We can see these terms being negotiated in the debate over music-hall's significance which took place in early 1914 between F. T. Marinetti, the Futurist leader and theorist, and Gordon Craig, the English theater critic and reformer. Marinetti's contribution to the debate, "The Variety Theater," first appeared in Italian in October 1913; a month later an English translation of it appeared under the title, "The Meaning of the Music Hall"; and finally, in January, 1914, a new English translation of it appeared, this time under the title "In Praise of the Variety Theatre," published in Craig's own journal, printed in Florence, The Mask. "In Praise of the Variety Theatre" is Marinetti's most sustained attack on "the contemporary theatre." He urges that the contemporary world demands a new kind of drama which should turn to "music Halls, Café-chantants or equestrian circuses" for models. Indeed, these are the only theatrical spectacles exclusively "worthy of a truly futurist spirit." For the properly Futurist theater requires a denial of history and tradition, which is precisely what music hall provides: there is not "any kind of tradition: neither master nor dogmas." 15
In his rejoinder, which appeared in the same number of The Mask, Craig singles out Marinetti's failure to discern the extensive history and tradition of that lay behind music-hall, a failure implicit in his anti-historical account of the halls. Drawing on the tradition epitomized by Pennell and Beerbohm, Craig patiently underscores how music-hall comprises and collates the very stuff of history. When Marinetti claims it a virtue of music hall that "serious men never go to a variety show," Craig counters: "I do. I now go very often to a Variety Theatre and to the Cinematograph," noting that "to watch how the conditions of these two places of amusement vary is of considerable interest to me." 16 Like Arthur Symons, Craig insists that apparently undifferentiated sites of mere vulgarity in fact boast a rich and surprising diversity. 17 And, like Pennell, Craig emphasizes the accumulation of tradition compressed in music-hall song stylings and sketch comedy. Pointedly diverging from Marinetti, Craig firmly insists that music-hall is "as old as the valleys." To Marinetti's primitivist passion, Craig replies with tempered appreciation. True, Craig's statement slights the popular; "old as the valleys" can imply that popular entertainment is merely natural, intuitive activity, as opposed to something learned or cultivated. But the exchange revealingly suggests the range and state of contemporary discourse about the English popular. Marinetti's polemical attempt to equate popular culture with variety theater and primitive vitality could not be accepted by Craig or other English readers without conceptual clarification and some required historicizing.
G.H. Mair's 1916 essay, "The Music Hall," was published in The English Review, a journal which addressed a smaller, more intellectual audience. Mair's essay, which almost takes for granted music hall's predominance in the London artistic scene, insists that music hall is a proud cultural resource. Its credibility resides in its reflective illumination of English character, an argument which easily aligns with Pennell's sense of music- hall pedigree. The halls join transient performance with historical tradition, suggesting the continuing vitality of both. Music-hall embodies a continuous history, because:
it has preserved the salient qualities of its ancestry--its delight in virtuosity, in the pleasure of a thing well done, its sense of an intimate personal relation between audience and actors. . . . And the art of the music-hall bears its flowers and fruit because it draws its nourishment from beneath the shams on the surface of our civilization, from the lasting permanent things. 18
Arguments concerning the natural strength and continuity of English character assume ideological overtones, and Mair strikes a new note in the discourse of music-hall when he proudly claims that it has transformed London into a repository of world culture. "Just because [music-hall] has this vitality, this close and intimate bond with its audience, the music-hall is . . . incomparably the most elastic" ("MH," 126). He offers a detailed inventory which suggests his satisfaction with these attainments, all secured by music-hall:
If you wanted to see how London draws into its throbbing centre all the splendour, and wealth, and beauty in the world, you could do not better [than visit] one of the great music-halls. All the wonders of the world are there, Indian jugglers, American cowboys, singers from Paris, dancers from St. Petersburg, and Moscow and Berlin and the East. ("MH," 126).
But this delight in expansive inventory alternates with fears of cultural deprivation, concern that demonstrable plenty does not ensure a continued surplus.
Whatever its capacity to capture and absorb every new kind of public delight, the music hall cannot preserve the final current of its life if it loses that part of itself which gives it its quality of race and its continuity. We cannot have our George Robey and Marie Lloyd and Harry Lauder forever. When the time comes whom shall we set on vacant thrones? It is a question which every true lover of the music-hall will want to settle for himself, and the critic must approach with some diffidence. ("MH," 127)
Here, Mair echoes Pennell's fear that music-hall will be unable to sustain itself. But Mair ascribes his fullest expression of cultural pessimism to another voice, a music-hall devotee whom he claims to know. This partisan, who in some respects resembles the music-hall spectator described in essays by Max Beerbohm, offers a different, much darker account of the form's current state, one which names the new forces that are challenging popular music-hall, threatening to end its dominance as a ritual, and with it a continuity in the experience of Englishness. "There are pessimists," he observes, "who believe that the heyday of the music-hall is over. A plethora of internationalism, respectability and syndicated halls has smothered, so they say, the native Anglo-Saxon vulgarity and individualism which was its chiefest glory; and the sketch, the moving pictures and the dancers but come to give the final blow" ("MH," 127). Mair sounds out the opinion of a dedicated member of this nostalgic party:
One of these strait and formal votaries I used sometimes to hear of, who . . . [possessed] an amazing and exact knowledge of the archaeology of the halls as they were twenty-five or thirty years ago. The music-hall was his hobby, his avocation, the thing at which he shone in all his splendour. . . . All the circumstance and traditionof the business he knew, as his betters might know a liturgy or a ritual. ("MH," 127)
Mair's music-hall adept reveals the extent to which the critical mainstream had assimilated what had once been an élite minority's critical expectations for the form, and how far the dominant agenda had assimilated a concept of the popular associated with it. His account presents us with an axiom that will serve as Eliot's first principle in "Marie Lloyd," namely, that music-hall form has something to do with the stuff of Englishness. Indeed, all the anxieties voiced by Mair's music-hall fan--the dangers of commercial acceptability, the marketing of music-hall, the growing success of moving pictures--return in Eliot's apocalyptic view of the demise of music hall and Englishness. Both believe that the halls stand in a mimetic relation to national character; both invest the form with the accompanying gravitas of accumulated English history and culture. Both voice considerable anxiety over the possibility that the music hall may die and national identity will be eclipsed as the audience for "authentic" music-hall dwindles. Both vilify the cinema as an example of "inorganic" mass culture, to which the genuine English popular stands in stark contrast as an ideal which has realized.
Did music-hall attest to seamless continuities in the history of English culture, or did it attest to its twilight, its impending bankruptcy? Such a question arose from what constitutes the stuff of legitimation within this rhetoric. Elegiac writing about the music-hall staved off suspicions that a new order might be emerging in which both the halls and the ideals enshrined in the literature of music-hall apology would prove outmoded. If the lament set music-hall legibility under the designation of national character, it also set the form and the accompanying concepts under considerable strain. At the onset of a new century, the globe was shrinking, colonialism was embattled, and new technologies of war, travel, and information flow were poised to overtake and overwhelm the faith in nation and Empire. For Mair, Craig, and other apologists for the halls, the Shaman poet of the past also served to re the only possible future for modern art worth having, where poets will receive the requisite dignity. In Mair, music-hall is colored by the old hues of the confident and expansive nation-state, along with the older tints of a previous aesthetic contract: the old world of Bardic expression.
Mair's survey of the music hall reveals the constant rhetorical strain evident in contemporary writing about it. The delight in various forms of national character and creativity alternates with fears of depletion. Modernity threatens to consume the resources of national expression and destroy their links with the past, leaving intellectuals to memorialize a vanished history. Apologists for the halls, in contrast, sanction a sentimental appreciation of that history which the halls have allegedly condensed. One response to such a threat is to circle up the wagons and protect whatever remains from outsiders. Inevitably, both Beerbohm's patron of the "older and better" music-hall and Mair's music-hall acolyte sound a protectionist note concerning the dangers facing English culture.
It was within the conventions of this ambivalent tradition that Eliot's essay on Marie Lloyd took shape, grounded in a notion of England which for Eliot assumed "classical proportions, as Alan Marshall has put it, an ideal and organic England with a unified tradition of practice and character, and a sense of music hall which required a tone of elegiac despair. 19 The essay posits the natural priority of local communication over mediated "art," music-hall over film, original performance over mere reproduction. The "working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd" was "performing part of the act; he was engaged in that collaboration of the audience with artist which is necessary in all art" ("ML," 174). What is mourned with her passing is not simply the loss of a singer or a performing style, but the end of a privileged relation between intellectuals, now red by Lloyd, and culture, now red by the working class.
Meanwhile, the new medium that had earlier served as a mere supplement to music hall has now replaced it.
With the decay of the music-hall, with encroachment of the cheap and rapid-breeding cinema, the lower classes will . . . go to the cinema, where [the] mind [is] lulled by continuous senseless music and continuous action too rapid for the brain to act upon, and will receive, without giving, in that same listless apathy with which the middle and upper classes regard any entertainment of the nature of art. ("ML," 174)
The disposable form of the new media is what Eliot believes to be dangerous, not the content of a specific broadcast or film. Worse still, the new mass culture seeks to embody the popular even as it negates a real relationship between that culture and national tradition. The products of cinema stand outside national origin, or at least attain this heady status by virtue of their global consumption. The commodified popular represents a new cultural force, existing on a scale that Eliot dreads.
When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100 cheap motorcars, when applied science has done everything possible with the material on this earth to make life as interesting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians. ("ML," 174)
The Melanesians, of course, had been committing suicide out of sheer boredom.
Lloyd's particular significance as popular representative emerges as the essay's crucial topic. The meaning of representation here looks back to the tradition of writing about music-hall as a re for the popular; but it also comprises the new core insight standing at the heart of Eliot's memorial. The singer stands as "representative" in two conflicting senses. On the one hand, it is suggested that, through song, Lloyd represents a fact of her nature, the working-class world from which she came. For Eliot, she stands within English history and within a recognizable, fixed cultural hierarchy. Her achievement and status exhibit a triumphant lack of self-consciousness, attainment gained without analysis. Her loss is all the more final because she is an inexplicable original, although her fidelity to her class nature remains in the last instance, "natural," that is uncritical, since it would be natural for working-class artists to express themselves in footloose, naughty, but instinctive, ways. In this reading Lloyd is representative, and also "representable" within a traditional order. The old languages of class and national verity which had been sounded in earlier laments about the music-hall are recycled.
Yet in small touches rather than broad strokes, Eliot also expresses another story here. He strives to suggest a core of difference that exists within the popular, to indicate that representation within the popular can comprise contingency rather than essence, and that contingency can encompass even performers who seem to embody a seamless relation between audience and artists. A year before the publication of "Marie Lloyd," Eliot writes of a Jewish-American performer on the London stage, Ethel Levey; he is fascinated by her calculated delivery and icy, formal remove from the ostensible content of her performance.
Her type is quite different from that of Marie Lloyd or Nellie Wallace. She is the most aloof and impersonal of personalities; indifferent, rather than contemptuous, towards that audience . . . Hers is not broad farce, but a fascinating inhuman grotesquerie; she plays for herself rather than for the audience. Her art requires a setting which (in this country) it has never had. 20
With Levey, the range of English national character projected at the halls becomes richer and more varied. Despite his familiarity with the conventions of fin-de-siècle appreciation of music-hall, Eliot moves to a conception of the popular that accommodates difference in ethnic or gendered performance styles, one that also distinguishes among competing aesthetic possibilities within music hall form, ranging from the fierce and forceful Englishness of singers such as Lloyd and Nellie Wallace to the cooler, more cerebral presentations of performers such as Levey. This conception of the popular is no longer the monolithic one which characterized earlier writings about music hall.
The Victorian compromise concerning music hall demanded that its proper appreciation be set within a specific tale about England and its people, and it slighted another aspect of music-hall performance which Victorian observers surely suspected, but which Eliot is among the first to articulate: that celebrities like Lloyd demonstrated unprecedented freedom in staging their status as celebrities. Indeed, Eliot may well have been drawing on popular tradition which noted and admired Lloyd's ability to manipulate the space between the "vulgar" content of a song's lyrics and her own identity, her capacity to construct and deconstruct her own image. Witness the oft-repeated story concerning Lloyd's performance before the censors. Lloyd, the legend goes, was once called before the Licensing Committee of the London County Council and asked to perform a song whose lyrics had caused complaint. She proceeded to perform the number without elaboration and won the committee's approval. Then she immediately launched into the innocuous parlor ballad, "Come into the Garden, Maud," by Alfred Lord Tennyson, giving it a thoroughly lascivious rendition. Even in the early days of Lloyd's career, when prostitution in certain London halls (e.g., the Empire in Leicester Square) was so conspicuous that it fueled fears that the halls and their songs fostered public lewdness, reviewers had noted Lloyd's distance from the commercial courtesans, a distance fashioned partly by her artful re-staging of street life. The Era, a popular late-Victorian trade journal for the halls, stressed the gulf between performance and essence in Lloyd; her performance made it clear that she "studied the habits and manners of pavement magdalenes with adequate care and attention," and without risk of contamination. 21
Lloyd's self-fashioning of her identity and celebrity resulted in paradoxes. She was the very image of working-class lubricity, but she also demonstrated her freedom from old rules by manipulating and crafting the stuff of the vulgar. Something believed uncontrollable sexuality, and in particular feminine sexuality, which was assumed to exert predatory control over consciousness, could be crafted, stylized, managed. As a celebrity, Lloyd occupied a contested territory which encompassed a contradiction: she expressed erotic life as something natural to working-class character, yet played with sexuality as spectacle and construct.
Eliot's essay on "Marie Lloyd" trucks with the ambiguities toward essence and art which Lloyd herself had marshalled, developing insights which do not fit within the conventions of writing about music hall. Eliot underscores the degree to which the audience participated in Lloyd's performances, becoming her collaborators, and this insight widens the semantic range ascribed to the term "representation" within the essay. For now representation stands as willed and artful manipulation, rather than natural fact rendered visible through a prior context of class or history. If an implied contract exists between performer and audience, one which licenses the performer to express and represent the audience, then Lloyd had pushed at the limits of her own contract. In her self-conscious challenge to the expectations that singers stand in for their audiences, Lloyd represents Eliot himself, in a startlingly novel fashion. It is Eliot's experience in a life lived outside the working-class, as much as her "native" working class, which gets clarified through Lloyd's performance. She represents Eliot in an individual capacity, as well as a public manner: in the private world of the fantasist. Lloyd's ability to remake her identity in public offers sanction for the poet's endeavor to displace the solid facts of class and gender in order to maintain his fandom. She manipulates class images with a liberty that threatens the hierarchical terms set within the Victorian compromise, where aesthetic order relied upon acceptance of essential class difference. The compromise was manifest in the heaps of critical praise lavished on working-class people for seeming to reproduce, rather than revise, their image and character. Lloyd's liberties, however, correlate with the freedoms that Eliot naturally assumes when he presumes that a working-class English woman represents his own place, in the England of his imagining.
Here, Eliot's presumption that Lloyd can represent his interests and desires touches on our own situation, our promiscuous affiliation with various contemporary avatars of the popular. It hints at the realization that notions like the body, the people, and woman are simply categories, and accordingly, might be evaded, transgressed or displaced--indeed, are fated to be so in a new order. Lloyd plays two roles in the essay and Eliot articulates both. The singer represents her class; at the same time, she speaks for Eliot, to push Ralph Ellison's phrase, on a different frequency. That Lloyd represents Eliot in this new register implies a shift, tacitly recognized by Eliot himself, within the protocols of representation authorized by the late-Victorian popular. According to the Victorian compromise, the representative quality of a popular singer confirmed pre-existing beliefs about the nature of England and Englishness. Lloyd's performance style does remind Eliot of continuity in English identity and history; but it also suggests a fundamental shift within the structure of the popular, which previous intellectuals had tended to homogenize.
Representation is not the only term in Eliot's essay which contains more than one set of meanings. Science is another. It stands for a realm of universal truths which will ratify what otherwise might be Eliot's purely subjective impressions, but it also names the forces which are fostering the new global order that is threatening the order of values reflected in the stories which earlier critics have told about national culture. It was, of course, nothing new for Eliot to invoke science in his critical prose, as readers of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" will readily recall, in which metaphors from chemistry are used to suggest the clarity and precision of the author's arguments over the imprecise thinking that by implication dominates the humanities. 22 In "Marie Lloyd" it is anthropology which is called on to provide the hard, factual basis for Eliot's dark speculation that contemporary culture is dying. Science marks the saving difference between his apocalyptic warnings and the dyspeptic rumblings of the Victorian sage. At the same time, however, the world-weariness that ethnographer W. H. R. Rivers diagnoses in his subject group of Melanesians, degraded by their encounter with the scientific products and cultural vacuum of Western modernity, provides an analogue to the cultural leveling Eliot discerns in English audiences who can no longer appreciate the music-hall. This contradiction gives the essay a burdensome ambiguity. Science grounds the author's cultural authority, yet it also represents the very forces that are endangering the fragile art of music-hall. The new kind of popular which is emerging under impress of advancing science performs in ways that render unnecessary the conventional story about national history which was thought to be epitomized in the music-hall. Science underwrites the conquest of distance and makes possible a global stance that threatens the coherence of stories about a national, homogenous cultural legacy.
Yet Rivers's Melanesians only appear to designate a cosmopolitan range of experience which exists outside the nation. Their allegorical import is more primary, for they re the experience of cultural decline which is occurring in a specifically English context. They stand in for the native English. Blame for the cultural negligence of music-hall does not fall with them; the blindness of the English to the art in their midst is due to cultural preconditioning and the materialist ethos of scientific progress. The Melanesians are proof that the people, faced with the choices presented by a widely dispersed media culture, will inevitably desecrate truly popular art. Indigenous peoples, including the English working class, are fated to become demoralized by the forces of a new world order.
The poet's dark apprehension stems from the deeper realization that a certain kind of critical project has passed with Lloyd. The literary professional, an expert at describing cultural work within the parameters of the nation, is losing ground to another expert, the producer utilizing "rapid-breeding" technology (e.g., cinema) to create transnational works. The literary intellectual owes fealty to culture as defined by specific, local manifestations, and the new global culture is outside his purview. Albeit implicitly, "Marie Lloyd" contains an embryonic awareness of the new role which the popular might assume in a world organized by a global distribution of information and commodities, but the point is left undeveloped, perhaps because Eliot clings to an exhausted notion of the popular. From late-Victorian to modernist, from Pennell to Eliot, lamenting the decline of music-hall had conferred critical purchase on a corps of expert observers who presented themselves as capable of discerning cultural achievement even in its decadence. The loss of Marie Lloyd and the imminent end of music-hall signify the passing of that project. Eliot's essay marks the final stand for one version of the myth of the intellectual, one in which he or she served as professional tutor for a public. That compact between the modern critic and reader was grounded in the loyalty of both to notions of cultural and national homogeneity.
In "Marie Lloyd," Eliot all but foresees the demise of that world; institutions of taste making that once cordoned off the popular are being cast aside. In the new world which Eliot sees at hand, consumers have access to an increasingly wider range of artistic options and consciousness is permeated by the reproduction and circulation of interiorities utterly divorced from their point of origin. Identity markers are merely a purchase away. Even dissent can be downloaded. Racial integration may be remote in real life, but fantasies of it are on sale for compensatory use. Identity models for affluent white youth, whether they express outrage, cool, or sexual confidence, leap over racial boundaries; exemplars are as likely to be culled from hip-hop as European art song, or from parental collections of mainstream pop. The popular is distributed everywhere today, and is the foundation of globalization. Defined around the commodity, identity itself becomes plural and variegated, accommodating plural selves, not uniform souls. We can be certain only that the aesthetic exemplars for our individual fantasies of identification and representation cannot simply be read off by the coordinates of their original social rank.
"Marie Lloyd" foreshadows this new dispensation, even if it does so only negatively as it announces an end to the old compact among criticism, national identity, and the popular, a compact withering in the face of global capitalism, with its enlarged markets and heightened capacity to move cultural products across borders. The passing of Lloyd has fixed Eliot's certainty that she spoke for both her audience and himself in a manner that has transgressed the conventional high / low hierarchy; she had created a new world where identification and imagination spilled over old boundaries. Class difference, and perhaps difference in general, no longer present a real barrier which separates the authority of middle-class gourmands from the cultural products they savor and esteem.
The fears expressed in "Marie Lloyd" and its chiliastic stance are wildly overblown. Our current cultural situation may suggest that the lament for Lloyd is fully justified, but that Eliot's concern over the end of a middle class dominion over aesthetic evaluation has been proved premature. Eliot, in mourning the loss of a compact which had permitted intellectuals to redeem the popular and exert enough authority to make this recognition of difference matter, also articulates the desire of modern subjects to sentimentalize difference for culture's sake. And after all, sentimentalizing difference is also the mean whereby contemporary culture fits professional culture to the popular. And now, as then, what gets sentimentalized is class; critics have never lost their belief that genuine culture transcends its origins, or that its reception somehow cancels out class realities. The sentimental popular treats real social inequity and barriers as imaginary. That formula for cultural hegemony of the new middle-class intellectuals has long outlasted the music-hall, and for all we know, it may well survive the imagined community forged by cinematic culture.
Barry J. Faulk is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida State University. He is currently working on a book entitled Aesthetics and Authority: London Professionals and the Fortunes of Music Hall.
1. See, for example, T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, (1984; Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, revised ed. 1984); henceforth abbreviated as POML; Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York: Oxford UP, 1994); Ronald Schuchard, Eliot's Dark Angel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999); henceforth abbreviated as EDA. Manju Jaidka, T.S. Eliot's Use of Popular Sources (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997); and Amy Koritz, Gendering Bodies / Performing Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
2. Eric Lott uses Clark's gloss on Eliot to read the composite, multi-class character of the American vernacular popular established in minstrelsy; see Love and Theft, 91, 103. David Peters Corbett takes Clark's Gallic popular to explain artistic choices made by painter Walter Sickert in composing canvases of English music-hall scenes; see Corbett's essay, "Seeing into Modernity: Walter Sickert's Music Hall scenes, c. 1888-1907, and English Modernism," Modernism /Modernity 7 (April 2000): 285-306. Like these writers, I build on Clark's claims concerning the genesis of the modern popular in nineteenth-century mass leisure forms, and I share Clark's understanding of the popular as a favorite discursive form of the new professional classes. However, I resist the implication that the popular had a simple functional use as a working-class containment for the class promulgating the notion.
3. Actually, on this point Clark's taut analysis of class and custom goes slack. He characterizes lower middle-class audiences for café-chantant as "connoisseurs of popular culture," proud experts who "define[d] themselves by their difference from the popular but also their possession of it" and that this possession offered this class fraction an edge over the "mere" working-class; see POML, 237. Clark similarly describes the café-chantant paintings by educated bohemians like Degas and Manet as the work of knowing and superior aficions of the popular. However, terms like "professional" and "expert" are stretched thin in the rush to harmonize these different instances as single manifestations of a repressive culture of professionalism. The homologies result from Clark's treatment of the rising managerial middle-class as both a grand transformation and mere capitalist business as usual. But not everyone is recognized as an expert to the same degree: and either professional culture produced a new dominant class, concerned with articulating its own codes, tastes and opinions, or it did not. The same inconsistency toward the managerial class (workers who are neither working-class nor owners, and wielding power on the basis of training and credentials rather than property or financial holdings) tempers the achievement of what remains the classic sociological treatment of the "new class" by Barbara and John Ehrenreich. The Ehrenreichs provide evidence that the consolidation of professional structures reshaped the capitalist division of labor, yet conclude by asserting that "to the extent that the PMC established itself . . . it did so on terms set by the capitalist class." See "The Professional-managerial class," in Between Labor and Capital ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979). My reading here has its genesis in reading the introduction to Mark Garrett Cooper's forthcoming Visual Love Story: How Silent Hollywood Incorporated America (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press). A conviction that professional culture transformed how capitalists wielded power underlies my essay; accordingly, I maintain that expert culture must be treated with a degree of specificity. My conception of the late Victorian English managerial class as a cadre of culture mavens and hedonists is influenced by Immanuel Wallenstein's witty and acute psychological profile of the professional class, "The Bourgeoisie--Concept or Reality," in The Wallenstein Reader (New York: the New Press, 2000), 324-43.
4. In the period between 1888 and 1914, an abundance of periodical essays seeking to interpret the deep significance of London music-hall commercial success saw print. Most of these essays assumed that the new prominence of music-hall resided in its ability to affect and reflect national character for good or ill. Such essays include James Payn, "The Music Hall," Cornhill 60 (July 1889): 68-79; F. Anstey, "London Music halls," Harpers Magazine 82 (January 1891): 190-202; Percy Fitzgerald, "Music-hall Land," National Review 15 (May 1890): 379-91; Frederick Wedmore, "Music Halls," The Nineteenth Century 40 (July 1896): 128-36. Below, I discuss in detail the possibly most influential of essays within this genre, authored by Elizabeth Pennell.
5. Ronald Schuchard shows how Eliot's earliest pronouncements on music-hall fit within the spirit of late Victorian discourse on the form, which held that it had value as heritage culture. The Victorian cognoscenti especially admired how music-hall seemed to express, or perhaps construct, English character. He cites Eliot's 1921 essay, "The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism," which asserts that "it is only perhaps in the music-halls" that once robust antique images of English character, of John Bull, retain vital life. See EDA, 106.
6. Schuchard views Eliot as "the last inheritor of the music-hall mystery," who sorts "the unsifted residue of the 1890s" (EDA, 104).
7. It is worth remarking that the distinction between mass culture and the popular articulated and maintained by fin-de-siècle and Edwardian music-hall observers does not resemble the traditional high / low divide that scholars typically draw, but plays according to more or less compelling versions of public culture. Intellectuals with managerial aspirations gained a measure of authority from recognizing and presiding over this difference, but the management logic refused to follow a strict binary. I am not alone in making revisionist claims on modernist culture divide rhetoric. See Corbett, cited above, but also Alison Pease, "Readers with Bodies: Modernist Criticism's Bridge across the Cultural Divide," Modernism / Modernity 7 (January 2000): 77-99; David Chinitz, "T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide," PMLA 110 : 236-48; Michael North, Reading 1922 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 140-73. A claim by North is especially relevant to my argument: that "modernism and popular culture" are "natural associates," a subset of "a larger cultural change in which public life and private consciousness came to be dominated by representations, by images" (North, Reading 1922, 141).
8. T.S Eliot, "Marie Lloyd," in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot ed Frank Kermode (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 173; hereafter abbreviated as "ML." See also T.J. Clark, POML, 216-17.
9. As noted above, Clark refers to the clerks and shop assistants who flocked to see café-chantant singer Thérèse perform, as "the connoisseurs of popular culture, its experts, its aestheticians; but expertise is a way of establishing imaginary distance and control" (POML, 237).
10. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, "The Pedigree of the Music-hall," Contemporary Review 63 (April 1893): 575-83; hereafter designated as "PMH."
11. Bill Readings suggests that the tradition of searching for a peculiarly English artistic genius, which Pennell fosters, began with John Dryden's construction of Shakespeare as resonant hybrid: both a natural English force and a master of high artifice and sophistication. See Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1996), 78.
12. These programmatic pieces include "The Blight on Music Hall," , "Demos's Mirror," , "At the Music Hall" , "The Older and Better Music Hall" , and "Idolum Aularum" . Many are collected in Around Theatres (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930). These pieces display a range of attitudes, from condescension to adulation. They work with a deceptive formal ease and apparent simplicity, which never fully conceals the complex emotional range at their core. With "At the Music Hall," (Saturday Review [20 July 1901]: 77), Beerbohm patronizes the halls as a nadir of popular stupidity and cultural abjection. Nonetheless, the halls still emerge as a cultural oasis in a period otherwise marked by sharp disjunctions between artist, craft, and audience demand. He idealizes performer and public in sharp statements such as this: "Turn by turn, these entertainments have grown up with reference to nothing but the public's own needs and aspirations. There is no compromise, no friction, between the form and the audience. The audience is the maker of the form, the form is the symbol of the audience." The statement reads like a codicil on Pennell's music-hall treatise; but the keen sense of the value of music-hall for the augmentation of critical authority is Beerbohm's own. "And thus a Music Hall offers always a great chance to any student of humanity at large."
13. Max Beerbohm, "The Older and Better Music Hall," in Around Theatres Volume II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 384; hereafter designated as "OBMH."
14. See Magali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley: 1977).
15. Both quotes from: Filippo Marinetti, "Futurism and the Theatre," in The Mask 6 (April 1914): 188.
16. Gordon Craig, "On Futurismo and the Theatre," in The Mask 6 (April 1914): 195.
17. Arthur Symons classifies different London music-halls by audiences and context in "A Spanish Music-hall," an essay reprinted in Cities, Sea-Coasts and Islands (New York: Brentano's 1918), 145. His larger argument in the essay stresses the complexity of music-hall experience and defends it from detractors who claimed it was uniformly vulgar and aesthetically unvarying.
18. G.H. Mair, "The Music Hall," in The English Review 13 (Dec. 1912-March 1913): 125. Henceforth abbreviated as "MH."
19. Alan Marshall, "'England and Nowhere'" in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 94.
20. T. S. Eliot, "London Letter," The Dial 70 (June 1921): 687.
21. The Era (30 April 1892): 3. I am grateful to Sally Ewer for this citation and her views on Lloyd's anti-realist performing style, contained in her unpublished essay "Every Little Movement has a Meaning of its own: Serious Frivolity at the Music Hall." Gareth Stedman Jones's dismissal of music-hall as a repressive "culture of consolation" has blocked more fluid readings of music-hall performance and audience response until relatively recently (Gareth Stedman Jones, "Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politlics in London, 1870-1900," Journal of Social History [summer 1974]: 490-917). See John Stokes, In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) for more subtle accounts. On Lloyd and the Licensing Committee incident, see Naomi Jacob, "Our Marie" (Marie Lloyd) (Bath: Cedric Chivers Ltd., 1936); Daniel Farson, Marie Lloyd and Music Hall (London: Tom Stacey Ltd., 1972); Richard Anthony Baker, Marie Lloyd: Queen of the Music Halls (London: R. Hale, 1990).
22. Eliot observes that "a suggestive analogy" for the poet's creative process might be "the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide" (Kermode, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 40).
Ezra Pound's "parleyings with Browning" are most apparent in the conception of the earliest Cantos. 1 Pound left little other direct commentary on the ways in which Browning's work influenced his own literary endeavors, although he frequently acknowledged Browning to be among the greatest poetic geniuses since Dante, one of the few that modern England had brought forth. 2 It has often been noted that Pound's early poetry imitates Browning's masks and the convolutions, colloquial tone, and rich, rugged rhythm of Browning's style. In his poem "Mesmerism" from 1906 Pound pays parodic tribute: "Here's to you, Old Hippety-Hop o' the accents." 3 The tone of Three Cantos 1, where Pound stages his exasperating effort of comprehending Browning's Sordello, is still dominated by such a self- ironizing admixture of irreverence and admiration. 4 Yet, Three Cantos also gives more complex testimony, both of Pound's deep indebtedness to Browning and of his struggle for poetic originality. Designed to be the exordium of Pound's modern epic, Three Cantos 1 in its first lines evokes Browning's Sordelloas a precursor text that is the unique example for a new form: a "bag of tricks" for poetic renewal, "a rag-bag" for modern consciousness, a theater for disembodied speech.
Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing's an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;
Say I dump my silvery catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines slapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse--this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.) 5
Quarreling with his muse, throughout Three Cantos 1, Pound points out Browning's "quirks and tweeks," the jarring idiosyncrasies of his poetry. A few lines offer a parody à la "Mesmerism": "Tower by tower / Red-brown the rounded bases, and the plan / Follows the builder's whim. Beaucaire's slim gray / Leaps from the stubby base of Altaforte" (P, 229). 6 Others comment directly on Sordello's confoundingly convoluted, allusive language and risky rhyming of the seemingly incompatible: "What a hodge podge you have made there!--/ Zanze and swanzig, of all opprobrious rhymes!" (P, 232). 7 Yet it is precisely this daring strategy of assembling the disparate that Pound finds intriguing. He suggests that Browning created a text that borders on the grotesque: half epic, half burlesque romance--"The rough men swarm out / In robes that are half Roman, half like the Knave of Hearts"(P, 229).He particularly dwells on Browning's montage of historical res, facts, events, and settings. He knowingly appraises Browning's "bag of tricks," devices for putting historical and literary tradition to free poetic use, as he points out that Browning falsely implied Sordello to be Dante's sole forerunner that he borrowed from Arnaut Daniel (whom Pound in turn had portrayed as a forerunner of Dante's in The Spirit of Romance) "that trick / Of the unfinished address," and that Browning disregards chronology:
And half your dates are out, you mix your eras;
For that great font Sordello sat beside--
'Tis an immortal passage, but the font?--
Is some two centuries out of the picture.
[P, 229] 8
Alluding to the rags of Sordello's narrator's motley dress, Pound labels a "rag-bag" Browning's technique of employing background materials, his drawing together bits and pieces into a plethora of textual and historical details. Pound implies that Browning has given him a good excuse for similarly pouring out on the public shore whatever he has gathered from the ocean of his readerly consciousness.
Say I dump my catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines flapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles.
[P, 229] 9
While Pound was not to retain this image in later versions of The Cantos, it is a metaphor for the technique he sets out to develop: the collecting of luminous concretenesses from the poet's store of knowledge for the rag-and-bone-shop of modernity.
The first decade of The Cantos's composition and revision has offered critics a natural place to look for the formative ideas behind the work as a whole. 10 Various critics have dwelt on the fact that the drastic reduction of allusions to Sordello coincides with an elliptical compression of Pound's language that helped introduce a new era in modernist writing. One common conclusion has been that Pound exorcised Browning from his Cantos in order to replace his own Browningesque "quirks and tweeks" with an original, modern poetic form. 11 More recent criticism, most notably Mary Ellen Gibson's, has tended to acknowledge that neither in his letters and critical prose, where he returned to him again and again as a point of reference, nor in his poetry did Pound ever completely turn away from Browning. 12 Pound's reading of Sordelloin Three Cantos indeed reveals how Pound explicitly worked his way toward remaking Browning, rather than exorcising him. Pound regards Sordellosimultaneously as a particular text and as an "art-form." Only with great difficulty, Pound seems to say, can this form be abstracted from Sordello and applied to Pound's own composition. Pound writes to his father in 1915 that Sordello is a "great work and worth the trouble of hacking it out" (quoted in GEPC, 75). In Three Cantos 1, he exhorts himself that in order to remake Sordello, rather than to incise it or scratch away at its surface, he needs to penetrate it, to chisel out its core:
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse-this booth is full of the marrow of wisdom.)
Give up th' intaglio method.
[P, 229]
As Ronald Bush has pointed out, Pound apparently was one of the first readers fully to understand that Sordello's initial narrator is the poet as a motley fool in a marketplace, who, having propped up his show-booth and summoned up a community of dead poets as his audience, keeps himself "out of view," hidden inside the booth in which he sets out to "make speak . . . the very man [Sordello] as he was wont to do" (S, 1, 15- 16). The poetic self has disappeared inside its stage, the unfolding discourse itself. In Three Cantos, Pound directs our view to this process and fathoms its implications for his own art.
The ur-Cantos explicitly discuss Pound's preoccupation with finding a poetic self, which was evident also in his previous experimentation with Browningesque dramatic masks. In 1969, Hugh Witemeyer drew attention to Pound's investigation of virtù, a concept he derived from Renaissance poets through Walter Pater: of how he could create a unified, idiosyncratic, and yet disembodied, transsubjective, poetic force. 13 Pound's idea of virtù, Witemeyer has convincingly argued, in essence underlay all of his subsequent aesthetic terminology, from "vortex" and "image" to "ideogram" and "paideuma." Yet Witemeyer did not acknowledge Browning's significance for this continuity within Pound's aesthetic. "Pound did not leap full-grown from the brow of Browning," Witemeyer asserted, claiming that, in order to come of age as a poet, Pound first had to move beyond Sordello toward Joyce, and beyond Browning's personae (which, he argued, never serve "as a means of self-construction" but "relive all the possible attitudes of the human spirit") toward a modernist construction of poetic selfhood. 14 What is missing from Witemeyer's account is what Christine Froula has since supplied: an acknowledgement that Sordellois a transitional, proto-modernist text. 15 As the following shall show, Pound saw what he understood by virtù already contemplated in Browning. The effort to create an idiosyncratic poetic self whose expressive power transcends subjectivity toward a stronger recreation of cultural reality is already at the heart both of Sordello's narrative and technique.
Witemeyer's assessment that Browning's personae never serve "as a means of self-construction" does not entirely agree with Pound's reading of Sordelloin Three Cantos 1. There, Pound quotes from a brief address prefacing the revised 1863 edition of Sordello, in which Browning chose to highlight that Sordello was "the story of the development of a soul."
So you worked out new form, the meditative,
Semi-dramatic, semi-epic story,And we will say: What's left for me to do?
[P, 231]
Pound recognizes that Browning's poem gives both epic and dramatic dimensions to a half-historical, half-fictional narrative in the form of a Dantesque transcendental journey--a journey, as Pound also understands, that recasts the author's own making and history of meta-poetic meditations.
You had your business:
To set out so much thought, so much emotion;
To paint, more real than any dead Sordello,
The half or third of your intensest life
And call that third Sordello;
And you'll say, "No, not your life,
He never showed himself." Is't worth the evasion, what were the use
Of setting res up and breathing life upon them,
Were't not our life, your life, my life extended?
[P, 229-30]
What Pound ponders here are the complications in Browning's mediation of poetic self. He wonders at the ways in which Browning's poem is a means of self-construction while it simultaneously strives to live up to the poetic ideal Browning had developed in his "Essay on Shelley": the ideal of a poetic objectivity that would synthesize the poet's subjectivity with transpersonal truth. 17
Many critics have pointed out that Browning's "story of a development of a soul" throughout at least the first three books of the poem closely resembles his own endeavor to overcome Shelley's Promethean subjectivism. 18 The last third of Book 1 introduces young Sordello at Goito, an idyllic castle in the country near Mantua, secluded from the town by a "slough" and "pine tree forests" (S, 1, 374). There, under the tutelage of the Ghibelline countess Adelaide, Sordello enjoys a sheltered upbringing reminiscent of Browning's own, which he passed in the household of his parents and among the books of his father's library. Sordello is surrounded by playful architecture, art objects, and a pastoral garden landscape charged with the inviting mystique that a childlike imagination projects. 19 Recalling his own poetic beginnings under the influence of Romanticism, Browning casts himself in the form of a young Sordello "less like a Troubadour than one of Shelley's protagonists," open to the influx of divine inspiration (GEPC, 83).
Up and down
Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine
To throb the secret forth; a touch divine--
And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod;
Visibly through his garden walketh God.
[S, 1, 500-505]
According to the "legend" of Romanticism the true genius, like Shelley's Prometheus, defies the gods with his own transcendental aspirations (S, 1, 516). This early life is for the first time overshadowed by crisis when the question arises how the poet can really be "equal to being all" without taking charge in the present affairs of his people (cf. S, 1, 535-47, as quoted below).Affairs in Northern Italy around 1224--the turmoil of Guelf and Ghibelline partisanship, particularly the Ghibelline general Taurello Salinguerra's climactic capture of the Guelf Count Boniface in the long-besieged Ferrara, and the effects of civil warfare on the spirit of the divided population in Verona--have been dramatized throughout most of the preceding portions of Book 1. Now the narrator instructs himself: "Go back to the beginning, rather; blend / It gently with Sordello's life" (S, 1, 597-8). In his "drowsy Paradise," Sordello grows a poetic soul increasingly inclined, as Browning was himself, to observe the warts of nature, the monstrosity of particulars, giving "to familiar things a face grotesque; / Only, preserving through the mad burlesque / A grave regard" (S, 1, 267; S, 1, 655-57). While he is thus developing the first traces of his own virtù, Sordello's true initiation begins only as his yearnings for an audience urge him to penetrate the forests that surround him in his seclusion, to go to Mantua to become a Troubadour. There, Sordello defeats his forerunner, the celebrated Troubadour Eglamor, in a spontaneous contest, a victory that leads to Eglamor's death and wins Sordello Palma's favor--his palm/Palma, reminiscent of the Petrarchan laurel/Laura--and appointment as her Trouvere. Confronted with an audience, Sordello gives up demanding that "'each shall love in me the love that leads / His soul to power's perfection'" (S, 2, 439-40). His goal becomes to achieve a more objective poetry that would, in the very expression of poetic self, render a realistic and thus morally responsible picture of the all of human experience. He takes on the task of reaching out to the actual world of living men: of authentically portraying the struggles of the individual existence through his crafting of dramatic personae and speech (cf. S, 2, 568-87).
Yet, as Pound notes, in Sordellothis struggle for a new aesthetic is not only mediated by the story of strife and repeated disappointments, or the "marrow" of the meta-poetic discourse; it is also enacted in narrative, dramatic, and poetic technique. If the presentation of Sordello includes from the start that of Browning's own aesthetic becoming, it likewise includes a plurality of articulations, a multitude of beings, a community of voices, because the voice of the poem's evanescent motley narrator, who is also a stand-in for the poet, is open to all kinds of intrusions.
So, homage, other souls direct
Without, turns inward. "How should this deject
Thee, soul?" they murmur; "wherefore strength be quelled
Because, its trivial accidents withheld,
Organs are missed that clog the world, inert,
Wanting in will, to quicken and exert
Like thine--existence cannot satiate,
Cannot surprise? Laugh thou at envious fate,
Who, from earth's simplest combination stampt
With individuality--uncrampt
By living its faint elemental life,
Dost soar to heaven's complexest essence, rife
With grandeurs, unaffronted to the last
Equal to being all!"
[S, 1, 535-47]
Here we find yet another version of the poet's self speaking, the "meditative" voice, in Pound's phrase, in which contemplations on the literary history of ideas mingle with scenes of Sordello's upbringing, and then moreover the "murmur" of a chorus of speakers is quoted, perhaps the ghosts of the Romantics. Their speech is then objected to by what seems to be still another guise of the narrative voice, the race of men addressing Sordello:
In truth? Thou hast
Life then--wilt challenge life for us: our race
Is vindicated so, obtains its place
In thy ascent, the first of us; whom we
May follow, to a meanest, finally,
With our more bounded wills?
[S, 1, 548-53]
The motley speaker is the presiding narrator of the poem not so much as the caricature that we actually see at the beginning of the poem, but as the idea of the poet-self that overarches the poem's dramatic technique. He embodies the poet not only clothed in the garment of the poem's time, but altogether made up of patchwork, a theatrical multitude. Like Browning in Sordello and his dramatic monologues, the motley speaker speaks through the ghosts of the past he summons, precursor poets and historical res, and is spoken through by them. His voice is a stage for the presence of the past--"Ghosts move about me / Patched with histories," comments his reader Pound. Sordello, which Pound called "one of the finest masks ever presented," finally sets an example for Pound. 20 In it, the poet is poetic subject and object alike, and self is visibly transformed into a composite artifact, the text itself: "To paint, more real than any dead Sordello, / The half or third of your intensest life / And call that third Sordello" (P, 229-30).
Mary Ellis Gibson gives us what may be the definitive reading of Pound's negotiation of Browningesque selfhood when, in her 1995 study Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians, sheargues that, in the model of the poet as ragpicker that Pound adopts from Browning, poetic self-creation and the epic quest for a renewal of the poetic canon are one. 21 In any event, the question of how the poet realizes his virtù and thus makes tradition new--how the individual poet res among and in turn affects the guise of those ghosts of literary history he summons--is not only the central question in Three Cantosbut already a topos in Sordelloitself. In the early stages of his poetic making at Goito, Sordello's talent is still overshadowed by his awe for the mighty Troubadour Eglamor at the Mantuan court, as well as Sordello's overall indebtedness to the literary past: "nor bid / Me rag by rag expose how patchwork hid / The youth--what thefts of every clime and day / Contributed to purfle the array / He climbed with" (S, 1, 897-901). Browning's poetic self emerging in the mask of Sordello here explicitly resembles the speaker's motley dress. Sordello's patchwork in this instance is still a sign of poverty of mature wit, a fault against which Pound warns his fellow poets in his early criticism, probably with his own endeavors to overcome his "Browningese" in mind: in "A Retrospect," a collection of earlier pieces of criticism published in Pavannes and Divisions in 1918, he writes, "Don't allow 'influence' to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire." 22 Browning's poem suggests a much more complex, transhistorical model of literary influence that anticipates Pound's. The elder troubadour Eglamor is to Sordello what Shelley is to Browning, and eventually Browning to Pound. Dante and Shelley are to Browning's Sordellowhat Sordello is to the Purgatory and eventually Browning to The Cantos, a ghost conjured up fleetingly, but whose work offers itself throughout for use and revision to the present poet.
In Three Cantos 1, Pound looks for a suitable persona to integrate such complex relationships:
What's left for me to do?
Whom shall I conjure up; who's my Sordello,
My pre-Daun Chaucer, pre-Boccaccio,
As you have done pre-Dante?
Whom shall I hang my shimmering garment on;
. . .
Whom set to dazzle the serious future ages?
[P, 231-32]
Pound answers to himself: "Not Arnaut, not De Born, not Uc St. Circ" (P, 232), thereby echoing what Bush describes as Sordello's narrator's "coming to terms with images of his older failed poetic self" and at the same time reiterating his own efforts in Personae, where Pound had cast off "complete masks of the self in each poem" (GEPC, 83). Three Cantos 2 still comments directly on Sordello's theme of successive poetic selves and eras: "Another crown, thrown to another dancer, brings you to modern times?" (P, 240). Yet already in Browning there is no clear linear succession; Eglamor's, Sordello's, and Dante's achievements simultaneously crowd the concluding reflections of Sordello. The dynamic of Browning's "semi-epic" literary quest integrates the circularity and polyphonic contemporaneity of sacred history in a framework of perpetual dramatic conflict. As he announces in Three Cantos 1, Pound will have to consider the "trick" of Browning's "showman's booth." He prepares to take his efforts out into some forum and establish his own kind of polyphony. 23 Three Cantos's ultimate background, materials that Pound introduces in Three Cantos 3 and will eventually rework in Canto 1 to replace Three Cantos 1, is Andreas Divus's Latin translation of Book 11 of The Odyssey. There, Odysseus conjures up the spirits of the past from Hades and makes them speak through the ghost of Tiresias by feeding him blood. Browning gives a dramatized version of the same epic topos at the beginning of his poem, thus prering one of the central motifs of The Cantos. Just as Browning's motley alter ego summons a community of poets from the past, indicating that the poem draws heavily on literary traditions and in turn is directed toward an audience of co-creators, so the blind seer Tiresias offers for interpretation a panhistorical glimpse to Odysseus, the future creator of civic order.
The relationships among poet, epic, and world are negotiated in a striking section at the symmetrical axis of Sordelloto which Pound paid particular attention. Browning-in-the-process-of-composition takes over the narrative voice and more or less retains it for the almost five hundred lines, concluding Book 3. Browning separates himself from his poem as if it were a living world, yet one animated only while he dreams it: "They sleep, and I awake / . . . being at Venice" (S, 3, 614-15). As if still in transition between such dreaming and waking, Browning's voice meditates on the relations between those two realities, the poet's and his work's. Commenting on his own poetic aspirations as much as Sordello's, Browning portrays the creative process as an epic sea voyage, and concludes that, as the work travels on alone in history, only the audience can redeem the poet's transcendental force that his work contains: "no other may . . . be informed what fate / Intends, if triumph or decline await / The tempter of the everlasting steppe" (S, 3, 673-75).
Browning, who interrupted the composition of Sordello in England in order to authenticate his work during his first travels in Italy, now feels he must "awake fully," so to speak, to his immediate present and surroundings:
I muse this on a ruined palace-step
At Venice: why should I break off, nor sit
Longer upon my step, exhaust the fit
England gave birth to? Who's adorable
Enough reclaim a--no Sordello's Will
Alack!--be queen to me?
[S, 3, 676-81] 24
The poet interprets his present reality in the light of his work in progress. He seeks a "queen" just as Sordello had "demand[ed] a Palma" earlier:
The common sort, the crowd,
Exist, perceive; with Being are endowed,
However slight, distinct from what they See,
However bounded; Happiness must be,
To feed the first by gleanings from the last,
Attain its qualities, and slow or fast
Become what they behold; such peace in strife,
By transmutation, is the Use of Life,
An Alien turning Native to the soul
Or body--which instructs me; I am whole
There and demand a Palma.
[S, 3, 159-69]
Palma (based on the historical Sordello's Cunizza and an analogue to Dante's Beatrice), is an allegory of poetic glory, or "peace in strife." She guides Sordello's poetic ascent toward the secret of experience: moral awareness of an "out-soul," that is, Being as it suffuses the yet alien "out-world" (S, 3, 319; S, 1, 757). Love for her transmutes both self and other in a poetic fulfillment of Being and Knowledge: "the Use of Life, / An Alien turning Native to the soul / Or body." Inspired by Palma, briefly before Browning's voice intervenes, Sordello resolves to be "Gate-vein of this heart's blood of Lombardy" (what Dante sees in Sordello in the Purgatory), an embodiment of both poetic and political fraternity, an "aggregate / Of souls and bodies" (S, 3, 556-60). He is now intent on battling the "ignominious exile of mankind," even at the risk of his own ignominious exile for his convictions (S, 3, 580).
As he overlooks a Venetian piazza, Browning's search for an equivalent incarnation of ideal femininity ironically settles on a pauper--"You sad disheveled ghost / That pluck at me and point"--a girl who touches him as she is begging for alms (S, 3, 664- 65). Like his protagonist, Browning is compelled to open himself to the out-world of "the common sort, the crowd," as he recognizes in the girl's countenance the faces of the unfortunate multitude. Yet there is no revelatory transformation, not even such a doomed one as Sordello's. In the poet's immediate present the problems that the poem-in-progress presents are only intensified; the relationships among poetic vision, poetic work, and socio-political reality are even further complicated.
[S, 3, 723-27].
Characteristically, as Book 3 concludes, the present voice of the poet becomes submerged again more and more among the voices of Sordello's realm, and finally completely among evocations of Greek mythology and the New Testament. According to Browning, meaning and moral instruction can no longer be drawn from visionary contemplation, but only from the maze of assembled poetic history.
In Three Cantos 1, where Pound wonders whether it is "worth the [author's] evasion" not to show himself in his poetry, fifty lines are heavily laden with references to the sequence concluding Book 3 of Sordello, where it appears that Browning does show himself. Pound writes: "I walk Verona (I am here in England)"--as Browning probably already was again was when he wrote his description of Venice--"I can see Can Grande (Can see whom you will)":
I walk in the airy street,
See the small cobbles flare with poppy spoil.
'Tis your "great day," the Corpus Domini,
And all my chosen and peninsular village
Has made one glorious blaze of all its lanes--
Oh, before I was up--with poppy flowers.
[P, 230]
Pound may have taken the image of the poppy from Sordello (S, 1, 705-16), where it presents itself to the romantic mind as a natural symbol of imaginative exuberance. If, on Corpus Domini (cf. S, 1, 766), the world offers itself as a spectacle, ritualistically spilling its theatrical vitality, Pound has missed the right moment to watch, and what remains for him is the poppy spoil, scattered testimony of such an expression of life. He yet lacks a focus, he flippantly complains, probably to Browning: "(Can see whom you will)." Pound then attempts to recreate such a contemplative moment like Browning's, in which Pound's immediate surroundings would merge with the world and work of a literary precursor. He tries Catullus, "the civilized poet who still understood the psychological reality of myths," and Arnaut Daniel (GEPC, 115). After a number of ostensibly forced invocations, Pound distances himself from his effort, which he apparently thinks falls short of authenticity. He sets out to recollect "a younger self" (GEPC, 115)--the Pound of 1908 during his first travels in Italy--and naturalistically elaborates on Browning's own subversion of the romantic crafting of revelatory moments:
Your "palace step"?
My stone seat was the Dogana's curb,
And there were not "those girls," there was one flare, one face.
'Twas all I ever saw, but it was real. . . .
And I can no more say what shape it was. . . .
But she was young, too young.
True, it was Venice,
And at Florian's and under the north arcade
I have seen other faces, and had my rolls for breakfast, for that matter;
So for what it's worth, I have the background.
[P, 231]
Pound intensifies Browning's moment of isolation here; the narrator is sitting like a beggar on the curb, not on a step reminiscent of past splendors. Pound's remembrance of visits past, moreover, is blurred by distractions, such as thoughts of food ("I had my rolls for breakfast") and sex ("she was young, too young"). He thus extends on Browning's own parodic vision of the "race" as his "mistress," which alludes to the Beatrice of the Vita Nuova, the half-eroticized, half-spiritualized little girl whom a young Dante watched walking in the street.
Browning's "ruined palace step," the locus of his emergence from his poem, is also carried further, even takes on a new life, in Pound's composition. This monument of past regal ascents which Browning conspicuously rhymes with "the everlasting steppe" of poetic aspiration is a metaphor for marred hopes of earthly transcendence (see S, 3, 675-76). In Pound this image is first explicitly replaced with the horizontal "Dogana's curb," but then finds its way back into the text a few lines later in the form of the steps leading up into a Japanese temple, and thus into a whole new realm of motifs suggesting the interpenetration of spiritual, natural, and artistic realities.
. . . and gray gradual steps
Lead up beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars,
Temple of teak wood, and the gilt-brown arches
Triple in tier, banners woven by wall,
Fine screens depicted, sea waves curled high,
Small boats with gods upon them,
Bright flame above the river!
[P, 233]
In the opening of the eventual Canto 3, finally, Pound recalls sitting on the "Dogana's step," as if ready to climb the flights of the merchants' city's history, those beginnings of modern economic government that will be thematized in much of The Cantos, and of which the Dogana is a monument. 25 Canto 3 already contains elements of Pound's later attacks on what he summarily called "usura": he sits on the step because "gondolas cost too much that year," and in the following lines evokes contrasting images of palatial splendors, individual impoverishment, and institutionalized greed (C, 11). Pound's gradual translation of Browning's image thus illustrates thematic continuities between Sordelloand The Cantos. They are both concerned with poetic power's losing battle with political power and the socio-economic deprivation politics effects. Browning's contemplations on the social, political, and moral role of the poet at the end of Book 3 look forward to the events of Book 4 (leading, as echoes from Dante suggest, to the innermost circles of hell), where Sordello faces devastated Ferrara, its vexed population, and the Machiavellian Taurello Salinguerra. As it had in Book 2, the vicious circle of leaving isolation only to find himself more isolated closes once more for Sordello when he emerges from his meeting with Salinguerra, already crushed in spirit, only to find that the ravished populace celebrating him is barely able to tell him from Eglamor, and asks for nothing but light entertainment. 26 It appears that there cannot be poetic truth in what does not touch the lives of the downtrodden, at the same time that the lives of the downtrodden are generally closed to poetic truth.
As it retraces the events of Book 4, Sordello's Book 5 climactically dramatizes Sordello's battle with the politics of his time. Now it is for most part Sordello who speaks directly, with his awareness having gradually grown to a dimension comparable to the author's. His reflections on his own past and the ephemeral nature of his aspirations torture and rupture his intent with hesitations. His very concern for self-expression, his Apollonian strife, he finds, is feeble compared to Salinguerra's Bacchanalian power politics. In a splendid moment, his monologue before Salinguerra in Palma's presence, he climactically abdicates direct political responsibility and formulates a matured, vitalist poetic whose first premise is the endeavor to overcome the original limitations of self.
Let essence, whatsoe'er it be, extend--
Never contract. Already you include
The multitude; then let the multitude
Include yourself; and the result were new:
Themselves before, the multitude turn you.

Thought is the soul of act, and, stage by stage,
Soul is from body still to disengage
As tending to a freedom which rejects
Such help and incorporeally affects
The world, producing deeds but not by deeds,
Swaying, in others, frames itself exceeds,
Assigning them the simpler tasks it used
To patiently perform till Song produced
Acts, by thoughts only, for the mind.
[S, 5, 537-45; S, 5, 567-75]
Browning describes his own poetics here. The salvational force is located in literary tradition, the "deeds" of poetic thought, the survival and progressive evolution of consciousness in art. Leaving it to posterity "to unveil the last of mysteries," Sordello promises that he will dramatize all of human experience he could possibly embrace, and that he will disengage himself from his own creation, so that:
Man's inmost life shall have yet freer play:
Once more I cast external things away,
And natures composite, so decompose
That" . . . Why, he writes Sordello!
[S, 5, 616; S, 5, 601-20]
That Sordello should be the author of Browning's poem follows the logic of the poetic just expressed--"Themselves before, the multitude turn you" (S, 5, 536). As Sordello gives voice to the philosophy that guides the writing of Sordello, he has taken the role of the creator--yet this philosophy simultaneously leads to the abdication of any integrated authorial presence. Thus, this climactic moment foreshadows the end of the poem. Sordello's insights include the expectation--as it turns out, an attitude of mind larger than he himself can bear--that his own efforts are limited, that even his undone, transmuted self awaits further undoing before it can be constructive. In the middle of his thus "decompos[ing]" himself, Palma surprises him with the news, conferred upon her at Adelaide's deathbed, that he in fact is Taurello's son. As his rightful heir, Sordello is presented with the badge of Ghibelline leadership, which, after Ecelin's retirement to a cloister, none of his descendants seems fit to wear. The situation leaves Sordello in complete disarray. Book 6 depicts the warfare of his multitudinous, conflicting attitudes of mind, which finally turn in on his vital powers. He is found dead with the badge at his feet, leaving leadership to Alberic the tyrant, and thus Italy to further devastation. Sordello's forerunner Eglamor's ghost haunts the conclusion of Sordello as a vision both of the protagonist's own failure, the failure to live up to himself, to match his thought in deed, and of the religious hope that there might be spiritual progress after all, "spiral on spiral, gyres of life and light" (S, 6, 804). Yet, the poem suggests, such progress certainly is not linear and not easily measured in terms of individual human history; "Sordello's chance was gone" for posterity (S, 6, 835).
When Pound writes in Three Cantos 1 that Browning "Watched the 'soul,' Sordello's soul, / And saw it lap up life, and swell and burst-- / 'Into the empyrean?,'" he comments not only on the dialectic dynamic of hope and doubt, strife for transcendence and anticipation of annihilation, that Browning's poem emplots to its last moment. Browning's version of Sordello's life, the swelling and bursting of Sordello's soul, is an existentialist account of the poet's designs to embody the world in his poetry. The fact of death that explodes the meaning of individual intent becomes a metaphor for the dispersion of the textualized authorial self--Eglamor's, Sordello's, Browning's-- among all the texts that crowd human history.
What remains of Sordellois the text itself and its intrinsic invitation to engage with it, even to rewrite it. It problematizes the art of poetry, the limits of the poet's capabilities and authority, in ways that ultimately both vindicate and prick poetic aspirations. Browning declares:
And therefore have I moulded, made anew
A Man, and give him to be turned and tried,
Be angry with or pleased at.
Try them upon Sordello when full-grown,
And then--ah then!
[S, 3, 934-39]
This is the direct challenge that Pound sets out to answer in Three Cantos--thus perhaps his decision to open with an exordium that immediately addresses Browning in imitation of Sordellois discursive, "meditative" mode: "Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello! . . ." Pound envies Browning the coherence of his mask in spite of all its "hodge-podge." As Pound parenthetically remarks in Three Cantos 1, he has learned of Confucius that "he started with himself, built out perfection" (P, 233). (Later, in Canto 13, he quotes Confucius more directly: "If a man have not order within him / He cannot spread order about him.") 27 Pound questions whether he could ever pursue a straight line of intent, a "business" such as Browning's, because he cannot embrace a unifying system of faith:
You had one whole man?
And I have many fragments, less worth? Less worth?
Ah, had you quite my age, quite such a beastly and cantankerous age?
You had some basis, had some set belief.
Am I let preach?
[P, 230]
At the beginning of the First World War, the individual operates within a world in which the breakdown of coherence and fragmentation of self that Sordello already anticipates appear to be complete. What Pound's epic will have to accomplish, and the remainder of Three Cantossets out to prepare for, is a way for Pound to find his own virtù, and to set in motion and put down in verse what the educator, campaigner, critic, and poet who, with Browning, walks among ghosts "patched with histories" has to offer to that centrifugal world.
"Much like Browning," Carol T. Christ writes, "Pound would like to assume that a center materializes from its circumference. If that center does not materialize, identity consists in a collection of historical debris, a flotsam without a cohering principle." 28 It is this danger that, analogously to Browning's use of Dante's Sordello, Pound's earlier poem "Near Perigord" dramatized with Dante's stirrer-up-of-strife and fragmenter Bertrans de Born as its central re. Pound recognizes that in order to rewrite Sordello, he first of all needs to construct an answer to Browning's question: "Have ye times, places, actors of your own?" because in Browning those times, actors, and places function as part and parcel, material and structural devices, of his enterprise. Browning reiterates and brings to life structural aspects of an original past that highlight contemporary concerns of social and cultural transition and renewal (S, 3, 937). Browning's post-Romantic experimentation with the epic form involved choosing as a hero an eminent cultural and political re from the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Browning then turns this re's career into that of a poet-antihero. He creates a narrative that presents the individual poet's struggle within the twilight of its time, with the light of the past (antiquity) shining beyond the present darkness (of medieval turmoil):
Fool, who spied the mark
Of leprosy upon him, violet-dark
Already as he loiters? Born just now,
With the new century, beside the glow
And efflorescence out of barbarism;
Witness a Greek or two from the abysm
That stray through Florence-town with studious air,
Calming the chisel of that Pisan pair:
If Nicolo should carve a Christus yet!
[S, 1, 567-75]
How intrigued Pound himself was by the times, places, and res that Browning had chosen for his material, by the mere facts of late-medieval Italy's cultural landscape, is evident from many of his poems and discursive works. In the chapter "Europe and the Setting" in his 1938 Guide to Kulchur, for instance, a discussion of Dante's admiration for Sordello and the moral strength of the real-life Cunizza (whom Dante as a child probably met at Guido Calvacanti's house) serves to usher in instructions on how to appreciate the European scene as transhistorical, precursors' "virtue" being "carrie[d] over" by future generations. 29 In Three Cantos 1, Pound acknowledges that it is difficult to find another single historical background that should be as effective as Browning's.
How shall we start hence, how begin the progress?
Pace naif Ficinus, say when Hotep-Hotep
Was a king in Egypt--
When Atlas sat down with his astrolabe,
He, brother to Prometheus, physicist--
Say it was Moses' birth-year?
Exult with Shang in squatness? The sea-monster
Bulges the squarish bronzes.
(Confucius later taught the world good manners,
Started with himself, built out perfection.)
With Egypt!
Daub out in blue of scarabs, and with that greeny turquoise?
Or with China, O Virgilio mio, and gray gradual steps
Lead up beneath flat sprays of heavy cedars,
Temple of teak wood, and the gilt-brown arches
Triple in tier, banners woven by wall,
Fine screens depicted, sea waves curled high,
Small boats with gods upon them,
Bright flame above the river!
[P, 233]
Pound is afraid of being a "naif Ficinus," the fifteenth-century Italian translator of Plato who drew on mythology the wrong way by "creating a systematic allegory of already allegorized and unfeared gods" (GEPC, 136). Recourse to history must not be stale and deadening, but vitalizing, an example for the avant-garde. As Pound suggests in both Three Cantos 1 and 2, the Renaissance as a stale "décor" (P, 234) will not do, and his quest for backgrounds leads him back to more vital origins. Pound here samples various original historical backgrounds potentially available to him: Egypt and its primitive power of art, Western and Biblical mythology (the potential ineffectiveness of whose montage Ficinus had given an example of) as they prere modern science, and ancient Asian cultures, the contemplative dynamic of Chinese philosophy from the sixteenth century B. C. onward, and the seductiveness of Japanese aesthetics and religion, penetrating everyday life with "emblems of divine perception" (GEPC, 138). 30 The Three Cantos proceed to find ways to overlay all these diverse backgrounds "ply over ply"--a term describing both poetic technique and a certain perception of reality that Pound cites from Sordello (S, 5, 163) in Three Cantos 2 (P, 236), and found poignant enough to insert again in the eventual Canto 4 and Canto 17 (C, 15, 78).
Pound's layering of historical and literary texts and rhyming of subjects and images, to borrow from Hugh Kenner's notion of Pound's "subject-rhymes," is a method that, in nuce, Sordello foreshadows both in its narrative technique and techniques of allusion. 31 The path that Browning's image of the "ruined palace step" takes within the genesis of The Cantos is a good example of how Pound was inspired by Browning's clustering, juxtaposition, and rhyming of images and themes. Browning opens his poem to such poetic experimentation by more often than not disrupting the linearity of the narrative process and the unity of place and time for the sake of capturing the workings of consciousness, its flux through jarring states of mind. Browning presents, for instance, most of Sordello's life in an extended flashback that, in Book 1, allows him immediately to juxtapose the scenarios of Verona (and Ferrara, superimposed) and Goito, and the contrasting states of mind dramatized by them. For similar purposes he reworks structures of epic and sacred narrative, such as employed by Homer and Dante, and of medieval romance, particularly the structures of departure and return. Sordello takes off from Goito twice, pushes toward immersion in the "out-world" twice, and both his journeys bring him full circle, with all scenarios of the past ultimately being mentally present in Sordello 6. In a similar vein, Sordello 5 reiterates the events of Sordello 4, replacing temporal progress with a heightening of narrative awareness. In such ways Browning's narrative strategies, which at times even foreshadow twentieth-century film techniques, may have prepared Pound for negotiating those of Joyce. 32
It seems safe to agree with Gibson that, while Pound's materials varied and sources of influence were numerous, principles of thought and composition that crystallize in his dialogue with Sordello remained vivid beyond Three Cantos. The allusions to Browning retained in the final version of The Cantos, even if more condensed and covert than in Three Cantos 1, are crucial, and the technique Pound develops through his revisions structurally owes more than is acknowledged to Browning's Sordello. The version of Three Cantos's opening apostrophe that survives as the beginning of Canto 2 suggests that what Pound cut was an initial analysis and discussion no longer necessary after he had found his own way of doing a Sordello:
Hang it all, Robert Browning,
there can be but the one "Sordello."
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.
[C, 6]
The last line, taken from the first line of one of Sordello's Vitae ("Sordello was from Mantua"), poses an answer to the preceding question. Browning found his way to Sordello through reading Dante, and subsequently extended his research on twelfth- and thirteenth-century culture and history to construct a new character. After penetrating Sordello, Pound also will move further back, to origins, primary texts, and documents, and assemble them with new authenticity, in his own idiom. 33
"Und überhaupt ich stamm aus Browning. Pourquoi nier son père," writes Pound to René Taupin from Vienna in May 1928, expounding his literary affiliations and ambitions. 34 This statement openly rejects anxiety of influence, belying, in German, the great Viennese school of Oedipal psychology with an untormented frankness very much in character for a poet whose critical writings point out writers held worthy to influence others, and whose own poetry explicitly relies on methods of imitation, intertextual commentary, pastiche, and translation, both in the literal and the widest senses. A close look at the German, however, reveals that Pound refers to his "father" not so much as a precursor self but as a place of origin; instead of "Ich stamme von Browning ab"--I am a descendant of Browning--he writes, "Ich stamme aus Browning"--I am from Browning, "ing" being a common ending of Germanic place names. This is surely not a slip on Pound's part. Anxiety of influence, one might argue, is "displaced" here in a peculiar sense of the word, as Browning becomes part of a geography--perhaps at the same time the ahistorical geography of extant texts and the nostalgic, historical geography of origin, departure, and return--rather than of a genealogy. Pound's poetic self, in turn, is thus constructed as geographical or textual, as divested of a fleshly or affective personality. Like Browning who emerges from and returns to the "lagune" of his poem, Pound, in re-working Browning's work, depicts himself as a disembodied consciousness arising from and shaping a literary landscape (S, 3, 607-15). 35
And so, toward the end of his life in Italy yet again, Pound types on a single sheet of paper:
Hang it all, there can be but one Sordello!
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks,
Let in your quirks and tweeks, and say the thing's an art-form,
Your Sordello, and that the modern world
Needs such a rag-bag to stuff all its thought in;
Say I dump my silvery catch, shiny and silvery
As fresh sardines slapping and slipping on the marginal cobbles?
(I stand before the booth, the speech; but the truth
Is inside this discourse--this booth is full of the marrow of wisdomEzra Pound
Venice, 20 October, 1966. 36
Michaela Giesenkirchen is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. She is presently completing a dissertation on Gertrude Stein, on whom she has also published. Research for the present article was conducted during her years as a Fellow of the German National Merit Foundation.
1. I would like to thank Christine Froula, Jeff Hamilton, Naomi Lebowitz, Jed Mayer, and John Morris for their help in reading drafts of this essay. The title phrase is George Bornstein's. "Pound's Parleyings with Robert Browning," in Ezra Pound Among the Poets, ed. George Bornstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 107-27.
2. "If you'll read Yeats and Browning and Francis Thomson and Swinburne and Rossetti you'll learn something about the progress of Eng. poetry in the last century" (Pound to William Carlos Williams, 21 May 1909, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (London: Faber and Faber, 1950),8. "I still think Byron amusing, but Browning and Fitzgerald are about the only later English poets that one can keep on reading," Pound to Alice Corbin Henderson, [15 June 1916], The Letters of Ezra Pound and Alice Corbin Henderson, ed.Ira B. Nadel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 151.
3. Ezra Pound, Personae: The Shorter Poems, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 13; hereafter referred to as P.
4. Pound began reading Sordello in the Fall of 1904 and kept returning to it until, around 1915, he felt he had understood it sufficiently to see in it a starting point for his own Cantos, according to Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (New York: Delta, 1988), 55). "I began to get it on about the 6th reading," Pound writes to his father in 1915; quoted in Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75; hereafter referred to as GEPC.
5. P, 229. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Three Cantos are taken from P, 229-45. Citations are to the page numbers in this edition.
6. As in "Mesmerism," Pound's parody of Browning entails elements of self-parody. In these lines, Pound uses details from Troubadour history related to Browning's in Sordello, namely details from Bertrans de Born's life and work. At the time, Pound himself drew heavily on this background, most recently in "Near Perigord" (see below).
7. All quotations from Sordello are taken from Robert Browning, The Poems, ed. John Pettigrew, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1981), hereafter referred to as S. In the parenthetical references following citations, the first numbers indicate book numbers and second numbers indicate line numbers. See S, 3, 873-81, for Browning's use of the word "Zanze." Pound's rhyme of "Zanze" and "swanzig," a comic spelling of German "zwanzig" (twenty), quibbles on the peculiar sound of "Zanze," possibly Browning's rendering of "Zante," either the name of a Greek island or of a flower (as in Edgar Allan Poe's "Sonnet to Zante" of 1837).
8. To compare Browing's and Pound's representation of the relationship between Sordello and Dante, see S, 1, 348 and Ezra Pound, "Il miglior fabbro," Chap. 2 in The Spirit of Romance (New York: New Directions, 1968), 22-38. Writing of the "trick" of the "unfinished address," Pound may have had in mind a number of Daniel's shorter poems (translations of which Pound first published in 1911 and 1912) that, like Sordello, open with a few lines in which the poet addresses his audience on the topic of his art. See Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Translations [New York: New Directions, 1970], 416-18, 420-25. Many of Pound's own short poems between 1913 and 1915 experiment with this device. The addresses could be considered "unfinished," because they are not developed throughout the poem toward a closure.
9. An earlier version of these lines reads: "Say I draw up my consciousness and dump the lot, / Drag the past with my net and spill the catch out / All shiny and silvery, like Sardines at Sirmione." Quoted in Mary Ellis Gibson, Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 88.
10. Three Cantos was published in Poetry in the summer of 1917, republished in the following fall in a slightly revised version in Lustra, and then again in excerpts in The Future the following spring (GEPC, xiii). By the time Pound published the first sixteen cantos in their final sequence and form in 1925, almost all original references to Browning had been scrapped.
11. Such interpretations are often in the spirit of Yvor Winters' much-quoted words: "[T]he first Cantos as they originally appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, were awkward Browningesque affairs which bear little resemblance to the later Cantos or their own later forms." Ezra Pound: A Critical Anthology, ed. J. P. Sullivan (Baltimore: Penguin, 1970), 197.
12. See also Thomas F. Grieve, Ezra Pound's Early Poetry and Poetics (Columbia: University of Columbia Press, 1997), 29-32.
13. Hugh Witemeyer, The Poetry of Ezra Pound: Forms and Renewal, 1908-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
14. Witemeyer, Poetry of Ezra Pound, 45, 84.
15. Christine Froula, "Browning's Sordello and the Parables of Modernist Poetics," in Critical Essays on Robert Browning, ed. Mary Ellis Gibson, Critical Essays on British Literature (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 161-85.
16. Browning, The Poems, 1:150.
17. In contrast to my argument, see Thomas F. Grieve, Ezra Pound's Early Poetry and Poetics, 176, who urges that this passage expresses Pound's view that "the objective enterprise for poetry that [Browning] had adumbrated in his essay on Shelley had only been half-fulfilled in the pseudo-historical Sordello."
18. See, for instance, Michael G. Yetman, "Exorcising Shelley out of Browning: Sordello and the Problem of Poetic Identity," Victorian Poetry 13.2 : 79-98.
19. In The ABC of Reading, Pound reprints as an "Exhibit" extensive passages from this section of Sordello (S, 1, 374-84; S, 1, 392-439). They are printed, in a fashion similar to Pound's own typescript style, with large spaces between individual words so as to give them proper weight and to force the reader to see the balance between the flow of the meter and the flow of the narrative. See Pound, The ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 188-91.
20. "One of the finest masks ever presented": Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1960), 86.
21. Gibson, Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians, 38.
22. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954, reprint 1985), 287, 6.
23. The alternative, he writes, is to "sulk and leave the world to novelists"--the novel, as practiced by Joyce, claiming an all-inclusiveness that poetry shall seek to rival. See Forrest Read, ed., Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce (New York: J. Laughlin, n.d.), 48-49.
24. For Browning's composition of Sordello see William Clyde De Vane, A Browning Handbook (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), 71-87.
25. All quotations from The Cantos are taken from The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1995). Citations are to page numbers in this edition.
26. This vicious circle closes for the first time in Book 2, when Sordello's first attempt at achieving a new aesthetic is marred by its intrinsic difficulty. The fruit of Sordello's effort at Mantua betrays his labor, "Because perceptions whole, like that he sought / To clothe, rejects so pure a work of thought / As language," making his poetry so difficult to comprehend that its deeper meanings completely escape his audience (S, 2, 659; S, 2, 589--91). "Sundered in twain," the aspiring poet-self split from the "Man," Sordello retires to Goito, where "the stain / Of the world forsakes Sordello, with its pain / Its pleasure," and in the very effort to heal himself--"Quiet those throbbing temples, then subdue / That cheek's distortion"--he falls into depression and passivity (S, 3, 15-17; S, 3, 5-8).
27. Bush, GEPC, 138, notes that Pound derived this information from a series of articles that Allan Upward ran on Confucius in The Freewoman in 1913.
28. Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 46.
29. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970), 117.
30. Commenting on these lines, Bush (GEPC, 137) cites a passage in Pound's Gaudier-Brzeska , where Pound notes that Ficino makes Moses's birth year coincide with that of Hermes' grandfather.
31. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 423.
32. Some of Sordello's lines read like directions from a screenplay: "Appears / Verona" (S, 1, 11- 12); "while within his palace these debate / . . . Glide we by clapping doors " (S, 1, 311-12); "So fare they. Now revert" (S, 1, 505); "Go back to the beginning, rather; blend / It gently with Sordello's life" (S, 1, 587-88); "Back now for Salinguerra" (S, 4, 376). See Witemeyer's discussion of Joyce's influence on Pound in The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 161-95.
33. The quoted lines, still closely connected to Browning's materials, "rhyme" with the end of Canto 6, where, after juggling references to Homer and Provençal history, Pound epitomizes Sordello's life by direct recourse to the chronicles and Sordello's poetry. By 1934, notwithstanding his own difficulty in grasping Sordello, Pound cited it as an example of "narrative limpidity" and poetic ease (Pound, The ABC of Reading, 188-91). Whereas "Victorian half-wits claimed this poem was obscure," he maintains that Browning's verse was "without clog and verbal impediment." To prove this he chooses passages that are relatively easy to follow. Evidently he is out to shatter prejudice against Browning--but perhaps also against the difficult idiom he had developed out of his engagement with Browning's.
34. Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 218.
35. In 1915 Pound acknowledges his earlier work's debt to Browning's and adds that studying Browning's achievement is necessary to understanding Pound's own enterprise. "If you like Perigord," he tells his father, "you would probably like Browning's Sordello. . . . You'll have to read it sometime as my big long endless poem that I am now struggling with, starts off with a barrelful of allusions to Sordello which will intrigue you if you haven't read the other" (quoted in Bornstein, Ezra Pound Among the Poets, 137).
36. Unpublished typescript, Ezra Pound Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: Box 34, Folder 800.
"The necessary condition for an image is sight," Gustav Janouch claims to have said to Kafka. Kafka supposedly smiled and replied: "We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." 1 Photography as exorcism is performed in order to drive things out of our minds. In a typical paradox, Kafka transforms the photograph from a vehicle of remembrance, a monument to a thing or moment in the external world, into a means of expelling a "thing"--a place, a person, a demon?--from the mind itself. Given material expression in the photograph, the image is separable, detachable not only from its referent but, as Kafka is supposed to have put it, from the "mind." In Kafka's formulation as transmitted by Janouch, stories are "a way," a means of shutting the eyes, of not looking at what we do not wish to see. But this paradox ensures that the link between photographs and works of fiction remains ambiguous. On the one hand, stories are seen in contradistinction to photography--not as a means of exorcising demons, but rather as a means of shutting them out, of erecting a textual barrier between self and world. On the other hand, it is the relatedness of story to photograph that is intriguing, the sense in which writing too, may be an exorcism. "Shutting the eyes," as an act entailed in writing, would render narrative an effort both to expel and shut out the images that photography fixes. In this reading, narrative is complicit with photography in its attempt to keep the "things" that haunt us at a distance. But is sight really the "necessary condition for the image," as Janouch postulates?  The title of Kubrick's last film almost certainly refers to this exchange between Kafka and Janouch, albeit indirectly. 3 Adopting Kafka's tendency to speak in paradoxes, Kubrick shrouds the relations between photograph and narrative in further ambiguity. Where to look for enlightenment? Quoting Kafka and Janouch in Camera Lucida, his meditation on photography, Roland Barthes muses that the best way to look at photographs may be to look away, to close one's eyes. "Absolute subjectivity," writes Barthes, "is achieved only in a state, an effort, of silence. Shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence . . . to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness" (CL, 55). The detail to which Barthes refers is of a particular kind: it is what he calls the punctum, an element which "shoots out of [the scene] like an arrow and pierces me" (CL, 26). The marks or wounds created by the punctum generate affective responses: "a photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)" (CL, 27); it is that which "attracts and distresses"(CL, 40).
With reference to Barthes's reflections, then, keeping the "eyes wide shut" refers to the insight that comes from sustained meditation on the image that a photograph leaves in the mind's eye. It is when all else is excluded--what Barthes calls the "noise" that surrounds the image--that the significant detail, the wounding punctum, brings insight in the form of affective response. Barthes, then, takes Kafka's words literally, applying them to the photograph rather than to the story. "Shutting his eyes," Barthes restores the image of the exorcised "thing" to the mind. Reconnecting with the wounding "thing" and viewing it in the mind's eye once more, Barthes savors those affects that Kafka prefers to keep at bay. Could it be that Eyes Wide Shut--a film whose title was chosen by Kubrick, remaining enigmatic to his screenwriter--contains a punctum, something that attracts and distresses Kubrick? Something once exorcised--only to be internalized and viewed with "eyes wide shut" after all? What is it that attracts and distresses? What is it that produces affects, both pleasurable and unpleasurable?
Kubrick's films reveal a fixation with the writers and artists of the Hapsburg monarchy; the "Blue Danube Waltz" and Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra" only momentarily seem out of place in the aural texture of 2001. In interviews, Kubrick in particular invokes the names of the late Austrian monarchy's Jewish writers and intellectuals--of Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, and Freud. 4 The Stefan Zweig story "The Burning Secret" ("Brennendes Geheimnis"), that took Kubrick's fancy was never made into a film, but the adaptation of Schnitzler's Traumnovelle intrigued Kubrick for decades before its realization (KUB, 154, 156). Frederic Raphael, screenwriter for Eyes Wide Shut, was given books of paintings by Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, and asked to study Freud (EWO, 112). Years before, collaborating on a screenplay for The Shining, Kubrick and Diane Johnson read Freud's essay on "The Uncanny" together, and Kafka was also on Kubrick's mind. 5 How intriguing, then, that in an essay written years before the release of Eyes Wide Shut, Michel Ciment suggests that Kubrick's "unfulfilled ambition" of filming the Schnitzler text may have "found an outlet" in The Shining (KUB, 144). As this essay will claim, the points of connection between The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut are mediated by the presence of Kafka.
In Kafka's writing, at once so allegorical and yet, as Kubrick put it, "simple and straightforward, almost journalistic" in style, Kubrick thought he had found the "perfect guide" for a "realistic approach" (KUB, 186). Critics who have sought the "missing auteur" in Kubrick's work might look to the extreme anonymity of Kafka's narrative technique--to what Kubrick refers to as Kafka's "journalistic" style--as a model for what is read as the filmmaker's authorial "absence"("TDA," 301). If Kubrick is said to have "eviscerated the affective surfaces" of more than one novel ("TDA," 291), it is equally claimed of Kafka that he "affectively neutralizes" what his stories are at pains to represent. 6 But oddly, perhaps, it is two minor scenes in Eyes Wide Shut that most obviously cue Kafkaesque concerns in Kubrick. It is Schnitzler's Traumnovelle that contains the scenes to which I am referring--the scenes in the costume shop--but readers of Kafka will agree that these scenes might well have come straight out of The Trial. In both their fictional and filmic versions, they play themselves out against the background of sexual antics performed by a young girl with two men in wigs--antics that take place behind and under furniture and have both the offhand and yet grotesque effect of similar couplings in Kafka's fiction. For Kubrick, I will suggest, the Kafkaesque overtones of these scenes in Schnitzler's novella constitute what Barthes's punctum is to the photograph: that which "pricks me, bruises me, is poignant to me."
A meditation on the nature of the still image lingers even in the midst of Kubrick's most kinetic films, not surprising in a filmmaker who began his career as a photographer. 7 Kubrick's concentration on the still image is the natural counterpart to his fascination with cinematic movement; we find it in the thousands of pre-production photographs in which most of Kubrick's films have their visual origins and we find it variously expressed in the films themselves. It appears, for example, in Barry Lyndon, the most painterly of Kubrick's films, usually in the rendering of painting. It is present in the compositions taken from Gainsborough and Hogarth, and in the homage to Reynolds that occurs in the static shots especially of the Lyndon residence, in reality the picturesque Castle Howard. We also find it in the careful composition of each frame, in the manner in which movement itself becomes an "actor" in some frames, often beginning in the middle of an otherwise still frame, and then gradually subsuming the frame from within, in the manner of F. W. Murnau. Kubrick's interest in the still image as the basis and foil for cinematic motion is evident even in 2001. Although the film is "a formal statement on the nature of movement", as Annette Michelson has pointed out, the orchestrated and abstract nature of this movement admits its reliance on the still image--hence our sense, as Michelson puts it, that we are viewing another Ballet Mécanique. 8 We find the still image likewise in the transparencies used for the "Dawn of Man" prologue in 2001: they are "picture postcards" that provide sublime backdrops for these scenes, but they also endow each of them with something of the photograph's atemporality, its "moment of time" feel in a series of incomprehensibly distant moments of the past.
In The Shining , the static image as photograph does much to evoke the uncanny and the supernatural. Perhaps Kubrick himself had the intuition expressed by Kracauer that the photographic rendering of human bodies produces portraits of ghosts and ghostly images. 9 Or perhaps it was Barthes's assertion in Camera Lucida, that the eidos of the photograph is death, which suggested the particular possibilities of still photography for rendering the supernatural to Kubrick (CL, 15). Certainly Freud's work on "The Uncanny" ("Das Unheimliche", 1919) would have triggered an interest in the effects that mechanically-rendered motion can have on the spectator, reminding Kubrick of early film's preoccupation with its capacity to set images of the human body in motion, to efface the divisions between life and death. 10 Or it may in fact have been Kafka's suggestion to Janouch, mediated by Barthes, that photography is a kind of exorcism. Whatever the source, The Shining is haunted by photography: photography itself resurfaces as an aspect of the film's imaginary, as a return of the repressed--or, as Barthes puts it, a "return of the dead" (CL, 9). 11
Most intriguing, perhaps, is the almost maniacal, willed insistence on photographic indexicality that persists in film's relation to photography in Kubrick: it is here that the body enters film. Photographs in The Shining become "material." Jack's "visions" or mental projections--his experiences with the dead--take their subjects both from newspaper photos and from the myriad black and white photographs that adorn the walls of the Overlook Hotel. These images take on lush colors as Jack brings their dead imaginatively to life, as he "realizes" the photographs and enters their spaces, interacting with the ghosts who populate them. 12 Jack has a "visionary" power that resides in the capacity to animate photographs from the past, to animate them narratively in the manner of cinema. But of greatest importance to this essay is the film's insistence on the (red) materiality of these images, on the manner in which they evoke the body. In one of his "visions," Jack "recognizes" the former caretaker from his photograph in the newspaper and, as Fredric Jameson puts it, "the film public palpably gasps when the conventions of the ghost story are violated, when the hero physically intersects with his fantasmagoric surrounding and he collides with the material body of a waiter whose drink he spills" (emphasis mine). 13 Another case in point is the allusion to Faust I as Jack sits down at the ballroom bar: "I'd give my goddamned soul for a glass of beer," he announces. A moment later, his own reflection in the mirror is replaced by the image of the bartender, a devil clothed in red. Just as Goethe's Mephisto plays to the students' bodily desires by conjuring up an image of wine real enough to guzzle down, the bartender produces a drink for the "parched" Jack in an atmosphere that similarly insists upon the materiality of illusion. 14 Drinks are spilled and consumed, music listened and danced to, lust is aroused, disgust produced. The horror film, as Linda Williams has famously said, is one of the "body genres." 15 Here, the ghost materializes and is revealed to have a body; Kubrick's uncanny is decidedly corporeal.
Using language that suggests the indexical relation of the photograph to the real, Mr. Halloran tells Jack's son Danny that the violent events perpetrated in the hotel have left "their trace." The photographic nature of certain images will be evoked visually several times later on in the film, each time juxtaposing the photograph's "flat Death" (CL, 92) and an uncanny materiality. One notable incidence occurs in the "Thursday" scene, when the film camera moves in on Jack's crazed face with its motionless grimace--an image that is a freeze frame--until Jack arches his eyebrows diabolically. This moment of controlled movement exemplifies the possibilities both of arresting action, and of killing off the moving, hence seemingly three-dimensional image into the photograph--and then bringing it to life by the introduction of movement once again. The macabre "frozen" moment and arrested action of the photograph are suggested in the ice sculpture that Jack's body--very much a material image--will become. How fitting, then, that the film camera, moving ever closer, will discover Jack at the center of the group photo of Overlook guests at a 1921 ball. Now himself a ghost, Jack has been exorcised into the space of photography.
Like father, like son. Danny's visions also have a photographic dimension: the first one features the oceanic, silent eruption of blood out of the elevator, with the two Grady girls not yet part of the scene. Instead, the image of the elevator is cut with a very briefly-held still of the two murdered girls: their frontality and the directness with which they look out of the frame suggest a family snapshot, while their near-doubling--they are not twins--seems to allude to subjects in similar compositions by American photographer Diane Arbus.  Although they have now "materialized"--become more filmic and entered the space of the narrative--they continue to assume a frontal pose. Even as they turn around they hold hands and maintain their "frontal" conration: they are silent images only partially released from a photograph. In the "Tuesday" scene, the Grady sisters will appear to Danny again as res in a photograph, but in the "Thursday" sequence he will come upon them at the end of a corridor, and this time they will speak to him--in tandem, and in the formulaic language of fairytales.
A number of Annette Michelson's assertions concerning 200l--that it dissolves the opposition between body and mind, that "things seen" are supplemented by "things felt," and the camera has a great deal to do with both--hold true for The Shining as well ("BIS," 60). There the film camera is a "presence" from its first frames, of course, when its eccentric trajectory seems to stalk, then lose interest in, the family in the VW below. Swooping over a cliff rather than keeping its prey in focus, the camera emerges as a character rather than as an embodiment of authorial presence--unlike the camera in a Hitchcock film, for instance, it is less voyeuristic than predatory. The familiar dies irae melody with which the film begins conjures up Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943; also known as Vredens Dag), reinforcing a connection with the earlier film in its use of a mobile camera. 16 Here, as in Day of Wrath, the camera seems to have the evil eye as well as the witch's power of invocation, the power to call up "the Quick and the Dead." Its sinister playfulness is continued in many interior shots of the hotel, where, rather than keeping the Torrances in frame, the camera often disappears behind pillars, only to bring them into focus once more as it wends its sinuous way along confining corridors.
My point here is simply that the film camera does not play to the eye alone. During long takes the steadicam tends to track rapidly backwards, retreating in front of the characters who are moving towards us, thus doubling the effect of speed and motion, and producing spectator vertigo. While the camera is rarely alligned with Jack, and prefers to shoot characters frontally, it is often located behind Danny--sometimes seeming to share his point of view, sometimes in pursuit--most notably during the dizzying sequences when he is on his tricycle. 17 In The Shining, the affective response missing from the film's unlocalizable narrative voice is displaced into the spectator, in whom camera movement and imagery produce sensations of vertigo and nausea. 18 Kubrick ensures that his spectator is embodied.
At times the film camera crosses to the other side. Moving "through the looking glass," it may playfully juxtapose the uncanny mirror image with the (diegetic) real, as in the crucial sequence titled "A Month Later," when Wendy brings Jack breakfast in bed. 19 In our first view of Jack, the camera pulls back from a frontal shot, only gradually revealing that what we see is his reflection in the mirror. Next the "real" Wendy enters the frame, and then the camera moves back into the space of the mirror. There follows a shot of Wendy from Jack's point of view that emerges from an "impossible" place--out of the mirror itself, another Dreyer moment, recalling the impossible point of view of the corpse in Vampyr (1932; also known as Vampyr--Der Traum des Allan Grey). The mirror will likewise be the site of the uncanny when Jack enters Room 237. A shot of Jack shows him in happy anticipation as a young and beautiful woman approaches him. But as he embraces her, he glances into the mirror in which their bodies are reflected. As the woman's body visibly ages, disintegrates, and decays in the mirror, telescoping time, we hear the cackle of a witch. Once again illusion asserts its connection to corporeality, a corporeality that corrupts the image from within. The witch as temptress and hag recalls Day of Wrath. But the image in the mirror--a trope of the supernatural--more importantly points to the abject maternal body, alive and dead, equally the object of desire and horror.
Citing Freud as his source, Winfried Menninghaus reminds us that fairytales can represent uncanny situations and occurrences without bringing them fully into affective consciousness. Just so, Kafka's stories have the ability, as Menninghaus puts it, "to render virtually invisible and affectively neutral what his fictions are continuously at pains to represent: disgusting bodies, gestures, and actions."  Similarly--the Deleuzian insistence on Kubrick's cinema as a "cinema of the brain" notwithstanding--critical response to The Shining has noted its corporeal concerns, variously connecting the Overlook Hotel with the womb, its labyrinth with the intestines, and pointing out that its dominant color is blood red. 21 As in Kafka's texts, disgust and nausea are often linked in the genre of the horror film to a complex relation to the female body. 22 But even beyond this clichéd common concern, the nature of Kubrick's obsession with the female body points to an unexpected dimension of Kafka's significance for his work.
"It's all very homey," says Jack Torrance when he first surveys the cavernous spaces of the Overlook Hotel; "homey" in the sense of comfortable, gemütlich, is precisely what the Overlook is not. A month later, when Jack claims to have fallen in love with the hotel right away, to have felt as though he "had been there before", as though he "knew what was going to be behind every corner," we know what his remarks are intended to suggest. "Homey" in this context means canny, and as Ciment reminds us with Freud, a sense of déjà-vu suggests that the familiar place has been connected with the maternal body (KUB, 144).  Blood is first seen seeping out from behind the doors, then gushing forth (the cinematic allusion here is to Fritz Lang's Metropolis of 1927), and the narrative overtly connects this blood with a paternal violence against children that transgresses our most rigid taboos. But visually, this scene accomplishes something else: by suggesting that the corridors of the hotel are corporeal passageways--arteries for the transport of blood--it turns the hotel itself into a body. What is more "homey"--heimlich, canny--than the body of the mother? And yet this scene is violent: the gushing of blood surrounds the deaths of children, as though to suggest a perverse inversion of the nourishing placenta.
Indeed, as in Kafka, perversion and disgust infiltrate the domain of nourishment and eating from this film's beginning, when a conversation about the snowbound Donner party cues the theme of cannibalism. Foreshadowing the desperate circumstances of the snowbound Torrances, this theme persists during the tour of the meat freezer, and we feel relief that Danny, when asked which meat is his favorite, replies "French fries and ketchup." The suggestion of cannibalism infects the act of eating so profoundly that it comes into play even as the sympathetic African-American chef, Mr. Halloran, serves Danny chocolate ice-cream, and we might add that his father Jack's preferred drink is Jack Daniels. Cannibalism resides in the domain of Kristeva's abject, a prime example of the "crossing over of the categories of Pure and Impure," a perversion of the infantile desire for incorporation. 23
If Danny experiences nausea as well as terror at the images of his bloody visions, his reactions only serve to make the connections between the digestive and the uterine domains more fluid. And then there is Tony, Danny's imaginary friend and double, the "author" of his visions, who lives, as Danny puts it, in his "mouth" and in his "stomach." In keeping with Otto Rank's insights concerning the double, Danny gives birth to Tony in order to ward off death, in turn keeping Tony "safe" in his "stomach," as he puts it, his metaphorical womb. From the child's point of view, Tony--both a voice who speaks through Danny, and the "source" of Danny's ghastly visions--inhabits his body rather than his mind. Thus Danny's visionary power--"shining"--is by its very location identified with the "desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside of the maternal body" (POH, 55). Danny's visions both re and produce substances--blood and vomit--that Kristeva relegates to the domain of the mother, the domain of the body. From what source, we may well ask, does the heartbeat that makes its way into so many of Kubrick's soundtracks emanate? And why does the color red tend to dominate the visual field?
The maternal body itself is abject, and we must break with it through the power of language (POH, 13). Small wonder, then, that Jack Torrance, would-be writer, imprisoned within the maternal body that is the Overlook Hotel, has a disturbed relation to the symbolic. Jack comes to the hotel armed with an album into which he has carefully pasted newspaper clippings--both photographs and stories--intending to use these as a basis for his novel. But Jack cannot write, he can only type; he and his typewriter have become a mechanical writing machine. In the manner of concrete poetry, Jack uses language as though it were a non-signifying material, creating a series of typographical variations on a single sentence--a sentence not even of his own devising. Page after page piles up, producing a modernist that is a material object, a sculpture--a text whose relation to temporality is distorted in favor of the image.
In Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, the two men engaged in sex with the young daughter of a costume shop owner first appear as judges of the Vehmic court, dressed in the red hats (Talare) and pleated robes of this office. 24 The judges are seated at a table from under which the young girl slithers to escape her approaching father. In this first scene at the costume shop, the father admonishes the girl and chastises the judges who, as they leave the shop in evening clothes, are revealed to have been in costume--not judges at all. The next day, when the hero of Schnitzler's story returns to find one of them leaving the young girl's room, the father will reveal himself to have been in complicity with their behavior: it had never been his intention to have recourse to the law at all. Indeed, the father is his daughter's pimp. Schnitzler's scene is a scene out of Kafka.
 The daughter's lovers do not even pose as judges: Kubrick's modern-day New York version of this scene transforms the costumed "judges" into Japanese tourists in wigs; one of them is wearing red bikini briefs, and the other emerges naked from behind the sofa where he has presumably been having sex with the young girl. In Kubrick's film, the costume shop owner is a man named Milich who speaks in a heavy accent that permeates the scene with a Middle-European atmosphere. The bathrobe that Milich wears is worn by Schnitzler's shop owner as well, a sign of the not-quite-respectable nearness of the body that evokes memories of many Kafka texts. Further, the film introduces a Kafkaesque "gatekeeper" aspect into the initial encounter between Bill Harford, the protagonist, and Milich: Harford bargains with Milich for access to his shop at an actual wrought-iron gate, while Milich--jangling his keys--claims "one can't be too careful." Milich, we might add, is played by Rade Scherbedgia, an actor who resembles Kubrick himself, suggesting that a personal concern may inform the costume shop sequences.
In his memoir of the collaboration with Kubrick, Frederic Raphael repeatedly recurs to the topic of "how thoroughly Schnitzler's story is impregnated with Jewishness" (EWO, 59). Although the topic of Jewishness came up between Kubrick and Raphael time and again, Raphael complains with more than some regret that Kubrick "forbade any reference to Jews"(EWO, 59) and that Jews are not featured in any of Kubrick's films (EWO, 108). 25 But Jewish culture must at least have had a part to play in the affinity Kubrick apparently felt both with Schnitzler and with Kafka. 26 It is present in Kubrick's intensification of the Kafkaesque scene embedded in the Schnitzler text--and perhaps in his decision to delete what may have been most meaningful to him, and yet to retain a reference to Kafka by other, more easily recognisable, means. 27
Let us return now to Schnitzler's young men dressed as Vehmic court judges. Their relations with a young girl are shocking in the Schnitzler story at least in part because of the nature of the office that they appear to hold: they appear to be the contaminated representatives of a Law which is itself contaminated by their acts. Nevertheless, the Law is not cleansed of its contamination when the men are revealed as imposters: on the one hand, their fantasies suffice to contaminate the Law and--equally important--paternal Law itself is "infected" when the father's complicity becomes apparent.
Citing Reiner Stach's work on Kafka, Slavoj Zizek reminds us that the "trespassing of the frontier that separates the vital domain from the judicial domain" is a characteristic of Kafka's universe. 28 In The Trial, for example, the court is located within the "vital promiscuity" of the workers' lodgings, it is a sexually-enticing washerwoman who allows K. entry into the interrogation chamber and, as K. stands before the tribunal, he dimly sees a man and woman locked in an embrace (LA, 147). Zizek puts it thus: "Smeared by an obscene vitality, the law itself--traditionally a pure, neutral universality--assumes the features of a heterogeneous, inconsistent bricolage penetrated with enjoyment" (LA, 149). Zizek reads Kafka's reaction to the separation of these domains as a sign of his embeddedness in Jewish culture: the Jewish religion, claims Zizek, "marks the moment of the most radical separation of these domains. In all previous religions, we encounter a place, a domain of sacred enjoyment (in the form of ritual orgies, for example), whereas in Judaism the sacred domain is evacuated of all traces of vitality and the living substance is subordinated to the dead letter of the Father's law" (LA, 150; emphasis mine). Reacting against this separation, writes Zizek, "Kafka trespasses the divisions of his inherited religion, flooding the judicial domain, once again, with enjoyment" (LA, 150).
It is as though Eyes Wide Shut had been made with this quotation from Zizek in mind. Kubrick's elaboration of the ritual orgy in his film culminates in the moment when its participants take on the role of judges as Bill Harford stands before them in the crimson circle, unmasked and brought to judgment. In Schnitzler's story, the mock judges who participate in the orgy with the shopkeeper's daughter anticipate this moment, of course. 29 Although Kubrick has disguised Schnitzler's mock-judges as businessmen, he nevertheless retains the theme of the permeability of the judicial to the vital domain that he reads in Kafka, transposing it to the scene of a ritual orgy enacted by powerful men participating in a quasi-religious rite.
It remains to suggest in what sense Kafka's merging of these domains might consitute a punctum for Kubrick. What, for Kubrick, might the implication of "flooding the judicial domain with enjoyment" be? If, as Zizek contends, in Judaism "the living substance is subordinated to the dead letter of the Father's law," then Kafka presents the reader with the counter-example of a textuality which is anything but dead--yet whose sensuality is masked by the glossy surface of a distanced, opaque, modernist style. It is a style of "proverbial purity," whose effect on the reader, as Zizek sees it, may be otherwise: "It is as if," he writes, "Kafka's text were a coagulated, stigmatized, signifying chain repelling signification with an excess of sticky enjoyment" (LA, 151). The "stickiness" of this text is that of unmentionable bodily substances--of the body of the sexual woman, of Kristeva's abject mother, and of the Bakhtinian grotesque who ingests, excretes, and fornicates.
In any art form, Annette Michelson has said with reference to Kubrick's 2001, the perception of "lived reality" is not easily compatible with the "movement towards abstraction which animates the style and esthetics of modernism" ("BIS," 58). As we have noted, Jack Torrance's typewriter is a machine that can only produce mechanical writing on stacks of paper, while in his Penal Colony, Kafka notoriously offers his reader a writing machine that inscribes human flesh. This bleeding script points to modernism's Other, its counterpart and complement. It is the vital domain itself--the stuff of representation becomes its surface--reversing the relation between the photograph and its inscription of the body as trace. What Kubrick sees in Kafka's stories is a relation between style and content that is antithetical in the extreme. If, as Kafka puts it, his stories are a way of "shutting his eyes," Kafka may also be referring to the manner in which his "pure" style acts as a kind of sealant, covering over--even entrapping--his subject under a veneer that represses it, contains it, and gives it an auratic glow. To have one's eyes "wide shut," then, is, like Kubrick, to be aware of Kafka's project--and to imitate it.