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

Criticism, Spring, 1993 by Joseph Kronick

Andrew Parker has discussed how stamp scrip and the ideogram serve as supplements compensating for the abstractions of phonetic language and money, and, at the same time, are undermined by the figural elements they were meant to exclude - stamp scrip depends upon a fixed monetary system, and the ideogram, as writing, is not free from arbitrariness. For Parker, Pound's hatrede of Jews is a hatred of writing. If the written sign is arbitrary and differential, then writing is "Jewish," since both the sign and Judaism confirm the absence of an original presence that would provide a stable site for Being.(16)

The equation of Judaism and writing fails to question the mimetic character of literature. Derrida has written of the tradition beginning with Plato that binds mimesis and metaphor to aletheia, or unveiling, a feature that, as Derrida says, puts mimesis on a par with mneme, since it, too, "is an unveiling (an un-forgetting), aletheia, "(17) Mimesis also sets up a relation between two terms, which is how we more generally define metaphor. Turning to Fenollosa, we find, "the Chinese written language has not only absorbed the poetic substance of nature and built with it a second work of metaphor, but has, through its very pictorial visibility, been able to retain its original creative poetry with far more vigor and vividness than any phonetic tongue" (CWC 24). The first work of metaphor is nature, the second ideogrammatic writing. It conforms to the classic concept of mimesis as the doubling of physis, nature. Fenollosa departs from Aristotle in claiming that writing, not the voice, is the property best suited to imitation ( cf. Aristotle's Rhetoric: "for words represent things, and they [poets] had also the voice at their disposal, which of all our organs can best represent [mimetikotaton] other things" [1404a21-22]). Mimesis produces likenesses but not identity. This may be why Aristotle singles out analogy as metaphor par excellence.

Again, we can turn to Pound and his critics to find the same order governs his thinking of writing and of economics - it is circulation. Richard Sieburth also pursues the analysis between stamp scrip and the ideogram, noting how both are thought to share "the properties of natural objects (perishability, velocity, cyclicity, and so on)" and that both function as symbols "adequate to (or, etymologically, |equal to') what [they] represent."(18) Sieburth contends, however, that whereas the ideogram is said to possess a natural connection to what it represents, paper money, as distinct from precious metal, has no such natural or material bond but, and this is why Pound preferred it, possesses an arbitrary relation to what it represents. Its only relation is that imposed by the will. Lacking a material basis, money is like spoken poetry. Moreover, its hoarding is a perversion since its value rests on its power of exchange - hence, Pound's attack on the "stability racket, meaning a fixed set of prices, i.e. an unchanging relationship between wanted and/or needed goods and a unit of money" (GK 48). The error that Sieburth makes, as do most critics who write on Pound and money, is to treat the analogy, between money and language as a semiological system capable of revealing the order of nature. In other words, to argue on the basis of analogy is to confirm the continuum between Being and representation or "a general representability of being."(19) Invariably, these critics characterize Pound as nostalgically longing to overcome the separation of money and commodity, word and thing.(20) The means of closing the gap, according to Sieburth, is Pound's volitionist economics, that is, an economics based on the will of the state as embodied in the leader: Jefferson and /or Mussolini. Pound constructs a hierarchical order rooted in natural processes that ensures a continuum between the will and the material basis of economy and culture. But this order is undercut by the very metaphors it is built upon. We have already seen the conflict between his condemnation of usury and his concept of writing. The gaps in distribution can only be closed by the implementation of a system of notation - stamp scrip or a fiduciary monetary system - which is dependent on the abstract, unnatural system of notation or writing. Pound's call for exact naming, a Confucian imperative for correct rule, means that even his own name is already inscribed in scripture - the book of Ezra to be precise.