war and the fear of violence. But here the song line functions parenthetically
and ironically in a very different context, the reference being to the succession
of Salon painters from Puvis de Chavannes to Eugene Carrière in a time “be-
fore the world was given over to wars” (78/526), when “near the museum”
[the British Museum] “they served it mit Schlag” (526). The wiener café is
not to be confused with any other.
The seeming excess of Poundian names—the multiplication of restau-
rants, cafés, and those who people them—is thus offset by the recycling of
a given unit in a context that changes its thrust in what is in fact a dense
economy of meanings. The acute awareness of difference is accompanied
by the concomitant play of likeness—a linking of items that seem quite un-
related. In this sense, nominalism Pound-style can be understood as an in-
stance of what Gertrude Stein called using everything. But then what are The
Cantos but—to take another Stein adage—a mode of beginning again and
again? Of citing more and more names that spill out of the Duchampian
boîte en valise for the reader to organize, not because Pound couldn’t “make
it cohere,” as he was wont to declare in moments of depression, but because
in the poet’s scheme of things, as in the case of Duchamp’s readymades, art
had become the process of discriminating the infrathin. Is the natural object
always the adequate symbol? Yes, and so is the unnatural object, provided of
course, that it is given its “right” name—a name that belongs to it alone.
Pound, Duchamp, and the Nominalist Ethos 59