by Ezra Pound
I have seldom seen our rhetoricians dwell on the fact that the great strength of our language lies in its splendid array of transitive verbs, drawn both from Anglo-Saxon and from Latin sources. These give us the most individual characterisations of force. Their power lies in their recognition of nature as a vast storehouse of forces. We do not say in English that things seem, or appear, or eventuate, or even that they are; but that they do. Will is the foundation of our speech. av We catch the Demi-urge in the act. I had to discover for myself why Shakespeare’s English was so immeasurably superior to all others. I found that it was his persistent, natural, and magnificent use of hundreds of transitive verbs. Rarely will you find an ‘is’ in his sentences. ‘Is’ weakly lends itself to the uses of our rhythm, in the unaccented syllables; yet he sternly discards it. A study of Shakespeare’s verbs should underlie all exercises in style.
We find in poetical Chinese a wealth of transitive verbs, in some way greater even than in the English of Shakespeare. This springs from their power of combining several pictorial elements in a single character. We have in English no verb for what two things, say the sun and moon, both do together. Prefixes and affixes merely direct and qualify. In Chinese the verb can be more minutely qualified. We find a hundred variants clustering about a single idea. Thus ‘to sail a boat for purposes of pleasure’ would be an entirely different verb from ‘to sail for purposes of commerce.’ Dozens of Chinese verbs express various shades of grieving, yet in English translations they are usually reduced to one mediocrity. Many of them can be expressed only by periphrasis, but what right has the translator to neglect the overtones? There are subtle shadings. We should strain our resources in English.
It is true that the pictorial clue of many Chinese ideographs can not now be traced, and even Chinese lexicographers admit that combinations frequently contribute only a phonetic value. But I find it incredible that any such minute subdivision of the idea could have ever existed alone as abstract sound without the concrete character. It contradicts the law of evolution. Complex ideas arise only gradually, as the power of holding them together arises. The paucity of Chinese sound could not so hold them. Neither is it conceivable that the whole list was made at once, as commercial codes of cipher are compiled. Foreign words sometimes recalled Chinese ideograms associated with vaguely similar sound? Therefore we must believe that the phonetic theory is in large part unsound? The metaphor once existed in many cases where we can not now trace it. Many of our own etymologies have been lost. It is futile to take the ignorance of the Han dynasty for omniscience.aw It is not true, as Legge said, that the original picture characters could never have gone far in building up abstract thought. This is a vital mistake. We have seen that our own languages have all sprung from a few hundred vivid phonetic verbs by figurative derivation. A fabric more vast could have been built up in Chinese by metaphorical composition. No attenuated idea exists which it might not have reached more vividly and more permanently than we could have been expected to reach with phonetic roots. Such a pictorial method, whether the Chinese exemplified it or not, would be the ideal language of the world.
Still, is it not enough to show that Chinese poetry gets back near to the processes of nature by means of its vivid figure, its wealth of such figure? If we attempt to follow it in English we must use words highly charged, words whose vital suggestion shall interplay as nature interplays. Sentences must be like the mingling of the fringes of feathered banners, or as the colors of many flowers blended into the single sheen of a meadow.
The poet can never see too much or feel too much. His metaphors are only ways of getting rid of the dead white plaster of the copula. He resolves its indifference into a thousand tints of verb. His figures flood things with jets of various light, like the sudden up-blaze of fountains. The prehistoric poets who created language discovered the whole harmonious framework of nature, they sang out her processes in their hymns. And this diffused poetry which they created, Shakespeare has condensed into a more tangible substance. Thus in all poetry a word is like a sun, with its corona and chromosphere; words crowd upon words, and enwrap each other in their luminous envelopes until sentences become clear, continuous light-bands.
Now we are in condition to appreciate the full splendor of certain lines of Chinese verse. Poetry surpasses prose especially in that the poet selects for juxtaposition those words whose overtones blend into a delicate and lucid harmony. All arts follow the same law; refined harmony lies in the delicate balance of overtones. In music the whole possibility and theory of harmony are based on the overtones. In this sense poetry seems a more difficult art.
How shall we determine the metaphorical overtones of neighbouring words? We can avoid flagrant breaches like mixed metaphor. We can find the concord or harmonising at its intensest, as in Romeo’s speech over the dead Juliet.
Here also the Chinese ideography has its advantage, in even a simple line; for example, ‘The sun rises in the east.’
The overtones vibrate against the eye. The wealth of composition in characters makes possible a choice of words in which a single dominant overtone colors every plane of meaning. That is perhaps the most conspicuous quality of Chinese poetry. Let us examine our line.
The sun, the shining, on one side, on the other the sign of the east, which is the sun entangled in the branches of a tree. And in the middle sign, the verb ‘rise,’ we have further homology; the sun is above the horizon, but beyond that the single upright line is like the growing trunk-line of the tree sign. This is but a beginning, but it points a way to the method, and to the method of intelligent reading.
JAMES JOYCE, AT LAST THE NOVEL APPEARSax
It is unlikely that I shall say anything new about Mr. Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I have already stated that it is a book worth reading and that it is written in good prose. In using these terms I do not employ the looseness of the half-crown reviewer.
I am very glad that it is now possible for a few hundred people to read Mr. Joyce comfortably from a bound book, instead of from a much-handled file of EGOISTS or from a slippery bundle of type-script. After much difficulty THE EGOIST itself turns publisher and produces A Portrait of the Artist as a volume, for the hatred of ordinary English publishers for good prose is, like the hatred of the Quarterly Review1 for good poetry, deep-rooted, traditional.
Since Landor’s Imaginary Conversations2 were bandied from pillar to post, I doubt if any manuscript has met with so much opposition, and no manuscript has been more worth supporting.
Landor is still an unpopular author. He is still a terror to fools. He is still concealed from the young (not for any alleged indecency, but simply because he did not acquiesce in certain popular follies). He, Landor, still plays an inconspicuous role in university courses. The amount of light which he would shed on the undergraduate mind would make students inconvenient to the average run of professors. But Landor is permanent.
Members of the “Fly-Fishers” and “Royal Automobile” clubs, and of the “Isthmian,” may not read him. They will not read Mr. Joyce. E pur si muove.3 Despite the printers and publishers the British Government has recognized Mr. Joyce’s literary merit. That is a definite gain for the party of intelligence. A number of qualified judges have acquiesced in my statement of two years ago, that Mr. Joyce was an excellent and important writer of prose.
The last few years have seen the gradual shaping of a party of intelligence, a party not bound by any central doctrine or theory. We cannot accurately define new writers by applying to them tag-names from old authors, but as there is no adequate means of conveying the general impression of their characteristics one may at times employ such terminology, carefully stating that the terms are nothing more than approximation.
With that qualification, I would say that James Joyce produces the nearest thing to Flaubertian prose that we have now in English, just as Wyndham Lewis has written a novel which is more like, and more fitly compared with, Dostoievsky than is the work of any of
his contemporaries. In like manner Mr. T. S. Eliot comes nearer to filling the place of Jules La Forgue in our generation. (Doing the “nearest thing” need not imply an approach to a standard, from a position inferior.)
Two of these writers have met with all sorts of opposition. If Mr. Eliot probably has not yet encountered very much opposition, it is only because his work is not yet very widely known.
My own income was considerably docked because I dared to say that Gaudier-Brzeska was a good sculptor and that Wyndham Lewis was a great master of design. It has, however, reached an almost irreducible minimum, and I am, perhaps, fairly safe in reasserting Joyce’s ability as a writer. It will cost me no more than a few violent attacks from several sheltered, and therefore courageous, anonymities. When you tell the Irish that they are slow in recognizing their own men of genius they reply with street riots and politics.
Now, despite the jobbing of bigots and of their sectarian publishing houses, and despite the “Fly-Fishers” and the types which they represent, and despite the unwillingness of the print-packers (a word derived from pork-packers) and the initial objections of the Dublin publishers and the later unwillingness of the English publishers, Mr. Joyce’s novel appears in book form, and intelligent readers gathering few by few will read it, and it will remain a permanent part of English literature—written by an Irishman in Trieste and first published in New York City.4 I doubt if a comparison of Mr. Joyce to other English writers or Irish writers would much help to define him. One can only say that he is rather unlike them. The Portrait is very different from L’Education Sentimentale, but it would be easier to compare it with that novel of Flaubert’s than with anything else. Flaubert pointed out that if France had studied his work they might have been saved a good deal in 1870. If more people had read The Portrait and certain stories in Mr. Joyce’s Dubliners there might have been less recent trouble in Ireland. A clear diagnosis is never without its value.
Apart from Mr. Joyce’s realism—the school-life, the life in the University, the family dinner with the discussion of Parnell depicted in his novel—apart from, or of a piece with, all this is the style, the actual writing: hard, clear-cut, with no waste of words, no bundling up of useless phrases, no filling in with pages of slosh.
It is very important that there should be clear, unexaggerated, realistic literature. It is very important that there should be good prose. The hell of contemporary Europe is caused by the lack of representative government in Germany, and by the nonexistence of decent prose in the German language. Clear thought and sanity depend on clear prose. They cannot live apart. The former produces the latter. The latter conserves and transmits the former.
The mush of the German sentence, the straddling of the verb out to the end, are just as much a part of the befoozlement of Kultur and the consequent hell, as was the rhetoric of later Rome the seed and the symptom of the Roman Empire’s decadence and extinction. A nation that cannot write clearly cannot be trusted to govern, nor yet to think.
Germany has had two decent prose-writers, Frederick the Great and Heine—the one taught by Voltaire, and the other saturated with French and with Paris. Only a nation accustomed to muzzy writing could have been led by the nose and bamboozled as the Germans have been by their controllers.
The terror of clarity is not confined to any one people. The obstructionist and the provincial are everywhere, and in them alone is the permanent danger to civilization. Clear, hard prose is the safeguard and should be valued as such. The mind accustomed to it will not be cheated or stampeded by national phrases and public emotionalities.
These facts are true, even for the detesters of literature. For those who love good writing there is no need of argument. In the present instance it is enough to say to those who will believe one that Mr. Joyce’s book is now procurable.
PARIS LETTER
May, 1922 Ulysses
Πoλλὤγ δ’ ἀνθρὣπων iδεν ἅστ∈α, καi υóoν ἕγνω. All men should “Unite to give praise to Ulysses”; those who will not, may content themselves with a place in the lower intellectual orders; I do not mean that they should all praise it from the same viewpoint; but all serious men of letters, whether they write out a critique or not, will certainly have to make one for their own use. To begin with matters lying outside dispute I should say that Joyce has taken up the art of writing where Flaubert left it. In Dubliners and The Portrait he had not exceeded the Trois Contes or L’Education; in Ulysses he has carried on a process begun in Bouvard et Pécuchet;1 he has brought it to a degree of greater efficiency, of greater compactness; he has swallowed the Tentation de St. Antoine whole, it serves as comparison for a single episode in Ulysses. Ulysses has more form than any novel of Flaubert’s. Cervantes had parodied his predecessors and might be taken as basis of comparison for another of Joyce’s modes of concision, but where Cervantes satirized one manner of folly and one sort of highfalutin’ expression, Joyce satirizes at least seventy, and includes a whole history of English prose, by implication.
Messrs Bouvard and Pécuchet are the basis of democracy; Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the man in the street, the next man, the public, not our public, but Mr. Wells’ public; for Mr. Wells he is Hocking’s public, he is I’homme moyen sensuel; he is also Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, Everyman, and “the goat” ... πoλλἁ πἁθεν ... κατα θυµòν.
Flaubert having recorded provincial customs in Bovary and city habits in L’Education, set out to complete his record of nineteenth century life by presenting all sorts of things that the average man of the period would have had in his head; Joyce has found a more expeditious method of summary and analysis. After Bouvard and his friend have retired to the country Flaubert’s incompleted narrative drags; in Ulysses anything may occur at any moment; Bloom suffers kata thumon; “every fellow mousing round for his liver and his lights”: he is polumetis and a receiver of all things.
Joyce’s characters not only speak their own language, but they think their own language. Thus Master Dignam stood looking at the poster: “two puckers stripped to their pelts and putting up their props....
“Gob that’d be a good pucking match to see, Myler Keogh, that’s the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bob entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. When is it? May the twenty second. Sure, the blooming thing is all over.”
But Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed: “And her boys, were they getting on well at Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad to hear that. And Mr. Sheehy himself? Still in London. The House was still sitting, to be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very probable that Father Bernard Vaughn would come again to preach. O, yes, a very great success. A wonderful man really.”
Father Conmee later “reflected on the providence of the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs where men might dig it out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.”
The dialects are not all local, on page 406 we hear that: “Elijah is coming. Washed in the Blood of the Lamb. Come on, you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanut-brained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy! Alexander J. Christ Dowie, that’s yanked to glory most half this planet from ’Frisco Beach to Vladivostok. The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that he’s on the square and a corking fine business proposition. He’s the grandest thing yet, and don’t you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You’ll need to rise precious early, you sinner there, if you want to diddle Almighty God.... Not half. He’s got a coughmixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his backpocket. Just you try it on.”
This varigation of dialects allows Joyce to present his matter, his tones of mind, very rapidly; it is no more succinct than Flaubert’s exhaustion of
the relation of Emma and her mother-in-law; or of Père Rouault’s character, as epitomized in his last letter to Emma; but it is more rapid than the record of “received ideas” in Bouvard et Pécuchet.
Ulysses is, presumably, as unrepeatable as Tristram Shandy; I mean you cannot duplicate it; you can’t take it as a “model,” as you could Bovary; but it does complete something begun in Bouvard; and it does add definitely to the international store of literary technique.
Stock novels, even excellent stock novels, seem infinitely long, and infinitely encumbered, after one has watched Joyce squeeze the last drop out of a situation, a science, a state of mind, in half a page, in a catechismic question and answer, in a tirade à la Rabelais.
Rabelais himself rests, he remains, he is too solid to be diminished by any pursuer; he was a rock against the follies of his age; against ecclesiastic theology, and more remarkably, against the blind idolatry of the classics just coming into fashion. He refused the lot, lock, stock, and barrel, with a greater heave than Joyce has yet exhibited; but I can think of no other prose author whose proportional status in pan-literature is not modified by the advent of Ulysses.
James (H.)2 speaks with his own so beautiful voice, even sometimes when his creations should be using their own; Joyce speaks if not with the tongue of men and angels, at least with a many-tongued and multiple language, of small boys, street preachers, of genteel and ungenteel, of bowsers and undertakers, of Gertie McDowell and Mr. Deasey.
One reads Proust and thinks him very accomplished; one reads H. J. and knows that he is very accomplished; one begins Ulysses and thinks, perhaps rightly, that Joyce is less so; that he is at any rate less gracile; and one considers how excellently both James and Proust “convey their atmospheres”; yet the atmosphere of the Gerty-Nausika episode with its echoes of vesper service is certainly “conveyed,” and conveyed with a certitude and efficiency that neither James nor Proust have excelled.