[In the following essay, North notes the many instances where Pound's historical and factual memory seems to fail him, but believes that for him it was a tool he used in his attempts to define culture.]

When Ezra Pound was returned to the United States in 1945, he declared, “I'd die for an idea all right, but to die for an idea I've forgotten is too much. Does anyone have the faintest idea what I said?” The statement is discomforting for a number of different reasons, not the least of which is the claim of poor memory by the poet who had just completed the Pisan Cantos. We know that memory loss was one symptom of the breakdown Pound suffered during his term in the gorilla cage, but in between that collapse and his return to the United States, Pound composed ten long cantos that depend on and celebrate the faculty of memory. “Dove sta memoria,” the phrase Pound adapts from Cavalcanti, is a kind of motto for these cantos, as it might be for the whole work that begins with a blood offering to the ghosts of the past. And some of Pound's most intemperate outbursts are directed at what he saw as a conspiracy of forgetfulness, a method of writing history “aimed at FORGETTING” the most salient facts. Yet Pound also defined culture as beginning “when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book.’”¹ If culture can be based on forgetting instead of on remembering, then the position of history in a poem like The Cantos may be a paradoxical one. The complex strategies by which Pound's poem manages to include history, especially in the later thirties, are directly related to this paradox in his conception of memory.

Pound can hardly be blamed for the fact that the Pisan Cantos contain many gaps and lapses of memory, references to “what's his name” (79/486) and “Monsieur Whoosis” (80/511). But such evasions are common in Pound's work before Pisa as well. Guide to Kulchur has quite a few references such as the one to “the what's-its-name theatre,” and earlier essays such as “Murder by Capital” contain references to historical figures like “what's-his-name, the Elector of Hanover or wherever it was” or to events in “the time of whatever their names were.” Contemporary scholars might well envy Pound's courage as he breezes past such empty spots in his knowledge. But at times Pound sounds like the kind of bad lecturer we know all too well who mentions “a Japanese emperor whose name I have forgotten and whose name you needn't remember,” apparently because it will not be appearing on the final.²

Despite his reverence for memory, Pound consistently shows a disdain for conventional mnemonic accuracy and an impatience with minute facts, the citation of which might impede his rhetorical progress. More than impatience is involved, however, in other, more complex lapses of memory. In his review of Laurence Binyon's translation of the Inferno, Pound laments that the “younger generation may have forgotten Binyon's sad youth.” Aside from the fact that only the older generation can have had the opportunity to forget Binyon's youth, it soon turns out that Pound himself has forgotten it: “Demme if I remember anything but a word.” Pound was prone to such odd self-contradictions also in the radio speeches, which contain a number of queerly self-destructive passages like this one: “After Winston's visit to Washington, have you mental coherence enough to recall what happened in England when the fat boy brought back the gold standard? Must have been YEARS ago, did someone say 1925? I have plumb forgot when it happened.”³ That Pound should castigate his listeners for the incoherence of their memories, while displaying a far greater incoherence in his own, may be the sort of contradiction allowed to great polemicists. On the other hand, such contradictions suggest that memory is not a simple matter for Pound, not purely the reverential faculty that it appears in the Pisan Cantos.

From the very beginning of his career, Pound derided mechanical memory. In 1914, he declared that “his respect for the mnemonic mind has been lessened by contact.” Some twenty years later, Guide to Kulchur begins with Kung's declaration that he does not depend on memory. These comments can be harmonized with Pound's obvious reverence for memory by identifying two different kinds of memory, each appropriate to a different kind of knowledge. As Pound says, “It does not matter a two-penny damn whether you load up your memory with the chronological sequence of what has happened, or the names of protagonists, or authors of books, or generals and leading political spouters, so long as you understand the process now going on.” There is a basic difference between rote memorization of such facts and knowledge of processes, knowledge which is “weightless, held without effort.”⁴

Elsewhere in Guide to Kulchur Pound draws a distinction between knowledge that must be looked up and committed to memory and that which is “part of my total disposition.” The distinction is between effortful memorization and natural, effortless memory, and though it does determine both the form and subject of Guide to Kulchur, the distinction itself depends in a paradoxical way on the opposite faculty of forgetfulness. For the more important kind of knowledge, held in the more authentic memory, is simply that which resists forgetfulness: “I am to put down so far as possible only what has resisted the erosion of time, and forgetfulness.” If forgetfulness is a threat, it is also a kind of test, because knowledge that must be constantly maintained is simply not part of that “total disposition” which is the source of true memory. Guide to Kulchur is formed by Pound's belief in this test. Pound freely admits that “I cd. by opening volumes I haven't seen for 25 or more years find data that run counter to what I am saying.” But such volumes are unimportant precisely because they must be looked up. When Pound says, “In the main, I am to write this new Vade Mecum without opening other volumes,” he is announcing that the book is a kind of stunt, a test of his own memory but also of what he has read, which is to be judged by the way it withstands Pound's forgetfulness. A few pages into the Guide, Pound allows that, contrary to what he has just been saying, Aristotle may have made some worthy suggestions about conduct. But “I don't remember 'em at the moment. Any more than I remember Plato's having thought about money, which lapse may mean that thirty years ago neither I nor anyone else read Plato … with an enlightened economic curiosity.”⁵

Notice that this lapse of memory becomes the occasion for a judgment, first of the forgotten source, then of Pound himself, and finally of the society at large. There is no attempt to discuss Plato's views on money, because the issue here is the knowledge available to the writer of the Guide at the moment of its conception. Pound takes this regimen to extraordinary lengths. He admits in a footnote to an early criticism of Aristotle that he had forgotten the beginning of his own book by the time he neared the end. This lapse is trivial, however, because it turns out that Pound has used exactly the same terms to describe Aristotle in both cases: “I leave these repetitions so that the strict reader can measure the difference, if any, between this ‘residuum’ left in my memory or whatever, and the justification or unjustification given in detail later.”⁶ What might have been seen as an extraordinary lapse of attention becomes a validation of his method and his memory. To be sure, Pound does refer at times to other books, despite his vow. For example, he takes down Bacon from the shelf. It then turns out that he has read Bacon, though he has forgotten having done so, but it does not matter because Bacon uncannily agrees with Pound's estimation of Aristotle. Thus the system is validated again, because what is crucially useful in the source has remained with Pound, though he has lost even the knowledge of having read the book.

In the writing of Guide to Kulchur, the resistance of the memory becomes a test of the value of knowledge, not so much a qualitative test as a kind of discrimination between mere facts and details that can become part of the “process” valued as true knowledge. Similarly, the strength of a writer's resistance to new material can be an index of the completeness of his memory. Pound once said of James that “the actual mechanism of his scriptorial processes became so bulky, became so huge a contrivance for record and depiction, that the old man simply couldn't remember or keep his mind on or animadvert on anything but the authenticity of his impression.”⁷ This comment is not so much a description of James as an eerie look into Pound's own future. The inability to remember here marks for Pound not the partiality but the completeness and the authenticity of the writer's knowledge. In writing Guide to Kulchur, Pound attempts to become this kind of writer, with this kind of authenticity protected by forgetfulness.

If such an emphasis on the power of forgetfulness seems to turn the concept of memory inside out, a look at one poem can help to verify that this inversion is Pound's own. The first issue of Blast contains a poem entitled “Monumentum Aere, etc.” The “etc.” is a rather engaging gesture, since the title is a fragment of Horace's famous claim for the durability of verse. The abbreviation thus becomes a backhanded tribute to Horace, a shrug toward the audience as if to say, “But you know the rest.” The poem itself has a paradoxical relationship to Horace's ode because it emphasizes not memory but forgetfulness, not the durability of verse but a convenient impermanence in it:

You say that I take a good deal upon myself;
That I strut in the robes of assumption.
In a few years no one will remember the “buffo,”
No one will remember the trivial parts of me,
The comic detail will not be present.
As for you, you will lie in the earth,
And it is doubtful if even your manure will be rich enough
To keep grass
Over your grave.(8)

The poem certainly intends to claim, at least implicitly, that the poet will outlast his detractors. But much unlike Horace, Pound emphasizes the way time will preserve his work by eliminating the trivial from it; there is no overt mention of memory or permanence in the poem at all. In fact, the poem describes exactly the process identified in the James essay, whereby time perfects the poet by allowing him to forget. The “etc.” of the title then comes to represent not what is remembered by all but what is forgotten, and Pound's title represents rather tersely the way he inverts Horace by only partially preserving him.

In a strange way, then, forgetfulness assumes the role conventionally assigned to memory. In Guide to Kulchur this reversal is at first personal, as Pound comes to resemble the James he describes in the earlier essay, and then it is cultural. In one instance, Pound turns his own poor memory into a new paradigm for culture. Groping for a quotation, he says, “Ford has mentioned it in a book that a human being can read. I have forgotten what book.” Then he calls the audience to order with a boldface subhead and announces, “Knowledge is NOT culture. The domain of culture begins when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book.’” Though he is at first clearly attempting to justify what has been his method of composition from the beginning of Guide to Kulchur, Pound allows his outrageous and seemingly uncharacteristic statement to become a new definition of culture. The definition is illustrated by the opposition drawn between Boccherini and Bartok, in which Boccherini represents culture and Bartok the kind of struggle undergone by individuals such as Beethoven and Pound himself when culture ceases to be an unconscious possession. As Donald Davie points out, the two antithetical composers correspond to the two different kinds of knowledge described earlier in the book: “The knowledge that one possesses securely is not safeguarded consciously, nor even is it so acquired; it is like a trained reflex, not maintained or extended by any act of will.”⁹ Extended to culture, this dichotomy separates the conscious, contrived culture of modern times and an unconscious, second-nature kind of culture that does not depend on libraries or retrieval systems. Pound apparently wants to say here that there are two kinds of memory, rote and traditional, and that true culture exists where rote memory is unnecessary because all the crucial knowledge of the clan is possessed naturally by its members. But his outburst about books is revealing, and it reveals more than what Pound admits immediately thereafter, that he does not belong to such a traditional culture himself.

In an essay entitled “Eliot and a Common Culture,” Terry Eagleton points out the way in which Eliot habitually hovers between two rather different definitions of the word culture: “roughly, the arts on one hand and a way of life on the other.” One definition is that which can be associated with Arnold, the other that made more common by modern anthropology. Eliot, in fact, begins the early, periodical version of Notes towards a Definition of Culture by insisting on this very distinction, which becomes in the final version the key distinction between “culture” and “a culture.” The first is the conscious achievement of an elite, while the second is the common possession of a whole people. Eagleton admits that Eliot is conscious of using the word in both senses, as when he speaks of “the hereditary transmission of culture within a culture.”¹⁰ But Eagleton is concerned to point out the trouble that can come from a confusion of the two definitions, especially of assuming too easily that literature and the arts are identical to the customs, habits, and beliefs anthropologists call “culture.” In his separation of Boccherini and Bartok, Pound seems not to be using two different definitions but to be defining culture against its opposite. But the contrast is in fact between two different kinds of culture that correspond to the two different kinds of knowledge described earlier: one kind of culture is an unconscious possession; the other, the result of conscious preservation and transmission. Like Eliot, Pound hovers between these two definitions, and the role of forgetfulness is to help to bridge the gap between them.

Pound has an easy pejorative always to hand in the German word Kultur, a word that is originally Poundian shorthand for the German philological tradition. Pound uses the word to encompass state education, rote learning, and academic logrolling. His lifelong use of the term in this way prompts the search for another term, ultimately found in Frobenius. “Frobenius escaped both the fiddling term ‘culture’ and rigid ‘Kultur’ by recourse to Greek, he used ‘Paideuma’ [which] means the mental formation, the inherited habits of thought, the conditionings, aptitudes of a given race or time.”¹¹ The change in terminology helps to differentiate between culture as an imposition and as an unconscious possession. Kultur is the regimentation of the best; paideuma, the aggregation of the whole.

The distinction is still in Pound's mind as he contemplates the method of Guide to Kulchur. At the beginning of that volume he recalls the British Museum reading room and his calculations of how long it would take to encompass all that material by study. Like many students and professors since, he felt that “there must be some other way for a human being to make use of that vast cultural heritage,” and that other way became apparent in Frobenius: “He has in especial seen and marked out a kind of knowing, the difference between knowledge that has to be acquired by particular effort and knowing that is in people, ‘in the air.’”¹²Guide to Kulchur rests on this distinction, which appears when Pound differentiates between Boccherini and Bartok. But it should be made apparent that the definition of culture has shifted. Frobenius does not promise access to the culture of the British Museum reading room. His paideuma is the anthropologist's culture, not that which is contained in literature and the arts. It is crucial, however, for Pound to insist that some version of the reading to be had in that room exists “in the air,” and he does so against the very implications of Frobenius. For the really crucial limitation of the paideuma is that it cannot be learned at all. Unlike Kultur, which at least is a methodology that can be practiced by anyone, the paideuma, since it is transmitted by inheritance, is a closed book to those outside and, what is perhaps more ominous for Pound, inseparable from the social, political, and geographic conditions in which it exists.

There can be no guide to such a culture, which Pound admits by placing himself with Bartok instead of Boccherini. But throughout Guide to Kulchur and Pound's poetry of this period, there are constant implications to the contrary. One such implication is contained in the close identification Pound sees between the anthropological observer and the culture under observation. The most common, indeed almost the sole, example of paideuma in Guide to Kulchur is the unearthing of “the bronze car of Dis” in a railway cutting, where peasants had opposed the excavation. The peasant's traditional, collective knowledge of what lies underground resembles the archaeologist's in a way, and in fact Frobenius himself could say, “If you will go to a certain place and there digge, you will find traces of a civilization.” So close is the resemblance between these two talents that, two hundred pages farther into the Guide, Pound makes the peasant's discovery into Frobenius's: “That a man find the car of Persephone in a German burrow is already a mental property.”¹³ By transposing race memory into a personal quality, Pound is able to imply that the culture of the peasants can be acquired by outsiders.

The peculiar role of forgetfulness in this transposition may now be described. Although Pound identifies Boccherini with a culture that begins “when one HAS ‘forgotten-what-book,’” this view cannot define culture as lived and experienced by Boccherini himself, simply because he had nothing to forget, just as he had nothing consciously to learn. For him, culture was truly “in the air,” and just this ease of possession marks him off from a later composer such as Bartok. Forgetfulness enters only if Bartok tries to become like Boccherini, lacking the hereditary transmission of his time and place. To become like Boccherini, Pound must somehow both learn and forget. He must first possess the book and then forget having done so. Forgetfulness therefore comes into play when a culture that is consciously acquired and maintained is to be transformed into an unconscious one. What is effaced, of course, is not the knowledge itself but the unpleasant fact of having had to learn it.

The mental and stylistic gyrations necessitated by this transformation are visible in another passage on Frobenius. “Frobenius forgets his note book, ten miles from camp he remembers it. Special African feast on, and no means of sketching it for the records. No time to return to camp. No matter. Black starts drumming. Drum telegraph works and sketching materials arrive in time for the beano.” The anecdote itself is complex enough, but Pound's summary comment “culture possessed and forgotten” complicates it further. The context seems to make it clear that it is the Africans who have possessed their culture in such a thorough way that they can communicate over long distances. But what, precisely, can they have forgotten? Frobenius has forgotten something—his notebook, which is the symbol of the sort of artificial memory he needs in order to participate in this culture. Rather than illustrating the possible benefits to a modern European society of the kind of culture Frobenius studies, the anecdote vividly illustrates the radical difference between the two. Yet “culture possessed and forgotten” is Pound's description of what poets like himself must do. Culture, he says, is “what is left after a man has forgotten all he sets out to learn.” Or, as he says in the essay on Cavalcanti, “It takes six or eight years to get educated in one's art, and another ten to get rid of that education.”¹⁴ In the anecdote, African cultural memory saves Frobenius where his own notebook memory fails, but the scientist can only truly resemble his subjects when he commits again the act of forgetfulness, deliberately casting the notebook aside.

Frobenius is such a hero to Pound partly because he seems to combine two different kinds of culture, only one of which is actually available to modern Europeans like Pound, Frobenius, and Bartok. Through study, the anthropologist comes to resemble his subjects, who sustain their culture without study or other effort. But Pound wants to go far beyond Frobenius, beyond mere study, to write a poem that will both demonstrate and proselytize for the new paideuma. The didactic method of Pound's literary project further complicates the already paradoxical situation described in Guide to Kulchur. As a polemicist for the new paideuma, Pound must preach from outside the promised land, standing, as he realizes he does, on the same dubious ground as Bartok, outside of any organized culture. As a teacher, Pound must attempt to re-create consciously what should ideally be an unconscious, natural possession, transmitted without teaching and in fact unteachable. These paradoxes help to explain, I think, some of the difficulties that beset Pound's poetry in the later thirties, when his various definitions of culture come to their sharpest collision.

The recurrent praise of forgetfulness in Pound's prose of this period calls into question his definition of the epic as a poem including history. Though The Cantos certainly include what we conventionally recognize as history, the actual value of history in the synthetic culture postulated by the poem is unclear. If, as Pound suggests in Canto 86, there is in nature a kind of culture “needing no verbal tradition” (86/573), perhaps history as a study is not really necessary. Pound's own view of civilization often seems ahistorical, as Michael André Bernstein suggests, in that the movement of humanity through time is not really a progression or a regression but a series of variations around a single invariable standard.¹⁵ That Pound in Canto 76 can celebrate the correspondence, over centuries, of Shun's will and King Wan's will, the “two halves of a tally stick,” suggests that for him the most perfect civilization existed almost at the beginning of time and that all variation from its static perfection means demise. Of course, The Cantos contain more than one kind of history and many different ideas about the histories contained in it, but the more overtly historical of The Cantos, the China cantos, 52-61, put history in the most equivocal position.

The China cantos, among Pound's most didactic, are also the densest and most confusing. It is particularly discouraging, especially to the diligent reader who has faithfully struggled through ten long cantos of what seems a lot like history, to read at the very end that “Chiyeou didn't do it on book readin' / nor by mugging up history” (61/338). De Mailla tells us that the farmer Shih-yu was praised by the emperor Yung-cheng in an eighteenth-century edict for returning a lost bag of silver and thus demonstrating reverence toward the innate sense of justice in all people.¹⁶ Pound's own faith in such justice can be bracing, but it is also demoralizing to the reader to be told that reading is unnecessary and to have nearly a hundred pages of history close with a dismissal of history. One way to read these lines, however, is as a rather brutal exposure of the difference between Shih-yu and ourselves, dependent, in our latter day, on artificial virtue. Whether we can ever approximate the virtue of Shih-yu is unknown, but if we must approach that virtue by reading books, even Pound's, we will apparently be eternally distant from it.

What then is the purpose of the history in the China cantos? This question might be answered by observing how history, as a study of the past, is treated by the figures described in the poem. In Canto 54, the emperor Kao Ti, as one of his several acts of exemplary virtue, restores “the books,” the Shu Ching and the Shih Ching (54/276). These books are, in fact, exactly the ones Shih-yu did not read,¹⁷ but at this period of history they seem necessary and the emperor rules wisely in restoring them. The books need restoring because about eleven years earlier they had been burned by order of the emperor Chi Hoang Ti, who also receives Pound's approbation:

and after 33 years burnt the books
                                                            because of fool litterati
by counsel of Li-ssé
                                                            save medicine and on field works.

(54/275)

Though this step was in fact a political move against Confucianism as much as anything,¹⁸ I think we must see it as one of those periodic rectifications necessary to keep learning and virtue in good order. As the example of Shih-yu shows, in any case, true Confucian virtue can remain in the absence of the history classics, though apparently excessive concentration on them can obscure the real core of Confucianism. Thus Pound says in Canto 76,

better gift can no man make to a nation
                    than the sense of Kung fu Tseu
.....                    nor in historiography nor in making anthologies.

(76/454)

History, or learning about the past from books, is unnecessary as long as the “sense” of Confucius is preserved. And this “sense” is not so much a set of rules and procedures as it is the whole context of China, that which makes the culture what it is (“Kung is to China as is water to fishes” [54/285]). We should notice in reading these cantos that even those great rulers who preserve and respect the Confucian classics do not become great through the classics. History may at times be for Pound a schoolbook for princes, but these cantos do not show emperors achieving greatness by reading the classic works. Rather the good emperors demonstrate their greatness by reverence toward the works as symbols. The emperor's success comes from knowing how to swim in the water that is China; no more than a whale does he need a book to tell him how to do it. If he does happen to feel reverence for the books, it is only because they are a convenient representation of the path he has already followed, and if excessive study should conflict with or obscure the true way, he is quite justified in destroying the books.

How does this equivocal attitude toward history books affect the writing of history in The Cantos? First of all, it should call into question the initial assumption that these are didactic poems, since they demonstrate that literary didacticism is, at the very least, beside the point. Pound was certainly convinced that many Confucian principles are transferable, and therefore transmittable, but in the poem such transmission is effected not by books but by the basic conditions of life in China. Non-Confucian leaders bring about poverty, disease, unrest, and ultimately their own downfall, while Confucian leaders bring about a stabilizing harmony. To return to Pound's metaphor, at times the fish try to swim out of the water, but inevitably they must return to their proper medium. The metaphor helps to explain as well the pattern of history described in these cantos. The China cantos do not represent struggles between individuals, organizations, or ideas, but a pattern of deviation from and return to one standard of truth. As Bernstein puts it, Confucian historiography sees the field of history as “a closed arena,” with eternal repetitions governed by the same fixed rules.¹⁹

The history contained in such works is ultimately tautological, a history composed of self-evident definitions. For when the ruler ceases to act by the precepts of Confucius, he simply ceases to be a ruler, both by definition and finally in fact. As Peter Nicholls has recently explained, relying on Levenson and Schurmann's history of China, “A king does not starve or slaughter his people, because it is of the essence of kingship that a king brings harmony to the realm. If one fails in this and is yet called a king then that name must be rectified.”²⁰ Written history, following such a belief, describes essences instead of acts, and it is by nature circular and repetitive, since the king who is not kingly ceases to be king, succeeded in the mandate by a truly kingly king. Much of the reaction of the common reader to the China cantos comes, I think, not from their obscurity or even their length per se but from the unimpeachable closure of Pound's system. All conclusions are foregone in such a history; all action, nothing but the acknowledgment of the obvious.

This kind of historiography seems to leave very little room for the reader. It is difficult to disagree with a tautology, but it is also superfluous to accede. Since this sort of history is meant not to teach or convince but simply to acknowledge the obvious, the reader's role must be something like that of the Chinese emperors themselves in their use of the Confucian histories. Either reverence or impiety is the possible reaction, not agreement or disagreement, comprehension or incomprehension. Perhaps the most revealing such use of history comes in Canto 61, when the people receive

                    the volumes of history
with a pee-rade with portable cases like tabernacles
the dynastic history with solemnity.

(6/336)

Here the history book is worshiped as an artifact, with a reverence toward history as such, not as conveyer of anything.

Another role Pound has in mind for his readers is revealed in an odd way toward the end of the section in Canto 60. For one of the few times in the China cantos, Europeans appear on the scene, exposing themselves as Europeans by their superfluous and foolish questions.

having heard that the Chinese rites honour Kung-fu-tseu
and offer sacrifice to the Heaven etc /
and that their ceremonies are grounded in reason
now beg to know their true meaning and in particular
the meaning of terms for example Material
Heaven and Changti meaning? its ruler?
Does the manes of Confucius
accept the grain, fruit, silk, incense offered
                                        and does he enter his cartouche?
The European church wallahs wonder if this can be reconciled.

(60/330)

With some of his old wit, Pound skewers the European churchmen on their own silly controversies, the absurdity of which is exposed by the transposition into Confucian terms. But Pound has not told his readers enough to make these questions seem utterly superfluous, and many readers may find themselves waiting for the answers that never come. If so, they have failed a kind of test or missed an opportunity offered by the poem, because the true oddity of this section of Canto 60 is that it coolly invites us to see the Europeans as ignorant outsiders, as if we were Confucian mandarins in the highest degree. Of course, most of us are ignorant Europeans, and the chance to see ourselves for a moment reveals the essential strategy of these poems, which is to place us from the first inside the Confucian system as if it were our own ancestral heritage. Only by accepting this position can we manage to fulfill our role in these histories, which is to take them for granted. Only by giving us such a role can the poem succeed in its basic task, which is to give the Confucian system an inevitability beyond all question. The China cantos make history not into a story for us to read but into water in which we either sink or swim.

Pound ends the China cantos, however, on a slightly different note. Canto 61 ends in praise of the Ch'ien-lung emperor who lowered taxes and condensed histories and wrote some poems. The final line of these ten long cantos addresses the reader directly: “Perhaps you will look up his verses” (61/340). In irony, this line is worthy of Pound's homage to Propertius. The “perhaps” carries just the right weight of skepticism. The line does not in fact advise us to look up those verses; it surrounds the act of looking up with an irony so devilish that readers are wrong no matter what they do. We are here only two pages from the story of Shih-yu, who “didn't do it on book readin',” and, of course, the whole thrust of these cantos has been to render book readin' superfluous, if not suspect. The line also bears an ironic relationship to the distinctions worked out in Guide to Kulchur, where the knowledge that must be looked up is dismissed.

Davie suggests that the first cantos devoted to John Adams, the early Nuevo Mundo cantos, are meant “to do no more than tease the reader into looking up [Pound's] source,” which might explain as well the taunt that ends Canto 61. At least one wartime radio speech uses unidentified material solely to goad the audience into realizing its own ignorance.²¹ When Pound claims in Canto 67 that “the materials are at the service of the public” (67/387), he seems to be admitting that this section of his poem is meant to send us to its voluminous sources. But these insinuations remain an embarrassment in the poem because they betray Pound's own uneasiness about his project. The irony and ambiguity of the final line of the China cantos betray Pound's own skepticism about his ability to work positively toward a renewed culture. As Eliot puts it, one cannot build a tree; nor can Pound build up through literature what requires the cooperation of race, time, and geography. If one cannot build a tree, one can, to switch from Eliot's metaphor to Pound's, at least clear the underbrush away from it—and this possibility presents forgetfulness in yet another role.

Pound's teaching was always as much negative as positive, pruning and eliminating as well as building up. With Guide to Kulchur, though, a different emphasis appears. At the very beginning of the book, Kung accompanies his dismissal of mere memory by announcing that his own system is a condensation: “I have reduced it all to one principle.” The distinction between sheer memory and a unitary knowledge achieved through condensation runs throughout the book. Pound draws a distinction in himself between memorized facts and knowledge that is part of his “total disposition,” and he speaks of the possibility of “taking a totalitarian hold on our history.” He is suggesting here that whole countries can accomplish what he and Confucius have accomplished, reducing their dependence on rote memory by integrating knowledge into a single, unitary, and total form. To take this totalitarian hold on history is to grasp the truly permanent nature of a country, which is inscribed in its “blood and bone,” integrating all its activities into a kind of group personality.²²

Elsewhere, Pound defines this group personality and associates it with the kind of folk culture studied by Frobenius. Curiously, he sees the culture of the folk or the masses as arrived at by selection. “The blessing of the ‘folk’ song is solely in that the ‘folk’ forget and leave out things. It is a fading and attrition not a creative process.” In “Murder by Capital” Pound says that the mass culture “sifts out and consigns to the ash-can a great deal that the generation of accepted authors of Mr. Arnold Bennett's period put in.” Thus a people achieves its culture primarily by negation, by forgetting what does not make a place for itself in the national paideuma. The optimum kind of culture therefore is unitary and simple. In the essay “National Culture,” he asserts that a “national culture has a minimum of components.” But these few components do not exist in contradistinction to other, noncultural materials. What remains outside the total culture is not set aside or subordinated but quite literally forgotten. Only in this way does the exclusive culture acquire the totality so important to Pound at this time. That this totality is perilously close to the totalitarian becomes clear when Mussolini is praised for “all he has sloughed off in evolving his totalitarian formulae.”²³ Like Confucius, Mussolini removes superfluities from his mind, forgetting so as to remember. Ominously, Mussolini's ability to ignore what does not fit his “totalitarian formulae” becomes a model of the whole cultural process.

The concept of totality is pertinent to, and entirely benign in its relationship to, Frobenius's view of culture because that view is inclusive. By definition, the anthropological purview includes everything that a culture is and does. In Pound's sense, however, totality is the result of a process of selection, a combination that overlays Arnold's idea of culture on Frobenius's. The problem occurs not with the good that is selected but with the bad that is rejected, a category that simply does not exist for the anthropologist. To retain its totality, Pound's mythical culture cannot simply choose some options and decline others, because the nature of totality rests on the fact that there is no residuum, nothing outside the system. What is not selected must therefore be destroyed, expunged, forgotten, and we all must be aware, with some sadness and I suppose some amusement, that Pound accepted this task with relish.

But it is a task that, by its very nature, cannot be accomplished. In the James essay, Pound says that “most good prose arises, perhaps, from an instinct of negation; is the detailed, convincing analysis of something detestable; of something which one wants to eliminate.” Though Pound defines poetry here as quite the opposite, The Cantos very often exhibit the same urge to destroy. This urge is, as Pound himself realizes, bound to frustrate itself: “It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.” Much of the ferocity of Pound's rhetoric comes, I think, from the knowledge of being trapped in this contradiction, of being forced to depict what ought to be forgotten. The metaphors that Pound uses for what he disapproves of, the cloacal and bacterial metaphors primarily, mark it as that which must be expelled. But of course, rhetoric can never de-create anything; it makes by naming, and the longer it denounces what it wishes to expel, the longer that horrid substance holds the stage. In a letter to Felix Schelling, Pound says, “There are things I quite definitely want to destroy, and which I think will have to [be] annihilated before civilization can exist. … Until the cells of humanity recognize certain things as excrement, they will stay in [the] human colon and poison it.” All of Pound's diatribes are against excrement, a metaphor that is chosen not to identify but to annihilate the superfluous. But as Pound himself realizes, “All violence is useless (even the violence of language).”²⁴

Pound's willingness to ignore this realization involves him, and us, in several difficulties. Pound's distaste for what he hates increases as he is forced to talk about it, and the rhetoric builds upon itself as he attempts to do the impossible, to destroy with words. The vagueness of much of Pound's polemic may come from a reluctance to elaborate on what he does not want to mention at all. The greatest difficulty, however, confronts Pound in his role as teacher. If Confucius and Mussolini reach a “total disposition” by sloughing off superfluities, and if folk cultures do so naturally, how are his readers to follow? Is it possible for a modern culture to forget what has made it in order to reachieve the unity and totality of the past? In other words, can there be a history that works backward? Though most of us find it easy to forget by accident, it is psychologically nearly impossible to forget something on purpose. If one attempts to do so, one is likely to find that the material to be forgotten overwhelms instead what one wants to remember, which I suggest is just what happens in Pound's work of the early forties. Instead of disappearing as they should, the usurers and those innocent scapegoats, the Jews, become the true gods of Pound's universe.

One of the very earliest histories (if it can be so called), Hesiod's Theogony, puts its own status in question by a contradictory approach to memory. Hesiod tells us first that the muses are daughters of Mnemosyne, and yet he also tells us that the purpose of the muses is to help people forget. Perhaps the function of fanciful genealogies is to help people forget, and the purpose of history may be to obscure the truly unpleasant ways in which events actually come to bear on our lives. Nietzsche certainly felt that action needed to wrestle itself free of history and could do so only by a kind of studious forgetfulness, a dominance achieved somehow, by some faculty, over our own memories. What brought Nietzsche to this pass is the fearful apprehension that what we now possess is not culture, not even a debased culture, but “knowledge about culture.”²⁵ How can this “knowledge about” be transformed back into its original subject matter? Can a reflective literature ever transcend reflectiveness so as to reassume the primary status of action itself? The deformations and difficulties of Pound's work of the thirties and forties can be traced, I think, to a tremendous effort to answer these questions.

Notes

1. William Van O'Connor and Edward Stone, eds., A Casebook on Ezra Pound (New York: Crowell, 1959), p. 122; Ezra Pound, “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II, ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 75; Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 134.

2. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1972). References to this edition of The Cantos will give canto number and page number, separated by a slash. Pound, Guide, p. 187; Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), pp. 187 and 60; Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1934), p. 92.

3. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), p. 201; Pound, Ezra Pound Speaking, p. 58.

4. Pound, Selected Prose, p. 408; Pound, Guide, pp. 51, 53.

5. Pound, Guide, pp. 28, 33, 39.

6. Ibid., p. 45.

7. Pound, Essays, p. 299.

8. Blast 1 (1914): 46.

9. Pound, Guide, p. 134; Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 148.

10. David Eagleton, “Eliot and a Common Culture,” in Eliot in Perspective, ed. Graham Martin (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 287; Eliot, “Notes towards a Definition of Culture,” New English Weekly, January 21, 1943, p. 117; Eagleton, “Common Culture,” p. 288.

11. Pound, Selected Prose, p. 148.

12. Pound, Guide, p. 57.

13. Ibid., pp. 57, 60-61, 244.

14. Ibid., pp. 98, 194-95.

15. Michael André Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 65.

16. See John J. Nolde, Blossoms from the East: The China Cantos of Ezra Pound (Orono: University of Maine Press, 1983), pp. 417-18.

17. Ibid., p. 418.

18. Ibid., pp. 99-100.

19. Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, p. 55.

20. Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 173.

21. Davie, Poet as Sculptor, p. 136; Pound, Ezra Pound Speaking, p. 246.

22. Pound, Guide, pp. 15, 32; Ezra Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini (New York: Liveright; London: S. Nott, 1935), p. v.

23. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; reprint, New York: New Directions, 1971), p. 127; Pound, Selected Prose, pp. 231, 163; Pound, Guide, p. 309.

24. Pound, Essays, p. 324; Pound, Letters, pp. 181-82.

25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and A buse of History, tr. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 23. For an illuminating discussion of Yeats' difficult relationship with his own memory, see James Olney, “W. B. Yeats's Daimonic Memory,” Sewanee Review 85 (October-December 1977): 583-603.