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

Criticism, Spring, 1993 by Joseph Kronick

A mimetic theory that does not distinguish logos from lexis, a mimetic theory such as that propounded by Benjamin, does not conceive of mimesis as simulacrum but as language. This resembles Pound's views in the following; "Works of art attract by a resembling unlikeness. Colloquial poetry is to real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. In every art I can think of we are dammed and clogged by the mimetic" (SP 41-42). Pound attacks mimetic art as a slavish effort to reproduce the likeness of the original, but his concern is with stoppage or blockage, not with resemblance. So conceived, the only true mimetic form would be translation, the archive of non-sensuous or linguistic correspondences. That which prevents translation, prevents the circulation of words, is the enemy.

The suggestion that mimesis is directed toward language would place the Cantos at the furthest remove from the dialogic discourse defined by Bakhtin, but Pound's text appears to be, if not heteroglossic, at least a veritable Babel of languages. In fact, for many critics, it is the infrequent appearances of the monological "I," "ego scriptor" (76/458), that leads to the Cantos' incoherence. Bakhtin's argument that the poetic image-as-trope exhausts itself in the play of word and object, to the exclusion of the other or social discourse, appears to deny Pound's Cantos the heterogeneity of the novel. However, his notion of the object in artistic prose proves his dialogism belongs to a reflexive theory that fails to confront radical alterity. For Bakhtin, "the object is a focal point for herteroglot voices among which [the prose writer's] voice may sound; these voices create the background necessary for his own voice."(13) Such a hermeneutics seeks the dialogical resolution of heterogeneous voices in which languages are said to be "dialogically implicated in each other and begin to exist for each other."(14)

I Introduce Bakhtin, in part, to draw Pound's Cantos into a discourse on narrative but largely to address the question of alterity or otherness, both in Pound's works and in his critics, particularly those who claim that his texts provide the means for a self-critique of their own ideology. Such readings, especially when they focus on analogies between language and money, writing and the "Jew," themselves construct a reflexive system that, rather than undo Pound's ideology, reconfirm ideology insofar as they fail to address the mimetic basis of language. In other words, readings that treat the Other as the negative in a reflexive system are producing allegories, narratives that confuse the contingent and metonymic with the mimetic and metaphoric. If it is argued that the Jew is the Other in Pound's works, an enabling other that allows for the chain of substitutions between money and language, then such readings are treating metonymy, the substitution of one signifier for another, as metaphor, the resemblance between one signified and another. I by no means intend to imply that the critics whom I discuss share Pound's ideology but that they mirror the production of ideology they help expose in Pound's texts. To make such an argument, we need to examine Pound's writings on economics and the ideogram.