EZR A POUND

The Cantos

i
n the final moments of Le Mépris (1963), Jean-Luc Godard’s
elegy for a lost cinema filtered through the production of an
ill-fated adaptation of The Odyssey, he left his fictional Odysseus
on the roof of the Casa Malaparte, that great wedge of modern-
ist architecture jutting out from the cliffs of Capri, as the camera
whirred behind him, and sky and sea unfurled towards a final cut.
To rediscover Odysseus, one must travel through thirty-five years of
Godard’s career to the final part of Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989–98),
Chapter 4B, ‘Les Signes parmi nous’ (1998), where Odysseus is the
thread linking Godard to the modernist American poet Ezra Pound.
The penultimate voice we hear at the culmination of Godard’s epic
account of the interrelations between film and twentieth-century
history belongs to Pound, reading from the first of the Cantos (2001).
Pound’s great multi-part poem was his attempt to write a ‘poem
containing history’, composed over half a century from the 1910s to
the 1960s, with early versions of the first three cantos published in
three successive issues of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in 1917
and the final section of the poem, Drafts and Fragments, published in
1969 (the first complete edition came in 1970). It marked the continu-
ation of his experiments into poetic form, pioneered in Imagism and
Vorticism, to create a poetics that could encompass high speech and
low doggerel, condottieri and scoundrels, and a historical sweep that
extended from Ancient Greece and Confucian China to Medieval
Provence and contemporary Italy. He described his method as ‘ideo­
grammic’, in reference to the Chinese poetry which had influenced
him as a young man, when he saw in the ideogram’s tense union of
form and idea a way to shirk off the crud of late Victorian verbiage.
The poem’s composition tracked Pound’s life: the modernist
tyro in London and Paris, championing James Joyce and T.S. ELIOT,
sparring with Ernest Hemingway and disdaining the Bloomsbury
set, giving way to the Fascist propagandist in Mussolini’s Italy, en-
tertaining anti-semitic fantasies as the poetry shrivelled into lists and
grievances, before fuming and blustering on Radio Rome during the
Second World War. And then, nearly two decades of incarceration:

A Draft of XVI Cantos of Ezra Pound for the Beginning of a Poem of

Some Length. Paris: Three Mountain Press, 1925.
Reading with Jean-Luc Godard 255

first in an American internment camp outside of Pisa, where, in the

darkest moment of his life, he produced in The Pisan Cantos (1948)
some of his greatest poetry, followed by seventeen years in an asylum
outside of Washington D.C., a diagnosis of personality disorder pre-
venting a treason trial that could have led to his execution.
Running to 800 pages and with a textual density rivalled only by
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), the Cantos are a monument to a lost
culture. As modernism itself slips into history it can seem a work
of impenetrable difficulty and strangeness, but one figure remains
a constant through the poem: Odysseus, whose journey becomes a
mirror for Pound’s own restless wanderings, and a thread that ties
him to a vision of culture and history. Indeed, in keeping with the
dialogic, polyvocal technique that is central to his poetic project,
Pound begins the poem with a sixteenth-century Latin translation
of Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, the so-called Nekyia, which recounts
the descent of Odysseus into the underworld to speak with the ghost
of the soothsayer Tiresias so that he may discover whether he will
end his wanderings and return to his homeland of Ithaca. It is a frag-
ment from this section of the poem that we hear as Histoire(s) draws
to a close:
But first Elpenor came, our Friend Elpenor / Unburied, cast
on the wide earth / Limbs that we left in the house of Circe
/ Unwept, unwrapped in sepulchre, since toils urged other /
Pitiful spirit (p. 4; 1998A, vol. 4, p. 304).
Before he can speak with the blind Theban seer, Odysseus is ac-
costed by other shades—the first of whom is Elpenor, the youngest
member of his crew who has been killed in a drunken fall from the
roof of Circe’s house. We know no more about him: youth and fool-
ishness are his only traits. At first, Odysseus believes Elpenor merely
made the journey to Hades more quickly than the rest, and it is with
shock that he comes to understand the truth: Elpenor remains cast
adrift in Hades because he has yet to be buried and is trapped in a
state of limbo. It is this interstitial status of Elpenor, between life and
death, which is his most marked characteristic. Odysseus’ descent
and his meeting with Elpenor then become one element in Pound’s
ideogrammic conception of history, allowing us to see interconnec-
tions between the different epochs through which the poem passes,
hearing voices from the past emerge from the babble of history for a
moment, only to return once more to silence.
256 Reading with Jean-Luc Godard

Despite Godard stressing in his narration earlier in the chapter

that ‘in the cinema we don’t have books / we only have music and
painting’ (1998A, vol. 4, p. 183), it is telling, in light of the central
project(ion) of Histoire(s), that Pound should enter the work at its
close. Of course, Godard’s Histoire(s) is itself largely composed of
visual and verbal ‘quotations’, creating a dense weave of images, cap-
tions and sounds, from grainy newsreels to the glossiest of Holly­
wood musicals: it is this, perhaps, which lies behind Godard’s decision
to use Pound’s lines at this point, gesturing to his insistent refrain
that there is no one history, only histories—something to which
the very title of Histoire(s) alludes. As with Pound, Godard’s frac-
turing and fragmenting of his sources is a form of transformation
and translation. Pound’s use of the ideogram and Godard’s expanded
conception of montage as it has developed over the past three dec-
ades have common cause in this regard: Godard has placed himself
in a direct line of descent from Sergei Eisenstein, although he has
claimed that ‘Eisenstein naturally thought he had found montage. . . .
But by montage I mean something much more vast’ (2000, p. 17), as
if expanding it beyond the limits of cinema to include history itself.
When Godard quotes Pound quoting Homer, the effect is dizzy-
ing. But why, from all of Pound’s oeuvre, should Godard use this
fragment, and particularly in a place of such prominence? Perhaps
a clue can be found in the construction ‘Elpenor, unburied’—and
one must hear the great rolling r-sounds Pound wrings from both
words—for here one finds what the present author believes to be its
central theme: that Elpenor not having been given his funeral rites
is the cause of his anguished seeking of Odysseus. Is it not possible,
therefore, to equate Elpenor with Godard’s conception of both cin-
ema and history at the end of the twentieth century, and to claim
that both are, effectively, unburied ? In Godard’s cinematographic
underworld, his Nekyia raises other shades who haunt our present
so that we too may become poets of our desolate time.
Corin Depper
Ezra Pound. The Cantos, 1993.
———. Les Cantos, 2013.
Jean-Luc Godard. Histoire(s) du cinéma, 4 vols., 1998A.
Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound Reads Ezra Pound (audio recording) (1960), 2001.
Michael Temple & James S. Williams. Introduction to the Mysteries of
Cinema, 2000.