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Pound's Pictographing Technique in the Pisan Cantos

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Pound's Pictographing Technique in the Pisan Cantos GORILLA LANGUAGE: POUND'S PICTOGRAPHING TECHNIQUE IN THE PISAN CANTOS BY YOON SIK JIM Bachelor of Arts Cheongju University Cheongju, South Korea 1978 Master of Human Relations University of Oklahoma Norman, Oklahoma 1982 Submit ted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December, 1991 GORILLA LANGUAGE: POUND'S PICTOGRAPHING TECHNIQUE IN THE PISAN CANTOS Thesis Approved: <:::::::: ~ ~sis Adviser ~ ~-~i Dean of the Graduate College ii PREFACE The highly original poetic techniques Ezra Pound em­ ploys in his Pisan cantos are a direct result of his serious concern and careful attempt to create a unique poetic medi­ um, a verbum perfectum, or a gorilla language that is hard, precise, and concrete. To this end, he creates an interac­ tion between the Chinese ideograms and the English text. Through his careful line breaks, Pound makes the English text visually rn i r ror the spatial contour of the ideograms. Such a "pictographing" technique points to two important facts: Pound's attempt to create an ideogram-like poetic medium and his attempt to freeze time via a temporal tempo­ rality in art, a task heretofore thought impossible. In fact, Modernists, such as Stein and Williams, have all tried to slow down tjme, having been also influenced by the aes­ thetics of the modern visual arts, Cubism in particular. Pound, a Picasso of modern poetry, broke the old tradition through a series of innovation involving, line breaks, fragmentation, and juxtaposition of Chinese and English text. Pound's "gorilla language" in the Pi san cantos truly marks a turning point in his poetic style. The poetic medium manifests itself as a culmination of his lifetime study of the Chinese ideograms as well as his active in­ volvement in the aesthetic movement of modern visual arts. iii I wish to express my sincere gratitude to' the individu­ als who assisted me in this project. In particular, I wish to thank my major adviser, Dr. Guy Bailey, for is intelli­ gent guidance, inspiration, and invaluable aid. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Smith Holt, Dean of Arts and Sciences, for his kind participation as a committee member in my project. I reserve my special thanks to Judas Riley, a colleague and a friend, without whose kind assistance and insight I would be unable to finish this project successfully. I should also like to express my deep gratitude to the Honorable Mr. William Packard, the editor of the New York Quarterly, for his advice and gut-felt encouragement on numerous occasions. Special thanks are due to Dr. Carroll F. Terrell of Maine who encouraged and inspired me with astute guidance and kind-hearted words during the course of my study despite the geographical barrier. In particular, I am very grateful that my long and hard labor has finally yielded itself into an unexpected fruition in the form of publication in a book thanks, of course, largely to his Poundian guidance. Finally and most important, I would 1 ike to thank my parents and my brothers and sisters back in Korea, all of whom I have not seen for as long as a decade now, but with­ out whose consistent, unreserved, love and care, let alone their constant financial support, I would be unable to complete this project. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I • INTRODUCTION . 1 II. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON THE PISAN CANTOS ..•• 5 The Je we 1 in the Crown . • • • • . • • • 5 Theme of Self-Purification •••••••••. 14 Notes • • • • • • • 2 8 III. CRITICISMS ON THE STYLE OF THE PISAN CANTOS •.•• 35 The Presence of the Unwobbling Personal Voice ................... 48 Cr y s t a 1 1 y r i c i sm • • . • • • . • • • • • • . 5 0 Highest Form of Free Verse ••.•••••.• 52 Musical Lucidity ••••.••••.••••• 54 Ide og r amm ic Method . • • . • . • . • • 57 The Logic of Imagination • . • • • • . • • • • 63 A Poetic Style After Noh ••........• 64 Concrete Poetry • • • • • • • • • . • • • • . 67 Obscuirty as Poetic Technique ••.••••.. 82 The Stream of Consciousness • • • . • • • • • 84 The Pisan Cantos as the Last of Epic .•••• 87 On the Form of the Pisan Cantos •••.••• 89 Scientific Objectivity • • • . • • . •. 90 Linguistic Criticism •••..••...••• 93 Summary • • • • . • • • • • . • • . • 95 Notes • • • • • • • . • • • • . 96 IV. THOUGHTS ON FUNDAMENTAL POETIC PRINCIPLE AND ITS IDEOGRAMMIC OPERATIONS • • • • . • • . 99 Conclusion . 136 Notes. 142 v. MODERN ARTS AND MODERN POETRY: POUND AMONG AND OUTSIDE HIS CONTEMPORARIES • • .145 This Hot Potato of Confluence: Controversies Involved in Inter-Art Study ••.•..•• 148 Modern Visual Arts and Modern Poetry ••.• 160 Clouds of Iconoclasm at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century: Realism, Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism in the Modern Visual Aarts ................. 166 v v. Cubism: a Modern Renaissamce (1907-1914) •• 167 Gertrude Stein: the Confluence OF Modernist Fiction and Modernist (Cubist) Painting .. 175 Les Demoiselles de BridfiepointT? : a Cubistic Readning of Stein's Tree Lives .•...• 176 Sunrrnary • •••••••••••••••••• 201 William Carlos Williams: The Confluence of Modernist Poetry and Modern Painters • • . 202 "Measuring the Line by Elapsed Time" as the Sourse "That Denotes a Certain Unquenchable Exaltation" in William's "the Red Wheelbarrow" ••••••••••••• 204 Conclusion • . • . • • • • • • • • • • . • • 219 Notes ••••••• .221 VI. EZRA POUND, A PICASSO OF MODERN POETRY: CUBISM, IMAGISM, FUTURISM, VORTICISM ••••••••••• 229 Twin Brothers within Tw:> Sister Arts: Cubism and Imagism . • • • . • • • . • . • • • • • 231 Pound, Futurism, and vorticism ••••••• 264 vorticism •••••••••••••••••• 266 Conclusion • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 275 Cubism and the Chinese ideograms ••••.•• 276 Notes. 281 VII. "VERBUM PERFECTUM" GORILLA LANGUAGE IN THE PISAN CANTOS • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 283 Conclusion ••••••••••••.•.••• 319 Afterword •••••.•.•••• 323 Notes ••••••••••••••.• ; ••• 326 WORKS CITED ••••••••••••••.••••••• • 330 vi NOMENCLATURE WORKS BY POUND ABC ABC of Reading CON Confucius GB Gaudier Br zeska: A Memoir GK Guide to Kulchur LE Literary Essays SL Selected Letters SP Selected Poems vii ' COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENT Grateful acknowledgment is made by the New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint all the materials from works of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams that I used in this dissertation. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Ezra Pound's the Cantos is, no doubt, one of his most celebrated works. The work itself, a culmination of his life-time's endeavors, contains some one hundred and seven­ teen cantos. Although the Cantos as a whole is challenging and inviting, Pound scholars and readers often concur that the Pisan Cantos merit particular attention. Their argu­ ment, among others, is that the emotional and private voice rendering the harrowing experience of incarceration reaches them most deeply. Indeed, various scholars have devoted themselves to the Pisan Cantos; and as a result the work has been scrutinized from almost every literary perspective. Despite the bulk of this literature, however, attention has yet to focus on the rather unusual visual patterns of the English-Chinese text. Pound's incorporation of Chinese ideograms into the English text seems rather eccentric, to say the- least. Yet no one has examined the peculiarity and oddity of the visual pattern. Perhaps one reason for such neglect seems rather obvious: unusual line breaks occur throughout the Cantos, rendering the visual layout of the whole work unconvention­ al. Thus, at first reading, the visual patterns of the Pisan Cantos, with or without Chinese ideograms, may not appear as particularly anomalous, given the donnee of the 1 2 work as a whole. After all, Pound was known to experiment with almost every verse form, ancient or modern, which he came to know. To a more careful reader, however, Pound's odd line breaks and peculiar visual patterns call attention to them­ selves; in particular, the line breaks and visual patterns of the English-Chinese text strike the informed reader as intentional and purposeful. Indeed, the first impression may be an overwhelming sense of artificiality, one which often arrests the careful reader. On the one hand, the Chinese ideograms appear obtrusive to the English text. Yet, on the other hand, the English text itself seems to pictorially reflect the visual patterns of the ideogram under consideration. The second impression, therefore, is one of confusion; is this conjunction of texts, Chinese ideogram, and Western verbiage meant to be destructive or instructive? Standing immediately next to the Chinese ideogram, the English text visually echoes, however sketchily, the overall pattern and the visual contour of the Chinese character. In short, text resonates the ideogram pictorially. It is, therefore, my contention that Pound's seemingly eccentric visual patterning of English-Chinese text in the Pisan Cantos is deliberate and purposeful. Not simply an elabora­ tion of his much-discussed contrapuntal technique, this patterning, in effect, evinces the fact that Pound was 3 trying to create a new poetic medium: a gorilla language1 that interweaves the two major languages known to mankind, ones which best represent the West and the East. His ef­ fort, I believe, was aimed at creating a unique poetic medium. Through this new medium, which is different from either English or Chinese, Pound was trying to embody the new world order that he envisioned. This dissertation will demonstrate that Pound con­ sciously
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