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

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

By the time Pound comes to write the Pisan cantos, and despite the poet's continued ambivalence toward him, Plarr is granted the highest of honors paid by an Odyssean wanderer such as Pound, who counts him among "Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven / these the companions":

Here, in the company of Ford Madox Ford, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce, Plarr's status, cataloguer or not, is clearly assured. As Binyon also does, Plarr returns once more in the Thrones Cantos, as well he should, for the last time set against the cynic philosopher Peregrinus "Who," significantly enough, "did not share Plarr's point of view" (100/734).

A third, and even more important, modern-day archivist celebrated by Pound is Manlio Torquato Dazzi, the Italian caretaker of the Biblioteca Malatestiana whom Pound first met in 1923 during what Rainey describes as the second phase of his work on the Malatesta Cantos. On a postcard sent to his wife Dorothy dated March 10 of that year, Pound reported that an "amiable librarian has showed me most of what he can lay his hands on" (qtd in Rainey 164). Dazzi clearly impressed Pound, particularly in showing him the medallionfalsely attributed to Pisanello-that would later appear on the inner fly leaf of Guide to Kulchur as an index to the cultural majesty of the Renaissance. Indeed, the archivist made enough of an impression that he resurfaces as one of three central figures in Canto LXXII, the first of the two vitriolic Italian Cantos, written more than twenty years after the initial meeting between Pound and Dazzi.7

In keeping with the long poem's patterns of recurrence, Canto LXXII is structured in the manner of the Canto I: an invocation of the dead and a series of resulting palimpsestic overlays. The first invocation is of the Futurist Marinetti, who attempts to possess the body of the narrator but is repelled and then chastised for being "Unlucky in excess, he wished to destroy / And now we see more ruins that he wanted" (Bacigalupo 11). The reference to the destructive program of the Futurists is key, particularly in light of Marinetti's call to burn down the libraries of Europe and his claim in the 1910 "Futurist Speech to the English" that "In spite of everything, a whiff of archives and a rattling of chains survive and hinder your precise, free and easy forward march" (Selected Writings 60). The next voice to speak is that of the librarian Dazzi, and the two imposing spectres-although, oddly enough, Dazzi was not yet dead at this point-are set in deliberate juxtaposition: "You and Marinetti are two of a pair, / Both loving too much: he the future, /You the past" (11). Dazzi also speaks, but only two cryptic lines, both quotations from his translation of Albertino Mussato's Ecerinis. "'The nostrils vomit spirits of flame"' (10) and "`little less than a bull"'(11).

Those two lines are enough, however, to bring about the third spectral manifestation of the canto, Ezzelino da Romano, the savage protagonist of Mussato's text, who returns to rectify some matters of poetic license taken by Mussato. Dazzi's lines refer to the rape scene in which Ezzelino is conceived, and Ezzelino takes exception to Mussato's account of his patrilineage. The problematics of narrative are brought into play here, and with that, questions of textual errancy and the idea of a history gone wrong. The poem then collapses into a polyphonic discord that seems not only beyond the control of the narrator, but seems also to be in sympathy with Pound's sense of the world in the days of Mussolini's collapsing regime. Interestingly, Dazzi, as an archivist, functions here as a kind of self-effacing signifier, pointing through his role as a translator and preserver of documents to the character Ezzelino who, more than any other figure, dominates the Canto. This self-effacing quality of the indicative sign is a consistently important attribute of the language of gesture, whether in the shape of a documentary assemblage, or in the figure of the fascist cultural and political hero-the one who, incontrovertibly, points the way of the nation. Pound characterizes Dazzi, as he also does Mussolini, as both a directive and a transparent signifier within a larger network of signs. Importantly, as Canto LXXII comes to a close, the narrator is accosted by a mysterious spectre: "and seizing my wrist / I saw a fist / without forearm / That held me like a nail in the wall" (15). Accompanying the fist, a tangible embodiment of a clearly ferocious language of gesture, is a voice that points to the return of the fascist regime: