| The Cantos of Ezra Pound(1885-1972),an American modernist poet,comprises 117 cantos and more than 800 pages.It is nearly all-inclusive in that it covers a wide range of languages as well as a large amount of material.All this makes it "a piece of abstruse writing" which is rather difficult to understand.A question arising in reading is whether there exists beneath the text a structure which makes the apparently disruptive poem awhole.Most of the allusions may end in unanimous explications if their sources are rightly located.Nevertheless,ideas may differ considerably in the discussions concerning the structure which may make all parts of the poem a coherent whole.Critics such as Hugh Kenner,Donald Davie and Daniel Pearlman have been involved in the discussion and made some excellent and insightful comments on this topic.The dissertation attempts to continue the topic on the basis of the researches carried out previously.Generally speaking,the studies of the Poem’s structure in academics abroad are primarily done from the aesthetic perspectives such as the epic tradition,the subject of time,the religious mysticism,most of which are characterized by Western culture.As far as the studies at home are concerned,the scholars are mainly interested in topics concerning Chinese classic culture,such as Chinese characters,poetics,or Confucianism embedded in The Cantos in particular.This study,combining Pound’s preference for Chinese culture with his innate mind of Western culture,elaborates on the idea of order by relating it to Neoplatonic emanation.To speak specifically,the dissertation starts with an explication of the close relation between order connoted by Confucian One Man and Neoplatonic emanation of light,and demonstrates further the overall structure of The Cantos.Plotinus,the most prominent representative of Neoplatonism,serves as the guide who accompanies Pound from the hell in canto 15 into the sunlight.In this sense,Plotinus assumes symbolically the role of spiritual guidance.Similarly,his doctrine of light emanation takes on the same guiding significance for an understanding of the structure of The Cantos.Four important Neoplatonic concepts,namely,emanation of the One,degeneration in the material world,inversion to the One,and the Nous,provide a philosophical frame against which an explication of the order in The Cantos is made to demonstrate Pound’s idea of disorder and his remedy for disorder in modern Western world.Accordingly,the dissertation consists of four chapters,apart from the introduction and the conclusion.They are briefly surveyed as follows.The literature review in the introduction mainly summarizes the different views of foreign and domestic academic studies of the structure of The Cantos.The introductionalso covers the research methodology of the study.The four chapters of the main body of the dissertation are detailed explications of the connotative order from four perspectives.They are emanation of man’s inside order,loss of order in the Western world,restoration of order based on legal justice represented by the exemplary civilized country in human history,and finally a display of divine order in nature respectively.Chapter One,related to Neoplatonic emanation of the One,mainly elaborates on a category of Poundian heroes throughout The Cantos.The motive mechanism of the emanating process of the One bears a resemblance to connotations of Confucian One Man adapted from The Great Learning,which is translated thus,"one word will ruin the business,While one man can bring the state to an orderly course".What is conveyed in the translation is the spreading influence of Confucian One Man,which is similar to light emanation or diffusion.It makes manifest the exemplary effect of Confucian One Man on establishment of order in his family and his state or country.This kind of emanating orspreading influence is compared by Pound in The Cantos to a PIVOT,from which inside order of Confucian One man flows around to make his family and country influenced and thus settled in peace and order.Furthermore,achievement of the exemplary effect of Confucian One Man depends not only on his inside order gained through rectification of his heart and self-cultivation,but also on his ability to put ideas into action.In other words,what is of equal importance is the capacity of turning his inside order and virtues into constructive action to build order of wider dimensions.For this,Pound,employing the epic hero Odysseus as the model for man of action and for builder of order,and sailing on the "sea" of mankind in the past and the present,recreates a group of heroes of directio voluntatis,who make a determined effort to lead their domains such as their family or country on the way to order.Whether the Renaissance figure Malatesta who has revolted against the current power of the church by building the Temple,or the modern leader Mussolini who has been wrongly thought to reform with firm determination to restore order,whether Jefferson and Adams who have led the newly-born country away from wilderness onto the way of a new order,or Chinese "Great Emperors" who have maintained social order by asserting the orthodoxy of Confucianism,whether a number of American presidents who have fought heroically against the evil banks,or several generations of Grand Dukes who have founded and reformed Monte dei Paschi,the Sienese bank,all are epitomes of man of constructive action in Pound’s mind.They are exemplary of Confucian One Man who is pivotal in diffusing his inside order through constructive action and thus establishing national as well as domestic peace and order.Chapter Two,employing Neoplatonic notion of degeneration in the material world,mainly explicates the darkness of hellish Western world due to loss of its order.The One,the first Hypostasis,is absolute Goodness and infinite Unity.The material world,descended from the One via the Nous and the Soul,is diversified and by far the most distant from the One.Consequently,degeneration and evil of the material world is inevitable.When adapted in The Cantos,the degenerating process is symbolically presented by Pound as a moral war between the antithetical forces of "light" and "mud".The light refers to the force which is creative,intelligent,and divine,epitomized by enlightened Confucian One Man discussed in Chapter One.Mud indicates the evil force of division and destruction,represented primarily in The Cantos by usury,which is entitled"obstructors of knowledge/obstructors of distribution".The antithetical forces are transformed into two mutually exclusive worlds in the poem.One world is composed of heroes who are creators of civilization and defenders of order,while the other world is composed of usurers who are destroyers of order and hell-makers.One world is serenity and peace embodied in Confucius’s teaching in canto 13,while the other world is darkness and confusion of the modern West depicted in the Hell cantos.With a ray of light pitted against the overwhelming darkness,Pound sketches the degenerating Occidental world.The first 50 cantos,according to Pound,are“a sort of detective story",attempting to explore what’s wrong with the past and the present of the West.This is made clear at the very beginning of The Cantos,where Odysseus sails to the underworld,an episode implying that the poet,who puts on the mask of the epic hero and explores in the history of the West.Pound begins his exploration in ancient myth and then resumes it in the age of Renaissance,presenting a picture of ever-growing darkness and decline of the West resulting from war,murder,economic evils and religious decadence.Then,the Hell cantos further unfolds a tableau of contemporary London,sketching corruption and confusion of modern English society and culture more strikingly.Lastly,corrupted and chaotic London actually represents in miniature the comprehensive chaos of postwar Western world,or thecontemporary Inferno.The corrupted politicians as well as the financiers,the money-grubbing usurers,the warmongers as well as the arms manufacturers,and the betrayers of language,all are representatives of those "obstructors of knowledge" or"obstructors of distribution",who have blocked the emanating light of intelligence and thus made a hell,or "a place of all light silent" of modern Western world.It is expected that a detective story not only looks into the crime,but also finds out the criminal.After exhibiting crimes and evils of the Inferno,Pound,like a detective,makes further investigations to reveal the causes for the hell of the present.The root cause is related to Pound’s idea of economics,the center of which is that usury is at the core of all evil.Wealth of a society comes from the producers’ creation.Nevertheless,usury and banks,taken as primary evildoer,create wealth out of nothing,and consequently disruptthe economical order of a society.Pound,by personifying usury as the monster Geryon,the witch Circe,or the city-destroyer Helen respectively,severely attacks usury in that it has caused great damages in spheres of religion,economy,art and nature.Usury in The Cantos is not merely an economical term.Since it originates from man’s love of money or desire for economic profits,usury has been transformed into the state of mind from which evil originates.Pound has entitled this kind of mental state "misdirected will",which reveals two defects permanent in human nature.One form of misdirected will is human avarice.Pound in his old age tries to rectify his diagnosis of the modem West,claiming that avarice which promotes man’s insatiable desire for profits is the root cause for chaos and darkness.Usury,merely a symptom instead of root cause,is only a concrete disease triggered by the mental state of avarice.The other form of misdirected will is abuleia,that is,paralysis of human will or "the impairment of volition",which is a total contrast to constructive action,the most striking quality of Confucian One Man in Chapter One.Abuleia,the state of mind which is characterized by lack of action,leaves evils and disorder of this world alone.This kind of misdirected will is typically represented by the contemporary westerners in canto 7 and the inhabitants dwelling in the hell depicted in the Hell cantos.The modem men are merely "husks and shells",making voices as feebly as the grasshoppers make sounds.Besides,the inhabitants of the hell are devoid of dignity or tragic sense possessed by the sinners dwelling in Dante’s Inferno.They are living dead or walking corpses,completely blind to ooze and dung in the surroundings.Pound shows a strong dislike of them,and thinks it is their willing passivity and voluntary inaction that prompt the pervasiveness of the present hell.In a sense,the hell of the modern West is partly motivated by two forms of misdirected will of modern men who possess such human defects as avarice and paralytic mental state,both of which are diseases resulting from man’s corrupted inside order.Similarly,Pound has fallen into hell of the Pisan prison due to loss of his inside order.Pound’s wrong in WWII has partly changed the design of The Cantos as well as having radically changed the poet’s life journey.From the Pisan cantos on,the poem changes into an autobiographical recording of the real life and emotions of the poet who is imprisoned in the Pisan prison then.On the one hand,the prison,a place which is compared to the darkest night of the soul,may be taken as Pound’s personal hell.This is indicated by the title of the very first canto of the Pisan sequence,"Nekuia" in canto 74,which recalls Odysseus’s sailing to the underworld in canto 1.There Pound has been cut off from all his friends and relatives,a situation confirming what the prophet Tiresias has said,"lose all companions".In darkness and loneliness,Pound makes a self-examination of the defects in his character,and comes to realize that what he has lost is what he has believed in,i.e.,the implied order in Confucian One Man—"And if a man have not order within him/He can not spread order about him",and that he has violated Confucian principle of Zhengming(正名)by talking too much.On the other hand,the underworld is the place where Odysseus sails and undergoes a ritual death before he returns home.Similarly,hellish Pisan prison is exactly the place where Pound suffers the death-like torture of mind and then resurrects.The resurrection in the Pisan cantos is presented as a process of the poet’s restoration of his inside order.More importantly,Pound,the poet of great mind,is by no means self-obsessed in that he resumes his exploration in the subsequent sequences,Rock-Drill and Thrones,to find the returning ways to order for the whole Western society.This will be discussed in Chapter Three.Chapter Three,related to Neoplatonic inversion following emanation of the One,explores the ways of restoring order both within the poet and without in the Western world.In parallel with emanation of the One is the motive motion of the inverted process of the Soul to a higher state.As a derivative of the One,the Soul doesn’t completely lose its divine origin even though it has fallen into the material world,and thus it desires to return to where it comes and achieve a mystical union with the One.The inverted way is via purification and sublimation of the individual soul,which is epitomized in The Cantos by two images analogous to that ascent.The one is an arm upward in the swamp,clutching a fragment of marble in canto 16.The image metaphorically refers to light in darkness or order amid confusion,signifying constructive action of the heroes who fight against corruption and destruction.What’s more,it throws new light on the design of the poem of more than 800 pages which is roughly taken as a journey from Dantesque "dark forest" to brilliant Paradise.The other image occurs in canto 40,which narrates the westward voyage of Carthaginian navigator,Hanno.To Pound,this historical incident takes on the significance of "seeking an exit" out of the chaotic world.It may be taken as an attempt at sailing away from the present situation of decay and confusion to the empyrean of light and order.Light imagery pervades the poem,and takes on rich connotations.Artistic beauty,power of female benevolence and love,life-fostering force of nature,and mystical experience of the divine,all these are made concrete by light.Light,as an essential attribute of everything,exists in everything,an idea which is conveyed by Erigena,a philosopher of mysticism,and is frequently quoted in the poem,"all things that are are lights".Even darkness,essentially dependent on the quality of light for its existence,results from a hindrance of the light of intelligence by ignorance.This is what is indicated in the quoted line,"there is no darkness but ignorance".In this sense,the pitch-dark hell,or"a place mute of all light",exists as a direct consequence of complete hindrance to intelligent light.Accordingly,out of hell towards order is a process of restoring intelligence and an inverted way to light.In The Cantos,the idea of inversion may be concretized in the prototype of Home both of the individual and of the mankind,or to be exact,Odysseus’s nostos and Earthly Elysium respectively,which conceptually define Pound’s exploration of the inverted way to order for the Western society as well as for himself.Furthermore,Pound makes a more concrete exploration of history and the past.In Pound’s mind,time or history is a purgatory of human error.History resembles Dante’s purgatory,a place between the hell where evils are punished and the bright paradise,and a place out of which man ascends further to the Empyrean.As a result,Pound has attempted to search the purgatorial history for remedies for errors of both the Western world and his own.In terms of the poet himself,Pound has recalled his own past in the Pisan cantos.Through self-examination of his past wrongs committed,Pound has purified his memory and been inspired by the regenerative power of human benevolence and love.Besides,through observing and meditating upon the present,the poet has been inspired by the regenerative effect of nature and regained his lost order and identity as a result.In terms of modem Western world,Pound makes further exploration in human history for the returning way to order.To be specific,it is the destructive force of usury that obstructs the emanating light of intelligence and thus makes the Western world shrouded in the darkness of ignorance.Usury disrupts the natural increase of economy,distorts the harmony between production and distribution,and results in great social disorder and confusion.To dispel the pervasive darkness of ignorance requires a pour of intelligent light into Western values to resist the primary evil of usury.For this,the notion of justice is introduced.In Rock Drill,light of intelligence shining through justice distributors as well as justice itself is made concrete by some light images and Chinese characters.What’s more,in Thrones,maintenance of civic order results largely from enactment,promulgation and enforcement of legislation.In other words,intelligent light of justice manifests itself more concretely in three monumental legislation in human history,namely,Byzantine Eparch’s Edict by Leo the Wise,Magna Carta by Sir Edward Coke and Emperor Kang Xi’s Shengyu.Law guarantees human justice and civic order,and best epitomizes human progression and achievements in that law makes human society develop from the primitive and uncivilized into prosperity and order.In Chapter One,history is the source from which Pound selects models of man of action to make manifest the spreading influence of Confucian One Man.Here Pound’s exploration of history surpasses well beyond his personal sentiment.In other words,the poet’s simple hero-worship has changed into a more profound belief in human legal justice.That is to say,it is human as a whole,insteadof individual heroes,that assumes responsibility for diffusing the light of intelligence.Human law which maintains the operation of an orderly and prosperous society may be taken as the bedrock from which the modem West starts on its returning way to order.This is precisely what the title "Thrones" connotes.Chapter Four,employing the Nous,the second Hypostasis in the triad of Neoplatonism,explicates the divine order in nature as well as divine revelations following the mystical inversion.In Neoplatonic emanation,the One is the divine origin to which all reality and the Soul desire to return.Nevertheless,what interests Pound is not the One which generates all and thus transcends all,but the Nous,which is both the essence and the existence.The One,as Pure Spirit,is rather abstract or ineffable,while the Nous,both as the highest level of being and as cause of the images in the phenomenal world,is a more concrete notion than the One.Accordingly,Pound’s view that the divine exists as "an eternal state of mind" may involve two aspects of connotations,and indicate two means of divine revelations.Firstly,the divine may be experienced through the mystical inversion of the Soul towards the Nous.Then,it is in the material world—the concrete form of existence of the Nous—that the divine exists and may be experienced.As far as the first means is concerned,the Soul’s inversion towards the Nous to experience the divine is either through moment of metamorphosis or the mystery rites represented by Eleusinian mysteries in The Cantos.The former refers to magic moment,i.e.“bust thru from quotidien into divine or permanent world",epitomized by Aphrodite,the metamorphosed deity who,as an incarnation of the empyreal in the poem,indicates the divine power of love.The latter refers to man’s mystical experience or awareness of the divine in the initiation rites enacting the motif of palingenesis,that is,metaphorical death of the physical life and rebirth of a spiritual one,which leads man’s soul from the dark and confused state into sudden illumination.Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greek are fertility rites in honor of Demeter,the grain-goddess,and her daughter,Persephone.Eleusinian mysteries are adapted by Pound to reveal the close relationship between man and the divine.Firstly,man’s mystical experience of the divine is made concrete in the form of light in cantos 36 and 39.More importantly,the mysteries of Eleusis are performed to establish a relation between man and nature which possesses the divinity.That is to say,Eleusinian mysteries,as one of the fertility rites,reveal man’s primitive awareness and worship of the divinity existing in nature.Besides,the ritualized copulation,enacted in the mystery rites as mysterious life-fostering force of nature to pray for natural fertility,further reveals a close association between man and divine nature in that the divinity in nature incarnated in the deities of fertility is capable of responding to man’s piety and reverence.That the divinity exists in nature coincides exactly with the viewpoint held by Pound that gods have never left us.It is true that the individual soul has never completely lost its original divinity.As a result,experience of the divine may be attained via an inverted ascent towards the empyrean.Nonetheless,the divinity is not something transcendental or inconceivable or ineffable.It exists in the material world,particularly in nature.This is thesecond means of divine revelations mentioned above,namely,the divinity displayed in nature as natural order,or what Pound has named in his poem,"the process",in Chinese,道(Tao).In The Cantos Pound makes Tao a Confucianist idea.In his ideogrammic definition of Tao,what he has made prominent is the idea of order and reason.Furthermore,the recurrent line“The wind also is of the process,rain also is of the process" indicates Confucian view of nature which holds that only if man pays the greatest respect for the omnipresent process does he coexist peacefully with nature.The process as an omnipresent order manifests itself in the rain as well as in the wind.That is to say,it resembles"signatures" or marks which display the divinity inherent in all in nature.Moreover,the process as the divine order in nature should be internalized by human values to guide man’s conducts and social development.This idea has been fully conveyed when Pound makes an adapted writing and translation of Charles Bowlker’s The Art of Angling and Chinese classics Li Ki(Book of Rites).Similar to the unwobbling pivot,中,the divine order occupies a central place in the ever-changing cosmos and regulates the vital interrelation between man and nature.It is only through a close observation of nature that man becomes aware of the divinity in nature.It is human society and culture firmly rooted in reverence for and adherence to the natural process that guarantee perfect harmony between man and nature,that is,anempyrean realm which is entitled the“fourth dimension of stillness" in canto 49,the Seven Lake canto.The mystical serenity and harmonious union of man,heaven and earth depicted in Chinese poetry and painting find best exemplifications both in the scenery and the nature-worshiping rites of ancient Na Khi community.Conclusion mainly summarizes three central views of the present dissertation.Firstly,the structure of The Cantos turns out to be an "elastic form",namely,graduated expanding dimensions with order as the center,with the scope ranging from the relationships between man and his self,man and society,and man and history,to that between man and nature.It breaks through Dante’s linear progressive model employed in his journey from Inferno to Paradise in that it explicates the structure of The Cantos as something dynamic and dimensional.Secondly,the dissertation creatively attempts to combine motion with stillness,the reason with the mystical or the factual with the divine,and to combine Confucianist culture with the Western Occultism.Taking Plotinist emanation and inversion as the philosophical references,the dissertation makes a reading of order which is at the core of The Cantos.This throws new light on the understanding of order.That is,order not only refers to orders of this world discussed in the former three chapters,but also takes the connotations of divine order in nature discussed in the last chapter.The irrational aspect of Pound’s mind reveals exactly the poet’s solicitude or concern for this-worldly matters instead of other-worldly ones.Essentially,his presentation of the transcendental order existing in nature is social by implication.Thirdly,an arranged structural unity which is explicated in the dissertation doesn’t conflict with the apparently broken and fragmentary text which may be taken typical of modern artistic techniques.On the contrary,the elastic structure appearing as ever-widening circles with order in the center corroborates exactly Pound’s poetic theory of Vortex which embodies great motion,energy and tension of the kind of dynamic art.Vorticism,emphasizing a combination of motion and central stillness,makes it possible for Pound to develop the modernist poetry from some short Imagist classics into this nearly all-inclusive masterpiece,The Cantos.Meanwhile,Vorticism,with its great capacity for artistic presentation,finds the very evidence in the demonstration of the structure in the dissertation.Conclusion also briefly deals with some inadequacies in the dissertation.In sum,study of the structure of The Cantos may be taken as a particular research perspective from which extensive cultures of both the West and China may be further explored.In other words,the method of starting from study of the structure of The Cantos and then delving into the poem from the Western culture helps greatly with the study of Chinese culture.This results in a rediscovery of the wisdom of Confucianism and an exhibition of practical value and far-reaching significance of Chinese traditional culture. |
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