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

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

If this is entirely the case, however, we could well expect some kind of consistent attention to accuracy and exactitude that is simply not characteristic of this or any other canto. On two instances in Canto XXXI, Pound incorrectly attributes his sources: the first, a reference to the American agent operating in France, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, is attributed to a Jefferson letter written to Washington in 1788, when the recipient was actually John Jay (Companion 122); the second fragment is from a letter to Charles Thomson written by Jefferson and not, as Pound notes in parentheses, by Adams:

The lines concerning Gosindi and Epicurus are from a Jefferson letter dated January 9, 1816 in which he describes making a "paradigms of His [Christ's] doctrines" and arranging them "on the pages of a blank book." Jefferson also mentions his desire to "subjoin a translation of Gosindi's Syntagma of the doctrines of Epicurus, which . is the most rational system remaining of the philosophy of the ancients" (The Writings of Thomas Jefferson XIV:358-86). Why Pound makes this error is a matter of pure speculation, although as critics such as Christine Froula and Jean-Michel Rabate have emphasized, such errors are not only integral to the epistemology of the cantos, but were something that Pound consciously tolerated in his refusal to make retrospective emendations. If these errors were permitted to persist in Pound's long poem, then we can assume that he trusted in the ability of his text to fulfil an even more important function-to give way to some prescribed antecedent meaning.

The misattribution is important on two further counts. Most importantly, this rearranging of paradigms (textual fragments shown side by side) and syntagma (an orderly collection of statements) within "pages of a blank book" is the very method of indexical textuality that Pound himself is in the midst of carrying out in his composition of the Cantos. Jefferson's source texts, like many of Pound's, are themselves already condensed versions of their own sources: both the New Testament and Gosindi's Syntagma are textual compendiums in which their transposed fragments sit clustered on the page. Jefferson's textual practice requires, as the Cantos does, the construction of an index of catalogues. Pound is attempting, then, to demonstrate that his treatment of the material text enjoys an authoritative precedent in an Enlightenment context. Text as index, the transposition and management of physical documents, Pound insists, has its origins amongst the Encyclopaedists and those under their influence.

In this sense, the poem is clearly intended to "swallow its own notes," as he maintained the ideal poem should in a New Review article published in the same year as the Jefferson cantos. The question, then, of who, whether Jefferson or Adams, announced his intention to create an index of significant theological fragments, and in what context he did so, is, and I use this word deliberately, immaterial in Pound's estimation. Both participate equally in the same cultural paideuma that provides the ground for Pound's indexical textuality. The question of sources fades in the light of Pound's attempt to validate, in a tautological manner, both his own methodology and his choice of cultural heroes. The point becomes here not what Pound is trying to show his reader, but what he is trying to say to his reader.