Blood for Ghosts? Homer, Ezra Pound, and Julius Africanus

Which is all of the story, like a torn papyrus. That is how the past exists, phantasmagoric weskits, stray words, random things recorded.

Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era¹

Most of the facts are well known. Ezra Pound's first canto begins in medias res, in the middle of a text, and ends abruptly with the words "Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:" It is a beginning that itself has no beginning or end. Canto 1 deals with the opening of Odyssey 11, the Nekuia or "Book of the Dead," which some, including Pound himself, held to represent older ("originary") strata of the Odyssey.² The Nekuia tells of Odysseus' journey to the world of the spirits of the past, where he must seek the ghost of the seer Teiresias and ask of his return to his past (Ithaca) and of his future (Ithaca). The lines given by Pound describe a ritual blood offering to the dead and the congregating of the ghosts. Canto 1 is Pound's blood offering to the past, but also a forward gesture and a sacrifice of that past. It gives voice, in English, to Andreas Divus and his 1538 Latin translation of the Odyssey.³ But by the end of the canto, Pound commands "Lie quiet, Divus." Beyond Divus lies Homer, a somewhat better-known source, whose ghost too is stirred by Pound's offering, but kept at second remove, robbed of his words by Divus' translation. Beyond Homer, this paper suggests, lies Julius Africanus. "Julius who?" asks the Reader. My point exactly. Julius Africanus has been silenced, sacrificed.

Pound was a modernist poet. He believed in progress, in a divide of high and low culture, and so on. He did, however, practice a compository art that played with histories and references, and produced a coexistence of otherwise incongruous elements. For example, he chose Andreas Divus, not Homer, as his point of departure. As Kenner says: The [first] Canto is not simply, as was Divus' Homer or Chapman's or Pope's, a passing through the knot of newer rope. It is also about the fact that self-interfering patterns persist while new ways of shaping breath flow through them. It illustrates that fact, and its subject is in part that fact. It is what mathematicians call a second derivative, a function of a function, an inspection of what is happening derived from its way of happening. "Lie quiet Divus," are its operative words:

Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer

—as suddenly Divus, from whose Latin text we are to understand Pound to be working, becomes one of the ghosts to whom, in the narrative taken from Divus himself, blood is being brought that they may speak in the present. With these words we are suddenly watching rope flow through the knot, particulars rushing through the "radiant node or cluster"; and the Canto is no longer a specimen "version of Homer" but an exhibition of "Homer" as a persistent pattern, "from which, and through which, and into which" flow imaginations, cultures, languages.

(PE 149)

In Kenner's words, Pound's output is a "self-interfering pattern." Whatever effort we exert on this "knot," each lobe of the knot makes it impossible that the other shall disappear. Pound both represses and venerates Divus ("the Divine One"), and Homer.⁴ "Lie quiet Divus" are the operative words here. Indeed, we can replace Kenner's term "operative" with the term performative. For the speech act "lie quiet Divus" in its poetic context is precisely, technically, a performance of self-interference. Prima facie it is a directive act, whereby the speaker attempts to get the hearer (addressee) to do something.⁵ That something is "silence," "non-being." However, one of the basic conditions of directive illocutionary acts is that they should be addressed to an appropriate recipient, who must not, at the moment of utterance, already be doing that which is expressed by the propositional contents of the utterance (in our case "silence," "non-presence"). We do not normally say "I order...