1 - Towards reading the Cantos

Summary

Magnanimity / magnanimity /

I know I ask a great deal

unpublished draft of Canto 84

By 1926, James Joyce and his friend, admirer and most vigorous publicist, Ezra Pound, were launched on the two long, difficult works which were to be their last - Finnegans Wake and the Cantos. From Paris, “Jim the comedian” (74/433) sent Pound, now settled in Rapallo, an early version of the Wake, but Ez, for all his legendary loyalty to old friends, would have none of it. “Dear Jim,” he wrote back, “I will have another go at it, but up to present I make nothing of it whatever. Nothing so far as I make out, nothing short of divine vision or a new cure for the clapp can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization” (L 202). There is more here than the comedy of leading avant-gardistes unable to deal with each other's most extreme texts (Joyce showed even less interest in the Cantos). The sub-text of Pound's snappy critique was precisely that his own ambitious poem did contain, or aspired to, both divine vision and cures for social disease - that is, for war, poverty, hunger, misgovernment and institutionalized oppression. Morever, the “long poem containing history” was based on a profound intuition that vision and cure were interdependent. Like Dante's Divine Comedy, the poem with which this most intertextual of texts is closely interwoven, the Cantos, while it wishes always to be divertente [entertaining] (41/202), is distinctly a didactic poem. It invites us to accompany its pilgrim/poet on a difficult, non-linear journey out of darkness towards light, in the course of which we meet innumerable examples of the blessed and the damned, as well as of every gradation between. In the course of that journey, we hear many specific judgements and interpretations of history, some of which are at best idiosyncratic, at worst bizarre or rebarbative. Of greater importance than those judgements, some of which we will agree with, some not, is the poet's invitation to join him in an active “volitionist” state of mind, a lively and holistic “awareness” leading toward “directio voluntatis [direction of the mil], as lord over the heart” (77/467). The poem urges us away from despair (“the wrong way about it” [89/598]), passivity, conformity, selfishness and received ideas and language (“Make it new!”), and towards such virtues as responsibility, an active sensibility and benevolence.