"To Be Men Not Destroyers": The Making of Men and the Reproduction of Culture in Ezra Pound's Cantos

J. CHRISTOPHER CUNNINGHAM "To Be Men Not Destroyers": The Making of Men and the Reproduction of Culture in Ezra Pound's Cantos The autonomous male subject was portrayed ... as threatened not simply by mechanical and therefore inhuman machines, but, more ominously, and as the consequence of an odd catachresis, by machines that appeared to be the result of some natural, organic, fertile force. Janice Radway And the betrayers of language ...... ? and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; the perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper Canto 14 In canto 39 of Ezra Pound's American encyclopaedia, we find Circe, "trim-coifed goddess,"1 "cunni cultrix" (39/193)/ surrounded by a torpid scene of animal satisfaction in which a chiasmus of bestial appetite and female sexuality effectively blurs the distinctions between the two: Arizona Quarterly Volume 53, Number 3, Autumn 1997 Copyright © 1997 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN ???4-G6G? 66J. Christopher Cunningham Girls talking 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 kaka pharmak edoken (39/193) "She gave them evil drugs," Pound concludes, transliterating Homer's Greek, and referring to the same tisane that transformed Odysseus' crew into speechless beasts (Terrell 160). The scene suggests profound anxieties about the threatening and emasculating possibilities of femininity , female desire, and indeed sexuality itself. "And then went down to the ship" (1/3): the narrative sequel to this debauch, Pound's first canto begins with an ending, a departure, with a rejection: Odysseus and his crew (the latter now returned to human form) leave the island of Circe, in search of the land of the dead. "And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban" (1/4): another rejection—Odysseus ' mother spurned as an obstacle in the way of the paternal prescience of the Theban seer. It is no coincidence that the first canto displaces and replaces the bonds of sexuality with fraternal ones (Odysseus' reunion with the dead Elpenor) or the maternal with paternal ones. Indeed such rejections and replacements merely set the pattern for what will be a consistent registration and strategic negotiation of anxieties about femininity and sexuality. For the women that people The Cantos, of whom Helen of Troy "????a?? and ???pt????" (2/6) ["shipdestroying, city-destroying" (5)] is the type, tend toward the fickle, governed by and ensnaring men with a wayward carnality that often leads to death for their lovers and just as often lands the women in Dante's infernal circle of passion.3 Such figures and such scenes as these need to be read within the context of contemporaneous American ideological concerns about femininity, culture, and subjectivity. As Janice Radway has argued in her work on American middlebrow culture , in the early decades of the twentieth century, "masculine agency was threatened ... by the effects of an increasingly visible, potentially uncontrollable and uncontainable femininity" (883). The integrity of the autonomous male subject was threatened, that is—as we can see dramatized here—by "the 'grotesque,' thoroughly sexualized body of the fully reproductive female" (882). Ezra Pound's Cantos67 Frank Lentricchia's work on the gender anxieties that troubled male modernist poetic production allows us to put an even finer point to the argument.4 As Lentricchia has argued, this poetics emerged in opposition to a literary mode ofproduction and a dominant literary style that was perceived as effeminate, commodified, and emasculating. Reiterating the genteel aesthetic of the dominant poetic anthologies of Rittenhouse , Palgrave, and Stedman, mass-circulation magazines mass-reproduced feminized "commodities of lyric sameness" that rendered poetry "an effeminate business" even as they threatened to drown out nongenteel , male—"masculine"—poetic voices ("Lyric" 70; "Resentments" 270).5 American culture then—specifically poetic, literary culture—for Pound and his male modernist cohort, was characterized by the incredibly successful, if intellectually and aesthetically impoverished, feminized superfecundity described by Radway in my first epigraph; in America...