Ezra pound's Cantos: "A memorial to archivists and librarians"

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 1999 by O'Driscoll, Michael

To borrow from Foucault's terminology in The Order of Things, the heterotopia that is Ezra Pound's Cantos-that compendium of archival documents and textual fragments, that sum of countless gestures toward fictive and factive images-is intended to give way to a linguistic utopia in which its real world textual referents might somehow co-exist in the non-space of language. This non-space of language is the walled city of Dioce, Pound's archetypal polis of human order that is none other than a purely textual referent. At the centre of that city stands the cultural archive and, within that archive, Pound's long poem itself. In that sense, the Cantos serves its readers best as a kind of cultural appendix-an index really-that proffers the excessive and dynamic intertextuality that comes of overtly situating any text within the ideal (dis)order of the library. His long poem also, however, relies upon the controlling and referential gesture of primordial language: the naturally motivated and, therefore, self-effacing figure of the pointing finger. If what I shall call here the indexical structure of Pound's Cantos is a way of both exploiting and, through the figure of indicative pointing, recontaining "that vast cultural heritage" which so overwhelmed the young Pound in the British Museum Reading Room (GK 534), then we might well expect such archivists as populate that long poem to assume a unique status of their own.

And, indeed, they do. As navigators of textual labyrinths, Pound's archivists are at best secondary, at worst ambivalent, epic heroes, for they are not the factive personalities-those figures who bring ideas into action-discerned in the likes of Odysseus and Sigismundo Malatesta. Pound's archivists are, rather, necessary functionaries in the movement beyond the physical embodiments of heterotopic knowledge to the transcendent, utopic light of understanding. But even such secondary status does not negate their interest for scholars, because Pound, as ah archivist/poet himself, bears a unique relationship to the keepers of material culture. That is to say, the Pound who regularly silenced his lyric voice in order to serve as an indicator of what he believed should be the "locorum communium" of twentieth-century economic, political, and artistic life, placed himself in a necessary yet secondary role as a cultural archivist. Pound falls silent under the assumption that the transmission of heretofore lost-or suppressed-textual fragments was central to the cultural revival he envisioned for the twentieth-century. The semiotic of Pound's indexical poem, however, is what brings the Cantos within the scope of fascism: here, both textual and political practice operate under the logic of the indicative sign.

Pound's hoped-for cultural revival was to take place on the same principles as the introduction of classical materials into Renaissance Italy. The lame, yet visionary, Domenico Malatesta (also known as Malatesta Novello or, with Pound's characteristic familiarity, "Novvy") served the poet as an exemplary figure. Younger brother to the fiery condottiere Sigismundo, Novello is marginal to Pound's reconstruction of the Malatesta narrative in its final form, yet central to the familial complex that also includes Sigismundo's mistress and third wife Isotta degli Atti. Novello's physical weakness relegates him to a role of cultural caretaker, unlike his warrior/patron brother, but that does not diminish his importance given Pound's contention that such figures are central to the infusion of textual documents that spawned the Italian Renaissance.

Novello, however, was not initially marginal to Pound's version of the Sigismundo story; indeed, in the early drafts of the Malatesta cantos, excerpts from Novello's letters to an unnamed recipient serve as the source of the poem's principal narrative voice (D'epiro 18-19, 30).1 Those early drafts, written in Paris between July 1922 and January 1923, follow Pound's initial notes collected during his stay in Sirmione in June 1922 (Rainey 229-30). The typescript submitted to the Dial's James Sibley Watson in January of 1923, which includes the then-numbered cantos nine through twelve, maintains the Novello narrative in a version Pound considered ready for publication. Yet, in subsequent corrections to the Watson typescript, the voice gleaned from Novello's correspondence is abandoned in favor of accounts rendered by an anonymous underling of Sigismundo's (along with the transcriptions of a modern-day historian and the lyric interjections of Pound himself). Minor alterations to the Novello narration (changing references such as "my brother" to the more ambiguous "he") sufficed to alter the dominant voice of certain passages. Yet traces of the sibling's account remain in the final text: "and the emperor came down and knighted us" (9/34), and "so they burnt our brother in effigy" (10/ 45). The question, then, also remains: why does Novello fail to maintain his role as narrator? There is no one simple answer. Rainey suggests that the Novello perspective, first introduced in Draft E of the Paris manuscripts, weakens the text and leaves it "at once too specific and too vague" (126). On a purely logistical level, Novello's early death makes it impossible for him to account for the final three years of Sigismundo's life. Most importantly, however, and on a structural level. Novello's narration detracts from his central function as a preserver and transmitter of documents whose cultural achievements are parallel, not incidental, to Sigismundo's military achievements. To place Novello in the role of narrator is to distance him from the glory days of the Malatesta family when, in fact. the practice of cultural patronage is crucial to the Malatesta legend.