Re/Membering Place: Ideogrammic Memory in Ezra Pound’s "The Cantos"

Abstract

In the aftermath of twentieth-century wars writing was, perhaps, one of the very few means available to work through horror and misery. Because of its ability to configure imagined spaces, literature became a way out of reality as much as a door into its deepest waters. In writing, authors managed to dissect terror from the safety of imagination. They also contrived to replace ruins and wreckage with hope for the future and possibility. This is particularly true of poetry. In their retrieval of fragments of the past, poets like Ezra Pound, elicited an emotional response to what seemed an impossible situation; sought an answer and a form of representation to the illegibility of a discourse also shattered by war. Their poetry offered a way out of mourning and desperation; opened paths to social reconstruction. It could be said, thence, that, as a leading proponent of this type of modernist poetry, in his Cantos Pound develops a literary language that, despite being undoubtedly influenced by previous tradition – particularly by Fenollosa’s ideogram, produces a new understanding of memory and history. Pound elaborates a language that helps humanity overcome the boundaries of the written word that had potentially lost meaning, logic and sequence. He perceives historical deeds as experiences that can (and should) be retrieved in poetry and deems writing an act of memory. Pound’s fragment retrieval is both metaphorical and literal, seeking to recover hopeful instances of the past as he searches for the unifying constituent of diverse elements. This article examines the interaction of images and words as Pound’s new theory of the poetic image, through which the poet favors natural associations and tries to restore historical pasts. In the midst of outright destruction, Pound’s Cantos are said to construct landscapes that break linear chronologies to find the common threat of the present and the past. In so doing, he fills a shattered reality back with hope and light.