his dear old friend Bride Scratton (“Thiy”) and T. S. Eliot (“il decaduto”),
¤rst in the Roman Arena in Verona and then nearby at the Café Dante in
1920, where the two poets were evidently drawing up “a literary program”
that “was neither [to be] published nor followed.”
Throughout the passage, the names invoked point to a more innocent
time, a prewar era when the poet’s life was still in the future, when Italy stood
for the pleasures of tourism: great Romanesque and Renaissance art to be
contemplated with one’s closest friends strolling through the ruins and chat-
ting about Dante or Cavalcanti or the French Symboliste poets in the local
cafés and restaurants. “War,” Pound was to remark many years later in Canto
110, where Dieudonné and Voisin are again cited, “is the destruction of res-
taurants” (800). That golden past would seem still to be alive—after all,
Salzburg is reopening, Mozart being played, and the cricket song at Pisa can
trigger positive and happy thoughts. But—and this is the curious moder-
nity of The Cantos—the names invoked fail to cohere into a larger image-
complex. The cake shops in the Nevsky, the legendary sexploits of Indian
army of¤cers in Kashmir—these are embedded into the texture of The Can-
tos precisely so as to “thicken the plot,” to use John Cage’s Zen term. Their
“irrelevant” introjection in what is already an excess of proper names is analo-
gous to the Duchampian demand for “prime words,” for the infrathin.
And here Pound and Duchamp’s reaction to Impressionism is important.
Both came of age at the height of Impressionist pictorialism: the line from
Monet to Cézanne to the Cubists and Abstractionists was a perfectly logi-
cal one, so Duchamp maintained, since in all these cases painting remained
retinal, its colors, even in the case of abstraction, endowed with expressive
value.^28 Wanting an art that might be cerebral rather than sensuous, concep-
tual rather than imagistic, Duchamp was assembling his readymades, boxes,
and especially the Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even), whose individual parts are identi¤ed less by their visual appearance,
which is less than striking, than by their wholly distinct names: Nine Malic
Molds, Milky Way, Oculist Witnesses, Capillary Tubes, and so on.
Pound’s proper names are of course much more literal, more referential
than Duchamp’s punning titles,^29 but like Duchamp’s, theirs is a reaction to
Impressionism as a “soft” form of mimetic art. In his essay on Joyce, for ex-
ample, Pound differentiates between the “clear hard prose” of Flaubert and
Joyce and an impressionism that smacks of “mushy technique” (Gaudier-
Brzeska 85):
These “impressionists” who write in imitation of Monet’s softness in-
stead of writing in imitation of Flaubert’s de¤niteness, are a bore, a56 Chapter 3