Resembling Pound: mimesis, translation, ideology - Ezra Pound - Post-ing Modernism

Criticism, Spring, 1993 by Joseph Kronick

In the discussion of justice that opens Plato's Republic, a suprising 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 interlocutors through a series of analogies, and it is not long before education, 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, 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 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 proxomity of mimesis and oikonomia "economimesis," and following him, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has written, "Mimesis has always been an economic problem; it is the problem of economy."(3) The introduction of economics into a discourse on mimesis may proceed by analogy, but it is dictated 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 ideology - the resemblance between languages and between communities 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 - it "begins when the design ceased to be cared for" - and of language - 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

The linkage of coinage and words ties Pound to Aristotle and the tradition 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, presupposes a certain violence to nature necessary for the supplementary birth of a community or nation.

Therefore, when, in conjunction with mimesis, we speak of ideology 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. Theodor Adorno defined it as "socially necessary appearance," Louis Althusser as the "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions 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 repetition 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 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 translation, 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 ideology through a framework of cultural symbology lies, to a great extent, 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 authority, we invariably assume the identity between mimesis and narrative. 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 division between verbal and non-verbal, between language and the given or phenomenal. Mimetic theories of representation have to state themselves in narrative.