Editorial Theory & The Cantos

ELT 41 : 3 1998 When in "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman" Jane says that in death she "Shall leap into the light lost/ In my mother's womb" surely Yeats thinks, like Wordsworth in the "Ode on Immortality" and Henry Vaughan, in "The Retreat," of the Platonic doctrine of recollection—in birth the soul leaps out of eternal light into the darkness of this life while in death it leaps back into the eternal light. Yet for Haswell, unaccountably , "the light" is that "of temporal existence." Haswell makes Jane the speaker of "Crazy Jane Reproved" without telling us that there have been other interpretations in which the speaker is the Bishop or some other reprover. But Jane speaks all the other six poems, and Haswell may be right. If so, Jane warns herself to "never hang your heart upon/A roaring, ranting journeyman" like Jack and then counters "Fol de rol, fol de rol." Haswell is certainly right to emphasize the womb image of the "shell's elaborate whorl" and its feminine delicacy and strength." But isn't it going too far for Jane to see "the divine manifested more perfectly in the feminine" (116) or to "affirm the divine power of the feminine" (117)? I mean, it may be true, but is it in the poem? Once again the daimon pushes in where she seems not to belong . One can only praise Haswell for her exposition of theory, her explanation of Yeats's daimon and of his struggles to enact her in his poems. This is a book about the genesis of poetry. But the application of Haswell's theory in her analysis of the poems fails to convince us that the daimon speaks. David R. Clark Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Editorial Theory & The Cantos Lawrence S. Rainey, ed. A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in "The Cantos". Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. χ + 275 pp. $54.50 ASKED TO LIST the "classic" works of modernism, those texts most often associated in the past with the multiple "disembedding mechanisms" and the desire for "monolithic authority" by which some have categorized it, one most likely will include on one's list The Waste Land, Ulysses, and The Cantos. As is generally known, however, the first of these was not produced by Eliot alone, while the status of efforts to determine Joyce's intention and the merits and failings of the significantly different versions of his novel that various editors have produced in re372 book Reviews cent years continue to form the basis of a heated international controversy . There is even a web site devoted to "The Joyce Wars" (http://home.att.net/~fnord32/joycewars.html). Pound's modern epic also possesses a history that calls into question certain modernist assumptions about textuality and authority, something the nine essays in this collection edited by Lawrence Rainey reemphasize in numerous ways. As Rainey points out in his substantive introduction to the book, all of the essays in it "focus less on the text as a linguistic code or the author as the source of a unique and permanent truth that has been lodged within the work, and more on the conditions that shaped the work's production and transmission, on the historical usages that many agents (including the author) have made of the workto -be as it crossed their paths." Applying a decidedly postmodernist or poststructuralist brand of editorial theory, the authors of these pieces on The Cantos, as Rainey puts it, all view the historical Ezra Pound as "only one subject among the many who are actively engaged in appropriating and misappropriating the very ideas and forms that he has helped to engender ." Several of the essays in this collection are preoccupied with the materiality or the radical inter- or hyper-textuality of Pound's long poem including history. Concentrating on the "physique" of a few of the earlier cantos, Jerome McGann, for instance, argues not only that the poet "was extremely aware of the significance of the material form that signs assume (or are given)" but that this awareness manifests itself within the text in "elaborate" instances of "cultural allusion," "deliberate" moments "of...