in nature and tradition. He need invent or pro duce nothing; his job is simply to point to what is already there (by deixis or quotation), to distribute or to place into circulation what has been entrusted to his care."21 This description is superb, but arguing from analogy, wherein "likenesses" govern narrative, Sieburth con demns the Cantos as mired in the same unnatural, incestuous produc tion of like out of like that Pound labels as "Jew" and "usury." Sie burth ignores Pound as reader and sanctions the metaphorics he con demns. If Parker's Pound is a Jew, Sieburth's is usurious.

Trying to turn Pound's anti-Semitism against him, these critics argue the Cantos mime the very mode of production he condemns as unnatural. He fails, we are told, to exlude from its borders the foreign Jewish element he condemns as contra naturam, usury. For if, as he says, "Credit is the future of money" (SP 243), then to hoard it is to try to stop time and to lend it is to distribute time, and defer the clo sure of money and commodity in a single identity when the com modity is money itself. But metaphor is unlike stamp scrip; whereas the latter loses value if it doesn't circulate, the former does the re verse. In either case, metaphor is the death of meaning, precisely be cause it cannot complete the circuit of exchange and return to its ori gin. Resemblance is not identity.

We can pause here to note that when an analogy is established be tween language and money, one has a conceptual system that little can withstand. After all, why else is it so hard to get rid of metaphys ics? Because when we talk of the analogy between money and lan guage, when we coin analogies, we are participating in a mode of thought that is mimetic and, therefore, belongs to logocentrism. Inso far as critics treat economics in Pound as analogous to language, they resemble him. The difference lies not in what they conceive to be "proper to man" (I quote Aristotle on metaphor) but in the narratives



they make of resemblance. When critics argue that the Cantos operate by presenting in language a material reality or tradition already there, they produce narrative as ideology.

Narratives that turn upon an equation of language and economics may be called a specular economy that recuperates the other as the same. In the closed economy of a specular system everything is fun gible, that is, exchangeable for something else. Money is fungible; it is the universal commodity, as Marx says. It therefore has the capac ity to refer to the other, just as for the Pepsi-Cola Corporation, Pepsi is exchangeable for Stolichnya vodka. But for language, everything is fungible but itself. Deixis, the indicational capacity of language, which allows it to indicate a here and now, is the foundation of refer entiality. However, as readers of Hegel know, this ground proves more of a bog, for the here and now, as well as the "\" and "you," re fer only to the present instance of discourse and not to a material reality that can become an object of cognition. Following the work of Emile Benveniste, Wlad Godzich argues the only thing language can refer to is that language has taken place. The resistance language meets is only itself, resistance being what allows the referent to be come an object of knowledge for the subject. He writes, "To lan guage, all of the real is fungible but itself, and the resistance that lan guage opposes to itself—which may take the form of troping—estab lishes the reality of language to language, which then constructs all other forms of reference upon this fundamental model."22 The resis tance of language to language, in this formula, takes many forms in theory today and is represented by ideology, the unconscious, the Other. The problem with these models lies in their attributing the re sistance, the non-fungible, that which is heterogeneous to thought, to an Other that I would insist allows for the reinstatement of the self

identical subject. The hypostatization of the Other in various forms— Jew, woman, unconscious—is the establishment of a lack or negative that is constitutive of the subject, but recuperable in speech.

Argument by analogy is argument by metaphor. I've already com mented on how Pound's writings on poetry, economics, history, and the ideogram are of one piece, and I merely wish to add that, if critics can marshall Pound's contradictions to find him either usurious or

even "Jewish," it is only a consequence of his own economy that seeks to regulate the distribution of time and wealth. A certain mis reading of Derrida's "White Mythology" underlies this interpretation of Pound. In analyzing metaphor as that which philosophy wishes to expunge from its text, Derrida is not arguing that metaphor is a for


232 Joseph Kronick

eign poison in metaphysics but that it belongs to metaphysics. Litera ture is not the Other of metaphysics. If it were, it would have to have its own essence of truth as distinct from philosophy, a distinction that would turn upon the relation of mimesis to aletheia. Therefore, to argue that usury is the Other of poetry is to confirm the thinking that opposes proper to nonproper, thought and language, intelligible and sensible. If Pound's Cantos collapse under the weight of a metaphor ics it cannot control, then it would be both one with metaphysical tradition, in that it seeks to overcome the division between Time and Being (Recall—credit is the future tense of money), and opposed to it, insofar as it attacks the hierarchical order of Western thought embod ied in causal logic and the idea of the Book.23

Which brings us to ideology and our opening discussion of mimesis and translation. Insofar as the mimetic element in language bridges the sensible and intelligible, it is irreducibly linked to metaphor and the unfolding of truth. What Pound calls myth, the translation of an experience into a narrative, "I turned into a tree," would be the trans portation into speech of that which is heterogeneous to it. As Pound's allegory of myth tells us, the originary experience of "nonsense" can only be reached in a language that negates it as sensuous experience and translates it into a story, thereby introducing a temporal element heterogeneous to the originary experience of truth, for Pound is speaking of the "measure of truth." The temptation, and a very strong one, would be to translate Pound's own allegory into a theory of ide ology very much like Althusser's, who writes "that in ideology 'men represent their real conditions of existence to themselves in an imagi nary form.'" Althusser goes on to say that "it is not their real condi tions of existence, that 'men' 'represent to themselves' in ideology, but above all it is their relation to those conditions of existence which

is represented to them."24 In other words, what is represented in ide ology is the imaginary, not the real, relations.

Pound's "nonsense" is the materiality that resists knowledge. To know something is to place it within logical and linguistic space, but this space can never be absolutely determined by language. This "failure" is not a failure of language in the sense of words being unre lated to things, let alone a failure of referentiality, but belongs to the rift structure of language, wherein language transcends the material by virtue of its capacity to imagine more contexts than that which is immediately given, and the material transcends language insofar as it remains opaque. The opacity of the material, however, is an opacity that belongs to the figural dimension of language—we experience it



as resistance in the call to translate, the urge to say, "I turned into a tree." The failure of translation reflects the resistance of the sensible, that which allows the referent to be an object of cognition, to repre sentation, but this failure does not end translation but is what calls it forth.

Pound's allegory of myth provides a fitting description of the Can tos; certainly many readers of it think they are walking sheer into nonsense in first opening the book. They may have even felt, if not like a tree, then like a block of wood. But what the Cantos calls forth,

precisely in its thick materiality of quotations, names, facts, and un digested history is the very opacity that calls forth translation.

Pound's desire is to redeem History. This governs the elegiac tone of the Pisan Cantos, but redemption is inseparable from memory. The poem is not just self-justification but an act of redemption. But to re deem, here, is not an event that occurs in history as if at some apoca lyptic moment in some future time, but is a moment in the past—re demption always occurs in memory because what we need to redeem is not the future or even the present but the past. This is why there is translation. For if translation is for those who don't understand the

original, then translation always says the same thing. But as we know, it can never say the same thing as the original. This is not be cause it cannot convey the information in the original or even its poetic effects, but because the translation issues from a call, a de mand to be translated.25 This means that translation is governed by the law of the original's translatability. This means that the original is governed not by nature (if it were then it would be of an essential quality so as not to be translatable), but by history, which means that the translation marks the stages of life, or rather afterlife, of the origi nal, which is always awaiting its proper translation. The aim of trans lation is, therefore, not pointed to the original as an object, but to his tory itself. Translation is redemptive. It expresses the reciprocal rela tionship between languages. When we say that translation is never adequate, it does not mean that a text is not translatable; in fact, it is governed by the form of its translatability (if not, it would not be lan guage—also see Pound on logopoeia), and is always possible, not in some future realm, but, as Benjamin says, in God's remembrance. Therefore, a translation does not strive for likeness with the original, but to mark the disarticulation the original undergoes in its afterlife. What the translation refers to is not the original, but the inaccessible realm of fulfillment of language (which is the element that does not lend itself to translation): it would be the realm of pure presence of


234 Joseph Kronick

God. To be in history or time is to be in the dispersal of language. What translation does is transplant the original into the more truly historical realm of language: that is, it disarticulates the original by bringing out its essentially linguistic character rather than some es sential logos.

To translate then is to seize hold of the past and redeem it not from time but from timelessness—which means it works against the belief in the eternal image of the past, universal history, or archetypal truth. This breaks up the homogeneous past and makes a specific era out of the homogeneous whole, giving it life and canceling it because now life is preserved in the translation and cancelled by it—that is, denied its transcendental removal from the world of the now. "Le Paradis

ne'est pas artificiel/but spezzato apparently" (74/438).

Louisiana State University

Notes

1. Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey (1930); reprinted in Plato: The Col lected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961), 331c.

2. Ibid., 377a-b. 3. Jacques Derrida, "Economimesis," Diacritics 11 (Summer 1981): 3-5.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 124, and see p. 126 for his discussion of the passage from Plato's Republic quoted above. I am indebted to his analysis of mimesis and ideology.

4. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; reprint, New York: New Direc tions, 1970), 36, 49. Hereafter cited as GK. The following abbreviations will be used for citations of texts by Pound, all published in New York by New Directions unless otherwise noted: ABCR—ABC of Reading (1934; reprint, 1960); CWC—Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (1936; reprint, San Francisco: City Lights, n.d.); GB— Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; reprint, 1970); GK—Guide to Kulchur (1938; reprint, 1970); LE—Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (1954; reprint, 1968); SP— Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (1973). The Cantos (1972) will be cited by canto and page numbers.

5. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 31; Louis Al thusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philoso phy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; new edition with added prefaces, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 471.

6. Tim Redman points out the importance of translation in his account of Pound's writings for the Genoese literary newspaper LTndice during 1930



and 1931 in Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press, 1991), 78-84.

7. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 160. Hereafter cited in text as OWS.

8. See "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 69-82.

9. Mimesis is, Derrida says, "the movement of physis . . . through which the physis, having no outside, no other, must be doubled in order to make its appearance." See Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 193. Also see "White Mythology," in Margins of Phi losophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): "Mimesis thus determined belongs to logos, and is not animalistic aping, or gesticular mimicy; it is tied to the possibility of meaning and truth in dis course. . . . Physis is revealed in mimesis. ... It belongs to physis, or, if you will, physis includes its own exteriority and its double" (237).

10. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 186.

11. In a critique of Kenner's reading of the metro poem as a condensation of Persephone's eternal return, Joseph Riddel argues, "Superpositioning can not escape successivity, the act of the second image displacing the first." As Riddel points out, superimposition "must include the temporalizing play." See "Decentering the Image: The 'Project' of 'American' Poetics?" in Textual Strategies, ed. Josue Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 342.

12. Kenner, 149. 13. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mi

chael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 278. My discussion of Bakhtin is indebted to Paul de Man's essay on him in Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 106-14.

14. Bakhtin, 400. 15. "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W.

Doob (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), 284. 16. Andrew Parker, "Ezra Pound and the 'Economy' of Anti-Semitism,"

boundary 2 11 (Fall/Winter 1982/83): 113-14, 120. 17. Derrida, Dissemination, 193. 18. Richard Sieburth, "In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The

Poetry of Economics," Critical Inquiry 14 (Autumn 1987): 154. 19. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970),

206. Cited by Siebruth, 155. 20. This is also true for Maud Ellmann, who links Pound's hatred of usury

to his desire to ensure the univocality of reference and the proper name and the "principle of teleology in history." See The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 156-58, 182.

See also Jean-Michel Rabate, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1986), 216: "the object of Pound's quest is the ultimate symbolic system which will unite the writing of a name, the definition of economic justice, and the radiance of life within a paternal law." Rabate proceeds to read Pound's economic theory through Lacanian and Derridean terms, arguing that Pound's system requires


236 Joseph Kronick

both a fixed monument, the proper name, and a circulating currency, signs (240). The failure to close the symbolic chain of circulation is read as a vic tory for an open hermeneutics. Whereas Rabate finds in Pound's poetics the means to undermine his authoritarianism, Ellmann finds confirmation of it.

21. Sieburth, 168. 22. See his Foreword to Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory, xvii. Also see

Godzich and Jeffrey Kittay, The Emergence of Prose: an Essay on Prosaics (Min neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 19-21.

23. Rabate claims, "It is only after the Pisan experience that Pound can reconcile Time and Being" (27).

24. Althusser, 163, 164. 25. My discussion throughout this conclusion is indebted to and alludes to

Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, 69-82.


resembling pound: mimesis, translation, ideology

Documents