Ezra Pound's CANTOS DE LUXE

Ezra Pound's Cantos De LuxePreamble

The following text takes to heart the possibilities opened up by a work like The Cantos. My main argument is the most obvious one—it consists in the design of this paper, in the kind of discipline this paper required in its refusal to say more than it needs to say, its refusal to repeat, rehash, and rephrase (and so appropriate other scholars' work). I have come to a point where it is impossible to go back—either to the idea that literary texts can be transparent and independent of what "container" they come into, or to a practice of criticism and scholarly work which assumes the same transparency for itself. The usual 12 point Times New Roman double-spaced page, which is then inflexibly poured into the template of whatever book or journal, is no longer neutral to my eyes. I see no reason why the objective, distanced, invisible position such page layout implies is often accepted to be the only option, and the resistances which keep it in place (lest we mistake criticism for something else) are yet to be brought to the table, especially as we are no longer dealing mainly with original texts, but with a rich (if not overwhelming) critical heritage on most subjects.

I am approaching criticism here in an almost combinatorial manner, as a game, a composition of elements. It is not the game of conforming to an institutionalized format and language, although the very desire that drives this text belongs properly to academic discourse. It is giving shape to the story a work can tell. Giving form rather than assuming one. This is why this text lets mostly quotations do the job. The quotations take their place in an argument, which is by definition an incomplete puzzle: white spaces make part of the picture.

Giacometti: "Cézanne never really finished anything. He went as far as he could, then abandoned the job. That's the terrible thing; the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it."

Lord: "Those were prophetic words. But I didn't know it then. I drank my Coca-Cola, said goodbye, and left."

Twelve days later,

Lord: "It's difficult for me to imagine how things must appear to you."

"That's exactly what I'm trying to do," he said, "to show how things appear to me."

"But what," I asked, "is the relation between your vision, the way things appear to you, and the technique that you have at your disposal to translate that vision into something which is visible to others?"

"That's the whole drama," he said. "I don't have such a technique."

(Lord pp. 11, 76–77 )

Saussure noted down in one of his notebooks:

"When the actors have left the stage, a few objects remain: a flower on the floor, a [ ]*

which lingers in the memory, suggesting more or less what has happened,

but which, being only partial, leaves room for—"

[*note of Starobinsky: "Space left blank in the text." ]

(Starobinski 7)

[These pages] offer an image of what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted, and what can appear as rational or not.

(Raad i–ii)

Cantos De Luxe

The facts: the first three editions of Ezra Pound's The Cantos were limited deluxe editions:

1925: A Draft of XVI. Cantos. (Three Mountains Press, Paris.)

1928: A Draft of Cantos 17–27. (John Rodker, London.)

1930: A Draft of XXX Cantos. (Hours Press, Paris.)

Then, in 1933, Farrar & Rhinehart in New York and

Faber & Faber in London issued the trade A Draft of XXX Cantos.

From then on, The Cantos came out in trade editions.

In their preparation of a revised edition in the 1970s (the project for a definitive edition of The Cantos was ultimately abandoned, for various reasons; see Eastman), the publishers and editors collated editions from the 1930's Hours Press (marginally included) onwards. The...